A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD BY H. G. WELLS
36.RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS UNDER THE ROMAN EMPIRE
The soul of man under that Latin and Greek empire of the first two centuries of the Christian era was a worried and frustrated soul. Compulsion and cruelty reigned; there were pride and display but little honour; little serenity or steadfast happiness. The unfortunate were despised and wretched; the fortunate were insecure and feverishly eager for gratifications. In a great number of cities life centred on the red excitement of the arena, where men and beasts fought and were tormented and slain. Amphitheatres are the most characteristic of Roman ruins.
Life went on in that key. The uneasiness of men’s hearts manifested
itself in profound religious unrest.
From the days when the Aryan hordes first broke in upon the ancient
civilizations, it was inevitable that the old gods of the temples and
priesthoods should suffer great adaptations or disappear. In the
course of hundreds of generations the agricultural peoples of the
brunette civilizations had shaped their lives and thoughts to the
temple-centred life. Observances and the fear of disturbed routines,
sacrifices and mysteries, dominated their minds. Their gods seem
monstrous and illogical to our modern minds because we belong to an
Aryanized world, but to these older peoples these deities had the
immediate conviction and vividness of things seen in an intense dream.
The conquest of one city state by another in Sumeria or early Egypt
meant a change or a renaming of gods or goddesses, but left the shape
and spirit of the worship intact. There was no change in its general
character. The figures in the dream changed, but the dream went on and
it was the same sort of dream. And the early Semitic conquerors were
sufficiently akin in spirit to the Sumerians to take over the religion
of the Mesopotamian civilization they subjugated without any profound
alteration. Egypt was never indeed subjugated to the extent of a
religious revolution. Under the Ptolemies and under the Cæsars, her
temples and altars and priesthoods remained essentially Egyptian.
So long as conquests went on between people of similar social and
religious habits it was possible to get over the clash between the god
of this temple and region and the god of that by a process of grouping
or assimilation. If the two gods were alike in character they were
identified. It was really the same god under another name, said the
priests and the people. This fusion of gods is called theocrasia; and
the age of the great conquests of the thousand years B.C. was an age of
theocrasia. Over wide areas the local gods were displaced by, or
rather they were swallowed up in, a general god. So that when at last
Hebrew prophets in Babylon proclaimed one God of Righteousness in all
the earth men’s minds were fully prepared for that idea.
But often the gods were too dissimilar for such an assimilation, and
then they were grouped together in some plausible relationship. A
female god - and the Ægean world before the coming of the Greek was
much addicted to Mother Gods—would be married to a male god, and an
animal god or a star god would be humanized and the animal or
astronomical aspect, the serpent or the sun or the star, made into an
ornament or a symbol. Or the god of a defeated people would become a
malignant antagonist to the brighter gods. The history of theology is
full of such adaptations, compromises and rationalizations of once
local gods.
As Egypt developed from city states into one united kingdom there was
much of this theocrasia. The chief god so to speak was Osiris, a
sacrificial harvest god of whom Pharaoh was supposed to be the earthly
incarnation. Osiris was represented as repeatedly dying and rising
again; he was not only the seed and the harvest but also by a natural
extension of thought the means of human immortality. Among his symbols
was the wide-winged scarabeus beetle which buries its eggs to rise
again, and also the effulgent sun which sets to rise. Later on he was
to be identified with Apis, the sacred bull. Associated with him was
the goddess Isis. Isis was also Hathor, a cow-goddess, and the
crescent moon and the Star of the sea. Osiris dies and she bears a
child, Horus, who is also a hawk-god and the dawn, and who grows to
become Osiris again. The effigies of Isis represent her as bearing the
infant Horus in her arms and standing on the crescent moon. These are
not logical relationships, but they were devised by the human mind
before the development of hard and systematic thinking and they have a
dream-like coherence. Beneath this triple group there are other and
darker Egyptian gods, bad gods, the dog-headed Anubis, black night and
the like, devourers, tempters, enemies of god and man.
