at 020the very outset of the profound enquiry on which we are now about to embark, we are met by a difficulty of considerable magnitude. in the opinion of most modern mythologists mythology is the result of “a disease of language.” we are assured by many eminent men that the origin of religion is to be sought, not in savage ideas about ghosts and spirits, the dead man and his body or his surviving double, but in primitive misconceptions of the meaning of words which had reference to the appearance of the sun and the clouds, the wind and the rain, the dawn and the dusk, the various phenomena of meteorology in general. if this be so, then our attempt to derive the evolution of gods from the crude ideas of early men about their dead is clearly incorrect; the analogy of christianity which we have already alleged is a mere will o’ the wisp; and the historical jesus himself may prove in the last resort to be an alias of the sun-god or an embodiment of the vine-spirit.

i do not believe these suggestions are correct. it seems to me that the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, instead of being an element in primitive religion, is really a late and derivative type of adoration; and that mythology is mistaken in the claims it makes for its own importance in the genesis of the idea of a god or gods. in order, however, to clear the ground for a fair start in this direction, we ought, i think, to begin by enquiring into the relative positions of mythology and religion. i shall therefore 021devote a preliminary chapter to the consideration of this important subject.

religion, says another group of modern thinkers, of whom mr. edward clodd is perhaps the most able english exponent, “grew out of fear.” it is born of man’s terror of the great and mysterious natural agencies by which he is surrounded. now i am not concerned to deny that many mythological beings of various terrible forms do really so originate. i would readily accept some such vague genesis for many of the dragons and monsters which abound in all savage or barbaric imaginings—for gorgons and hydras and chim忙ras dire, and other manifold shapes of the superstitiously appalling. i would give up to mr. clodd the etruscan devils and the hebrew satan, the grendels and the fire-drakes, the whole brood of cerberus, briareus, the cyclops, the centaurs. none of these, however, is a god or anything like one. they have no more to do with religion, properly so called, than the unicorn of the royal arms has to do with british christianity. a god, as i understand the word, and as the vast mass of mankind has always understood it, is a supernatural being to be revered and worshipped. he stands to his votaries, on the whole, as dr. robertson smith has well pointed out, in a kindly and protecting relation. he may be angry with them at times, to be sure; but his anger is temporary and paternal alone: his permanent attitude towards his people is one of friendly concern; he is worshipped as a beneficent and generous father. it is the origin of gods in this strictest sense that concerns us here, not the origin of those vague and formless creatures which are dreaded, not worshipped, by primitive humanity.

bearing this distinction carefully in mind, let us proceed to consider the essentials of religion. if you were to ask almost any intelligent and unsophisticated child, “what is religion?” he would answer offhand, with the clear vision of youth, “oh, it’s saying your prayers, and heading your bible, and singing hymns, and going to church 022or to chapel on sundays.” if you were to ask any intelligent and unsophisticated hindu peasant the same question, he would answer in almost the self-same spirit, “oh, it is doing poojah regularly, and paying your dues every day to mahadeo.” if you were to ask any simple-minded african savage, he would similarly reply, “it is giving the gods flour, and oil, and native beer, and goat-mutton,” and finally if you were to ask a devout italian contadino, he would instantly say, “it is offering up candles and prayers to the madonna, attending mass, and remembering the saints on every festa.”

and they would all be quite right. this, in its essence, is precisely what we call religion. apart from the special refinements of the higher minds in particular creeds, which strive to import into it all, according to their special tastes or fancies, a larger or smaller dose of philosophy, or of metaphysics, or of ethics, or of mysticism, this is just what religion means and has always meant to the vast majority of the human species. what is common to it throughout is custom or practice: a certain set of more or less similar observances: propitiation, prayer, praise, offerings: the request for divine favours, the deprecation of divine anger or other misfortunes: and as the outward and visible adjuncts of all these, the altar, the sacrifice, the temple, the church; priesthood, services, vestments, ceremonial.

