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I^'i 
 
 CROWN THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY 
 
 VOL. XII. 
 FARNELL'S THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 
 
THE EVOLUTICr^^^ _ 
 
 RELIGION '^ 1 
 
 AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY 
 
 BY 
 
 L. R. FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "cults OF THE GREEK STATES" 
 
 FELLOW AND TUTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; UNIVERSITY LECTURER 
 
 IN CLASSICAL ARCHEOLOGY ; CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE 
 
 GERMAN IMPERIAL ARCHiEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE ; FELLOW 
 
 OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY 
 
 NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 LONDON : WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 
 1905 
 
REPLACW6 
 
 U4^ n^ 
 
r2 
 
 Preface 
 
 A SMALL book on a great and difficult subject 
 must explain and apologise for itself, especially 
 if it cannot claim a raison d'etre as a hand- 
 book for beginners. Having accepted the 
 stimulating invitation to give in the spring of 
 this year a short series of lectures for the 
 Hibbert Trust on some subject belonging to 
 the department of comparative religion, I felt 
 that it was desirable to avoid those topics that 
 had been appropriated by former lecturers ; and 
 also that the Trustees, as well as the audience, 
 deserved that what the lecturer put forth 
 should embody the results of some personal 
 and original study. I finally selected for 
 special discussion the ritual of purification, and 
 
 V 
 
 M554311 
 
vi Preface 
 
 the influence of the ideas associated with it 
 upon law, morality, and religion ; and secondly, 
 the development of prayer from lower to 
 higher forms. These subjects do not appear 
 to have been as yet exhaustively treated by 
 modern anthropology or scientific and com- 
 parative theology, and I had already worked 
 upon them to some extent as " parerga " of the 
 treatise that I am completing for the Clarendon 
 Press on the history of Greek cults. I am 
 aware that these special questions would well 
 repay longer and more minute research, aad 
 could each furnish material for a large volume. 
 But having been advised to publish the lectures 
 more or less as they were delivered, I put 
 them forth as tentative and incomplete work. 
 I specially regret to have been unable to have 
 gone further at present into the Egyptian 
 evidence, with the kindly proffered assistance 
 of Mr Griffiths, the Reader in Egyptology at 
 Oxford. 
 
 The first two lectures, dealing with the 
 methods and the value of the study of com- 
 
Preface vii 
 
 parative religion and its relations to anthro- 
 pology, are of a more general character. If 
 they seem to occupy somewhat too large a 
 part of a work of this small compass, the 
 urgency of the questions they^raise may serve 
 as an apology. It was suggested to me that 
 some such pronouncement might be timely at 
 the point we have reached. For the subject 
 is winning greater consideration, and even 
 receiving endowment, in the organisation of 
 the newer Universities. From the scientific 
 point of view it is one of the most fascinating 
 of studies ; and its practical importance for 
 our colonial administrators and our missionaries 
 is obvious to those who reflect. It is also a 
 legitimate hope that its wider and more intel- 
 ligent recognition in England may tend to 
 cool and temper the heated atmosphere of 
 dogmatic controversy, by presenting rehgious 
 facts in their true proportion and proper 
 setting. 
 
 I must take this opportunity of expressing 
 my gratitude to many friends for valuable 
 
viii Preface 
 
 assistance, and especially to my friend and 
 colleague, Mr R. Marett, to whose compre- 
 hensive knowledge of the religious thought 
 and ritual of savage races I owe many im- 
 portant clues. 
 
 L. R. FARNELL. 
 
 August, 1905. 
 
Contents 
 
 LECTURES I. AND II. 
 
 PAGE 
 THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS I ITS METHOD 
 
 AND PROBLEMS . 1 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION 
 OF PURITY : THEIR INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, 
 MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM . . . . 88 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER 
 
 FORMS l6S 
 
 INDEX 232 
 
The Evolution of Religion 
 
 LECTURES I. AND II. 
 
 THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS I 
 ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS 
 
 The reasonable and sympathetic study of the 
 various reHgions of mankind, which are per- 
 haps the clearest mirror we possess of human 
 feeling, aspiration, and thought in its highest 
 and lowest forms, is only possible for the 
 individual or for the age that feels no con- 
 straining call to suppress and obliterate all 
 save one cherished creed. Such study began, 
 as we should expect, in the earlier Hellenic 
 period, the Hellenic religion throwing few 
 or no obstacles in the way of undogmatic 
 investigation; and the first anthropologist of 
 
 religion is Herodotus. Then among Hellen- 
 
 1 
 
2 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 istic scholars and those of pre-Christian Rome 
 there were some who devoted themselves to 
 the collection and exposition of the religious 
 institutions of foreign races. But save a few 
 short treatises, such as Plutarch's De Iside et 
 Osiride, Sallustius' De Diis et Mundo, Lucian's 
 De Dea Syria, nothing has survived beyond the 
 titles and the fragments of their works ; and 
 by an irony of fortune we owe much of our 
 knowledge of Hellenic and other religions of 
 the Mediterranean area to the Christian con- 
 troversialists, who reveal many of the essential 
 features of the various pagan creeds in order 
 to expose them to obloquy : they could 
 not anticipate that we should gather as the 
 fruit of their labours a better appreciation 
 than we could otherwise have gained of the 
 religions which they strove to destroy, and 
 possibly of Christianity itself. If I were 
 attempting, as I do not propose to attempt, 
 to give a complete survey of the growth 
 and development of the study which we are 
 considering, I should probably be able to cull 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 3 
 
 but little material for the narrative from 
 Byzantine and mediagval sources. We may 
 note that the spirit of these ages was, on the 
 whole, alien to our present interest ; and that 
 it is not till after the Renaissance and the 
 discovery of America that systematic work in 
 this field begins again. To two Spaniards of 
 Peruvian and Mexican descent,^ we owe our 
 knowledge of the religions of the Incas and 
 the Aztecs, that of the latter at least being of 
 prime importance for the student of the higher 
 religions of mankind. A Polish nobleman of 
 the 16th century has left us a fairly detailed 
 account of the religious practices and beliefs 
 of the then semi-pagan Lithuania.^ But it 
 may be regarded as one of the greatest achieve- 
 ments of the latter part of the 19th century 
 to have raised the comparative study of re- 
 ligion to a high position in the whole domain 
 of inductive speculation and inquiry. And 
 
 ^ Garcilasso de la Vega, Royal Commentary of the Incas 
 
 (Hakluyt Society) : Sahagun — transl. Jourdanet et Simeon. 
 
 2 Jacob Laskowski, vide Usener, G'dttemamen, p. 82, etc. 
 
4 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 its development has been mainly due to two 
 independent lines of investigation. The first 
 stimulus came with the discovery and the 
 interpretation of the sacred books of the 
 East, a momentous epoch in the history of 
 European thought, and certain important 
 theories concerning religious origins were put 
 forth by Vedic scholars, and based on the 
 evidence of Vedic literature : at the same 
 time the decipherment of the Assyrian- Baby- 
 lonian and Egyptian texts has contributed a 
 wealth of new material, and has started new 
 problems of religious inquiry, which specially 
 concern the students of Hellenic as well 
 as those of Semitic antiquity. But an 
 equally or, as some may think, more power- 
 ful factor in the recent advance towards 
 the organised knowledge of religions has 
 been the growth, in the last half-century, 
 of the study that has appropriated the name 
 of anthropology, which is generally under- 
 stood to mean the study of primitive or 
 savage man, both in the past and the present, 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 5 
 
 in respect of his physical and mental condi- 
 tions. It is quite unnecessary for me to dilate 
 on the high and manifold utility, both practical 
 and speculative, of this new branch of human 
 inquiry ; the theme has become almost a 
 popular commonplace in the leading journal- 
 ism of the day. And anthropology, defined 
 as above, has a definite value and object apart 
 from its contributions to our knowledge of 
 the religions of the world. It is nevertheless 
 true that the religious interest in England is 
 so strong and penetrating, that many of our 
 leading anthropologists, in their investigations 
 of savage society, have directed their attention 
 mainly to religious or quasi-religious pheno- 
 mena. Even if their labours were confined 
 to the discovery and the exposition of savage 
 ritual and belief, we should still be greatly 
 indebted to them ; for to many of us at least 
 the savage man is interesting in his own right, 
 whether it is true or not that the study of his 
 mental phenomena helps to explain the mental 
 phenomena of our higher selves or of the 
 
6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 higher races in the past. But these writers 
 claim, and 1 think with right, to have done 
 more than this, and by comparison, induction, 
 and hypothesis to have thrown some Hght on 
 the evolution of religion from lower to higher 
 forms, and therefore to have laid the founda- 
 tion for the science with which we are con- 
 cerned. Also attempts have been recently 
 made by an accomplished scholar of the new 
 doctrine, Dr Frazer, to trace what may be 
 called the anthropological genesis of the 
 central idea of Christianity itself.^ It is not 
 then surprising that in England at least such 
 claims and such ambitions should excite mis- 
 trust, even hostility, and the prestige of 
 anthropology may have also suffered at times 
 from the indiscretion of its friends. Still, its 
 work is of wide vogue, its energy exuberant, 
 and its influence in the future assured. In 
 considering, therefore, the aims and methods 
 of the comparative science of religion, it has 
 appeared to me that its relations to anthro- 
 
 ^ Golden Bough, 2nd ed., vol. iii, p, 186. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 7 
 
 pology are now one of the main points in the 
 inquiry. And we may seem to have reached 
 a stage where it is desirable to test our posi- 
 tion, to take stock as it were, to examine our 
 methods, and to consider whether they are 
 capable of improvement. The task is difficult, 
 and in facing it one must face the imputation 
 of presumption, especially as in a short course 
 of lectures one must be brief, and may there- 
 fore appear over-dogmatic. 
 
 If the comparative study of religion is to 
 examine, as on the ground of its title it must, 
 the various recorded or discoverable religions 
 of every branch of the human family, then a 
 part of anthropology, limited, as it has usually 
 chosen to limit itself, to the study of the savage 
 races, is obviously a sub-department of the 
 whole. And its work, conducted often under 
 great difficulties, has been solid, well-organised, 
 and of high importance. Even those who 
 deny its claim to be called a science, whatever 
 that word may mean, must admit that it is 
 at least an indispensable branch of historic 
 
8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 inquiry, and that it has deepened the self- 
 knowledge of mankind. 
 
 Some of its pioneers may have been over- 
 eager in their theorising, premature in their 
 attempts to reveal the origin of all religion in 
 some savage ritual or in the background of 
 savage thought, for instance in ancestor-worship 
 or totemism. Such rash generalisations are 
 inevitable in the opening periods of a new 
 study, and may be discredited or abandoned 
 without discrediting the investigations that 
 gave rise to them. We may have come to 
 be aware of the excesses of the students of 
 totemism : we may have come to the convic- 
 tion that neither theirs nor any other special 
 and single hypothesis has as yet supplied us 
 with the master-clue by which we can pene- 
 trate to the aboriginal source of human 
 religion : we may have found scientific reasons 
 for rejecting the belief that all gods arose as 
 ghosts of departed ancestors. But if we dis- 
 card such theories of origin, we owe this 
 negative result to the maturer study of anthro- 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 9 
 
 pology itself; and we may owe to it the 
 positive induction that the rehgious product 
 at the different stages and in the different 
 branches of mankind was a complex growth 
 from many different germs. 
 
 It has taught us also much more than this. 
 It has shown us that all through the present 
 societies of savage men there prevails an ex- 
 traordinary uniformity, in spite of much local 
 variation, in ritual and mythology, a uniformity '^ 
 so striking as to suggest belief in an ultimately 
 identical tradition, or, perhaps more reason- 
 ably, the psychologic theory that the human 
 brain-cell in different races at the same stage 
 of development responds with the same 
 religious speech or the same religious act to 
 the same stimuli supplied by its environment. 
 
 We have learnt to discover a certain savage 
 style, as we may call it, in myth and ritual ; and 
 anthropology has performed a twofold work 
 of comparison ; for it has not only compared 
 the various savage races of mankind, but it 
 has compared the results of this colligation 
 
lo The Evolution of Religion 
 
 with the rehgioiis phenomena of the higher 
 races, and has revealed the savage style in 
 much of their mythology and ritual. It was 
 first discovered by the earlier investigators of 
 the antiquity of Northern Europe, such as the 
 brothers Grimm and Mannhardt, that under- 
 lying the religion of Christendom lay a stratum 
 of peasant-ritual and belief, not yet extinct 
 nor likely soon to be, that reveals the 
 same mental condition in early Europe that 
 exists among our savage contemporaries in 
 various parts of the world. Then the sacred 
 edifice of Hellenism was attacked ; and the 
 complacency of Hellenic scholars was some- 
 times disturbed by the revelation, through a 
 strict comparative method, of the same savage 
 style in much of Hellenic ritual and Hellenic 
 myth. Thus for the first time we came to 
 understand the true significance of many of 
 the crude and repulsive facts in Hellenic 
 religion — the human sacrifices, the reverence 
 paid to animals, stones, and trees, the demon- 
 ology and magic rites. Many of these practices 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 1 1 
 
 had lost their meaning for the more advanced 
 generations, who nevertheless retained them 
 under the strong constraint of religious con- 
 servatism ; but if we find the same practices 
 among existing races who perform them with 
 a living and plenary faith as part of a quasi- 
 logical structure of belief, we can place them 
 back into their proper setting when we dis- 
 cover them still surviving in the higher and 
 alien society. Greek religion especially, having 
 never violently broken with its own past, is 
 a bed of rich deposit still inviting exploration. 
 And now Hellenic scholars are ransacking 
 the same treasure for further anthropological 
 material ; while Assyriologists and Egypto- 
 logists are treating a part of the phenomena 
 of their special departments in the same spirit. 
 We realise the gain of this : we are slowly 
 and surely arriving at inductive conclusions 
 concerning the similarity of development 
 through which the higher and lower races 
 have passed and are passing ; the solidarity of 
 the human family appears stronger than we 
 
12 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 might have supposed. At the same time we 
 have now to be on our guard against certain 
 common anthropological fallacies. Some of 
 these are less inevitable than others : for 
 instance, that which we may call the fallacy 
 of simple enumeration. On the ground of 
 the general inductive belief that the higher 
 races have at one time passed through a 
 savage phase, it is often too rashly assumed 
 that each and all of them must at one time 
 have possessed a particular institution, such 
 as totemism or ancestor- worship, which, as a 
 matter of fact, is found among the majority of 
 the savage races of to-day. This is to ex- 
 aggerate the principle of solidarity, to ignore 
 the fact of the great diversity actually observ- 
 able among existing primitive societies, and 
 the possibility that it was just by avoiding 
 some particular detrimental institution that 
 some of the higher peoples were able to pro- 
 ceed on their path of progress. Again, the 
 anthropological explanation is often obhged 
 to be hypothetical, for the evidence presented 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 13 
 
 is often very fragmentary: by means of a 
 reasonable and expert imagination, an attempt 
 is made to reconstruct a whole fabric out of 
 a few fragments. A single bone may enable 
 the expert biologist to reshape unerringly the 
 once living animal; but in anthropology the 
 fragment in question may have descended 
 from either one of two differing organisms or 
 organic institutions that may have left very 
 much the same imprint upon mythology and 
 religion. For instance, a full-fledged totemistic 
 system, having fallen into decay, might leave 
 its trace in certain stories about animals or 
 in occasional reverence paid to a particular 
 animal : but direct animal- worship, a religious 
 view that may be quite independent of totem- 
 ism, or certain forms of ancestor- worship may 
 equally well have deposited the same fossil- 
 thought or fossil-rite.^ And we know how 
 recklessly the theory of the ubiquitous practice 
 
 1 For instance^ an ancestor may for certain reasons be 
 worshipped in the form of a snake, and yet this need not 
 imply a snake-tribe or any tribal worship of snakes in 
 general. 
 
14 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 of human sacrifice has been used to explain 
 certain peculiar phenomena in later ritual, such 
 as the scourging of the Spartan boys, for 
 example. 
 
 But a stricter anthropology can correct the 
 over-narrow hypotheses of its immaturity, and 
 can render masterly aid to the evolutionary 
 study of the higher religions ; for each of 
 these, in spite of revelation or transforming 
 enthusiasm that would obliterate the past, 
 contains a mass of mysterious dead matter ; 
 and it is for the anthropologist to show the 
 prior functional organic significance of this. 
 But if, in obedience to the currently accepted 
 limitation of his subject, he confines himself 
 mainly to the study of savage life and to the 
 dead matter of the higher religions, and yet is 
 tempted to deal with the more vital and 
 essential elements in these, he will be liable to 
 the special bias of his own study. We may 
 note such bias in recent attempts to ex- 
 plain the essential features of the Eleusinian 
 Mysteries in the light of merely savage anthro- 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 15 
 
 pology. And of course we are all apt to lose 
 the sense of proportion and to exaggerate the 
 importance of the special phenomena to which 
 we confine our regard. The folk-lorist will be 
 liable to over-emphasise the part played by 
 mythology in religion, and may ignore the 
 higher importance of prayer and ritual ; for 
 the most conscientious cobbler is never really 
 able to stick to his last. In fact, though the 
 whole exposition of the higher religions is 
 impossible without anthropology, there is some 
 danger at present lest the part be at times 
 mistaken for the whole. For instance, we 
 may feel with some uneasiness that recent 
 expositions of Hellenic religion tend, uninten- 
 tionally no doubt, to distort the view of the 
 reader and to produce a false impression by 
 exaggerating the savage and primitive facts, 
 missing the true perspective and misjudging 
 the whole. Our appreciation of Greek myth- 
 ology may suffer in the same way, unless we 
 can keep the keen edge of our appreciative 
 faculty : the Greek myth has often its striking 
 
1 6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 affinities with the Arunta or the Pawnee, and 
 it is necessary for comparative folk-lore and 
 anthropology to point this out, and often to 
 insist on the beauty of the legend and the 
 dignity of the religious thought among savages : 
 but it is unfortunate if these studies should 
 result in our loss of the perception that Greek 
 mythology, after all, is the most beautiful of 
 any of which we have record. 
 ST The fallacy which I have so far tried to 
 indicate arises from the temper of mind that a 
 special study is liable to engender. On the 
 other hand, there is a particular fallacy of 
 method to which the modern study of anthro- 
 pology, as it has chosen to limit itself, specially 
 exposes us. It is liable to withdraw us from 
 the immediate entourage of a particular fact — 
 a particular legend or a religious service — to 
 the distant circumference. It was inevitable 
 for the earliest pioneers of the study to travel 
 far, for the circumference was unexplored, and 
 there were facts lying at the distant points 
 that concerned us. But, after all, our first 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 17 
 
 object of study should be the more immediate 
 environment of the thing which we wish to 
 understand. The student of Hellenic religion 
 and myth may have ultimately to roam, in a 
 literary sense, into Central Australia and the 
 byways of America ; but he ought first to 
 explore the Mediterranean regions and the 
 lands of anterior Asia. It is interesting, and 
 may be necessary, to know " the Pawnee ver- 
 sion of the Eleusinia " ; but, for the true 
 understanding of the great Greek mystery, 
 certain elements in the Egyptian religion, in 
 Mithraism, and in Christianity itself will prob- 
 ably afford a more illuminative comparison. 
 The mind of our student is sometimes tempted, 
 in fact, to travel too easily and too cheaply to 
 the other side of the globe, and to leave un- 
 done work that should first have been done 
 nearer home. 
 
 ^^To reduce these ideas to something like a 
 working formula of method, may we say 
 that the anthropology which the comparative 
 study of any one of the more complex and 
 
1 8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 advanced religions immediately demands is 
 " an adjacent anthropology " ? For religious 
 ideas, legends, and ritual are most contagious, 
 and tend to propagate themselves over large 
 contiguous areas : for, to reverse a stereotyped 
 question, " what is less its own than a people's 
 gods?" We greatly desiderate an anthro- 
 pology of the Mediterranean basin, including 
 anterior Asia ; for there are strong reasons for 
 the belief that from very early times the fre- 
 quent intercourse of the leading peoples in this 
 region endowed them with a common stock of 
 religious ideas, ritual, and legend which have 
 probably left their impress on the higher 
 religions of the world. It is these that speci- 
 ally interest most of us, and we feel we cannot 
 solve their problems by means of savage 
 anthropology alone. Why, after all, should the 
 latter term be restricted, as it usually is, to the 
 study of savage life? Doubtless we cannot 
 so extend the use of the word as to cover its 
 full etymological signification: else it would 
 come to include the whole of human history 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 19 
 
 from the beginning down to the present, and 
 would lose its value as a mark of any special 
 science. But we might somewhat enlarge its 
 present connotation with advantage to the 
 comparative method, and without a too wide 
 departure from current usage. We might 
 define the anthropological study of any one of 
 the higher religions as an evolutionary study 
 of its embryology : the evolutionary law might 
 appear in the first instance as a proximate 
 law of growth. For probably every one of the 
 world-creeds has inherited, apart from its own 
 achievement, a double tradition, a tradition 
 from the more remote and one from the more 
 immediate past. The first may descend from 
 immemorial antiquity, and from really primi- 
 tive or savage mental and social life ; and it 
 has been the task of primitive anthropology 
 to expound and explain the facts that this 
 tradition has deposited. But many if not 
 most of these facts may be regarded as func- 
 tionally dead matter surviving in the more 
 advanced system of behef, and as not belong- 
 
20 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 ing to its essential life. On the other hand, 
 from the immediate tradition much will be 
 found to have been taken over by an inevitable 
 law of assimilation, certain potent ideas which, 
 though transformed, will enter into the very 
 life-blood of the new creed. And these are to 
 be discovered and analysed by what I have 
 ventured to call an " adjacent " anthropology, 
 which will include a comprehensive study of 
 the literature and monuments belonging to 
 the more proximate past of the race which 
 develops the new faith as well as of the races 
 that are its nearer neighbours. 
 
 Such a method, though not hitherto styled 
 anthropological, has already been applied by 
 various scholars in the different parts of 
 our field ; the exposition of the Babylonian 
 elements in Judaic religion, of the Judaic 
 and pagan elements in Moslemism, are 
 examples of it. On the present occasion I 
 would prefer to illustrate it by noting its 
 application to the scientific study of Chris- 
 tianity itself, of which the remarkable com- 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 21 
 
 plexity, the variety of forms that it has 
 assumed in different parts of Christendom at 
 different periods, seems specially to invite the 
 higher anthropological treatment. Moreover 
 it probably contains a richer deposit than any 
 other of the v^orld-religions from the various 
 streams of thought and belief that nourished 
 the life of early civihsed or semi -civilised man. 
 The illustration drawn from our own religion 
 vsdll be also more personally interesting to 
 ourselves ; and though the limits of time 
 and my own knowledge may prevent me 
 from putting forth any original statement, 
 yet something may be gained and a more 
 extended interest awakened by a brief notice 
 of what has been and what remains to 
 be done. 
 
 There is now no need for apology if one 
 wishes frankly to consider the genesis of the 
 fundamental ideas and prevailing institutions of 
 earlier and later Christianity, although hitherto 
 a certain rehgious shyness, which belongs to 
 the national character, may have made English 
 
2 2 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 scholars reluctant to attempt the anthropology 
 of our national faith ; and the progress of the 
 subject owes more to foreign workers. Our own 
 theological students of distinction have not 
 evaded the question as to the early influences 
 that may have moulded the religious thought of 
 Christ and St Paul ; but these were naturally 
 sought mainly in the later Judaism; and 
 though the debt of the developed Christianity 
 to Hellenic philosophy has never been ignored, 
 yet that neither our sacred books nor Judaic 
 literature nor Greek philosophy explain the 
 whole complex of historic Christianity, is a 
 conviction of recent growth, and the investiga- 
 tions to which it has prompted are recent. 
 For instance, it was a new departure of great 
 promise for the future of our science when, in 
 a course of Hibbert lectures delivered some 
 years ago, Dr Hatch publicly expounded the 
 deep indebtedness of Christianity in respect of 
 ritual, organisation, and even religious con- 
 cept to the Eleusinian Mysteries and other 
 mystic societies of Greek lands. And the few 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 23 
 
 students of Hellenic religion in England have 
 often noted its many ties of affinity with our 
 own, though of these there has been as yet no 
 complete and authoritative account. We may 
 admit that the triumph of a new and great 
 creed may imply a potent revelation, perhaps 
 a sudden mental transformation in the 
 catechumens difficult to equate with any 
 formulated law of evolution. Still we cannot 
 gainsay the experience that as the religion 
 establishes and organises itself, it draws 
 nourishment from the old soil which is full of 
 the living germs of past organisms. Therefore 
 it was inevitable that Hellenic religion should 
 leave a deep impress upon earlier and later 
 Christianity; partly because the religious 
 temper in the Greek world throughout 
 the centuries immediately preceding the adop- 
 tion of Christianity was more powerful and 
 fervid than it had been in the days of Homer 
 or Pericles, and mainly because Hellenic 
 converts became the pillars of the Church. 
 But the comparative student must pursue the 
 
24 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 problem further afield and beyond the track 
 of Hellas. The old Phrygian religion, which 
 Professor Ramsay's travels and investigations 
 have assisted us to know, must be seriously 
 taken into account ; for Phrygia was one of 
 the earliest homes of Christianity, its ab- 
 original religion had germinated in ideas 
 strikingly akin to some that are primary in all 
 or many of the creeds of Christendom ; and the 
 morbid and ecstatic temperament of the native 
 Phrygian, which gave so distinct a colour to 
 the Cybele-Attis cult, seems to have appeared 
 again in certain schismatic forms of Christian 
 doctrine in Phrygia, especially in the heresy of 
 Montanism. Finally, we may learn much, 
 even adopt much, from our enemies. The 
 most dangerous antagonists of Christianity 
 were, after all, the worship of Isis and 
 Mithraism. It may be possible to trace the 
 influence of these on their conqueror: the 
 great work of M. Cumont on Mithras cult 
 suggests at least many interesting religious 
 parallels ; and even the older Zoroastrian 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 25 
 
 literature must be considered within the range 
 of necessary and legitimate comparison. 
 
