mr. 068herbert spencer has traced so admirably in his principles of sociology the progress of development from the ghost to the god that i do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, i shall supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the life of the dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. but the hasty resume which i shall give at present will be fleshed out incidentally at a later point by consideration of several national religions.

in the earliest stage of all—the stage where the actual bodies of the dead are preserved,—gods as such are for the most part unknown: it is the corpses of friends and ancestors that are worshipped and reverenced. for example, ellis says of the corpse of a tahitian chief that it was placed in a sitting posture under a protecting shed; “a small altar was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were daily presented by the relatives, or the priest appointed to attend the body.” (this point about the priest is of essential importance.) the central americans, again, as mr. spencer notes, performed similar rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. the new guinea people, as d’albertis found, worship the dried mummies of their fathers and husbands. a little higher in the scale, we get the developed mummy-worship of egypt and peru, which survives even after the evolution 069of greater gods, from powerful kings or chieftains. other evidence in abundance has been adduced from polynesia and from africa. wherever the actual bodies of the dead are preserved, there also worship and offerings are paid to them.

often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole body but the head alone that is specially kept and worshipped. thus mr. h. o. forbes says of the people of buru: “the dead are buried in the forest in some secluded spot, marked often by a merang or grave-pole; over which at certain intervals the relatives place tobacco, cigarettes, and various offerings. when the body is decomposed, the son or nearest relative disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and places it in the matakau at the back of his house, or in a little hut erected for it near the grave. it is the representative of his forefathers, whose behests he holds in the greatest respect.”

two points are worthy of notice in this interesting account, as giving us an anticipatory hint of two further accessories whose evolution we must trace hereafter; first the grave-stake, which is probably the origin of the wooden idol; and second, the little hut erected over the head by the side of the grave, which is undoubtedly one of the origins of the temple or praying-house. observe also the ceremonial wrapping of the skull in cloth, and its oracular functions.

similarly, mr. wyatt gill, the well-known missionary, writes of a dead baby at boera, in new guinea: “it will be covered with two inches of soil, the friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull and smaller bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” and of the suau people he says: “enquiring the use of several small houses, i learned that it is to cover grave-pits. all the members of a family at death occupy the same grave, the earth that thinly covered the last occupant being scooped out to admit the newcomer. these graves are shallow; the dead are buried in a sitting posture, hands folded. 070the earth is thrown in up to the mouth only. an earthen pot covers the head. after a time the pot is taken off, the perfect skull removed and cleansed—eventually to be hung up in a basket or net inside the dwelling of the deceased over the fire, to blacken in the smoke.” in africa, again, the skull is frequently preserved in such a pot and prayed to. in america, earthenware pots have been found moulded round human skulls in mounds at new madrid and elsewhere; the skull cannot be removed without breaking the vessel. indeed, this curious method of preservation in pots seems to be very widespread; we get perhaps a vague hint or reminiscence of its former prevalence in europe in the story of isabella and the pot of basil.

the special selection and preservation of the head as an object of worship thus noted in new guinea and the malay archipelago is also still found among many other primitive peoples. for instance, the andamanese widows keep the skulls of their husbands as a precious possession: and the new caledonians, in case of sickness or calamities, “present offerings of food to the skulls of the departed.” mr. spencer quotes several similar examples, a few of which alone i extract from his pages.

“‘in the private fetish-hut of king adolee, at badagry, the skull of that monarch’s father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the earth.’ he ‘gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to answer his expectations.’ similarly among the mandans, who place the skulls of their dead in a circle, each wife knows the skull of her former husband or child, ‘and there seldom passes a day that she does not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food.... there is scarcely an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband—talking to it in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer back.’”

this 071affectionate type of converse with the dead, almost free from fear, is especially characteristic of the first or corpse-preserving stage of human death-conceptions. it seldom survives where burial has made the feeling toward the corpse a painful or loathsome one, and it is then confined to the head alone, while the grave itself with the body it encloses is rather shunned and dreaded.

a little above this level, mr. du chaillu notes that some of his west african followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off small portions of the bone, which they mixed with water and drank; giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless like their ancestors. here we have a simple and early case of that habit of “eating the god” to whose universality and importance mr. frazer has so forcibly called attention, and which we must examine at full in a subsequent chapter.

