female; the distinction between its permanent objects, and its occasional or recurring operations; the recognition that behind sudden manifestations of power, like the thunder-storm, there are steady forces and continuous cosmic agencies at work—lead to the gradual rise of the higher deities. And from the social side the development of law, the influence of city life, the formation of priesthoods, the connexion of particular deities with the fortunes of dynasties or the vicissitudes of nations, the processes of migration, of conquest and political fusion, the deportations of vanquished peoples, even the sale of slaves to distant lands and the growth of trade and travel, all contribute to the processes which expand and modify different pantheons, and determine the importance of particular deities. In the midst of the bewildering variety, where all types co-exist together and act and react on each other, it is impossible to do more than point out some obvious groups receiving their special forms chiefly from the side (1) of nature, (2) of human life, and (3) from moral or theological speculation. Divine persons, objects or powers, connected with ritual, are not here considered, such as the Brahman priests who claimed to be manushyadevāh (human-gods), or the sacred soma-juice which grew by strange analogies into a mysterious element, linking together heaven and earth.
I. On the side of Nature the lowest rank (1) seems to belong to what Usener has designated “momentary” or “occasional” gods.[1] They embody for the time being a vague consciousness of the divine, which is concentrated for some single act into an outward object, like a warrior's spear or the thunderbolt,[2] or the last sheaf of corn into which the Corn-Mother has been driven.[3] (2) Above these, to use again Usener's nomenclature,[4] are the “special” or “functional” gods, “departmental gods,” as Mr Lang has called them. Such were some of the deities of the Indigitamenta already compared with the Japanese Kami. Among them, for example, were twelve deities of ploughing and harvest operations, who were invoked with Tellus and Ceres. (3) Another class may be seen in the species-deities previously named; the Samoan gods which could become incarnate as a heron or an owl, did not die with particular birds. A dead owl was not a dead god; he yet lived in all other owls.[5] (4) The worship of trees, plants and animals is a particular phase of the wider series of nature-cults, only named here because of its frequency and its obvious survivals in some of the higher polytheism's, where, as in Egypt, the Apis bulls were worshipped; or where, as in Mesopotamia, the great gods are partly symbolized by animal forms; or where, as in Israel, Yahweh might be represented as a bull; or where, as in Greece, such epithets as Dendrites and Endendros preserved traces of the association of Dionysus and Zeus with vegetation; while sacred animals like the serpents of Aesculapius were preserved in the temples.[6] (5) The higher elemental gods sometimes, like the sun, as the Indian Sūrya, the Egyptian Rê, the Babylonian Shamash (Samas), the Greek Helios, retain their distinct connexion with the visible object. It was naturally more easy for a relatively spiritual worship to gather round a god whose name did not immediately suggest a familiar body. No one ever thought of confessing sin, for instance, to a river. But the daily survey of the sun (occasionally also the function of the moon as measurer of time), together with his importance for life, secured him a high moral rank; and Rê, united with the Theban Ammon, became (under the New Empire) the leading god of Egypt for a thousand years, “He who hath made all, the sole One with many hands.” Other deities, like Zeus, rise to the head of a monarchical polytheism, in which their physical base is almost, if not quite, forgotten in cosmic and moral grandeur. The gods are often arranged in groups, three, seven and twelve being frequent numbers. Egyptian summaries recognized gods in the sky, on earth and in the water; gods of the north and south, the east and west, gods of the field and the cities. Indian theologians classified them in three zones, earth, air and sky. Babylonian speculation embraced the world in a triad of divine powers, Anu the god of heaven, Bel of earth and Ea of the deep; and these became the symbols of the order of nature, the divine embodiments of physical law.[7] Sometimes the number three is reached by the distribution of the universe into sky, earth and underworld, and the gods, of death claim their place as the, rulers of the world to come. Among these deities all kinds of relationships are displayed; consorts must be provided for the unwedded, and the family conception, as distinct from the regal, presents a divine father, mother and child. The Ibani in Southern Nigeria recognized Adurn the father-god, Okoba the mother-god and Eberebo the son-god.[8] In Egypt, Osiris, Isis and Horus proved an influential type. Perhaps at a relatively earlier stage maternity alone is emphatically asserted, as in the figure of the Cretan Mother, productive without distinctly sexual character.[9] Or, again, maternity disappears, while parenthood survives, and causation is embodied in a universal “Father of all that are and are to be,” like the Indian Brahmā in the days of Gotama the Buddha.”[10]
II. On the human side polytheism receives fresh groups in connexion with the development of social institutions and national feeling. (1) In the family the hearth-fire is the scene of the protecting care of deity; the gods of the household watch over its welfare. Each Roman householder had his Genius, the women their Junones. These stood at a higher level than the “occasional gods,” having permanent functions of supervision. (2) From the household a series of steps embodied the divine power in higher forms for social and political ends. Hestia presided over cities; there was even a common Hestia for all Greece. The fravashi or ideal type, the genius of both men and gods in the Zend Avesta (possibly connected originally with the cultus of the dead[11]), rises in successive ranks from the worshippers own person through the household, the village, the district and the province, up to the throne of Ahura himself.[12] The Chinese Shin were similarly organized; so (less elaborately) were the Japanese Kami;[13] and the Roman lares, the old local land-gods, found their highest co-ordinating term in the Lares Augusti, just as the Genius was extended to the legion and the colony, and finally to Rome itself. (3) In the case of national deities the tie between god and people is peculiarly close, as when Yahweh of Israel is pitted against Chemosh of Ammon (Judges xi. 24). The great gods of Greece, in their functions as “saviours” and city-guardians, acquire new moral characters, and become really different gods, though they retain the old names. Ashur rises into majestic sovereignty as the “Ruler of all the gods,” the supreme religious form of Assyrian sway: when the empire falls beneath the revived power of Babylon, he fades away and disappears. (4) The earthly counterpart of the heavenly monarch is the divine king, who may be traced back in Egypt, for example, to the remotest antiquity,[14] and who survives to-day among the civilized powers in the emperor of Japan (anciently Arahito-gami, “incarnate Kami”). “To the end of time,”
- ↑ Götternamen, Bonn, 1896, p. 279 ff. But cp. Dr Farnell's essay “On the Place of the Sonder-Götter in Greek Polytheism,” in Anthropological Essays presented to Edward Burnett Tylor (1907), p. 81.
- ↑ Ibid. pp. 285, 286.
- ↑ Frazer, The Golden Bough (2), ii. 170-1.
- ↑ Götternamen, p. 75.
- ↑ Turner, Samoa, 1884, p. 21.
- ↑ Cf. de Visser, Die nicht Menschen-Gestaltigen Götter der Griechen (Leiden, 1903).
- ↑ Jastrow, Rel. of Babylonia, p. 432.
- ↑ Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, p. 354.
- ↑ Cf. Farnell, Cults of Greece, iii. 295.
- ↑ Dīgha Nikāya, i. 18.
- ↑ This is denied by Tiele, Religion im Altertum, tr. Gehrich, ii. (1898), p. 259.
- ↑ Cf. Yasna, lxxi. 18; S.B.E. xxxi. p. 331; and Söderblom's essay in the Rev. de l'hist. des religions, xxxix. (1899), pp. 229, 373.
- ↑ Hirata's morning prayer in the last century included 800 myriads of celestial kami, 800 myriads of ancestral kami, the 1500 myriads to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands, and all places of the great land of eight islands, &c.
- ↑ Moret, Du caractère religieux de la. royauté pharaonique (1902). For instances in the lower culture see Frazer, Golden Bough (2), i. 140 ff.
