Besides the case of the stone at Bethel, there is the later one (in our narrative) when Jacob and Laban made a covenant, “and Jacob took a stone, and set it up for a pillar. And Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took stones and made an heap: and they did eat there upon the heap.” So, once more, at Shalem, he erects an altar called El-Elohe-Israel; he sets a pillar upon the grave of Rachel, and another at the place at Luz where God appeared to him. Of like import is the story of the twelve stones which the twelve men take out of Jordan to commemorate the passage of the tribes. All are clearly attempts to Jehovise these early sacred stones or local gods by connecting them with incidents in the Jehovistic version of the ancient Hebrew legends.
That such stones, however, were worshipped as deities in early times, before the cult of Jahweh had become an exclusive one among his devotees, is evident from the Jehovistic narrative itself, which has not wholly succeeded in blotting out all traces of earlier religion. Samuel judged Israel every year at Bethel, the place of Jacob’s sacred pillar: at Gilgal, the place where Joshua’s twelve stones were set up; and at Mizpeh, where stood the cairn surmounted by the pillar of Laban’s covenant. In other words, these were the sanctuaries of the chief ancient gods of Israel. Samuel himself “took a stone and set it between Mizpeh and Shem and its very name, Eben-ezer, “the stone of help,” shows that it was originally worshipped before proceeding on warlike expeditions, though the Jehovistic gloss, “saying, Hitherto the Lord hath helped us,” does its best, of course, to obscure the real meaning. So at Peran, in New Guinea, Mr. Chalmers saw “a large peculiarly-shaped stone,” by name Ravai, considered very sacred. Sacrifices are made to it, and it is more particularly addressed in times of fighting. “Before setting forth, offerings are presented, with food,” and the stone is entreated to precede the warriors into battle. Wherever a stone has a name, it is almost certainly of mortuary origin. It was to the stone-circle of Gilgal, once more, that Samuel directed Saul to go, saying, “I will come down unto thee, to offer burnt-offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace-offerings.” It was at the cairn of Mizpeh that Saul was chosen king; and after the victory over the Ammonites, Saul went once more to the great Stonehenge at Gilgal to “renew the kingdom,” and “there they made Saul king before Jahweh in Gilgal; and there they sacrificed sacrifices of peace-offerings before Jahweh.” This passage is a very instructive and important one, because here we see that in the opinion of the writer at least Jahweh was then domiciled at Gilgal, amid the other sacred stones of that holy circle.
Observe, “however, that when Saul was directed to go to find his father’s asses, he was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah, and then to the plain of Tabor, where he was to meet “three men going up to God [not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” evidently to sacrifice, “one carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine.” These and many other like memorials of stone-worship lie thickly scattered through the early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes openly avowed, and sometimes cloaked under a thin veil of Jehovism.
On the other hand, at the present day, the Palestine exploration has shown that no rude stone monuments exist in Palestine proper, though east of the Jordan they are common in all parts of the country. How, then, are we to explain their disappearance? Major Conder thinks that when pure Jehovism finally triumphed under Hezekiah and Josiah, the Jehovists destroyed all these “idolatrous” stones throughout the Jewish dominions, in accordance with the injunctions in the Book of Deuteronomy to demolish the religious emblems of the Canaanites. Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would tolerate no alien sacred stones within his own jurisdiction.
And who or what was this Jahweh himself, this local and ethnic god of the Israelites, who would suffer no other god or sacred monolith to live near him?
I will not lay stress upon the point that when Joshua was dying, according to the legend, he “took a great stone” and set it up by an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jahweh, saying that it had heard all the words of Jahweh. That document is too doubtful in terms to afford us much authority. But I will merely point out that at the time when we first seem to catch clear historic glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we find Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic object might have been, located with his ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is quite clear that in “the camp at Gilgal,” as the later compilers believed, Jahweh, god of Israel, who had brought his people up out of Egypt, remained till the conquest of the land was completed. But after the end of the conquest, the tent in which he dwelt was removed to Shiloh; and that Jahweh went with it is clear from the fact that Joshua cast lots for the land there “before Jahweh, our God.” He was there still when Hannah and her husband went up to Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh; and when Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli the priest. That Jahweh made a long stay at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a true old tradition—a tradition of the age just before the historical beginnings of the Hebrew annals.
But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present the descriptions in the Pentateuch, which seem likely to be of late date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A god is come into the camp.” But when the Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke in pieces—so Hebrew legend declared—before the face of Jahweh. After the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for a time at Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of Jerusalem from the Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from thence the ark of the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they “played before Jahweh on all manner of instruments,” and David himself “danced before Jahweh.” Jahweh was then placed in the tent or tabernacle that David had prepared for him, till Solomon built the first temple, “the house of Jahweh,” and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the oracle of the house, the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim.” Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he was at Peran, in New Guinea, the peculiarly-shaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two wooden idols, Epe and Kivava, “made long ago and considered very sacred,” were for the moment “located in an old house, until all the arrangements necessary for their removal to the splendid new dubu prepared for them are completed.” And so, too, at the opposite end of the scale of civilisation, as Mr. Lang puts it, “the fetish-stones of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted.”
That Jahweh himself, in the most ancient traditions of the race, was similarly concealed within his chest or ark in the holy of holies, is evident, I think, to any attentive reader. It is true, the later Jehovistic glosses of Exodus and Deuteronomy, composed after the Jehovistic worship had become purified and spiritualised, do their best to darken the comprehension of this matter by making the presence of Jahweh seem always incorporeal; and even in the earlier traditions, the phrase “the ark of the covenant of Jahweh” is often substituted for the simpler and older one, “the ark of Jahweh.” But through all the disfigurements with which the priestly scribes of the age of Josiah and the sacerdotalists of the return from the captivity have overlaid the primitive story, we can still see clearly in many places that Jahweh himself was at first personally present in the ark that covered him. And though the scribes (evidently ashamed of the early worship they had outlived) protest somewhat vehemently more than once, “There was nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there at Horeb, when Jahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of the land of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they admit—that the object or objects concealed in the ark consisted of a sculptured stone or stones; and that to dance or sing before this stone or these stones was equivalent to dancing or singing before the face of Jahweh.