throughout the earlier and ruder phases of human evolution, this primitive conception of ancestors or dead relatives as the chief known objects of worship survives undiluted: and ancestor-worship remains to this day the principal religion of the chinese, and of several other peoples. gods, as such, are practically unknown in china. ancestor-worship also survives in many other races as one of the main cults, even after other elements of later religion have been superimposed upon it. in greece and rome, it remained to the last an important part of domestic ritual. but in most cases, a gradual differentiation is set up in time between various classes of ghosts or dead persons, some ghosts being considered of more importance and power than others; and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are finally developed. a god, in fact, is in the beginning at least an exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost—a ghost able to help, and from whose help great things may reasonably be expected.

again, 072the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do with the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king of any great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time as a god of considerable importance. we shall trace out this idea more fully hereafter in the religion of egypt; for the present it must suffice to say that the supposed power of the gods in each pantheon has regularly increased in proportion to the increased power of kings or emperors.

when we pass from the first plane of corpse-preservation and mummification to the second plane where burial is habitual, it might seem at a hasty glance as though continued worship of the dead, and their elevation into gods, would no longer be possible. for we saw that burial is prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse or ghost should return to plague the living. nevertheless, natural affection for parents or friends, and the desire to ensure their good will and aid, make these seemingly contrary ideas reconcilable. as a matter of fact, we find that even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship them: while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great stones which they roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead from rising again become in time altars on which sacrifices are offered to the spirit.

in these two later stages of thought with regard to the dead which accompany burial and cremation, the gods, indeed, grow more and more distinct from minor ghosts with an accelerated rapidity of evolution. they grow greater in proportion to the rise of temples and hierarchies. furthermore, the very indefiniteness of the bodiless ghost tells in favour of an enlarged godship. the gods are thought of as more and more aerial and immaterial, less definitely human in form and nature; they are clothed with mighty attributes; they assume colossal size; they are even identified with the sun, the moon, the great powers of nature. but they are never quite omnipotent during the polytheistic stage, because in a pantheon they are 073necessarily mutually limiting. even in the greek and roman civilisation, it is clear that the gods were not commonly envisaged by ordinary minds as much more than human; for pisistratus dressed up a courtesan at athens to represent pallas athene, and imposed by this cheap theatrical trick upon the vulgar athenians; while paul and barnabas were taken at lystra for zeus and hermes. many similar instances will occur at once to the classical scholar. it is only quite late, under the influence of monotheism, that the exalted conceptions of deity now prevalent began to form themselves in judaism and christianity.

mere domestic ancestor-worship, once more, could scarcely give us the origin of anything more than domestic religion—the cult of the manes, the household gods, as distinct from that of the tribal and national deities. but kingship supplies us with the missing link. we have seen in mr. duff macdonald’s account of the central african god-making how the worship of the chief’s ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods; and it is clear how, as chieftainship and kingship widen, national gods of far higher types may gradually evolve from these early monarchs. especially must we take the time-element into account, remembering that the earlier ancestors get at last to be individually forgotten as men, and remain in memory only as supernatural beings. thus kingship rapidly reacts upon godship. if the living king himself is great, how much greater must be the ancestor whom even the king himself fears and worships; and how infinitely greater still that yet earlier god, the ancestor’s ancestor, whom the ancestor himself revered and propitiated! in some such way there grows up gradually a hierarchy of gods, among whom the oldest, and therefore the least known, are usually in the end the greatest of any.

the consolidation of kingdoms and empires, and the advance of the arts, tell strongly with concurrent force in these directions; while the invention of written language sets 074a final seal on the godhead and might of great early ancestors. among very primitive tribes, indeed, we find as a rule only very domestic and recent objects of worship. the chief prays for the most part to his own father and his immediate predecessors. the more ancient ancestors, as mr. duff macdonald has so well pointed out, grow rapidly into oblivion. but with more advanced races, various agencies arise which help to keep in mind the early dead; and in very evolved communities these agencies, reaching a high pitch of evolution, make the recent gods or kings or ghosts seem comparatively unimportant by the side of the very ancient and very long-worshipped ones. more than of any other thing, it may be said of a god, vires acquirit eundo. thus, in advanced types of society, saints or gods of recent origin assume but secondary or minor importance; while the highest and greatest gods of all are those of the remotest antiquity, whose human history is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages.

three such agencies of prime importance in the transition from the mere ghost to the fully developed god must here be mentioned. they are the rise of temples, of idols, and, above all, of priesthoods. each of these we must now consider briefly but separately.

