Sibbald A.T. - The Sraddha

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The Sraddha

Andrew T Sibbald

(English: A. T. Sibbald, The Sraddha)

A. T. Sibbald’s study of the origin and significance of śrāddha, published in Lucifer from May to August 1888 with H. P. Blavatsky’s footnotes. (B. de Zirkoff, BCW 9:261)

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Mentioned in: Footnotes to The Sraddha (BCW 9:261)

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Title for references: Sibbald A.T. - The Sraddha
Short description: A. T. Sibbald’s study of the origin and significance of śrāddha, published in Lucifer from May to Au...

Andrew T Sibbald

The Sraddha

May 1888

185

The Sraddha

This ceremony belongs to no one race or creed, for it is the link between the races, and the common matrix of their creeds; it transcends all other branches in importance, and exceeds them in difficulty. It cannot be dealt with as history, or as metaphysics, for both are born from it; in the mysteries of life and love its spring is hidden, and is not to be found unless sought for there. As on entering a sacred grove, here also we must deposit the profane vestment of opinion, nor would this (if practicable) be all, we must surrender for a time our judgment as well, and give up our wisdom, as our folly; for a clear eye will not give you to know man as if he were a crystal or a plant; the eye to see him by is the soul. Seek to know as a child seeks to know, and you will be able to judge as a man ought to judge; for this, speculativeness must give place to reverence, knowledge to ignorance, science to superstition.

That this appeal is not misplaced, nor the awe with which I approach the subject groundless, appears in this, that no writer in any age or country has handled it. Connected as it is, no less with the actual government of India than with the interpretation of the monuments of Egypt – interwoven as it is with the institutes and laws of all the great states of antiquity, and followed by one half of the present human family – this neglect is only to be attributed to an incompatibility of assimilation between its nature and our ideas. A splendid task remains yet to be undertaken; when accomplished, the world of letters and of laws will learn that it itself had once an ancestry of heart. I presume not to handle such weighty matters, but yet from the field may pluck some ears of grain for present use.

The duty of the primitive child to the parent extended to every service that could be rendered, to every sacrifice that could be made The most menial offices had to be fulfilled, and life itself had to be surrendered, if necessary, for the parent’s well-being, or, as we see in the cases of Abraham and Jephtha, at his desire. This relationship did not close with life; it was the part of the son to “serve his parents dead as he had served them living,” a service accomplished through their notion of death, which enabled him still to perform

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equally his twofold duty of doing reverence and providing food. A touching scene is related by some African traveller of an Abyssinian woman placing a morsel of bread in the mouth of her dead child, the most artless expression of grief and desire, in presence of the mystery of death while startling and new. The spirit had fled naked and helpless, into cold space; it was not dead – it could not die; reasoning was not wanted, it returned nightly in visions and in dreams. Like despotism, materialism is modern; like liberty, spiritualism is ancient; not that of the metaphysician, but of the child. The ghost must want sustenance, it must require clothing; who but its kin on earth could furnish it? but by what way could it be reached? Where was the messenger?

This longing is universal, the methods employed to gratify it are dissimilar. In the grosser mythologies, death itself was used as a vehicle, and animals, attendants, or wives were entombed with the corpse, or poisoned, or left to perish by hunger; but here another process was employed. A reversed flame has always been the symbol of death; but the to us the production of flame is not less a mystery than death itself. It suggests imagery for life, for soul, for faith, for genius.

Light springing from darkness – flame flowing out of cold matter, incessantly flying from earth to heaven, ascending, as it were, to its native sky, and seeming to carry up with it the substance upon which it feeds – of the nature of the stars assigned as the abode of the departed, to whose flight, as to that of the ancestors, the pathless air was no obstacle; this was the vehicle. To flame, then offerings were consigned as the messenger of the Gods.

The Rig Veda opens with this passage, which, as containing the elementary part of faith, is recited before reading the Sacred Books.

“I praise divine fire, primevally consecrated, the efficient performer of a solemn ceremony, the chief agent of a sacrifice.”

The Hindus have a ritual which may have been, like our own, subjected to interpolation, but of which the frame-work is older than any writings or institutes. There we find fire personified thus:

“Fire, approach to taste (my offering), thou, who art praised for the gift of oblations. Sit down on this grass, thou, who art the complete performer of the solemn sacrifice.”

Why it is praised and invoked, this passage shows:

“Accept these offerings; carry them to the ancestors. Thou knowest thy office,” or “thy way.”

It was not ordinary fire that was employed, but a flame obtained in that manner which philosophers have imagined to have first conferred on man the knowledge and possession of this wonderful element – the friction of the branches of trees. This is the “Primevally consecrated

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fire.” Such are the words of the Vedas. What is implied in “Primevally,” save that the process was used by all before their dispersion or their schisms? and so we find it amongst Buddhists or Brahmins, Arians or Chinese, Romans or Mexicans. Humboldt, describing the process employed by the latter people to relight the sacred fire, when at the close of every 52nd year they had extinguished it, employs the very terms of the Puranas in prescribing to the Hindus the form of the same ceremony. A block of wood, five inches cube, hollowed into a cup, is drilled with a spindle of itself till it flames; a consecrated tree is used for this purpose – the Sami or Soma (moon-plant), thence entitled Arani, or “mother of fire.” Here was surely no idea of fire as an element, but solely as a sacrificer; and, whether as to the primitiveness of the process, or object, or universality and uniformity of the practice, it is impossible to ascend higher; here we have reached the fountain-head, not of this rite, but of ritual.

The Romans had but one fire for the whole state continually burning, and whence sacrificial flame was distributed; but the Brahmin or Alhan, and, indeed, all the “twice born” who kept “consecrated hearths,” had the sacred fire produced for each. It was made on his investment with the sacrificial cord, it supplied the fire for all sacred offices during life, lit his funeral pyre, with which it became extinct.

As actually practised, the Sraddha has, in the first instance, to restore to the spirit the organs destroyed by cremation. The ceremonies used for this end occupy the period of mourning; the spirit has then to be elevated to the sphere and placed in the rank of the former ancestors. This operation is not concluded till the end of a year, and in and by the performance of multiplied solemn acts, but always consisting in the offering of sustenance. But it did not suffice to commit the offering to the flame; the assurance was required that it had been received; besides the ancestors were to be no less honoured than fed; they needed a banqueting hall, no less than a banquet. There was then no temple, no grave or tomb; a place had still to be fixed upon, and to it they had to be brought down. In this great dexterity and profound science were required; for the ancestors, needy and dependent, were also haughty and punctilious. If the scenes, circumstances, thoughts, words, motions of the sacrificers and attendants were satisfactory and pleasing, then, on being invited by “race and name,” they came and took their places according to their rank, on small cushions made of folded blades of grass. It was a scene of grave, solemn, and of affectionate family meeting, not one of grief and tumult. “Unwillingly do the manes taste the tears and rheum shed by their kinsmen; then do not wail, but diligently perform the obsequies of the dead!”

“By the Hindu ritual,” says Macpherson, “six ancestors only were called upon by name, but amongst the hill tribes, all the ancestors are called upon. The worship of deceased ancestors is a striking and

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important feature of the Khond religion. The more distinguished fathers of the tribe, of its branches, or of its sub-divisions, are all remembered by the priests, their sanctity growing with the remoteness of the period of their deaths, and they are invoked in endless array after the gods. . . . They are propitiated upon every occasion of public worship whatever; and it is said that a perfectly accomplished priest takes between three and four hours to recite his roll of beads.”