 As I am here concerned with illustration of 
 method rather than with positive proof, I can 
 only offer a very brief summary of the results 
 which the anthropological study of Christianity 
 has hitherto achieved, and may yet achieve. 
 
 The religious affinities discoverable be- 
 tween the earlier and later "Mediterranean" 
 systems may be classified according as they 
 appear in the legends, in nomenclature and 
 terminology, in external symbols and liturgical 
 objects, in hieratic institutions, and finally in 
 the ideas, aspirations, and concepts of faith. 
 As regards legend and mythology, a great 
 historic religion may of course claim to be 
 free from all m5rthology ; nevertheless it is a 
 matter of experience that popular legends are 
 sure at some period earlier or later to creep in, 
 for the people insist on telling the old stories 
 under changed names. I myself have heard 
 the immemorial story of Odysseus walking 
 inland with his oar, which the rustic mistakes 
 
26 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 for a winnowing-fan, told about St Peter, 
 St Paul, and St John on the coast of the 
 Peloponnese ; just as an old Norse legend 
 about Odin and Baldur is retold of Christ and 
 St Peter/ And students of mediseval hagi- 
 ology will discover more and more clearly- 
 various fragments of pre-Christian mythology 
 embedded in the legends of the saints. Such 
 facts are the material of comparative folk-lore, 
 which plays a useful but quite subordinate part 
 in the work of comparative religion. Legends 
 have indeed their own independent interest, 
 poetical, ethical, and other ; but the importance 
 of mere mythology in the study of religion has 
 been often much overrated ; St Augustine, mis- 
 taking Greek legends for Greek religion, could 
 discover no morality in it at all,^ and modern 
 scholars have inherited the fallacy. Myths are 
 often irresponsible, capricious, volatile, and flit 
 like a vapour round the sohd structure of real 
 
 1 Vide infra, pp. 192, 193. 
 
 2 E.g. De Civ. Dei., bk. 2, ch. 6 : deos paganorum 
 nunquam bene vivendi sanxisse doctrinam. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 27 
 
 belief and ritual. A high religion may attract 
 low myths : some of our own are not spotless, 
 but Christianity can ignore them. The myth 
 that is an essential fact for the student of religion 
 is that which enshrines some living religious 
 idea or institution, or one which proves the 
 survival of some ritual or faith that belonged 
 to an older system. I may note a few of this 
 kind which illustrate the affinities of Judaic, 
 Christian, and pagan legend. The cessation 
 of human-sacrifice in the Mediterranean area, 
 the awakening of the conviction that the 
 practice was abhorrent to a merciful God, 
 implied so momentous a change in religious 
 and moral thought and practice that it would 
 be strange if it left no legendary record of 
 itself. We may discern one in the story of 
 Abraham's sacrifice ; to which we find a very 
 striking and close parallel in the Laconian 
 legend of Helen, whose father intended to 
 sacrifice her to God in order to stay a plague :^ 
 
 1 Plutarch, Parallela, 25. Vide my Cults of Greek States, 
 vol. i. p. 93. 
 
2 8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 the eagle, the messenger of God, swooped 
 down and snatched the knife from the sacri- 
 ficer's hand, and let it fall on a kid that was 
 pasturing near. Again, we are all familiar 
 with the story of Jephtha's vow : the fact is 
 not so well known that a story identical in 
 nearly every detail was told of Idomeneus, 
 the Cretan hero,^ who vowed that if he re- 
 turned home from the Trojan war he would 
 sacrifice to God the first thing that he met on 
 landing: his daughter was the first that met 
 him — and Idomeneus " did with her according 
 to his vow," or intended to do so, and the 
 people exiled him for it. Different from 
 these, but belonging to the inner circle, so 
 to speak, of sacred narrative, are one or 
 two Gospel stories which are not peculiar to 
 Palestine or to our sacred books. The mir- 
 aculous star that guides sacred personages 
 on a divine errand must be an Anatolian star- 
 legend, for it is told of JEneas and his voyage 
 to Italy.^ And a critical appreciation of the 
 
 1 Servius, jEn. iii. 121. 2 i^fi^^ ^^ goi. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 29 
 
 style of Hellenic folk-lore detects at once a 
 marked Hellenic colour in the legends that 
 gather around the birth and rearing of the 
 Virgin in the apocryphal Gospel of St James. 
 More important and suggestive of much more 
 is the parallelism that we discover between 
 the story of our Lord's temptation and the 
 temptation of Zarathustra in the Zend-Avesta: 
 here also the evil god offers the holy prophet 
 the kingdoms of the world if he will fall down 
 and worship him/ 
 
 Finally, it is not improbable that the strange 
 legend preserved in various late Greek MSS., 
 of the Virgin Mary's descent into hell,^ where 
 she is shown the torments of the damned, is 
 derived ultimately from the Babylonian myth 
 of the descent of Ischtar, which in the Greek 
 world transformed itself into the story of the 
 descent of Aphrodite. This suggestion is in 
 harmony with the evidence which will be 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. (ed. Mills)^ p. 211. 
 
 2 Fide account of these in Revue des Etudes grecques^ xiii. 
 (1900), p. 233, and Annuairede V Association pour V encourage- 
 ment des Etudes grecques^ 1871, p. 92. 
 
30 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 noticed below for the belief that the develop- 
 ment of the worship and the divine character 
 of the Virgin owed much, directly or indirectly, 
 to the great Anatolian cult of the mother- 
 goddess. 
 
 As regards the legend just mentioned, we 
 may suppose direct borrowing, or at least 
 direct mental suggestion from an older 
 mythology and faith. To the other examples 
 which I have adduced — probably only a few 
 among many that might be quoted — the theory 
 of borrowing may be inappropriate. 
 
 It may be more scientific, and certainly it is 
 at present more expedient, to be content with 
 the assumption that for thousands of years 
 over contiguous human areas a similarity of 
 religious temperament, religious institutions, 
 religious crises may tend to produce a common 
 stock of legend ; whether the legend is true or 
 false is not our present concern. 
 
 I turn now to the second group of affini- 
 ties, those in nomenclature and terminology. 
 This may at first sight appear a matter un- 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 31 
 
 important for the evolution of religion, and of 
 merely linguistic concern. A people changing 
 its religion cannot suddenly change its speech, 
 but must adapt the old terminology to the 
 new thought. It may be of interest for the 
 student of language to know that when St 
 Paul promises to " show you a mystery " he is 
 borrowing the language of paganism ; that 
 when Bishop Clemens^ ecstatically exclaims, 
 "The Lord is our hierophant ; bearing the 
 sacred torch He has marked the initiate with 
 His own seal . . . once join our mystery and 
 you will dance in the choir of angels," he is 
 using the phraseology of the Eleusinian and 
 Attis Mysteries. But the interest of such a 
 style, upon which Dr Hatch has sufficiently 
 commented, is more than linguistic ; for it 
 foreshadows a real though fortunately a 
 temporary change which came over Chris- 
 tianity in the first few centuries of its life, 
 transforming it from an open doctrine into a 
 mystery organised after the old Greek type. 
 
 1 Protrept, 12, § 120 (p. 92 P). 
 
32 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Moreover the modern logical view of names 
 as merely indifferent speech-symbols, which 
 can be changed without affecting the essence 
 of the things, was by no means the old-world 
 view. The formula nomina sunt nuviina was 
 valid in all the old religions of the Mediter- 
 ranean area, including earlier and even later 
 Christianity : the divine name was felt to be 
 part of the divine essence and itself of super- 
 natural potency ; and this will be seen to be 
 of paramount importance when we consider 
 the forms of ancient prayer. Therefore 
 the propagation of a new religion was greatly 
 assisted if it could allow itself to employ some 
 at least of the names potent and familiar 
 in the older creed. Now the personal 
 names of the various deities of paganism, 
 owing to the mental illusion noted above, were 
 necessarily hateful to the new faith and were 
 ruthlessly suppressed, surviving merely as 
 names of demons or for purposes of magic : 
 only in remote corners of the old world one 
 or two may still be lingering, purified as it 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 33 
 
 were and at peace, as in the modern chapel 
 of "Panagia Aphroditissa," near the old 
 Paphos in Cyprus. But some of the sacred 
 names of Greek paganism were mere appel- 
 latives, possessing less individual personality, 
 and were therefore innocent in the ears of 
 the Christian propagandists. And two of 
 these were destined to become names of 
 primary virtue in the terminology of the new 
 faith. When the apostles and their successors 
 preached the Gospel of **the Saviour," this title 
 could awaken at least a responsive religious 
 thrill in the hearts of the Hellenes who had 
 been nursed in their ancestral religion. For it 
 had long been attached to their supreme god, 
 and in its feminine form to their beloved 
 goddess Kore, and as applied to her the 
 appellative already connoted " salvation " after 
 death ; ^ and already it had been used by the 
 Alexandrian Greeks to sanctify the divine 
 man, God's representative on earth, "the 
 
 1 I have noticed the evidence of this in my forthcoming 
 third volume of the Cults of the Greek States. 
 
34 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 living image of God," as one of the later 
 Ptolemies is styled in the ecstatic language of 
 the Rosetta inscription.^ But in the history 
 of divine names none have been of greater 
 import for paganism and Christianity alike 
 than ** Kore-Parthenos " and that of the Greek 
 and Phrygian "Divine Mother," the Oeo)v 
 My]Tr)p. It is at least probable that the pre- 
 valence of the cult and the name of " Kore," 
 the goddess who proffered salvation in the 
 pre-Christian Hellenic world, afforded strong 
 stimulus to the later growth and diffusion of 
 Mariolatry, which is one of those phenomena 
 in the history of the Church which cannot be 
 adequately explained without looking beyond 
 the limits of Christianity proper. A passage 
 in the Panarium of Epiphanios ^ is of singular 
 interest for those who wish to study the 
 period of transition between old things and 
 
 1 C./.G., 4697. 
 
 2 Haeres. 51, 22; Dindorf, vol. ii. p. 483, 12-29 :, vide 
 Philologus, l6, p. 354. I find that the view 1 have taken 
 of this important text agrees on the whole with that of 
 Usener in his Untersuckungen, p. 27. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 35 
 
 new. This writer tells us that on the night 
 of the 5th or 6th of January, in Alexandria, 
 the worshippers met in the sacred enclosure or 
 temple of " Kore," and having sung hymns to 
 the music of the flute till dawn, they de- 
 scended by the light of torches into an under- 
 ground shrine and brought up thence a 
 wooden idol on a bier representing Kore, 
 seated and naked, with the sign of the cross 
 on her brow, her hands, and her knees. 
 And with the accompaniment of flutes, hymns, 
 and dances the image was carried round the 
 central shrine seven times, before it was 
 restored again to its nether dweUing-place : 
 " and the votaries say that to-day at this hour 
 Kore — ^that is, the Virgin — gave birth to the 
 Eternal." 
 
 It is strange that Epiphanios should quote 
 this rite as an example of pure paganism. 
 This cannot be true : the image has been 
 carefully signed with the cross in such a way 
 as to suggest, not casual violence, but the 
 deliberate intention of the worshippers ; nor 
 
36 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 could the formula, "the Virgin has born the 
 Eternal," have been part of a purely pagan 
 liturgy consecrated to the Hellenic Kore. 
 Still less could the service be purely Christian : 
 at least I imagine that a naked Virgin, kept in 
 a cavern shrine and carried round with timbrels, 
 would be a unique fact in Christian archae- 
 ology. The belief is forced upon us that we 
 have here a blending of at least two rival 
 creeds in a period of transition. An old ritual 
 of Kore at Alexandria, the goddess of the 
 underworld whose statue was kept in a sub- 
 terraneous cavern, may have included a kind 
 of passion play in which a holy child was 
 born : as this occurred near the beginning of 
 January, it could all the more easily be adapted 
 to the requirements of a gradually prevailing 
 Christianity. The idol is sanctified with the 
 sign of the cross, and the child is called " the 
 Aion." This name betrays the influence at 
 work. The doctrine which laboured most 
 zealously to combine the various elements of 
 the pagan and Christian creeds was Gnosti- 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 37 
 
 cism, and " Aion " was a figure which the 
 Gnostics borrowed from Mithraism/ It seems 
 that the religious rays from Hellas, Persia, 
 and Bethlehem converged at the " Korion " of 
 Alexandria. But the name K6pr) does not 
 seem to have usually formed part of the sacred 
 title accepted by the early Church for the 
 Mother of our Lord. Probably the name had 
 acquired a personal association with the pagan 
 goddess too strong to allow it to be used for 
 the new faith ; ^ nor was the idea of virginity 
 so directly connoted by it as by the term 
 irapOivo^ : hence j) ayvrj uapOivo^ or y) ayia 
 TTapOivos is chosen for the Christian appellation 
 of Mary. But these words themselves belong 
 to the ancient hieratic vocabulary of Hellas, 
 for the maiden-goddess known by no other 
 name than Parthenos had long been adored in 
 
 1 That Aion was a real figure of Mithraic religion has 
 been finally proved by the Mithras-Liturgie, published by 
 Dieterich, p. 4, 1. 21. 
 
 2 Usener quotes a few examples from the liturgy of the 
 Greek Church and one or two from patristic literature, 
 Religionsgesch. Untersuchungen, 1, p. 28, n. 5 : some of 
 these are poetical. 
 
38 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 various states of Asia Minor and Thrace ; ^ 
 " Hagne," the " Holy One," was a divinity 
 dear to the Arcadians ; ^ and at Assos, the 
 chief port of Mysia, visited by St Paul on one 
 of his journeys, an inscription attests that 
 ** the Holy Virgin of our fatherland " — such 
 is her style — had been pre-eminent in the 
 pagan worship.^ Moreover the sacred title, 
 " the Mother of God," was sympathetic with 
 a very ancient and dominant Mediterranean 
 faith : in prehistoric times from Crete, and 
 at a later period from Phrygia, had gone 
 forth the worship of the divine mother, 
 known generally as " the Gods' Mother " or 
 ** the Mother," which had left a deep impress 
 upon the religious imagination of the various 
 races of the Greek and Roman world. It is 
 no paradox to affirm that one of the streams 
 
 ^ Vide Artemis R. 37, in my Cults of the Greek States , 
 vol. ii. p. 567. 
 
 2 Paus. 4, 33, 4 : inscription in Dittenberger, Sylhge'^, 
 
 2 Vide Report of American School at Athens ^ vol. i,, inscr. 
 No. xxvi. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 39 
 
 that fostered the later growth of Mariolatry 
 may have descended from the Minoan palace 
 of Knossos.^ 
 
 As regards the third group in my classifica- 
 tion, external symbols and liturgical objects, 
 we might suppose that these mainly belong to 
 the minutiae of archaeological study. A phil- 
 osopher may ignore them as trivial facts ; but 
 they have been the cause of too much blood- 
 shed and strife to be ignored by the history of 
 religions, and the feelings they excite are still 
 powerful enough to divide the churches and the 
 sects of Christendom. Besides, if one religion 
 borrows its symbols and sacred objects from an- 
 other, it probably borrows much more besides. 
 The use of candles and incense in churches, 
 the fashion of certain ecclesiastic vestments, 
 can be shown to have descended to us from a 
 pre-Christian world. And it was quite natural 
 that the new faith should take over the religious 
 property of paganism, whatever at least it could 
 
 1 Vide chapter on Cybele in the forthcoming third 
 volume of my Cults of the Greek States. 
 
40 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 receive without violation of its own essential 
 principles. It is only the anthropological study 
 of these particulars, apparently insignificant in 
 themselves, that enables us to understand 
 certain modern controversies, as for instance 
 concerning incense, and also to appreciate 
 the extraordinary tenacity with which the 
 successive generations cleave to the smaller 
 things of cult. These latter are felt to be part 
 of the spell which is exercised upon us by an 
 immemorial tradition, a spell that is all the 
 stronger because it works upon the "sub- 
 conscious " self; and those who maintain them 
 are rarely aware of the aboriginal reason which 
 prompts them. And often the question about 
 the symbols or the sacred objects of worship, 
 as distinct from the ideas and personalities, 
 becomes obviously of prime importance for 
 the comparison and classification of religions. 
 Thus the distinction between iconic or idola- 
 trous and aniconic or non-idolatrous cults 
 is of deep significance, for it may correspond 
 to the distinction between a more and a less 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 41 
 
 anthropomorphic conception of the divinity, 
 or to a behef that the embodiment of him 
 in material objects is right and seemly or 
 wrong and unseemly. The more spiritual a 
 religion becomes, the greater is its inclination 
 to dispense with the idol and even to reprobate 
 it ; the worshipper of Jahve was thus set in 
 antagonism to the surrounding tribes, and in the 
 Iranian region the Zarathustrian votary to the 
 worshipper of the Daevas. The history of Chris- 
 tianity in regard to this matter is familiar to us 
 all : in spite of the vehement protests of its 
 apostles and earlier propagandists who in- 
 herited the spiritual Judaic view, we know that 
 all the efforts of the iconoclastic emperors 
 could not suppress the veneration of images in 
 the later period. Even in the Teutonic north, 
 Christianity came, in the days before the Refor- 
 mation, to assume an iconic character which is 
 not accounted for by the ancestral tradition 
 of our pagan forefathers : who certainly carved 
 images, in spite of what Tacitus tells us, but 
 do not appear to have been markedly idola- 
 
42 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 trous. We infallibly detect here the abiding 
 influence of Greco- Roman paganism, in which 
 idolatry had taken so deep a root, satisfying 
 as it did the artistic-religious cravings of the 
 people. We have records of the transforma- 
 tion of the old statues into Christian images ; 
 in an epigram we find Heracles pathetically 
 complaining that he is forced to become 
 St Luke : ^ a beautiful head of Aphrodite in 
 Athens is rudely stamped with the cross, 
 perhaps to convert her into the Virgin : ^ at the 
 present day there exists in South Italy an 
 image of a Madonna del Granato, holding a 
 pomegranate, which by a curious chain of 
 evidence can be traced with some probability 
 back to the Hera of Argos, carved by 
 Polycleitos. 
 
 Now the image may be regarded in two 
 aspects : as a symbol merely bringing close to 
 the sense the spiritual idea of divinity, and 
 
 1 Anth. Pal. xi. 269, " I am Heracles^ the triumphant son 
 of Zeus ; I am not Luke, but they compel me." 
 
 2 Ephemeris Archaiologike, 1900, ttiV. 5. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 43 
 
 serving to stimulate the prayerful thought of 
 the worshipper : or it may be venerated as the 
 indwelling abode of the divinity, in which he 
 habitually resides, or into which, by spells and 
 blood-offerings, he may be compelled to enter. 
 The first is the more spiritual and advanced point 
 of view, the orthodox aspect of the image in 
 the iconic churches of Christendom at most 
 periods ; and this is put forward as an apology 
 for what may seem idolatry : we may note in 
 passing that the same apology was put forward 
 by the advanced champions of paganism. The 
 second is the more primitive view, accepted at 
 most periods by the people, and sometimes 
 tolerated or even encouraged by certain of the 
 churches : the idol is regarded as miraculous, 
 as infused with divine power, perhaps itself the 
 very divinity ; and the uncultured Greeks who 
 whipped the idol of Pan with squills if food 
 was scarce,^ or bound the image of Aphrodite 
 with cords to prevent it running away,^ the 
 
 1 Theocritus, Id. 7, 106. 
 
 2 Cults of Greek States, vol. ii. p. 735 : R. 25b. 
 
44- The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Breton smith mentioned by Renan, who 
 threatened the saint's image with red-hot 
 pincers to compel him to heal his son, the 
 modern savage who smears his idols with 
 blood,^ are to be classed together in the 
 morphology of religion. 
 
 Idolatry in this sense is a higher form of 
 fetichism, which, strictly defined, is the venera- 
 tion of material objects, often shaped by art 
 and handled in such a way as to endow them 
 with divine potency, which bring good fortune 
 to the owner. It is supposed to connote 
 savagery, but survivals of it are found in most 
 civilised communities, and we probably all 
 inherit some faint impress of the fetichistic 
 spirit, nor need we be startled if we find it in 
 the higher religions. 
 
 In ancient Greece the fetich was common 
 enough : sacred axes, sacred sceptres, pyra- 
 midical or cone-shaped stones, rudely hewn 
 
 1 Cf. the method of Greco-Egyptian magic of strangling 
 birds before the idol of Eros, in order that their breath may 
 animate it, mentioned in an Abraxas papyrus, Class. Rev. 
 1896, p. 409. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 45 
 
 tree-stumps, are examples which we find in 
 the hterature and art of the historic or pre- 
 historic periods ; the most common kind of 
 private fetich was the gem, carried as an 
 amulet. This superstitious view of gems 
 belonging to primitive faith has continued 
 through many ages. Moreover, both in the 
 public and private religion of Christendom in 
 many periods, and even at the present time, 
 we can easily recognise the fetichistic value of 
 the sacred objects, relics, crucifixes ; and the 
 Bible itself might sometimes be carried as an 
 amulet about the person to secure one from 
 danger, and its modern use in the English 
 legal oath, the witness "kissing the book," 
 conforms to a fetichistic type of oath which 
 was common in the primitive Teutonic com- 
 munities.^ When TertuUian exclaims, " How 
 great is the difference between the wood of 
 the cross and the shapeless wooden emblems 
 of Pallas or Ceres," ^ he is thinking generally 
 
 ^ Vide Schrader, Real-Lexikon, s.v. Eid. 
 2 Ad Nat i. 12. 
 
46 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 of the wide difference between Christianity 
 and Hellenic polytheism. As regards the 
 attitude of the Christian and pagan wor- 
 shippers towards these emblems of their "cult 
 which Tertullian mentions, we are not sure 
 that any such general distinction could be 
 drawn. The " adoration of the true wood of 
 the cross," of which we have heard in recent 
 times, if we merely consider the nature of the 
 religious object and the value of the material 
 thing for faith, must be called fetichistic : at 
 least I know of no other word equally appro- 
 priate in the terminology of the science of 
 religions. Doubtless the modern mind, in the 
 performance of such ritual practices, can dis- 
 tinguish between the inanimate or material 
 thing and the divine spirit which sanctifies it. 
 But so also can the intelligent savage, who 
 cares nothing for his piece of wood when he 
 thinks the power-giving spirit has departed 
 from it. The fetichism then of the higher 
 religions and of the savage faith is morpho- 
 logically the same ; the vital difference lies in 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 47 
 
 the conception of the divinity that is supposed 
 to animate or sanctify the material thing. 
 
 It would be wrong to attribute the fetichistic 
 proclivities discovered in the Christian com- 
 munities wholly to the Hellenic or Mediterranean 
 strain in our religion ; for we must reckon with 
 the survival among the later ritual-observances 
 of the superstitions of the Northern peoples, and 
 fetichism was certainly characteristic of the 
 early Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic races. In 
 this matter, as in others, we have to note that 
 the puritanism of the early Church could not 
 prevail against the strength of habit and im- 
 memorial tradition. 
 
 The illustration of this group of affinities may 
 conclude with the observation that the most cher- 
 ished emblem of our creed, the type of the cross 
 itself, had already been in vogue as a religious 
 symbol of certain of the earlier pagan peoples ; 
 it played a part in the ancient Egyptian ^ and 
 
 ^ The TatUj Tat^ or Ded pillar erected in the ritual of 
 Osiris, perhaps as a symbol of the resurrection of the god, 
 had the form of a cross : vide Frazer, Golden Bough^''\ ii. p. 141. 
 
48 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Assyrian ritual, and recently Dr Evans has 
 revealed to us in the Palace of Minos in 
 Crete a chapel of the cross dedicated to 
 the worship of the divine mother.^ We can 
 go no further than the surmise that the 
 propagation of Christianity may have been 
 assisted by the fact that the emblem of the 
 new faith would not appear wholly unfamiliar 
 to some of the converted races. 
 
 As regards the affinities discernible in re- 
 spect of hieratic institutions, the organisation 
 of churches, the relations of Church and State, 
 I have only space to cite a few salient illustra- 
 tions. The earliest Christian Church, a private 
 religious society united by the bond of faith, 
 the members contributing to each other's 
 wants, with a simple democratic organisation 
 of ecclesia and sacred officials, would not strike 
 the contemporary Greco-Roman world as an 
 unfamiliar phenomenon ; for its family like- 
 
 ^ Vide Palace of Knossos : Provisional Report for year 
 1903, p. 92 : the writer quotes Babylonian and Assyrian 
 examples. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 49 
 
 ness to the Hellenic " thiasoi " or brotherhoods 
 of cult was sufficiently obvious, and has often 
 been commented on. They, Uke it, were 
 often proselytisers, and, ignoring the barriers 
 of caste, gens, and city, accepted in principle 
 the religious fellowship of man. "It is well 
 to consider all men friends and brothers, as 
 being the family of God," says ApoUonius,^ 
 echoing the doctrine of the Stoics. The soil 
 was ready prepared for the new cosmopolitan 
 religion. 
 