The question whether the mysterious body concealed in the ark was or was not a lingam or other phallic object I purposely omit to discuss here, as not cognate to our present enquiry. It is sufficient to insist that from the evidence before us, first, it was Jahweh himself, and second, it was an object made of stone. Further than that ‘twere curious to enquire, and I for one do not desire to pry into the mysteries.
Not to push the argument too far, then, we may say this much is fairly certain. The children of Israel in early times carried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh, whose presence in their midst was intimately connected with a certain ark or chest, containing a stone object or objects. This chest was readily portable, and could be carried to the front in case of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in the ark with certainty, but they regarded it emphatically as “Jahweh their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt.” Even after its true nature had been spiritualised away into a great national deity, the most unlimited and incorporeal the world has ever known (as we get him in the best and purest work of the prophets), the imagery of later times constantly returns to the old idea of a stone pillar or menhir. In the embellished account of the exodus from Egypt, Jahweh goes before the Israelites as a pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of fire by night. According to Levitical law his altar must be built of unhewn stone, “for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” It is as a Rock that the prophets often figuratively describe Jahweh, using the half-forgotten language of an earlier day to clothe their own sublimer and more purified conceptions. It is to the Rock of Israel—the sacred stone of the tribe—that they look for succour. Nay, even when Josiah accepted the forged roll of the law and promised to abide by it, “the king stood by a pillar (a menhir) and made a covenant before Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in vague glimpses the real original nature of the worship of that jealous god who caused Dagon to break in pieces before him, and would allow no other sacred stones to remain undemolished within his tribal boundaries.
I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference that Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and etherealised into the God of Christianity, was in his origin nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all, the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.
MILTON speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and briefly contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really cover the vast majority of objects of worship for the human race at all times and in all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks must now come in for their fair share of attention. They need not, however, delay us quite so long as their sister deities, both because they are on the whole less important in themselves, and because their development from grave-marks into gods and idols is almost absolutely parallel to that which we have already followed out in detail in the case of the standing stone or megalithic monument.
Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks of an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in the honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less important as elements in the growth of religion than standing stones for two distinct reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often marks the interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs and great men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour; the commonalty have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as one may observe to this day at Père Lachaise, or any other great Christian cemetery. In the second place, the stone monument is far more lasting and permanent than the wooden one. Each of these points counts for something. For it is chiefs and great men whose ghosts most often grow into gods; and it is the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are always the most sacred. For both these reasons, then, the stake is less critical than the stone in the history of religion.
Nevertheless, it has its own special importance. As the sacred stone derives ultimately from the great boulder piled above the grave to keep down the corpse, so the stake, I believe, derives from the sharp-pointed stick driven through the body to pin it down as we saw in the third chapter, and still so employed in Christian England to prevent suicides from walking. Such a stake or pole is usually permitted to protrude from the ground, so as to warn living men of the neighbourhood of a spirit.
At a very early date, however, the stake, I fancy, became a mere grave-mark; and though, owing to its comparative inconspicuousness, it obtains relatively little notice, it is now and always has been by far the most common mode of preserving the memory of the spot where a person lies buried. A good example, which will throw light upon many subsequent modifications, is given by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port Moresby in New Guinea. “The body,” he says, “was buried. At the side was set up a stake, to which were tied the spear, club, bow and arrow of the deceased, but broken, to prevent theft. A little beyond was the grave of a woman: her cooking utensils, grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the stake.” Similar customs, he adds, are almost universal in Polynesia.
Though worship of stakes or wooden posts is common all over the world, I can give but few quite unequivocal instances of such worship being paid to a post actually known to surmount an undoubted grave. Almost the best direct evidence I can obtain is the case of the grave-pole in Buru, already quoted from Mr. H. O. Forbes. But the following account of a Samoyed place of sacrifice, extracted from Baron Nordenskiold’s Voyage of the Vega, is certainly suggestive. On a hillock on Vaygats Island the Swedish explorer found a number of reindeer skulls, so arranged that they formed a close thicket of antlers. Around lay other bones, both of bears and reindeer; and in the midst of all “the mighty beings to whom all this splendour was offered. They consisted’ of hundreds of small wooden sticks, the upper portions of which were carved very clumsily in the form of the human countenance, most of them from fifteen to twenty, but some of them three hundred and seventy centimetres in length. They were all stuck in the ground on the southeast part of the eminence. Near the place of sacrifice there were to be seen pieces of driftwood and remains of the fireplace at which the sacrificial meal was prepared. Our guide told us that at these meals the mouths of the idols were besmeared with blood and wetted with brandy; and the former statement was confirmed by the large spots of blood which were found on most of the large idols below the holes intended to represent the mouth.” At a far earlier date, Stephen Burrough in 1556 writes as follows to much the same effect in his interesting narrative printed in Hakluyt: “There I met againe with Loshak, and went on shore with him, and he brought me to a heap of Samoeds idols, which were in number about 300, the worst and the most unartificiall worke that ever I saw: the eyes and mouthes of sundrie of them were bloodie, they had the shape of men, women, and children, very grossly wrought, and that which they had made for other parts was also sprinkled with blood. Some of their idols were an olde sticke with two or three notches, made with a knife in it. There was one of their sleds broken and lay by the heape of idols, and there I saw a deers skinne which the foules had spoyled: and before certaine of their idols blocks were made as high as their mouthes; being all bloody, I thought that to be the table wheron they offered their sacrifice.”