The Institutes of Manu and the Vedas limit the “calling by name” to the three ancestors. These gradations mark the relative antiquity of the Vedas, the ritual, and the practices of the hill tribes. The knowledge of these names thus became a mystery, affording to the Sacerdotal class material for the establishment of power and influence. Here is the explanation of the calling on the names of gods, etc.; of the potency attributed in the Greek mysteries to the utterance of certain names, some of which could stop the moon in her course, some the sun, some disturb the order of nature, and shake the universe. These names were not Greek, but Barbarian; and the knowledge of them constituted the mystery. Now for the scene of this festival. We stand in an age when nothing of what is ancient had as yet existence; when nothing had become consecrated by time; when the tide of tradition had not yet commenced to roll; when each process, if new, had reference to its purpose, and had its key either in extant ideas or prevailing circumstances; how, then, consecrate a spot, when all earth was alike? How choose a direction? Yet they did consecrate a spot, and it was by drawing geometrical lines, derived from the motions of the earth and the heavenly bodies; on these lines, first used to place altars, were temples subsequently raised, so uniformly in all succeeding time, and throughout every region of the earth, that it has not entered into the mind of man to inquire into the motive, or to think even of the fact. The process may be seen practised to-day as originally devised, by every Brahmin who prepares the scene for a Sraddha; he commences by drawing the figure of the cross.

The ancestors having attended and taken their seats, they are furnished with water to drink, with water for purification, with water for bathing. They are also clothed. The food is then presented (through the fire), and they are thus addressed: –

“Ancestors rejoice! take your respective shares, and be strong as bulls.”

Nor was it from any portion of the hand that they would accept their food; it had to be presented by the part between the thumb and the forefinger, which afterwards, in Chiromancy, was known as “the line of life,” and which, consequently, was designated Pitriya.

After they have fed, the performer of the sacrifices dismisses them

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with the same honours with which they had been received, and thus addresses them: –

“Fathers, to whom food belongs, guard our food, and the other things offered by us; venerable and immortal as ye are, and conversant with holy truths; quaff the sweet essence, be cheerful, and depart contented by the paths which the gods travel.”

According to the Institutes of Manu, the first offerings specified are “grains, the natural product of the earth.” If this be the commonest of things, it is the first fruits of human toil, and consequently the first of human offerings.

Next to these come “vegetables, rice, clarified butter, the milk of cows, and food made from it; but flesh is particularly agreeable to them, especially that of the long-eared white goat.”

The cow is not mentioned by the Hindu lawgiver, but that it had been anciently sacrificed, the name of the yearly Sraddha shows; and still a cow, after having been consecrated as a victim, is liberated in their honour.

Honey and milk are specified as their food of predilection; but, “whatever suitable food is presented with pure faith, and with the enunciation of name or race to ancestors, at an obsequial oblation becomes food to them.”

These different aliments supplied to the ancestors satisfaction of various degrees of intensity and duration; their gratification depended, however, not only on the quality of the offering, but also on the appositeness of the occasion. The malignant spirits being always at war among the stars with the beneficent ones, seeking to disturb the order of nature and thereby to destroy the progeny of men, the successful accomplishment of the various phases of the Heavenly Host had to be celebrated as triumphs, on which the ancestors, as parties concerned, had to be congratulated: such as the new moon, the 15th of the moon’s wane, the new year, solar and lunar eclipses, certain lunations of the dark fortnights, the solstices, and when the sun is in Aries.

The following is the song of the Pitris, heard by Ikshwaku, the son of Manu, in the groves of Kálapa (skirts of the Himalaya): –

“Those of our descendants shall follow a righteous path, who shall reverently present us with cakes at Gaya. May he be born in our race who shall give us, on the thirteenth of Bhádrapada and Mágda, milk, honey, and clarified butter. There are two classes of rites; those performed by the offering of the cake, and those by the libation of water. The last class in the failure of males could be performed by females; the others by daughters’ sons, and their sons, and also by the ‘prince who inherits the deceased’s property.’”

The ceremony, however, did not solely consist in feeding the

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ancestors; their honour required the distribution of food to the living, and chiefly to the indigent and destitute; it was equally furnished to animals and men. Thus the connection of the living child with the dead parent was used to inculcate practices of charity.

This support could only be received from those who were bound by affinity to offer it. Deprived of it, they were emaciated with want, and disturbed with sorrow. Some wild, indefinite, and supernatural torments – some incomprehensible fate – fell upon them and awaited, them; and they “blasted with their sighs” the mansions of those who refused them their rites. Whoever was guilty of this dereliction was exposed to the most terrible punishments on earth, being, ipso facto, excommunicated, and so cut off from his fellow-men that his touch polluted, and the very sight of him defiled the eye.

The Pitris had, however, effectual means of control over their descendants. If they could blast and curse, they could also bless and cause to fructify. To them entreaty was made for success in every enterprise, and acknowledgments offered in return for good fortune. Vows were paid to them for fame, wealth, power, length of days, or increase of happiness. They are applied to as intercessors, both for men on earth and for departed spirits, and they stood in the relation to men of saints and of gods, linked to them by the ties of blood, so that each race of mortals on earth, became part of a dynasty in heaven; the gods were not brought down to the level of the Pitris; but these were raised to the rank of divinities. As fire was worshipped as their messenger, so was the moon as their abode.

“May this oblation to fire, which conveys offerings to the manes, be efficacious.”

“May this oblation to the moon, wherein the progenitors of mankind abide, be efficacious.”

The gods are introduced into the ceremonies of the Pitris, not these into those of the gods. “Two cushions are placed, one on each side of the altar, for the gods, and six for the ancestors before it.”

Of the twelve species of Sraddha, one (the tenth) is “Sraddha, in honour of deities.” Another (the ninth) is preparatory to any solemn rite, and considered a part of it. The two last are as propitiatory for a journey, or to sanctify a meal of flesh. In fact, the Sraddha serves all the purposes of religion; and the rites to the gods and the ancestors were so assimilated as to be performed in common. But the line between duty to the ancestors, consisting in the furnishing of food, and

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duty to the gods by a virtuous life, is altogether effaced by a remarkable notion that the Pitris were fed by the moon’s light, which accounted for the changes in that luminary; and when the reservoir was exhausted it had to be replenished by the good deeds of men; so that the nightly changes of the sky, in connection with their ancestral reverence, became an unceasing incitement to a good life; and the sustenance of the manes depended no less on obedience than on sacrifice.

Unless by this transition, how, indeed, could the notion of sustaining the gods by sacrifice have ever arisen? The original conception of the Divinity must, by universal consent, have been that of an incorporeal and all-powerful Creator; that it was so in Brahminism there is no doubt. If then we have the Maker of the Universe suffering from emaciation, attenuated by hunger, and begging for the minutest portion of sacrificial butter, even if no bigger than a pistachio nut (the afflicting condition of Indra, at the time of that Buddhist reform), it was that the distinction between gods and ancestors had been lost.

