Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/89

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have for their object the recently deceased corpse. For life and death are conceptions very doubtfully marked off from one another in savage thought. Death is unnatural ; and the savage has great difificulty in believing any one to be really dead. The dead man is therefore treated as living, though seeming dead. If Hving, he has still the needs of a living man — food, clothing, shelter, service, weapons. Even if dead, he may rise again, since men who have been to all appearance dead have returned to life and (but at a later stage) have detailed their adventures in the Other World. By the time that point is reached, the idea of the soul has been developed, and the rites are no longer performed to the corpse, but to the ghost of the departed. Naturally it is the kin of the deceased who by affection as well as interest desire to retain communion with him ; and if in life he has been powerful, they think of him as still possessed of might, and do all they can to enlist his might on their side. Hence arises Ancestor-Worship; and when the ancestor has been a man of renown, or when pro- sperity attends his worshippers, he rises by degrees to the dimen- sions of a god. His burial-place becomes a temple ; his kinsmen become his priests ; a stone or a piece of wood replaces the corpse, and the ghost is conjured into it ; and thus we get full- blown idolatry. The great gods of heathenism, however, are probably not the ghosts of individuals. Zeus and Athene and Dionysos never were living persons. They are severally a syn- thesis of a whole class of deities, having similar attributes, and receiving a similar cultus.

A large portion of the work is devoted to human sacrifices, considered as the deliberate manufacture of gods to gratify the need of humanity for constantly new and powerful protectors. In connection with this, the sacrifice of the jNIeriah, the legend and rites of Attis, Adonis, and other divinities in east and west undergo examination ; and the connection between sacrifice and sacrament is discussed. The author then turns to sacrifice as expiation, piacular sacrifice, and the scapegoat. At this point his argument reaches Christianity. In two chapters on the spread of Christianity he draws a picture of the Roman world when the new religion appeared, and of the classes among whom it appeared, their super- stitions and conditions of thought ; and he traces with the vigour we always expect from him, whatever we may think of his theories, the influences which made not merely for the local extension of

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