what is not at all essential to religion in its wider aspect—taking the world round, both past and present, pagan, buddhist, mohammadan, christian, savage, and civilised—is the ethical element, properly so called. and what is very little essential indeed is the philosophical element, theology or mythology, the abstract theory of spiritual existences. this theory, to be sure, is in each country or race closely related with religion under certain aspects; and the stories told about the gods or god are much mixed up with the cult itself in the minds of worshippers; but they are no proper part of religion, strictly so called. in a single word, i contend that religion, as such, is essentially 023practical: theology or mythology, as such, is essentially theoretical.

moreover, i also believe, and shall attempt to show, that the two have to a large extent distinct origins and roots: that the union between them is in great part adventitious: and that, therefore, to account for or explain the one is by no means equivalent to accounting for and explaining the other.

frank recognition of this difference of origin between religion and mythology would, i imagine, largely reconcile the two conflicting schools of thought which at present divide opinion between them on this interesting problem in the evolution of human ideas. on the one side, we have the mythological school of interpreters, whether narrowly linguistic, like professor max m眉ller, or broadly anthropological, like mr. andrew lang, attacking the problem from the point of view of myth or theory alone. on the other side, we have the truly religious school of interpreters, like mr. herbert spencer, and to some extent mr. tylor, attacking the problem from the point of view of practice or real religion. the former school, it seems to me, has failed to perceive that what it is accounting for is not the origin of religion at all—of worship, which is the central-root idea of all religious observance, or of the temple, the altar, the priest, and the offering, which are its outer expression—but merely the origin of myth or fable, the mass of story and legend about various beings, real or imaginary, human or divine, which naturally grows up in every primitive community. the latter school, on the other hand, while correctly interpreting the origin of all that is essential and central in religion, have perhaps underestimated the value of their opponents’ work through regarding it as really opposed to their own, instead of accepting what part of it may be true in the light of a contribution to an independent but allied branch of the same enquiry.

in short, if the view here suggested be correct, spencer and 024tylor have paved the way to a true theory of the origin of religion; max m眉ller, lang, and the other mythologists have thrown out hints of varying value towards a true theory of the origin of mythology, or of its more modern equivalent and successor, theology.

a brief outline of facts will serve to bring into clearer relief this view of religion as essentially practical—a set of observances, rendered inevitable by the primitive data of human psychology. it will then be seen that what is fundamental and essential in religion is the body of practices, remaining throughout all stages of human development the same, or nearly the same, in spite of changes of mythological or theological theory; and that what is accidental and variable is the particular verbal explanation or philosophical reason assigned for the diverse rites and ceremonies.

in its simplest surviving savage type, religion consists wholly and solely in certain acts of deference paid by the living to the persons of the dead. i shall try to show in the sequel that down to its most highly evolved modern type in the most cultivated societies, precisely similar acts of deference, either directly to corpses or ghosts as such, or indirectly to gods who were once ghosts, or were developed from ghosts, form its essence still. but to begin with i will try to bring a few simple instances of the precise nature of religion in its lowest existing savage mode.

i might if i chose take my little collection of illustrative facts from some theoretical writer, like mr. herbert spencer, who has collected enough instances in all conscience to prove this point; but i prefer to go straight to an original observer of savage life and habit, a presbyterian missionary in central africa—the rev. duff macdonald, author of africana—who had abundant opportunities at the blantyre mission for learning the ideas and practice of the soudanese natives, and who certainly had no theoretic predisposition towards resolving all religious notions into 025the primitive respect and reverence for the dead or the worship of ancestors.

here, in outline, but in mr. macdonald’s own words, are the ideas and observances which this careful and accurate investigator found current among the tribes of the heart of africa. “i do not think,” he says, “i have admitted any point of importance without having heard at least four natives on the subject. the statements are translations, as far as possible, from the ipsissima verba of the negroes.”

the tribes he lived among “are unanimous in saying that there is something beyond the body which they call spirit. every human body at death is forsaken by this spirit.” that is the almost universal though not quite primitive belief, whose necessary genesis has been well traced out by mr. herbert spencer, and more recently in america with great vigour and clearness by mr. lester ward.