 In considering the history of the hierarchy 
 in Christendom, we are often obliged to turn 
 our eyes back upon the pre-Christian period. 
 For instance, the insistence on the apostolic 
 succession in the various churches, a primary 
 
 1 Epist. 395 : the doctrines of the Orphic sects from 
 the fourth century b.c. onwards also emphasised the kin- 
 ship of man with God, as the well-known Orphic tablets, 
 found in South Italy and Crete, reveal {Hell. Jovrn. S, 
 p. 112: Miss J. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek 
 Religion : Appendix by Prof. Murray, p. 660). In the 
 pseudo- Platonic Axiockus, p. 371 D, the sick man is 
 assured of salvation as being " of the family of God " 
 
 4 
 
50 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 article of faith with many at the present time, 
 is entirely in keeping with a very old Mediter- 
 ranean tradition : for we find it not in- 
 frequently maintained in Hellenic paganism 
 that the priest should descend directly from 
 the god whom he serves, or from the first 
 apostle who instituted the particular cult or 
 mystery ; ^ we hear of the priest being quali- 
 fied " by descent and by divine appointment."* 
 But in the earlier religious period the succes- 
 sion or descent was regarded in the linear and 
 physical sense: this has become refined into 
 the idea of a spiritual succession, maintained 
 however by a continuity of physical though 
 mystic contact. Here, as so often in the 
 comparative study of religion, we have to note 
 
 1 E.g. a priest of Megalopolis, a hierophantes of the 
 Great Goddesses, is spoken of as descended from "those 
 who first established the mystic worship of the Great 
 Goddesses among the Arcadians," Eph. Archaiol. 1896, p. 
 122 : the priests of Poseidon at Halikarnassos traced their 
 descent from those who brought his cult from Troezen at 
 the foundation of the city, C.I.G. 2655. 
 
 2 At Cos, vide Paton and Hicks, Inscriptions of Cos, 
 No. 103 (Roman Imperial period). 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 51 
 
 the physical and material ideas of the more 
 primitive period maintaining themselves in 
 the later but translated into a spiritual 
 significance. 
 
 The relation between the priesthood and the 
 State has been one of the burning questions of 
 the secular and religious history of Europe. 
 To understand fully all the features in the 
 State organisation of the Church and the 
 many points of controversy, we need often 
 to go far back into the records of early Aryan 
 and Mediterranean society. We may mark 
 here and there in the pagan Anatolian region 
 the emergence of the idea that the priest 
 should be temporal lord/ vj^hile in most early 
 Aryan societies the subordination of the 
 spiritual to the secular power appears to have 
 been maintained. A study of the sagas of the 
 North suggests the reflection that the struggle 
 fought out to a definite decision at the Refor- 
 mation had already been decided in the 
 
 ^ E.g. the priest of Cybele at Pessinus, and the priest of 
 Ma in the two Comanas. 
 
52 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Teutonic North in the far-off days before 
 Christianity ; ^ also that the secular character of 
 the married English priesthood in our pre- 
 Conquest period is only the reflex of old 
 Teutonic custom. 
 
 The celibacy of the priesthood is, again, a 
 question that has agitated and divided the 
 churches, nor does it appear that we ourselves 
 have finished with it. To trace its origin and 
 inner significance, a wide anthropological study 
 is necessary, and I may be able to return to 
 it in another association in a later lecture. 
 Within the history of the Church, we may 
 trace back the religious ideas underlying the 
 dogma of celibacy to the ascetic enthusiasm of 
 the third and fourth centuries, and we may be 
 right in connecting it with the growth of 
 Mariolatry. But the original source of the 
 phenomenon lies far in the background of our 
 religion ; the impulse to religious celibacy had 
 long been congenial to the temperament of 
 
 1 Vide Golther, Handhuch der germaniscken Mythologie, 
 p. 612, 617. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 53 
 
 some of the Anatolian races. We find it power- 
 ful in the Judaic sect of the Essenians ; and in 
 the anthropology of primitive societies we are 
 often confronted with the idea that the virgin 
 body is the only fit organ for the full divine 
 afflatus. 
 
 In another question of administration, in the 
 position of women in regard to the ministry, 
 we can trace the opposing forces of differing 
 pre-Christian traditions.^ Their present total 
 exclusion from sacred functions in all but a 
 few sects shows the triumph of the Judaic 
 rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul ; 
 it is not at all in accordance with Teutonic 
 or Greco-Roman religious custom ; and in 
 fact we find in the early centuries of the 
 Church, when Greek influence was strongest, 
 that certain offices of the ministry could be 
 fulfilled by women ; we even hear of a heretic 
 sect in the fifth century that signalised itself 
 by the orgiastic processions of the " priestesses 
 
 ^ Fide my paper in the Archiv fur Religionswissensckaji, 
 1904, on '^^The Position of Women in Ancient Religion." 
 
54 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 of the Virgin Mary."^ It is still possible that 
 the old Teutonic view in this matter may 
 reassert itself. 
 
 If we try to give a complete account of 
 any of the important institutions of the 
 churches, infant baptism or the Roman 
 confession for instance, we ought at least, 
 before we can pronounce that any particular 
 one is a spontaneous or a unique growth, to 
 survey the religions contiguous to or immedi- 
 ately preceding Christianity. As regards the 
 practice of confession, a usage which, as I hope 
 to show, may be explained as connected with 
 a ritual of purification, its institution cannot 
 at least be regarded as a unique phenomenon 
 in the early Church. A very simple form of 
 it appears to have been known to the Judaic 
 system, and it appears as a formal element 
 in the Babylonian liturgy:^ as a spiritual 
 relief to which a man might voluntarily 
 resort, it was encouraged by the Delphic 
 
 ^ Vide infra, p. 72. 
 
 ^ See King, Babylonian Religion, p. 211. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 55 
 
 oracle ; ^ as part of the cathartic ritual which 
 was preliminary to initiation it was required 
 by the ordinances of the Samothracian 
 Mysteries ; and it is in an anecdote con- 
 cerning these that we meet with the first 
 example of the free Protestant spirit repro- 
 bating the practice.^ We may infer that it 
 was uncongenial to the character and alien 
 to the tradition of our Teutonic forefathers, 
 in the record of whose pagan institutions there 
 is no hint of it, and Alcuin complains of his 
 Goths " that no one of the laity was willing 
 to confess to the priests." ^ It may well have 
 been a spontaneous growth of southern 
 Christianity ; but it appears to have arisen 
 first within the early monastic orders,* and 
 
 ^ Vide chapter on "Apollo Cult" in my forthcoming 
 fourth volume of Cults. 
 
 2 Plutarch, Apophtheg. Lacon. p. 229 D : Lysander is 
 told by the priest that before initiation he must confess 
 his worst sin : he asks if this was the gods' command or 
 the priests', and on hearing that it was the gods who 
 enjoined it, he replied, " Then do you stand aside and I 
 will tell the gods if they ask me." 
 
 3 0pp. Ep. 96. 
 
 * Vide Herzog, Real-Ena/clopddie, s.v. Beichte. 
 
56 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 as these in their origin had certain affinities 
 with the non-Christian mystic brotherhoods, 
 where the practice was not unknown, it is 
 possible that in this matter also a pre-Christian 
 tradition was still of some effect. Or, if this 
 is unlikely, we must maintain that like 
 conditions evolve similar products over the 
 whole area with which comparative religion 
 deals ; and the most striking resemblance to a 
 Christian confessional is to be observed in the 
 old Mexican ritual, if we can trust Sahagun.^ 
 As regards the other suggested example, we 
 should probably find, if we followed out the 
 history and origin of infant baptism, that the 
 pre-Christian tradition was a strong efficient 
 force in the settlement of the question ; there 
 were urgent reasons at least why the rite 
 should soon have come to be maintained by 
 the early Church, for analogous rites whereby 
 the new-born child was consecrated to the 
 divinity were probably part of the hereditary 
 tradition of most of the converted races. 
 
 1 Jourdanet et Simeon, p. 24. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 57 
 
 We know that many of the Hellenes had 
 been in the habit of passing the infant 
 solemnly round the fire, a purificatory and also 
 consecrating process ; ^ the northern Teutons 
 sprinkled the infant with water :^ and when 
 Aristotle tells us that many of the barbarian 
 tribes were in the habit of plunging the new- 
 born into river- water, to harden the little ones, 
 he is mistaking a religious for a secular 
 practice.^ Looking at the baptism of the 
 adult neophyte, we find interesting resem- 
 blances to the ceremonies of the pre-Christian 
 mystic initiations ; the idea commonly ex- 
 pressed in these latter, that the catechumen 
 died to his old life and was born again, was 
 eagerly adopted and developed by the later 
 rehgion, and here as there left its imprint on 
 the ritual: death and rebirth were actually 
 simulated in the mystic service.* 
 
 ^ Heszch, s.v. 'A/x</>i8po/xta. 
 
 2 Fide Golther, op. cit. p. 555. 3 Poiu^ p. 1336 g. 
 
 * In the Attis Mysteries the reborn and initiated were 
 fed on milk — Sallustius, De Diis et Mundo, 4 : for a care- 
 ful treatment of the whole question, vide Dieterieh, Eine 
 
58 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 The affinities between Christian and pagan 
 ritual, in many cases no doubt the result of 
 direct inheritance, demand a more detailed 
 investigation than they have yet received, 
 especially in respect of the festival calendar: 
 even the early writers of the Church were of 
 opinion that the feast of the Purification of 
 the Virgin Mary in February, was a develop- 
 ment of the old Roman Februalia instituted 
 by Numa ; ^ and such names of Christian saints 
 and bishops as Hilarion, Hilarius, attest the 
 popularity of the Hilaria, the festival of 
 Adonis in the last days of paganism. Much 
 might be still discovered by a minute know- 
 ledge of the Greco-Roman records, combined 
 with travel in Mediterranean lands and with 
 personal observation of the ritual of feast- and 
 fast-days in the remoter villages.^ 
 
 Mithras-LUvrgie, pp. 157-178 : for various savage parallels 
 showing the prevalence in primitive societies of the idea 
 of death and rebirth at initiation, vide Frazer, Golden 
 Bough, vol. iii. pp. 424-446. 
 
 1 Vide Herzogj ReaUEncycl.f xii. p. 319- 
 
 2 Vide Trede, Das Heidenthum in der rbmischen Kirche, 
 vol. i. p. 280, '* Neue und alte Fest-Lust." 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 59 
 
 Finally, there remains the question, of greater 
 moment and perplexity than all the preceding, 
 concerning the affinities of the Christian and 
 pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and 
 essential behef. To point out resemblances 
 is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only 
 it is of more avail for present science to 
 emphasise the former, as the latter are obvious 
 enough and have always been emphasised. 
 But we must guard against accepting too 
 rashly the fact of resemblance for proof of 
 actual origin ; nor must we ignore the truth 
 that two religions may be vitally different in 
 effect, while they use the same materials of 
 thought and belief. The subject demands 
 great knowledge and critical insight, and I 
 can only indicate here clues that have already 
 been followed and might be followed further. 
 There is probably no need to call to your 
 notice the fact that the incarnation of the 
 Godhead in human form was a familiar con- 
 ception to the civilised and half-civilised races 
 of the old world, and was attached equally to 
 
6o The Evolution of Religion 
 
 mythic personages as well as to actual men. 
 That such a personality could serve as a 
 mediator between man and the Supreme God 
 was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, 
 even the Latin imagination ; and though the 
 idea does not seem to have been woven into 
 any fabric of faith by these races, it appears 
 as a natural product in the higher stages of 
 polytheism, and in many primitive and 
 advanced societies it has dominated men's 
 views concerning the person and position of 
 the King. 
 
 More important still for the purposes of the 
 religious comparison is the wide prevalence in 
 the Mediterranean communities of the behef 
 in the death and resurrection of the divinity : 
 and this has been the theme of much recent 
 anthropological investigation.^ This is not 
 
 1 Fide Frazer's Golden Bough, passim, especially vol. ii. 
 pp. 115-168 (death and resurrection in rites of Adonis, 
 Attis, Osiris, Dionysos), and vol. iii. pp. 138-200: cf. 
 articles by Bernard Cook in Classical Revie?v, 1903, 1904, on 
 " Zeus Jupiter and the Oak " : we must distinguish between 
 the simulated death of the divine effigy, and the simu- 
 lated or real death of the human representative of divinity. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 6i 
 
 the time to examine into its origin and signi- 
 ficance or to track out the various phenomena 
 that illustrate and group themselves around 
 it in the Mediterranean cults. I would 
 merely call attention in passing to the fact 
 that the belief existed, and was probably ex- 
 pressed in the pre-Christian ritual of St 
 Paul's own city of Tarsos/ and that it was 
 especially strong in the Attis Mysteries of the 
 Great Mother of Phrygia and Crete ; we know 
 that these were celebrated at a season which 
 corresponded to the end of our Lenten period 
 and the beginning of Easter, that they were 
 preceded by fasting and began with lamenta- 
 
 In Hellenic religion we can trace the idea in the worship 
 of Pan, in the legends and ritual of Artemis-Iphigenia and 
 Aphrodite, vide Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii. pp. 440- 
 442, 650-652, and in the Cretan worship of Zeus, vol. i. 
 pp. 36-38 : but it had lost its vitality in the purely Hellenic 
 cults of the classical period, and was only real and energetic 
 in the legends and ritual of Adonis and Dionysos. 
 
 1 Vide Dio Chrys., vol. ii. p. l6 (Dindorf), and K. O. 
 Miiller's Sardon und Sardanapal {Kleine Sckriften, vol. ii. 
 p. 100) : on a coin published in British Museum Catalogue, 
 '* Lycaonia," etc., pi. xxxiii. 2, p. 180, we see the god on 
 his lion standing on what may be his pyre. 
 
62 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 tions, the votaries gathering in sorrow around 
 the bier of the dead divinity; then followed 
 the resurrection, and the risen god gave hope 
 of salvation to the mystic brotherhood, and 
 the whole service closed with the feast of 
 rejoicing, the Hilaria.^ The Christian fathers 
 themselves were struck with the deep resem- 
 blance between this and their own mystery, 
 and they were tempted to attribute it to the 
 diabolic spirit of parody. We may take the 
 words of Firmicus Maternus,^ with which he 
 concludes his description of such an Attis 
 Mystery as I have outlined — " truly the devil 
 has Christians of his own" — as the text of 
 a very important chapter in comparative 
 religion. We hear of a Christian convert in 
 Crete being seduced by the fascinations of the 
 Hilaria ; and Phrygia, its ancestral home, was 
 one of the earliest strongholds of Christian- 
 ity. Here at least we may assume that the 
 
 1 Fide especially Hippol., Ref. Haeres. 5, p. 118 (Miller) : 
 Macrob., Saturn. 1, 21, 7: Arnobius, Adv. Gent. 5, 7, l6; 
 7, 49 : Julian, Or. 5, l68 C. 
 
 2 De error, c. 22. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 63 
 
 ancient dogma and ritual of the people was 
 one of the predisposing causes operating in 
 favour of the new. 
 
 The comparative student must also give 
 careful consideration to what are called the 
 eschatologic doctrines, the beliefs concerning 
 posthumous happiness, salvation, and damna- 
 tion, not only of the Judaic, but also of the 
 Hellenic, Anatolian, and Egyptian rehgions: 
 and especially to those of the Hellenic, for it was 
 they that were most viddely known in the area 
 of the Greco-Roman world, and modern theory 
 has at times endeavoured to trace back the 
 apocalyptic literature of Christianity to Hellenic 
 sources.^ The investigation would demand a 
 careful study of the Eleusinian and the Orphic 
 Mysteries, in both of which we find the preg- 
 nant idea that salvation after death depended 
 
 1 For the Greek origin of the Christian apocalyptical 
 literature, vide Dieterich, BeUrage zur Erkl'drung der neu- 
 entdeckten Petrus Apokalypse, Leipzig, 1893. The clearest 
 trace of Orphic influence on historic Christianity is the 
 doctrine of purgatory, which was popularised for the 
 later ages by Vergil's Vlth Mneid : vide especially the 
 purgatorial theory in Servius' Commentary, Mn, vi. 741. 
 
64 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 on a religious act of faith or on a mystic 
 communion with a divinity that might be 
 attained on earth by a sacrament or other 
 liturgical means: and the inquiry will in- 
 clude the question how far in these earlier 
 systems the doctrine of salvation by faith 
 was actually blended with any admixture 
 of the ethical doctrine of salvation by 
 works. And the problem, like many others 
 in the scientific study of religion, will be 
 found to concern philosophic as well as 
 religious history. 
 
 The ideas attaching to sacrifice in the Medi- 
 terranean world have long been recognised as 
 a vital subject of inquiry for the comparative 
 science; and both the lower and the higher 
 anthropology can contribute much that is 
 essential to the full understanding of the 
 evolution of the Christian doctrine concern- 
 ing the divine sacrifice and the Holy Com- 
 munion. I need not here enlarge on this 
 subject, even by way of mere illustration, for 
 I have already dealt with it, however inade- 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 65 
 
 quately, in a former paper : ^ it is an intricate and 
 fascinating theme and invites further research. 
 But for proving the revival on the new 
 Christian soil of the older pre - Christian 
 religious thought and aspiration, there is no 
 special subject so fruitful as the study of 
 Mariolatry. I have already suggested by 
 way of illustration the possibility of such 
 pagan titles as " Kore-Parthenos," the " Gods' 
 mother," having exercised an abiding influence 
 in exciting and shaping the nascent thought 
 of earlier Christendom ; and I affirmed that 
 their prevalence corresponded to a prevailing 
 religious bias which turned the minds of 
 many of the peoples in the old world to 
 cleave affectionately to the mother-goddess 
 or to the divine maid. Apart from mere 
 titles, the student of the latter days of 
 paganism is forced to note at almost every 
 point the deep impress of such ideas and the 
 enthusiasm they evoked. In all the leading 
 Greek mysteries, the Mother and the Maid 
 
 1 Hihhert Journal, January 1904. 
 
66 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 held a dominant position, and the Orphic 
 brotherhoods had ranged the Mother by the 
 side of the Son- God and the Father- God ; 
 and even in the state-cults of the ancient 
 centres of Hellenic civilisation, the maternal 
 character of the divine power had long been 
 cherished. Finally, the Phrygian religion of 
 the Mother, to which even Mithraism, a pre- 
 eminently masculine or paternal religion, was 
 obliged to accommodate itself, had captured the 
 greater part of the Greco-Roman world ; and 
 was certainly very influential in the districts of 
 Asia Minor visited by St Paul and in every one 
 of the cities of the Seven Churches. The senti- 
 ment it evoked is expressed by the words of a 
 poet of the Middle Attic comedy : " For those 
 who have true knowledge of things divine, there 
 is nothing greater than the Mother ; hence the 
 first man who became civilised founded the 
 shrine of the Mother."^ This then is a lead- 
 ing factor in the religious psychology of the 
 converted nations with which we must reckon. 
 
 1 Alexis in Stobaeus, Florileg. (Meineke), vol. iii. p. 83. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 67 
 
 We cannot, in accordance with the laws of 
 human nature, suppose that a rehgious tra- 
 dition of such hereditary power as this could 
 wholly lose its force under a changed creed. 
 The gaps in the record will probably make it 
 impossible to supply a detailed and geogra- 
 phical statement showing how in the various 
 communities of the ancient cult the person- 
 ality of the pre-Christian goddess was fused 
 gradually with the ideal image of the Virgin- 
 Mother of Christ. Only a few suggestive 
 facts in the development and organisation 
 of Mariolatry may be mentioned here. The 
 heretic Montanists of Phrygia were charged 
 with deifying the Virgin and believing that 
 one of their leaders was united in a mystic 
 marriage with her, a belief natural to Phry- 
 gian paganism ; and their founder Montanus 
 is said to have originally been a priest of 
 Cybele.^ The mother of Constantine, the 
 
 1 Vide Herzog, Real-Encycl., s.v. " Montanismus " : cf. 
 the article there on "Maria" and the chapter in Trede, 
 op. cit. vol. ii., " Die grosse Mutter." 
 
68 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Empress Helena, who is supposed to have 
 been of Bithynian origin, was praised for 
 decking the grotto of Bethlehem with sacred 
 gifts as the shrine of the Virgin ; ^ it is 
 noteworthy that her earliest recorded chapel 
 should be a grotto or cave ; for it was in 
 such underground shrines that the Phrygian 
 Mother was commonly worshipped in her 
 own land. Another striking analogy to 
 the ancient ritual of the mother-goddess is 
 presented by the feast called the /cot/xryo-ts 
 and avd\r)\lrL<; rrjs OeoTOKov, first mentioned 
 by Andreas of Crete {circ, 650 a.d.), but 
 probably in existence long before his time: 
 the Mother of God dies and rises again in 
 the Assumption. It would be of special 
 interest if we could discover that this ritual 
 first became canonical in Crete, the home 
 of Andreas ; for in Crete as in Cyprus, 
 where the Virgin succeeded to the name of 
 Aphrodite, we have traces of a similar rite in 
 which the goddess Aphrodite was laid out 
 
 1 Euseb., V. Const, iii. 43, 2. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 69 
 
 as dead on a bier and was afterwards raised 
 to life.^ 
 
 And is it nothing more than a coincidence 
 that in the same city of Ephesus, where during 
 St Paul's visit the fanatics raised a tumult 
 in behalf of their Virgin Artemis, some six 
 centuries later the people with equal ecstasy 
 hailed the decision of the Synod that pro- 
 claimed the Virgin-Mother of God (OeoroKos) ? 
 The mention of Ephesus suggests another 
 consideration of the greatest importance for 
 the study of the development and propa- 
 gation of the Christian dogma concerning 
 the virginity of the Mother of God. The 
 Virgin-birth, an idea which has long been a 
 stumbling-block to science, and which has 
 recently been pronounced by some to be un- 
 essential to Christianity, was a dogma that 
 could easily be understood and even eagerly 
 accepted by the converts of Anatolia ^ and the 
 
 1 Vide CuUs of the Greek States, pp. 650-652. 
 
 2 One of the Babylonian goddesses is addressed in the 
 same hymn as "Mother, wife, and maid/' Jastrow, Relig. 
 Bahyl, Assyr., p. 459. 
 
70 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Greek world. In Ephesus itself the ancient 
 goddess had been imagined in some sense as 
 a maternal or generative divinity, yet also as 
 a virgin, in whose ritual, conducted partly 
 by a priesthood of monks, a strong rule of 
 austerity and chastity was enforced.^ The 
 great Phrygian Mother was herself, according 
 to a native legend, miraculously conceived, 
 and there are grounds for suggesting that she 
 was occasionally regarded as a virgin.^ The 
 evidence indeed concerning such ideas in the 
 pre-Christian cults is always confused, casual, 
 and often contradictory, with no power 
 apparently in themselves to develop a fixed 
 dogma of faith. It would be in fact unreason- 
 able to maintain that the Christian doctrines 
 concerning the Virgin-Mother could have been 
 evoked merely by the spontaneous demand 
 of the Anatolian or Greek converts. But 
 we may affirm that when that doctrine was 
 
 1 Vide Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii., Artemis, R 133: 
 cf. Paus. 8, 13, 1. 
 
 2 I am treating this question in an appendix to the 
 Cybele chapter in vol. iii. of my Cults, etc. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 71 
 
 presented to them, their own traditions had 
 prepared their imaginations to receive it as 
 congenial. We meet in the late pagan liter- 
 ature passages in praise of virginity as a 
 divine quality quite as ecstatic and extrava- 
 gant as many in the Christian fathers/ Many 
 of the nations had long cherished the ideal 
 of a virgin goddess ; most had been devotees 
 of the Divine Mother. The successful pro- 
 pagation of Christianity may have owed much 
 to the means which it possessed for satisfying 
 these two sentiments and for reconciling 
 them in a primary article of faith. Then, 
 we must certainly ascribe the exaltation 
 of Mary in the Church of the first six 
 centuries to the enthusiasm engendered by 
 the older goddess-worships. Alexandria may 
 have contributed much more than we have 
 already noted ; and more than one writer 
 has explored the deep indebtedness of the 
 developed Mariolatry to the older figure of 
 
 1 E.g. fragment of Naumachius in Stobaeus, op. cit., vol. iii. 
 pp. 16-17. 
 
72 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Isis.^ The extravagance of an enthusiasm 
 that was rooted in old pagan sentiment 
 occasionally engendered heresies. Besides 
 the records concerning the Montanist, of 
 which the significance has already been 
 noticed, most interesting and valuable for 
 our purpose is the sermon of Epiphanius 
 against the heresy of the CoUideriani,^ wild 
 women who devoted themselves to the wor- 
 ship of Mary, and whose orgiastic service he 
 describes and reprobates : in their processions 
 they appear to have drawn the Virgin round in 
 a car strewn with raiment, and they solemnised 
 a sacrament with bread : and he adds that they 
 came from Thrace, the immemorial home 
 of fanatic women and of the goddess "Artemis 
 the Queen," to whom also offerings of corn 
 were made.^ The procession of a goddess in 
 a car was probably part of an old Thrako- 
 
 1 Fide specially Trede^ Das Heidentkum in der r'dmischen 
 Kirche : Renan, Les origines du christianisrne, vol. vii. 572-573. 
 The resemblances are particularly striking between the 
 Catholic and the Isiac sacerdotalism. 
 