the origin of the temple is various; but all temples may nevertheless be reduced in the last resort either into graves of the dead, or into places where worship is specially offered up to them. this truth, which mr. herbert spencer arrived at by examination of the reports of travellers or historians, and worked up in connection with his principles of sociology, was independently arrived at through quite a different line of observation and reasoning by mr. william simpson, the well-known artist of the illustrated london news. mr. simpson has probably visited a larger number of places of worship all over the world than any other traveller of any generation: and he was early impressed by the fact which forced itself upon his eyes, that almost every one of them, where its origin could be 075traced, turned out to be a tomb in one form or another. he has set forth the results of his researches in this direction in several admirable papers, all of which, but especially the one entitled the worship of death, i can confidently recommend to the serious attention of students of religion. they contain the largest collection of instances in this matter ever yet made; and they show beyond a doubt the affiliation of the very idea of a temple on the tomb or grave of some distinguished dead person, famous for his power, his courage, or his saintliness.

the cave is probably the first form of the temple. sometimes the dead man is left in the cave which he inhabited when living; an instance of which we have already noticed among the veddahs of ceylon. in other cases, where races have outgrown the custom of cave-dwelling, the habit of cave-burial, or rather of laying the dead in caves or in artificial grottoes, still continues through the usual conservatism of religious feeling. offerings are made to the dead in all these various caves: and here we get the beginnings of cave-temples. such temples are at first of course either natural or extremely rude; but they soon begin to be decorated with rough frescoes, as is done, for example, by the south african bushmen. these frescoes again give rise in time by slow degrees to such gorgeous works as those of the tombs of the kings at thebes; each of which has attached to it a magnificent temple as its mortuary chapel. sculpture is similarly employed on the decoration of cave-temples; and we get the final result of such artistic ornament in splendid cave-temples like those of ellora. both arts were employed together in the beautiful and interesting etruscan tomb-temples.

in another class of cases, the hut where the dead man lived is abandoned at his death by his living relations, and thus becomes a rudimentary temple where offerings are made to him. this is the case with the hottentots, to take an instance at a very low grade of culture. of a new guinea 076hut-burial, mr. chalmers says: “the chief is buried in the centre; a mat was spread over the grave, on which i was asked to sit until they had a weeping.” this weeping is generally performed by women—a touch which leads us on to adonis and osiris rites, and to the christian piet脿. mr. spencer has collected several other excellent examples. thus, the arawaks place the corpse in a small boat and bury it in the hut; among the creeks, the habitation of the dead becomes his place of interment; the fantees likewise bury the dead person in his own house; and the yucatanese “as a rule abandoned the house, and left it uninhabited after the burial.” i will not multiply quotations; it will be better to refer the reader to mr. spencer’s own pages, where a sufficient number of confirmatory examples are collected to satisfy any but the most prejudiced critic. “as repeated supplies of food are taken to the abandoned house,” says mr. spencer, “and as along with making offerings there go other propitiatory acts, the deserted dwelling house, turned into a mortuary house, acquires the attributes of a temple.”

a third origin for temples is found in the shed, hut, or shelter, erected over the grave, either for the protection of the dead or for the convenience of the living who bring their offerings. thus, in parts of new guinea, according to mr. chalmers, “the natives bury their dead in the front of their dwellings, and cover the grave with a small house, in which the near relatives sleep for several months.”

“where house-burial is not practised,” says mr. spencer, once more, “the sheltering structure raised above the grave, or above the stage bearing the corpse, becomes the germ of the sacred building. by some of the new guinea people there is a ‘roof of atap erected over’ the burial-place. in cook’s time the tahitians placed the body of a dead person upon a kind of bier supported by sticks and under a roof. so, too, in sumatra, where ‘a shed is built over’ the grave; and so, too, in tonga. of course 077this shed admits of enlargement and finish. the dyaks in some places build mausoleums like houses, 18 feet high, ornamentally carved, containing the goods of the departed—sword, shield, paddle, etc. when we read that the fijians deposit the bodies of their chiefs in small enbures or temples, we may fairly conclude that these so-called temples are simply more-developed sheltering structures. still more clearly did the customs of the peruvians show that the structure erected over the dead body develops into a temple. acosta tells us that ‘every one of these kings yncas left all his treasure and revenues to entertaine the place of worshippe where his body was layed, and there were many ministers with all their familie dedicated to his service.’”

