Introduction to the History of Religions Part 7

+261+. Yet beast wors.h.i.+p, such as it was and is, has played an important part in religious development. It has furnished a point of crystallization for early ideas, and has supplied interesting objects in which man's demand for superhuman companions.h.i.+p could find satisfaction.[469] It has disappeared when it has been no longer needed.

PLANTS

+262+. The cult of plants has been as widespread as that of animals, and, if its role in the history of religion has been less important than that of the latter, this is because plants show less definite signs of life than animals and enter less intimately than they into the social interests of man. But, like all other things, they are regarded by early man as living, as possessing a nature similar to that of man, and as having power to work good or ill. Trees are represented as thinking, speaking, entering into marriage relations, and in general doing whatever intelligent beings can do. Through thousands of years in the period before the dawn of written history man was brought into constant contact with the vegetable world, and learned by experience to distinguish between plants that were beneficial and those that were harmful. His observation created an embryonic science of medicine, and his imagination an embryonic religious cult.

+263+. The value of certain vegetable products (fruits, nuts, wild plants) as food must have become known at a very early time, and these would naturally be offered to the extrahuman Powers. At a later time, when cereals were cultivated, they formed an important part of sacrificial offerings, and were held--as, for example, among the Greeks and the Hebrews--to have piacular efficacy.

+264+. Among the discoveries of the early period was that of the intoxicating quality of certain plants--a quality that came to play a prominent role in religious life. Valued at first, probably, for the agreeable sensations they produced, such plants were later supposed to possess magical power, to exert a mysterious influence on the mind, and to be the source or medium of superhuman communications. Thus employed by magicians they were connected with the beginnings of religious ecstasy and prophecy. Their magical power belongs to them primarily as living things, but came to be attributed to extrahuman beings.

+265+. Plants as living things were supposed to possess souls.[470]

Probably the soul was conceived of at first as simply the vital principle, and the power of the plant was thought of as similar to the power of an animal or any other living thing. In the course of time this soul, the active principle, was distinguished from the vital principle, was isolated and regarded as an independent being dwelling in the plant.

To it all the powers of the latter were ascribed, and it became a friend or an enemy, an object of wors.h.i.+p or of dread.[471]

+266+. This difference of att.i.tude on man's part toward different plants probably showed itself at an early period. Those that were found to be noxious he would avoid; the useful he would enter into relations with, though on this point for very early times there is in the nature of the case little information.[472] Unfriendly or demonic spirits of plants are recognized by savage man in certain forests whose awe-inspiring gloom, disease-breeding vapors, and wild beasts repel and frighten him.

Demons identified with plants or dwelling in them are of the same nature as animal demons, and have been dealt with in the same way as these.[473]

+267+. The progress of society brought men into a.s.sociation with useful plants, such as medicinal and edible herbs, and fruit-bearing and shade-giving trees; these, conceived of as inhabited by anthropomorphic spirits, fulfilled all the functions that attach to friendly animals.

They became guardians and allies, totems and ancestors.[474] Several of the Central Australian totems are plants, and form part of the mythical ancestral population constructed by the imagination or ethnographic science of the people.[475] In Samoa a plant is often the incarnation of a spirit friendly to a particular family[476]--a conception that is not improbably a development from an earlier view that a certain plant had a special relation to a certain clan.[477] In general, a plant important in a given region (as, for example, the tobacco plant in North America) is likely to be invested with a sacred character.

+268+. Trees, by reason of their greater dignity (size, beauty, protective character), have generally been singled out as special cultic centers.[478] A great tree sometimes served as a boundary mark or signpost; under trees chiefs of clans sat to decide disputes. Thus invested with importance as a sort of political center as well as the abode of a spirit, a tree naturally became a shrine and an asylum.[479]

In India and Greece, and among the ancient Celts and Germans, the G.o.ds were wors.h.i.+ped in groves, by the Canaanites and Hebrews "under every green tree." To cut down a sacred tree was a sacrilege, and the spirit of the tree was believed to avenge the crime.[480]

+269+. As might be expected, there is hardly a species of tree that has not been held sacred by some group of men. The Nagas and other tribes of Northeast India regard all plants as sacred,[481] and every village has its sacred tree. In Babylonia and a.s.syria, it is said, there were hundreds of trees looked on as invested with more or less sanct.i.ty. The oak was revered in some parts of Greece, and among the Romans and the Celts. The cult of particular species, as the pipal (_Ficus religiosa_), the vata or banyan (_Ficus Indica_), the karam and others, has been greatly systematized in India.[482]

