Part 23 (2/2)

Adonis sprang from a tree; his mother may have, according to primitive belief, been simply a tree; Dagda, the patriarchal Irish corn G.o.d, was an oak; indeed, the idea of a ”world tree”, which occurs in Sumerian, Vedic-Indian, Teutonic, and other mythologies, was probably a product of Totemism.

Wild animals were considered to be other forms of human beings who could marry princes and princesses as they do in so many fairy tales.

Damayanti addressed the tiger, as well as the mountain and tree, saying:

I approach him without fear.

”Of the beasts art thou the monarch, all this forest thy domain;...

Thou, O king of beasts, console me, if my Nala thou hast seen.”[307]

A tribal totem exercised sway over a tribal district. In Egypt, as Herodotus recorded, the crocodile was wors.h.i.+pped in one district and hunted down in another. Tribes fought against tribes when totemic animals were slain. The Babylonian and Indian myths about the conflicts between eagles and serpents may have originated as records of battles between eagle clans and serpent clans. Totemic animals were tabooed. The Set pig of Egypt and the devil pig of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were not eaten except sacrificially. Families were supposed to be descended from swans and were named Swans, or from seals and were named Seals, like the Gaelic ”Mac Codrums”, whose surname signifies ”son of the seal”; the nickname of the Campbells, ”sons of the pig”, may refer to their totemic boar's head crest, which commemorated the slaying, perhaps the sacrificial slaying, of the boar by their ancestor Diarmid. Mr. Garstang, in _The Syrian G.o.ddess_, thinks it possible that the boar which killed Adonis was of totemic origin. So may have been the fish form of the Sumerian G.o.d Ea. When an animal totem was sacrificed once a year, and eaten sacrificially so that the strength of the clan might be maintained, the priest who wrapped himself in its skin was supposed to have transmitted to him certain magical powers; he became identified with the totem and prophesied and gave instruction as the totem. Ea was depicted clad in the fish's skin.

Animism, the other early stage of human development, also produced distinctive modes of thought. Men conceived that the world swarmed with spirits, that a spirit groaned in the wind-shaken tree, that the howling wind was an invisible spirit, that there were spirits in fountains, rivers, valleys, hills, and in ocean, and in all animals; and that a hostile spirit might possess an individual and change his nature. The sun and the moon were the abodes of spirits, or the vessels in which great spirits sailed over the sea of the sky; the stars were all spirits, the ”host of heaven”. These spirits existed in groups of seven, or groups of three, and the multiple of three, or in pairs, or operated as single individuals.

Although certain spirits might confer gifts upon mankind, they were at certain seasons and in certain localities hostile and vengeful, like the gra.s.s-green fairies in winter, or the earth-black elves when their gold was sought for in forbidden and secret places. These spirits were the artisans of creation and vegetation, like the Egyptian Khnumu and the Indian Rhibus; they fas.h.i.+oned the gra.s.s blades and the stalks of corn, but at times of seasonal change they might ride on their tempest steeds, or issue forth from flooding rivers and lakes. Man was greatly concerned about striking bargains with them to secure their services, and about propitiating them, or warding off their attacks with protective charms, and by performing ”ceremonies of riddance”. The ghosts of the dead, being spirits, were similarly propitious or harmful on occasion; as emissaries of Fate they could injure the living.

Ancestor wors.h.i.+p, the wors.h.i.+p of ghosts, had origin in the stage of Animism. But ancestor wors.h.i.+p was not developed in Babylonia as in China, for instance, although traces of it survived in the wors.h.i.+p of stars as ghosts, in the deification of kings, and the wors.h.i.+p of patriarchs, who might be exalted as G.o.ds or identified with a supreme G.o.d. The Egyptian Pharaoh Unas became the sun G.o.d and the constellation of Orion by devouring his predecessors[308]. He ate his G.o.d as a tribe ate its animal totem; he became the ”bull of heaven”.

There were star totems as well as mountain totems. A St. Andrew's cross sign, on one of the Egyptian s.h.i.+p standards referred to, may represent a star. The Babylonian G.o.ddess Ishtar was symbolized as a star, and she was the ”world mother”. Many primitive currents of thought shaped the fretted rocks of ancient mythologies.

In various countries all round the globe the belief prevailed that the stars were ghosts of the mighty dead--of giants, kings, or princes, or princesses, or of pious people whom the G.o.ds loved, or of animals which were wors.h.i.+pped. A few instances may be selected at random. When the Teutonic G.o.ds slew the giant Thja.s.se, he appeared in the heavens as Sirius. In India the ghosts of the ”seven Ris.h.i.+s”, who were semi-divine Patriarchs, formed the constellation of the Great Bear, which in Vedic times was called the ”seven bears”. The wives of the seven Ris.h.i.+s were the stars of the Pleiades. In Greece the Pleiades were the ghosts of the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione, and in Australia they were and are a queen and six handmaidens. In these countries, as elsewhere, stories were told to account for the ”lost Pleiad”, a fact which suggests that primitive men were more constant observers of the heavenly bodies than might otherwise be supposed. The Arcadians believed that they were descended, as Hesiod recorded, from a princess who was transformed by Zeus into a bear; in this form Artemis slew her and she became the ”Great Bear” of the sky. The Egyptian Isis was the star Sirius, whose rising coincided with the beginning of the Nile inundation. Her first tear for the dead Osiris fell into the river on ”the night of the drop”. The flood which ensued brought the food supply. Thus the star was not only the Great Mother of all, but the sustainer of all.