“do these spirits ever die?” mr. macdonald asks. “some,” he answers, “i have heard affirm that it is possible for a troublesome spirit to be killed. others give this a direct denial. many, like kumpama, or cherasulo, say, ‘you ask me whether a man’s spirit ever dies. i cannot tell. i have never been in the spirit-world, but this i am certain of, that spirits live for a very long time.’”

on the question, “who the gods are?” mr. macdonald says: “in all our translations of scripture where we found the word god we used mulungu; but this word is chiefly used by the natives as a general name for spirit. the spirit of a deceased man is called his mulungu, and all the prayers and offerings of the living are presented to such spirits of the dead. it is here that we find the great centre of the native religion. the spirits of the dead are the gods of the living.

“where are these gods found? at the grave? no. the villagers shrink from yonder gloomy place that lies far beyond their fields on the bleak mountain side. it is only 026when they have to lay another sleeper beside his forefathers that they will go there. their god is not the body in the grave, but the spirit, and they seek this spirit at the place where their departed kinsman last lived among them. it is the great tree at the verandah of the dead man’s house that is their temple; and if no tree grow here they erect a little shade, and there perform their simple rites. if this spot become too public, the offerings may be defiled, and the sanctuary will be removed to a carefully-selected spot under some beautiful tree. very frequently a man presents an offering at the top of his own bed beside his head. he wishes his god to come to him and whisper in his ear as he sleeps.”

and here, again, we get the origin of nature-worship:

“the spirit of an old chief may have a whole mountain for his residence, but he dwells chiefly on the cloudy summit. there he sits to receive the worship of his votaries, and to send down the refreshing showers in answer to their prayers.”

almost as essential to religion as these prime factors in its evolution—the god, worship, offerings, presents, holy places, temples—is the existence of a priesthood. here is how the central africans arrive at that special function:

“a certain amount of etiquette is observed in approaching the gods. in no case can a little boy or girl approach these deities, neither can anyone that has not been at the mysteries. the common qualification is that a person has attained a certain age, about twelve or fourteen years, and has a house of his own. slaves seldom pray, except when they have had a dream. children that have had a dream tell their mother, who approaches the deity on their behalf. (a present for the god is necessary, and the slave or child may not have it.)

“apart from the case of dreams and a few such private matters, it is not usual for anyone to approach the gods except the chief, of the village. he is the recognised high priest 027who presents prayers and offerings on behalf of all that live in his village. if the chief is from home his wife will act, and if both are absent, his younger brother. the natives worship not so much individually as in villages or communities. their religion is more a public than a private matter.”

but there are also further reasons why priests are necessary. relationship forms always a good ground for intercession. a mediator is needed.

“the chief of a village,” says mr. macdonald, “has another title to the priesthood. it is his relatives that are the village gods. everyone that lives in the village recognises these gods; but if anyone remove to another village he changes his gods. he recognises now the gods of his new chief. one wishing to pray to the god (or gods) of any village naturally desires to have his prayers presented through the village chief, because the latter is nearly related to the village god, and may be expected to be better listened to than a stranger.”

a little further on mr. macdonald says: “on the subject of the village gods opinions differ. some say that every one in the village, whether a relative of the chief or not, must worship the forefathers of the chief. others say that a person not related to the chief must worship his own forefathers, otherwise their spirits will bring trouble upon him. to reconcile these authorities we may mention that nearly everyone in the village is related to its chief, or if not related is, in courtesy, considered so. any person not related to the village chief would be polite enough on all public occasions to recognise the village god: on occasions of private prayer (which are not so numerous as in christendom) he would approach the spirits of his own forefathers. besides, there might be a god of the land. the chief kapeni prays to his own relatives, and also to the old gods of the place. his own relatives he approaches himself; the other deities he may also approach himself, but he often 028finds people more closely related and consequently more acceptable to the old gods of the land.”

the african pantheon is thus widely peopled. elimination and natural selection next give one the transition from the ghost to the god, properly so called.

