RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Worship
xii.): “For the worship which naturally men exhibit to powers invisible, it can be no other but such expressions of their reverence as they 7- Caution would use toward men; gifts, petitions, Requisite in thanks, submission of body, considerate Constructing addresses, sober behavior, premeditated Theories. words, swearing (that is, assuring one another of their promises) by invoking them. Beyond that reason suggesteth nothing; but leaves them either to rest there, or for further ceremonies to rely on those they believe to be wiser than themselves.” Too often, again, a whole theory has been constructed upon observations relating to a single group of phenomena, and then boldly given forth as accounting for the origin and significance of worship in general, if not of religion itself. Thus, those who maintain that the origin of primitive religious worship was fear may be supposed to have neglected such records as the answer made to the early Spanish missionaries in America, questioning the Indians on their belief as to the origin of their gods; the usual reply was that they had come from the air or heaven, to dwell among them and do them good. Other investigators of aboriginal beliefs in the same continent have dwelt, and even with astonishment, on the prevalence of the worship of malicious spirits rather than good, led to their conclusion by the somewhat serious failure to take into account the totem-god in a land where totemism flourished to a degree unequaled elsewhere except in Australia. Again, among the Aryan races, which to this day are the most thoroughly known, the simple household worship, in no sense public, did not attract the attention of the poets, whose verses are filled with the more picturesque marvels of mythological legend. Very little testimony concerning this system of worship has made its way into literature; what is known about it has been largely recovered by a patient piecing together of information recovered from an illuminating interpretation of a sentence here and a paragraph there.
It is not, however, a rash speculation to see in the history of primitive man first a recognition of the existence of superhuman powers controlling his des-
tinies, or at least intervening in them 8. Probable at times; then a tendency to see in Origin of these powers a personal will analogous Worship. to that of which he was conscious in himself; and finally a casting about for means of entering into relations with them to his own advantage. His sentiment of a certain kinship with the supernatural powers, combined with his conviction of entire dependence upon them, impelled him to seek communion with them, and to reestablish such communion when he thought it had been broken off through his own fault. From this impulse, according to Tiele, spring all those religious observances which are usually embraced in the term worship.
The content of this term, however, was very much smaller in prehistoric times. Holding strongly to the idea of blood-kinship; extending it beyond the visible family to include the deceased members with whom communion is still desired; then seeking, under totemism, for alliance with another tribe,
some mysterious supernatural clan—a prehistoric race develops but slowly a definite idea of worship offered ‘‘to’”’ some one. According to
9. The Jevons, worship in its rudimentary Earliest stage meant the sprinkling upon the Forms of altar of the blood of the totem-animal, Worship. with the sole purpose of renewing the
blood-covenant and procuring the presence and aid of the totem-god. On this theory, the idea of offering a sacrifice ‘ to ” a god could be developed only in a later stage of totemism, when the stone had come to be identified with the god, and the god was no longer in the animal. The idea of worship, further, implies the existence, for the worshiper, not merely of a supernatural being as such, but of a supernatural being who “ has stated relations with a community ”’ (Robertson Smith, ut sup., p. 119).
In the nature-religions—those which have grown up by a gradual process of evolution, not derived from the authority of a conscious and definite founder—the organization of the worship continues to coincide with that of social life, this social life being, according to the stage of development, that of the clan, the family, or the nation. In the head of the
family are combined the temporal rule 1o. Worship and the religious leadership; and the and the same prerogatives are conceded to the
Kingship. heads of a larger family, the early
kings. In Egypt the king and his sons held as of right the highest sacerdotal dignities, while the other priests were merely their deputies in religious as well as in civil and even military affairs. The same thing is found in the Babylonian and Assyrian systems; the kings attached great importance to their sacerdotal titles, and they conducted all religious observances without the assistance of any other priests. Long after historical memory of this state of things had faded in Greece and Rome, its record was preserved in the attribution of the title archon basileus (king) to the official who conducted the public worship, and that of rez to the patrician who, in the Roman republic, presided over the ancient sacra. Then and later the title of pontifex maximus, or high-priest, still borne by the pope, was conferred upon the head of the state; nor may it be unduly fanciful to see a reminiscence of this early feeling in the concession to the later heads of the Holy Roman Empire of the right to assist as subdeacons, wearing the dalmatic, in the solemn mass celebrated by the pope—although it would more probably be consciously referred to the analogy in Jewish history of the similar anointing of prophets, priests, and kings. There is, then, much evidence to show that in the older forms of society the two offices were one, and only gradually became differentiated, owing in great measure to the practical difficulties arising from the strict taboo which surrounded these sacred personages. The evolution, however, of a separate priestly class, and the way in which its rights and duties developed, belongs less to this place than to the article Priest (q.v.)
Among strictly communal rites of worship, a time comes when disasters and distresses impress the tribe with the idea that they have offended their
Worship
divine protector, and they seek to propitiate him by what are called piacular sacrifices. The development of this sentiment on a large scale may more fitly be treated later, when the discussion comes to
the gradual loosening of the bonds of 11. Relation the predominantly tribal or national of Fetishism cult. The mention of it here will afford to Worship. an opportunity to speak of what is
somewhat loosely known as Fetishism (q.v.). The term calls up all the associations which are vaguely present to the minds of average people when they sing the words ‘“ The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone ”’; and indeed the objects supposed to be endued with supernatural power are often, to our minds, of a very inadequate and even ridiculous nature. But, as far as the mind of the African savage, for example, can be studied, it seems tolerably clear that the original source of these strange proceedings is nothing more than the desire to secure the countenance or protection of some mighty spirit, possibly one not already preoccupied with the tribal affairs, who chooses to take up his abode in or render himself accessible through some such object as a prominent rock or a curiously carved piece of wood. There is no longer likelihood of falling into the error, once so prevalent, of supposing that the African savage worships an inanimate object, knowing it to be inanimate. As Pfleiderer puts the matter generally, ‘“ what is really worshiped in the object anywhere is not itself but a transcendental x within and beyond it.” Fetishism, in the sense of the worship which finds its way, frequently from the individual, to dimly conceived supernatural beings by and through such means of approach, leads to the next branch of the subject.
As the clan dissolved, or else increased so that its members were at too great a distance from the official seat of worship, guardian spirits or family gods were chosen for the smaller groups or for individuals, the rites of their worship being modeled on those
already familiar to the race. Among the
12. Ancestor Semites, the Teraphim (q.v.) were fam- Worship. ily gods, as the lares were among the Romans; while the Greeks had their
theot patriot. 'The tendency here indicated connected itself very easily and naturally with the respect paid to deceased members of the family; and the ceremonies at first usual as mere signs of grief developed, as they grew conventional, into rites of worship. It was the danger of this development which caused a special prohibition of them to the Hebrews (Ley. xix. 28). It comes up first in the period of settled agricultural life, when the family begins to be an institution. “The worship of ancestors,” says H. Clodd (Myths and Dreams, p. 118, 2d ed., London 1891), “is not primal. The comparatively hee recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship.’”’ Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen attempted to account for the origin of religion by the worship of ghosts; but there are countless phenomena which can not be traced back to it—and it can be proved that wherever ancestorworship exists, as in China, it exists side by side with the public worship of the community. The two have