The brightest stars were regarded as being the greatest and most influential. In Babylonia all the planets were identified with great deities. Jupiter, for instance, was Merodach, and one of the astral forms of Ishtar was Venus. Merodach was also connected with ”the fish of Ea” (Pisces), so that it is not improbable that Ea wors.h.i.+p had stellar a.s.sociations. Constellations were given recognition before the planets were identified.

A strange blending of primitive beliefs occurred when the deities were given astral forms. As has been shown (Chapter III) G.o.ds were supposed to die annually. The Egyptian priests pointed out to Herodotus the grave of Osiris and also his star. There are ”giants' graves” also in those countries in which the G.o.ds were simply ferocious giants. A G.o.d might a.s.sume various forms; he might take the form of an insect, like Indra, and hide in a plant, or become a mouse, or a serpent, like the G.o.ds of Erech in the Gilgamesh epic. The further theory that a G.o.d could exist in various forms at one and the same time suggests that it had its origin among a people who accepted the idea of a personal G.o.d while yet in the stage of Naturalism. In Egypt Osiris, for instance, was the moon, which came as a beautiful child each month and was devoured as the wasting ”old moon” by the demon Set; he was the young G.o.d who was slain in his prime each year; he was at once the father, husband, and son of Isis; he was the Patriarch who reigned over men and became the Judge of the Dead; he was the earth spirit, he was the bis.e.xual Nile spirit, he was the spring sun; he was the Apis bull of Memphis, and the ram of Mendes; he was the reigning Pharaoh. In his fusion with Ra, who was threefold--Khepera, Ra, and Tum--he died each day as an old man; he appeared in heaven at night as the constellation Orion, which was his ghost, or was, perhaps, rather the Sumerian Zi, the spiritual essence of life. Osiris, who resembled Tammuz, a G.o.d of many forms also, was addressed as follows in one of the Isis chants:

There proceedeth from thee the strong Orion in heaven at evening, at the resting of every day!

Lo it is I (Isis), at the approach of the Sothis (Sirius) period, who doth watch for him (the child Osiris), Nor will I leave off watching for him; for that which proceedeth from thee (the living Osiris) is revered.

An emanation from thee causeth life to G.o.ds and men, reptiles and animals, and they live by means thereof.

Come thou to us from thy chamber, in the day when thy soul begetteth emanations,-- The day when offerings upon offerings are made to thy spirit, which causeth the G.o.ds and men likewise to live.[309]

This extract emphasizes how unsafe it is to confine certain deities within narrow limits by terming them simply ”solar G.o.ds”, ”lunar G.o.ds”, ”astral G.o.ds”, or ”earth G.o.ds”. One deity may have been simultaneously a sun G.o.d and moon G.o.d, an air G.o.d and an earth G.o.d, one who was dead and also alive, unborn and also old. The priests of Babylonia and Egypt were less accustomed to concrete and logical definitions than their critics and expositors of the twentieth century. Simple explanations of ancient beliefs are often by reason of their very simplicity highly improbable. Recognition must ever be given to the puzzling complexity of religious thought in Babylonia and Egypt, and to the possibility that even to the priests the doctrines of a particular cult, which embraced the acc.u.mulated ideas of centuries, were invariably confusing and vague, and full of inconsistencies; they were mystical in the sense that the understanding could not grasp them although it permitted their acceptance. A G.o.d, for instance, might be addressed at once in the singular and plural, perhaps because he had developed from an animistic group of spirits, or, perhaps, for reasons we cannot discover. This is shown clearly by the following pregnant extract from a Babylonian tablet: ”_Powerful, O Sevenfold, one are ye_”. Mr. L.W.

King, the translator, comments upon it as follows: ”There is no doubt that the name was applied to a group of G.o.ds who were so closely connected that, though addressed in the plural, they could in the same sentence be regarded as forming a single personality”.[310]

Like the Egyptian Osiris, the Babylonian Merodach was a highly complex deity. He was the son of Ea, G.o.d of the deep; he died to give origin to human life when he commanded that his head should be cut off so that the first human beings might be fas.h.i.+oned by mixing his blood with the earth; he was the wind G.o.d, who gave ”the air of life”; he was the deity of thunder and the sky; he was the sun of spring in his Tammuz character; he was the daily sun, and the planets Jupiter and Mercury as well as Sharru (Regulus); he had various astral a.s.sociations at various seasons. Ishtar, the G.o.ddess, was Iku (Capella), the water channel star, in January-February, and Merodach was Iku in May-June. This strange system of identifying the chief deity with different stars at different periods, or simultaneously, must not be confused with the monotheistic identification of him with other G.o.ds. Merodach changed his forms with Ishtar, and had similarly many forms. This G.o.ddess, for instance, was, even when connected with one particular heavenly body, liable to change. According to a tablet fragment she was, as the planet Venus, ”a female at sunset and a male at sunrise[311]”--that is, a bis.e.xual deity like Nannar of Ur, the father and mother deity combined, and Isis of Egypt. Nannar is addressed in a famous hymn:

Father Nannar, Lord, G.o.d Sin, ruler among the G.o.ds....

_Mother body which produceth all things_....

Merciful, gracious Father, in whose hand the life of the whole land is contained.

One of the Isis chants of Egypt sets forth, addressing Osiris:

There cometh unto thee Isis, lady of the horizon, who hath begotten herself alone in the image of the G.o.ds....

She hath taken vengeance before Horus, _the woman who was made a male by her father Osiris_.[312]

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