In neither of these accounts, it is true, is it distinctly mentioned that the place of sacrifice was a Samoyed cemetery: but I believe this to be the case, partly from analogy, and partly because Nordenskiôld mentions elsewhere that an upturned sled is a frequent sign of a Samoyed grave. Compare also the following account of a graveyard among nominally Christian Ostyak Siberians, also from Nordenskiôld: “The corpses were placed in large coffins above ground, at which almost always a cross was erected.” [The accompanying woodcut shews that these crosses were rude wooden stakes with one or two crossbars.] “In one of the crosses a sacred picture was inserted which must be considered a further proof that a Christian rested in the coffin. Notwithstanding this, we found some clothes, which had belonged to the departed, hanging on a bush beside the grave, together with a bundle containing food, principally dried fish. At the graves of the richer natives the survivors are even said to place along with food some rouble notes, in order that the departed may not be altogether without ready money on his entrance into the other world.”
To complete the parallel, I ought to add that money was also deposited on the sacrificial place on Vaygats Island. Of another such sacrificial place on Yalmal, Nordenskiôld says, after describing a pile of bones, reindeer skulls, and walrus jaws: “In the middle of the heap of bones stood four erect pieces of wood. Two consisted of sticks a metre in length, with notches cut in them.... The two others, which clearly were the proper idols of this place of sacrifice, consisted of driftwood roots, on which some carvings had been made to distinguish the eyes, mouth, and nose. The parts of the pieces of wood, intended to represent the eyes and mouth, had recently been besmeared with blood, and there still lay at the heap of bones the entrails of a newly killed reindeer.”
Indeed, I learn from another source that “the Samoyedes feed the wooden images of the dead”; while an instance from Erman helps further to confirm the same conclusion. According to that acute writer, among the Ostyaks of Eastern Siberia there is found a most interesting custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “we see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual idol.” When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him in the yurt, which receives offerings at every meal and has honours paid to it, while the widow continually embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried at the end of three years or so: but sometimes “the image of a shaman (native sorcerer),” says Tylor, “is set up permanently, and remains as a saint for ever.” For “saint” I should say “god”; and we see the transformation at once completed. Indeed, Erman adds acutely about the greater gods of the Ostyaks: “That these latter also have a historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished men, to which prescription and the interest of the Shamans gave by degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to doubt.”
With regard to the blood smeared upon such Siberian wooden idols, it must be remembered that bowls of blood are common offerings to the dead; and Dr. Robertson Smith himself, no friendly witness in this matter, has compared the blood-offerings to ghosts with those to deities. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, for example, the ghosts drink greedily of the sacrificial blood; and libations of gore form a special feature in Greek offerings to heroes. That blood was offered to the sacred stones we have already seen; and we noticed that there as here it was specially smeared upon the parts representing the mouth. Offerings of blood to gods, or pouring of blood on altars, are too common to demand particular notice; and we shall also recur to that part of the subject when we come to consider the important questions of sacrifice and sacrament. I will only add here that according to Maimonides the Sabians looked on blood as the nourishment of the gods; while the Hebrew Jahweh asks indignantly in the fiftieth Psalm, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?”
To pass on to more unequivocal cases of stake-worship, where we can hardly doubt that the stake represents a dead man, Captain Cook noticed that in the Society Islands “the carved wooden images at burial-places were not considered mere memorials, but abodes into which the souls of the departed retired.” So Ellis observes of Polynesians generally that the sacred objects might be either mere stocks and stones, or carved wooden images, from six to eight feet long down to as many inches. Some of these were to represent “tu,” divine manes or spirits of the dead; while others were to represent “tu,” or deities of higher rank and power. To my mind, this is almost a distinction without a difference; the first being ghosts of recently deceased ancestors, the second ghosts of remoter progenitors. The ancient Araucanians again fixed over a tomb an upright log, “rudely carved to represent the human frame.” After the death of New Zealand chiefs, wooden images, 20 to 40 feet high, were erected as monuments. I might easily multiply instances; but I refrain lest the list grow tedious.
Dr. Codrington notes that the large mouths and lolling tongues of many New Zealand and Polynesian gods are due to the habit of smearing the mouth with blood and other offerings.
Where men preserve the corpses of their dead, images are not so likely to grow up; but where fear of the dead has brought about the practice of burial or burning, it is reasonable that the feelings of affection which prompted gifts and endearments to the mummy in the first stage of thought should seek some similar material outlet under the altered circumstances. Among ourselves, a photograph, a portrait, the toys of a dead child, are preserved and cherished. Among savages, ruder representations become necessary. They bury the actual corpse safely out of sight, but make some rough wooden imitation to represent it. Thus it does not surprise us to find that while the Marianne Islanders keep the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts as household gods, and expect them to give oracles out of their skulls, the New Zealanders, on the other hand, “set up memorial idols of deceased persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them as if still alive, and casting garments to them when they pass by,” while they also “preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor.” The Coast Negroes “place several earthen images on the graves.” Some Papuans, “after a grave is filled up, collect round an idol, and offer provisions to it.” The Javans dress up an image in the clothes of the deceased. So, too, of the Caribs of the West Indies, we learn that they “carved little images in the shape in which they believed spirits to have appeared to them; and some human figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them.” From such little images, obviously substituted for the dead body which used once to be preserved and affectionately tended, are derived, I believe, most of the household gods of the world—the Lares and Penates of the Romans, the huacas of the Peruvians, the teraphim of the Semites.