+270+. Vegetable spirits in some cases have developed into real G.o.ds. A notable example of such growth is furnished by the history of the intoxicating soma plant, which in the Rig-Veda is represented not only as the inspiring drink of the G.o.ds but as itself a deity, doing things that are elsewhere ascribed to Indra, Pushan, and other well-established deities.[483] The spirit, coming to be regarded as an anthropomorphic person, under peculiar circ.u.mstances a.s.sumes the character of a G.o.d. A similar development appears in the Iranian haoma, and the cultic ident.i.ty of soma and haoma shows that the deification of the plant took place in the early Aryan period.[484]

+271+. Another example has been supposed to be furnished by corn-spirits. The importance of cereal crops for human life gave them a prominent position in the cult of agricultural communities. The decay and revival of the corn was an event of prime significance, and appears to have been interpreted as the death and resurrection of the spirit that was the life of the crop. Such is the idea in the modern popular customs collected by Mannhardt and Frazer.[485] The similarity between these ceremonies and those connected with the Phoenician Tammuz (Adonis) and the Phrygian Attis makes it probable that the two are based on the same ideas; that is, that Adonis and Attis (and so also Osiris and Ishtar) were deities of vegetation. This, however, does not prove that they were developed out of spirits of vegetation; they may have been deities charged with the care of crops.[486] The Phoenician name Adon is merely a t.i.tle ('lord') that might be given to any G.o.d; he whom the Greeks called Adonis was a Syrian local deity, identical in origin with the Babylonian Tammuz, and a.s.sociated in wors.h.i.+p with Astarte, whom the Greeks identified with their Aphrodite.

+272+. A sacred tree often stood by a shrine; that is, probably, the shrine was put in the spot made sacred by a tree, and a ritual connection between the two was thus established. Later, when a shrine for any reason (in consequence of a theophany, for example) was built where there was no tree, its place was supplied by a wooden post, which inherited the cultic value of a sacred tree. In the Canaanite cult, which was adopted by the Hebrews, the sacred post (called "ashera") stood by the side of every shrine, and was denounced by the prophets as an accompaniment of foreign (that is, non-Yahwistic) wors.h.i.+p.[487] The transition from tree to post is ill.u.s.trated, perhaps, by the conventionalized form of trees frequent on Babylonian seal cylinders.[488] How far the sacred post was an object of wors.h.i.+p by the people we have no means of knowing; but by the more intelligent, doubtless, it came to be regarded simply as a symbol, a sign of the presence of a deity, and was, in so far, in the same category with images.[489]

+273+. It is not impossible that totem posts may be connected with original totem trees or other sacred trees. A tree as totem would naturally be the object of some sort of cult, and when it took the form of a post or pole, would have totemic symbols carved on it. Oftener, probably, it was the sacred pole of a village (itself descended from a sacred tree) that would be adorned with totemic figures, as among the Indians of Northwestern America.[490] In all such cases there is a coalescence of totemism and tree wors.h.i.+p.

+274+. It was natural in early times, when most men lived in forests, which supplied all their needs, that trees should be looked on as intimately connected with human life. A tree might be regarded as in itself an independent personality, having, of course, a body and a soul, but not as dependent on an isolated spirit. A group of men might think itself descended from a tree--a conception that may have been widespread, though there is little direct evidence of its existence.[491] Indirect evidence of such a view is found in the custom of marrying girls to trees,[492] and in the belief in "trees of life,"

which are sometimes connected with individual men in such a way that when the tree or a part of it is destroyed the man dies, as in the case of Meleager whose life depended on the preservation of a piece of wood,[493] the representative, probably, of a tree, and the priest of Nemi whose life was bound up in the "golden bough"[494]; sometimes the tree has a magical power of conferring life on whoever eats of its fruit, as in the case of the tree of Eden.[495]

+275+. These stories involve the conception of blood-kins.h.i.+p between man and tree. Closely related to the "tree of life" is the "tree of knowledge"--life is knowledge and knowledge is life. In the original form of the story in Genesis there was only one tree--the tree of the knowledge of good and evil[496]--whose fruit, if eaten, made one the equal of the G.o.ds;[497] that is, the tree (in the original form of the conception, in remote times) was allied in nature (that is, in blood) to G.o.ds and to men, so that whoever partook of its substance shared its attribute of knowledge in sharing its life, and the command not to eat of it was due apparently to Yahweh's unwillingness that man should equal the G.o.ds in knowledge. The serpent-G.o.d, who belongs to the inner divine circle, but for some unexplained reason is hostile to the G.o.d of the garden,[498] reveals the secret.