 2 Hseres., 79- » Herod., 4, SS. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 73 
 
 Phrygian ceremonial, and we hear of a sacra- 
 mental eating of bread in the service of 
 Cybele. 
 
 We may finally note that the enthusiastic 
 literature devoted to the pre-Christian Divine 
 Mother and Maid and to the Virgin-Mother of 
 God is the same in quality and tone. The 
 prayer addressed to Isis in the story of 
 Apuleius reminds us of a Christian hymn of 
 praise ; and the older liturgical or literary 
 expressions would naturally colour the later/ 
 
 Another question with which the compara- 
 tive study of Christianity is concerned touches 
 the evolution of the Trinitarian idea.^ Here 
 
 1 Cf. the prayer to Ninlil or Belit (a parallel form to 
 Ischtar) of Asarhaddon, "may the lips of Nin-lil, the 
 Mother of the Great God^ utter daily a gracious word 
 before Aschur for the King of Assyria" (J astro w, op. cit. 
 p. 525). Mary was chiefly worshipped in the same way as 
 an intercessor. 
 
 2 For the identity of Father and Son in the later 
 Mithraic cult-dogma, vide Dieterich, Eine Mithras- Liturgie, 
 p. 68 : for the Trinitarian idea in Mithraism, vide Cumont, 
 Die Mysterien von Mithra {deutsche Avsgabe), pp. 96, 145 : 
 Mr Cook endeavours to trace it in the old Pelasgian cult 
 of Zeus, Class. Rev. 1903, 1904: vide Hell. Joum., 19OI, 
 
74 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 again it is necessary carefully to sift the 
 phenomena of the contiguous religions, to 
 consider whether they present such a con- 
 ception at all, and whether in any of them 
 it had gained sufficient vividness and power 
 to be likely to evoke a dogma of religious 
 metaphysic. Moreover, to understand the 
 complete genesis of the Christian doctrine, we 
 must trace out the idea of divine emanations 
 in the Mediterranean and the East ; for the 
 religions of the Iranian and even the Greek 
 world present us with parallels to the process 
 whereby the Holy Spirit becomes in relation 
 to the personal God a distinct though closely 
 attached personality. In the Zoroastrian 
 ritual the Fravashi or Soul of Ahura receives 
 reverence,^ and in Greek speculation and even 
 cult the Oeov Upovoua or Divine Providence 
 is sometimes regarded as an individual and 
 
 p. 139, for Trinitarian symbolism in Carthaginian worship. 
 (Note a certain mystic sanctity attached to the triad in later 
 Greek philosophy, e.g. in Porphyry, Serv., Verg., Eel., 5, 
 66: lo. Lydus, de Mens., 2, 19.) 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 278. 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 75 
 
 personal power ; ^ nor is the conception of 
 a plurality of beings within the limits of 
 the same personality unfamiUar to primitive 
 thought. The subject is one of the most 
 intricate in the field of religious study, and 
 the more hopeful investigation of it would 
 demand anthropological study in its widest 
 sense, combined with a knowledge of the 
 later Greek metaphysic which has clearly 
 left its impress on our doctrine. 
 
 I will close these illustrations with the most 
 obvious example of the contribution of anthro- 
 pological study to our knowledge of actual 
 Christendom. One of the most fruitful off- 
 shoots of the older Hellenic system was 
 hero-worship, which itself may have arisen 
 as a development of ancestor-cult. At first 
 confined to the mythic figures of the past, 
 it came to be applied to founders of colonies, 
 legislators, and even to athletes ; in its final 
 development in the last centuries before Christ 
 it was chiefly consecrated to kings and dynasts, 
 
 1 Vide CuUs of the Greek States, vol. i. p. 306. 
 
76 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 the founders of religious societies, men of 
 science, and political benefactors. The divine 
 worship of the mortal, an idea abhorrent to 
 Judaism, and not accepted by the severer Zoro- 
 astrian, was part of the state system of earlier 
 and later Egypt, and was finally imposed on 
 the Greco- Roman world. The soil in which 
 it had most rankly flourished was Greek, 
 and Greece and Anatolia were crowded with 
 chapels consecrated to recently living men or 
 to faded figures who were supposed to have 
 once lived on earth, some of them perhaps 
 actual ancestors, some imaginary personages 
 of the epic or legendary world, some merely 
 functional divinities of subordinate depart- 
 ments, like the hero of the ploughshare or the 
 tutelary hero of the potters. This growth 
 of polytheism had struck its roots so deeply 
 that Christianity, in spite of its monotheistic 
 ideal, was unable to eradicate it. The ancient 
 hero may sometimes be lurking under the 
 later disguise of the saint: the mediaeval 
 guild, like the Attic fraternity of potters, 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 77 
 
 had its sacred tutelary patron ; and it is 
 curious to observe that in the matter of 
 canonisation the Pope came to play exactly 
 the same part as the Delphic oracle had 
 played in the public consecration of the hero- 
 cult : the divine authorisation is given or 
 withheld by the vicar or agent of God. 
 The importance of this inherited tradition in 
 determining our religious estimate of historical 
 Christendom is of the highest : for whatever 
 may have been or may be the orthodox dogma 
 of the Church concerning the status of the 
 saint, such worship inevitably means poly- 
 theism from the point of view of the popular 
 faith : and we gather that in many outlying 
 communities of Christendom, as of the ancient 
 Greek world, the lower cult overshadows 
 the higher. And this is one of the most 
 salient and sure examples that we can quote 
 of the direct influence of the older religions 
 upon the later. This special influence is 
 mainly Greek, though the pagan North, 
 the Celtic and Lithuanian, and perhaps the 
 
78 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Teutonic peoples, have contributed much to 
 the tradition of saint-worship. 
 
 The illustrations given may suffice as a 
 sketch of the various applications of a com- 
 parative method to the problems that the 
 phenomena of Christianity offer to the student. 
 In the choice of illustration I may seem to 
 have ignored the strength of the Judaic 
 element in determining the evolution ; but I 
 have considered it unnecessary to touch on 
 this, as it has long been the familiar theme of 
 scientific theology. I have also ventured to 
 suggest that our own religious history should 
 be traced back to the period of our ancestral 
 paganism. And 1 would strongly recommend 
 to the student of comparative religion in 
 England a devoted attention to the world of 
 the Norse Saga : for this has been strangely 
 and fatally neglected by our English system 
 of culture, with grievous loss to our poetic 
 imagination, and to our knowledge of the 
 early law and the religious institutions and 
 temperament of our ancestors. Such a work 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 79 
 
 as Golther's Handbuch der germanischen 
 Mythologie shows us what a harvest may be 
 reaped in that field for the science of rehgion. 
 The subject in its own right claims our interest, 
 and certain phenomena in the old Teutonic 
 religion, its fatalistic ideas, its eschatologic 
 beliefs concerning a "day of judgment," 
 demand consideration in the light of more 
 advanced creeds. On the other hand it may 
 be wrong to attribute to it any direct influence 
 on the inner development of Northern Christi- 
 anity; for there may be reason for the view that, 
 when the new religion conquered the Teutonic 
 North, it found there in some sense a religious 
 vacuum, the old ritual and faith having lost its 
 vitality and hold; and certainly our ancestral 
 paganism made no such struggle to survive 
 as did the Greco- Roman. Nevertheless the 
 history of its institutions may be necessary, as 
 has been suggested already, to explain the 
 struggle between Church and State in Teu- 
 tonic lands ; and, further, it is only the pages 
 of the Norse Saga-book that can yield us 
 
8o The Evolution of Religion 
 
 an answer to the question whether we may 
 not have inherited from remote times a certain 
 average racial law of religious temperament 
 resulting in a characteristic attitude towards 
 matters of religion that may have determined 
 our religious history. If the answer were 
 affirmative and definite, the fact would have 
 a practical no less than a speculative import- 
 ance. At least we shall not know ourselves 
 completely in this or in other matters if we 
 continue to think that Greece and Rome and 
 Palestine are our sole intellectual and spiritual 
 ancestors ; in fact we may say that no account 
 of the history of Christianity in any European 
 State can be real and complete unless we can 
 get back to the pre-Christian past of that 
 community. 
 
 Yet, while making full allowance for the 
 influence of special ancestral traditions, those 
 who work on the lines which have been 
 indicated in the illustrations of method which 
 I have selected, will acquire the ever-growing 
 conviction that Hellas has dominated the 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 8i 
 
 creed as she has dominated the intellectual 
 
 history of Christendom ; that the new faith, in 
 
 spite of its fierce or contemptuous intolerance 
 
 of the past, was only able to transform but not 
 
 to abolish the Mediterranean tradition : that in 
 
 fact Sir Henry Maine's often quoted aphorism, 
 
 while by no means wholly true, was truer in 
 
 respect of religious history than he himself 
 
 was aware. 
 
 I have been speaking hitherto mainly on the 
 
 relations of anthropology to the comparative 
 
 study of religion. And it may be well now 
 
 to point out that anthropology, as I have tried 
 
 to define and distinguish its functions, though 
 
 an essential part, is only a part of the whole. 
 
 For we must know not only the past but the 
 
 present conditions, not only the embryology 
 
 but the perfected growth. And, again, we 
 
 compare religions not merely to test theories 
 
 of origin^ ancestry, and indebtedness, but also 
 
 to form the proper estimate of each one, and 
 
 to correct the one-sided judgment that is 
 
 always quick to pronounce this phenomenon 
 
 6 
 
82 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 or feature in any particular system as unique. 
 If the comparison reveals more divergences 
 than parallels, the result is no less important. 
 And the comparative method should be applied 
 not merely to ritual, liturgy, hieratic institu- 
 tions, legends, and dogmas, but also to the 
 varying phenomena and expressions of the 
 religious temperament in the various races. 
 Only the study of the latter can enable us to 
 test the living force of a faith, the degree with 
 which it possesses the national mind ; and 
 such a study is only possible when a nation 
 has produced a rich rehgious literature or 
 monuments of art embodying the public and 
 private worship and religious sentiment. We 
 know what we have gained by the discovery 
 of the sacred books of the East, by the 
 interpretation of the Babylonian inscriptions, 
 and from their revelation to us in the Vedic, 
 Iranian, and Mesopotamian cult-centres of a 
 fervour as deep and passionate as any that we 
 find in Hebraic or Christian writings. On the 
 other hand, when a religion has passed away, 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 83 
 
 as is the case with that of pre-Hellenic Rome, 
 without leaving any articulate expression of 
 its inner life, our knowledge of it can be 
 superficial only, confined to mere ritual, 
 fragments of liturgies, and the externals of 
 cult. 
 
 A dispassionate and uncontroversial study 
 of that which is at least one of the greatest 
 forces in human society cannot but be interest- 
 ing, and fruitful also for other branches of 
 inquiry, such as the history of early law and 
 morals, of which in many primitive communi- 
 ties the religion is the only record. It may 
 even solve certain problems concerning the 
 early migrations of races, as I have been con- 
 vinced by the investigation of various Greek 
 cults. In England the trained workers in 
 this field are still unfortunately few, perhaps 
 because a certain latent prejudice, born of 
 religious partisanship, is not yet extinct, and 
 may act somewhat as a deterrent. I have 
 avoided hitherto alluding to any of the 
 practical and controversial considerations 
 
84 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 which the methodical pursuit and propaga- 
 tion of this science may excite, though I am 
 well aware that its practical effects may be of 
 high importance ; but they are not immediately 
 our concern at present. There is, however, 
 one such consideration that it is pertinent to 
 touch on before concluding the survey of the 
 methods and functions of this branch of 
 historical inquiry, which deals much with 
 origins and with the evolution of higher 
 forms of religion from the lower. Dis- 
 coveries of origins may appear to affect the 
 validity of a creed or certain articles of creed. 
 That this is actually the case in regard to the 
 great problem with which the illustrations I 
 have put before you are mainly concerned, 
 namely, the genesis of Christianity, has been 
 recently frankly admitted by a leading digni- 
 tary of the Roman Church : who, moved by 
 a rumour of anthropological research, has 
 promptly turned it to the profit of his cause 
 by maintaining that the Roman ritual and 
 communion gains in force and validity by 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 85 
 
 the discovery that it has inherited and ab- 
 sorbed the religious thought and practice of 
 ancient Greece and Rome. On the other 
 hand, others may find the exposition of the 
 so-called pagan elements in the essence of 
 Christianity repugnant to their sentiment ; 
 and hence are inclined to accept the dictum 
 "that origin does not affect validity." I 
 imagine the facts of religious psychology make 
 somewhat against this aphorism. But it only 
 concerns the science of comparative religion, 
 because in the history of creeds validity has 
 been very often found to maintain itself mainly 
 by an appeal to origin ; and as our science, to 
 reiterate, is much concerned with origins, it 
 is indirectly concerned with those claims of 
 validity that support themselves by such an 
 appeal. 
 
 Another cause of the paucity of workers in 
 this field is the complexity and difficulty of 
 the subject, which can be handled success- 
 fully only by the advanced and mature student. 
 The pre-requisites of competence are an 
 
86 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 exact philological as well as an archaeological 
 training, with a view to the proper appreciation 
 both of texts and monuments ; secondly, a 
 general acquaintance with the problems and 
 history of philosophy, and especially of ethics, 
 and with the history of early social institutions 
 and law ; thirdly, a comprehensive study of 
 anthropology. To this must be added a 
 sympathetic and minute knowledge of at least 
 two of the great world-religions, whereby 
 alone a critical insight into the essential 
 and significant phenomena of the religious 
 experiences of our race can be obtained. 
 The comparative science of religion has 
 now become possible, thanks partly to the 
 labours of philological specialists in the 
 ancient languages of Europe and Asia, and 
 partly to the organisation of anthropological 
 travel. 
 
 Let me conclude with remarking that 
 subdivision of labour is imperative in this 
 field : and it is especially in Oxford that the 
 opportunities for the requisite preliminary 
 
Comparative Study of Religions 87 
 
 training are plentiful. It would be a gain for 
 more than science if we could see a group of 
 mature students organised here exploring the 
 various departments of this complex subject 
 in co-operation and with mutual assistance. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CON- 
 CEPTION OF PURITY : THEIR INFLUENCE ON 
 RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM 
 
 Among all the varied religious acts of man, 
 there is probably none that has been so widely 
 prevalent throughout the different races of 
 mankind as the ritual of purification, nor does 
 any idea seem to have possessed so strong a 
 legislative power in the various departments 
 of our life as the concept of purity. We can 
 trace it back to instincts that we appear to 
 share with the higher animals, and we can 
 track it upwards through the complex rites 
 of the higher religions. The record presents 
 us with a vast mass of phenomena which, as 
 far as I am able to discover, have not yet been 
 reduced to system or unified by any con- 
 
 88 
 
The Ritual of Purification 89 
 
 structive theory of evolution. In this lecture 
 I venture to attempt the systematisation of 
 the subject, first giving a brief summary 
 of the main facts which are well known to 
 the students of primitive anthropology and 
 comparative religion and which confront us 
 in nearly all the societies that have been 
 explored. 
 
 In the stage of our conscious life which we 
 may call, relatively to man's growth, primeval, 
 certain bodily acts and states and certain 
 material substances are regarded as unclean 
 and impure, likely to imprint a stain upon the 
 person. It is impossible here to attempt to 
 enumerate all the examples, and it is enough 
 to mention a few that are salient and typical. 
 The generative processes of life, the states and 
 activities of the male and especially the female 
 organism connected with them, the bodily 
 changes incident on puberty, are among the 
 most familiar phenomena with which the idea 
 of impurity in some peculiar sense has been 
 universally associated. A chief centre or 
 
go The Evolution of Religion 
 
 " nidus " of impurity is child-birth ; but still 
 more dangerously impure is its counterpart, 
 death and all the phenomena of death. In 
 respect of child-birth the idea is fading away 
 from our civilised consciousness ; but it has 
 left a deep deposit in our conscious or sub- 
 conscious self in regard to death. The 
 material substance that has been most 
 generally felt to be impure is blood ; the 
 curious feeling that the mere mention of the 
 word often excites in certain modern people is 
 a faint reflex of the savage mental state in 
 respect to the thing ; and the influence of this 
 disposition upon advanced society raises the 
 most interesting question in which com- 
 parative law, ethics, and religion are jointly 
 concerned, and which will be considered later. 
 To continue our enumeration we may not 
 find that the objects of the inanimate world out- 
 side ourselves are usually regarded by primi- 
 tive thought as in themselves impure, but all 
 or most of them are capable of catching the 
 infection from ourselves, from death or child- 
 
The Ritual of Purification 91 
 
 birth for instance : hence it may be necessary 
 to break or destroy or purify the utensils and 
 furniture of the house where a death or a birth 
 has occurred. At a somewhat more advanced 
 stage, certain food-stuiFs come to rank as 
 impure, and a compUcated code of " tapu " is 
 estabhshed for specialty sanctified persons. 
 Then we are confronted, but not apparently 
 in the most primitive period, with the distinc- 
 tion between pure and impure animals, which 
 also dictates certain rules and practices of 
 diet. 
 
 On the other hand certain natural things 
 may come to be regarded as specially 
 "pure," whether on the ground of a certain 
 intrinsic quality, because for instance they 
 are bright and lustrous, or from the fact that 
 they were habitually used for cathartic or 
 cleansing processes, as fire, water, odorous 
 wood or spices, or substances which emitted 
 a pungent odour such as sulphur. Such 
 objects " are used in ritual," says Jamblichus,^ 
 
 1 Be Mysteriis, 5, 23. 
 
92 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 " because they are specially full of the divine 
 nature." But the psychic phenomena and the 
 corresponding acts with which we are dealing 
 may be well suspected of descending from an 
 age at which no definite concept of a divine 
 nature had as yet arisen, an age not yet 
 perhaps even animistic, for in their crudest 
 form they do not seem necessarily to imply 
 any articulate system of belief in a world of 
 ghosts and spirits. And this reflection brings 
 us to the first question of importance, what 
 this primitive concept of purity and impurity 
 really is, and what were the sensations from 
 which it was evolved. Nothing is more 
 difficult to describe than simple sensations, 
 but it is possible to distinguish one from 
 another. And we must distinguish between 
 the modern feeling about cleanliness and the 
 primitive feelings which we are considering. 
 That " cleanliness is next to godliness " is an 
 aphorism suggested no doubt by sensations 
 fundamentally akin to these ; but many a savage 
 who is most particular about " impurity " 
 
The Ritual of Purification 93 
 
 cares little or nothing for what we call 
 " cleanliness." We consider that the cleansing 
 acts we ourselves perform are purely hygienic 
 or pleasure-giving, partly connected with the 
 instinct of self-preservation, and some of them 
 we find performed by other animals than man. 
 But the savage ritual of purification does 
 not by any means tend necessarily to self- 
 preservation, but at times may lead to self- 
 destruction, and no hygienic or utilitarian or 
 secular considerations will carry us far in ex- 
 plaining the cathartic code of Leviticus or the 
 Zend-Avesta, or Buddhism, or the impurity of 
 tabooed animals. These codes, while some 
 of their prescriptions may be such as modern 
 utilitarian ideas might dictate, are obviously 
 instinct with religious or superstitious beliefs, 
 and to explain the distinction between the 
 pure and the impure animals would need a 
 long excursus into primitive religion ; the 
 distinction is certainly not one between 
 wholesome and unwholesome, or pleasant and 
 unpleasant, meat. 
 
94 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 We may probably discover the nature of 
 the instinct underlying much of the cathartic 
 custom-law by taking as our typical example 
 the savage feeling about blood. Evidence 
 from almost every society in the world yields 
 proof that the stain of blood is the primary 
 impurity that needs a purifying ritual : hence 
 arose a body of rules that were a burden upon 
 domestic life, hence the elaborate purifications 
 of warriors after battle or of the individual 
 homicide. Such rules in no way remind us 
 of the natural desire to take a bath at the end 
 of a warm field-day : the savage purifications 
 after battle may last for weeks ; it is recorded 
 that a North American Indian tribe was ex- 
 tirpated because it needed a month to wipe 
 off the stain of a single conflict, while their 
 enemies needed only a week for that purpose 
 and therefore had the advantage of three 
 weeks' start in preparing for the next attack. 
 The sense - instinct that suggests all this is 
 probably some primeval terror or aversion 
 evoked by certain objects, as we see animals 
 
The Ritual of Purification 95 
 
 shrink with disgust at the sight or smell of 
 blood. The nerves of savage man are strangely- 
 excited by certain stimuli of touch, smell, 
 taste, sight : the specially exciting object is 
 something that we should call "mysterious," 
 " weird," or, still more expressively, " uncanny." 
 To the primitive mind nothing was more 
 uncanny than blood, and there are people 
 still who faint at the sight of it: for *'the 
 blood is the life," life and death are the 
 great primeval mysteries, and all the physical 
 substances that are associated with the inner 
 principle of either partake of this mysterious- 
 ness. For the savage, what is mysterious is 
 also dangerous and not to be lightly handled 
 or approached. Now, the man who incurs 
 such stain not merely is exposed to some un- 
 accountable danger himself, but he is able to 
 infect others by contagion ; he spreads a sort 
 of miasma, he is the conducting vehicle of a 
 dangerous spiritual electricity — mere meta- 
 phors, which, however, may enable us to catch 
 something of the primitive thought. Such a 
 
9 6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 man therefore must avoid communion with his 
 fellows for a time, must be " tabooed " ; and 
 will naturally endeavour to remove the " tapu " 
 or dangerous " miasma " by some magic rites of 
 cleansing or release. The kinsmen of the re- 
 cently dead in all primitive societies are impure, 
 because they have come into contact with death, 
 the chief source of all impurity ; therefore they 
 must be isolated, and, until they are purified, 
 must wear some badge or external mark — 
 which we call " mourning " — to warn others 
 against approaching them. The "tapu" still 
 remains in civilised communities ; we abstain 
 from intruding on the bereaved family, though 
 we give a different motive for our keeping 
 aloof. It so often happens that in such 
 matters we act as the savage acts ; but we 
 must abandon for a time our normal way of 
 looking at things in order to imagine his. 
 To us a corpse may be an object of aversion, 
 and it is in some degree contagious ; but our 
 view of it, when we are cool, is secular and 
 scientific : while the primitive aspect of it is 
 
The Ritual of Purification 97 
 
 supranormal and mystic, and the contagion is 
 something spiritual and incalculably danger- 
 ous. In the Zend-Avesta we find an inter- 
 esting special application of this idea: the 
 defiling power of the dead varies directly 
 according to the sanctity or rank of the 
 deceased ; thus it is greatest in the corpse of 
 the priest, somewhat less in that of a warrior, 
 and least in that of the husbandman : ^ 
 corruptio optimi pessima: the most sacred 
 person can defile the most, because he is 
 charged with the most mysterious and there- 
 fore dangerous potency. The Latin term 
 "sacer" has the double meaning of "holy" 
 and "accursed": from the same Greek root, 
 ay, spring a word connoting holiness and a 
 word meaning " pollution." Primeval thought 
 or feeling holds together in a vague unity ideas 
 that afterwards differentiate themselves and 
 even become antithetical. The same power 
 of radiating dangerous influence, supposed 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv., Zend-Avesta, pt. i. 
 pp. 58-59. 
 
 7 
 
98 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 to attach to the holy man, the polluted man 
 and the polluting thing, brought them 
 originally under the same dim conception. 
 
 It would not repay us here to endeavour to 
 trace out and explain all the minutige of this 
 superstition : the long lists of pure and impure 
 things that one might compile do not disclose 
 any single regulative idea, and nothing is more 
 baffling than the eccentricities of prejudice and 
 terror. But this superstition often proceeds 
 with a logic of its own : as a corpse is most un- 
 clean, and all who touch it are impure, there- 
 fore dogs and wolves and carrion birds are 
 impure and must not be eaten : and anything 
 that however distantly reminds us of danger 
 and death, such as quarrelsome acts and 
 words, may come to be rigidly prohibited 
 during a ritual of purification. As blood is 
 primevally impure, therefore any substance 
 analogous to it or of the same colour might 
 be regarded as ill-omened, such as beans or 
 pomegranates. The same kind of sensational 
 aversion will cause malodorous substances to 
 
The Ritual of Purification 99 
 
 be regarded usually as unclean ; therefore food 
 of an evil savour, or such as leaves unpleasant 
 traces in the person, will often be tabooed by 
 certain strict sects. ^ There is also a certain 
 common-sense discoverable in the distinction 
 between substances on the ground of their 
 greater or less susceptibility to spiritual con- 
 tagion : earthen pots, for instance, have been 
 often considered more easily infected than 
 metal, and need longer purification, liquid 
 substances more dangerous conductors than 
 dry. " Should the dry mingle with the dry," 
 says Ahura Mazda in a conversation with 
 Zarathustra, " how soon all this material 
 earth of mine would be only one Peshotanu," 
 which is as much as to say that the earth 
 would become a charnel-house of impurity. 
 And Darmesteter ^ remarks, in commenting on 
 this verse, " Nowadays in Persia, the Jews are 
 
 1 E.g. onions, pease-soup, cheese : I-Tsing, Records of 
 the Buddhist Religion , p. 138, "onions have a foul smell and 
 are impure " : cf. list of impure substances in ritual inscrip- 
 tion of Rhodes, C.I.G. Ins. Mar. jEg. i. No. 789. 
 