There were thus originally two thoughts in the breast of man; the one an incorporeal faith, directed to the Creator, the other a ceremonial love, devoted to the ancestors. As the one lost its distinctness, the other acquired intensity, and when, if I may so say, an external religion arose, the spirit of the former invested itself in the mantle of the latter. The beatitude of the manes in Heaven being dependent on their descendants on earth, the latter were bound, above all things, to take care that their line should not be interrupted. Three duties were imposed; the one in respect to the wise, the second in respect to the gods, the third in respect to the ancestors. The first was performed by the study of the Vedas the second by sacrifice, the third by begetting a male child. The first could only have been imposed after the composition of the Vedas, and consisted in the knowledge of duties; the second was performed at once to the gods and the ancestors, and had been performed to the ancestors before the gods; so that, in fact, the whole duty of the Hindu was summed up in service to the ancestors, which insured that first object of primeval legislation – the peopling of the earth. Hence, that inordinate desire still maintained in all eastern countries for offspring; hence also the female infanticide so prevalent amongst the hill tribes, as they imagine that their chances of male offspring are thereby increased. The same practice, though otherwise explained, existed in Sparta.

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The childless condition carrying such consequences, provision was made for supplying the deficiencies of nature by a legal process, which we translate “adoption.” It will, however, be seen at a glance that this relationship had in their system nothing in common with our word.

The purpose was to engraft on the old stock a new shoot, which had, therefore, not only to be completely united to the one, but entirely dissevered from the other. As in the same operation with trees, the main branch could not be taken, and the sprout to be available required to be young.

The eldest son of a house could not become an adopted child, whatever the poverty or distress of the natural father, whatever the wealth and the power of the adopting one, because his duty was that of the continuation of his own line. The younger son – the object of adoption – could not be taken after his habits were formed, or his affections fixed; as an old branch will not serve for a graft. He had to be taken before his fifth year. The ceremony was a sacrament, named Hom, or Joy, and apparently connected with the Tree of Life (Hom). From that hour the child knows no father but his adopted one; passes the barrier of Caste; and succeeds of right to his property. This is required to confirm the adoption, for otherwise he cannot offer to him the Sraddha after his death.

Amongst us, the childless possessor of wealth is incapacitated from disposing of it in a manner which would secure to him even that amount of respect and affection which we still associate with parental and filial ties; and consequently we would imagine that by rendering final the disposal of the property, he would lose those services and that consideration which we look to obtain by uncertainty of expectation. By this process, as well as by the concurrent habits and feelings, all these ends are attained, and fortune enables man to supply the niggardliness of nature, securing at once a son to himself and a line of succession to his house.

Shall we treat such a system as rude? Shall we brand it as superstitious? Shall we hold it to have its origin in accident and caprice? Here there may be superstition, but it has been handled with wisdom, and applied with art. In the earliest of laws are anticipated the last conclusions of science; in the first of societies are excluded the principal causes of the breaking up of states. Instituted prior to caste, it has overruled even its authority. Other legislations have reckoned the family the unit of the state; this establishes it. Other systems have looked to preventing public crimes; this to the nurturing of domestic affections. It may well be imagined how incomprehensible was such a system to Western conquerors – what difficulties it occasioned them when they sought to do right – what facilities it afforded them when they intended to do wrong! It may well be imagined how, in the one case and in the other, the whole of a people could be sickened with disgust, or

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aroused to indignation, by acts which presented to the dispassionate or conscientious observer or judge at home no character of offence.

Of this we have an instance in the case of the late Raja of Sattara, the deprivation of whose property vitiated his adoption and consequently according to his belief and that of his fellow-countrymen, consigned his soul to eternal damnation. The adopted son was placed in the same predicament, being cut off from both stocks. This was the great wrong which he suffered; which all India felt, which no man in England could, comprehend, and which, from the incompatibility of ideas, no one belonging to the one country could render intelligible to the people of the other.

Had it happened under a Hindu government, the case would have been provided for; in the event of succession by the prince, for confiscation is wholly prohibited by their law, he was bound to appoint the proper officer to perform in his name the Sraddha, and could only hold the property on that condition. No doubt under the Mussulman system, as it always conformed to existing usages, provision had been made for similar contingencies; an Eastern people could not be ignorant of usage, far less contemptuous of it; and though Islam has put an end to the ancestral oblation, the professors of that creed retained its impress in all their ideas, and in many of their customs.

Andrew T. Sibbald.

(To be continued.)

June 1888

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The Sraddha

(Continued from the May Number.)

That the Sraddha did not originate in the Hindu system is evident from the contradiction in which it stands to caste, to which it must have been anterior, and, further, from its incompatibility with transmigration, which, though in dogma directly opposed to it, has not prevailed against it. They have, further, the tradition of the introduction of this dogma, which is attributed to several personages, but especially to Pururavas, son of Buddha, chief of the Lunar Line, a line marked throughout by religious innovation, and presenting, if not the fleshly body, at least the “ferver” of Buddhism.

We must naturally look to the names as furnishing further elucidation. Ekkodishto, the monthly oblation, does not sound by any means Sanscrit; the Zend, however, may aid us. Kuds and Kuddus is the name anciently given to Jerusalem, and still preserved; Feridoun conferred it on a religious edifice which he there constructed. The great annual oblation is called Sapindana; in this the cow is consecrated for sacrifice; and here Sanscrit philologists are entirely at fault. In Turkish, dana is “cow”; it is the common word in use in every field, market-place and butcher’s shop. If so, we have then a compound word. Sapin is not Turkish; but if we write the word Sab-i-dana, we have, in Turkish, “the master and the cow.”

Swadha is the word ceremoniously pronounced during the oblation; it means “food,” but the Hindus render it “oblation,” and they personified it as the daughter of the patriarch Packshu, and the wife of the Pitris. Swadha is “the consuming power of sacrificial fire,” which they personify as the sister of the former, and make the wife of Vahni, “the god of fire.” Sraddha itself is in like manner a sister of the other two, and the wife of Dharma, “the lord of righteousness.” In Sanscrit, it is rendered “faith.” Had it originally had this meaning it could never have been given to any ceremony in particular. It follows, then, that

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the word was foreign, and the rite imported at a time when there existed no abstract idea of faith. Now, in the cuneiform we have the Thrada, and it applies to this ceremony; the Sanscrit word, is, therefore, adopted from the Zend, with the addition of an “s.” The philosophical character of the Chinese places in a clear light an institution which the legendary, metaphorical and metaphysical spirit of the Hindus has disguised with fable, and enveloped in mystery. There it is assumed to be the foundation of doctrine, and the political bond of the constitution. What is left to inference and interpretation in India is, in China, declared as maxim, and asserted as Truth; for instance: “A child serves the dead parents as if they were alive.”

“The want of posterity is the greatest of defects.” The only act worthy of being esteemed great is the rendering due service to the dead. “All virtue and all wisdom reside in reverence for elders and parents.” “That reverence towards the living was maintained by the influence of this ceremonial towards the dead.”

After an interval of twenty-five centuries the Sraddha, which was restored under the Hya, has lost nothing of its grandeur, and it is thus described as actually practised: –

“According to the ritual which regulates the state proceedings of the Emperor of China, he is bound to visit every year, on the first day of the moon, the temple of his ancestors, and to prostrate himself before the tablet of his fathers. There is before the entrance of this temple, a long avenue, wherein the tributary princes, who have come to Pekin to render homage to the Emperor, assemble. They range themselves right and left of the peristyle, in three lines, each occupying the place appertaining to his dignity; they stand erect, grave and silent. It is said to be a fine and imposing spectacle, to witness all these remote monarchs attired in their silk robes, embroidered with gold and silver, and indicating, by the variety of their costumes, the different countries they inhabit, and the degrees of their dignity.”