+276+. Probably, also, it is from this general order of ideas that the conception of the cosmic tree has sprung. The Scandinavian Yggdrasil is the source of life to all things and represents also wisdom; though the details may contain Christian elements, the general conception of the world as a tree or as nourished by a tree is probably old.[499] The same conception appears in the cosmic tree of India.[500] Such quasi-philosophical ideas of the unity of the life of the world suppose, doubtless, a relatively advanced stage of culture, but they go back to the simple belief that the tree is endowed with life and is a source of life for men. The transition to the cosmic conception may be found in those quasi-divine trees that grant wishes and endow their friends with wisdom and life.

+277+. The divinatory function of trees follows as a matter of course from their divine nature (whether this was regarded as innate or as due to an indwelling spirit). Their counsel was supposed to be expressed by the rustling of their leaves,[501] or in some way that was interpreted by priests or priestesses (as at Dodona and elsewhere) or by diviners (so, perhaps, the Canaanite "terebinth of the diviners").[502] The predictions of the c.u.maean sibyl were said to be written on leaves that were whirled away by the wind and had to be gathered and interpreted. To what method of divination this points is not clear--possibly to supposed indications in the markings of the leaves; it may, however, be merely an imaginative statement of the difficulty of discovering the sibyl's meaning.[503]

+278+. The pa.s.sage from the conception of the tree as a divine thing or person (necessarily anthropomorphic) to the view that it was the abode of a spirit was gradual, and it is not always easy to distinguish the two stages one from the other. The tree-spirits, in the nature of the case very numerous, were not distinguished by individual names, as the trees were not so distinguished.[504] The spirits resident in the divine trees invoked in the Vedas are powerful, but have not definite personality, and it is hard to say whether it is the tree or the spirit that is wors.h.i.+ped. The Indian tree-spirits called Nagas appear to be always nameless, and are not mentioned in the list of deities that pay reverence to the Buddha (in the Maha Samaya).[505] The large number of trees accounted sacred in Babylonia were doubtless believed to be inhabited by spirits, but to no one of these is a name given.

+279+. Thus the divine tree with its nameless spirit stands in a cla.s.s apart from that of the G.o.ds proper. A particular tree, it is true, may be connected with a particular G.o.d, but such a connection is generally, if not always, to be traced (as in the parallel case of animals[506]) to an accidental collocation of cults. When a deity has become the numen of a tribe, his wors.h.i.+p will naturally coalesce with the veneration felt by the tribe for some tree, which will then be conceived of as sacred to the G.o.d. Such, doubtless, was the history of the oak of Dodona, sacred to Zeus; when Zeus was established as deity of the place, the revered tree had to be brought into relation with him, and this relation could only be one of subordination--the tree became the medium by which the G.o.d communicated his will. There was then no need of the spirit of the tree, which accordingly soon pa.s.sed away; the tree had lost its spiritual divine independence. The G.o.d who is said to have appeared to Moses in a burning bush, and is described as dwelling in the bush, is a local deity, the _numen loci_ later identified with Yahweh, or called an angel.[507] That a tree is sacred to a G.o.d means only that it has a claim to respect based on its being the property or instrument of a G.o.d.

+280+. While the tree-spirit has undoubtedly played a great role in early religious history, there is not decisive evidence of its ever having developed into a true G.o.d, with name, distinct personality, and distinct functions.[508] There are many Greek and Roman t.i.tles that connect G.o.ds with trees,[509] but these may be explained in the way suggested above: Zeus Endendros is a G.o.d dwelling in a tree, but the tree is only an abode, not a G.o.d, and the G.o.d Zeus does not come from the tree--rather two distinct sacred things have been brought together and fused into a unity, or the tree is a rude, incipient image. The Dionysos Hermes-figures may be explained in the same way.[510]

+281+. It appears to be the aloofness of trees that prevents their becoming G.o.ds; they are revered and wors.h.i.+ped, but without becoming personalities. Babylonian seal engravings and wall pictures often represent a tree before which men or higher beings stand in adoration; according to Maspero[511] there was actual wors.h.i.+p of trees in Egypt, and similar cults are found among the wild tribes of India.[512]