 2 Sacred Books of the East, Zend-Avesta, pt. i. p. 105. 
 
loo The Evolution of Religion 
 
 not allowed to go out of their house on a 
 rainy day, lest the religious impurity conducted 
 through the rain should pass from the Jew to 
 the Mussalman." We have here a view of 
 contagion that seems to agree with that of 
 modern science, only the latter is physical, 
 the former mystic or spiritual. Again, the 
 choice of substances used for purification was 
 not dictated by the modern idea of a cleansing 
 quality, but by a certain superstitious logic 
 which we can sometimes detect. If liquid 
 substances have a natural affinity for contagion, 
 then if we take them while they are uninfected 
 and use them for lustration, they will easily 
 absorb the impurities of our own persons and 
 rid us of them ; therefore the modern savage 
 or the ancient Greek might think it desirable 
 to daub himself with clay or mud to wash 
 away his taint : and from this example we see 
 how distinct these primeval lustral processes 
 are from the modern hygienic washing, to 
 which nevertheless they often bear a close 
 resemblance. By a similar reasoning we 
 
The Ritual of Purification loi 
 
 may explain an inconsistency that occasion- 
 ally appears in the cathartic ritual ; a sub- 
 stance impure as food might be used for 
 purposes of lustration : for instance, we find 
 garlic used as a cathartic in the worship of 
 the Phrygian god Men at Athens.^ Fire, the 
 universal purifier, may have been accredited 
 with this power by right of its own nature, 
 but partly in all probability because it was be- 
 lieved to dry up miasma and damp infection.^ 
 
 In the Zend-Avesta code, after drying for a 
 whole year under the light of the sun, the 
 corpse at last becomes pure ; for by the same 
 natural instinct that caused the aversion to 
 blood, the sun's light comes to be regarded as 
 the purest thing in the world : meat cooked by 
 its warmth is more sanctified than fire-cooked 
 meat ; and certain acts and states of man 
 have a greater defilement in the sun's face. 
 
 So far I have been trying to present the 
 
 1 C.I.A., 3, 73. 
 
 2 The purifying power that ashes possess in certain 
 ritual may be derivative from fire. 
 
I02 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 phenomena without reference to any definite 
 rehgious belief, to express them as far as 
 possible in terms of simple sensation ; for, as 
 was said at the beginning of the discussion, it 
 is possible that they have descended from a 
 pre-religious age. We may now ask how the 
 baneful influence of the impure thing in this 
 primeval stage of thought was supposed to 
 work, unassisted by any spiritual agency such 
 as spirit or god. We may suppose that it 
 produced its results indirectly by depressing 
 the vital energies of the man who was the 
 victim of the superstition : the savage might 
 believe that it worked directly, by some 
 mysterious law of luck, paralysing a man's 
 force and spoiling his hunting and fighting. 
 This idea of a spontaneous mesmeric power 
 of evil that certain things possess seems to 
 glimmer through the verse in the Zend- 
 Avesta. " Here am I," says an unlucky 
 man to those whom he meets, ** one who has 
 touched the corpse of a man and who is 
 powerless in mind, powerless in tongue. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 103 
 
 powerless in hand ; do make me clean." ^ 
 Is it an illusion to believe that we have 
 here penetrated to the psychological root of 
 the whole matter? And here there is no 
 direct reference to spirit or god. 
 
 But at an early period such reference was 
 made, and it was then that this cathartic ritual 
 really started on a momentous career. When 
 the doctrine of animism became firmly estab- 
 lished, it attracted the ritual and the ideas 
 associated with it, and the animistic imprint 
 upon them can still be traced even in the 
 higher religions. A dangerous spirit was sup- 
 posed to abide in the impure thing and to be 
 evoked by the unclean act ; the potency which 
 in the primeval stage of feeling had been per- 
 haps regarded merely as something mysteriously 
 baneful and " uncanny," now becomes personal 
 and intelligible and can be dealt with and 
 exorcised by certain efficacious rules. The 
 stain of blood on the homicide attracts the 
 ghost of the slain to pursue him, certain foods 
 1 Op, cit., pt. i. p. 120. 
 
I04 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 are impure because evil spirits attach to them, 
 disease is specially their work, and a veritable 
 pandemonium gathers around the corpse, 
 the woman in child-birth, and the new-born 
 child. Illustrations showing how this de- 
 moniac faith has pervaded the thought of the 
 world are broadcast in the records of primi- 
 tive man as well as in the higher literature of 
 our race, the Vedic and Iranian sacred books, 
 the New Testament, the Pythagorean, Platonic, 
 and Neoplatonic texts. In the view of the 
 Zend-Avesta, which regards the whole uni- 
 verse as an overcharged battery of spiritual 
 electricity, a single careless act of accidental 
 uncleanliness is a cosmic catastrophe : legions 
 of '* drugs " or devils start up at once into exist- 
 ence to destroy the world of righteousness.^ 
 Plato, though on the whole he preserves his 
 sanity in the matter, is under the dominion 
 of similar ideas, and Neoplatonism reverts 
 back to the savage view, believing that the 
 chief aim of ayveiai, or purifications, was to 
 
 1 E.g. op. dUy pp. 201, 204. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 105 
 
 drive the evil spirits out of certain kinds 
 of food/ 
 
 The deep animistic colouring that the con- 
 ception we are analysing came at a very 
 early time to acquire may be responsible for a 
 very important event in the history of religion : 
 the evolution, namely, of the dualistic principle, 
 the idea of the antagonism between good and 
 evil spirits, the germ of which we can already 
 detect in the animistic stage which may have 
 preceded the faith in high personal gods. If 
 the impure things and acts are impregnated 
 with evil spirits, it is natural to suppose 
 that the pure are the abode of the good, and 
 these are contrary the one to the other. It 
 may have required a very long period for a 
 clear belief in the good spirit to crystallise ; for 
 to the very primitive mind all spirits are 
 mysteriously dangerous, even the ghosts of 
 one's dearest kinsmen. Still, the ancestral 
 spirits make on the whole for righteousness, 
 and can be given the position of guardians of 
 
 ^ E.g. Porphjny in Euseb., Prcep. Evang., 4, 22. 
 
io6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 the purification code. Thus the New Cale- 
 donians avert the wrath of the ghosts of their 
 ancestors by washing, fasting, and chastity : ^ 
 the ancient Greek might pray or sacrifice to 
 a vague animistic company of Oeol ^AnoTpo- 
 iraioL or Mei\c;)(tot, regarded perhaps as ghosts 
 of the lower world, to avert the impure omen 
 or to wash off the taint of blood. 
 
 Finally, the conception of purity comes under 
 the dominion of the higher faith in a personal 
 god. In Greece, Apollo and Zeus attach to 
 themselves the ritual and the associated ideas ; 
 in Persia the whole complex code of purity 
 is established by Ahura Mazda ; in Israel by 
 Jahve, who enforces the minutest details of the 
 law with insistence on the purity of God.^ 
 In Babylonian as in Vedic religion, the fire- 
 god is pre-eminently the purifier, a name 
 which is attached particularly to Agni, and we 
 find in the Babylonian liturgical texts the 
 
 1 Steinmetz, Die Entwickelung der Strafe, vol. ii. p. 355. 
 
 2 Cf. "Ye shall be holy, for I am holy," Lev. xi. 44 
 Deuteron. xxiii. 12. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 107 
 
 prayer,^ "May the torch of the shining fire- 
 god cleanse me." Nor does Buddhism appear 
 to differ from Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta in 
 respect of the complications of its cathartic 
 rules and the importance it attached to them. 
 The Buddhist missionary, I-Tsing, exhorts the 
 faithful to observe the elaborate prescriptions 
 of the Buddha, " because," as he naively puts it, 
 " gods and spirits get disgusted with our ways 
 of wearing garments and eating food." With 
 this abundance of testimony before us, we are 
 all the more surprised to find that very little 
 is forthcoming from the records of our own 
 ancestral paganism. We can scarcely believe 
 that our Teutonic ancestors were destitute of 
 the idea of lustration, and that their cleanliness 
 and chastity, attested by the Roman writers 
 and still more clearly by their own sagas, were 
 virtues of purely secular origin. And in fact 
 we have certain records of Teutonic ritual that 
 seem to point to cathartic ideas : " After the 
 goddess Nerthus had gone on her annual 
 
 ^ Jastrow, op. cii., p. 500. 
 
io8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 procession round the villages," as Tacitus in- 
 forms us,^ " her chariot and garments and her 
 own person were solemnly washed in the 
 waters of a sacred lake, as if the holy divinity 
 had been polluted by her intercourse with men." 
 It is also possible that the custom still pre- 
 valent in the Teutonic populations of Europe, 
 of leaping over the bonfire on midsummer's 
 eve, is the relic of a ceremony of fire-lustration 
 performed before the beginning of harvest.^ 
 Doubtless also they had the same rules as 
 those prevailing in nearly all communities, 
 whether civilised or uncivilised, concerning the 
 purity of temples ; for we have record of an 
 Icelandic law that the " Holy Place of Peace " 
 was not to be defiled by blood or any human 
 uncleanness.^ Still, though other evidence 
 pointing in the same direction might be 
 gathered, it seems clear that the burden of 
 the cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on 
 the consciences of our fathers when the dawn 
 
 ^ Germania, c. 40. ^ Golther, op. cit. p. 570. 
 
 3 Golther, op. cit. p. 607. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 109 
 
 of their history begins. I am not aware of 
 any indication, for instance, that they regarded 
 formal lustration after bloodshed to be obliga- 
 tory or desirable. And their comparative 
 freedom in regard to such ceremonies is a fact 
 of great importance with which we must 
 reckon in our estimate of our later spiritual 
 history. We may at the same time believe, 
 on general grounds, that they also had at some 
 remoter epoch passed through a period of 
 bondage to the same ideas and the same 
 formalities that we find so generally prevalent 
 in other kindred and alien races. 
 
 The more interesting side of the inquiry 
 now presents itself, the question about the 
 influence that these cathartic ideas may have 
 exercised upon religion, morality, and law. 
 We may endeavour, for the sake of systematis- 
 ation, to maintain this tripartite classification, 
 although we find it becoming more and more 
 illusory the further our investigation travels 
 back to the earlier social life of man. 
 
 But before attempting to survey the special 
 
no The Evolution of Religion 
 
 facts that present themselves within these 
 three departments, it is well to note one 
 phenomenon that concerns religion and 
 morality in equal measure, and is of perhaps 
 greater importance than all others in the 
 varied process of the evolution of the 
 cathartic idea. We have mainly been 
 dealing so far with facts that seem to belong 
 to the most primitive deposit of human 
 consciousness and not properly to be ethical 
 in the modern sense at all : the stain of blood, 
 even incurred by ruthless murder, the stain 
 of childbirth and the sexual processes, the 
 contagion of the corpse, are all for the same 
 reason "suspect" to primitive man because 
 they involve vague and mysterious danger, 
 not because they are associated with the 
 concept of sin. Nor does this latter concept 
 necessarily enter in, even when a more articu- 
 late animism has taken possession of the 
 superstition, and the impurity means the 
 presence of an evil spirit : the leper, the man 
 who has come into contact with the dead. 
 
The Ritual of Purification iii 
 
 the blood-stained murderer, are all regarded 
 as suffering from the same trouble, though 
 in greater or lesser degree. The idea of 
 purity and impurity, in fact, whether cor- 
 poreal and external or whether spiritual in 
 the sense of its association with the world 
 of spirits, is still non-ethical, and we must 
 not apply our moral standards to it until 
 a later stage. It arrives at this stage and 
 at its higher significance for morality when 
 it has evolved the conception of a pure 
 heart, a pure soul. And that this latter, 
 which is one of the most pregnant of the 
 concepts of developed ethics, was actually 
 evolved from the primitive ritualistic and 
 demoniac superstition can, I believe, be 
 proved by the evidence, and accords with a 
 well-known psychologic law of early thought. 
 We deceive ourselves if we are content 
 to say that terms such as "pure heart," 
 " pure soul " are mere metaphors. The theory 
 of metaphors is a refuge for those who do 
 not understand, or who do not wish to under- 
 
112 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 stand, religious history, and much might be 
 said of the far-reaching effects of this fallacy 
 of interpretation. The soul was not called 
 "i/)t>X^" or "animus" or "spiritus" by mere 
 metaphor: nor was the phrase "white liver" 
 a metaphor for the people who first applied 
 it to the coward. Primitive man may be 
 the victim of false analogy and association 
 of ideas, but these mental processes mean 
 for him something other than metaphor 
 means for us. It is not by way of metaphor 
 that the modern Basuto speaks of his heart 
 "being black and dirty," that is, "impure" 
 or "sad," the same word being used for 
 corporeal impurity, sadness, and sin.^ The 
 colour of the impure act or bodily state is, 
 so to speak, transferred inwards: if the act 
 involves a physical stain, then, as things, 
 
 1 Casalis, Les Bassoutos, p. 269 •' among the ZuluSj sin 
 and dirt are spoken of as the same, — " You have dirt, you 
 are dirty " = '' You have done wrong," LesUe, Among the 
 Zuliis, p. 1 70. (These and other references to the evidence 
 from savage society I owe to the kindness of my friend 
 Mr R. Marett.) 
 
The Ritual of Purification 113 
 
 words, and thoughts are so closely correlated 
 in early psychology, the term ** unclean word," 
 "unclean thought" expresses a literal belief: 
 gradually, as the concept of mind and soul 
 becomes more and more immaterial, we 
 may reach the spiritual concept of mental 
 purity which is of value for modern ethics. 
 The example quoted above reveals the Basuto 
 at the half-way point in this evolution: and 
 a certain North- American Indian tribe, whose 
 customs have been recorded by Miss Alice 
 Fletcher, appears to have reached the same 
 mental stage ; in her paper called the " Shadow 
 of a Ghost Lodge," ^ she mentions that the 
 kinsmen who sit together isolated from others 
 and mourning the dead for a period must 
 rigidly abstain from any tales of fighting or 
 "bad words," they must forget old injuries 
 and cancel all grudges. The mental process 
 that leads to this excellent tapu may be 
 stated thus : the mourners are in a condition 
 of deep impurity which they are endeavouring 
 
 1 P. 301. 
 
114 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 to cleanse away ; quarrelling, vindictive speech, 
 and memories would intensify the impurity, 
 because all these are associated with blood- 
 shed and death. This analogy may serve 
 to explain the curious rule prevailing at 
 Athens that anyone who laid a suppliant- 
 bough on the altar in the Eleusinion during 
 the period of the Eleusinian Mysteries was 
 liable to the penalty of death or a heavy fine.^ 
 I would suggest that the underlying thought 
 is the same: the laying the suppliant-bough 
 indicated a grievance and was a legally quarrel- 
 some act, and therefore a violation of the purity 
 of the solemn season. It was probably a 
 similar chain of reasoning that induced the 
 Greeks and other races of the higher religion 
 to enforce silence before and during the 
 sacrifice, not merely in order that the priest 
 should not be disturbed by the chatter of 
 the crowd ; for the word used for this sacred 
 silence is ev^-qy^ia, "auspicious speech": it is 
 obvious that the original motive of the rule 
 
 1 Andoc, De Myst., 110. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 115 
 
 was to guard against the utterance of any 
 impure word that might produce an ill-omened 
 condition of mind in the congregation. 
 
 Of this development of the idea of spiritual 
 from that of ritualistic purity, the language 
 of certain of the higher races affords the 
 same indication as we find in the Basuto 
 phrase : the Latin " purus " and the Greek 
 KaOapos and (f)OL/Bos themselves have an original 
 material or physical significance; the blood 
 that is shed and the unburied corpse emit a 
 " miasma," a defiling atmosphere charged with 
 dangerous spirits, and the same word /xiao-/u,a 
 comes to denote a spiritual corruption of the 
 soul: touching a corpse is called "sin" in 
 the Zend-Avesta;^ and it is significant that 
 the same word which is used to express the 
 material idea of impurity in the Old Testament 
 in the earlier books of the Law is employed 
 in the later and more advanced ethical 
 vocabulary of the Bible for a real sin against 
 God as understood in the modern sense. 
 1 Op. cU,, p. 102. 
 
ii6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Again, we have other evidence besides the 
 Hnguistic that the earliest conception of sin 
 which we can call spiritual was still half- 
 materialistic, and was still closely allied to 
 that of bodily impurity. In the theory of 
 earlier ritual, the sin can be washed away 
 like a physical taint, the atonement takes the 
 form of certain lustrations, and repentance 
 is not considered necessary as a moral con- 
 dition of release. And to the same middle 
 stage of development belongs the process 
 known as the transference of sin, whereby 
 the sin can be extracted as if it were a 
 substance from the person of the sinner and 
 transferred into another man or animal or 
 even an inanimate object. Think of sin as 
 an inner vapour or exhalation and the idea of 
 quasi-mechanical transference is intelligible.^ 
 It no doubt belongs to a comparatively early 
 
 ^ The same kind of ceremonious logic inspires the 
 practice of the Damaras^ who, when making peace with 
 an alien tribe, go into a river with their foes and throw 
 water into their faces to wash away enmity. — Sir J. E. 
 Alexander, Expedition and Discoveries^ vol. ii. p. 171. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 117 
 
 period of savage religion. Among the Atkans, 
 for instance,^ we hear of such a release as this : 
 the sin, which in this case was a gross violation 
 of a natural law of the sex-instinct, was made 
 to enter into certain weeds which were worn 
 about the person, and then, under a clear sun 
 were carefully thrown away, the sun himself 
 being called to witness the act of transference. 
 In the ancient Peruvian Church, the shaking 
 off of evils was a great public festival : bands 
 of warriors marched forth crying out, "Go 
 forth, all evils," and then bathed in the river, 
 while the people shook out their clothes from 
 the doors.^ A similar record speaks of the 
 Inca praying to the river-god to bear away 
 his sins, which he had confessed in the sight 
 of the sun. And during the Peruvian puri- 
 fication a similar rule prevailed to that which 
 was noticed above, that all abusive language 
 and strife was to be avoided. Or again, the 
 
 1 VeniaminofF ap. PetrofF, Alaska^ p. 158. 
 
 2 Molina, Fables and Rites of the Yticos (Hakluyt 
 Society), p. 22, 
 
ii8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 belief that the sin is an evil spirit that can be in- 
 duced to find another living-lodgment, suggests 
 the scapegoat, a familiar figure in Leviticus and 
 in Greek ritual, the animal who bears away 
 with it into the wilderness the sins of the 
 people, or is put to death with the uttered 
 prayer that into it may enter all the evils 
 of the community. The Judaic record tells 
 us that Aaron "confessed over him all the 
 iniquities of the children of Israel . . . putting 
 them on the head of the goat"; after this, 
 as the animal was in a high degree of sin- 
 infection, both Aaron and the man who led it 
 away into the wilderness must wash and change 
 their clothes.^ The Egyptian rite described by 
 Herodotus,^ shows us the same idea differently 
 worked out : the head of the animal is severed 
 with the imprecation that it may bear the evils 
 of the community, and is then either thrown 
 into the river so that the stream may carry 
 them away, or is sold to the Hellenes wherever 
 there happens to be a Hellenic market : Hero- 
 
 1 Lev. xvii. 2 2, 39. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 1 1 g 
 
 dotus does not tell us the reason of this, which, 
 however, is easily divined : the Hellene is the 
 stranger who, as the Egyptians hoped, might 
 eat the infected flesh and thereby absorb into 
 his alien person the people's sins ; for the eating 
 of other people's sins is a recognised primitive 
 process of transference.^ What is unique in 
 the Egyptian management of the ceremony 
 is the skilful combination of religion and trade. 
 Finally, the ritual may demand a human 
 scapegoat, who will fulfil exactly the same 
 function as the animal. He may be put to 
 death, or driven over the border, carrying 
 away the national sins : he may be very vile, 
 and therefore a fitting receptacle for sin, like 
 the " KaOapfia,'' the " purifying man " in the 
 Attic festival of the Thargelia, who was led 
 through the streets, whipped with rods, and 
 at one time burnt ; or the slave at Marseilles,^ 
 who was fed up and reverentially treated for 
 
 ^ The cathartic process of transference applied to plague 
 as well as actual sin, e.g. Aristotle, Frag., 454, transference 
 of disease into a raven. 
 
 2 Serv., jEn. 3, 57. 
 
120 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 a year, and then was led forth in solemn 
 procession through the streets and expelled 
 from the city, praying that on him might 
 fall all the evils of the community:^ or the 
 scapegoat-man may be exceptionally holy, 
 being the better able, through his very holi- 
 ness, to absorb harmlessly and dissipate the 
 evils of others. Thus even the miserable 
 victim of the Thargelia was mysteriously in- 
 vested with a certain sacred character, and 
 seems once to have been regarded in a certain 
 degree as the counterpart of the divinity.^ 
 
 Much of this ritual of sin-transference is 
 altogether independent of the higher gods ; 
 it is worked by mesmeric or mimetic or 
 mechanical magic. At a later period it is 
 harmonised with their service and accom- 
 panied with prayer ; and at this stage we note 
 a curious ritualistic phenomenon. Blood, the 
 primeval source of impurity, becomes itself 
 
 ^ In modern India a criminal and his wife sometimes 
 undertake to transfer into their own persons the sins of the 
 Rajah and the Rani : Anthrop. Journ., 19OI, p. 302. 
 
 2 Fide chapter on Apollo Ritual, Cults, vol. iv. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 121 
 
 a purifier, not by the law similia similibus 
 curantur, but owing to the growing power of 
 the sacrificial concept. " The blood of bulls 
 and goats can wash away sins," because the 
 animal that has been consecrated by contact 
 with the altar becomes charged with a divine 
 potency, and its sacred blood, poured over the 
 impure man, absorbs and disperses his impurity. 
 Illustrations are easily gathered from Hellenic 
 ritual,^ which frequently employed the blood 
 of swine for cathartic purposes. On an early 
 vase-painting we see the hero Theseus seated 
 on the altar of God the Atoner with pig's 
 blood running down his body to cleanse him 
 from the slaughter of the brigands.^ In the 
 Judaic rule the blood of the red heifer was 
 
 1 Cf. Blood-purification in Vedic ritual, Hillebrandt, 
 Vedische Opfer und Zauber, p. 179 (evil spirits driven away 
 by a reed dipped in blood of the sacrifice, p. 1 76) : in the 
 Lupercalia at Rome the foreheads of youths were smeared 
 with the blood of the sacrificed goat and dog and then 
 wiped with wool dipped in milk, probably a piacular 
 ceremony ; vide W. Fowler, The Roman Festivals j p. 311. 
 
 2 Cf. Apollon. Rhod., 4, 478, for pig's blood in purifica- 
 tion from murder. 
 
122 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 first sprinkled by the priest before the 
 tabernacle of the congregation seven times, 
 but for special purposes of lustration the 
 " water of separation " was used, that is, water 
 made holy by being mingled with the ashes of 
 the heifer that had been burnt. We have a 
 curious illustration of the double character of 
 this water of separation : being consecrated 
 and holy, it was powerful to cleanse away stain 
 and sin : yet its own impure composition was 
 not wholly forgotten, for he who sprinkled the 
 water or touched it was unclean till evening.^ 
 
 These ideas belong to very old-world thought, 
 yet their reflex abides with us still in the heart 
 of a spiritual creed ; for their association is 
 clear with the Christian conception of the 
 transference of sin and of the divine victim that 
 takes upon himself the sins of the people. 
 
 As far as we have examined it as yet, the 
 
 concept of a " pure heart " is not necessarily 
 
 wholly ethical ; it is often coexistent with 
 
 the ideas of sin that do not clearly recognise 
 
 1 Numbers c. 19. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 123 
 
 moral responsibility or the essential differ- 
 ence between deliberate wrong-doing and 
 the ritualistic or accidental or involuntary sin. 
 In the middle stage of ethical - religious 
 growth, an innocent (Edipus may yet be 
 regarded as ttol? avayvo<i, impure body and 
 soul. The final point is reached when it is 
 reahsed that the blood of bulls and goats 
 cannot wash away sin, that nothing external 
 can defile the heart or soul, but only evil 
 thoughts and evil will. This purged and 
 ideahsed concept will then in the progressive 
 religions revolt against its own parentage, and 
 will prompt the eternal antagonism of the 
 prophet against the ritual priest, of the Christ 
 against the Pharisee. 
 