note in the last touch, by anticipation, one origin of priesthood. on the other hand, we saw in mr. duff macdonald’s account of the central african natives that those savages do not worship at the actual grave itself. in this case, terror of the revenant seems to prevent the usual forms of homage at the tomb of the deceased. moreover, the ghost being now conceived as more or less freely separable from the corpse, it will be possible to worship it in some place remote from the dreaded cemetery. hence these africans “seek the 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.” we have in this case yet another possible origin for certain temples, and also, i will add by anticipation of a future chapter, for the sacred tree, which is so common an object of pious adoration in many countries.

beginning with such natural caves or such humble huts, the temple assumes larger proportions and more beautiful decorations with the increase of art and the growth of kingdoms. especially, as we see in the tomb-temples and pyramids 078of egypt and peru, does it assume great size and acquire costly ornaments when it is built by a powerful king for himself during his own lifetime. temple-tombs of this description reach a high point of artistic development in such a building as the so-called treasury of atreus at mycen忙, which is really the sepulchre of some nameless prehistoric monarch. it is admirably reconstructed in perrot and chipiez.

obviously, the importance and magnificence of the temple will react upon the popular conception of the importance and magnificence of the god who inhabits it. and conversely, as the gods grow greater and greater, more art and more constructive skill will constantly be devoted to the building and decoration of their permanent homes. thus in egypt the tomb was often more carefully built and splendidly decorated than the house; because the house was inhabited for a short time only, but the tomb for eternity. moreover, as kings grew more powerful, they often adorned the temples of their ancestors with emulous pride, to show their own greatness. in egypt, once more, the original part of all the more important temples is but a small dark cell, of early origin, to which one successive king after another in later dynasties added statelier and ever statelier antechambers or porches, so that at last the building assumed the gigantic size and noble proportions of karnak and luxor. this access of importance to the temple cannot have failed to add correspondingly to the dignity of the god; so that, as time went on, instead of the early kings being forgotten and no longer worshipped, they assumed ever greater and greater importance from the magnificence of the works in which their memory was enshrined. to the very end, the god depends largely on his house for impressiveness. how much did not hellenic religion itself owe to the parthenon and the temple of olympian zeus! how much does not christianity itself owe to lincoln and durham, to amiens and chartres, to milan and pisa, to st. mark’s and 079st. peter’s! men cannot believe that the deities worshipped in such noble and dimly religious shrines were once human like themselves, compact of the same bodies, parts, and passions. yet in the last instance at least we know the great works to be raised in honour of a single lower syrian peasant.

with this brief and imperfect notice of the origin of temples, which will indirectly be expanded in later portions of my work, i pass on from the consideration of the sacred building itself to that of the idol who usually dwells within it.

where burial prevails, and where arts are at a low stage of development, the memory of the dead is not likely to survive beyond two or three generations. but where mummification is the rule, there is no reason why deceased persons should not be preserved and worshipped for an indefinite period; and we know that in egypt at least the cult of kings who died in the most remote times of the early empire was carried on regularly down to the days of the ptolemies. in such a case as this, there is absolutely no need for idols to arise; the corpse itself is the chief object of worship. we do find accordingly that both in egypt and in peru the worship of the mummy played a large part in the local religions; though sometimes it alternated with the worship of other holy objects, such as the image or the sacred stone, which we shall see hereafter to have had a like origin. but in many other countries, where bodies were less visibly and obviously preserved, the worship due to the ghost or god was often paid to a simulacrum or idol; so much so that “idolatry” has become in christian parlance the common term for most forms of worship other than monotheistic.

now what is the origin and meaning of idols, and how can they be affiliated upon primitive corpse or ghost worship?

like the temple, the idol, i believe, has many separate origins, several of which have been noted by mr. herbert spencer, 080while others, it seems to me, have escaped the notice even of that profound and acute observer.

the earliest idols, if i may be allowed the contradictory expression, are not idols at all—not images or representations of the dead person, but actual bodies, preserved and mummified. these pass readily, however, into various types of representative figures. for in the first place the mummy itself is usually wrapped round in swathing-cloths which obscure its features; and in the second place it is frequently enclosed in a wooden mummy-case, which is itself most often rudely human in form, and which has undoubtedly given rise to certain forms of idols. thus, the images of amun, khem, osiris, and ptah among egyptian gods are frequently or habitually those of a mummy in a mummy-case. but furthermore, the mummy itself is seldom or never the entire man; the intestines at least have been removed, or even, as in new guinea, the entire mass of flesh, leaving only the skin and the skeleton. the eyes, again, are often replaced, as in peru, by some other imitative object, so as to keep up the lifelike appearance. cases like these lead on to others, where the image or idol gradually supersedes altogether the corpse or mummy.

