Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/50

40 intervals of stagnation or retrogression. Even when the general religious condition of a country is advancing it will be found that the lower popular stratum of thought consists less of undeveloped germs of future progress than of a breccia of the debased or imperfectly assimilated ideas of the wise men of preceding generations. In this retrograde movement a large part is played by the invincible tendency of the vulgar to give metaphors their literal signification. This, I take it, is the source of the numerous actual children or descendants of the Sun and other deities who are found all over the world, in Greece, Peru, Japan, and elsewhere. The sequence of ideas may be thus represented:—

I. The King or sage is like the Sun.

II. He is (rhetorically) a Sun, or the Sun's brother or offspring.

III. He is actually descended from the Sun in the nth generation, the intermediate links of the genealogy being a, b, c, d, &c., and he is therefore himself a divinity.

Herbert Spencer, in his 'Sociology,' says:—

"There are proofs that like confusion of metaphor with fact leads to Sun-worship. Complimentary naming after the sun occurs everywhere, and where it is associated with power, becomes inherited. The chiefs of the Hurons bore the name of the Sun; and Humboldt remarks that 'the "Sun-Kings" among the Natches recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.' Out of numerous illustrations from Egypt may be quoted an inscription from Silsilis—'Hail to thee! King of Egypt! Sun of the foreign peoples...... Life, salvation, health to him! he is a shining Sun.' In such cases, then, worship of the ancestor readily becomes worship of the Sun...... Personalization of the wind had an origin of this kind."

"Nature-worship, then, is but an aberrant form of ghost-worship."

Surely this is an inversion of the true order of things.