Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningCarpenter, Edward
Religion
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
Carpenter, Edward
Christianity and other religions; Mythology; Paganism; Religion
and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the
composite-image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic powers.
"Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have shown us in abundance
the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain."
Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man
may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual
representative of the glorified and composite being who exists in the
mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be unworthy, but is
surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real
[gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in
clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the
mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The
medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some
connection with the great god more intimate than that of other men... he
knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him." (2) Thus
did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but three
names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the god.
(1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions
of the Race-Life."
(2) The Four Stages, p. 140.
And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in
chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals
and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of
the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people
whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear,
and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there
would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of
emotions--emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and
so forth--an image of a _divine Bear_ in whom they lived and moved and had
their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or
a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same
way spring up the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred
kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its
presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these
objects were and had been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly
and seasonal Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo
(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the totem-animal
or priest or magician-chief gradually invested him with Awe and
Divinity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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