mr. h. o. forbes gives an interesting instance of such a transitional stage in timorlaut. “the bodies of those who die in war or by a violent death are buried,” he says; “and if the head has been captured [by the enemy], a cocoanut is placed in the grave to represent the missing member, and to deceive and satisfy his spirit.” there is abundant evidence that such makeshift limbs or bodies amply suffice for the use of the soul, when the actual corpse has been destroyed or mutilated. sometimes, indeed, the substitution of parts is deliberate and intentional. landa says of the yucatanese that they cut oft the heads of the ancient lords of cocom when they died, and cleared them from flesh by cooking them (very probably to eat at a sacrificial feast, of which more hereafter); then they sawed 081off the top of the skull, filled in the rest of the head with cement, and, making the face as like as possible to the original possessor, kept these images along with the statues and the ashes. note here the usual preservation of the head as exceptionally sacred. in other cases, they made for their fathers wooden statues, put in the ashes of the burnt body, and attached the skin of the occiput taken off the corpse. these images, half mummy, half idol, were kept in the oratories of their houses, and were greatly reverenced and assiduously cared for. on all the festivals, food and drink were offered to them.

mr. spencer has collected other interesting instances of this transitional stage between the corpse or mummy and the mere idol. the mexicans, who were cremationists, used to burn a dead lord, and collect the ashes; “and after kneading them with human blood, they made of them an image of the deceased, which was kept in memory of him.” sometimes, as in yucatan, the ashes were placed in a man-shaped receptacle of clay, and temples or oratories were erected over them. “in yet other cases,” says mr. spencer, “there is worship of the relics, joined with the representative figure, not by inclusion, but only by proximity.” thus gomara tells us that the mexicans having burnt the body of their deceased king, gathered up the ashes, bones, jewels, and gold in cloths, and made a figure dressed as a man, before which, as well as before the relics, offerings were placed. it is clear that cremation specially lends itself to such substitution of an image for the actual dead body. among burying races it is the severed skull, on the contrary, that is oftenest preserved and worshipped.

the transition from such images to small stone sarcophagi, like those of the etruscan tombs, is by no means a great one. these sarcophagi contained the burnt ashes of the dead, but were covered by a lid which usually represented the deceased, reclining, as if at a banquet, with a beaker in his hands. the tombs in which the sarcophagi were placed were of two types; one, the stone pyramid or 082cone, which, says dr. isaac taylor, “is manifestly a survival of the tumulus”; the other, the rock-cut chamber, “which is a survival of the cave.” these lordly graves are no mere cheerless sepulchres; they are abodes for the dead, constructed on the model of the homes of the living. they contain furniture and pottery; and their walls are decorated with costly mural paintings. they are also usually provided with an antechamber, where the family could assemble at the annual feast to do homage to the spirits of departed ancestors, who shared in the meal from their sculptured sarcophagus lids.

at a further stage of distance from the primitive mummy-idol we come upon the image pure and simple. the mexicans, for example, as we have seen, were cremationists; and when men killed in battle were missing, they made wooden figures of them, which they honoured, and then burnt them in place of the bodies. in somewhat the same spirit the egyptians used to place beside the mummy itself an image of the dead, to act as a refuge or receptacle for the soul, “in case of the accidental destruction of the actual body.” so the mexicans once more, if one of their merchants died on a journey, were accustomed to make a statue of wood in the shape of the deceased, to which they paid all the honours they would have done to his actual corpse before burning it. in africa, while a king of congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. mr. spencer has collected several similar instances of idols substituted for the bodies of the dead. the roman imagines wore masks of wax, which preserved in like manner the features of ancestors. perhaps the most curious modern survival of this custom of double representations is to be found in the effigies of our kings and queens still preserved in westminster abbey.

