speculations on that dark period which precedes the first faint dawning of history. The Jewish doctors, indeed, are kind enough to point out the very individual by whose means idolatry was introduced into the world, and a firm faith in their dictum would save much trouble. According to the rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, Enos, discoursing on the splendor of the heavenly bodies, insisted, that, since God had thus exalted them above the other parts of creation, it was but reasonable that we should praise, extol, and honour them. The consequence of this exhortation, says the rabbi, was the building of temples to the stars, and the establishment of idolatry throughout the world. By the Arabian divines however, the imputation is laid upon the patriarch Abraham; who, they say, on coming out from the darkcave in which he had been brought up, was so astonished at the sight of the stars, that he worshipped Hesperus, the Moon, and the Sun successively as they rose.* These two stories are very good illustrations of the origin of myths, by means of which, even the most natural sentiment is traced to its cause in the circumstances of fabulous history. But the Arab Job, without thinking it necessary to inquire into the sources of his feelings, explains the philosophy of early idolatry, in a few simple and beautiful words. "If," says he, "I gazed upon Orus (the sun) when he was shining, or upon lärêcha (the moon) when rising in her glory; and my heart went secretly after them, and my hand kissed my mouth, I should have denied the God that is above." The pious Arab here points to what the easterns tell us is the most ancient religion in the world. This, the historian Abul Faragi says, consisted in the belief of the eternity of the world, governed by a co-eternal mind, whose symbol was fire. The apparent, or material source of fire, was the sun, to which, as well as to the moon and stars, as partakers of the same celestial nature, a proportioned reverence was due. The chief seat of this religion was in Haran, on the Chaldean border, where the grand temple of the Sabeans was on the top of a hill. The words Haranite and Sabean came thus to be used as equivalent terins. We have now almost lost sight of the original tradition; and the revelations of the Deity are made to mankind through the stars "walking in brightness" and the various phenomena and صابي Ab. Ecchellens. Arab. Hist. vi. + Historia Dynast. Dynast. ix. Sabi Sabita, qui est cultor stellarum, Golii Not. ad Alfragan. influences of nature. The worship of the mysterious element of fire soon gives place to that of its material fountain the Sun; the whole host of heaven gradually become immortal powers; the entire world is a reflex of God, and God is adored in that world which thus reveals him to man. Thus primitive religion. becomes a pantheism.* At first, the style of religious instruction would be plain, concise, even abrupt, to suit the simplicity of the dogmas; but afterwards, as Pausanias relates of early Greece, the priests would begin to envelope their ideas in enigmatical forms. The same diversity of intellect, which at the present day causes the component parts of even civilized society to resemble different races of men, must have existed from the beginning; some magnificent minds, towering above the common boundaries of knowledge, would lift up the veil of nature; while the vulgar, grasping as it were only the outside of their thoughts, would materialize their most refined ideas, and multiply the number of gods till the pantheism arrived at the axiom of the Greeks, "Every thing is the image of the Deity." Hence the esoteric and exoteric doctrines; the priest would speak a different language to the wise and to the ignorant; his meaning would be addressed to the initiated, and its enigmatical form of communication to the multitude. The time was past when God talked face to face with man, but the same need of such intercommunication remained; and in the flight of birds, the entrails of beasts, and the thousand other omens so dear to ignorant credulity, the will of heaven would be manifested to mankind. Symbols, or the images of ideas, must thus have been of very early invention; and the obscurity of the symbolical mode of teaching, is the consequence of the difficulty of reducing idea to form. The myth speedily followed, and was at first, perhaps, intended to explain or illustrate the symbols; subsequently, it was used in the biography of personages who were supposed to partake of the sanctity of the symbol; and finally, * Goerres, Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt, i. p. 16. + VIII. Arcad. 8; Plutarch; Clemens Alex.; Jamblichus. The word symbol, according to Creuzer, meant originally a thing composed of two." Thus the halves of a tablet broken between two persons who entered, according to the custom of antiquity, into a contract of hospitality, were called symbols, oúμbora, ovμbóλaia, tesseræ hospitales. By degrees it came to signify every kind of contract, and then every kind of pledge the ring, for instance, which was deposited at a public banquet as a security that each person's reckoning should be paid. The nuptial ring, the seal ring, and, at last, rings in general, were all called symbols. The idea of symbol thus came to be confounded with that of sign in the most general sense. was understood to mean ancient tradition as contradistinguished from history. The heroes of the myths were probably at first imaginary beings-personifications of the powers of nature; and as man can only reason from what he knows, their constitution and attributes must have been borrowed from his own. The earth, that fertile womb, from which he saw new or renewed creations springing every day, became a female, the Mighty Mother, the Eternal Spouse; and the heavens, whose powers were concentrated in the Sun, were the original male-the principle of life and fecundity. The grand distinction of sex was preserved throughout the whole system. When Nature came to be personified, not as a whole, but in her attributes, every god had either a wife or a mistress; and in the heat, the thunder, the storm, and the volcano, the mythologist found materials for the discords, rapes, and adulteries of the immortals, but too closely analogous with the crimes and sufferings of mankind. In fine, these distinctions were concentrated, as it were, in two emblems, called the Lingam and the Yoni by the Hindoos, and the Phallus and Cteis by the Greeks, and observable in a greater or less degree in every system of mythology. But the mere fact of conferring a name upon an abstract idea, and attaching an almost human history