How absolutely image and ancestor are identified we can see among the Tenimber Islanders, with whom “the matmate are the spirits of their ancestors which are worshipped as guardian spirits or household gods. They are supposed to enter the house through an opening in the roof, and to take up their abode temporarily in the skulls, or in images of wood or ivory, in order to partake of the offerings.”
A few more facts in the same direction may help to bring out in still stronger relief this close equivalence of the corpse and the image. A New Guinea mother keeps the mummied body of her child, and carries it about with her; whereas a West African mother, living in a tribe where terror of the dead has induced the practice of burial, makes a little image of her lost darling out of a gourd or calabash, wraps it in skins, and feeds it or puts it to sleep like a living baby. Bastian saw Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it. At a somewhat higher level, “the spiritual beings of the Algonquins,” says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe not a few of these instances, “were represented by, and in language completely identified with, the carved wooden heads” (note this point) “or more complete images, to which worship and sacrifice were offered.” In all these instances we see clearly, I think, the course of the genesis of household deities. In Siam, the ashes of the dead are similarly moulded into Buddhist images, which are afterwards worshipped as household gods.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected several interesting examples some of which I will borrow, as showing incidentally how much the growth of the idol or image depends upon such abstraction of the real body for burial or its equivalent. While a deceased king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with meat and drink. When Charles VI. of France was buried, “over the coffin was an image of the late king, bearing a rich crown of gold and diamonds, and holding two shields.... This image was dressed with cloth of gold.... In this state was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre Dame.” Madame de Motteville says of the father of the great Condé, “The effigy of this prince was waited upon for three days, as was customary”—forty days having been the original time during which food was supplied to such effigies at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes a like figure used at the burial of Henry V. of England: and the Westminster Abbey images already noticed belong to the same category.
As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to admit that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles came to be generally recognised, it would be a simple transference of feeling to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become the shrine or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the Brazilian tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings before them to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are assured that among the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food before a short thick staff planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases is there necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff was set up was not a place of burial; while in the second instance this is even probable, as hut interments are extremely common in Africa. I will quote one other instance only, for its illustrative value in a subsequent connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are clothed in native cloth (like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil, receiving adoration and sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity. This custom is parallel to that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a dead friend from the grave, wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of it for oracles.
Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work The Hairy Ainu, figures and describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese aborigines. The stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a phallic protuberance; those on the women’s with an equally phallic perforation. This fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred stones in Syria and elsewhere.
Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from their genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of stakes usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of wood described as an ashera. What kind of object an ashera was we learn from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an ashera of any kind of wood beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibition is clearly parallel to that against any hewn stone or “graven image.” But the Semites in general worshipped as a rule at a rude stone altar, beside which stood an ashera, under a green tree,—all three of the great sacred objects of humanity being thus present together. A similar combination is not uncommon in India, where sacred stone and wooden image stand often under the shade of the same holy peepul tree. “The ashera,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “is a sacred symbol, the seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G. Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the ‘mark’ of the divine presence.” Those who have followed me so far in the present work, however, will be more likely to conclude that it meant originally the mark of a place where an ancestor lay buried. “Every altar,” says Professor Smith, again, “had its ashera, even such altars as in the popular preprophetic forms of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to Jehovah.”
The Semitic sacred pole was treated in most respects like the other grave-stakes and idols we have hitherto considered; for an Assyrian monument from Khorsabad, figured by Rawlinson, represents an ornamental pole, planted beside an altar; priests stand before it engaged in an act of worship, and touch the pole with their hands, “or perhaps,” says Professor Smith, “anoint it with some liquid substance.” That the ashera was also draped, like the logs of the Society Islanders, or Monigan’s Irish idol, we learn from the famous passage in Second Kings (xxiii. 7) where it is said that the women “wove hangings for the ashera.” Dr. Robertson Smith illustrates this passage by the parallel of the sacred erica at Byblus, which was “a mere dead stump, for it was cut down by Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped in a linen cloth and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore represented the dead god” (Osiris, or rather in its origin Adonis). “But as a mere stump, it also resembles the Hebrew ashera.” So near may a man come to the perception of a truth, and yet so utterly may he miss its actual import.
I will dwell no longer upon these more or less remote derivatives of the grave-stake. I will only say briefly that in my opinion all wooden idols or images are directly or indirectly descended from the wooden headpost or still more primitive sepulchral pole. Not of course that I suppose every wooden image to have been necessarily once itself a funereal monument. Donatello’s Magdalen in San Giovanni at Florence, the blue-robed and star-spangled Madonna of the wayside shrine, have certainly no such immediate origin. But I do believe that the habit of making and worshipping wooden images arose in the way I have pointed out; and to those who would accuse me of “gross Euhemerism,” I would once more remark that even in these highest Christian instances the objects of veneration are themselves in the last resort admitted to have been at one time Galilean women. Nay, is not even the wayside shrine itself in most Catholic countries more often than not the mortuary chapel erected where some wayfarer has died a violent death, by murder, lightning, accident, or avalanche?
The sacred tree stands less obviously in the direct line of ancestry of gods and of God than the sacred stone and the sacred stake which we have just considered. I would willingly pass it over, therefore, in this long preliminary inquisition, could I safely do so, in order to progress at once to the specific consideration of the God of Israel and the rise of Monotheism. But the tree is nevertheless so closely linked with the two other main objects of human worship that I hardly see how I can avoid considering it here in the same connexion: especially as in the end it has important implications with regard to the tree of the cross, as well as to the True Vine, and many other elements of Christian faith and Christian symbolism. I shall therefore give it a short chapter as I pass, premising that I have already entered into the subject at greater length in my excursus On the Origin of Tree-Worship, appended to my verse translation of the Attis of Catullus.