 It would be interesting to trace the points 
 of this long development, which has here been 
 hastily sketched, among the higher races of 
 the old world ; but a brief and partial indi- 
 cation of its history among some of them 
 must here suffice. We are all acquainted with 
 the final evolution of the idea of purity in 
 
124 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Judaic history ; but the phenomena of its 
 embryonic stages, as revealed in the ritual 
 books of the Old Testament, may not be so 
 familiar. They present the Hebrew mind in 
 regard to this particular as on the same level 
 with the Zarathustrian Persian, the Vedic 
 Indian, and the Hellene of the seventh century. 
 Purity is the strictest law of Jahve, the pure 
 god, who intimates that he would punish 
 Aaron with death if he heedlessly entered the 
 holy place without purification.^ But the 
 processes by which it is secured are mechani- 
 cal, quasi-magical, and the concept itself 
 appears more materialistic than spiritual, rit- 
 ualistic rather than ethical in our sense: the 
 processes of cleansing are such as the use of 
 incense, lustrations with blood, water, and even 
 fire, cathartic methods which are almost uni- 
 versal : we hear nothing of prayer or repent- 
 ance. Blood is the chief impurity, whether 
 shed deliberately, accidentally, or righteously. 
 The warriors after battle must be purified 
 1 Levit. xvi. 2. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 125 
 
 before they enter the camp.^ Murder has 
 indeed become a tribal offence, and this marks 
 a great advance in the social development of 
 human society : no satisfaction such as the 
 were-gilt was allowed for murder ; but it is 
 regarded as a sin rather than a crime, and its 
 sinfulness is the uncleanness of the land on 
 which the blood is shed. "Blood defileth 
 the land," and " I the Lord dwell among the 
 children of Israel." ^ Even the accidental homi- 
 cide must fly to the city of refuge, not merely 
 to escape the avenger of blood, who represents 
 the old family right of the blood-feud, but to 
 rid the land of the impurity of his presence. 
 Nor must he return till the death of the high 
 priest.^ This latter restriction has not yet 
 been explained, so far as I am aware. I 
 venture the explanation that the high priest 
 is regarded here as the temporary representa- 
 tive of Jahve, and as infected with the impurity 
 that cleaves to the outraged god ; but when 
 
 1 Numbers xxxi. 19. ^ Numbers xxxv. 
 
 3 Numbers xxxv. 25. 
 
126 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 he dies, the stain that has been put upon the 
 god fades away and his wrath ceases. Finally, 
 we may note the rule that when the murderer 
 could not be discovered, the nearest city must 
 offer cathartic sacrifices, " and thy sin " — that 
 is, the ritualistic sin of having an impure spot 
 of ground in one's territory — "shall then be 
 forgiven thee." ^ In fact the Judaic law con- 
 cerning homicide as shown in these books, 
 though it has advanced far beyond savagery, 
 and has even attained to the modern view 
 that manslaying concerns the whole community, 
 is yet barbaric on the whole. The concept of 
 purity aided development up to a certain point 
 and then probably retarded it. On the other 
 hand, in the department of sexual morality its 
 operation was most powerful for good ; it con- 
 secrated and safeguarded the fundamental laws 
 if it did not actually construct or evoke them ; 
 but, as we should expect, the sexual purity of 
 the Hebrew code remains a religious law and 
 does not pass into the domain of secular ethic. 
 
 1 Deuteron. xxi. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 127 
 
 Another religion that is of equal value for 
 our present purpose is the Zarathustrian. 
 Trusting as far as we may the translation and 
 interpretation of its sacred books, we may 
 gather the impression from the study of them 
 that no reUgion on the earth has ever been 
 under such bondage to the cathartic ideal as 
 this one ; nor does it appear very profitable at 
 first sight to put the question here of the 
 influence of the idea of purity on religion, law, 
 and morals, for the idea seems all-absorbing 
 and these three to have no independent exist- 
 ence apart from it. It creates for the Mazdean 
 believer a morality of its own, with which the 
 secular systems have little or nothing to do. 
 " Oh, maker of the world," asks Zarathustra 
 of Ahura Mazda, " can he be clean again who 
 has eaten of the carcase of a dog or the corpse 
 of a man ? " The deity answers — " He cannot, 
 oh holy Zarathustra."^ Nor is there any 
 purification possible for the unforgivable sin 
 of walking about after fifteen years of age were 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. part i. p. 81. 
 
128 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 reached without a girdle or a proper shirt: 
 "such a one goes henceforth with power to 
 destroy the world of righteousness." ^ On the 
 other hand, the highest act of righteousness 
 which brings forgiveness of all sins to him who 
 performs it is the pulling down of a dakhma, 
 the scaffold on which the corpses were hung 
 according to the Persian system of burial, 
 after it had served its purpose ; for naturally 
 it was a focus of impurity, and demons con- 
 gregated there in swarms.^ And the Persian 
 concept of purity makes its own law. As the 
 ritual of cleansing is the prime article of the 
 Zarathustrian code, so the sacrilegious cleanser, 
 that is, the amateur who tried to purify another 
 without knowledge of the Mazdean ceremonies, 
 brought sterility upon the land and was 
 punished with death.^ And death was the 
 penalty for him who dared to carry a corpse 
 alone, for the dead body spread around the 
 contagion of a myriad " drugs " or demons, 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. part i. p. 204. 
 2/6. p. 88. 3/6. p. 136. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 129 
 
 and two men at least must set hand to it to 
 prevent an intolerable epidemic of impurity/ 
 Legislation in the Zend-Avesta is merciless 
 beyond any recorded code ; we must suppose 
 that it was mainly idle thunder, or Persia 
 would have been depopulated. The whole 
 universe of Mazdeism is permeated with these 
 cathartic ideas, and a secular or physical view 
 of things scarcely glimmers through : the 
 ritual order dominated what we call the 
 material as well as the spiritual world ; the 
 sun, moon, and stars are purified by the Word. 
 On this basis arose a religion of great exalta- 
 tion and a religious fervour of rare intensity : 
 and the sacred books of Persia are of great 
 value for the present inquiry, for they show 
 us more clearly than any other record the 
 spiritual concept of the pure heart emerging 
 from the ritualistic idea ; while it is often 
 hard in any particular text to distinguish 
 between the lower and the higher significance. 
 When God speaks to the prophet thus — 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. p. 28. 
 
 9 
 
130 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 " Purity is for man, next to life, the highest 
 good : that purity, O Zarathustra, that is in 
 the rehgion of Mazda for him who cleanses 
 himself with good thoughts, words, and 
 deeds," ^ we believe we have reached a high 
 ethical conception ; but the phrase is supposed 
 by Darmesteter to refer to him who cleanses 
 himself according to the prescriptions of the 
 law. Yet in their cathartic code were the 
 germs of an advanced morality, and truthful- 
 ness and chastity were fostered by it.^ The 
 lustrations were partly of the primitive type, 
 taken over, as usual, from a lower stratum of 
 religion ; their most interesting features are the 
 cleansing words that accompanied them, which 
 were not usually prayers but spells, formulas 
 of magic potency, but drawn from a high 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv. p. 56; cf. p. 141. 
 
 2 The virtue of chastity is religious rather than ethical ; 
 the courtesan is reprobated because she mingles the seed 
 of believers and unbelievers alike, ih. p. 205. Yet the 
 Zarathustrian system escaped the extravagant exaltation 
 of mere virginity that is found in early Christian literature : 
 '' the man who has a wife is far above him who lives in 
 continence " (Fargard^ iv.-iii. 6, p. 46). 
 
The Ritual of Purification 131 
 
 religion, such as these, for instance: — "The 
 will of the Lord is the Law of Righteousness " ; 
 " Holiness is the best of aD Good : it is also 
 Happiness." ^ Even the virtue of philanthropy 
 is given cathartic value in a spell-formula, " he 
 who relieves the poor makes Ahura King," 
 recited before the person was washed with 
 the holy water of Mazda and the "gomez" 
 of an ox.^ 
 
 In a certain sense the Mazdean religion has 
 been the " purest " the world has known ; but 
 the high spiritual concept of purity that it 
 evolved never escaped nor struggled to 
 escape, as did the Judaic and Hellenic, from 
 the bondage to ritual. Therefore the religion 
 was doomed to ceremoniousness and sacer- 
 dotalism ; and the modern student who is 
 fascinated with its frequent outbursts of genius 
 and its deep, whole-hearted conviction must be 
 prepared for the inevitable bathos that awaits 
 him. Its remoteness from the modern and 
 civihsed view of things may be estimated from 
 
 1 Sacred Books, vol. iv. p. 21 6. 2 /^ p 216. 
 
132 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 the Zarathustrian text, in which the prophet 
 exalts the priestly medicine-man who heals the 
 diseased limb with a cleansing spell and by the 
 ejection of the demon, above the surgeon who 
 heals it with a knife. ^ 
 
 It is with a feeling of relief that we now 
 turn to the survey of the Hellenic phenomena, 
 passing by as we must the Vedic and the 
 Islamic, which appear to be of lesser im- 
 portance so far as I have been able to study 
 them. The Hellenic religion more than all 
 others of the ancient world is the mirror 
 of the manifold civilisation of a people; 
 for its lesser intensity allowed it more 
 varied application, and it was obliged to re- 
 concile itself speedily with the utilitarian and 
 secular forces of rational progress, which there 
 was no sacerdotal caste strong enough to 
 oppose. And it is in the light of this religion 
 therefore that the concept of purity can best 
 be studied in its relations to law and morality. 
 The history of the cathartic ritual in Greece 
 
 1 Sacred Books, vol. iv. p. 87. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 133 
 
 does not begin till the eighth century ; for 
 the Homeric age was strikingly sane, cheerful, 
 and secular in its views about such things. 
 Though Hektor feels, as any modern gentle- 
 man would feel, that it was wrong to go to a 
 religious service "bedabbled in gore and filth," 
 though Odysseus purifies his house with 
 sulphur-fumigation after the carnage of the 
 fight, the world for whom Homer sang does 
 not appear to have been burdened with the 
 ceremoniousness of purification or with dread 
 of the impurity of blood and death, or with 
 any sort of care for the vengeance or miasma 
 of the ghost. An age that could rise to the 
 height of such a sentiment as *'best of omens 
 is it to fight for one's country," was likely to 
 be healthy-minded in all such matters. The 
 first mention of purification for bloodshed is 
 in a poem of Arctinos of the eighth century ; 
 and a certain ritual-code of purity begins to 
 emerge in Hesiod. Henceforward cathartic 
 legislation comes to be very rife in Greece, 
 emanating chiefly from two centres as it 
 
134 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 seems, Delphi and Crete. The gods to whom 
 the domain of ritual-purity belongs especially 
 are Apollo, Zeus, and Dionysos ; at the 
 same time the ghostly terrors of the under- 
 world appear to be gaining a greater hold 
 on the Hellenic imagination, and " catharsis " is 
 specially needed to deal with these. Probably 
 all this is only a revival of aboriginal practices 
 and superstitions rooted in the Hellenic soil, a 
 religion which the intellectualism of Homeric 
 civilisation had happily suppressed for a time, 
 but which asserted itself with renewed strength 
 when that civilisation was overthrown. Yet the 
 revival, though apparently a " set-back," bore 
 fair fruit for morality, law, and even religion. 
 The history of Greek ethic must reckon as it 
 has not yet done with the ritual of purity, and 
 the history of Greek law with the fear of the 
 ghost and the miasma of bloodshed. 
 
 At first the idea is, as usual, ritualistic and 
 non-moral : and much that we find in savage 
 communities, and in Judsea, Persia, and India, 
 we find again in Greece. As the Hebrew 
 
The Ritual of Purification 135 
 
 warriors were purified before returning to 
 camp, so the Macedonian army was purified 
 in spring before the campaign,^ and the mis- 
 understood story of the Phokians daubing 
 themselves with gypsum before battle points 
 to a cathartic ritual.^ And the Hellenic 
 ceremonies agreed with those of most other 
 nations in regard to the causes of uncleanness 
 and the methods of deliverance: fire, water, 
 blood, onions, the skins of animals sacrificed, 
 even clay and bran, are the usual purifying 
 media. In one method of Ka6ap(ji<; only the 
 Hellenic ritual is unique so far as I know : 
 sacrificial communion with God was some- 
 times considered an effective means of obliter- 
 ating the impurity which the kinsmen con- 
 tracted by a death in the family : at Argos the 
 mourners put off the *' tapu " by eating of the 
 sacrifice to Apollo, believing that the spirit of 
 the pure god in the sacred food could destroy 
 
 1 Livy, 40^ 6, 1-3 : the whole host was led between the 
 severed limbs of a dog. 
 
 2 Herod., 8, 27. 
 
136 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 the miasma within and around them.^ The 
 strongholds of Pharisaic purification were the 
 religious brotherhoods of Orphism and the 
 earlier Pythagoreanism, a religious-philosophic 
 school closely associated with the former; in 
 these the law of " the pure life " is a cere- 
 monious law, specially concerned with abstin- 
 ence from certain food. But Greek thought 
 did not remain long on this level : a saying is 
 attributed to Charondas of Catana, but perhaps 
 of later origin, which asserts that " foul speech 
 is a defilement of the soul";^ and in a fragment 
 of Epicharmos of the fifth century, we have the 
 utterance of the higher gospel, " If thou art 
 pure of soul, thou ait pure of all thy body " ; 
 and the later Pythagorean literature, such as 
 the " Golden Song " of Hierocles, contains the 
 doctrine that '* purity of soul is the only divine 
 service " ; *' God has no more familiar abode 
 on the earth than the pure soul." And to 
 an unknown writer, probably of the same 
 
 1 Plutarch, Qucest. Grcec, 24. 
 
 2 Stobaeus, Florileg. Meineke, vol. ii. p. 184. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 137 
 
 school/ we owe the dogma, " We worship God 
 most meetly if we render our own soul pure 
 from every stain of evil." There are two 
 epigrams in the Anthology, included in the 
 fanciful collection of Pythian oracles, express- 
 ing the same idea that holiness is a spiritual fact 
 independent of ceremonies or lustrations : " Oh 
 stranger, if holy of soul, enter the shrine of the 
 holy God, having but touched the lustral 
 water : lustration is an easy matter for the 
 good, but all ocean with its streams cannot 
 cleanse the evil man."^ The other maintains 
 as clearly as Isaiah or the New Testament the 
 uselessness of all mere washing of hands : " The 
 temples of the gods are open to all good men, 
 nor is there any need of purification : no stain 
 can ever cleave to virtue. But depart, who- 
 soever is baneful at heart, for thy soul will 
 never be washed by the cleansing of the body." ^ 
 The better Greek mind attained this free- 
 dom the more easily in that it was not strongly 
 
 1 Mullach, Frag. Philos.^ Adespota. 
 
 2 Anth. Pal, 14, 71. ^ Ih. No. 74. 
 
138 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 or generally possessed with the belief in the 
 aboriginal impurity or sinfulness of the flesh 
 and the earthly life. And Greek ritual itself, 
 conservative as it was and never abandoning 
 its code of purification, comes at last to be 
 influenced by this freer atmosphere and to 
 reconcile ceremonious purity with a higher 
 moral law. Before the temple of Asclepios 
 at Epidauros stood the text, "Within the 
 incense-filled sanctuary one must be pure ; and 
 purity is to have righteous thoughts."^ An 
 inscription on a temple in Rhodes of the time 
 of Hadrian ^ shows a strange blend of primi- 
 tive and advanced thought. Its preamble 
 mentions " rules concerning righteous entrance 
 into the shrine." " The first and greatest rule 
 is to be pure and unblemished in hand and 
 heart and to be free from an evil conscience." 
 Then follows the usual ceremonious code of 
 rules concerning the impurities of food, 
 
 1 Wilamowitz^ Isyllos,Q\ Anth. Pal, Adespota, ccxxxiii. h: 
 cf. inscription from Astypalaia in Collitz, Dialect-Inschriften, 
 No. 3472. 
 
 2 C.I.G. Ins. Mar. Mg. 1, 789- 
 
The Ritual of Purification 139 
 
 funerals, and natural affections of the body : 
 and the last clause shows the ethical idea 
 penetrating even these, for the code prescribes 
 that a person may enter the shrine "on the 
 same day after lawful married intercourse." 
 This means that the adulteress was excluded, 
 as she was at Athens by a law quoted by 
 Demosthenes.^ It appears then that the 
 liberal ethic judgment attributed to Theano, 
 the female Pythagorean teacher, that while 
 lawful intercourse was no bar to participating 
 in a religious service on the same day, the 
 adulteress was to be for ever excluded,^ was 
 not wholly out of accordance with the ad- 
 vanced ritualistic code of Greece. 
 
 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 depart- 
 ment of law — the law of homicide. Perhaps 
 the most significant distinction between the 
 code of a civilised and that of a savage or 
 
 1 In Neaeram, § 85. 2 ciem. Alex., Strom., 619, Pott. 
 
140 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 at- 
 tained a high general level of civilisation with- 
 out 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.^ Then follows a blank in 
 
 1 I believe that the trial scene on the shield of Achilles, 
 rightly interpreted, implies that the community are begin- 
 ning to decide whether the avenger shall accept the were- 
 gilt or not. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 141 
 
 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 bar- 
 barism 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 analo- 
 gies 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 develop- 
 ment of the monarchy. But as a universal 
 axiom this cannot be accepted ; for, as 
 
142 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Steinmetz in his treatise on " The Develop- 
 ment of Punishment"^ 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 mon- 
 archical 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 estab- 
 lished seem certainly to have been consecrated 
 
 1 Die Entwickelung der Strafe^ vol. ii. p. 347. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 143 
 
 at a very early time by the concept of purity 
 that came to be attached to them.^ Now it 
 is probable that a similar religious feeling was 
 operative in the case of homicide. 
 
 If in any given society the primitive behef 
 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 
 
 1 An example is given by Steinmetz^ op. cit. ii. p. 336^ of 
 the punishment of incest among the Pasemaher : the guilty 
 pair were buried alive with a hollow pipe reaching from 
 their mouths 'to the top of the earth : if they survived 
 seven days of this agony their lives were spared : no ex- 
 planation is offered, but it is not improbable that the law 
 is inspired by the idea that the earth could absorb their 
 impurity. 
 
144 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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.^ 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 intensifica- 
 tion 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 hypo- 
 
 ^ Sacred Books , vol. iv. p. I69 (pt. i.). 
 
The Ritual of Purification 145 
 
 thesis. 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 ex- 
 communication 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 them- 
 selves. 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. ^ 
 
 1 Vide Cults of the Greek States^ vol. i. pp. 66-69 •* 
 Steinmetz, op. cit., vol. ii. p. 345, discusses a record concern- 
 ing the Ossetes, who live habitually in the system of the 
 blood-feud, to the effect that a person guilty of parricide 
 was surrounded and burnt in his house by the whole people, 
 and he suggests that this may be the first example among 
 them of a State cognisance of murder. 
 
 10 
 
146 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Now if we assume that the old ideas associ- 
 ated with kinship came to be extended 
 to the whole community of the poUs — 
 as might easily happen through the inter- 
 marriage of the yePT) — 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 first- 
 hand 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 purifi- 
 cation, 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 
 
The Ritual of Purification 147 
 
 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 asso- 
 ciation 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.^ 
 
 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 
 1 Antiphon, Or. 6, p. 764: cf. Eurip., Hecuba, pp. 291-292. 
 
148 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 for- 
 giveness of one of the kinsmen of the dead.^ 
 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 acci- 
 dental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide 
 returns he must go through elaborate purifica- 
 tions. 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 per- 
 fectly 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.^ The first legal preliminary in a case 
 of murder, which reveals clearly the religious 
 origin of the State law, was the solemn procla- 
 mation, made by one of the relatives holding 
 
 1 Demosthenes, c. Aristocrat., pp. 643-644. 
 
 2 Antiphon, p. 686. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 149 
 
 a spear at the funeral, tliat the murderer should 
 keep aloof from all the holy and public places 
 of the community.^ And Antiphon strongly 
 expresses the popular sentiment that the 
 unpunished murderer pollutes the public altars 
 and vitiates the atmosphere of the city : ^ and 
 the whole of Plato's legislation^ 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 ; there- 
 fore the accused was allowed to go out of the 
 country before the verdict.* 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." ^ 
 Also it is part of primitive animistic behef 
 that such miasma could cleave to things which 
 had caused the death of a man : hence the 
 
 1 Plato, Laws, 873 A-B : Demosth., c. Euerg., p. II60. 
 
 2 P. 749 ; c/. 764. 3 Laws, pp. 854, 865. 
 ^ Demosthenes, c. Aristocrat.^ p. 643. 
 
 ^ Antiphon, p. 709- 
 
150 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 : ^ 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 pro- 
 gress 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 
 
 1 Demosthenes, op. cit., p. 645 : cf. the account in 
 Pausanias, 5, 27, 10, of the purification by the Eleans at 
 Olympia of the bronze ox which had caused the death of a 
 boy. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 151 
 
 existed in the Attic code,^ 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.^ 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 move- 
 ment, as it usually did in Greece. Or it may 
 
 1 Drako appears to have systematised it, but it may have 
 existed as custom-law before his period. 
 
 2 Paus., 1, 19, 1; 1, 28, 10: Plut., vit. Thes., 12, 18: 
 Demosth., c. Aristocrat. j 74. 
 
152 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 : ^ 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,^ and it only remains to indicate 
 
 1 We note the legend that purification was refused to 
 Ixion, and the express statement that no one would purify 
 King Pausanias from his brutal crime against the 
 Olynthian maiden. 
 
 2 The procedure by ordeal, prevalent in the ancient 
 world and common among contemporary savages, is prob- 
 ably derived from an animistic conception of purity : the 
 
The Ritual of Purification 153 
 
 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 initia- 
 
 primitive theory appears to be that, if the person is inno- 
 cent, the pure spirit within him makes his body able to 
 resist the trial, and is not dependent upon any idea of a 
 higher god of righteousness. The ordeal procedure is 
 very common in African society : Post, Afrikanisch. 
 Jurisprud., 2, p. 110. 
 
154 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 tion/ the early Christian Church prescribing 
 it for the days preceding the Easter com- 
 munion ; also before the individual can attain 
 the divine afflatus of prophecy or the super- 
 natural 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 con- 
 dition of exaltation, ecstasy, and supra-normal 
 self-confidence: other ideas, such as the dis- 
 cipline 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 pheno- 
 
 1 E.g. the Eleusinian^ Mithraic, and Phrygian Mysteries : 
 for examples of it in savage initiation rites^ see Annual 
 Report Smithsonian Institute, 1899-1900, p. 435. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 155 
 
 menon, which is commonly or exception- 
 ally 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-abne- 
 gation usually engenders a stronger conscious- 
 ness of religious power. There are signs that 
 the idea is losing its hold on the modern con- 
 sciousness, 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 pre- 
 valent in any given society of the priestly 
 function ; it is likely to be enforced when 
 the priest is invested with a specially pro- 
 phetic and mystic character, and is required 
 to mediate between the society and God by 
 means of frequent communion with the 
 
156 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 in- 
 teresting 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 purifi- 
 cation 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 
 
The Ritual of Purification 157 
 
 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."^ 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.^ 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.^ 
 We discover the same theories held by the 
 
 1 Sahagun, Jourdanet, pp. xxxix. and 4<55. 
 
 2 Vide supra J p. 57. 
 
 3 Vide Arckiv fur Religionswissensckafi, 1904, pp. 401-409. 
 
158 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 exor- 
 cisms : such ceremonies as the breathing on his 
 forehead by the priest, the sacramental partak- 
 ing 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.^ 
 
 We must also regard confession as a kind 
 of purification : for the " speaking out " of 
 
 1 Duchesne, Origines du culte Chretien^ transl. by M'Clure, 
 p. 296. 
 
The Ritual of Purification 159 
 
 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 
 religion^ where it was associated with purifi- 
 cation 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.^ An interesting formula of 
 confession is found among the Babylonian 
 liturgical tablets : the penitent prays to the 
 god and the goddess — " I^et 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 
 
 1 Sahaguiij op. cit., pp. 340-341. 
 
 ^ Vide Herzog, Real-Erwyclop., s.v. Beichte. 
 
i6o The Evolution of Religion 
 
 works partly by prayer to the high god, 
 partly by the old idea of the magic trans- 
 ference of sin into an alien substance.^ 
 
 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 thanks- 
 giving service, has descended from an old 
 cathartic ritual that purged away the danger- 
 ous pollution of child-birth ; and the consecra- 
 tion 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."' 
 
 1 King, Babylonian Religion, p. 212. 
 
 2 Vide Von der Goltz, Das Gehet, p. 297 : Cabrol, Priere 
 Antique, p. 3l6 : the aspersion with holy water in the 
 present Roman ritual does not seem to have been 
 
The Ritual of Purification i6i 
 
 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 contri- 
 butions to our civilisation have been, as we 
 have seen, of inestimable service. It has 
 engendered the modern horror of murder 
 
 obligatory in the early period : vide Duchesne, Origines, 
 p. 404, Engl, transl. 
 
 11 
 
i62 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM 
 LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS 
 
 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 develop- 
 ment as the formulae 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 earUer 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 reli- 
 
 163 
 
164 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 gions, and that we may with confidence believe 
 to have descended from an immemorial anti- 
 quity. 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 ques- 
 tions of such importance, a single lecture would 
 be a very inadequate space for its exposition.^ 
 Therefore, though I may indicate, I will not 
 attempt in this lecture to decide on, the ques- 
 tion 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 
 
 1 An interesting and original contribution to the solu- 
 tion of the question will be found in a recent paper by 
 Mr R. Marett in Folk-Lore^ 1904, " From Spell to Prayer." 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 165 
 
 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 d ivine power conceived as Spiri t 
 orGod^_bu t always as personal, in order to 
 obtain materia l^^no ral, or spirit ual ble ssings : 
 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 formulae contain much 
 positive statement and are by no means con- 
 fined to the optative mood, the attitude of the 
 
1 66 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 supplicator is always reverential and self-abased ; 
 modern religion reprobates any idea of com- 
 pelling the divinity ; only it generally seals its 
 petitions with the mystic signature of a power- 
 ful name. If this may pass as a fairly com- 
 prehensive and adequate account of modern or 
 advanced prayer, it will still be found to con- 
 tain elements that may descend from a very 
 ancient mould of religious thought not easy 
 to reconcile with our higher religious con- 
 sciousness ; and it is no adequate account of 
 the various modes which less advanced socie- 
 ties have used and are still using to express 
 their desires to the supernatural power. It 
 has indeed been recently asserted, with some 
 plausibility,^ that no savage community yet 
 explored lacks the conception of a high 
 god making for righteousness ; and cer- 
 tainly many of the lower races have spon- 
 taneously developed genuine prayer in the 
 modern sense. Still it is sometimes reported 
 by scientific observers that some backward 
 
 1 Fide A. Lang, The Making of Religion. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 167 
 
 peoples do not pray at all ; ^ and it appears 
 not to be uncommon for the_savage__tp 
 regard his high ^od as too rei note_jto__be 
 addressed for any practical purpo se. 
 