there are two other sources of idol-worship, however, which, as it seems to me, have hardly received sufficient attention at mr. spencer’s hands. those two are the stake which 083marks the grave, and the standing stone or tombstone. by far the larger number of idols, i venture to believe, are descended from one or other of these two originals, both of which i shall examine hereafter in far greater detail. there is indeed no greater lacuna, i fancy, in mr. spencer’s monumental work than that produced by the insufficient consideration of these two fruitful sources of worshipful objects. i shall therefore devote a considerable space to their consideration in subsequent chapters; for the present it will suffice to remark that the wooden stake seems often to form the origin or point of departure for the carved wooden image, as well as for such ruder objects of reverence as the cones and wooden pillars so widely reverenced among the semitic tribes; while the rough boulder, standing stone, or tombstone seems to form the origin or point of departure for the stone or marble statue, the commonest type of idol the whole world over in all advanced and cultivated communities. such stones were at first mere rude blocks or unhewn masses, the descendants of those which were rolled over the grave in primitive times in order to keep down the corpse of the dead man, and prevent him from returning to disturb the living. but in time they grew to be roughly dressed into slabs or squares, and finally to be decorated with a rude representation of a human head and shoulders. from this stage they readily progressed to that of the greek herm忙. we now know that this was the early shape of most hellenic gods and goddesses; and we can trace their evolution onward from this point to the wholly anthropomorphic aphrodite or here. the well-known figure of the ephesian artemis is an intermediate case which will occur at once to every classical reader. starting from such shapeless beginnings, we progress at last to the artistic and splendid bronze and marble statues of hellas, etruria, and rome, to the many-handed deities of modern india, and to the sculptured madonnas and piet脿s of renaissance italy.

naturally, 084as the gods grow more beautiful and more artistically finished in workmanship, the popular idea of their power and dignity must increase pari passu. in egypt, this increase took chiefly the form of colossal size and fine manipulation of hard granitic materials. the so-called memnon and the sphinx are familiar instances of the first; the pashts of syenite, the black basalt gods, so well known at the louvre and the british museum, are examples of the second. in greece, effect was sought rather by ideal beauty, as in the aphrodites and apollos, or by costliness of material, as in the chryselephantine zeus and the athene of the parthenon. but we must always remember that in hellas itself these glorious gods were developed in a comparatively short space of time from the shapeless blocks or standing stones of the ruder religion; indeed, we have still many curious intermediate forms between the extremely grotesque and hardly human mycen忙an types, and the exquisite imaginings of myron or phidias. the earliest hellenic idols engraved by messrs. perrot and chipiez in their great work on art in primitive greece do not rise in any respect superior to the polynesian level; while the so-called apollos of later archaic workmanship, rigidly erect with their arms at their sides, recall in many respects the straight up-and-down outline of the standing stone from which they are developed.

i should add that in an immense number of instances the rude stone image or idol, and at a still lower grade the unwrought sacred stone, stands as the central object under a shed or shelter, which develops by degrees into the stately temple. the advance in both is generally more or less parallel; though sometimes, as in historical greece, a temple of the noblest architecture encloses as its central and principal object of veneration the rough unhewn stone of early barbaric worship. so even in christendom, great churches and cathedrals often hold as their most precious possession some rude and antique image like 085the sacred bambino of santa maria in ara coli at rome, or the “black madonnas” which are revered by the people at so many famous italian places of pilgrimage.

nor do i mean to say that every idol is necessarily itself a funereal relic. when once the idea of godship has been thoroughly developed, and when men have grown accustomed to regard an image or idol as the representative or dwelling-place of their god, it is easy to multiply such images indefinitely. hundreds of representations may exist of the self-same apollo or aphrodite or madonna or st. sebastian. at the same time, it is quite clear that for most worshippers, the divine being is more or less actually confused with the image; a particular artemis or a particular notre dame is thought of as more powerful or more friendly than another. i have known women in southern europe go to pray at the shrine of a distant madonna, “because she is greater than our own madonna.” moreover, it is probable that in many cases images or sacred stones once funereal in origin, and representing particular gods or ghosts, have been swallowed up at last by other and more powerful deities, so as to lose in the end their primitive distinctness. thus, there were many baals and many ashteroths; probably there were many apollos, many artemises, many aphrodites. it is almost certain that there were many distinct herm忙. the progress of research tends to make us realise that numberless deities, once considered unique and individual, may be resolved into a whole host of local gods, afterwards identified with some powerful deity on the merest external resemblances of image, name, or attribute. in egypt at least this process of identification and centralisation was common. furthermore, we know that each new religion tends to swallow up and assimilate to itself all possible elements of older cults; just as hebrew jahwehism tried to adopt the sacred stones of early semitic heathenism by associating them with episodes in the history of the patriarchs; and just as christianity has sanctified 086such stones in its own area by using them sometimes as the base of a cross, or by consecrating them at others with the name of some saint or martyr.

but even more than the evolution of the temple and the idol, the evolution of the priesthood has given dignity, importance, and power to the gods. for the priests are a class whose direct interest it is to make the most of the greatness and majesty of the deities they tend or worship.