The worship of sacred trees is almost as widely diffused over the whole world as the worship of dead bodies, mummies, relics, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and stone or wooden idols. The great authorities on the subject of Tree-Worship are Mannhardt’s Baumkultus and Mr. J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Neither of those learned and acute writers, however, has fully seen the true origin of worship from funeral practices: and therefore it becomes necessary to go over the same ground again briefly here from the point of view afforded us by the corpse-theory and ghost-theory of the basis of religion. I shall hope to add something to their valuable results, and also incidentally to show that all the main objects of worship together leads us back unanimously to the Cult of the Dead as their common starting-point.
Let us begin in this instance (contrary to our previous practice) by examining and endeavouring to understand a few cases of the behaviour of tree-spirits in various mythologies. Virgil tells us in the Third Æneid how, on a certain occasion, Æneas was offering a sacrifice on a tumulus crowned with dogwood and myrtle bushes. He endeavoured to pluck up some of these by the roots, in order to cover the altar, as was customary, with leaf-clad branches. As he did so, the first bush which he tore up astonished him by exuding drops of liquid blood, which trickled and fell upon the soil beneath. He tried again, and again the tree bled human gore. On the third trial, a groan was heard proceeding from the tumulus, and a voice assured Æneas that the barrow on which he stood covered the murdered remains of his friend Polydorus.
Now, in this typical and highly illustrative myth—no doubt an ancient and well-known story incorporated by Virgil in his great poem—we see that the tree which grows upon a barrow is itself regarded as the representative and embodiment of the dead man’s soul, just as elsewhere the snake which glides from the tomb of Anchises is regarded as the embodied spirit of the hero, and just as the owls and bats which haunt sepulchral caves are often identified in all parts of the world with the souls of the departed.
Similar stories of bleeding or speaking trees or bushes occur abundantly elsewhere. “When the oak is being felled,” says Aubrey, in his Remains of Gentilisme, “it gives a kind of shriekes and groanes that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heared it severall times.” Certain Indians, says Bastian, dare not cut a particular plant, because there comes out of it a red juice which they take for its blood. I myself remember hearing as a boy in Canada that wherever Sanguinaria Canadensis, the common American bloodroot, grew in the woods, an Indian had once been buried, and that the red drops of juice which exuded from the stem when one picked the flowers were the dead man’s blood. In Samoa, says Mr. Turner, the special abode of Tuifiti, King of Fiji, was a grove of large and durable afzelia trees. “No one dared cut that timber. A story is told of a party from Upolu who once attempted it, and the consequence was that blood flowed from the tree, and that the sacrilegious strangers all took ill and died.” Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a sacred larch-tree at Nauders in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever it was cut. In some of these cases, it is true, we do not actually know that the trees grew on tumuli, but this point is specially noticed about Polydorus’s dogwood, and is probably implied in the Samoan case, as I gather from the title given to the spirit as king of Fiji.
In other instances, however, such a doubt does not exist. We are expressly told that it is the souls of the dead which are believed to animate the speaking or bleeding trees. “The Dieyerie tribe of South Australia,” says Mr. Frazer, “regard as very sacred certain trees which are supposed to be their fathers transformed; hence they will not cut the trees down, and protest against settlers doing so.” Some of the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their forefathers inhabit certain trees, which they therefore spare. If obliged to fell one of these sacred trunks, they excuse themselves by saying that it was the priests who made them fell it.
Now, how did this connexion between the tree and the ghost or ancestor grow up? In much the same way, I imagine, as the connexion between the sacred stone or the sacred stake and the dead chief who lies buried beneath it. Whatever grows or stands upon the grave is sure to share the honours paid to the spirit that dwells within it. Thus a snake or other animal seen to glide out of a tomb is instantly taken by savages and even by half-civilised men as the genius or representative of the dead inhabitant. But do trees grow out of graves? Undoubtedly, yes. In the first place, they may grow by mere accident, as they might grow anywhere else; the more so as the soil in such a case has been turned and laboured. But beyond this, in the second place, it is common all over the world to plant trees or shrubs over the graves of relatives or tribesmen. Though direct evidence on this point is difficult to obtain, a little is forthcoming. In Algeria, I observed, the Arab women went on Fridays to plant flowers and shrubs on the graves of their immediate dead. I learned from Mr. R. L. Stevenson that similar plantings take place in Samoa and Fiji. The Tahitians put young casuarinas on graves. In Roman Catholic countries the planting of shrubs in cemeteries takes place usually on the jour des morts, a custom which would argue for it an immense antiquity; for though it is a point of honour among Catholics to explain this fete as of comparatively recent origin, definitely introduced by a particular saint at a particular period, its analogy to similar celebrations elsewhere shows us that it is really a surviving relic of a very ancient form of Manesworship.
In Græco-Roman antiquity it is certain that trees were frequently planted around the barrows of the dead; and that leafy branches formed part of the established ceremonial of funerals. I cannot do better than quote in this respect once more the case of Polydorus:=
Ergo instauramus Polydoro funus, et ingens
Aggeritur tumulo tellus; stant Manibus aræ,
Cæruleis mostæ vittis atraque cupresso.=
Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus of the divine Augustus was carefully planted; and the manner in which he notes the fact seems to me to argue that some special importance was attached to the ceremony. The acacia is one of the most sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian monuments, with their usual frankness, show us a sarcophagus from which an acacia emerges, with the naïve motto, “Osiris springs forth.”,
An incident which occurred during the recent Sino-Japanese war shows how easily points of this sort may be overlooked by hasty writers in formal descriptions. One of the London illustrated papers printed an account of the burial of the Japanese dead at Port Arthur, and after mentioning the simple headstone erected at each grave volunteered the further statement that nothing else marked the place of interment. But the engraving which accompanied it, taken from a photograph, showed on the contrary that a little tree had also been planted on each tiny tumulus.
