war-car, the drum, quiver, bow and axe. The Earth-Mother and Sky-Father are to be found again and again in religions, at various stages of development, as co-ordinating conceptions which comprehend the universe.[1] Sometimes one is more prominent, sometimes the other. In many cases the Sky has been already resolved into the visible firmament and its lord and owner, like the Yoruban Olorun or the Finnic Ukko. The consort of Ukko is Maan-emō, “mother of the earth,” or maan emäntä, “mistress of the earth.” But the rare expression maan-emä, “Mother-earth,” still used in the ancient lays,[2] points to the older type of belief in the animation of the productive soil. So the Peruvians designated the Earth as Pachamama, “mother of (all) things.” In Egypt the relation was curiously reversed; the earth-god Keb was the husband of Nut, the sky, represented sometimes as a woman, overarching the earth and supported on hands and feet, sometimes as a gigantic cow, upheld on the outstretched hands of Shu, the atmosphere.[3] When earth and sky were still unseparated, Shu thrust himself between them and raised Nut to the heights. So in the New Zealand myth, Rangi and Papa, Sky and Earth, who once clave together in the darkness, were rent asunder by the forest-god Tane-mahuta, who forced up the sky far above him.[4] The most elaborate presentment of this mode of thought is to be seen in the organized animism of the ancient state religion of China, where the supreme power is lodged in the living sky (Tien).[5] Tien was originally the actual firmament. In the Shi-King it is addressed in prayer as “great and wide,” as “vast and distant”; it is even “blue” (Pt. II. v. 6, 5). So it is the ancestor of all things; and Heaven and Earth are the father and mother of the world. From the imperial point of view the sky bore the name of Ti, “ruler,” or Shang Ti, “supreme ruler” (emperor); and later commentators readily took advantage of this to discriminate between the visible expanse and the indwelling spirit, producing a kind of Theism. But the older conception still holds its own. “Why” (says Edkins, Religion in China, 95), “they have been often asked, should you speak of those things which are dead matter, fashioned from nothing by the hand of God, as living beings? And why not? they have replied. The Sky pours down rain and sunshine; the Earth produces corn and grass. We see them in perpetual movement, and we therefore say that they are living.” Tien Ti, Fu Mu, “Heaven and Earth, Father and Mother,” are conjoined in common speech, and are the supreme objects of imperial worship. The great altar to Heaven, round in shape like the circuit of the sky, and white as the symbol of the light principle (Yang), stands in the southern suburb of Peking in the direction of light and heat. The altar to the Earth is dark and square, on the north side of the city, the region of yin, the principle of cold and gloom. Associated with the Sky are tablets to the sun and moon, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the five planets, the twenty-eight constellations, and all the stars of heaven; tablets to clouds, rain, wind and thunder being placed next to that of the moon. With the Earth are grouped the tablets to the five lofty Mountains, the three Hills of perpetual peace and the four Seas, the five celebrated Mountains and the four great Rivers.[6] The ancient ritual (Chow Li) carefully graded the right of sacrifice from the viceroys of provinces down to the humblest district-superintendent who offered to the spirits of his district, the hills, lakes and grains. With these spirits ranged in feudal order in two vast groups beneath Heaven and Earth is associated a third class, those of human beings. They are designated by the same name, shin; and they are inextricably mingled with the operations of nature. So in the Vedic hymns the departed “Fathers” inhabit the three zones of earth, air and sky; they are invoked with the streams and mountains of this lower earth, as well as with the dawns and the sky itself; even cosmic functions are ascribed to them; and they adorn the heaven with stars. The Chinese conception of the Shin under the name of Shin-to (Chinese tao) or “spirits'-way” profoundly infiuenced Japanese thought from the 6th century A.D. onwards; and the great Shinto revival of the 18th century brought the doctrine again into prominence. The Japanese Kami are the “higher” powers, the superi, conceived as acting through nature on the one hand and government on the other. Just as the emperor is kami, and provincial officers of rank, so also mountains, rivers, the sea, thunder, winds, and even animals like the tiger, wolf or fox, are all kami.[7] The spirits of the dead also become kami, of varying character and position; some reside in the temples built in their honour; some hover near their tombs; but they are constantly active, mingling in the vast multitude of agencies which makes every event in the universe, in the language of Motowori (1730-1801), the act of the Kami. They direct the changing seasons, the wind and the rain; and the good and bad fortunes of individuals, families and states are due to them.[8] Everywhere from birth to death the entire life of man is encompassed and guided by the Kami, which are sometimes reckoned at 8,000,000 in number.
2. Transition to Polytheism.—In such ways does the Polydaemonism of early faith survive in the modern practice of religion. The process of enrolling the spirits of the dead in the ranks of what may be more or less definitely called “gods” may be seen in the popular usages of India at the present day, or traced in the pages of the Peking Gazette under the direction of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient branches of Chinese administration. Whether the higher polytheisms were produced in this fashion out of the cultus of the dead, may, however, be doubted. Many influences have doubtless contributed, and different races have followed different lines of development. No definite succession like the series of ages marked by the use of stone, bronze and iron can be clearly marked. But there must always have been some correspondence between the stages of social advance (or, in certain cases, of degeneration) and the religious interpretation of the world. The formation of clans and tribes, the transitions from the hunting to the pastoral life, and from the pastoral to the agricultural—the struggle with forest and swamp, the clearings for settlement, the protection of the dwelling-place, the safety of flocks and herds, the production of corn,—the migration of peoples, the founding of colonies, the processes of conquest, fusion, and political union—have all reacted on the elaboration of the higher polytheisms, before bards and poets, priesthoods and theological speculators, began to systematize and regulate the relations of the gods. Certain phases of thought may be more or less clearly indicated; certain elements of race, of local condition, of foreign contact, may be distinguished with more or less historic probability; but no single key can explain all the wide diversity of phenomena. Broadly speaking it may be said that a distinction may be drawn between “spirits” and “gods,” but it is a distinction of degree rather than of kind, obvious enough at the upper end, yet shading off into manifold varieties of resemblance in the lower forms. Some writers only recognize friendly agencies as gods; but destructive powers like the volcano, or the lords of the underworld, cannot be regarded as the protectors of the life of man, yet they seem in many mythologies to attain the full personalised stature of gods with definite names. Early Greek religion recognized a class of gods of Aversion and Riddance, ἀποτρόπαιοι and ἀποπομπαῖοι. Neither the spirit nor the god is conceived as
- ↑ The Japanese name is Ame-tsuchi, “heaven and earth,” a translation of the Chinese ten-chi, Aston, Shinto (1905), p. 35.
- ↑ Castrén, Finnische Mythologie, p. 86.
- ↑ Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion (1907), pp. 8, 12.
- ↑ Sir George Grey, Polynesian Mythology (1855), pp. 1-4.
- ↑ The English “Heaven” has acquired a quasi-personal meaning, and is usually employed as its equivalent, but, like the Jewish use (e.g. Luke xv. 18), tends to carry too definite religious associations with it.
- ↑ Blodget, on “The Chinese Worship of Heaven and Earth,” Journ. of the American Oriental Society, xx. p. 58 ff.
- ↑ So the epithet ’êl might be applied in Hebrew to men of might, to lofty cedars, or mountains of unusual height, as well as to the Supreme Being.
- ↑ See E. M. Satow, “Revival of Pure Shinto,” Trans. As. Soc. of Japan, vol. iii. pt. 1 (1875), Appendix, p. 26.
