The above is some slight illustration of the development of the Greek concept of purity and of its ethical influence. It remains to trace its action in a very important department of law—the law of homicide. Perhaps the most significant distinction between the code of a civilised and that of a savage or barbaric community lies in their respective attitudes towards manslaughter or murder: in the latter society it is mainly an affair between the families concerned, to be settled by the were-gilt or the blood-feud: in the former the whole community feels itself to be deeply concerned. Our Teutonic ancestors, at the time of Tacitus and for centuries after, remained at the lower stage, though we discern that the legal genius of the Icelanders was impelling them towards the higher even before Christianity reached them. What is strange is that some societies appear to have attained a high general level of civilisation without making this momentous advance: the Homeric world, for instance, was scarcely abreast with the early Icelandic in this respect, although we may see signs that the higher idea was ready to emerge in the later Homeric period.140.1 Then follows a blank in our record which may be tentatively filled up by the interpretation of mythology, until in the developed Attic law—which we know better than the law of any other Greek state—we find the modern idea fully recognised and applied to a criminal code, probably from the sixth century onward, though traces of legal barbarism still survive. We would gladly discover the constructive forces, spiritual or political, that brought this great reform about. The anthropology of our contemporary savage societies has not yet supplied us with analogies that we could apply to Greek history: a few savage states have indeed spontaneously achieved the great advance from the blood-feud to a public law of homicide, but there is no record showing how they have achieved it. Some writers have supposed that the emergence of criminal law in general is always due to some great increase of power in the central government, probably to the development of the monarchy. But as a universal axiom this cannot be accepted; for, as Steinmetz in his treatise on “The Development of Punishment”142.1 has shown, such a suggested cause is not found operative in the backward communities of modern times that have developed a public criminal law. Nor would it be reasonable to urge that the central authority was stronger in Greece of the seventh century than in the earlier monarchical period. Probably Steinmetz is right in his belief that among savage societies the earliest criminal law arises from some intense feeling of hatred or dread excited by acts that violate religious feeling or secular interests. One of the earliest crimes to be punished by death at the hands of the society is incest: the horror that it excites among savages is a feeling that we may call religious. We may not be able to show indeed that the primitive ideas of purity would explain the earliest complicated codes of human marriage: but the circles of kinship that are thus established seem certainly to have been consecrated at a very early time by the concept of purity that came to be attached to them.143.1 Now it is probable that a similar religious feeling was operative in the case of homicide.
If in any given society the primitive belief in the impurity of bloodshed became intensified beyond a certain point, homicide might easily come to be regarded no longer as a matter to be settled by the families of the slayer and the slain, but as the deep concern of the people of the land. We have seen that it was just this religious concept of impurity that brought the act under the cognisance of the national religious law of Israel: the people are terrified because the soil has been made impure and their god has been stained. In the Zend-Avesta we find that the slaying of a water-dog was an impure act against God, and was avenged by the whole community; and sacrifice was offered to appease the holy soul of the dog.144.1 These facts then offer some analogy for the theory that I would suggest, namely, that the civilised law in Greece concerning homicide arose in the post-Homeric period through an intensification of the feeling concerning the impurity of bloodshed and owing to the greater hold that the terrors of the ghostly world had come to gain over the later Hellenic imagination; for the ghost or the Erinys of the dead is the embodiment of the miasma that arises from the slaying; and the ghost knows how to drive it home, and is no respecter of persons, but can make a whole area uninhabitable. The religious phenomenon and the legal fact that I would connect as cause and effect are not found in the Homeric period: both are found coexisting in the later. And much legendary evidence accords with this hypothesis. Perhaps the earliest indication of the emergence of the idea in Greek society that certain kinds of homicide concern the State, is found in the legends about exile and excommunication for the shedding of kindred blood, the exile, for instance, of Bellerophon and Ixion. Such exile is not the ordinary flight of the homicide to avoid the avenger of blood; for in the cases where a man is of the same kin as the slain, there is no family avenger, but the whole community in horror cast him out lest the curse should infect themselves. Kinsmen’s blood was more sacred than other, therefore the shedding it spread the greater impurity over the land. And the Greek legends suggest that this offence was one of the earliest in the legal history of the race which awoke the religious conscience of the State.145.1 Now if we assume that the old ideas associated with kinship came to be extended to the whole community of the polis—as might easily happen through the intermarriage of the γένη—then a similar miasma would be caused by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance.
The reasons for supposing that this was the actual order in the Hellenic evolution of the homicide law may appear to rest on mere legends, but legends are often direct and firsthand evidence of early thought, and the stories about the slayers of kindred who were driven out of the communities and who were the first applicants for the ritual of purification, such as Ixion, Orestes, Theseus, accord well with the early belief that the Erinyes were the ghostly avengers of kindred slaughter. Then we find that in the Aithiopis, the poem of Arctinos of Miletus, Achilles has to leave the army and retire to Lesbos for purification, although Thersites, whom he has slain, is no real kinsman of his: whence we may draw the conclusion that the State of Miletus, in the eighth century, had come to take cognisance of the slaying of any citizen. And the Argives, in the fifth or fourth century, offer atonement to Zeus Meilichios for a civic massacre, the god who has a legendary association with purification for the shedding of kindred blood. By the fifth century in Athens the religious feeling concerning the sacredness of all life within the city had so deepened that even the slaying of a slave caused a miasma and was a State offence.147.1
Now when we examine certain details of Attic law, together with certain expressions of sentiment concerning homicide in the classical writers of Attica, we see the clear imprint of its origin. Accidental homicide was as gravely regarded by the Athens of the fourth century as by the old Hebrew code: such homicides must fly over the border, but if they went by a certain road, the State refused to allow the avenger of blood to follow them: they must remain in exile until they have won the forgiveness of one of the kinsmen of the dead.148.1 We may suppose that the kinsmen are regarded as taking up the feud of the ghost, who is likely to be vindictive, even when the slaying was accidental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide returns he must go through elaborate purifications. These latter were to wipe off the miasma, not to ease what we might call the burden of conscience. And the community were obliged to expel temporarily even a perfectly innocent man, because of their fear of the wrath of the dead. This dread of the ghost is appealed to by an Attic orator as a motive that should influence the judges to condemn the prisoner.148.2 The first legal preliminary in a case of murder, which reveals clearly the religious origin of the State law, was the solemn proclamation, made by one of the relatives holding a spear at the funeral, that the murderer should keep aloof from all the holy and public places of the community.149.1 And Antiphon strongly expresses the popular sentiment that the unpunished murderer pollutes the public altars and vitiates the atmosphere of the city:149.2 and the whole of Plato’s legislation149.3 concerning homicide is based on the idea of the miasma arising from bloodshed, and is quite in accord with Attic law. The exile of the murderer purges the city as well as his execution; therefore the accused was allowed to go out of the country before the verdict.149.4 The contagion was worse under a roof than in the open air; therefore the Athenian judges insisted on trying homicide in an unroofed court, “lest they should be under one roof with the slayer.”149.5 Also it is part of primitive animistic belief that such miasma could cleave to things which had caused the death of a man: hence the inanimate object such as an axe or bar of iron might be solemnly tried and, if found guilty, would be thrown into the sea to rid the State of infection:150.1 the same superstition explains the old English law that a waggon which ran over a man and caused his death should be given to God—“deodand”: that is, it was to become a perquisite of the King, who represented God.