“the gods of the natives then are nearly as numerous as their dead. it is impossible to worship all; a selection must be made, and, as we have indicated, each worshipper turns most naturally to the spirits of his own departed relatives; but his gods are too many still, and in farther selecting he turns to those that have lived nearest his own time. thus the chief of a village will not trouble himself about his great-great-grandfather: he will present his offering to his own immediate predecessor, and say, ‘o father, i do not know all your relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.’ the offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his relatives.”

ordinary ghosts are soon forgotten with the generation that knew them. not so a few select spirits, the c忙sars and napoleons, the charlemagnes and timurs of savage empires.

“a great chief that has been successful in his wars does not pass out of memory so soon. he may become the god of a mountain or a lake, and may receive homage as a local deity long after his own descendants have been driven from the spot. when there is a supplication for rain the inhabitants of the country pray not so much to their own forefathers as to the god of yonder mountain on whose shoulders the great rain-clouds repose. (smaller hills are seldom honoured with a deity.)”

well, in all this we get, it seems to me, the very essentials and universals of religion generally,—the things without which no religion could exist—the vital part, without the ever-varying and changeable additions of mere gossiping mythology. in the presents brought to the dead man’s grave to appease the ghost, we have the central element of all worship, the practical key of all cults, past or present.

on 029the other hand, mythologists tell us nothing about the origin of prayer and sacrifice: they put us off with stories of particular gods, without explaining to us how those gods ever came to be worshipped. now, mythology is a very interesting study in its own way: but to treat as religion a mass of stories and legends about gods or saints, with hardly a single living element of practice or sacrifice, seems to me simply to confuse two totally distinct branches of human enquiry. the origin of tales has nothing at all to do with the origin of worship.

when we come to read mr. macdonald’s account of a native funeral, on the other hand, we are at once on a totally different tack; we can understand, as by an electric flash, the genesis of the primitive acts of sacrifice and religion.

“along with the deceased is buried a considerable part of his property. we have already seen that his bed is buried with him; so also are all his clothes. if he possesses several tusks of ivory, one tusk or more is ground to a powder between two stones and put beside him. beads are also ground down in the same way. these precautions are taken to prevent the witch (who is supposed to be answerable for his death) from making any use of the ivory or beads.

“if the deceased owned several slaves, an enormous hole is dug for a grave. the slaves are now brought forward. they may be either cast into the pit alive, or the undertakers may cut all their throats. the body of their master or their mistress is then laid down to rest above theirs, and the grave is covered in.

“after this the women come forward with the offerings of food, and place them at the head of the grave. the dishes in which the food was brought are left behind. the pot that held the drinking-water of the deceased and his drinking-cup are also left with him. these, too, might be coveted by the witch, but a hole is pierced in the pot, and the drinking calabash is broken.

“the 030man has now gone from the society of the living, and he is expected to share the meal thus left at his grave with those that have gone before him. the funeral party breaks up; they do not want to visit the grave of their friend again without a very good reason. anyone found among the graves may be taken for a cannibal. their friend has become a citizen of a different village. he is with all his relatives of the past. he is entitled to offerings or presents which may come to him individually or through his chief. these offerings in most cases he will share with others, just as he used to do when alive,” sometimes the man may be buried in his own hut.

