immaterial. They can take food, though the crudest form of this belief soon passes into the more refined notion that they consume the impalpable essence of the meals provided for them. The ancient Indian ritual for the sacrifice to the Fathers required the officiating priest to turn away with bated breath that he might not see the spirits engaged upon the rice-balls laid out for them. The elastic impalpable stuff of the spirit-body is apparently capable of compression or expansion, just as Athena can transform herself into a bird. The spirits can pass swiftly through the air or the water; they can enter the stone or the tree, the animal or the man. The spirit-land of the Ibo on the Lower Niger had its rivers, forests or hills, its towns and roads, as upon earth:[1] the spirits of the Mordvinian mythology, created by Chkaï, not only resembled men, they even possessed the faculty of reproduction by multiplication.[2] The Finns ascribed a haltia or genius to each object, which could, however, guard other individuals of the same species. This is the beginning of the species-god, and implies a step of thought comparable to the production in language of general terms. These protecting spirits were free beings, having form and shape, but not individualized; while above them rose the higher deities like the forest-god Tapio and his maiden Hillervo, protectress of herds, or Ahto the water-god who gradually took the place of Vesi, the actual element originally conceived as itself divine, and ruled over the spirits of lakes and rivers, wells and springs.[3] The Finns came to apply to the upper gods the term Yumala which originally denoted the living sky; the Samoyedes made the same use of Num, and the Mongols of Tengri.[4] Above the innumerable wongs of the Gold Coast rose Nyongmo, the Sky-god, giver of the sunshine and the rain. The Yoruba-speaking peoples generalized the spirits of mountain and hill into Oke, god of heights; and the multitude of local sea-gods on the western half of the slave coast was fused into one god of the Ocean, Olokun.[5] The Babylonian theology recognized a Zi or “spirit” in both men and gods, somewhat resembling the Egyptian “double” or ka; spirits are classed as spirits of heaven and spirits of earth; but the original identity of gods and spirits may be inferred from the fact that the same sign stands before the names of both.[6] Out of the vast mass of undifferentiated powers certain functional deities appear; and the Kami of Japan to-day who preside over the gilds and crafts of industry and agriculture, over the trees and grasses of the field, the operations of the household, and even the kitchen-range, the saucepan, the rice-pot, the well, the garden, the scarecrow and the privy, have their counterparts in the lists of ancient Rome, the indigitamenta over whose contents Tertullian and Augustine made merry. The child was reared under the superintendence of Educa and Potina. Abcona and Adeona taught him to go out and in. Cuba guarded him when he was old enough to exchange a cradle for a bed. Ossipaga strengthened his bones; Levāna helped him to get up, and Statina to stand.[7] There were powers protecting the threshold, the door and the hinge: and the duties of the house, the farm, the mill, had each its appointed guardian. But such powers were hardly persons. The settler who went into the woods might know neither the name nor the sex of the indwelling numen; “si deus si dea,” “sive mas sive femina,” ran the old formulae.[8] So the Baals of the Semitic peoples constituted a group of powers fertilizing the land with water-springs, the givers of corn and wine and oil, out of which under conditions of superior political development a high-god like the Tyrian Baal, the majestic City-King, might be evolved. The Celts who saw the world peopled with the spirits of trees and animals, rocks, mountains, springs and rivers, grouped them in classes like the Dervonnae (oak-spirits), the Niskai (water-spirits), the Proximae, the Matronae (earth-goddesses)[9] and the like. Below the small band of Teutonic divinities were the elves of forest and field, the water-elves or nixes and spirits of house and home. The Vedic deities of the nobler sort, the shining devas, the asuras (the “breathers” or living, perhaps to be identified with the Scandinavian æsir) rose above a vast; multitude of demonic powers, many of them doubtless derived from the local customs and beliefs of the native races whom the immigrant Aryans subdued. In the