In one respect, however, they failed in philosophy, as compared with the Hindus – they wailed and lamented; grief was not with Roman stoicism forbidden, it was indulged in, cultivated, and exhibited; it was a luxury, a passion, and a performance. The period of mourning lasted for three years, during which time the son was incapacitated for public functions, sometimes dwelling at the entrance of the tomb, and there serving the dead as if yet living.

While the religion of Hoangti anticipated Brahminism in date, the detailed practices, as recorded so far back as the times of the Hya, exactly correspond with those of the Tartars under their tents. In the “earliest antiquity,” the body was cast out into the ditches by the wayside; it is actually exposed by the Tartars on the hill-tops. The number of sacrificial vessels used by the Emperors was nine. The same number is daily used by every Mogul, and the oblations made therewith

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by the votaries of Buddha are identical with those prescribed in the Brahmin ritual. The Chinese vases were, so to say, the earliest coinage, and the most ancient of continuous records; they were costly in material, elaborate in their workmanship, beautiful in their forms, and necessarily devoted to the then highest objects of worship; they were sacrificial. Four emblems are to be found on them – the Moon, the Fish, the Eye, and the Cross. The two first are united in one of the most ancient; the third appears on nearly all; and the last is often repeated, and in various forms. We have already seen that the moon was the abode of the ancestors; we, therefore, perfectly understand its introduction as an emblem on an ancestral vase, without adopting the explanation offered of moon-worship. The fish and the eye are easily explained in the same manner. The first lived in the element of which the moon’s substance was held to be a concretion. The eye presents us with a point of greater intricacy; and to which belong a multiplicity of interesting ramifications. Whoever has visited the Mediterranean, has observed it painted on the bow of boats and galleys, as it was on those of the Phoenicians of old. It was, amongst the Jews, enclosed in a triangle – an emblem of the deity. There is a species of Etruscan vase, which has not been understood; in it also are two great eyes. It is figured in gigantic proportions on the exterior of the Chaitiyas of the Buddhists; now we discover it in China, on the oldest monuments. The character of those monuments, and the other emblems with which it is associated, point at once to the ancestral worship, the origin of all forms of worship.

The Eye from its transparent nature in the body, from its connexion with light, would naturally be one of the first of symbols employed by an allegorising faith; but we must find some minute point of identification to connect it with the manes; and it appears to me that that is afforded in the consecration of the hare by the Chinese, the cat by the Egyptians, and the rabbit by the Greeks. Great importance was attached in the ancestral worship to the increase and decrease of the moon. This was supposed to be typified in the dilation and contraction of the iris in these animals; if they were accepted as emblems of the moon, how much more the eye itself? There was not only the “lunar eye,” which expressed duty, but the “solar eye,” with a more general significance, conveying benevolence. Thus the Brahmin prays, “May all things view me with the eye of the sun. I view all things with the solar eye. Let us view each other with the solar eye.” The eye was also the visible sign of grief, and thus we have among the Egyptians the eye and the tear; the right eye being supposed to represent the sun; the left the moon.

The Jews placed the eye in the triangle: now, the triangle is connected, though in a manner which I do not understand, with the Sraddha, for it was one of the forms of the earth-elevation or altar

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constructed for that purpose. It was a square in ordinary cases; but for a person recently deceased, and apparently during the season of mourning, it was a triangle.

It is impossible not to suspect here that that great mystery of the Trinity, which pervades all Eastern religions, was itself connected with the ancestral sacrifice. How else explain the use of this remarkable figure which has ever continued to be its emblem? To this we join the triple division of Fire, essentially belonging to the same worship. The Chinese defined the Deity as “Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity.” This doctrine, it will be self-evident, has no connection whatever with the Trinity of the Brahmins or the Trinity of the Buddhists, which had reference to attributes, combination or time, being the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer;” “Wisdom, Nature and Union;” and “Past, Present and Future;” whilst its original form on the eastern limits of the old continent exactly corresponds with the specification of the Athanasian creed, being the three Hypostases or Impersonations of one and the same divine nature.

If we are to accept this as a record of primitive revelation, all inquiry is at an end, and all argument ceases; but if we are to consider it in a mere human sense, that is to say, as a doctrine evolved by the unaided effort of the spirit of man, then must we proceed as in respect to any other phenomenon. Now, as in our own faith, the doctrine of the Trinity confessedly transcends reason, it is hopeless to look for the origin of it in the Chinese; that is to say, if we consider it as a conclusion arrived at with reference to the nature of the Deity; but there is a path which we may take, and proceeding by which we may find the problem less intractable.

The primitive conception of God must have been one of such profound reverence that to dare to inquire into His nature would have been deemed sacrilege. In the words of Menu, He could be “apprehended only by the class of abstraction.” He was without form, without limit, without name. How then could he be divided into three persons? In fact, that Materialism which produced Polytheism sprang from the deep abstraction connected with the idea of a Creator. It may, therefore, be inferred, looking at the matter in a human point of view, that the doctrine of the Trinity as regarded the Godhead, was not primitive, but derivative.

Whence then could it have sprung? From Psychology? Death though a mystery, did not repel, it invited inquiry; the nature of death could be comprehended only by that of life.

“What is God?” is a question which no primitive man would ask. “What am I?” is one which must ever have been present to his

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thoughts. Suppose now, that the answer made had been by a division of the soul into different natures, and these threefold, would we not have, as regards human life, three in one and one in three? If so answered in respect to the life of man, the idea of a Trinity of Spirit was established in his mind, and might thereafter be applied to other spiritual existences, and even to the Divine Nature itself.

This is no hypothesis; we have this very division of Life as a fundamental dogma amongst those populations who have preserved the earliest records of religious thoughts and ceremonies.

The Khond say that life is composed of three souls, one of which is animal, one intellectual and one Divine; that the first, when the body dies, dies with it; that the second, after death, is punished or recompensed, according to the body’s deeds; and that the third returns to and is absorbed in the Deity from which it had originally emanated.

An ampler conception of life and existence has not been attained to by all subsequent metaphysics; extending immortality backwards, and separating the taint of earth from the breath of Heaven; and in it we may recognise conjoined the elements of the several dogmas on which are based the various structures of philosophy, belief and superstition. The point upon which I rest here is that this Trinity was connected with the soul of man, and therefore with the ancestral oblations; that with it, too, was connected the figure of the Triangle, especially applied at the time when the separation was supposed to take place by the occurrence of death.

It was only in the fourth century, and after the Labarum of Constantine had appeared in the skies, that the Christian Church adopted the cross as an emblem; it was centuries later that the cruciform cathedral came into use, through the Goths of Spain and the Saracens of Africa, whose architecture was adopted from the Philistine tribes of Barbary. The Chaitiya Buddhists, in all the completeness still to be witnessed in the rock temples of India, was then inaugurated in Europe, as at once the Gothic and Christian architecture. If it be repugnant to all our notions to assert that the cross, as a Christian emblem, did not originate in the crucifixion, so it is perplexing to our condition to find it a religious emblem before that event, and an object of veneration and adoration through all the regions of the earth, and from the earliest times.