“in this case the house is not taken down, but is generally covered with cloth, and the verandah becomes the place for presenting offerings. his old house thus becomes a kind of temple.... the deceased is now in the spirit-world, and receives offerings and adoration. he is addressed as ‘our great spirit that has gone before.’ if anyone dream of him. it is at once concluded that the spirit is ‘up to something.’ very likely he wants to have some of the survivors for his companions. the dreamer hastens to appease the spirit by an offering.”

so real is this society of the dead that mr. macdonald says: “the practice of sending messengers to the world beyond the grave is found on the west coast. a chief summons a slave, delivers to him a message, and then cuts off his head. if the chief forget anything that he wanted to say, he sends another slave as a postscript.”

i have quoted at such length from this recent and extremely able work because i want to bring into strong relief the fact that we have here going on under our very eyes, from day to day, de novo, the entire genesis of new gods and goddesses, and of all that is most central and essential to religion—worship, prayer, the temple, the altar, priesthood, sacrifice. nothing that the mythologists can tell us about the sun or the moon, the dawn or the stormcloud, 031little red riding hood or cinderella and the glass slipper, comes anywhere near the origin of religion in these its central and universal elements. those stories or guesses may be of immense interest and importance as contributions to the history of ideas in our race; but nothing we can learn about the savage survival in the myth of cupid or psyche, or about the primitive cosmology in the myth of the children of kronos, helps us to get one inch nearer the origin of god or of prayer, of worship, of religious ceremonial, of the temple, the church, the sacrifice, the mass, or any other component part of what we really know as religion in the concrete. these myths may be sometimes philosophic guesses, sometimes primitive folk-tales, but they certainly are not the truths of religion. on the other hand, the living facts, here so simply detailed by a careful, accurate, and unassuming observer, strengthened by the hundreds of similar facts collected by tylor, spencer, and others, do help us at once to understand the origin of the central core and kernel of religion as universally practised all the world over.

for, omitting for the present the mythological and cosmological factor, which so often comes in to obscure the plain religious facts in missionary narrative or highly-coloured european accounts of native beliefs, what do we really find as the underlying truths of all religion? that all the world over practices essentially similar to those of these savage central africans prevail among mankind; practices whose affiliation upon the same primitive ideas has been abundantly proved by mr. herbert spencer; practices which have for their essence the propitiation or adulation of a spiritual being or beings, derived from ghosts, and conceived of as similar, in all except the greatness of the connoted attributes, to the souls of men. “whenever the [indian] villagers are questioned about their creed,” says sir william hunter, “the same answer is invariably given: ‘the common people have no idea of religion, 032but to do right [ceremonially] and to worship the village god.”

in short, i maintain that religion is not mainly, as the mistaken analogy of christian usage makes us erroneously call it, faith or creed, but simply and solely ceremony, custom, or practice. and i am glad to say that, for early semitic times at least, professor robertson smith is of the same opinion.

if one looks at the vast mass of the world, ancient and modern, it is quite clear that religion consists, and has always consisted, of observances essentially similar to those just described among the central african tribes. its core is worship. its centre is the god—that is to say, the dead ancestor or relative. the religion of china is to this day almost entirely one of pure ancestor-cult. the making of offerings and burning of joss-paper before the family dead form its principal ceremonies. in india, while the three great gods of the mystical brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and its own special cult of its little domestic altar.

“the first englishman,” says sir william hunter, “who tried to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the brahmans described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship quite distinct from that of the hindu deities. a bengal village has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-hinduised low-castes. the rude stone represents the non-aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village.”

omitting the mere guesswork about the fetish and the gratuitous supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of max-m眉llerism, that ancestor-worship must necessarily 033be a “non-aryan” feature (though it exists or existed in all so-called aryan races), this simple description shows us the prevalence over the whole of india of customs essentially similar to those which obtain in central africa and in the chinese provinces.

the roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once into a civic or national and a private or family cult. there were the great gods, native or adopted, whom the state worshipped publicly, as the central african tribes worship the chiefs ancestors; and there were the lares and penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral spirits. and as the real or practical hindu religion consists mainly of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family deities or to the chosen patron god in the brahmanist pantheon, so, too, the real or practical roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice done at the domestic altar to the special penates, farre pio et saliente mica.