to it, was not sufficient. The vulgar, with something like the scepticism of St. Thomas, required to see and feel; and visible and tangible images were therefore presented to their brute senses. These, at first, were rude stones or columns, for religion had precedence in point of time of the arts; but as mythological story took hold of the imaginations of men, they were seized with the desire of fashioning their blocks in imitation of their gods: and hence, we presume, the beginning of sculpture. Unchiselled stones, according to Pausanias, were the first images of the gods of the Greeks; and the Phoenicians, the Megareans, the ancient Arabs, and the Jews, were once plunged in the same rude idolatry. The Lacedæmonians may be said to have arrived at some improvement when they constructed their famous Decanes, or simulacra of Castor and Pollux, of two wooden *Moos is used by Homer and his imitators simply as a discourse without distinction of truth or falsehood; and Plato applies the verb μυθολογεῖν in the ancient sense. A distinction, however, was early made between λoyos and μdos; the former meaning a true recital, and the latter a fictitious or poetical one. Thus we have óyos iv μúdų “truth under the veil of fable."-See Creuzer, P. 536. It is not a statue, but ETHAH, a pillar, or stone set on end, which the Jews are prohibited to erect, posts, connected at the top by a cross-beam; and Daedalus went vastly further when he made his wooden Venus move, and thus compelled the people to chain the images to the temple lest their gods should run away. Mythology," says Guigniaud, "is an immense tree, whose trunk is unique, but whose branches cross and entwine in every direction." We would add, that the circumstances of climate and situation have the same effect upon the mythological as upon the natural tree. National character developes itself as visibly in the formation of a statue as in the construction of a system of religion. Creuzer says, that the sitting or reclining posture of the Hindoo idols was chosen for its character of sanctity; but the remark would have been more obvious, that the indolent orientals, as expressed in their common proverb, like better" to sit than to stand." This, besides, is the position in which their kings receive homage. The rich clothing, crowns, and jewels of the idols are also in conformity with the tastes and habits of the people. The same author suggests, that the poverty of the Greeks was the original cause of the nakedness of their statues; but the Greeks wore clothes like other people, and in sculpture cloth of gold and cloth of wool are alike. The Greeks, besides, were taught the art in Egypt, notwithstanding the story of Debutadis, whose daughter traced the image of her lover by his shadow on the wall; and they might there have learnt the secret of cutting drapery out of stone. The origin of the art among the Egyptians we know nothing about; the earliest statues we have heard of, being the colossal monuments of Mæris and his queen; but the first Greek statuaries were potters-workers in clay, a substance by means of which we may make correct models of the living body, but not of the dress. In the time of Phidias, the public exercises of running, leaping, wrestling, &c., which were performed naked, gave the last polish to the art of sculpture, and to the taste of the Greek nation. The multitude of heads, arms, and other organs, with which, in many cases, we find a single Hindoo statue provided, arose, it is probable, from the eager desire of the constructors to express as completely as possible the various properties and attributes of the divinity. But the Hindoos are not singular in this extravagance, for we find the same thing in the most ancient statues of Greece. The Jupiter Patröos at Larissa (Zɛùç * Bossuet, Hist. Univer. p. 3, art. 3. + Calcosthenes the Athenian, Demophilus and Gorsanus, were potters; nor is it improbable that Idiocus and Theodorus of Samos were so also. Tarpoç of Pausanias) was represented with three eyes, watching over the heavens, the air and the earth. The Diana of Ephesus also, with her numerous breasts; and the Janus of the Romans, sometimes seen with two, and sometimes with four faces, are instances of the same kind.* But the extravagant imagination of the Hindoos far outstripped competition. The image of Brahma, an account of which is transmitted to us by Porphyry, must have been the most stupendous of all human conceptions. He was represented in the figure of an hermaphrodite, with the sun in his right-hand, the moon in his left, and a multitude of genii, with the different parts of the world, the heavens, the mountains, the sea, the river Ganges, the oceanplants, animals, and all nature on his crossed arms. Here the progress of Hindoo sculpture stopped: the brahmins and buddhists continuing to vie with each other in deformity and absurdity. As for the Greeks, they went steadily onwards till they attained the summit of perfection; and it was not till the sanctuary of the arts was violated by the Romans, about half a century after Phidias, that sculpture with them began to decline. In the deification of the musical sounds, however, the Hindoos exhibited a beauty of imagination that has never been equalled. What are the Peris of the Persians, asks M. Muller-what are the nymphs of the Greeks-to the truly ideal delicacy of this thought? Nothing, however, can be conceived more gross and stupid, when taken in the mass, than the exoteric system of the Hindoos; and, although it is our purpose to offer some expositions of the metaphysical doctrines, for the purpose of illustrating the Buddhaic system, in mercy to the reader's taste and patience, we shall say as little as possible about the thirty-three millions of the popular divinities. In India, as the almost universally acknowledged centre from which population, art, and science radiated over the rest of the world, we shall find, if any where, the vestiges of primitive religion, or at least be enabled to trace the progress of unassisted reason in its instinctive researches into the moral mysteries by which the world is surrounded. Guigniaud, and other writers, trace back the religion of Hindostan to its origin in the worship of the Sun, which they term the Indian Bacchus. Supposing this to be correct, the next step might be, to distinguish the * We do not know of any instance of this liberality on the part of the Egyptian mythologists; but among the Persians the sun is represented as a man on horseback, with two heads. The dragon and the beasts of the Revelations, prove that such ideas were not unfamiliar to the Jews. ↑ Mill, Hist. India, vol.i. p. 285. |