The Cross was known to the Jews; Moses raised the serpent on a cross in the desert; Christ refers to it as an emblem of persecution. On the two earliest monuments of China we have that cross, which is called “Greek,” and also one with a longer limb – that called “Latin.” In the hieroglyphics the cross appears on the breast of the tribes of Northern Asia, fifteen hundred years before the Crucifixion. It is tattooed on

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those of the Berber tribes of Africa, as it was on those of the tribes of North America, in whose tombs it was also found, and who adored it when presented to them by the Spaniards. It appears in the Buddhistic monuments of India, and the coins called Hindu-Scythic, and amongst the stamps by which the tribes of Tartary marked their horses. In one of the last discovered Assyrian monuments it hangs on the breast of a king, exactly in the form and fashion of a modern decoration.

The only explanation which has been offered for the paramount importance of this figure is that it typified the four elements and the four cardinal points; but the elements were five, not four, as amongst them was enumerated the empyrean, or Αιθηρ, because the points of the cross are five, not four; nor was it necessary to typify what itself was the point of adoration.

All the sacred buildings of antiquity were most rigidly mathematical in their form, and astronomic in their position They are composed of the circle, the oval, the square, the parallelogram, and the cross. The circle belongs to the worship of fire, and we are familiar with it in the beautiful temple of Vesta at Rome, and in the majestic Pantheon, originally a fire temple, but restored and disfigured by Agrippa by the addition of the colonnade. The Dagopas were also round, which I take, however, to be only a modification of the square pyramid. In every case the ground plan presents the circle enclosed within a square. To the building so modified, they gave the shape of a bell, evidently in connexion with the figure of the lotus, and with the “sacred bell,” itself, so essential an instrument in their worship.

The oval represented the figure of the ecliptic. The examples of it are rare.

The square structures are both monumental, as in the Dagopa and the pyramids of Egypt, and ecclesiastical, as in the pagoda; and are invariably placed according to the cardinal points.

In the Pagoda and in the Chaitiya the square becomes extended to the oblong and to the cross. I give a description of one from Tavernier, which will further exhibit the still closer approach to the Catholic form of worship in his day; it is the celebrated Pagoda of Casi or Benares.

“It is placed on the bank of the Ganges, into which a flight of stone steps descends from the gate of the pagoda. The body of the temple itself is constructed in the form of a vast cross, with a very high cupola in the centre of the building, but somewhat pyramidal towards the summit; and at the extremity of each of the four parts of the Cross is a tower with an ascent on the outside, and balconies at stated distances affording delightful views of the city, the river, and the adjacent country. Under the high dome, in the middle, there stands an altar, in form of a

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table, eight feet in length and six in breadth, covered sometimes with rich tapestry, and sometimes with a cloth of gold or silver, according to the greater or less solemnity of the festival. Upon this altar were several idols, one of which, six feet in height, had its neck splendidly decorated with a chain of precious stones, of which the priests have a variety for different festivals, some of rubies, some of pearls, and others of emeralds. The head and neck of this idol were alone visible; all the rest of the body was covered with an embroidered robe spreading in ample folds upon the altar below.”

The Pagoda of Seringham recalls Ecbatana. Mr. Orme describes it as composed “of seven square enclosures, one within the other, the walls of which are twenty-five feet high, and four thick. These enclosures are 350 feet distant from one another, and each has four large gates with a high tower, which are placed one in the middle of each side of the enclosure, and opposite to the four cardinal points. The outward wall is nearly four miles in circumference.”

The systematic regularity of those buildings shows the deep importance that was attached to the position of the worshippers, and which we are naturally to expect in religions which saw in the heavenly bodies animated intelligences, considered the firmament to be tenanted by countless numbers of spiritual beings endowed with terrible and Divine power, as also by maleficent spirits almost equally gifted, and in whose struggles the fate of man was involved, where the preponderance of the benign over the maleficent influences, though daily in the balance, was necessary to ensure the order of nature, and the existence of the universe. Even without a celestial belief or a Divinatory Code, we see faiths and institutions threatened by the revolving motions of a priest round an altar table.

Under these impressions, not only the plan of the Temple, but the respective positions of host and guest, etc., were subject to astronomic conditions. In every daily ceremony the different points of the Heavens had to be turned to or avoided, according to their various influences, or symbolical applications. The Arhan and the Brahmin, the Yogi and the Sudra, had equally at every moment, and in every incident, to mark the divisions of the compass with a steersman’s accuracy.

Andrew T. Sibbald.

(To be continued.)

July 1888

403

The Sraddha

(Continued from the June Number.)

Amongst the various religions which have sprung up from Tartary, the fundamental points are much the same; yet we find a striking difference in the direction of worship. The sun is more particularly the object of adoration to the Fire worshippers than to the Brahmins; but the former being a reformation directed against the latter, the Kibla was immediately changed together with the rectangular form of the building. The circle was substituted for the square, the point of adoration was placed on the south, and the entrance to the north.

The Brahmins placed the great entrance to the east, in order that the morning rays should break upon the sanctuary.

The worshippers having performed their ablutions before dawn crowd round the portals, which are thrown open the moment the sun appears; the temple, indeed, opens on the four sides, but the gates to the east predominated. That the Jews had a difference to mark is shown by the point of adoration being transferred to the west, and in a minor degree to the north.

Abraham, on Mount Moriah, turned to the west. The Holy of Holies was placed at the west end. In the vision of Ezekiel (ch. viii.) the vengeance of God is denounced against the Apostate Jews, who had “their back towards the temple of the Lord, and worshipped the Sun towards the east.”

Christianity, making its difference with Judaism, removed back again its Kibla to the east. The Reformation signified its protest by placing the priest on the north of the altar. The Dissenters, like the early Christians, pay no attention to the points of the compass, but the new sect in the Anglican church go round again to the east.

If, then, the professors of a religion which pretends to be spiritual, and in which the turning to the east has been forbidden, because it implies “worship of the sun,” and who are, moreover, assured of the immaterial being of their Maker, and his Omnipresence, are thus to be traced in their mutations by imaginary astronomic lines, how much more must they have been important in religions professedly astronomic, and wherein the meditation upon mere geographical points constituted a large portion of their devotion.

But, whatever the point which might have been particularly or successively preferred, they all equally depended upon the accuracy of drawing the intersecting lines. Whatever the object of varying

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adoration, the plan itself was connected with that original form of worship out of which the various beliefs subsequently sprang; and, in fact, amongst the earliest on record we find one which especially bore the designation of “Religion of the Cross,” which prevailed in China as a reformation of that of Hoang-ti from before the Deluge, to at least the 5th century after Christ. But as this was neither the object of adoration, nor the name of a founder, it must have been the introduction of a ceremony, and not that of a belief; that ceremony, the drawing of the cross, is preliminary throughout Hindustan to this hour to the performing of the Sraddha; thus the cross became the emblem of the ancestral worship.

This operation of drawing the cross is identical with that of the Etruscan augur, when drawing the Cardo and crossing it with the Decumanus, in order to describe the bounds for sacred edifices. The very word cardo is derived from the Zend, and signifies adoration; and amongst the Chinese the mere act of forming the figure of the cross was so esteemed; to this idea no doubt we must refer the turning wheels of the Buddhists, which were originally in the form of a cross. The universality of its adoption from Rome to China, from the Druids to the Mexicans, who worshipped it when presented to them by the Spaniards, proves alike its high antiquity and its use in that lofty and central region to which in so many other points the diverging lines of superstition and belief have severally to be traced back.