So far we seem to discern clearly the concept of purity evolving State law in a very vital matter. And this is a great achievement. But it might easily evolve law which from our point of view would be unjust and superstitious. The terrors of the ghost, the inequitable wrath of a pure god, the insistence on the ritualistic view of impurity, might retard progress and prevent the evolution of the highest law which regards extenuating circumstances and admits justifiable homicide. Such law is not heard of in the Mosaic books, but it existed in the Attic code,151.1 which specially on this account may be called civilised. The court which tried admitted cases of homicide where the plea of justification was raised was the Delphinion, and its foundation legend claimed that it was instituted to try Theseus for slaying the Pallantids who attacked him, and that the plea of justifiable homicide was allowed.151.2 The name of the court shows that its patron is the pure god, and points to Crete and Delphi, the chief centres of the ritual of purification. Now it is quite possible that this momentous advance in law may have been prompted by the healthy rationalism of the early Greek mind, to some extent by secular utilitarian thought, which reacted on the religious view of purity. We shall then say that the religion adapted itself dexterously to a secular movement, as it usually did in Greece. Or it may be the truth that the advance was due to a spontaneous movement within the religion itself, beginning perhaps in the seventh century, and to the growing consciousness that the purity or impurity of an act depended on motive and will. If this idea penetrated at an early time, as it certainly did at a later, into the sacerdotal circle, then the priest of Apollo might grant or withhold purification according to the degree of justification the homicide might prove:152.1 in this case a court would be established at the instigation of the purifying god to consider the circumstances. This explanation must remain a hypothesis, but it is one that assumes the action of real forces.
Enough has been said to illustrate the intimate association of the idea of purity with legal progress,152.2 and it only remains to indicate very briefly its impress and effect on religious institutions. One of the methods most frequently employed to attain mental purity or freedom from the evil spirit is fasting; from all human societies, primitive and advanced, we could gather a copious stock of illustration. And mankind has, on the whole, agreed as to the occasions at which the ritual is desirable; in spring before the crops and the first-fruits appear, before the warriors go forth to battle, before any kind of intimate communion with God, when the family is in mourning for a kinsman and evil influences are abroad, fasting has been practised as a mode of purging the body and safeguarding it against spiritual harm or preparing it for the privilege of divine intercourse. It has been held necessary before any mystic initiation,154.1 the early Christian Church prescribing it for the days preceding the Easter communion; also before the individual can attain the divine afflatus of prophecy or the supernatural potency for expelling evil spirits or working wonder-cures. “Such kind goeth not forth save by prayer and fasting.” The psychological basis of the ritual is the belief that certain foods, and finally all food, are liable to engender evil influences in the body; and, moreover, the experience that the abstinence generates a peculiar mental condition of exaltation, ecstasy, and supra-normal self-confidence: other ideas, such as the discipline of self-denial, that come to gather round the practice are of later growth.
From the same primitive view of the relations between our body and the spiritual world has arisen the enforcement of celibacy upon the priesthood. To trace the phenomenon, which is commonly or exceptionally found in all human societies, throughout the history of the churches, would require a separate chapter. It is not a late growth in religion, nor of necessity a sign of high development. And here again the original psychological motive is not a spirit of self-mortification, but the belief that the chaste body is the purer abode for the Divine Spirit, and the mental experience that such self-abnegation usually engenders a stronger consciousness of religious power. There are signs that the idea is losing its hold on the modern consciousness, but we see the deep impress it has made upon some of the ideas and dogmas of our religion. The institution of a sacerdotal rule of celibacy corresponds to the view prevalent in any given society of the priestly function; it is likely to be enforced when the priest is invested with a specially prophetic and mystic character, and is required to mediate between the society and God by means of frequent communion with the divinity: it is rare when the civic and semi-secular view of the sacerdotal office prevails, rare therefore among the Northern Aryans and in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman states, although the Hellenic ritual generally required virginity, or at least a prolonged chastity, in the prophetess and occasionally in the ordinary priest. It was common in the ecstatic religions of Anatolia, and in the worship of Cybele was pushed to an unnatural extreme. It is interesting again to trace the association between the Phrygian-Christian heresy of Montanism and the older Phrygian paganism; and we have noted that Montanus, its founder, the champion of celibacy, is reported to have been in his unconverted days a priest of Cybele.