I learn from Mr. William Simpson that the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine trees.
Evergreens, I believe, are specially planted upon graves or tumuli because they retain their greenness throughout the entire winter, and thus as it were give continuous evidence of the vitality and activity of the indwelling spirit. Mr. Frazer has shown in The Golden Bough that mistletoe similarly owes its special sanctity to the fact that it visibly holds the soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while all the surrounding branches stand bare and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are very frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost all the round barrows in southern England, for example, are topped by very ancient Scotch firs; and as the Scotch fir is not an indigenous tree south of the Tweed, it is practically certain that these old pines are the descendants of ancestors put in by human hands when the barrows were first raised over the cremated and buried bodies of prehistoric chieftains. In short, the Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of the barrows. As a rule, however, in Northern Europe, the yew is the species specially planted in graveyards, and several such yews in various parts of England and Germany are held to possess a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of very ancient yews in Norbury Park near Dorking, known as the Druids’ Grove, has long been considered a holy wood of remote antiquity. In southern Europe, the cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen most closely connected with tombs and cemeteries. In Provence and Italy, however, the evergreen holme-oak is almost equally a conventional denizen of places of interment. M. Lajard in his able essay Sur le Culte du Cypres has brought together much evidence of this worship of evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.
Sacred trees, especially when standing alone, are treated in many respects with the same ceremonial as is employed towards dead bodies, mummies, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved idols or statues. In other words, the offerings to the ghost or god may be made to the tree that grows on the grave just as well as to any other of the recognised embodiments of the indwelling spirit. Darwin in the Voyage of the Beagle describes how the Indians of South America would greet with loud shouts some sacred tree, standing solitary on some high part of the Pampas; libations of brandy and maté were poured into a hole at its base to gratify the soul of the deity who dwelt there. One of these tree-gods had a name, Walleechu. The Congo people, again, put calabashes of palm-wine at the foot of “trees treated as idols.” In other cases, blood is smeared on the tree; or oil is offered to it. Mr. Duff Macdonald’s Central Africans kill chickens at the foot of the “prayer tree,” and let its blood trickle down to the roots. Oldfield saw at Addacoodah fowls and many other articles of food suspended as offerings to a gigantic tree. Sir William Hunter mentions that once a year at Beerbhoom the Santals “make simple offerings to a ghost who dwells in a Bela tree.” In Tonga, the natives lay presents of food at the foot of particular trees which they believe to be inhabited by spirits. I need not multiply instances; they may be found by the hundred in Dr. Tylor and other great anthropological collections.
Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in the closest possible connection with the other indubitably ancestral monuments, the sacred stone and the idol. “A Bengal village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red lead”; the last being probably a substitute for the blood of human or animal victims with which it was once watered. “Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity; and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts or gods of the village.” That is to say, we have here ancestor-worship in its undisguised early native development.
I may mention here in brief that, as we shall hereafter see, this triple combination of stone, log, and tree forms almost the normal or invariable composition of the primitive shrine the whole world over.
The association of the sacred tree with actual idols or images of deceased ancestors is well seen in the following passage which I quote from Dr. Tylor: “A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur coats, each set up beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns and household valuables strewn as offerings before the gods—such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of foreign civilisation has begun by ornamenting the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing. A race ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In Esthonian districts, within the present century, the traveller might often see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house; and the old memories are handed down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast was sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back, which stone he kissed when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an offering.‘” After the evidence already given, I do not think there can be a reasonable doubt, in such a combination of tree and stone, that we have here a sacrifice to an ancestral spirit.
Similarly, in the courtyard of a Bodo house is planted the sacred euphorbia of Batho, the national god, to which a priest offers prayer and kills a pig. In the island of Tjumba, in the East Indies, a festival is held after harvest, and vessels are filled with rice as a thank-offering to the gods. Then the sacred stone at the foot of a palm tree is sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed animal, and rice is laid on the stone for the gods. When the Khonds settle a new village, a sacred cotton tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is placed the sacrificial stone which embodies or represents the village deity. Among the Semites, says Professor Robertson Smith, “no Canaanite high place was complete without its sacred tree standing beside the altar.” We shall only fully understand the importance of these facts, however, when we come later to consider the subject of the manufacture of gods by deliberate process, and the nature of the bloody ceremonial which always accompanies it.
In some of the above instances it is incidentally mentioned that the trunks of sacred trees are occasionally draped, as we saw to be also the case with sacred stones, sacred stakes, idols, and relics. Another example of this practice is given in the account of the holy oak of Romowe, venerated by the ancient Prussians, which was hung with drapery like the ashera, and decked with little hanging images of the gods. The holy trees of Ireland are still covered with rag offerings. Other cases will be noticed in other connexions hereafter.
Once more, just as stones come to be regarded as ancestors, so by a like process do sacred trees. Thus Galton says in South Africa, “We passed a magnificent tree. It was the parent of all the Damaras.... The savages danced round it in great delight.” Several Indian tribes believe themselves to be the sons of trees. Many other cases are noted by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. I do not think it is necessary for our argument to repeat them here. Sometimes, however, especially in later rationalising times, the sacred tree is merely said to have been planted by the god or hero whom it commemorates. Thus the cypresses of Herakles at Daphne were believed to have been set on the spot by that deity, while the tamarisk at Beersheba was supposed to have been placed there by Abraham.