Adoration, however, does not necessarily imply a G.o.d; the Buddhist's wors.h.i.+p under the bo-tree is not directed to any being; it is only the recognition of something that he thinks worthy of reverence.[513]

+282+. The cult of the corn-spirit is referred to above,[514] and doubt is there expressed as to whether such a spirit has grown into a true G.o.d. The question is confessedly a difficult one on account of the absence of full data for the period involved. The chief ground for the doubt as to the development in question lies in what we know of early G.o.ds. The term 'Adon,' as is remarked above, is the Phoenician t.i.tle of the local deity. The origin of such deities is involved in the obscurity of the remote past, but they are, each in his community, universal powers; their functions embrace all that their communities desire, and they represent each the total life of a people. It is the general rule that any popular custom may be introduced into the cult of the local G.o.d; of such sort of procedure there are many examples. In the case under consideration the G.o.d may have become the hero of a ceremony with which he had originally nothing to do, as the Hebrews when they entered Canaan connected Canaanite festivals with their national G.o.d, Yahweh, and later a cult of the wilderness deity Azazel[515] was adopted and modified by the Yahwist leaders. Various cults attached themselves to the wors.h.i.+p of Zeus, Apollo, Dionysos, and other Greek deities.[516]

+283+. A similar explanation may be given of the ceremonies of death and resurrection connected with Attis and Osiris. Of Attis we have only late accounts, and do not know his early history. Osiris is an old underground deity (later the judge of the Underworld), with functions that included more than the vivification of vegetation, and the absorption of the corn-spirit into his cult would be natural. The collocation of a male with a female deity, common to the three cults, may be merely the elaboration of the myth in accordance with human social usage (the dead deity is mourned by his consort).[517] The descent of Ishtar has been interpreted of the weakening of the sun's heat in winter; but as she is obviously a deity of fertility and, in her descent, disappears entirely from among men, while the sun does not disappear entirely, she rather, in this story, represents or is connected with the decay and rebirth of vegetation.

+284+. It is thus possible that, though many ancient ceremonies stand in relation to the corn-spirit and also to a G.o.d, the explanation of this fact is not that the spirit has grown into a G.o.d, but that it has coalesced with a G.o.d. In all such explanations, however, our ignorance of the exact processes of ancient thought must be borne in mind.

+285+. Trees have been widely credited with the power of bestowing blessings of all sorts. But, like animals, they rarely receive formal wors.h.i.+p;[518] the reason for this is similar to that suggested above[519] in the case of animals. The coalescence, spoken of above, of tree ceremonies with cults of fully developed G.o.ds is not uncommon, and trees figure largely in mythical divine histories.

STONES AND MOUNTAINS

+286+. Like all other objects stones have been regarded, in all parts of the world, as living, as psychologically anthropomorphic (that is, as having soul, emotion, will), and, in some cases, as possessing superhuman powers.[520] The term 'sacred,' as applied to them, may mean either that they are in themselves endowed with peculiar powers, or that they have special relations with divine beings; the first meaning is the earlier, the second belongs to a period when the lesser revered objects have been subordinated to the greater.

+287+. The basis of the special belief in their sacredness was, probably, the mystery of their forms and qualities, their hardness, brilliancy, solidity. They seem to have been accepted, in the earliest known stages of human life, as ultimate facts. When explanations of their presence were sought, they were supposed to have been deposited by ancestors or other beings, sometimes as depositories of their souls.[521] Meteorites, having fallen from the sky, needed no other explanation. Popular science (that is, popular imagination), perhaps from fancied resemblances to the human form, a.s.sumed of some stones that they were human beings turned to stone, and stories grew up to account for the metamorphoses. In many different ways, according to differences of physical surroundings and of social conceptions, men accounted for such of these objects as interested them particularly.

+288+. That stones were believed to be alive and akin to men is shown by the stories of the birth of men and G.o.ds from stones,[522] the turning of human beings to stone (Niobe, Lot's wife), the accounts of their movements (rocks in Brittany).[523]

+289+. Small stones, especially such as are of peculiar shape, are in many parts of the world regarded as having magic power; the peculiarity of shape seems mysterious and therefore connected with power. Doubtless accidental circ.u.mstances, such as the occurrence of a piece of good fortune, have often endowed a particular stone with a reputation for power. Certain forms, especially flat disks with a hole in the center, have preserved this reputation down to the present day. The Roman lapis ma.n.a.lis is said by Festus to have been employed to get rain.[524]

+290+. Magical stones were, doubtless, believed to possess souls. In accordance with the general law such stones and others were regarded later as the abodes of independent movable spirits.[525] When the power of a fetish seems to be exhausted, and a new object is chosen and by appropriate ceremonies a spirit is induced to take up its abode in it, there seems to be no theory as to whether the incoming spirit is the old one or a new one, or, if it be a new one, what becomes of the old one, about which little or no interest is felt.[526] The pneumatology is vague; the general view is that the air is full of spirits, whose movements may be controlled by magical means: spirits, that is, are subject to laws, and these laws are known to properly trained men.