i will not go on to point out in detail at the present stage of our argument how professor sayce similarly finds ancestor-worship and shamanism (a low form of ghost-propitiation) at the root of the religion of the ancient ac-cadians; how other observers have performed the same task for the egyptians and japanese; and how like customs have been traced among greeks and amazulu, among hebrews and nicaraguans, among early english and digger indians, among our aryan ancestors themselves and andaman islanders. every recent narrative of travel abounds with examples. of netherland island i read, “the skulls of their ancestors were treasured for gods of the new hebrides, “the people worshipped the spirits of their ancestors. they prayed to them, over the kava-bowl, for health and prosperity.” in new caledonia, “their gods were their ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolised.” at tana, “the general name for gods seemed to be aremha; that means a dead man, and hints,” 034says the rev. george turner, with pleasing frankness, “alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship.” when the chief prayed, he offered up yam and fruits, saying, “compassionate father, here is some food for you; eat it. be kind to us on account of it.” those who wish to see the whole of the evidence on this matter marshalled in battle array have only to turn to the first volume of mr. herbert spencer’s principles of sociology, where they will find abundant examples from all times and places gathered together in a vast and overwhelming phalanx.

what concerns us in this chapter a little more is to call attention by anticipation to the fact that even in christianity itself the same primitive element survives as the centre of all that is most distinctively religious, as opposed to theological, in the christian religion. and i make these remarks provisionally here in order that the reader may the better understand to what ultimate goal our investigation will lead him.

it is the universal catholic custom to place the relics of saints or martyrs under the altars in churches. thus the body of st. mark the evangelist lies under the high altar of st. mark’s, at venice; and in every other italian cathedral, or chapel, a reliquary is deposited within the altar itself. so well understood is this principle in the latin church, that it has hardened into the saying, “no relic, no altar.” the sacrifice of the mass takes place at such an altar, and is performed by a priest in sacrificial robes. the entire roman catholic ritual is a ritual derived from the earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry at an altar, and its connection with the primitive form is still kept up by the necessary presence of human remains in its holy places.

furthermore, the very idea of a church itself is descended from the early christian meeting-places in the catacombs or at the tombs of the martyrs, which are universally allowed to have been the primitive christian altars. 035we know now that the cruciform dome-covered plan of christian churches is derived from these early meeting-places at the junction of lanes or alleys in the catacombs; that the nave, chancel, and transepts indicate the crossing of the alleys, while the dome represents the hollowed-out portion or rudely circular vault where the two lines of archway intersect. the earliest dome-covered churches were attempts, as it were, to construct a catacomb above ground for the reception of the altar-tomb of a saint or martyr. similarly with the chapels that open out at the side from the aisles or transepts. etymologically, the word chapel is the modernised form of capella, the arched sepulchre excavated in the walls of the catacombs, before the tomb at which it was usual to offer up prayer and praise. the chapels built out from the aisles in roman churches, each with its own altar and its own saintly relics, are attempts to reproduce above ground in the same way the original sacred places in the early christian excavated cemeteries. we will recur to this subject at much greater length in subsequent chapters.

thus christianity itself is linked on to the very antique custom of worship at tombs, and the habit of ancestor-worship by altars, relics, and invocation of saints, even revolutionary protestantism still retaining some last faint marks of its origin in the dedication of churches to particular evangelists or martyrs, and in the more or less disguised survival of altar, priesthood, sacrifice, and vestments.

