Sed adhuc supersunt aliae superstitiones, quarum secreta pandenda sunt, ut et in istis profanis religionibus sciatis mortes esse hominum consecratas.' -FIRMICUS MATERNUS, De errore profanarum religionum, c. 6. LACKING the idea of eternal duration primitive man naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself. The Greenlanders believed that a wind could kill their most powerful god, and that he would certainly die if he touched a dog. When they heard of the Christian God, they kept asking if he never died, and being informed that he did not, they were much surprised, and said that he must be a very great god indeed.1 In answer to to the inquiries of Colonel Dodge, a North American Indian stated that the world was made by the Great Spirit. Being asked which Great Spirit he meant, the good one or the bad one, "Oh, neither of them," replied he, "the Great Spirit that made the world is dead long ago. He could not possibly have lived as long as this." 2 A tribe in the Philippine Islands told the Spanish conquerors that the grave of the Creator was upon the top of Mount Cabunian.3 Heitsi-eibib, a god or divine hero of the Hottentots, died several times and came to life again. His graves are generally to be met with in narrow defiles between mountains. When the Hottentots pass one of them, they 1 Meiners, Geschichte der Religionen (Hanover, 1806-1807), i. 48. 2 R. I. Dodge, Our Wild Indians, p. 112. VOL. II 3 F. Blumentritt, "Der Ahnencultus und die religiösen Anschauungen der Malaien des Philippinen - Archipels," Mittheilungen d. Wiener geogr. Gesellschaft, 1882, p. 198. B throw a stone on it for good luck, sometimes muttering "Give us plenty of cattle." The grave of Zeus, the great god of Greece, was shown to visitors in Crete as late as about the beginning of our era. The body of Dionysus was buried at Delphi beside the golden statue of Apollo, and his tomb bore the inscription, "Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele." According to one account, Apollo himself was buried at Delphi; for Pythagoras is said to have carved an inscription on his tomb, setting forth how the god had been killed by the python and buried under the tripod. Cronus was buried in Sicily, and the graves of Hermes, Aphrodite, and Ares were shown in Hermopolis, Cyprus, and Thrace." The great gods of Egypt themselves were not exempt from the common lot. They too grew old and died. For like men they were composed of body and soul, and like men were subject to all the passions and infirmities of the flesh. Their bodies, it is true, were fashioned of more ethereal mould, and lasted longer than ours, but they could not hold out for ever against the siege of time. Age converted their bones into silver, their flesh into gold, and their azure locks into lapis lazuli. When their time came they passed away from the cheerful world of the living to reign as dead gods over dead men in the melancholy world beyond the grave. Even their souls, like those of mankind, could only endure after death so long as their bodies held together; and hence it was as needful to preserve the corpses of the gods as the corpses of common folk, lest with the divine body the divine spirit should also come to an untimely end. At first their remains were laid to rest under the desert sands of the Sir James E. Alexander, Expedition of Discovery into the interior of Africa, i. 166; Lichtenstein, Reisen im Südlichen Africa, i. 349 sq.; W. H. I. Bleek, Reynard the Fox in South Africa, P. 75 sq.; Theophilus Hahn, TsuniGoam, the Supreme Being of the KhoiKhoi, pp. 56, 69. 2 Callimachus, Hymn to Zeus, 9 sq.; Diodorus, iii. 61; Lucian, Philopseudes, 3; id., Jupiter Tragoedus, 45; id., Philopatris, 10; Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae, 17; Cicero, De natura deorum, iii. 21. 53; Pomponius Mela, ii. 7. 112; Minucius Felix, Octavius, 21. 3 Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 35: Philochorus, Fragm. 22, in Müller's Fragm. Hist. Graec. i. p. 378; Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos, 8, ed. Otto; Tzetzes, Schol. on Lycophron, 208. Cp. Ch. Petersen, "Das Grab und die Todtenfeier des Dionysos," Philologus, xv. (1860), pp. 77-91. Porphyry, Vit. Pythag. 16. 5 Philochorus, Fr. 184, in Fragm. Hist. Graec. ii. p. 414. 6 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, p. 574 sq. mountains, that the dryness of the soil and the purity of the air might protect them from putrefaction and decay. Hence one of the oldest titles of the Egyptian gods is "they who are under the sands." But when at a later time the discovery of the art of embalming gave a new lease of life to the souls of the dead by preserving their bodies for an indefinite time from corruption, the deities were permitted to share the benefit of an invention which held out to gods as well as to men a reasonable hope of immortality. Every province then had the tomb and mummy of its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes; Thinis boasted of the mummy of Anhouri; and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of Toumou. But while their bodies lay swathed and bandaged here on earth in the tomb, their souls, if we may trust the Egyptian priests, shone as bright stars in the firmament. The soul of Isis sparkled in Sirius, the soul of Horus in Orion, and the soul of Typhon in the Great Bear.2 But the death of the god did not involve the extinction of his sacred stock; for he commonly had by his wife a son and heir, who on the demise of his divine parent succeeded to the full rank, power, and honours of the godhead. The high gods 1 G. Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient classique: les origines, pp. 108-111, 116-118. 2 Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, 21. 