I hope it is clear from this rapid resume that all the facts about the worship of sacred trees stand exactly parallel to those with regard to the worship of graves, mummies, idols, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and other signs of departed spirits. Indeed, we have sometimes direct evidence of such affiliation. Thus Mr. Turner says of a sacred tree on a certain spot in the island of Savaii, which enjoyed rights of sanctuary like the cities of refuge or a mediæval cathedral: “It is said that the king of a division of Upolu, called Atua, once lived at that spot. After he died, the house fell into decay; but the tree was fixed on as representing the departed king, and out of respect for his memory it was made the substitute of a living and royal protector.” By the light of this remark we may surely interpret in a similar sense such other statements of Mr. Turner’s as that a sweet-scented tree in another place “was held to be the habitat of a household god, and anything aromatic which the family happened to get was presented to it as an offering;” or again, “a family god was supposed to live” in another tree; “and hence no one dared to pluck a leaf or break a branch.” For family gods, as we saw in a previous chapter, are really family ghosts, promoted to be deities.
In modern accounts of sacred trees much stress is usually laid upon the fact that they are large and well-grown, often very conspicuous, and occupying a height, where they serve as landmarks. Hence it has frequently been taken for granted that they have been selected for worship on account of their size and commanding position. This, however, I think, is a case of putting the cart before the horse, as though one were to say that St. Peter’s and Westminster Abbey, the Temple of Karnak or the Mosque of Omar, owed their sanctity to their imposing dimensions. There is every reason why a sacred tree should grow to be exceptionally large and conspicuous. Barrows are usually built on more or less commanding heights, where they may attract general attention. The ground is laboured, piled high, freed from weeds, and enriched by blood and other offerings. The tree, being sacred, is tended and cared for. It is never cut down, and so naturally on the average of instances grows to be a big and well-developed specimen. Hence I hold the tree is usually big because it is sacred, not sacred because it is big. On the other hand, where a tree already full-grown is chosen for a place of burial, it would no doubt be natural to choose a large and conspicuous one. Thus I read of the tree under which Dr. Livingstone’s heart was buried by his native servant, “It is the largest in the neighbourhood.”
Looking at the question broadly, the case stands thus. We know that in many instances savages inter their dead under the shade of big trees. We know that such trees are thereafter considered sacred, and worshipped with blood, clothes, drapery, offerings. We know that young shrubs or trees are frequently planted on graves in all countries. We know that whatever comes up on or out of a grave is counted as representative of the ghost within it. The presumption is therefore in favour of any particular sacred tree being of funereal origin; and the onus of proving the opposite lies with the person who asserts some more occult and less obvious explanation.
At the same time I am quite ready to allow here, as in previous instances, when once the idea of certain trees being sacred has grown common among men, many trees may come to possess by pure association a sanctity of their own. This is doubtless the case in India with the peepul, and in various other countries with various other trees. Exactly the same thing has happened to stones. And so, again, though I believe the temple to have been developed out of the tomb or its covering, I do not deny that churches are now built apart from tombs, though always dedicated to the worship of a God who is demonstrably a particular deified personage.
Another point on which I must touch briefly is that of the sacred grove or cluster of trees. These often represent, I take it, the trees planted in the temenos or sacred tabooed space which surrounds the primitive tomb or temple. The koubbas or little dome-shaped tombs of Mahommedan saints so common in North Africa are all surrounded by such a walled enclosure, within which ornamental or other trees are habitually planted. In many cases these are palms—the familiar sacred tree of Mesopotamia, about which more must be said hereafter in a later chapter. The well-known bois sacré at Blidah is a considerable grove, with a koubba in its midst. A similar temenos frequently surrounded the Egyptian and the Greek temple. I do not assert that these were always of necessity actual tombs; but they were at any rate cenotaphs. When once people had got accustomed to the idea that certain trees were sacred to the memory of their ancestors or their gods, it would be but a slight step to plant such trees round an empty temple. When Xenophon, for example, built a shrine to Artemis, and planted around it a grove of many kinds of fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and an image of the goddess, nobody would for a moment suppose he erected it over the body of an actual dead Artemis. But men would never have begun building temples and consecrating groves at all if they had not first built houses for the dead god-chief, and planted shrubs and trees upon his venerated tumulus. Nay, even the naïve inscription upon Xenophon’s shrine—“He who lives here and enjoys the fruits of the ground must every year offer the tenth part of the produce to the goddess, and out of the residue keep the temple in repair”—does it not carry us back implicitly to the origin of priesthood, and of the desire for perpetuity in the due maintenance of the religious offices?
I shall say nothing here about the evolution of the great civilised tree-gods like Attis and Adonis, so common in the region of the eastern Mediterranean, partly because I have already treated them at some length in the essay on Tree-Worship to which I have alluded above, and partly because they would lead us too far afield from our present subject. But a few words must be devoted in passing to the prevalence of tree-worship among the Semitic peoples, intimately connected as it is with the rise of certain important elements in the Christian cult.
“In all parts of the Semitic area,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “trees were adored as divine.” Among the species thus honoured he enumerates especially the pines and cedars of Lebanon, the evergreen oaks of the Palestinian hills, the tamarisks of the Syrian jungles, and the acacias of the Arabian wadies. Most of these, it will be noted, are evergreens. In Arabia, the most striking case on record is that of the sacred date-palm at Nejran. This was adored at an annual feast, when it was “all hung with fine clothes and women’s ornaments.” A similar tree existed at Mecca, to which the people resorted annually, and hung upon it weapons, garments, ostrich eggs, and other offerings. In a sacred acacia at Nakla a goddess was supposed to live. The modern Arabs still hang pieces of flesh on such sacred trees, honour them with sacrifices, and present them with rags of calico and coloured beads.