Again, the baptismal rite is a form of purification of world-wide prevalence, as has been already intimated. The washing of the new-born has been generally interpreted as a purgation of dangerous and evil influence among the lower as well as the higher races. An interesting form of such lustration is recorded of the old Aztec home-life: the midwife washed the infant with the prayer, “May this water purify and whiten thy heart: may it wash away all that is evil.”157.1 The adult, before initiation into any mystic society, usually needed elaborate purification; and this often took the form of baptism with water and occasionally with blood: and in certain of the Mediterranean religions the lustration was not merely regarded as a washing away of the old sin, but as a spiritual rebirth.157.2 In the Isis rites the baptism with water was supposed to raise the mortal to the divinity: in the description of the baptismal purification of Setis I. the words occur: “I have purified thee with life and power, so as to make thee young, like thy father Ra.” And the gods themselves were believed to be reborn through the sprinkling of lustral water over their images.157.3 We discover the same theories held by the early Church concerning the Christian rite: the font washes away the taint of the flesh, while at the same time the divine potency of the water revivifies and recreates the catechumen, who dies to the old life and is born again; so that the font, which itself was exorcised and purified in the early period, was in some sense the womb of spiritual life, and the rite is both an exorcism and a communion. Very soon in the history of the Church it came to be regarded as of such serious and critical significance that the catechumen must prepare himself for it by prior purifications and exorcisms: such ceremonies as the breathing on his forehead by the priest, the sacramental partaking of the salt, the anointing with oil, together with the utterance of a prayer that “the enemy might be put to flight,” have an obvious cathartic significance.158.1
We must also regard confession as a kind of purification; for the “speaking out” of sin would be regarded as a real purgation and deliverance at that period of thought when words might be viewed as things, or at least as controlling things. This was its meaning in the preliminary ritual of the Samothracian Mysteries, in the Mexican religion159.1 where it was associated with purification and the concept of rebirth, and finally in the early Christian Church, where it was specially imposed upon the priest before the Easter communion as part of the purificatory preparation.159.2 An interesting formula of confession is found among the Babylonian liturgical tablets: the penitent prays to the god and the goddess—“Let the seven winds carry away my sighs… let the bird bear my wickedness to the heavens: let the fish carry off my misery, let the river sweep it away. Let the beast of the field take it from me. Let the waters of the river wash me clean.” Here the purificatory confessional works partly by prayer to the high god, partly by the old idea of the magic transference of sin into an alien substance.160.1
These are examples of practices in the advanced religions aiming at the purging of internal and spiritual sin. But the older and more materialistic view of impurity as a physical taint or as the miasma of an evil spirit, has not wholly faded even from historic Christianity: the ceremony of the churching of women, though transformed into a thanksgiving service, has descended from an old cathartic ritual that purged away the dangerous pollution of child-birth: and the consecration of churches was originally merely a special application of the old-world practice of purifying the house against demons, as we may see from the legendary example given in the apocryphal “Acts of St Thomas.”160.2
The facts which I have collected and exposed, incomplete as the statement is, may justify what was said at the outset of the inquiry, that the aboriginal idea of purity has struck deep roots in the soil on which much of our ethical thought and feeling, many of our legal and religious institutions, have grown and developed. The concept, owing perhaps to its immemorial continuity of life and deep primeval instinctiveness, if the word may pass, is liable to fantastic exaggerations. It has sometimes proved itself an insurmountable barrier to moral and legal progress. When it has crystallised into a hard “pharisaic” form, it has arrested and imprisoned the life of a hitherto progressive people. On the other hand, though its innate quality, so to speak, is never secular-utilitarian, its contributions to our civilisation have been, as we have seen, of inestimable service. It has engendered the modern horror of murder and bloodshed, and the ideal of the chaste life: we owe to it in great degree the delicate sensitiveness of spiritually gifted characters. For good and for evil, it has been an instinctive religious force more potent than any other of these in the mental evolution of man.
There is no part of the religious service of mankind that so clearly reveals the various views of the divine nature held by the different races at the different stages of their development as the formulæ of prayer, or reflects so vividly the material and psychologic history of man. The historic material at our disposal is unfortunately modern, not reaching back, that is to say, to a period earlier than some four thousand years before Christ; but this can be supplemented, as usually happens, by the evidence gathered from the lower societies, as well as by the observation of practices that frequently accompany and are very closely blended with prayer even in the higher religions, and that we may with confidence believe to have descended from an immemorial antiquity. The question as to the origin of prayer is one of great difficulty and of the deepest significance for the history and philosophy of religion; for it inevitably involves the questions concerning the origin of the belief in a personal divinity, concerning the relation of magic to religion, of the spell-ritual which commands or constrains to a prayer-ritual of humiliation and entreaty. Even if I had an original and matured judgment to put before you on questions of such importance, a single lecture would be a very inadequate space for its exposition.164.1 Therefore, though I may indicate, I will not attempt in this lecture to decide on, the question of origin. I will content myself with arranging the phenomena according as they appear from our point of view to belong to a lower stratum of religion or a higher; such an arrangement begs no question, and agrees with our experience that in all religions, whether savage or civilised, lower and higher elements are able to coexist. I will first give a general sketch of the facts, with some interpretation of them, and will follow this with an illustrative selection of the prayers of primitive and advanced communities.
According to the modern definition of prayer, man addresses uttered or inaudible speech to a divine power conceived as Spirit or God, but always as personal, in order to obtain material, moral, or spiritual blessings: that part of the address that contains the actual prayer will be often accompanied by words of homage, adoration, confession of sin, expressions of doctrinal faith, statements concerning the beneficent operations of the divinity in time past, self-assuring utterances of confidence in divine protection or the divine promise. Though the formulæ contain much positive statement and are by no means confined to the optative mood, the attitude of the supplicator is always reverential and self-abased; modern religion reprobates any idea of compelling the divinity; only it generally seals its petitions with the mystic signature of a powerful name. If this may pass as a fairly comprehensive and adequate account of modern or advanced prayer, it will still be found to contain elements that may descend from a very ancient mould of religious thought not easy to reconcile with our higher religious consciousness; and it is no adequate account of the various modes which less advanced societies have used and are still using to express their desires to the supernatural power. It has indeed been recently asserted, with some plausibility,166.1 that no savage community yet explored lacks the conception of a high god making for righteousness; and certainly many of the lower races have spontaneously developed genuine prayer in the modern sense. Still it is sometimes reported by scientific observers that some backward peoples do not pray at all;167.1 and it appears not to be uncommon for the savage to regard his high god as too remote to be addressed for any practical purpose.