+291+. Reverence for divine stones continues into the period of the rise of the true G.o.ds. When G.o.d and stone stand together in a community, both revered, they may be and generally are combined into a cultic unity: the stone becomes the symbol or the abode or the person of the G.o.d.[527] It was, doubtless, in some such way as this that a stone came to be identified with the Magna Mater of Pessinus. When this stone was brought to Rome toward the end of the Second Punic War, the Roman leaders may have regarded it simply as a symbol of the G.o.ddess, but the people probably looked on it as itself a divine defense against Hannibal.[528]

The Israelite ark, carried out to the battle against the Philistines,[529] appears to have contained a stone, possibly a meteorite, possibly a piece taken from the sacred mountain Sinai, itself divine, but in the Old Testament narrative regarded as the abode of Yahweh (a Sinaitic G.o.d), though it was probably of independent origin and only gradually brought into a.s.sociation with the local G.o.d of the mountain.

+292+. Similar interpretations may be given of other stones identified or connected with deities, as that of Zeus at Seleucia,[530] that of Aphrodite at Paphos,[531] that of Jupiter Lapis,[532] and the black stone that represented the Syrian Elagabalos at Emesa.[533] The remark of Pausanias, after he has described the thirty sacred stones of Pherae, that the early Greeks paid divine honors to unhewn stones, doubtless expresses the traditions and beliefs of his time;[534] and it is probable that in antiquity there were many divine stones, and that these were frequently in later times identified with local G.o.ds. In many cases, however, there was no identification, only a collocation and subordination: the stone became the symbol of the deity, or a sacred object a.s.sociated with the deity.[535]

+293+. This seems to be the later conception of the character of the sacred stones mentioned in the Old Testament, as the one that Jacob is said to have set up as a ma.s.seba and anointed.[536] The Canaanite ma.s.sebas, adopted as cultic objects by the Israelites,[537] were stone pillars standing by shrines and regarded as a normal if not a necessary element of wors.h.i.+p; originally divine in themselves (as may be inferred from the general history of such objects), they came to be regarded as mere accessories; there is no indication in the Old Testament that they were looked on as G.o.ds, though they may have been so regarded by the people[538]--their presence at the Canaanite shrines, as a part of foreign, non-Yahwistic wors.h.i.+p, sufficiently explains the denunciation of them by the prophets.[539]

+294+. In the story of Jacob he is said to have given the name Bethel to the place where he anointed the stone. It does not appear that he so called the stone itself; Bethel (in Hebrew, "house of G.o.d"[540]) seems to have been an old sacred place, and terms compounded with 'beth' in Hebrew are names of shrines. The relation between this name and the Semitic word whence, probably, comes Greek _baitulos_[541] (Latin _baetulus_) is not clear; this last is the designation of a sacred stone held to have fallen from heaven (meteoric). Such an one is called by Philo of Byblos "empsuchos," 'endowed with life or with soul.'[542]

Pliny describes the baetulus as a species of ceraunia (thunderstone).[543] The Greek word is now commonly derived from _betel_ ('bethel')--a derivation possible so far as the form of the word is concerned.[544] According to this view the stone is the abode of a deity--a conception common in early religion. Such an object would be revered, and would ultimately be brought into connection with a local G.o.d.[545] If Hebrew bethel was originally a stone considered as the abode of a deity, then in the Old Testament the earlier form of the conception has been effaced by the later thought--the word 'bethel' has become the name of a place, a shrine, the dwelling place of G.o.d.[546]

+295+. The origin of the black stone of the Kaaba at Mecca is unknown--it was doubtless either a meteorite or in some way connected with a sacred place; it was, and is, regarded as in itself sacred, but whether it represented originally a deity, and if so what deity, is not known.[547]

+296+. The belief in the sacred character of stones may account, at least in part, for the custom of casting stones on the grave of a chieftain (as in Northern Arabia), though this may be merely intended to preserve the grave. So also the stones thrown at the foot of a Hermes pillar may have been meant as a waymark, yet with the feeling that the stone heap had a sacred character of its own.[548] The stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury may have had a religious significance, but their function is not clear. Boundary stones seem to have had at first simply a political function, but were naturally dedicated to the deities who were guardians of tribal boundaries (Roman Terminus, various Babylonian G.o.ds, etc.).