now, i do not say ancestor-worship gives us the whole origin of everything that is included in christian english minds in the idea of religion. i do not say it accounts for all the cosmologies and cosmogonies of savage, barbaric, or civilised tribes. those, for the most part, are pure mythological products, explicable mainly, i believe, by means of the key with which mythology supplies us; and one of them, adopted into genesis from an alien source, has come to be accepted by modern christendom as part of 036that organised body of belief which forms the christian creed, though not in any true sense the christian religion. nor do i say that ancestor-worship gives us the origin of those ontological, metaphysical, or mystical conceptions which form part of the philosophy or theology of many priesthoods. religions, as we generally get them envisaged for us nowadays, are held to include the mythology, the cosmogony, the ontology, and even the ethics of the race that practises them. these extraneous developments, however, i hold to spring from different roots and to have nothing necessarily in common with religion proper. the god is the true crux. if we have once accounted for the origin of ghosts, gods, tombs, altars, temples, churches, worship, sacrifice, priesthoods, and ceremonies, then we have accounted for all that is essential and central in religion, and may hand over the rest—the tales, stories, and pious legends—to the account of comparative mythology or of the yet unfounded science of comparative idealogy.

once more, i do not wish to insist, either, that every particular and individual god, national or naturalistic, must necessarily represent a particular ghost—the dead spirit of a single definite once-living person. it is enough to show, as mr. spencer has shown, that the idea of the god, and the worship paid to a god, are directly derived from the idea of the ghost, and the offerings made to the ghost, without necessarily holding, as mr. spencer seems to hold, that every god is and must be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a particular human being. once the conception of gods had been evolved by humanity, and had become a common part of every man’s imagined universe—of the world as it presented itself to the mind of the percipient—then it was natural enough that new gods should be made from time to time out of abstractions or special aspects and powers of nature, and that the same worship should be paid to such new-made and purely imaginary gods as had previously been paid to the whole host of gods 037evolved from personal and tribal ancestors. it is the first step that costs: once you have got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any number of extra gods may be invented or introduced from all quarters. a great pantheon readily admits new members to its ranks from, many strange sources. familiar instances in one of the best-known pantheons are those of concordia, pecunia, aius locutius, rediculus tutanus. the romans, indeed, deified every conceivable operation of nature or of human life; they had gods or goddesses for the minutest details of agriculture, of social relations, of the first years of childhood, of marriage and domestic arrangements generally. many of their deities, as we shall see hereafter, were obviously manufactured to meet a special demand on special occasions. but at the same time, none of these gods, so far as we can judge, could ever have come to exist at all if the ghost-theory and ancestor-worship had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles and practice of religion generally. the very idea of a god could not otherwise have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of new beings could readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.

still, to admit that other elements have afterwards come in to confuse religion is quite a different thing from admitting that religion itself has more than one origin. whatever gives us the key to the practice of worship gives us the key to all real religion. now, one may read through almost any books of the mythological school without ever coming upon a single word that throws one ray of light upon the origin of religion itself thus properly called. to trace the development of this, that, or the other story or episode in a religious myth is in itself a very valuable study in human evolution: but no amount of tracing such stories ever gives us the faintest clue to the question why men worshipped osiris, zeus, siva, or venus; why they offered up prayer and praise to isis, or to artemis; why they made sacrifices of oxen to capitolian jove 038at rome, or slew turtle-doves on the altar of jahweh, god of israel, at jerusalem. the ghost-theory and the practice of ancestor-worship show us a natural basis and genesis for all these customs, and explain them in a way to which no mythological enquiry can add a single item of fundamental interest.

it may be well at this point to attempt beforehand some slight provisional disentanglement of the various extraneous elements which interweave themselves at last with the simple primitive fabric of practical religion.