But the savage, though he may pray as we do, has other ways of addressing himself to the unseen personal agencies that he believes to surround him; and these are the ways of magic and the magic-spell. Having learned from human experience that he can project his will-power by an occult process so as to subdue the mind of his fellow-man, he experiments with this method upon the world of nature and spirits: he deals with ghosts chiefly in this way, though he may pray to them also; and he has no reluctance in applying his magic even to the higher divinities. As magic-worker he stands on a different footing altogether from the petitioner: his attitude towards the supernatural power is self-confident and imperious, his speech is no prayer but a command. He may project his will by dumb show, by action suggestive of his desire: but in most cases he will probably prefer to accompany it with potent speech, so as to drive his will home to the mark, so to speak: and the psychology of such magic practices has been ably investigated by recent writers. The technical name for such exercise of will upon another person is suggestion; a modern application of it sometimes appears in the extreme form that we call mesmerism or hypnotism. For the successful application of the charm, it is often an essential condition that one should possess oneself of the name of the person against whom it is directed, and at times of his picture or effigy, for both the name and the picture are regarded as vital parts of the whole individuality that one seeks to control. The same ideas transferred into the world of supernatural personalities account for the potency and deep significance that attaches to the divine name, and for the prominence of the picture and the effigy in the religious magic. But the savage has also learned from experience that he can work upon his fellows by entreaty, flattery, soothing and endearing address: and it was obviously natural for him to approach the divine powers in the same fashion, and to use humble and prayerful petitions. Nor does there seem any reason why he should not employ the methods of magic and prayer simultaneously or in close conjunction on the same occasion. We may often in fact be in doubt whether to interpret a certain primitive religious act from one point of view or the other. Thus we are told that when the Khonds of Orissa are about to enter on a campaign, “the priest cuts a branch and dresses it and arms it, so as to personate one of the foe: thereupon it is thrown down at the shrine of the war-god”:169.1 This formal appeal to the god is speechless, and may be thought to be a speechless prayer; but it is of the same colour as a multifarious mass of practices which are mimetic and which are intended to work by means of suggestion. A singular ritual is recorded of the rain societies of North America:170.1 emblems or picture-writing representing clouds, with vertical drops symbolising rain, are placed on an altar, ears of maize are placed by the side of them with other objects, and the corn-ears are sprinkled with water, while at the same time prayers are proffered to the ghosts that control the rain-supply. We would wish to know what the manner of the praying is; but it seems clear that we here have the ritual of prayer combined with magic-suggestion, which consists in pretending to do the thing which it is desired to bring about. Again, the primitive formulæ devised to drive out the demons of disease and poverty are usually imperious commands and not prayers: such as the Chinese “Let the devil of poverty depart”;170.2 the Greek, “Go out, hunger,”170.3 and “To the door, you ghosts.”170.4
But when, as in Buro, the bidding takes such a form as “Grandfather small-pox, go away,”171.1 the reverential and soothing address allows us to approximate this to prayer, for in the liturgies of the earlier as well as the advanced religions the divinity is commonly addressed in terms of kinship. We shall note instances of real prayers proffered by the uncultured races to a high god, yet retaining something of the magic character and tone: we detect it in the mystic employment of the name, in the reiteration of the same short phrase, in the droning sing-song in which, according to Professor Tylor,171.2 savage prayers are usually intoned, the tone of a mesmeric incantation. But gradually, as the concept of divinity deepens in the progressive race, and the mind becomes penetrated with the consciousness of the littleness of man and of the incomparable greatness of God, the worshipper tends to become the humble petitioner and prayer comes to predominate over spell. And it has happened in the legislation of the higher religions that magic at last becomes “suspect” and tabooed: yet the most austere and purified religion often unconsciously retains certain elements of spell-ritual, and even legitimatises the spell by virtue of the distinction between white magic and black. The distinction is morphologically unsound, and arises generally from ex-parte prejudice. We do not find, in fact, if we broadly compare the phenomena of all religions, that cleavage and irreconcilable antagonism between magic and religion which has often been supposed. Even in religions that we must class as high, the deity himself is often imagined to work by means of magic, and the Christian Church itself has given its patronage and consecration to practices of magical significance, such as the ordeal, purification, certain forms of healing, exorcisms of evil spirits: all these will be accompanied by prayers to God, but the prayers are so impregnated with the ideas of animistic magic that we can hardly regard them as pure forms. Nevertheless, though the lower elements are so difficult to eradicate, yet the experience of some few of the higher communities may reassure us that as a religion progresses in spirituality it can purge itself more and more thoroughly of these, and the progress is from spell to prayer.
Again, we may compare the phenomena from the point of view of the progress in aspiration. In the primitive period, when the struggle is to live at all rather than to live well, the objects of prayer must be material blessings, and these are still prominent in the liturgies of the civilised societies. There is a sameness in all these, and the chief distinction to note is between the prayers that look to the individual alone and those that look to the good of the community. A higher stage is reached when moral and spiritual qualities become the object of prayer; and when this is attained, the principle of prayer is likely to become more and more spiritual, and the petitioner more and more diffident in the expression of his material wants, and with a growing consciousness that the Deity knows best what is good for man, may rise to the height of the formula, “Thy will be done.” It is interesting to note in how many races some such utterance has been heard; and at times men may have been helped to it by the consciousness which scientific advance had awakened, that the laws of the material universe cannot be capriciously altered to suit the temporary needs of the individual: a formula of acquiescence appears then to be the deepest and truest prayer. Finally, in the evolution of prayer we may consider that the consummation is marked by the theory, maintained by later Greek philosophy and early Christian fathers alike, that the true intention of prayer is not the mere petition for some special blessing, but rather the communion with God, to whom it is a spiritual approach. Here as often elsewhere, the highest spiritual product of human thought reveals its affinity with some dimly remote primeval concept; for much of the spell-ritual at which we have been glancing implies an idea of such communion, the human agent endeavouring to charge himself with a potency drawn from a quasi-divine source.