But wherein lay the association with the worship of the ancestors? It lay in the necessity of fixing a point for the sacrifice. This sacrifice was not made at the tomb; there was neither grave, nor funeral pyre; the body was disregarded and cast out; there were then no temples; there was no one spot more consecrated than another; the Pitris belonged to the stars which they were supposed to inhabit; the lines of the heaven were, therefore, to be brought down upon the earth, and the intersection of the Red Line of Fire, with the Yellow Line of earth, determined by the points of the compass, was supposed to be the fitting place to invoke them down.

Once thus associated it necessarily took hold on the imaginations and affections of men, as implying a knowledge of the deep mysteries of the Universe, as the connecting link with the Invisible. It was, in fact, in matters of faith, what the compass was to the mariner, pointing to them the way of salvation. It was consecrated to their ruling passion, ancestral devotion, and filial piety; and then there was a world largely stocked with affections and rich in love. No wonder that religion received from it a name, and that the emblem has spread to every clime.

I had omitted one point, not to encumber the matter with details, which I now advert to for its argumentative value. Besides food and raiment, the ancestors required drink, and water for ablution. Fire did

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not, however serve for conveying water. It was, besides, an element, and constituted the substance of the gods. They had recourse to a peculiar process; it was suspended, or poured out, and so supposed to be conveyed to them. Probably motion was given to it; this, the wave-offering of the Jews, would suggest. They used fire and sacred fire. The vessel used in sacrifice by the Hindus is called Arghya Natha. In the Jewish sacrifice the vessel used for receiving the blood was called Aganath.

Amongst the Brahmins and the Buddhists the Cross is known as Swastika, thus: It was in this very form that it was first adopted by the Christians. I subjoin some of the forms in which it appears on the vases of the Hya and Shang dynasties, cotemporaneous with Noah.

The first letter in the Chinese Alphabet is a Cross in this form:

Their writing being originally ideographic, is is explained as implying “a home, a temple or a niche for an idol. It was anciently an ornament for a temple.” On the early Chinese vases this figure is used to enclose distinguished names, as the oval or cartouche of the Egyptians. The Cross appears also on the sepulchral monuments of the Tartars.

Thus, then, the earliest temples were constructed in the form of a Cross, and the most ancient of those discovered in India are in all points the facsimile of a Gothic cathedral – a form not explained by any inherent use, and referable only to the practice observed in the ancestral worship.

There has been abundance of disquisition on an ancient ornament which we choose to call a “cross.” It has suggested learned commentaries and endless explanations, but the religion bearing that name has strangely suggested no inquiry.

“The Roman Catholic, or the Greek,” says Clarke, “in bowing before the Cross, would be little disposed to believe that centuries before the birth of Christ the same emblem was adored as that of the Resurrection.”

Now the figure referred to by the learned traveller is not a cross, nor has it any connexion whatever in its symbolical origin, mythological or national history, with the cross of antiquity. He is speaking of the Tau of the Egyptians, which, in its natural sense, was a key adapted for the

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opening of doors, the turning of sluices and, probably, also that ingenious masonic device for lifting stones. It became the key symbolically of the womb and a future life, and thus decorates the hand of Osiris, as it does in its modern shape the escutcheon of the Roman Pontifex. This is what is called the Crux Ansata, being, in fact, the letter (tau) with a handle. Mysticism in abundance was evolved from the figure, which I do not enter into because it is precisely what I want to put aside in order to get at the source.

There is another figure of Indian origin which bears to this a close resemblance, and with which it has, therefore, been confounded, especially as the mysticism which enveloped the one intermingled with that which belonged to the other. The Indian figure may be represented by an anchor without the stocks, thus: or as a boat and a mast, standing for the Arghya Natha, typifying the double generative power of nature. The connexion with the Tau is obtained by an easy process in argument, that of reversing it, when it becomes pretty nearly a T. In China, however, there is a TI which also is the letter T, but with a perfectly distinct meaning, and represents the outspread canopy of heaven. That there could be no real connexion between the Egyptian Tau and the Hindu Arghya Natha, appears in this: that the Egyptians did not entertain the doctrines upon which the latter was founded; for they separated the Linga and the Yoni, of which it was the conjoint emblem.

There were thus two cruciform figures and one cross complete; we have confounded them together, we have mixed up the ideas from which they sprang, and the myths to which they gave rise. They belong to different nations, to different periods; they are founded on wholly dissimilar ideas, having different names, and are of different forms. The Tau rising in Egypt, in connexion with that people’s notions of a future state; the Arghya Natha rising in the Himalaya, and having reference to the mysteries of life; beyond these, we come to the figure represented in the configuration of the plateau of Pamer, the primitive abode of man called “the cross,” typifying the motion of the earth and the heavenly bodies, and employed as the process of consecration, of which it contained the idea.

Wherever we find fire worship we have found the ancestral worship. The latter is to be held a distinct religion on which others have been engrafted – not a portion of different creeds; to this religion, sacrifice was peculiar – fire was its instrument, and the cross its sign.

This is not a theory propounded, but an explanation offered, for as yet no explanation has ever been suggested of sacrifice. It has been

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strangely overlooked that this rite did not consist in the slaughter of the victim, but on its being laid on the fire. It was thus it became “sacrifice,” being made sacred. Sacrum faceo; by that process it was oblated, or borne to the gods. Expiation or atonement, the accepted reason of sacrifice had no connexion with its being burnt. No doubt, both expiation and execration came to be associated with the rite; but they bear only on the life of the victim, and noways explain the manner of disposing of the body, in which the value of sacrifice depended. I now come to Iran; having already referred the name of Sraddha to the Zend, we may expect to find it here more clearly defined, and more distinctly represented than in the other systems. This, however, is not the case. In one point, indeed, it gives us a positive assurance of the lineal derivation of the Parsees, from the old Mahabadians with their proper names and designations; for in the Zend-Avesta the enumeration and the invocation of the ancestors, which, without the knowledge of this rite, would be set down to mere vague tradition, becomes a record of legal authority, and there they trace back to Jemshid and Carjoumers. I may here remark that the air of fable connected with the latter arises from the supposed etymology of his name as first man (Mesha); but the first man of the Parsees is a wholly distinct personage – as much as Adam and Abraham.

Beyond this we find little in ceremonial or in monuments to illustrate the ceremony, but in the religion itself we have valuable light as bearing on the metaphysical and dogmatic part; and, in fact, of all the religions of the East, that of the Parsees is the most interesting, as being freest from metaphysics and mythology; as inculcating the purest morals, and as linking together, in a manner nowhere else to be found, the earliest belief of mankind, not with the maxims only, but with many of the most important doctrines of Christianity.

The oblation to the ancestors, or their sustenance, depends upon their being considered as ghosts, for if they passed into another state, either that of judgment, which would allot them a habitation of happiness or of misery, or if they animated their bodies, such oblation would be needless; yet we have concurrently oblation and transmigration. The question then arises whether transmigration was the original creed, and the Sraddha the foreign graft, or the reverse. When, however, a ritual observance is in conflict with a metaphysical conception it is to be inferred that the latter is the ingraft on the former. But we have here the tradition of the introduction of the dogma, together with the explanation of its motive – that of putting an end to bloody sacrifice, whether of man or of animals; and though this is understood as simply affecting the condition of the victim, it was no doubt aimed, although it failed in its effect, at the object of the sacrifice; the sacrifice has been maintained, although the nature of the offering has been altered, or, more accurately, brought back to its original form of libation – fruits, flowers, and sweet odours.

Andrew T. Sibbald.