earliest literary record of Greek religion Homer distinguishes between the θεός and the δαίμων, the personalized god and the numen or divine power. In Homer the element of time is definitely recognized. The gods are the “Immortals.” They are born, and their parentage is known, but they do not die. Zeus is not self-existent in the sense in which the Indian Brahmā is svayambhū, but certain questions have been by implication asked and answered, which the demonology of the savage has not yet raised. But behind Homer stretches the dim scene of pre-Hellenic religion, and the conflict of elements “Pelasgic,” oriental and Hellenic, out of which the Homeric religion emerged; and beneath the Homeric religion how many features of the religion of ghosts and nature-spirits survived in popular usage and the lower cults![10] When Herodotus (ii. 53) tried to trace the origin of the beliefs around him, he found his way back to an age before Hesiod or Homer, when the gods were nameless. To that age the traditions preserved at Dodona bore witness; and the designations of special groups like the θεοὶ μέγιστοι, θεοὶ μειλίχιοι, θεοὶ πραξιδίκαι, or, possibly, the Venerable Goddesses (θεαί σεμναί) of Athens, point to a mode of thought when the divine Powers were not definitely individualized. They are just at the point of transition from the ranks of spirits to the higher classes of the gods. As they had no names, they had no relations. Nor had any images yet been made of them. They were associated with hallowed trees, with sacred stones and pillars, out of which came the square rough-hewn Hermae which were anointed with oil like the sacred stone attributed by legend to Jacob at Bethel.[11] By what processes the Hellenic immigration introduced new deities and the Greek pantheon was slowly formed, can only be conjecturally traced with the help of archaeology. But Herodotus and Aeschylus were well aware that the religion of Greece had not been uniformly the same; and the gods whom they knew had been developed out of intercourse with other peoples and the succession of races in the obscure and distant past.
3. Polytheism.—The lower and unprogressive religions practically remain in the polydaemonistic stage, though not without occasionally feeling the stimulus of contact with higher faiths, like some of the West African peoples in the presence of the Mahommedan advance. Among the more progressive races, on the other hand, continual processes of elevation and decline may be observed, and the activities of the greater gods are constantly being enriched with new functions. Personal or social experiences of the satisfaction of some desire or escape from some danger are referred to some particular deity. Elements of race-consciousness help to shape the outlook on nature or life: and slight differences of linguistic use in the coining of descriptive terms sometimes lead to the multiplication of divine forms. Exacter observation of nature; closer attention to its contrasts of life and death, or light and darkness, or male and
- ↑ Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes (1906), p. 186.
- ↑ Mainof, “Les Restes de la mythologie mordvine,” Journal de la Soc. Finno-Ougrienne, v. (1889), p. 102.
- ↑ Castrén, Finn. Mythol. pp. 92 ff., 72.
- ↑ Ibid. pp. 7, 14, 17, 24.
- ↑ A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-speaking Peoples (1894), p. 289.
- ↑ Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), p. 181. The Zuñis applied the term ā-hâi “All-Life” or “the Beings” to all supernatural beings, men, animals, plants, and many objects in nature regarded as personal existences, as well as to the higher anthropomorphic powers known as “Finishers or Makers of the Paths of Life,” Report of Bureau of Ethnol. (1883), p. 11. On the distinction between “gods” and “spirits,” cf. Ed. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, 2nd ed. Band i. erste Haelfte (1907), p. 97 ff.
- ↑ Tert. De Anima, 39 Aug. De Civ. Dei, iv. 11, &c.
- ↑ On the Dei Certi and the Dei Incerti, see von Domaszewski in the Archiv für Religionswiss., x. (1907), pp. 1-17.
- ↑ Cf. the groups of “Mothers” in modern India, of various origins, Crooke, Popular Religion and Folklore (2), i. 111.
- ↑ Cf. Andrew Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion; and Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
- ↑ Cf. A. J. Evans, on The Mycenean Tree and Pillar Cult (1901), and Sir W. M. Ramsay, “Religion of Greece and Asia Minor,” in Hastings' Dict. of the Bible, extra vol.