It remains now to take concrete examples from the record of prayer illustrative of these phases of development. Looking first at the savage races, we have already observed that some of their formulæ seem to belong to the borderland between spell and prayer. When the New Caledonian says over the fire that he kindles to increase the heat of the sun, “Sun, I do this that you may be burning hot,” it is obviously not a prayer that he utters to the sun-god but a formula expressing the suggestion of his magic.175.1 And when the Karens of Burma at the threshing of the rice call out to the corn-mother, “Shake thyself, grandmother, shake thyself. Let the paddy ascend till it equals a hill, equals a mountain; shake thyself, grandmother, shake thyself,”176.1 we have surely a command rather than a pure prayer; for primitive vegetation-ritual works by compulsion rather than entreaty. On the other hand, we have record of a genuine Karen prayer addressed to “the God of heaven and earth, God of the mountains and hills,” on the occasion when a sin of unchastity was supposed to have sterilised the earth: “Do not be angry with me, do not hate me, but have mercy on me and compassionate me.… Now I repair the mountains, now I heal the hills.… Make thy paddy fruitful, thy rice abundant.… If we cultivate but little, still grant that we may obtain a little.” But the prayer is accompanied with rites that are purely magical and aiming at the restoration of the earth.176.2
The buffalo clan among the Sioux Indians decorate themselves with emblems of their totem animal before going on the war-path, and express the purpose of the dressing with a sententious phrase: “My little grandfather is always dangerous when he makes an attempt.”177.1 Such an utterance, considered formally, is not a prayer but a statement about the power of the buffalo, “the little grandfather”; for it is an article of faith in the magic creed that the supernatural force, which the spell aims at setting in operation, can be made to work by definite statements that it is working; these are suggestive assurances that increase one’s own confidence; and the Sioux formula is of such a nature; only the coaxing and endearing phrase of kinship seems to imply a half entreaty as well. We discern more clearly the rudiments of a prayer in the words addressed by the Santee Indians to the buffalo when they have offered him a feast: “Grandfather, venerable man, thy children have made this feast for you: may the food thus taken cause them to live and bring them good fortune.”178.1 The account of the Sioux religion preserves a quaint form of words which are used for the riddance of the ghost, to despatch the soul of the deceased to the home of the dead: “You are going to the animals, you are going to your ancestors, you came hither from the animals and you are going back thither: do not face this way again: when you go, continue walking.”178.2 The tone of the words is kind and considerate, but authoritative rather than supplicatory, and unlike the formula which the same Indians are reported to use when praying to their ancestors for good weather or good hunting, “Spirits of the dead, have mercy on us.”178.3 Certain prayers used habitually by the Todas of the Nalgiri hills for the thriving of the dairy and the buffalo herd have recently been published,178.4 and as the formulæ are all in the optative mood—“May it be well for the buffaloes, may there be no destroyer, etc.,” and there is an appeal to divine personages or powers—“for the sake of such or such a god may this happen”—we may class them as prayers; but the appeal is very faint and the formulæ seem to be used as if they possessed a self-dependent efficacy. More interesting and fervent is the address to the sun, proffered by a solitary hunter of the half-christianised Kekchi tribe of Indians:179.1 his object is to secure game and food in the wilderness both for himself and as an oblation to the god; but in the very long and impassioned utterance, with its many repetitions, there is very little direct entreaty: the Indian contents himself with definite and reassuring statements concerning the omnipresence of the deity and the ease with which the latter can execute his will: “It will give you no trouble to give me all kind of game”; and a moving appeal is made on the ground of kinship: “Thou art my father: who is my mother, who is my father? Only thou, O God.”
We may regard these utterances of the hunter not indeed as spells, for his attitude is most reverent and loving, but as potent statement effecting the purpose of prayer. Nor need we see Christian influence in the striking phrase last quoted, though of course this is possible; such endearing address is common both in the lower and higher liturgies: the Egyptian appealed to Isis in similar terms180.1—“Oh my father, my brother, my mother Isis,” the Babylonian addressed Bel as father and mother,180.2 and a Vedic hymn contains the phrase, “Thou, oh Agni, art our father, we are thy kinsmen.”180.3 Such appeals, suggested by the affection between kinsmen and the idea of the kinship of man with God, belong to the alphabet of pure prayer.
Of still more value for the light it throws on the attitude of the Indian’s mind to the powers of the unseen world, is the so-called prayer of a Navajo Shaman belonging to the district of Arizona, recently published in the American Anthropologist;181.1 and to understand it the circumstances must be briefly stated. The Shaman had been telling the American inquirer the story of his tribe’s descent through the lower world and their re-emergence: after the narrative he fears that speaking about the lower regions may have caused his own spiritual or astral part to have left his body and departed thither; and he therefore proceeds to recite a long so-called prayer intended to deliver his soul from the witchcraft that may be detaining it below. We should not strictly call it a prayer at all, but a narrative in the indicative mood stating that the war-gods of the tribe are actually doing what he specially wants them to do, namely, to go down and rescue his soul from the woman-chieftain, “the underground witch.” Every step of their way there and back is carefully recounted several times over, so that they cannot go wrong; and when they are supposed to have brought back his soul, the recital ends with the joyful refrain, “The world before me is restored in beauty: my voice is restored in beauty,” each phrase repeated five times. It is really a spell-narrative about the gods, having the same effect as prayer, and is a twofold illustration of the primitive idea that talking about a thing makes it happen; an idea not wholly extinct among ourselves, and possibly underlying some of the liturgies of higher religions.