(To be Concluded next Month.)

August 1888

435

The Sraddha

(Concluded from the last Number.)

Arianism was a reform of Brahminism; “Given against the Divas,” was the title of the sacred writings. They are required to resist the sacrilege of burning, or burying, the body. They devote Indra to execration, and in fact attack the then existing system as directly as the United Colonies attacked the English Parliament, or as the Reformation attacked Catholicism. But Zoroaster lived in the sixth century before Christ, when the Parsees were an oppressed people, enslaved to the Assyrians, and situated at a great distance from India, where at that time the Buddhist reform had prevailed over Indra; besides the Parsees, when they regained national independence, had to struggle with the tribes and religion of Turan; Zoroaster himself fell a sacrifice to the political power and religious hatred of that race, who for a time prevailed over his country and faith. Thus entirely cut off from India, the Parsees were, moreover, engaged against two powerful enemies, the Assyrians to the west, the Turanians, or (as they are expressly called by the compilers of the Dabistan) Turks, to the north.

These doctrines must, therefore, have belonged to another epoch, and in fact Zoroaster professes only to restore “the religion of Jemshid,” whom we may safely identify with the first Zoroaster, and the connexion is rendered indubitable by the ancestral sacrifice. The Arians who were established in India, were there conquered by the Hindus; but as the latter came from Tartary, Brahminism had been there established at a still earlier period, and so was in contact with the Arians on both fields and during a long period of time. Now the date which, after all the light which has been thrown on chronology, is assigned by the best authority to the origin of the Mahabadian dynasty, is not less than the twenty-third century before Christ, admitting a possible margin beyond that period of several centuries, the Oriental writers carrying it up to thirty-seven centuries B.C. We may, therefore, take the Parsee doctrines as a record of the ideas existing about the time of the Deluge, it being then a reform of a still more ancient system, which system is now admitted to date in India from 3,102 years B.C.

But Arianism seems to have been a reform of the religion of Hoang-Ti no less than of Brahminism, for it denounces the gravest imaginable penalties against a practice which that religion especially consecrated – that of mourning and lamentation.

The Hindus had a “river of hell” (Veitarani) which flowed with the tears of relatives; the Arians carried this river round their Paradise, so

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as to render it unapproachable by those whose relatives supplied the lugubrious waves; thus was the screaming ghost hurried away to that worse region, appropriated, as in Dante’s Hell, to those who had neither virtues to recompense, nor crimes to punish. If this hypothesis be correct, the religion of Hoang-Ti must have co-existed with Arianism in Tartary no less than Brahminism.

Metempsychosis, though it did not prevail against the Sraddha, may have obliterated other doctrines; as, for instance, that of a Final Judgment, the Resurrection of the body, and a Future state of Penalties and Recompenses, with all which it was incompatible, being itself a final judgment, the spirits passing according to their acts into other human bodies, or into those of beasts, or into Divine natures; and each of these bodies would have an equal claim to the spirit which had inhabited them. Now the Parsees have a Paradise; a Resurrection in the Body, and a Final Judgment; we may therefore infer that such was the general belief prior to the introduction of metempsychosis. The ideas of the Hill tribes in many points support this conclusion, and traces of the Resurrection are to be found in the notion of the Hindus, of the restoration to the spirit of the organs that had been destroyed by the funeral pyre.

It would be sufficiently striking to find the doctrines enunciated in Judea by Christ and his disciples, in an Oriental creed. How much more so to discover that they belonged at one time to the whole ancient world. This issue depends on the superior antiquity of the Sraddha to the Metempsychosis; so that, however objectionable the form it may have assumed, the Sraddha is the evidence of the primitive and universal simplicity of faith.

I cannot here omit mentioning one of the most beautiful of allegories which have descended to us from these times. The soul could reach the Paradise of the Arians only by a long narrow bridge. The ghost as he approached it was met by a spectre, which proved either a hideous monster, or a guardian angel. It is to lead him across, or to scare him into the gulf. He asks his name and is answered, “I am the spirit of thy life!”

To us nothing can appear more repugnant in itself, or more revolting to every feeling of reverence for the dead, than the exposure of the dead body; and our conclusion would be that the ancestral worship could not possibly have arisen amongst a people addicted to so horrid a practice. But the fact is, their reverence followed the soul and not the flesh, and the corpse was disregarded by the survivors, having been abandoned by its own life. Porphyry has preserved to us a corresponding idea. He says, dead flesh is in itself not impure; but that of man is so because, having been united with a portion of the Divine Spirit, when that departs it is rejected. Thus they fell upon the process which Nature herself employs for preventing putrefaction. A Tartar brought

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to the capital of this kingdom, and made to comprehend the process of burial and its consequences, might, religious ideas apart, be as much filled with disgust and indignation as any traveller from Europe in witnessing the method practised in his country. The Parsees have also, in this respect, alone, of the great systems, retained the original practice; and this is again important as showing that the worship of the elements was like Metempsychosis, a more recent invention. It is true that they held burial, cremation, or the confiding of the ashes, or the body, to the waters, to be a sacrilege against the elements, but it does not follow that that was the motive which introduced, in the first instance, the exposure of the body to birds and beasts. The Chinese as stated by Meng Tseou in the “earliest antiquity,” threw out their parents into the ditches by the roadside; afterwards they hermetically closed them up in coffins, with the view of preventing the desecration of any of the elements: the Hindus still specially set aside, at the funeral obsequies, a portion for dogs and ravens, as if in compensation for their vested right in the corpse.

Turning to Tartary, we find conjointly practised all the methods of the Chinese, the Arians, the Buddhists, and the Hindus. They burn the body, bury it, expose it to the air, immerse it in water, or abandon it to animals and birds. The last prevails amongst the tribes of the desert.

“The true nomadic tribes,” says Huc, “convey the dead to the tops of hills, or the bottoms of ravines, there to be devoured by the beasts and birds of prey. It is really horrible to travellers through the deserts of Tartary to see, as they continually do, human remains, for which the eagles and wolves are contending.”

In Thibet dogs are employed as sepulchres. The practice is so extraordinary in itself, and at the same time so valuable as a means of identification, in consequence of it having been remarked by the ancients, that I collate a recent description of it in Thibet, with what has been reported of the ancient Parthians, Caspians, Hyrcanians, and Bactrians.

“This marvellous infinitude of dogs arises from the extreme respect which the Thibetians have for these animals, and the use to which they apply them in burying the dead. There are four different species of sepulture practised in Thibet; the first, combustion; the second, immersion in the rivers and lakes; the third, exposure on the summit of mountains; and the fourth, which is considered the most complimentary of all, consists in cutting the dead body in pieces and giving these to be eaten by the dogs. The last method is by far the most popular. The poor have only as their mausoleum the common vagabond dogs of the locality; but the more distinguished defunct are treated with greater ceremony. In all the Lamaseries, a number of dogs are kept ad hoc, and within them the rich Thibetians are buried.”

Justin says of the Parthians that “their burial was effected by means of dogs and birds,” and that “the naked bones strewed the earth.”

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Porphyry relates the same of the Caspians. Cicero says of the Hyrcanians that the people supported public dogs – the chief men, private ones – each according to his faculty, to be torn by them, and that they deem this to be the best kind of sepulture. Of the Bactrians Strabo says: –

“In the capital of Bactria they breed dogs, to which they give a special name, which name, rendered into our language, means buriers. The business of these dogs is to eat up all persons who are beginning to fall into decay from old age or sickness. Hence it is that no tomb is visible in the suburbs of the town, while the town itself is all filled with human bones. It is said that Alexander abolished this custom.”

