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infer that because there is now no element of religion in the Midsummer rites, therefore there never was. Rather, I would suggest, the inference is that the fire-festivals, occurring as they do at the summer solstice, are like other festivals occurring on that day, survivals of early sun-worship; while the burning of the vegetation spirit's representative is the early cultivator's method of commending his crops to the sunspirit, as immersion is his method of placing them under the care of the sky-spirit or rain-god. On the other hand, if we regard these fire-festivals and water-rites as pieces of sympathetic magic, they are clear instances in which man imagines himself able to constrain the gods-in this case the god of vegetation-to subserve his own ends. Now, this vain imagination is not merely non-religious, but antireligious; and it is difficult to see how religion could have been developed out of it. It is inconsistent with the abject fear which the savage feels of the supernatural, and which is sometimes supposed to be the origin of religion; and it is inconsistent with that sense of man's dependence on a superior being which is a real element in religion.

CHAPTER XVIII

SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM

THE material progress made by man, as he advanced from the material basis of subsistence on roots, fruits, and the chase, first to pastoral and then to agricultural life, required that he should make an ever-increasing use for his own ends of natural forces. These forces were to him living beings with superhuman powers, of whom he stood in dread, but whose co-operation he required. Without some confidence that it was possible, if he set about it in the right way, to secure their favour and assistance, his efforts would have been paralysed. That confidence was given him by religion; he was brought into friendly relations with powers from which, in his previously narrow circle of interests, he had had little to hope or to gain; and thus the number of his gods had been increased.

Pastoral life and even a rudimentary form of agriculture are compatible with a wandering mode of existence, in which the sole ties that can keep society together are the bonds of blood-kinship and a common cult. But the development of agriculture is only possible when the tribe is permanently settled in a fixed abode; and then it becomes possible for neighbours, not of kindred blood, to unite in one community. In a word, political progress becomes possible; and political progress at this stage consists in the fusion or synoikismos of several tribes into a single State. This process also had its effect upon religion: a clan is a religious community as well as a body of kinsmen, and the fusion of two clans implied the fusion of their respective cults. In many cases the resemblances of the two cults may well have been so great as rather to promote than hinder the alliance; thus when

we find, as occasionally happens, that in some villages two May-poles (survivals of tree-worship) are used at a harvest festival instead of one, the inference1 rightly seems to be that two communities, both worshipping trees, if not the same species of tree, have in neighbourliness united their worship. Or, again, when we find that the branch which the treeworshipper annually carries round the community, in order that the spirit present in it may confer blessings on all to whom it is presented, is hung with various kinds of fruits and associated with cereals, we may infer that tree-worshipper and plant-worshipper have found no difficulty in uniting in a joint festival and common act of worship. So, too, in the Lithuanian Samborios, the Athenian Pyanepsion, and the Mexican offering to Chicomecoatl, the common feature is that cereals and leguminous plants of all kind are combined in one offering; and the implication is that the festival was one common to all the cultivators and worshippers of the various plants represented in the offering.

Again, two communities might happen to agree, though for different reasons, in offering the same kind of animal in their annual sacrifice. Thus the moon-worshipper seems very generally to have believed that the moon-spirit manifested herself on earth in the shape of a cow, and that a cow was therefore the proper victim to offer, on the principle that the deity is to be offered to himself. A fusion, therefore, between a family of moon-worshippers and a family whose original totem and traditional deity was the cow, would meet with no difficulty on the ground of religion, if prompted by neighbourliness or political reasons. So, too, the clan that bred horses would be prepared to recognise fellow-worshippers in a clan that was in the habit of offering horses to the sun; one that owned bulls, to unite with one whose river-deity was bull-shaped.

Or neighbourhood and neighbourliness might lead to the use of a common altar and sacred place by two or more clans, each offering a different victim, because having different totems, and each sacrificing at different times; until the fusion became complete, and nothing more would be required but a myth to explain how it was that the one god worshipped 1 Mannhardt, W. F. K. 260.

at the altar appeared in different animal shapes, or had different animals offered to him.

Fusion of this kind-syncretism-would be materially facilitated at first by the fact that the gods had originally no proper names. As long as the clan had only one god, no name was required, the gods of hostile clans were sufficiently distinguished by the fact that they were the gods of other clans: "the deity" was the deity of our clan, just as "the river" is that near which I dwell, and whose geography-book name I may not know. But the possession of a proper name gives more individuality to a god; and fusion between two gods, each possessing this higher degree of personality, is more difficult than between two nameless spirits. On the other hand, fusion is not impeded, if of the two gods one possesses a name and the other does not, only the advantage is with the one having a personal name. He readily absorbs Greek god of wine

the nameless one: thus the cult of the was a combination of the worship of a vegetation spirit and of the spirit of the vine, but the former was nameless, and therefore it was the latter, Dionysus, that gave its name to the god. So, too, when we find that in different places half a dozen different animals-wolf, roe, goat, ram, mouse, grasshopper, lizard, swan, hawk, eagle-to say nothing of plants (e.g. the laurel), were associated with or offered to Apollo, we are justified in inferring that as many different nameless totem gods, plant or animal, have been absorbed by the spirit which was fortunate enough to possess the personal name Apollo. Whether that spirit was or was not a sungod is a question to which no decisive answer is forthcoming. But it is clear that fusion between the cult of the sun-god and the worship of other gods would be considerably facilitated by the fact that burnt-offerings played a part in the ritual both of the sun-god and of other gods. The agriculturist, whose crops required sunshine, acknowledged his dependence on the sun and worshipped him. In many cases the sun-god might continue to be consciously distinguished from the plant totem or vegetation spirit, but in many, perhaps most, cases the agriculturist would worship both gods in a common festival, and combine their ritual: he had to make offerings to both, and to both it was possible to convey his offerings

by casting them into a fire. quinquennial festival, constructed a colossal Jack of the Green, placed inside it both animal victims and human criminals (captives, or, in default thereof, clansmen), and burnt the whole. That in course of time their festival might come to be regarded as a feast in honour of some one god, is readily intelligible; and as long as the different gods concerned were nameless, none could appropriate the festival. A similar combination of cults is indicated by the fact that before temples were known, and, for the matter of that, after they were common, the altars of the gods—whether Aryan or Semitic or Hamitic-were usually to be found in the neighbourhood of a sacred tree, or trees, and a sacred stream. Now the cultivator whose crops required watering (and the herdsman whose pasturage was dependent on the water-spirit) had an interest in worshipping the spirit of waters as well as the vegetation spirit; and, as the common association of sacred grove and sacred stream shows, he sought, for the place of his worship, a spot in which he could at one and the same time approach both spirits in a joint act of worship, and there he set up the altar-stone on which he dashed the blood of sacrifice. To this spot he resorted at the fixed festivals of the agricultural calendar-the solstices and equinoxes-and also on extraordinary occasions, when drought, sterility, or disease awoke in him a consciousness of the necessity of renewing the bond with the gods to whose protection it was the custom of the clan to resort with confidence in cases of emergency. On such occasions there was a fixed ritual to be observed: some "offerings" must be cast into the river, others hung upon the trees, the blood of sacrifice be sprinkled on the stone, and the victim's flesh be solemnly consumed by the assembled clan. It was on the exact and punctilious performance of all these various proceedings that the success of the act of worship (i.e. a sense of reconciliation with the god, and the termination of the drought, or the staying of the plague) depended. The omission of any one of them, or the failure to perform them in the exact manner prescribed by custom and tradition, 1 B. K. 526; Cæs. B. G. vi. 16; Strabo, iv. c. 198; Diod. v. 32. 2 Supra, p. 135.

Thus the Druids, at their great

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