 'BuTthe 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.A 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:Lvmrker he 
 stands on a different footing altogether from 
 the petitioner: his attitude towards the 
 supernatural power is self-confident and im- 
 perious, his speech is no pra yer but a com- 
 mand. He may project his will by dumb show, 
 
 1 Vide Anthropolog. Joum.y 1904, p. l65. 
 
1 68 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 
 teehnical 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 apphcation of 
 the charm, it is often an essential condition 
 that one should possess oneself of thejiama. 
 of the person a gainst whom it jsjirected, 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 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 169 
 
 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 " : ^ 
 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. 
 
 1 R. Marett, op. cit., p. 145. 
 
170 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 A singular ritual is recorded of the rain 
 societies of North America : ^ emblems or 
 picture-writing representing clouds, with 
 vertical drops symbolising rain, are placed on 
 ^ agTaltar ) 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 
 
 Iit seems clear that we here have the ritual 
 lof prayer combined with magic-suggestion, 
 Iwhich consists in pretending to do the thing 
 which it is desired to bring about. Again, the 
 primitive formulas devised to drive out the 
 demons of disease and poverty are usually im- 
 perious commands and not prayers : such as the 
 Chinese " Let the devil of poverty depart " ; ^ 
 the Greek, " Go out, hunger," ^ and " To the 
 door, you ghosts."* 
 
 1 Man, 1902, p. 104. 
 
 2 Frazer, Golden Bough <2) iii. 83. ^ Plutarch, 69S F. 
 * At the Anthesteria, Photius, s.v, Ovpa^e /c^ocs: 
 
 Hesych., s.v. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 171 
 
 But when, as in Buro, the bidding takes such 
 a form as " Grandfather small-pox, go away," ^ 
 the reverential and soothing address allows 
 us to approximate this to prayer, for in the 
 liturgies of t he e arlier as wel Las_the advanced 
 religions the divinit y is commonly addresse d 
 in terms_ o f k inship. 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,^ 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 
 
 1 Frazer, op. aV., iii. 98 : mde Marett, op. cit., p. l63. 
 
 2 Primitive Culture, vol. ii. (concluding chapter). 
 
172 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 
 legit imatises the spell by virtu p nf ±h^-a4i;:^f:iTVP- 
 tion bet ween whitejTia^ic and bl^aek. The dis- 
 tinction 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 consecra- 
 tion 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 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 173 
 
 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 j y! 
 communities may reassure us that as a religion ; J^ 
 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 Uve at_a]l rather Jimn-ta-Jive 
 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'N 
 reached when moral and spiritual qualities ' 
 become the object of prayer ; and when this / 
 is attained, the principle of prayer is Hkely 1 
 to become more and more spiritual, and the 
 
174 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 _bedone." It 
 is mterestmg to notem 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^ 
 formu la of acquiescence appears jthenjtoJie the 
 deepest and ^jtruest-^pfayerr^ 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 com- 
 munian with God, to whom it is a spiritual 
 approach. Here as often elsewhere, the 
 highest spiritual product of human thought 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 175 
 
 reveals its affinity with some dimly remote 
 primeval concept ; for much of the ^spelW itual 
 at which we have been glancing implies^ ag 
 idea of s uch_jCQ mTmimoii , the human agent 
 ^deavQuring-tcLcharge himself witt 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 formulae 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 sugges- 
 tion of his magic.^ 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 thy- 
 
 1 Marett, op. cit., p. 152. 
 
176 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 self, grandmother, shake thyself,"^ 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 1 
 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 restora- 
 tion of the earth. ^ 
 
 The buffalo clan among the Sioux Indians 
 decorate themselves with emblems of their 
 totem animal before going on the war-path, 
 
 1 Tylor, op. cit, ii. p. SS4>. 
 
 2 Frazer, Golden Bough,^^) vol, ii. p. 212. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 177 
 
 and express the purpose of the dressing with a 
 sententious phrase: "My little grandfather 
 is always dangerous when he makes an 
 attempt."^ 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 
 
 1 Annual Report of Smithsonian Institute, " Study of Sioux 
 Cults, by Dorsey/' 1899-1900, p. 381, etc 
 
 12 
 
178 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 and bring them good fortune." ^ The account 
 of the Sioux rehgion 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."^ 
 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." ^ 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,* and as the formulae are all 
 
 1 Peahody Museum Reports, vol. iii. p. 276^ etc. 
 
 2 Annual Report Smithsonian Institute, 1899-1900, pp. 420- 
 421. 
 
 3 Tylor, op. cit., ii. p. 331. 
 
 4 Folk-Lore, 1904, p. I68 : Toda Prayer, Yf, H. R. Rivers. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 179 
 
 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 formulae seem to be used as 
 if they possessed a self-dependent efficacy. 
 More interesting and fervent is the address 
 to the sun, proffisred by a solitary hunter of 
 the half-christianised Kekchi tribe of Indians : ^ 
 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 im- 
 passioned 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 
 
 ^ Published by Carl Sapper in Nordlickes Mittel-Amerika^ 
 vide Archiv jiir vergl. Relig. Wiss., 1904, p. 468. 
 
i8o The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 
 statemenL 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 terms ^ — " Oh my father, my brother, 
 my mother Isis," the Babylonian addressed Bel 
 as father and mother,^ and a Vedic hymn con- 
 tains the phrase, " Thou, oh Agni, art our 
 father, we are thy kinsmen."^ Such appeals, 
 suggested by the affection between kinsmen 
 
 1 Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 49. 
 
 2 Jastrow, Religion Babyloniens Assyriens, p. 490 : cf. 
 the formula in the prayer of one of the early kings to 
 the goddess Ga-tiim-dug: "I have no mother — Thou 
 art my mother : I have no father — Thou art my father/' 
 Jastrow, p. 395. 
 
 3 Sacred Books, vol. xlvi. p. 23. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer i8i 
 
 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',^ and to understand it the 
 circumstances must be briefly stated. The 
 Shaman had been telling the American in- 
 quirer 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 spirit- 
 ual or astr aLpart 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 
 1 Vol. I. 
 
iSa The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 illus- 
 tration of the primitive idea that talking 
 tbout a thing makes it happen ; an id ea not 
 ^hoU y extinc j^ jinongjQurselv es, and possibly 
 underlying some of the liturgie s of h igher 
 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 Evolution of Prayer 183 
 
 the fetich holds it first up to heaven and 
 prays, "Father Heaven, bless this medicine 
 that I now give."^ But I have not been able 
 to find any example of a savage jprayerjfor 
 mor al or spiritual_ blessiiigs^ An interesting 
 feature is, however, observable in a verbose and 
 very exacting prayer made by the Khonds of 
 Orissa to the earth-goddess; after particular- 
 ising 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."^ 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,^ we may note briefly at the 
 
 1 Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. p. S33. 
 
 2 Tylor, op. cit., ii. p. 335. 
 
 ^ I have only space to make a summary reference here 
 to the very noteworthy collection of Peruvian prayers pre- 
 served by De Molina, Fables and Rites of the Yncas, p. 28, 
 etc._, 38, 5Q : they have all the character of pure prayer, 
 and occasionally reach a high spiritual level : the only 
 appearance of magic is in the sacrifice that accompanies 
 the singular petition " that the Creator and the sun may 
 remain ever young." 
 
184 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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-testa- 
 mentliche Schdtzung des Grottesnamens} 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, 
 uperhuman, or divine, can exercise a certain 
 ontrol over him by means of its magical 
 pplication. 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 
 
 1 Vide also Andrian in Deutsch. Gesellsch. Antkropol., xxvii., 
 1896, p. 109. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 185 
 
 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 persons^ or lest the enemy 
 should get the knowledge of them and there- 
 with the power to draw the divinities away. 
 We may thus understand the often misinter- 
 preted 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 fragment^ about 
 the enlightened man "whoknows the silent 
 names of the _godsIL: it is curious to find 
 exactly the same expression in a Vedic hymn,^ 
 
 1 Serv., jEn., 2, 351. 2 ^r. 781, Pkaethon. 
 
 8 Vedic Hymns {Sacred Books^ etc.), pt. ii. p. 378. 
 
1 86 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 formulae 
 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 Tabulas Iguvinas, where the god Gra- 
 bovius 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 quahfying epithets 
 were selected and attached to the personal 
 name of the divinity, so as to make clear 
 what was the precise operation of divine 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 187 
 
 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 TToXvcowfjie, 
 " thou god of many names," all possible titles 
 of power being summed up in one word. 
 Certain passages in the poets become intelli- 
 gible only in the light of this idea : such as 
 the well-known phrase in the chorus of the 
 Agamemnon of ^schylus : ^ " Zeus, whoso- 
 ever 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 7ro\va)vv^o<; : " 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."^ 
 But it is in Egypt, the land of magic, where 
 the idea of the potency of the divine name 
 
 1 1. 160 : cf. Plat. Crat., 400 E., '^ It is our custom in our 
 prayers to call the gods by whatsoever name they most 
 rejoice to be called by." 
 
 2 Vedic Hymns, pt. ii., pp. 281, 372. 
 
1 88 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 assumes dimensions that are truly gigantic. 
 In an early metaphysical theory of the origin 
 of things, which in its harmonious self-con- 
 tradiction 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 utter- 
 ance of his own portentous name : ^ 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.^ In certain 
 Egyptian papyri containing Abraxas prayers, 
 we find the prayer sometimes coupled with 
 the reminder that the petitioner knows the 
 divine mystic name ; ^ thus equipped, the 
 prayer is more than a mere humble entreaty. 
 
 1 BudgCj op. cit., p. 161. 
 
 2 Budge, op. cit., pp. 137-141. 
 
 3 Vide examples quoted by Ausfeld, De Grcecorum Pre- 
 caiionihus, p. 519. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 189 
 
 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 " : ^ of Jahve'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 : " ^ of the oath taken 
 by those initiated into the Essenian sect not 
 to reveal the names of the angels : ^ of ex- 
 pressions 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," * which reveals the name 
 as a religious potency into which as into a 
 
 1 Ps. 54, 31. 2 c. 23, V. 21. 
 
 ^ Joseph, De hell. Jud., 2, 8. * Acts 8, l6 ; 19, 5. 
 
I go The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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-formulas 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.^ 
 
 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 
 origyxand to express what one knows about 
 them in the charm : thus in the Kalevala 
 the young magician is taught the origin 
 
 1 Von der Goltz, Das Gebet, p. 353. 
 
 V 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 191 
 
 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."^ 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.^ Is it then too 
 far-fetched to trace the survival of this old- 
 
 1 Hymns of the Atharva-Veda {Sacred Books, etc., xlii. 
 p. 167). 
 
 ^ Vedic HymnSy pt. ii. p. 391. 
 
192 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 world thought, rooted as it is in the magic 
 / of the word and the statement, in the promi- 
 nence 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.^ 
 
 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 pur- 
 pose 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 per- 
 
 ^ Cf. a formula in an Egyptian papyrus published by 
 Kenyon (122, v. IS), "I know thee, Hemies, who thou 
 \\ art and whence thou art and what city is the city of 
 M Hermes" ; quoted by Ausfeld, op. cit. p. 524, n. 1. 
 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 193 
 
 haps the only surviving fragment of Indo-j 
 Germanic poetry.^ 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."^ 
 Neither god nor ghost was needed to help 
 out the force of such incantations. But prob- 
 ably some time before Christianity prayer had 
 come to prevail over spell in the Teutonic 
 North, for there are traces there of a certain 
 
 1 The "Merseburg charm/' old High German tenth- 
 century MS. : cf. R. Chambers, Fireside Stories, Edinburgh, 
 1842. My attention was called to the great antiquity of 
 this Norse charm by Prof. Napier, to whose kindness I owe 
 these references. 
 
 2 Sacred Books, xlii. p. 20. 
 
 13 
 
194 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 antagonism growing between magic and 
 religion, which led to the condemnation of 
 certain forms of magic. ^ 
 
 An interesting question arises about a 
 prayer - charm used by the early English 
 
 I against sterility of the fields : "Hail be thou, 
 u Earth, Mother of Men, wax fertile in the 
 
 II embrace of God, fulfilled with fruit for the 
 Uuse of man."^ This poetic utterance implies 
 
 aj^eritaWe_^te/oos ya/ xog, 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, Ye Kue, *'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 
 
 1 Golther, op. cit, pp. 647-648. 
 
 2 In a pre-Conquest Cotton MS. in the British Museum, 
 vide Grein's Bibliothek der dngels'dchsischen Poesie : ed. 
 Miilcker, vol. i. p. 31 6. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 195 
 
 \ 
 
 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 sugges 
 tion 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.^ 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 
 
 1 Livy, 22, 10. 
 
196 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Cato's that has been preserved is merely 
 materialistic.^ 
 
 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 fidyoL of Cleonae who averted hailstorms 
 with incantations and the shedding of their 
 own blood.^ 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 anthropo- 
 logical 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 
 
 1 De Re Rustica^ 139, 141 : Wordsworth, Fragments and 
 Specimens of Early Latin, p. SS5. 
 
 2 Clemens, Strom., p. 754, Pott. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 197 
 
 Jewish service, which we still use on Ash 
 Wednesday, employs curse-formulae 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 iEschylus, which binds 
 his soul and withers him away.^ And the 
 many private "devotiones" or "dirae" that 
 have come down to us from Greek antiquity, 
 written usually on leaden tablets and conse- 
 crating 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 quaUty 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 
 
 1 Eumen,y 332. 
 
198 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 rather than entreated. In one interesting 
 example of the first century a.d., found in 
 ^gina,^ 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 unfor- 
 tunate Heracleia." In the Greek legal pro- 
 cedure 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,^ " 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 
 
 1 Dittenberger, Sylloge^'^\ vol. iii. 81 6. 
 
 2 Post, Afrikanisch. Jurisprud., 2, p. 128. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 199 
 
 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 utter- 
 ance of the old Dodonasan 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. "^ The resem- 
 blance 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 formulas 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 
 
 1 Paus., 10, 12, 10. 
 
200 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Sharman 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,^ 
 or " Come forth, dear sun," to the sun-god.^ 
 
 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 com- 
 pared with the Babylonian, Vedic, or Iranian. 
 But though the actual formulee 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 
 
 ^ TrActcTTov ov\ov L€if tovX.ov tet, Athenae., 6l8 E. 
 
 2 The song sung by the children, probably an old 
 weather-spell, called <^tA.iyA,ta9, with the refrain, e^e^* w <^tA' 
 5A.16, Pollux, 9, 123, Athenae., 6l9 B. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 201 
 
 health and safety of the people of the 
 Athenians, their wives and children and all 
 in the country," ^ and the formula might in- 
 clude a prayer for the prosperity of their allies, 
 such as Milesians or Plataeans. But we have 
 no indications that the blessings prayed for 
 included others besides the material ones. The 
 Lacedaemonians are commended by Socrates ^ 
 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 ra koKol inl Tolq 
 ayadoLs: 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 bless- 
 ings 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 formulae were very old and the 
 range of aspiration usually narrow ; and the 
 
 1 Ephem, ArchaioL, 1891, p. 82. 
 
 2 Plato, Alcibiad., 2, p. 148 C. 
 
202 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 Corcyrsean 
 state, w^eary of civic strife and massacre, to 
 the Dodonaean oracle, asking, " To what god 
 or what hero shall we pray in order to obtain 
 concord, and to govern our city fairly and 
 well ? " ^ 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." ' 
 
 We are better informed concerning the 
 style of private prayer in Greece, as also con- 
 cerning 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 
 
 ^ Collitz, Dialect-InschrifU, 1562_, 1563, early fourth 
 century b.c. 
 2 Collitz, 3648. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 203 
 
 to the god that he might " have a good report 
 among men." ^ Among the prayers contained 
 in the Uterature 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 " ; ^ and again, " Oh God that 
 bringest all things to pass, grant me the spirit 
 of reverence for noble things " ; ^ and by this of 
 Euripides, " May the spirit of chastity abide 
 with me, the fairest gift of God."* 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." * 
 The prayers of Xenophon and Plutarch may 
 
 1 Roberts, Greek Epigraphy^ vol. i. p. 304. 
 
 2 Nem., 8, 35. 3 Q]^, 13, 115. ^ Med., 635. 
 ^ Bergk, Frag. Lyr. Groec.^ vol. iii., Scolia 2. 
 
y 
 
 204 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 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 " ; ^ the latter for " wealth, concord, 
 righteousness in word and deed."^ 
 
 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, SovrjTe 
 fjLOL /caXw y^viadai TavSoOev, " Grant me to be- 
 come noble of heart "^ ; of ApoUonius of Tyana, 
 w ^€01 SoCrjTe fjiOL ret 6(j>eik6iJieva, " Oh gods, grant 
 me that which I deserve " * ; the longer poetic 
 
 1 (Econ., 11, 8. 2 x)e Superst., p. II6 D. 
 
 3 Fl8Lt,^Pk(iedr., 279 B. * Philostr., Fit. ApolL, 4, 41. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 205 
 
 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 " ^ : and 
 with these we may compare the dictum of 
 Epictetus '^ : ''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 in- 
 spires them. Here is the prayer of Epictetus : 
 " Do with me what thou wilt : my will is thy 
 will : I appeal not against thy judgments " ^ ; 
 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 re- 
 corded in the apocryphal Acts of St Thomas * 
 seems almost an echo of these : " 1 go whither 
 Thou wilt, oh Jesus : Thy will be done." 
 When the best thought of the age had 
 
 1 Plat., Alcib., 2, p. 143 A. 
 
 2 Epictet. (Schenkle), p. 479. ^ Id., p. 158. 
 * Von der Goltz, Das Gebet, p. 292. 
 
2o6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 >/ 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,^ for the 
 j reason that God knew better how to give than 
 ! man knew how to ask ; but the later Neo- 
 Platonism discovered an ideal raison-d'etre 
 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.^ 
 
 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 
 
 1 Diog. Laert. 8, \Q,1 : yet, according to Clemens, "The 
 Pythagoreans enjoin that prayer should be uttered aloud, so 
 that one might never pray for what one would be ashamed 
 that others should hear," Strom. ^ p. 641, Pott. 
 
 2 Porphyry ap. Proclus in Tim., 2, 64 B : Procl. in Tim., 
 2, 65 : Sallustius, De Diis et Mundo, c. l6 : cf. Max. Tyr., 
 Dissert, xi. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 207 
 
 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 : ^ " 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.^ 
 
 1 Vide Archivfur vergl. Religionswissensck.^ 1904, p. 395. 
 
 2 The remarkable ethical fragment of an unknown 
 philosopher, Eusebios, in Ionic dialect, quoted by Stobaeus, 
 TTcpl dperrj^i § 85 (vol. i. p. 39, Meineke), contains moral 
 aspirations that strikingly resemble New Testament 
 doctrine, and may possibly have been intended as a prayer, 
 but it contains no appeal to a divinity : he may belong to 
 the Neo-Platonic sect, vide Orelli, Optisc. Grcec. Sentent., 
 vol. ii. p. 728. 
 
2o8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 It will be convenient next to glance at the 
 records of the other great branches of the 
 ancient Aryan world, the Vedic Indians and 
 the Iranians. One does not read long in the 
 sacred books of India without attaining the 
 conviction that the highest religion of the Vedas 
 was deeply penetrated with sacerdotal magic ; 
 which was so far from losing its hold in the 
 later period that it imprisoned the religious 
 thought, and the later Brahmanism was cap- 
 able of the belief that without the spell of the 
 sacrifice the sun could not run his course in 
 heaven. And the recital of spells forms a 
 great part of the Vedic ritual. Thus the 
 hymns say of the fire-god Agni, " The thought- 
 ful men find Agni when they have recited 
 the spells " ; and the gods themselves, like the 
 Norse divinities, work by spells : " Agni up- 
 holds the sky by his efficacious spells." ^ Yet 
 the early record gives us also copious illustra- 
 tion of real prayer, and occasionally of a very 
 exalted tone. It is true, as we should expect, 
 
 1 Fedic Hymns J pt. ii. p. 6l. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 209 
 
 that material and temporal advantages are by 
 far the predominant objects of the petition: 
 the head of the household prays for wealth, 
 offspring, victory in battle or the races ; with 
 rare exceptions, the prayers are personal and 
 private rather than political, and are thus in 
 marked contrast to the Hellenic ; yet we have 
 a few that are evidently proffered for the 
 community,^ and at times the deity is peti- 
 tioned to grant an abundant supply of valiant 
 men. But even in the few prayers that reflect 
 the political life of the State, the individualistic 
 spirit is apt to appear. We have a curious 
 example of a petition to Indra to make a 
 man powerful in the political assembly: 
 " In this entire gathering render, O Indra, 
 me successful," and this is combined with a 
 naive spell whereby the politician endeavours 
 to mesmerise the whole meeting: he names 
 the assembly — as our Speaker might name a 
 recalcitrant member — " We know thy name, 
 
 1 E.g., " Protect our people all around with those un- 
 deceived guardians of thine, oh Agni," ib., p. 158. 
 
 14 
 
2IO The Evolution of Religion 
 
 oh assembly. ... Of them that are sitting 
 j together I take to myself the power and the 
 understanding " : and again, " With my mind 
 do I seize your minds." ^ But even when 
 the prayer is personal and materialistic a real 
 fervour and a genial poetic freshness is often 
 to be found. Here is a beautiful prelude 
 to a prayer for long life proffered to the 
 ancient heaven-god : " Many dawns have not 
 yet dawned : grant me to live in them, 
 O Varuna." And often the worshipper rises 
 above mere material aspirations, as in such 
 appeals to Agni as the following: "May we 
 be well-doers before the gods.'"^ "Give us 
 not up, oh Agni, to want of thought."^ 
 " Mayest thou bestow splendour, renown, and 
 (wise) mind upon such mortals as satisfy thee 
 with refreshment, oh Agni."* "Drive far 
 from us senselessness and anguish : drive far 
 all ill-will from whom thou attendest."^ 
 
 1 Atharva-Veda {Sacred Books, vol. xlii. p. 138). 
 
 2 Vedic Hymns, pt. ii. p. 376. 
 
 3 Ih., p. 273. ^ lb,, p. 383. 5 /^^ p. 352. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 211 
 
 At times also the hymns reveal a deep 
 consciousness of sin and a desire for divine 
 forgiveness. " Through want of strength, ^/^' 
 thou strong and bright god, have I gone 
 astray. Have mercy. Almighty, have 
 mercy !"^ "Agni, drive away from us sin, 
 which leads us astray." ^ " By the earth's great- 
 ness, oh Agni, forgive us even committed sin, 
 that we maybe great." ^ '* Whatever sin we 
 have committed against thee in thoughtless- 
 ness, men as we are, make thou us sinless 
 before Aditi."* Yet we may suspect that 
 the term sin is not always used in these 
 prayers in its modern ethical sense, not for 
 instance in the prayer, " From the sins which 
 knowingly or unknowingly we have com- 
 mitted, do ye, all gods, of one accord release 
 us " ; ^ and the primitive concept on which 
 the old magic of sin-transference was based 
 survives in such passages as the following: 
 
 ^ Quoted by Prof. Tylor, Primitive Culture , vol. ii. p. 339, 
 from Rig Veda^ vii. 89, 3. 
 
 2 Vedic Hymns J pt. ii. p. 181. ^ lb., p. 249. 
 
 * lb., p. 354. 5 Atharva-Veda, p. l64. 
 
212 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 " Pass far away, oh sin of the mind : why dost 
 thou utter things not to be uttered? Pass 
 away, I love thee not: to the trees and the 
 forests go on ! " ^ " Enter into the rays, into 
 smoke, oh sin ; go into the vapours, and into 
 the fog."^ The context discloses only an 
 indirect appeal to a personal deity, though 
 the term sin in the former passage is clearly 
 applied to what we should call moral offences. 
 In the Vedic ritual, then, we find a pure and 
 spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell- 
 power may attach even to the highest types, 
 for we find not infrequently the conception 
 that not only the power of the worshipper but 
 the power of the deity also is nourished and 
 strengthened by prayer ; ^ and the prayer itself 
 is usually accompanied by a potent act. With 
 this aspect of Vedic prayers we may associate 
 
 1 Athan^a-Veda, p. l63. 2 75.^ p, 165, 
 
 ^ " Bring ye forward an ancient mighty speech to Agni. 
 . . . May our prayers increase Agni/' Vedic Hymns, 
 pt. ii. p. 259: cf. p. 391, "The prayers fill thee (oh 
 Agni) with power and strengthen thee^ like great rivers 
 the Sindhu." 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 213 
 
 the fact that Agni, the fire-god, appears as the 
 chief divinity to whom they are addressed ; for 
 his ritual is purificatory, and the prayers are 
 thus based on a Hturgy of purification which 
 stimulates the mental or spiritual force of the 
 worshipper. 
 