The Turks have two names for dogs, independently of those of different breeds. The proper name is Et, or It; but that in common use for those scavengers of the street is Kopek; Kapak is to “cover.” Though no longer used for the original purpose, they are maintained by the public for a similar one, and present the otherwise inexplicable anomaly of being at once objects of charity and aversion. In the cuneiform inscription of Behistun, Darius no less than five times enumerates Sraddhas, but the translators, unacquainted with the ceremony, have not known what to make of the passages. Colonel Rawlinson has ingeniously made out the word which he renders Thrada to govern the sentence, and after exhausting every etymological and constructive resource, translates it “performance,” or “record,” and supposes it to be some “allusion to the ancestors of Darius.” By the knowledge of this word four or five other words connected with it might have been made out.

While borne on the full tide of discovery, and swept along by the breath of applause, the bark freighted with hieroglyphical investigation has well nigh been wrecked upon a sunken rock – the Chamber of Karnak. This is an apartment without windows, and only a single door, having all around in four rows the kings of Egypt arranged in a peculiar and anomalous fashion. They are placed back to back, beginning from a perpendicular line facing the entrance; you see them as you enter, looking to the right and to the left, until, at the extremities on either side, there is the king whose name the chamber bears, Tothnes III. standing making his offering. But not only is he repeated on the right and on the left in face of these lines of Lares, but on each side he is figured twice in two compartments, one above the other. How so solemn a representation should have been enclosed in a secret chamber, shut out from the gaze of men, and yet not connected with a sepulchral edifice, remained a mystery wholly unfathomable. Nor less comprehensible nor more reducible to any established order, was the number of these princes. The lists of Manetho and Eratosthanes were in vain sifted and assorted anew. The successions, as made out by previous enquiry, were re-examined afresh, but no key was found. The learned

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were at their wits’ ends, but this was not all; the names, as deciphered were no less intractable than their numbers.

Now, had any of the Egyptian travellers who happened to be attended by a Hindu servant, thought of applying to him, and asking him to explain the enigma, he would have done so at once; he would have told him that it was the Sraddha, either Kamya or Vridi; that is to say, a special votive offering before undertaking a war, or upon its successful issue. If then asked if these ancestors were the predecessors of the king, he would have answered: “By no means; they are his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, great-grandfather’s brother, son, etc., on the paternal and maternal sides, and he presents them various offerings, making oblation with the part of his hand sacred to the manes.” If asked why they are placed back to back, and why the king does not perform the ceremony at once to all, he would answer: “They are so divided because they composed his paternal and maternal ancestors, the first of which are adored with their faces to the east, and the latter with their faces to the north.” If asked why they were divided again into two sets, as the king is not repeated twice, but four times, he would answer: “There are two classes of progenitors; the Nandimukth, or great ancestors, being addressed as Pitris, and as gods, are worshipped differently from Viswadavas or immediate ancestors; and as there are four classes of ancestors, greater and lesser, paternal and maternal, so must there be four Sraddhas.” Finally if asked why so solemn a ceremony should be represented in a hidden and secret chamber, he would answer: “Because the ceremony itself could only be performed in a spot carefully enclosed; neither gods nor progenitors will partake of the food if the obsequial rite be looked at by a eunuch, an outcast, heretic, drunkard, sick or unclean person, mendicant, cock or monkey.”

I cannot omit an identity in the form of adoration in the two ceremonies, and the form of expression in the two languages. “I adore with my arms,” is the expression of the hieroglyphics. In the Puranas it is said, that a man having no means to perform the oblation shall repair to a forest and lift up his arms to the sun and other regions of the spheres, and say aloud: “I hope the progenitors will be satisfied with these arms tossed up in the air in devotion.” When, then, Sir Gardiner Wilkinson treats the fact of the Indian sepoys, during the occupation of Egypt, prostrating themselves in the Egyptian temples as a mere result of their ignorance, and as an incident which might equally have happened in any Gothic cathedral which contained the sculpture of a cow, it is only to be regretted that he had not made himself better acquainted with the religion of Brahma, and the customs of Hindustan.

The connexion between the present and the future state was thereby established in such a manner as to interweave future punishments with present existence; assigning the terror of punishment inflicted in this world on those who had taken their departure for the next. This was

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the check imposed upon absolute power; this it was which secured the balance of the constitution without parliaments or press, and which gave a sanction to law beyond that of penal enactments; hence that maxim of Civism which Cicero lays down as constituting the highest excellence of a free state, according to which each man should consider his remotest ancestor, and his furthest posterity in the same light as his nearest living relative. This end was attained under those despotisms from which the idea was transmitted, not by schools and philanthropy, but by superstition.

Amongst the Jews, of course, there was no ancestral sacrifice, but the traces of it as belonging to their old faith (that is to say, of the system to which Abraham had originally belonged) are impressed in indelible characters upon their ideas, laws, and institutions. To it we must refer the desire for children, the disgrace of a childless condition; and if it were sought to interpret these feelings by general instincts or considerations, the answer is to be found in the law by which the wife of the deceased brother, if he died childless, was taken by the next brother in order to raise up to him seed. The first child of such a marriage did not belong to the father but to the uncle, and inherited his property. This was the rite of Levirate, which constitutes so important a chapter in their civil law. The case was one in which the property would not have gone out of the line, for there was the collateral male branch; and the institutions of Moses so particular in respect to the descent of property, did not regard the descent by the family, but by the tribe. The object was not to establish primogeniture. The Levirate was therefore no portion of the system; it was wholly extraneous, and is explicable only by the worship of the ancestors.

The lamentations of the Virgins of Israel over a premature death, is explained by us as losing the chance of giving birth to the Messiah.

The whole of the representations on the monuments of Egypt consist of Sraddhas. The oblation of Sraddhas to the living as well as to the dead was not unknown to the Hindus.

We thus see the progress of faith running parallel in Hindustan and in Egypt; the ancestors worshipped as gods, and the gods reigning as kings, for the gods of the old world, that is, of the idolatrous one, were the lares of sovereigns. These Pantheistic associations point not only to a common faith, but to an original race. After those personages, with whom we are acquainted, or at least with whose names we are familiar, had passed to the rank of Divinities, belief might be propagated by the ordinary methods of conversion; but in the ordinary form that was impracticable, not only initiation but affiliation was required.

The religion of the forefathers thus reached in the first instance Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece and Italy, as seen in the Herves, Manes, Lares, Patres and Penates, constituting at once a general faith and

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genealogical bond in particular families. So the distinction of the deities of the “Majorum et Minorum Gentium,” reproducing the greater and lesser Ancestors of the Sraddha.

Whatever theoretical or social distinctions may have arisen in the religion of Asia, they noways interfered with the uniformity of this ceremonial, which was, in rites, identical from the Yellow Sea to the Mediterranean, and to Abyssinia. The objects figured on the monuments of that Egypt which two thousand years ago descended to the tomb, correspond with the Chinese oblations two thousand five hundred years before that period, and with those offered to this hour in Hindustan. The eldest of religious practices remains as firmly seated to-day as the oldest of human monuments; and as the Pyramids stand amongst structures, so amongst ceremonies does the Sraddha.

Andrew T. Sibbald.

Footnotes

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