3 A. Wiedemann, Die Religion der alten Aegypter, p. 59 sq.; G. Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient classique: les origines, pp. 104-108, 150. Hence the Egyptian deities were commonly arranged in trinities of a simple and natural type, each comprising a father, a mother, and a son. If the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. took shape under Egyptian influence, the function originally assigned to the Holy Spirit may have been that of the divine mother. In the apocryphal Gospel to the Hebrews, as Mr. F. C. Conybeare was kind enough to point out to me, Christ spoke of the Holy Ghost as his mother. The passage is quoted by Origen (Comment. in Joan. II. vol. iv. col. 132, ed. Migne), and runs as follows: "My mother the Holy Spirit took me a moment ago by one of my hairs and carried me away to the great Mount Tabor." Cp. of Babylon also, though they appeared to their worshippers only in dreams and visions, were conceived to be human in their bodily shape, human in their passions, and human in their fate; for like men they were born into the world, and like men they loved and fought and even died.1 One of the most famous stories of the death of a god is told by Plutarch. It runs thus. In the reign of the emperor Tiberius a certain schoolmaster named Epitherses was sailing from Greece to Italy. The ship in which he had taken his passage was a merchantman and there were many other passengers on board. At evening, when they were off the Echinadian Islands, the wind died away, and the vessel drifted close in to the island of Paxae. Most of the passengers were awake and many were still drinking wine after dinner, when suddenly a voice hailed the ship from the island, calling upon Thamus. The crew and passengers were taken by surprise, for though there was an Egyptian pilot named Thamus on board, few knew him even by name. Twice the cry was repeated, but Thamus kept silence. However at the third call he answered, and the voice from the shore, now louder than ever, said, "When you are come to Palodes, announce that the Great Pan is dead." Astonishment fell upon all, and they consulted whether it would be better to do the bidding of the voice or not. At last Thamus resolved that, if the wind held, he would pass the place in silence, but if it dropped when they were off Palodes he would give the message. Well, when they were come to Palodes, there was a great calm; so Thamus standing in the stern and looking towards the land cried out, as he had been bidden, "The Great Pan is dead." The words had hardly passed his lips when a great sound of Namentation broke on their ears, as if a multitude were mourning. This strange story, vouched for by many on board, soon got wind at Rome, and Thamus was sent for and questioned by the emperor Tiberius himself, who caused inquiries to be made about the dead god. It has been plausibly conjectured that the god thus lamented was not mystical nature of the deity. Thus it seems not impossible that the ancient Egyptian doctrine of the divine Trinity may have been distilled through Philo into Christianity. 1 L. W. King, Babylonian Religion and Mythology (London, 1899), p. 8. 2 Plutarch, Dedefectu oraculorum, 17. Pan but Adonis, whose death, as we shall see, was annually bewailed in Greece and in the East, and whose Semitic name of Thammuz or Tammuz may have been transferred by mistake to the pilot in Plutarch's narrative.' However this may be, stories of the same kind found currency in Western Asia down to the Middle Ages. An Arab writer relates that in the year 1063 or 1064 A.D., in the reign of the caliph Caiem, a rumour went abroad through Bagdad, which soon spread all over the province of Irac, that some Turks out hunting in the desert had seen a black tent, where many men and women were beating their faces and uttering loud cries, as it is the custom to do in the East when some one is dead. And among the cries they distinguished these words, "The great King of the Jinn is dead, woe to this country!" In consequence of this a mysterious threat was circulated from Armenia to Chuzistan that every town which did not lament the dead King of the Jinn should utterly perish. Again, in the year 1203 or 1204 A.D. a fatal disease, which attacked the throat, raged in parts of Mosul and Irac, and it was divulged that a woman of the Jinn called Umm 'Uncūd or "Mother of the Grape-cluster" had lost her son, and that all who did not lament for him would fall victims to the epidemic. So men and women sought to save themselves from death by assembling and beating their faces, while they cried out in a lamentable voice, "O mother of the Grape-cluster, excuse us; the Grape-cluster is dead; we knew it not." " If the high gods, who dwell remote from the fret and fever of this earthly life, are yet believed to die at last, it is not to be expected that a god who lodges in a frail tabernacle of flesh should escape the same fate. Now primitive peoples, as we have seen, sometimes believe that their safety and even that of the world is bound up with the life of one of these god-men or human incarnations of the divinity. Naturally, therefore, they take the utmost care of his life, out of a regard for their own. 1 F. Liebrecht, Gervasius von Til bury, p. 180. 2 F. Liebrecht, op. cit. p. 180 sq.; W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 412, 414. The latter writer observes with justice that "the wailing for 'Uncud, the divine Grapecluster, seems to be the last survival of an old vintage piaculum." "The dread of the worshippers," he adds, "that the neglect of the usual ritual would be followed by disaster, is particularly intelligible if they regarded the necessary operations of agriculture as involving the violent extinction of a particle of divine life." |