As regards the Phoenicians and Canaanites, Philo Byblius says that plants were in ancient times revered as gods, and honoured with libations and sacrifices. Dr. Robertson Smith gives several instances. Christianity has not extinguished the veneration for sacred trees in Syria, where they are still prayed to in sickness and hung with rags. The Moslems of Palestine also venerate the sacred trees of immemorial antiquity.
In the Hebrew scriptures tree-worship constantly appears, and is frankly dwelt with by Professor Robertson Smith, who does not refuse to connect with this set of beliefs the legend of Jahweh in the burning bush. The local altars of early Hebrew cult were habitually set up “under green trees.” On this subject I would refer the reader to Dr. Smith’s own interesting disquisition on p. 193 of The Religion of the Semites.
With regard to the general sacredness of vegetation, and especially of food-plants, such as corn, the vine, and the date-palm, I postpone that important subject for the present, till we come to consider the gods of cultivation, and the curious set of ideas which gradually led up to sacramental god-eating. In a theme so vast and so involved as that of human religion, it becomes necessary to take one point at a time, and to deal with the various parts in analytic isolation.
We have now examined briefly almost all the principal sacred objects of the world, according to classes—the corpse, the mummy, the idol, the sacred stone, the sacred stake, the sacred tree or grove; there remains but one other group of holy things, very generally recognised, which I do not propose to examine separately, but to which a few words may yet be devoted at the end of a chapter. I mean, the sacred wells. It might seem at first sight as if these could have no possible connection with death or burial; but that expectation is, strange to say, delusive. There appears to be some reason for bringing wells, too, into the widening category of funereal objects. The oxen’s well at Acre, for example, was visited by Christian, Jewish, and Moslem pilgrims; it was therefore an object of great ancient sanctity; but observe this point: there is a mashhed or sacred tomb beside it, “perhaps the modern representative of the ancient Memnonium.” Every Egyptian temple had in like manner its sacred lake. In modern Syria, “cisterns are always found beside the grave of saints, and are believed to be inhabited by a sort of fairy. A pining child is thought to be a fairy changeling, and must be lowered into the cistern.” The similarity of the belief about holy wells in England and Ireland, and their frequent association with the name of a saint, would seem to suggest for them a like origin. Sacred rivers usually rise from sacred springs, near which stands a temple. The river Adonis took its origin at the shrine of Aphaca: and the grave of Adonis, about whom much more must be said hereafter, stood near the mouth of the holy stream that was reddened by his blood. The sacred river Belus had also its peculiar Memnonium or Adonis tomb. But I must add that sacred rivers had likewise their annual god-victims, about whom we shall have a great deal to say at a later stage of our enquiry, and from whom in part they probably derived their sanctity. Still, that their holiness was also due in part, and originally, to tombs at their sources, I think admits of no reasonable doubt.
The equivalence of the holy well and the holy stone is shown by the fact that while a woman whose chastity was suspected had to drink water of a sacred spring to prove her innocence, at Mecca she had to swear seventy oaths by the Kaaba.
Again, sacred wells and fountains were and are worshipped with just the same acts of sacrifice as ghosts and images. At Aphaca, the pilgrims cast into the holy pool, jewels of gold and silver, with webs of linen and other precious stuffs. A holy grove was an adjunct of the holy spring: in Greece, according to Botticher, they were seldom separated. At the annual fair of the Sacred Terebinth, or tree and well of Abraham at Mamre, the heathen visitors offered sacrifices beside the tree, and cast into the well libations of wine, with cakes, coins, myrrh, and incense: all of which we may compare with the Ostyak offerings to ancestral grave-stakes. At the holy waters of Karwa, bread, fruit, and other foods were laid beside the fountain. At Mecca, and at the Stygian Waters in the Syrian desert, similar gifts were cast into the holy source. In one of these instances at least we know that the holy well was associated with an actual burial; for at Aphaca, the holiest shrine of Syria, the tomb of the local Baal or god was shown beside the sacred fountain. “A buried god,” says Dr. Robertson Smith quaintly, in commenting on this fact, “is a god that dwells under ground.” It would be far truer and more philosophical to say that a god who dwells underground is a buried man.
I need not recall the offerings to Cornish and Irish well-spirits, which have now degenerated for the most part into pins and needles.
On the whole, though it is impossible to understand the entire genesis of sacred founts and rivers without previous consideration of deliberate god-making, a subject which I reserve for a later portion of our exposition, I do not think we shall go far wrong in supposing that the sacred well most often occurs in company with the sacred tree, the sacred stone or altar, and the sacred tomb; and that it owes its sanctity in the last resort, originally at least, to a burial by its side; though I do not doubt that this sanctity was in many cases kept up by the annual immolation of a fresh victim-god, of a type whose genesis will hereafter detain us. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith says of the Semitic worship in general, “The usual natural symbols are a fountain or a tree, while the ordinary artificial symbol is a pillar or pile of stones: but very often all three are found together, and this was the rule in the more developed sanctuaries.” I cannot agree with him on the point of “symbolism”: but the collocation of objects is at least significant.
Thus, in ultimate analysis, we see that all the sacred objects of the world are either dead men themselves, as corpse, mummy, ghost, or god; or else the tomb where such men are buried; or else the temple, shrine, or hut which covers the tomb; or else the tombstone, altar, image, or statue, standing over it and representing the ghost; or else the stake, idol, or household god which is fashioned as their deputy; or else the tree which grows above the barrow; or else the well, or tank, or spring, natural or artificial, by whose side the dead man has been laid to rest. In one form or another, from beginning to end, we find only, in Mr. William Simpson’s graphic phrase, “the Worship of Death,” as the basis and root of all human religion.