priesthood, again, has probably at least two distinct origins. the one is quasi-royal; the other is quasiservile.

i begin with the first. we saw that the chief of an african village, as the son and representative of the chief ghosts, who are the tribal gods, has alone the right to approach them directly with offerings. the inferior villager, who desires to ask anything of the gods, asks through the chief, who is a kinsman and friend of the divine spirits, and who therefore naturally understands their ideas and habits. such chiefs are thus also naturally priests. they are sacred by family; they and their children stand in a special relation to the gods of the tribe, quite different from the relation in which the common people stand; they are of the blood of the deities. this type of relation is common in many countries; the chiefs in such instances are “kings and priests, after the order of melchizedek.”

to put it briefly, in the earliest or domestic form of religion, the gods of each little group or family are its own dead ancestors, and especially (while the historic memory is still but weak) its immediate predecessors. in this stage, the head of the household naturally discharges the functions of priest; it is he who approaches the family ghosts or gods on behalf of his wives, his sons, his dependants. to the last, indeed, the father of each family retains this priestly function as regards the more restricted family rites; he is priest of the worship of the lares and penates; he offers the family sacrifice to the family gods; he reads family prayers in the christian household. but as 087the tribe or nation arises, and chieftainship grows greater, it is the ghosts or ancestors of the chiefly or kingly family who develop most into gods; and the living chief and his kin are their natural representatives. thus, in most cases, the priestly office comes to be associated with that of king or chief. indeed, we shall see hereafter in a subsequent chapter that many kings, being the descendants of gods, are gods themselves; and that this union of the kingly and divine characters has much to do with the growth of the dignity of godhead. here, however, i waive this point for the present; it will suffice for us to note at the present stage of our argument that in a large number of instances the priesthood and the kingship were inherent and hereditary in the self-same families.

“the union of a royal title with priestly duties,” says mr. frazer in the golden bough, “was common in ancient italy and greece. at rome and in other italian cities there was a priest called the sacrificial king or king of the sacred rites (rex sacrificulus or rex sacrorum), and his wife bore the title of queen of the sacred rites. in republican athens, the second magistrate of the state was called the king, and his wife the queen; the functions of both were religious. many other greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly. at rome the tradition was that the sacrificial king had been appointed after the expulsion of the kings in order to offer the sacrifices which had been previously offered by the kings. in greece a similar view appears to have prevailed as to the origin of the priestly kings. in itself the view is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of sparta, the only purely greek state which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. for in sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of the god. this combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar to every one. asia minor, for example, was the seat of various great religious capitals, peopled by thousands of ‘sacred 088slaves,’ and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval rome. such priest-ridden cities were zela and pes-sinus. teutonic kings, again, in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position and exercised the powers of high priests. the emperors of china offer public sacrifices, the details of which are regulated by the ritual books. it is needless, however, to multiply examples of what is the rule rather than the exception in the early history of the kingship.”

we will return hereafter in another connexion to this ancient relation of kingship with priesthood, which arises naturally from the still more ancient relation of the king to the god.

where priesthood originates in this particular way, little differentiation is likely to occur between the temporal and the ecclesiastical power. but there is a second and far more potent origin of priesthood, less distinguished in its beginnings, yet more really pregnant of great results in the end. for where the king is a priest, and the descendant of the gods, as in peru and egypt, his immediate and human power seems to overshadow and as it were to belittle the power of his divine ancestors. no statue of osiris, for example, is half so big in size as the colossal figure of rameses ii. which lies broken in huge pieces outside the mortuary temple of the king it commemorates, among the ruins of thebes. but where a separate and distinct priesthood gets the management of sacred rites entirely into its own hands, we find the authority of the gods often rising superior to that of the kings, who are only their vicegerents: till at last we get popes dictating to emperors, and powerful monarchs doing humble penance before the costly shrines of murdered archbishops.

the origin of independent or quasi-servile priesthood is to be found in the institution of “temple slaves,”—the attendants told off as we have already seen to do duty at the grave of the chief or dead warrior. egypt, again affords 089us, on the domestic side, an admirable example of the origin of such priesthoods. over the lintel of each of the cave-like tombs at beni hassan and sakkarah is usually placed an inscription setting forth the name and titles of its expected occupant (for each was built during the life-time of its owner), with an invocation praying for him propitious funeral rites, and a good burial-place after a long and happy life. then follows a pious hope that the spirit may enjoy for all eternity the proper payment of funereal offerings, a list of which is ordinarily appended, together with a statement of the various anniversaries on which they were due. but the point which specially concerns us here is this: priests or servants were appointed to see that these offerings were duly made; and the tomb was endowed with property for the purpose both of keeping up the offerings in question, and of providing a stipend or living-wage for the priest. as we shall see hereafter, such priesthoods were generally made hereditary, so as to ensure their continuance throughout all time: and so successful were they that in many cases worship continued to be performed for several hundred years at the tomb; so that a person who died under the early empire was still being made the recipient of funeral dues under kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties.