 We may now turn to another great Aryan 
 stock, the Iranian, whose earlier religion 
 culminated in the Zarathustrian system. The 
 relation of spell to prayer is, on the whole, 
 the same in the Zend-Avesta as we find it in 
 the Vedic hymns, a real spell can accompany 
 a real prayer, and the text of the prayer itself 
 becomes a most potent charm. The "sacer- 
 dotal" physician, who, as we have seen, occupied 
 a higher rank in the Zarathustrian estimate 
 than the scientific practitioner, offers first a 
 genuine prayer to Ahura-Mazda for spiritual 
 strength to deal with the disease — " Give us, 
 Ahura, that powerful sovereignty by the 
 strength of which we may smite down the 
 drug (the demon)." Fraught with this 
 mesmeric power he then directs his spell 
 
214 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 against the sickness - demon : ** To thee, oh 
 Sickness, I say — A vaunt ! To thee, oh Death, 
 I say — A vaunt ! " ^ And in the ritual of 
 purification, which closely resembles the 
 system of therapeutics, the formulae of prayers 
 of the most exalted type in the sacred books 
 are used, not as prayers, but as cathartic spells.^ 
 It is not hard to discern the steps that lead 
 from this grade of thought to the highest at 
 which the religious speculation of the Zara- 
 thustrian arrived. The uttered Word of God 
 is given a supernatural cosmic force ; and the 
 prophet pronounces that this utterance of the 
 ** Holy Word is of such a nature that if all 
 the corporeal and living world should learn it, 
 and learning hold fast to it, they should be 
 redeemed from their mortality."^ And we 
 can understand why a large part of the Zara- 
 thustrian liturgy should be devoted to the 
 recital of formulae which are statements of the 
 
 1 Sacred Books, etc., vol. iv. (Zend-Avesta, pt. i. p. 228). 
 
 2 76., pp. 145-147. 
 
 3 Sacred Books, etc.^ vol. xxxi. {Zend-Avesta, pt. iii. p. 262.) 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 215 
 
 Mazdean faith. Before rising in the morning 
 and retiring at night, the pious Persian was 
 recommended to say, " All good thoughts, all 
 good words, all good deeds I do willingly: 
 all evil thoughts, all evils words, all evil deeds 
 I do unwillingly."^ It is interesting to com- 
 pare with our own creed the following Mazdean 
 confession : ** I confess myself a Mazdayasnian 
 of Zarathustra's order : I celebrate my praises 
 for good thoughts, good words, and good 
 deeds. . . . With chanting praises I present all 
 good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, 
 and with rejection I repudiate all evil 
 thoughts and words and deeds. Here I give 
 to you, oh ye Bountiful Immortals, sacrifice 
 and homage with the mind,^ with words, deeds, 
 and my entire person, yea, I offer to you the 
 flesh of my very body."^ The formulae of 
 confession, as well as other parts of this liturgy, 
 are penetrated with the idea of a moral-theo- 
 
 1 Zend-Avesta, pt. i. p. 246. 
 
 ^ Cf. the Greek sentiment^ Ova-ta dptcrTr) yviofJirj ayaO-q, 
 Joann. Damascen.j Sacr. Par., tit. ix. p. 640. 
 3 Zend-Avesta, pt. iii. p. 247. 
 
2i6 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 logical dualism to which our Christian theology 
 has been indirectly deeply indebted. The 
 Mazdean proclaims his detestation of the 
 Daevas, and of Angra-Mainyu, the evil god. 
 "Taught by Ahura, I drive away Angra- 
 Mainyu from this house, this borough " ; such 
 words are " victorious, most healing," ^ and 
 could be used as the recitation of our creed 
 and paternoster have been used, as veritable 
 spells against the evil power or demon. But 
 in comparing the spell-prayers of the Persian 
 with the Vedic, we are struck with the superi- 
 ority of the former liturgy in one respect, 
 that here the spell is only brought to bear on 
 the demon, not on the highest god ; the 
 prayer increases the spiritual force of the 
 worshipper but does not constrain Ahura. 
 
 And the Iranian prayers appear to rise 
 above the Vedic in the enthusiasm of the idea 
 of righteousness that pervades them, and in 
 the conviction that the believer can aid Ahura- 
 Mazda in the continual struggle against the 
 
 1 Zend-Avesta, pt. i. p, 138. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 217 
 
 power of evil and in helping towards the final 
 establishment of the righteous kingdom. He 
 prays that, "Through the good thought and 
 the holiness of him who offers thee the due 
 meed of praise thou mayest, oh Lord, make 
 the world of Resurrection appear at thy will, 
 under thy sovereign rule."^ " May we be such 
 as those who bring on this great Renovation."^ 
 " May we help to bring on the good govern- 
 ment of Ahura, which is the best for us at 
 every present hour."^ " Be righteousness life- 
 strong and clothed with body. In that realm 
 which shines with splendour as the sun, let 
 piety be present, and may she, through the 
 indwelling of thy good mind, give us blessings 
 in reward for deeds."* In fact the greater 
 number of the prayers are strikingly spiritual, 
 and for spiritual, not material blessings. The 
 prophet asks Ahura, " How man may become 
 most like unto thee ? "^ and prays for " aids 
 of grace, beseeching what in accordance with 
 
 1 Pt. i. p. 147. 2 pt. iii. pp. 33-34. 
 
 3 /6., p. 179. * Ih., p. 106. 5 /6., p. 49. 
 
2i8 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 thy wished-for aim is best."^ And the prayer 
 is sometimes directed to abstract moral powers, 
 emanations of A hura : ** If the Mazda- Ahura 
 and Righteousness and Pious Concord be 
 invokable, I implore through the good mind a 
 kingdom for myself, through whose increase 
 we may conquer the Lie." The kingdom is 
 here the "Desirable Kingdom of Righteous- 
 ness."^ Certainly the Mazdean kingdom was 
 not of this world, and the Zarathustrian 
 religion is one of the least materialistic that 
 the world has known ; its chief moral weakness 
 being, as we have seen, its bondage to ritualistic 
 purity. We may note in conclusion, as show- 
 ing the continuity of the national spirit, the 
 pronouncement of a Persian Christian, Bishop 
 Aphrahat of East Syria, that the only valid 
 object of prayer was purity of heart. ^ 
 
 Many of the phenomena that we have been 
 noting among the Aryan races confront us 
 
 1 Pt. iii., p. 170. 
 
 ^ Archivf. Religionsrviss., 1904, p. 395. 
 
 3 Von der Goltz, Das Gebet, p. 288. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 219 
 
 again when we turn to the Chaldasan-Baby- 
 lonian liturgies. Here also there appears no 
 real antagonism between spell and prayer, 
 magic and religion/ Spell- formulae are used 
 and accompanied with a ritual of purification 
 to drive out the evil spirits of sickness ; and 
 the highest hymns containing real prayers 
 can be employed as texts for magic purposes ; 
 even the gods themselves work by magic, and 
 Marduk himself is invoked as the arch- 
 magician.^ And the idea that the prayer 
 could in some sense exercise compulsion on 
 the god appears in an anecdote told by 
 Porphyry about a Chaldaean who was an expert 
 in " purifications of the soul : but found his 
 efforts thwarted because another man who was 
 powerful in the same art had, by means of 
 mystic prayers, bound over the powers he had 
 invoked not to grant his demands."^ Yet by 
 the side of all this we find often an exalted 
 
 ^ Jastrow, Religion Bahyloniens w. Assyriejis, vol. i. pp. 
 391-393, 423, 427. 
 
 2 76., p. 497. 3 s. Aug., De Civ. Del, 10, 9- 
 
220 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 type of prayer, with spiritual and fervent 
 expressions of homage ; and the rehgious law 
 that "prayer absolves from sin" is given as 
 part of Marduk's revelation to man/ A large 
 number of the records contain the liturgies 
 used by the kings, and while victory, health, 
 and long life, the permanence of the dynasty 
 are the more usual objects of the petition, the 
 deeper ethical tone is often heard. The 
 following are a few examples of the higher 
 aspirations of the Babylonian religion. The 
 founder of the new Babylonian kingdom has 
 recorded his convictions for the guidance of his 
 successor : ** Marduk sees through the lips, 
 sees the heart : he who keeps true to Bel and 
 the son of Bel will last for ever."^ One of the 
 greatest prayers in this or any other liturgical 
 collection is that which Nebukadnezar made to 
 Marduk on his accession :^ " Oh Eternal Ruler, 
 Lord of All . . . lead the King by the right 
 way ... I am . . . the work of thy hand : 
 
 1 King, Babylonian Religion, p. 83. 
 
 2 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 401. ^ /^^ p 4Q2. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 221 
 
 after thy great mercy which thou showest to 
 all, oh I^ord, grant that thy high majesty may 
 show compassion upon me : set in my heart 
 the fear of thy Godhead : grant me what thou 
 deemest best : for thou it is that hast created 
 my life." This is scarcely the Nebukadnezar 
 whom we once thought we knew. There is 
 also a pathetic interest attaching to the prayer 
 of Nabonnedos to the god Schamasch for his son 
 Belsazar : ^ " Prolong the days of Belsazar, my 
 first-born son — may he commit no sin." The 
 king Nabonnedos prays also to Marduk : "May 
 I rule as king according to thy wish ... let 
 me not in my pride lose knowledge of thee, 
 for it is thou that hast chosen me out." ^ The 
 following phrases in a prayer to Marduk of an 
 unknown ruler are still more striking : " Oh 
 Marduk, great Lord ... let me behold thy God- 
 head, let me attain my heart's desire : set right- 
 eousness on my Ups and grace in my heart." ^ 
 
 1 Jastrow, op. cit.^ p. 408. ^ lb., p. 411. 
 
 3 lb., p. 501 : the elevated tone of the old Babylonian 
 royal hturgy was still preserved under the later Seleukid 
 rule, vide p. 414. 
 
222 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 Among the attributes of the gods there is a 
 fervent recognition of their mercy and com- 
 passionateness : Marduk is " the god full of 
 mercy, who loves to quicken that which is 
 dead " ; ^ and Ischtar, the goddess, is invoked 
 as "the helper of the oppressed, oh thou 
 endowed with majesty ; thou who raisest 
 the fallen and exaltest the trodden under 
 foot."^ And the same idea reappears in a 
 hymn to another goddess of like character 
 with Ischtar, in which we catch the tones of 
 a high religious poetry of homage:^ ''Oh 
 strong and majestic, highest of the goddesses, 
 radiant star . . . strongest of the goddesses 
 whose robe is the light: thou who dost 
 course through heaven and engirdle the 
 earth . . . dealing punishment and plead- 
 ing for men, rewarding the just, leading 
 the wanderer, overthrowing the enemy who 
 feareth not thy Godhead, protecting the 
 captive, taking the weak by the hand — be 
 
 1 Jastrow, oy. cit, p. 501. ^ /^^ p, 533 
 
 8 lb., p. 536. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 223 
 
 gracious unto thy servant, who calls upon 
 thy name with grace." 
 
 This brief illustrative selection may close 
 with the quotation of a prayer or hymn of 
 praise to Marduk, perhaps the most remark- 
 able among those that have as yet been 
 translated:^ "The Lord, peerless in might, 
 the King of grace, the Ruler of the lands, that 
 bringeth peace in heaven, that through his 
 glance overthroweth the mighty. Lord, thy 
 seat is Babylon, thy crown Borsippa. Thy 
 thought, oh Lord, passeth over the wide 
 heavens, and with thine eyes thou beholdest 
 the affliction of men, through the anger of thy 
 countenance thou spreadest lamentation, and 
 thou takest him captive who regardeth thee 
 not and setteth himself up against thee. 
 Through thy gracious countenance thou 
 showest men favour, thou lettest them see 
 the light and they proclaim thy Righteous- 
 ness. Oh Lord of the lands. Light of Izizi, 
 thou who proclaimest grace, who is it whose 
 
 1 Jastrow, op, cit., p. 509. 
 
2 24 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 mouth doth not tell of thy Righteousness, who 
 doth not praise thy majesty, and glorify thy 
 lordship ? . . . Look down upon the hands 
 raised in prayer to thee. Grant favour to thy 
 city Babylon . . . and turn thy countenance 
 upon thy house, and give help to the sons of 
 Babylon and all thy people." 
 
 With all their spells and their magic, the 
 higher minds of the Babylonians knew how 
 to pray, and the fervent and exalted tones of 
 such liturgies remind us of the religious poetry 
 of Israel. And it is interesting to note that 
 among the few deities of Babylon whose ideal 
 reached to such a point of ethical development, 
 the moon-god Sin appears, who gave his name 
 to Sinai, and who has been thought by some to 
 have had some original affinity with the God 
 of Israel.^ 
 
 As regards the liturgies of Egypt, so far as 
 1 have been able with very limited oppor- 
 tunities to examine them, the superstition of 
 the spell lay so heavy on the Egyptian mind, 
 
 ^ Jastrow, op, cit,, pp. 439-4-40. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 225 
 
 that prayer does not seem able to extricate 
 itself from its prepossession. Not only do the 
 deities work by means of spells and the magic 
 of their names, but the worshipper uses the 
 same means to work upon them ; and the 
 prayer that accompanies the spell seems 
 usually to savour of self-confidence and 
 command. At least this is the impression 
 one gathers from what is published concerning 
 the Book of the Dead and the ritual practised 
 to secure the happiness of the deceased. By 
 utterance of words of enchantment over 
 pictures, the soul of the dead becomes divine.^ 
 The magic word helps to transfer the power 
 of the deity into the fetich, and this with the 
 word written upon it is placed on the body 
 of the dead : for instance, an amulet with the 
 words, *' May the blood of I sis . . . and the 
 word of power of I sis be mighty to protect 
 this mighty one " ; ^ a terra-cotta lamp of the 
 Greco-Roman period, carved with the symbol 
 
 1 Budge, Egyptian Magic, pp. 108^ 110, 120. 
 2/6., p. 127. 
 
 15 
 
2 26 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 of the frog-headed goddess Heqt, and bearing 
 the words, '• I am the Resurrection."^ On an 
 object placed under the head of the deceased 
 to maintain the warmth of the body, we find 
 the following words, supposed to be addressed 
 by the spirit to Amen:^ "I am a perfect 
 spirit among the companions of Ra, and I 
 have gone in and come forth among the 
 perfect souls . . . grant thou unto me the 
 things which my body needeth, and heaven 
 for my soul and a hidden place for my 
 mummy." "May the god who himself is 
 hidden and whose face is concealed, who 
 shineth upon the world in his forms of exist- 
 ence and in the underworld, grant that my 
 soul may live for ever."^ Here we have the 
 statement of a conviction that gains its 
 assurance from magic, followed by prayer. 
 It seems that the Egyptian prayed to the 
 gods, as if by such prayer he might gain 
 immortality, but that he trusted equally to 
 
 ^ Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 63. 
 2/6., p. 119. 3/6., p. 119. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 227 
 
 magical means, to pictures and words of power 
 from the sacred texts, and employed at once 
 the methods of religion and of enchantment.^ 
 
 Looking at the Christian religion, we should 
 find it hard to give a succinct and accurate 
 account of these phenomena in the various 
 stages of its history. We may be able to 
 set forth the theories and ritual -practices of 
 the various churches and compare them with 
 what we find elsewhere ; but it is more 
 difficult to analyse accurately the religious 
 psychology, the thought and feeling which 
 accompanies the ritual : the quality of the 
 mental state would depend partly on the 
 ancestral conditions and the strength of the 
 ancestral instincts of the individual. And 
 the teaching of the most spiritual Christian 
 philosophy has not been able to prevent 
 some touches of the old-world magic from 
 contaminating the worship. The theory of 
 the leading thinkers among the early Christian 
 fathers agreed, as we have seen, with the 
 
 ^ Budge^ Egyptian Magic, p. 184. 
 
228 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 pronouncement of later Greek philosophy. 
 Both for Clemens, who gives us the earliest 
 theory of Christian prayer, without finding, 
 however, a clear logical system, and for Origen, 
 the final justification of prayer was com- 
 munion with God, TO OLvaKpaOrjifaL tw Tn^ev/mari,^ 
 ofjuXCa 77/009 TOP 6eov r) ^^XV*^ And Clemens 
 maintains that the true gnostic, he who has 
 the true knowledge of God, " works himself 
 with God in his prayer so as to attain per- 
 fection."^ The gnostic of Clemens, then, is 
 not purely petitionary in his prayer; by his 
 spontaneous self - projection he contributes 
 something himself to the attainment of the 
 end he prays for; and, as I have ventured 
 to suggest above, we may discern in this 
 theory the meeting-point of the more primi- 
 tive and the more exalted religious views. 
 
 Meantime the actual heretic sect of the 
 gnostics were applying much of the old magic 
 
 1 Origen, irepl cv^^s, c. 10, 2. 
 
 2 Clemens, Strom., vii., eh. 7, § 39, p. 854, Pott. 
 
 3 lb., § 38, p. 853, Pott. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 229 
 
 under new names and new texts, and did not 
 even care to discard wholly the old spell- 
 nomenclature/ And even in the orthodox 
 churches, as we have seen, the mystic power 
 and liturgical use of the name has continued, 
 being the inheritance of a different religious 
 world from that with which we are familiar 
 or of which we are conscious. We may also 
 legitimately compare many of the ritual acts 
 which accompany prayer, for instance in the 
 earlier and later Roman Church, with the 
 suggestive or mimetic religious actions of less 
 advanced cults. One of the most interesting 
 examples that may be quoted is the description 
 of the blessing of the baptismal water on the 
 eve of the Epiphany, a custom prevalent in 
 the earlier Church of Rome : ^ the priest, while 
 praying to God to sanctify the water, dipped a 
 crucifix thrice into it, recalling in his prayer 
 the miracle described in Exodus, the sweeten- 
 ing of the bitter water with wood ; then 
 
 ^ Fide Von der Goltz, op. ciL, p. 310. 
 
 2 Fide Usener, Archiv fur Religionstviss., 1904, p. 293. 
 
7 
 
 230 The Evolution of Religion 
 
 followed antiphonal singing describing Christ's 
 baptism in Jordan, which sanctified the water. 
 We appear to have here a combination of 
 the great typical forms of the immemorial 
 religious energy, prayer pure and simple, the 
 potent use of the spiritually charged object, 
 the fetich (in this case the crucifix), and an 
 intoned or chanted narrative which has the 
 spell- value of suggestion.^ 
 
 What maintained the use of the spell- 
 prayer in full vigour throughout the earlier 
 and medieval epochs of Christendom, even in 
 the orthodox ritual, was chiefly the practice 
 of exorcism and the belief in demons and 
 demoniac possession ; and the legal institution 
 of the ordeal contributed also to its main- 
 tenance. As modern society has abandoned 
 such institutions, and the modern mind is no 
 longer possessed with demonology, so in the 
 modern worship prayer has become more and 
 more purified from the associations of the 
 spell ; the traces that remain of the latter are 
 
 ^ Vide supra, pp. 181-182. 
 
The Evolution of Prayer 231 
 
 faint and usually unintelligible to the modern 
 worshipper. And on the other side there is 
 a progressive tendency beginning to be felt, 
 making for a reform of our liturgy in respect 
 of the objects for which prayer should be 
 proffered. But in this respect, as the com- 
 parison has shown, we cannot be said to have 
 advanced as yet beyond many of the old-world 
 religions. 
 
 The special subjects of these last two 
 lectures, the history of purification and prayer, 
 have only been presented in an inadequate 
 sketch. The full and exhaustive treatment 
 of either would serviceably fill a gap in the 
 library of comparative religion. But they 
 have served my present purpose, if they have 
 been able to illustrate and to some extent test 
 the value of the comparative study of the 
 various theologies of mankind. 
 
Index 
 
 Aion, 36, 37. 
 
 Anthropology, value of, 5 : 
 occasional defects in its 
 method of treating re- 
 ligious problems^ 1 2-1 7 : 
 suggested improvements in 
 method, 17-23. 
 
 Apostolic succession, 49-50. 
 
 Babylonian spells and prayers, 
 
 218-224. 
 Baptism, a cathartic ritual, 
 
 156-158: of infants, 56- 
 
 57. 
 Buddhism, ideas concerning 
 
 purity, 107. 
 
 Celibacy of priesthood, 154- 
 156. 
 
 Christianity, comparison with 
 earlier " Mediterranean " 
 religions in mythology, 25- 
 30 ; in terminology, 30-39 ; 
 external symbols, 39-48 ; 
 institutions and organisa- 
 tion, 48-58 ; in dogma and 
 belief, 59-75 : vide Prayer. 
 
 CoUideriani, 72. 
 
 Comparative religion, method 
 of study, 81-85 : short 
 survey of its growth, 1-6. 
 
 Confession, 54-56, 158-l60. 
 
 Cursing-ritual, a form of spell, 
 196-198. 
 
 Eschatological beliefs, 63-64. 
 
 Fasting, a cathartic ritual, 
 
 153-154. 
 Festivals, influence of pagan 
 
 on Christian, 58. 
 Fetichism, 44-47 : in Hellas, 
 
 44-45 : in Christianity, 45- 
 
 47. 
 
 Hellenism, influence on 
 
 Christianity, 23. 
 Hero-worship, 75-76. 
 Hilaria, 62. 
 Homicide, cathartic origin 
 
 of law concerning, 140- 
 
 152. 
 Human incarnation of divinity, 
 
 59-60. 
 
 233 
 
Inde; 
 
 233 
 
 Human sacrifice, legends 
 concerning, 27-28. 
 
 Idolatry, 40-44, 
 Indo-Gei*manic spell, 193. 
 Ischtar, legend of, 29. 
 
 Kalevala, 184, I9I. 
 Kore, 33 : gnostic-pagan wor- 
 ship of, 34-35, 65. 
 
 Mariolatry, 60, 69, 72. 
 Mexican religion, 3. 
 Montanism, 67. 
 Mother of God, 38, 66. 
 
 Names, religious influence of, 
 32, 184-192. 
 
 Parthenos, 37-38 : cf. 65, 69, 
 70. 
 
 Peruvian religion, 3. 
 
 Phrygian religion, 24, 62, 66~ 
 68. 
 
 Prayer (vide Spell) definition 
 of, 1 65 : distinction be- 
 tween prayer and spell, l67- 
 169 : antagonism between 
 them, 193-194: objects of 
 prayer, progi*ess from 
 material to spiritual, 173- 
 174: prayer a form of 
 communion with the deity, 
 174: Christian theory of 
 prayer, 227-228 : survival 
 of spell in Christian liturgy, 
 228-230 : Egyptian prayer, 
 188; dominated by spell, 
 224-227 : EngHsh, earliest 
 
 example of spell-prayer, 
 194 : Eleusinian spell- 
 prayer, 194 : Hellenic 
 prayer, 187, 200-205, 207; 
 Hellenic spells, 196; spell 
 prayer, 199-200 ; theory of 
 prayer in Hellenic phil- 
 osophy, 206 : Iranian lit- 
 urgical magic, 199 ; prayers 
 and spells in Zarathustrian 
 ritual, 213-218: Latin 
 prayer, 185 : Roman spell- 
 prayer, 195 : Peruvian 
 prayer, 183 n. 3 : savage ex- 
 amples of real prayer, 1 82- 
 1 83 : Umbrian prayer, 186 : 
 Vedic spell-formulae com- 
 bined with prayer, 208-21 3. 
 Purification : primitive ideas 
 concerning pure and im- 
 pure substances, 89-91 • 
 analysis of primitive sensa- 
 tion of impurity, 92-98 : 
 purification after battle, 94 ; 
 after funerals, 96 : logical 
 development of idea of 
 purity, 98-101 : psycho- 
 logical effect of impure 
 contact, 102-103: purity 
 connected with belief in 
 spirits, 103-104 ; dualism 
 of good and evil spirits, 
 
 1 05 : with belief in gods, 
 
 1 06 : earliest concept non- 
 moral, 110-111: evolution 
 of idea of "pure heart," 
 111-115: cathartic sacrifice, 
 120-122 : opposition be- 
 tween spiritual and ritual- 
 
 16 
 
234 
 
 Index 
 
 istic purity, 123: Iranian 
 ideas, 97, 101, 107, 115, 
 127-132 : Jewish, 124, 126 : 
 Hellenic, 132-139; in- 
 fluence on Hellenic law, 
 140-152 : influence of idea 
 of purity on religious 
 institutions, 152-160. 
 
 Rebirth, mystic sense of, 57. 
 Resurrection, belief in, 60- 
 
 62 : resurrection of divinity, 
 
 68. 
 
 Sacrifice, 64, 120-122. 
 
 Saint- worship, 77. 
 
 Savagery, survival of, in higher 
 
 religion, 10, 11, 15, 17. 
 Scapegoat, cathartic use of, 
 
 119, 120. 
 Spell, examples of spell- 
 
 prayer, 169, 170, 175, 180: 
 spell-value of the name in 
 lower and higher religions, 
 184-192: use of narrative 
 as a spell-form of sugges- 
 tion (Navajo prayer), 181- 
 182: knowledge of origin 
 of person or substance 
 useful for spell-purposes, 
 190- 193 : progress from 
 spell to prayer, 171-173. 
 
 Teutonic religion, 41, 51, 53, 
 55, 57, 78-80: ideas of 
 purity, 107-109. 
 Thiasoi, 48-49. 
 Totemism, 13. 
 I Transference of sin, 11 6- 11 9. 
 I Trinitarian ideas, 73-74. 
 
 Virginity, exaltation of, 70-7 1 . 
 
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