in the first place, there is the mythological element. the mythopoeic faculty is a reality in mankind. stories arise, grow, gather episodes with movement, transform and transmute themselves, wander far in space, get corrupted by time, in ten thousand ways suffer change and modification. now, such stories sometimes connect themselves with living men and women. everybody knows how many myths exist even in our own day about every prominent or peculiar person. they also gather more particularly round the memory of the dead, and especially of any very distinguished dead man or woman. sometimes they take their rise in genuine tradition, sometimes they are pure fetches of fancy or of the romancing faculty. the ghosts or the gods are no less exempt from these mythopoic freaks than other people; and as gods go on living indefinitely, they have plenty of time for myths to gather about them. most often, a myth is invented to account for some particular religious ceremony. again, myths demonstrably older than a particular human being—say c忙sar, virgil, arthur, charlemagne—may get fitted by later ages to those special personalities. the same thing often happens also with gods. myth comes at last, in short, to be the history of the gods; and a personage about whom many myths exist, whether real or imaginary, a personification of nature or an abstract quality, may grow in time to be practically a divine being, and even perhaps to receive worship, the final test of divinity.

again, 039myths about the gods come in the long run, in many cases, to be written down, especially by the priests, and themselves acquire a considerable degree of adventitious holiness. thus we get sacred books; and in most advanced races, the sacred books tend to become an important integral part of religion, and a test of the purity of tenets or ceremonial. but sacred books almost always contain rude cosmological guesses and a supernatural cosmogony, as well as tales about the doings, relationships, and prerogatives of the gods. such early philosophical conjectures come then to be intimately bound up with the idea of religion, and in many cases even to supersede in certain minds its true, practical, central kernel. the extreme of this tendency is seen in english protestant dissenting bibliolatry.

rationalistic and reconciliatory glosses tend to arise with advancing culture. attempts are made to trace the pedigree and mutual relations of the gods, and to get rid of discrepancies in earlier legends. the theogony of hesiod is a definite effort undertaken in this direction for the greek pantheon. often the attempt is made by the most learned and philosophically-minded among the priests, and results in a quasi-philosophical mythology like that of the brahmans. in the monotheistic or half-monotheistic religions, this becomes theology. in proportion as it grows more and more laboured and definite the attention of the learned and the priestly class is more and more directed to dogma, creed, faith, abstract formulae of philosophical or intellectual belief, while insisting also upon ritual or practice. but the popular religion remains usually, as in india, a religion of practical custom and observances alone, having very little relation to the highly abstract theological ideas of the learned or the priestly.

lastly, in the highest religions, a large element of ethics, of sentiment, of broad humanitarianism of adventitious emotion, is allowed to come in, often to the extent of obscuring the original factors of practice and observance.

we are 040constantly taught that “real religion” means many things which have nothing on earth to do with religion proper, in any sense, but are merely high morality, tinctured by emotional devotion towards a spiritual being or set of beings.

owing to all these causes, modern investigators, in searching for the origin of religion, are apt to mix up with it, even when dealing with savage tribes, many extraneous questions of cosmology, cosmogony, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and mythology. they do not sufficiently see that the true question narrows itself down at last to two prime factors—worship and sacrifice. in all early religions, the practice is at a maximum, and the creed at a minimum. we, nowadays, look back upon these early cults, which were cults and little else, with minds warped by modern theological prejudices—by constant wrangling over dogmas, clauses, definitions, and formularies. we talk glibly of the hindu faith or the chinese belief, when we ought rather to talk of the hindu practice or the chinese observances. by thus wrongly conceiving the nature of religion, we go astray as to its origin. we shall only get right again when we learn to separate mythology entirely from religion, and when we recognise that the growth and development of the myth have nothing at all to do with the beginnings of worship. the science of comparative mythology and folk-lore is a valuable and light-bearing study in its own way: but it has no more to do with the origin of religion than the science of ethics or the science of geology. there are ethical rules in most advanced cults: there are geological surmises in most sacred books: but neither one nor the other is on that account religion, any more than the history of jehoshaphat or the legend of samson.

what i want to suggest in the present chapter sums itself up in a few sentences thus: religion is practice, mythology is story-telling. every religion has myths that accompany it: but the myths do not give rise to the religion: 041on the contrary, the religion gives rise to the myths. and i shall attempt in this book to account for the origin of religion alone, omitting altogether both mythology as a whole, and all mythical persons or beings other than gods in the sense here illustrated.