For the rest, savages often pray very much as the civilised man, and accompany some of their purifications and medicine-magic with real prayers to higher gods to give them efficacy: for instance, the African doctor administering the medicine shown him by the fetich holds it first up to heaven and prays, “Father Heaven, bless this medicine that I now give.”183.1 But I have not been able to find any example of a savage prayer for moral or spiritual blessings. An interesting feature is, however, observable in a verbose and very exacting prayer made by the Khonds of Orissa to the earth-goddess; after particularising very carefully their material wants, they conclude with the words, “We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us, give it us.”183.2 This appears to be a unique savage version of the great phrase, “Thy will be done.”
Turning now to the liturgies of the more advanced peoples,183.3 we may note briefly at the outset one feature that is found in most of them if not common to all; namely, the idea that the prayer gains potency from the solemn utterance of the true divine name. The phenomenon has been examined by recent writers on comparative religion, especially by Giesebrecht in his treatise on Die Alt-testamentliche Schätzung des Gottesnamens.184.1 In primitive psychology, the name is part of the personality, and the soul or power of the individual inheres in it: therefore he who has the name of the person, whether human, superhuman, or divine, can exercise a certain control over him by means of its magical application. Thus in the appeal to the god Ukko in the Kalevala, “Ukko, oh thou god in heaven, Ukko come, we call upon thee, Ukko come, we need thee sorely,” there is virtue in the threefold repetition of the name, and the passage is part of an address which is called “magic words.” Evidence from Teutonic paganism, so far as I know, is lacking, although the idea has left its clear imprint on the human saga. Its influence is strongest and its operation most interesting in the liturgies of the Mediterranean and of India. In old Latium, it seems, the pontifices endeavoured to conceal the true names of the gods, lest they might be wrongly used by unauthorised persons185.1 or lest the enemy should get the knowledge of them and therewith the power to draw the divinities away. We may thus understand the often misinterpreted statement in Herodotus, that the Pelasgian deities were nameless; and the Greeks themselves must have been familiar with the ritual precaution of keeping secret the divine name, as we may gather from the phrase in the Euripidean fragment185.2 about the enlightened man “who knows the silent names of the gods”: it is curious to find exactly the same expression in a Vedic hymn,185.3 in which the sacrificial post, or tree to which the sacrifices were attached, is thus addressed: “Where thou knowest, oh tree, the sacred names of the gods, to that place make the offerings go.” It is possible that the same superstition may have been the original cause of the custom that has sometimes been observed of silent or inaudible prayer: the formulæ with the divine name attached to them being of such potency that they must be concealed.
The belief that the name belongs to the essence of the personality explains the curious formula in the Umbrian prayer preserved in the Tabulæ Iguvinæ, where the god Grabovius is implored to be propitious to the “Arx Fisia” and to “the name of the Arx Fisia,” as if the name of the city was a living and independent entity.
In the Greek liturgies we note the anxious care with which particular qualifying epithets were selected and attached to the personal name of the divinity, so as to make clear what was the precise operation of divine favour which the prayer aimed at evoking. This explains why so many divinities, some of whom were scarcely known outside a narrow area, were invoked as πολυώνυμε, “thou god of many names,” all possible titles of power being summed up in one word. Certain passages in the poets become intelligible only in the light of this idea: such as the well-known phrase in the chorus of the Agamemnon of Æschylus:187.1 “Zeus, whosoever the god is, if this name of Zeus is dear to him, by this name I now appeal to him.” The thought and the words of the Vedic poet are often the same as the Greek: Agni is πολυώνυμος: “Agni, many are the names of thee the Immortal one”; and again, “The father adoring gives many names to thee, oh Agni, if thou shouldest take pleasure therein.”187.2
But it is in Egypt, the land of magic, where the idea of the potency of the divine name assumes dimensions that are truly gigantic. In an early metaphysical theory of the origin of things, which in its harmonious self-contradiction reaches quite to the level of Hegelian philosophy, the universe is said to have come into being, and the first god himself effects his own creation by the utterance of his own portentous name:188.1 in the beginning was the name. It is said of the great god Ra that “his names are manifold and unknown, even the gods know them not.” Naturally, therefore, the goddess Isis was desirous of knowing his real name, and having discovered it by a ruse, she became mistress over him and all gods.188.2 In certain Egyptian papyri containing Abraxas prayers, we find the prayer sometimes coupled with the reminder that the petitioner knows the divine mystic name;188.3 thus equipped, the prayer is more than a mere humble entreaty.