+297+. It is by virtue of their divine character that stones came to be used as altars.[549] As things divine in themselves or as representing a deity they receive the blood of the sacred (that is, divine) sacrificial animal, which is the food of the G.o.d. Originally a part of the blood is applied to the stone, and the rest poured out or eaten (as sacred food) by the wors.h.i.+per. In process of time, when the G.o.d has been divorced from the stone, the latter becomes a table on which the victim is offered;[550] the old conception survives in the custom of slaying the victim by the side of the altar, and applying the blood to the horns of the altar as a representative part of the sacred structure. In the late Jewish ritual this application of blood is interpreted as a purification of the altar from ceremonial defilements.[551]

+298+. Originally, it seems, it was only natural stones that were sacred or divine and were employed as representatives of deities; but by a natural process of thought the custom arose of using artificial stones in the same way. By means of certain ceremonies, it was held, the deity could be induced to accept an altar or a house, or to take up his abode in an image, as a spirit is introduced by the savage into a fetish object.[552] The basis of this sort of procedure is first the belief in the amenableness of the deity to magical laws, and, later, the belief in his friendly disposition, his willingness to accede to the wishes of his wors.h.i.+pers provided they offer the proper tribute; but even in very late ceremonies a trace of the magical element remains.

+299+. The significance of the high pillars, of stone or of metal, that stood at the entrance of certain Semitic temples, is not clear. Examples are: in Tyre, the temple of the local Baal (Melkart);[553] Solomon's temple of Yahweh in Jerusalem, and the temple planned by Ezekiel in imitation of that of Solomon;[554] compare the temple of the Carthaginian Tanit-Artemis, a form of Ashtart, the votive stela from the temple of Aphrodite in Idalium (in Cyprus), and similar figures on Cyprian coins.[555] Of the various explanations offered of these pillars that which regards them as phallic symbols may be set aside as lacking proof.[556] It is not probable that they were merely decorative; the details of ancient temples, as a rule, were connected with wors.h.i.+p. It has been suggested that they were fire altars,[557] in support of which view may be cited the figures on Cyprian coins (mentioned above), and the fact that sailors sacrificed at Gades at a place where there were two high pillars;[558] but such a custom does not prove that the sacrifices were offered on the pillars, and these latter are generally too high to serve such a purpose; they are too high also to be convenient candelabra.[559] It seems more probable that they were developments from sacred stones (such as the Canaanite ma.s.sebas), which originally represented the deity, came to be conventional attachments to temples, and then were treated in accordance with architectural principles. They would be placed in pairs, one pillar on each side of the temple door, for the sake of symmetry, and dignity would be sought by giving them a considerable height.[560] They might also be utilized, when they were not too high, as stands for lamps or cressets, but this would be a secondary use. The obelisks that stood in front of Egyptian temples, likewise, were probably sacred monuments reared in honor of deities.[561]

+300+. Images of G.o.ds and other extrahuman beings arise through the natural human impulse to represent familiar objects of thought. Very rude tribes have stone or wood carvings of spirits and G.o.ds, good and bad. These images are generally in human shape, because all Powers are thought of as anthropomorphic. Sometimes, as Reville suggests, a root, or branch of a tree, bearing some resemblance to the human face or figure, may have led to the making of an image; but the general natural artistic tendency is sufficient to account for the fact.[562]

+301+. The character a.s.signed to images varies with stages of culture.

In low communities they are themselves divine--the G.o.ds have entered into them and they are not thought of as different from their divine indwellers. In such cases they are sometimes chained to prevent their getting away; if they are obstinate, not listening to prayers, they are cuffed, scourged, or reviled.[563] This conception lingers still among the peasants of Southern Europe, who treat a saint (a rechristened old G.o.d) as if he were a man to be won by threats or cajolements. In a more refined age the image becomes simply a symbol, a visible representation serving to fix the attention and recall divine things. Different races also differ in the extent of their demand for such representations of deity.

+302+. Stones and rocks, like other natural objects, are starting-points for folk-stories and myths. All over the world they lie on the ground or rise in the shape of hills, and, being mysterious, require explanation.