i give this interesting historical instance at some length because it is one of the best known, and also one of the most persistent. but everywhere, all the world over, similar evolutions have occurred on a shorter scale. the temple attendants, endowed for the purpose of performing sacred rites for the ghost or god, have grown into priests, who knew the habits of the unseen denizen of the shrine. bit by bit, prescriptions have arisen; customs and rituals have developed; and the priests have become the depositaries of the divine traditions. they alone know how to approach the god; they alone can read the hidden signs of his pleasure or displeasure. as intermediaries between worshipper and deity, they are themselves half sacred. 090without them, no votary can rightly approach the shrine of his patron. thus at last they rise into-importance far above their origin; priestcraft comes into being; and by magnifying their god, the members of the hierarchy magnify at the same time their own office and function.

yet another contributing cause must be briefly noted. picture-writing and hieroglyphics take their rise more especially in connexion with tombs and temples. the priests in particular hold as a rule the key to this knowledge. in ancient egypt, to take a well-known instance, they were the learned class; they became the learned class again under other circumstances in mediaeval europe. everywhere we come upon sacred mysteries that the priests alone know; and where hieroglyphics exist, these mysteries, committed to writing, become the peculiar property of the priests in a more special sense. where writing is further differentiated into hieratic and demotic, the gulf between laity and priesthood grows still wider; the priests possess a special key to knowledge, denied to the commonalty. the recognition of sacred books has often the same result; of these, the priests are naturally the guardians and exponents. i need hardly add that side by side with the increase of architectural grandeur in the temple, and the increase of artistic beauty and costliness in the idols or statues and pictures of the gods, goes increase in the stateliness of the priestly robes, the priestly surroundings, the priestly ritual. finally, we get ceremonies of the most dignified character, adorned with all the accessories of painting and sculpture, of candles and flowers, of incense and music, of rich mitres and jewelled palls,—ceremonies performed in the dim shade of lofty temples, or mosques, or churches, in honour of god or gods of infinite might, power, and majesty, who must yet in the last resort be traced back to some historic or prehistoric dead man, or at least to some sacred stone or stake or image, his relic and representative.

thus, 091by convergence of all these streams, the primitive mummy or ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity of unbounded glory and greatness and sanctity. the bodiless soul, released from necessary limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely forgotten. but to the last, observe this curious point: all new gods or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop up first, of demonstrably human origin. whenever we find a new god added from known sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he turns out to be—a human being. whenever we go back to very primitive religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their ancestors. it is only when we take relatively advanced races with unknown early histories that we find them worshipping a certain number of gods who cannot be easily and immediately resolved into dead men or spirits. unfortunately, students of religion have oftenest paid the closest attention to those historical religions which lie furthest away from the primitive type, and in which at their first appearance before us we come upon the complex idea of godhead already fully developed. hence they are too much inclined, like professor robertson smith, and even sometimes mr. frazer (whose name, however, i cannot mention in passing without the pro-foundest respect), to regard the idea of a godship as primordial, not derivative; and to neglect the obvious derivation of godhead as a whole from the cult and reverence of the deified ancestor. yet the moment we get away from these advanced and too overlaid historical religions to the early conceptions of simple savages, we see at once that no gods exist for them save the ancestral corpses or ghosts; that religion means the performance of certain rites and offerings to these corpses or ghosts; and that higher elemental or departmental deities are wholly wanting. even in the great historical religions themselves, the further back we go, and the lower down we 092probe, the closer do we come to the foundation-stratum of ghosts or ancestor-gods. and where, as in egypt, the evidence is oldest and most complete throughout, the more do we observe how the mystic nature-gods of the later priestly conceptions yield, as we go back age by age in time, to the simpler and more purely human ancestral gods of the earliest documents.

it will be our task in the succeeding chapters of this work to do even more than this—to show that the apparently unresolvable element in later religions, including the hebrew god jahweh himself, can be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the primitive conception of a ghost or ancestor.