Was it from Egypt that the early Israelites derived the same mystic illusion concerning the divine name, which to some of the scholars of the last generation appeared to be a faith peculiar to the chosen people? At least we are now enabled, by the recent exposition of the facts, to understand the inner force of such prayers as the Psalmist’s “Save me, oh God, by thy name and judge me by thy strength”:189.1 of Jahvé’s warning to his people in the Exodus to obey the angel whom he sends them, “Obey his voice… for my Name is in him:”189.2 of the oath taken by those initiated into the Essenian sect not to reveal the names of the angels:189.3 of expressions in the New Testament concerning the casting out of devils and the healing of the sick in the name of Jesus: finally, of the significant baptismal phrase, “to baptize into the name of Christ,”189.4 which reveals the name as a religious potency into which as into a spiritual atmosphere the adult catechumen or the initiated infant is brought. And these facts of old-world religion and religious logic cast a new light on the name-formulæ which close most of the prayers of the Christian Church, and which are words of power to speed the prayer home; and though the modern consciousness may often be unaware of this mystic function of theirs, we may believe that it was more clearly recognised in the early days of Christianity, for in the apocryphal acts of St John we find a long list of mystical names and titles attached to Christ giving to the prayer much of the tone of an enchantment.190.1
Connected as it seems with this superstition about names is the belief that, in order to gain complete power over a human or divine personality, it is necessary to know their origin and to express what one knows about them in the charm: thus in the Kalevala the young magician is taught the origin of things in order that he may know the proper enchantment against them, and a long account of the origin of iron, regarded as a demoniac substance, occurs in the word-magic used to cure the wound it inflicted. Hence we may account for the descriptive or, so to speak, biographical element in charms that are on the borderland of prayer. The exorciser of evil dreams in the Atharva-Veda prays or sings thus: “We know, oh sleep, thy birth; thou art the son of the divine women-folk, the instrument of Death. Thou art the ender, thou art Death. Thus do we know thee, oh sleep: do thou, oh sleep, protect us from evil dreams.”191.1 And in the worship of Agni the belief is expressed that “the prayers fill thee with power and strengthen thee,” and this is at once followed by an account of his nature and origin.191.2 Is it then too far-fetched to trace the survival of this old-world thought, rooted as it is in the magic of the word and the statement, in the prominence given to the dogmatic biographical statement in our own liturgy? We regard it as a confession of faith: it may also be regarded as an expression of the worshipper’s knowledge of the divine personality, whereby he raises himself into communion with it and thus gains power for his prayer.192.1
Considering now in a more general survey the liturgies of the nations that have attained culture, we might begin with our own fathers. But so little that touches the inner life of their pre-Christian religion has been preserved, that probably not much material for our present purpose is to be discovered from the records. We know that they were given to the employment of the rune or the spell, the rival or the parent of prayer; and one of these, used by Odin to heal the sprained foot of Baldur’s foal, is perhaps the only surviving fragment of Indo-Germanic poetry.193.1 Odin sings, “Bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, as though they were glued together”; in a later Norwegian, and also in a Scottish version, it is Christ who heals the foal with the same magic words, strengthened however by the formula, “Heal in the Holy Ghost’s name.” And this useful medicine-charm was not forgotten by the Aryan Indians, for we find the words in the Atharva-Veda, “Fit together, hair with hair, fit together, skin with skin: thy blood, thy bone shall grow.”193.2 Neither god nor ghost was needed to help out the force of such incantations. But probably some time before Christianity prayer had come to prevail over spell in the Teutonic North, for there are traces there of a certain antagonism growing between magic and religion, which led to the condemnation of certain forms of magic.194.1
An interesting question arises about a prayer-charm used by the early English against sterility of the fields: “Hail be thou, Earth, Mother of Men, wax fertile in the embrace of God, fulfilled with fruit for the use of man.”194.2 This poetic utterance implies a veritable ἱερὸς γάμος, or holy marriage of earth and heaven in the Greek sense; and reminds us vividly of the spell-formula, used in the Eleusinian Mysteries and descending from the period when the purpose of these was mainly agricultural, Υέ Κύε, “Rain and Conceive,” which was uttered by the mystes, who folded his arms and glanced up to the sky at the first word and down to the earth at the second: a spell-prayer for fertility and human increase. It is probably then correct to call this phrase of our ancestors, which is the only surviving fragment, so far as I am aware, of their pre-Christian liturgy, a spell-prayer that was efficacious by way of suggestion rather than of entreaty.
Of the same ambiguous character was the old Roman chant of the priests of Mars, “Enos Lases juvate,” “Help us, O spirits of our ancestors,” repeated with the iteration common in enchantments and accompanied with dancing and with the utterance of the word “triumpe.” From the higher point of view the Roman prayers that have come down to us are barren and dull; the well-known liturgical archive containing Rome’s address to Jupiter in the critical days of the Hannibalic war is a wary and cleverly drawn legal document, intended to bind the god as well as the State.195.1 In fact the spiritual side of the old Roman character has left no trace of itself in any ritual or liturgy of which we have record. The prayer of Cato’s that has been preserved is merely materialistic.196.1
We expect much more from Greece, and in some measure we are not disappointed. Spell-ritual was no doubt always much in vogue, especially for the purposes of agriculture and purification: we hear of certain “magicians” or μάγοι of Cleonae who averted hailstorms with incantations and the shedding of their own blood.196.2 And a solemn part of the State liturgy in Greece was a commination service, which pronounced a curse on certain offences against the State. The religious curse is an interesting phenomenon of which it is not easy to give briefly a full and exact anthropological account; it is taken up by the higher religions, but it by no means originated in them, belonging to the sphere of spell rather than of prayer, and working out its effect by means of magic suggestion. Even the Jewish service, which we still use on Ash Wednesday, employs curse-formulæ in which there is no immediate reference to God, and they may have been regarded originally as having an independent efficacy. This was certainly the case in Greece, for the curse was itself personified as an independent, personal power; and the Erinyes themselves, in some degree the personal embodiments of the curse, work their effect on the victim by singing a spell-song, according to Æschylus, which binds his soul and withers him away.197.1 And the many private “devotiones” or “diræ” that have come down to us from Greek antiquity, written usually on leaden tablets and consecrating the enemy to the powers of the lower world, employ indeed an appeal to these powers that may be interpreted as prayer, but their essential quality is magical, and they certainly were supposed to operate as spells against the individual, while even the divinities to whom they are addressed appear to be constrained rather than entreated. In one interesting example of the first century A.D., found in Ægina,198.1 of Hellenic-Christian or possibly Judaic origin, the curse takes on the form of a prayer for righteous vengeance—“I call on the Highest God, the Lord of all spirits and of all flesh, before whom every soul this day is humbled with supplication, against those who have treacherously slain or poisoned the unfortunate Heracleia.” In the Greek legal procedure a curse was sometimes uttered against oneself if one forswore oneself or if one was guilty of the charge; and here as in similar cases in Christian jurisprudence the curse is an invocation of the high god who will punish perjury; but we find it similarly employed in the animistic stage of religion, by the African for instance, who takes an oath by his fetich,198.2 “May this fetich slay me if I do not fulfil the contract”; and in such cases we must regard the curse as a spell working by suggestion against oneself rather than as a prayer.
Before considering Greek prayer proper, we may note as a last example of an ambiguous formula, standing midway as it seems between spell and prayer, the striking liturgical utterance of the old Dodonæan ritual, employed for an agricultural service: the priestesses chanted the refrain in two hexameters, the old metre of religion, “God was, God is, God will be, oh Great God; the earth brings forth fruits, therefore call on mother earth.”199.1 The resemblance of this to the early English formula quoted above is striking enough. The first line belongs to an elevated religion and seems far removed from the region of magic; but equally spiritual formulæ concerning the nature and the attributes of God were used in the Zarathustrian and Babylonian liturgies for magical purposes, just as texts from the Bible and Koran have been. And the second line employs the same method as the Navajo Shaman employed, for it states that the divinity is doing that very thing which it is the object of the liturgy to bring about. The appeal to mother earth which is enjoined may have been merely the invocation of her name, a spell at least as much as a prayer. The same may be said of the other popular refrains chanted by the husbandmen of ancient Greece to obtain good crops or fair weather—“Give us big sheaves, sheaves,” to Demeter,200.1 or “Come forth, dear sun,” to the sun-god.200.2
The public prayers of Greece, those actually used in the temple-service and the official liturgies, have not been preserved, and in this respect the Greek record is very barren compared with the Babylonian, Vedic, or Iranian. But though the actual formulæ are lost, we can gather some impression from the inscriptions and other literary sources as to the objects of prayer. The Athenian state prayed, “For the health and safety of the people of the Athenians, their wives and children and all in the country,”201.1 and the formula might include a prayer for the prosperity of their allies, such as Milesians or Platæans. But we have no indications that the blessings prayed for included others besides the material ones. The Lacedæmonians are commended by Socrates201.2 for refraining from specifying any particular want, either in their private or public prayers, but contenting themselves with praying that the gods should grant them τὰ καλὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς: the phrase has something of a genuine ring, and is probably derived from a real liturgy, but it is not absolutely precise; it seems, however, to comprise spiritual blessings as well as material, and in this respect to be unique among the public prayers in Greece, if we dare judge them by the scanty record. Probably the formulæ were very old and the range of aspiration usually narrow; and the idea that moral advance could be attained by prayer is perhaps hardly likely to have been reflected in them; yet we must take note of the plaintive question put by the Corcyræan state, weary of civic strife and massacre, to the Dodonæan oracle, asking, “To what god or what hero shall we pray in order to obtain concord, and to govern our city fairly and well?”202.1 and we find an educational official of Cos, in the second century B.C., praying “for the health and the virtuous behaviour of the boys.”202.2
We are better informed concerning the style of private prayer in Greece, as also concerning the theory of prayer that gradually commended itself to the highest intelligences. The average private man was certainly capable of praying for blessings other than material. We have the prayer of a potter of Metapontum, of the sixth century B.C., praying to the god that he might “have a good report among men.”203.1 Among the prayers contained in the literature of the fifth century, our interest is arrested by such utterances as Pindar’s, “May I walk, oh God, in the guileless paths of life, and leave behind me a fair name for my children”;203.2 and again, “Oh God that bringest all things to pass, grant me the spirit of reverence for noble things”;203.3 and by this of Euripides, “May the spirit of chastity abide with me, the fairest gift of God.”203.4 To this age may belong the poetical fragment of a banquet song—for the Greeks could pray genially and seriously in the midst of social intercourse—which must have once had much vogue: “Oh Pallas, born of waters, Queen Athena, mayest thou and thy father keep this city and its citizens in prosperity, free from sorrow, civic discord, and untimely deaths.”203.5 The prayers of Xenophon and Plutarch may be taken as typical of the average ethical feeling of their respective periods: the former petitions for “health, bodily strength, good feeling among friends, safety in war, and wealth”;204.1 the latter for “wealth, concord, righteousness in word and deed.”204.2
Meantime the philosophers from Socrates onwards were insisting on the more spiritual view of prayer, preaching that, in the first place, there was no need to particularise one’s needs in one’s petitions to God, for there was danger lest one should pray for what is injurious; in the second place, that prayer should look only to the spiritual, not the material life. And we owe to this theory some striking utterances that must rank high in the literature of ethical religion: such as the prayer of Socrates, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν, “Grant me to become noble of heart”204.3; of Apollonius of Tyana, ὦ θεοὶ δοίητέ μοι τὰ ὀφειλόμενα, “Oh gods, grant me that which I deserve”204.4; the longer poetic formula quoted by Plato, “King Zeus, grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep from us though we pray for it”205.1: and with these we may compare the dictum of Epictetus205.2: “In praying to the divine powers ask for divine things, things free from fleshly or earthly circumstance.” Other expressions of the Stoic sect are equally striking for the spirit of fervent acquiescence and resignation that inspires them. Here is the prayer of Epictetus: “Do with me what thou wilt: my will is thy will: I appeal not against thy judgments”205.3; and a poetic version of this has come down to us from earlier stoicism—“Lead me, O God, and I will follow, willingly if I am wise, but if not willingly I still must follow.” A prayer recorded in the apocryphal Acts of St Thomas205.4 seems almost an echo of these: “I go whither Thou wilt, oh Jesus: Thy will be done.”
When the best thought of the age had reached to such a point of spiritual abstraction, it was natural that the same question should arise as arose among the more philosophic adherents of early Christianity, whether special prayers were justifiable at all. It seems that at some period the Pythagorean school were inclined to forbid prayer altogether,206.1 for the reason that God knew better how to give than man knew how to ask; but the later Neo-Platonism discovered an ideal raison-d’être for the practice, on the ground that it raised the mind to direct communion and converse with God; and this view is developed at great length by Proclus.206.2
This sketch of the Greek phenomena that belong to our subject may close with an example of that perfervid mysticism that marks the liturgies of latest paganism: the following is the close of a long address to Asclepios—an Hellenic deity attracted here into the Egyptian circle—found in the treatise called Asclepios, attributed to Apuleius:207.1 “We rejoice in thy divine salvation, because thou hast shown thyself wholly to us: we rejoice that thou hast deigned to consecrate us to eternity, while we are still in these mortal bodies. We have known thee, oh true life of the life of man.… Adoring thy goodness, we make this our only prayer… that thou wouldst be willing to keep us all our lives in the love of thy knowledge.” Portions at least of this prayer, which was the prelude to a communion supper, would not surprise us if we found it in a Christian liturgy.207.2