MITHRAS SACRIFICING A BULL, ROMAN
MITHRAS SACRIFICING A BULL, ROMAN
_(In the British Museum)_
Every religious system does in the course of time fit itself to the
shape of the human soul, and there can be no doubt that out of these
illogical and even uncouth symbols, Egyptian people were able to
fashion for themselves ways of genuine devotion and consolation. The
desire for immortality was very strong in the Egyptian mind, and the
religious life of Egypt turned on that desire. The Egyptian religion
was an immortality religion as no other religion had ever been. As
Egypt went down under foreign conquerors and the Egyptian gods ceased
to have any satisfactory political significance, this craving for a
life of compensations here-after, intensified.
ISIS AND HORUS
ISIS AND HORUS
After the Greek conquest, the new city of Alexandria became the centre
of Egyptian religious life, and indeed of the religious life of the
whole Hellenic world. A great temple, the Serapeum, was set up by
Ptolemy I at which a sort of trinity of gods was worshipped. These were
Serapis (who was Osiris-Apis rechristened), Isis and Horus. These were
not regarded as separate gods but as three aspects of one god, and
Serapis was identified with the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter and the
Persian sun-god. This worship spread wherever the Hellenic influence
extended, even into North India and Western China. The idea of
immortality, an immortality of compensations and consolation, was
eagerly received by a world in which the common life was hopelessly
wretched. Serapis was called “the saviour of souls.” “After death,”
said the hymns of that time, “we are still in the care of his
providence.” Isis attracted many devotees. Her images stood in her
temples, as Queen of Heaven, bearing the infant Horus in her arms.
Candles were burnt before her, votive offerings were made to her,
shaven priests consecrated to celibacy waited on her altar.
The rise of the Roman empire opened the western European world to this
growing cult. The temples of Serapis-Isis, the chanting of the priests
and the hope of immortal life, followed the Roman standards to Scotland
and Holland. But there were many rivals to the Serapis-Isis religion.
Prominent among these was Mithraism. This was a religion of Persian
origin, and it centred upon some now forgotten mysteries about Mithras
sacrificing a sacred and benevolent bull. Here we seem to have
something more primordial than the complicated and sophisticated
Serapis-Isis beliefs. We are carried back directly to the blood
sacrifices of the heliolithic stage in human culture. The bull upon
the Mithraic monuments always bleeds copiously from a wound in its
side, and from this blood springs new life. The votary to Mithraism
actually bathed in the blood of the sacrificial bull. At his
initiation he went beneath a scaffolding upon which a bull was killed
so that the blood could actually run down on him.
Both these religions, and the same is true of many other of the
numerous parallel cults that sought the allegiance of the slaves and
citizens under the earlier Roman emperors, are personal religions.
They aim at personal salvation and personal immortality. The older
religions were not personal like that; they were social. The older
fashion of divinity was god or goddess of the city first or of the
state, and only secondarily of the individual. The sacrifices were a
public and not a private function. They concerned collective practical
needs in this world in which we live. But the Greeks first and now the
Romans had pushed religion out of politics. Guided by the Egyptian
tradition religion had retreated to the other world.
BUST OF THE EMPEROR COMMODUS, A.D. 180-192
BUST OF THE EMPEROR COMMODUS, A.D. 180-192
Represented as the God Mithras, Roman, Circa A.D. 190
_(In the British Museum)_
These new private immortality religions took all the heart and emotion
out of the old state religions, but they did not actually replace them.
A typical city under the earlier Roman emperors would have a number of
temples to all sorts of gods. There might be a temple to Jupiter of
the Capitol, the great god of Rome, and there would probably be one to
the reigning Cæsar. For the Cæsars had learnt from the Pharaohs the
possibility of being gods. In such temples a cold and stately
political worship went on; one would go and make an offering and burn a
pinch of incense to show one’s loyalty. But it would be to the temple
of Isis, the dear Queen of Heaven, one would go with the burthen of
one’s private troubles for advice and relief. There might be local and
eccentric gods. Seville, for example, long affected the worship of the
old Carthaginian Venus. In a cave or an underground temple there would
certainly be an altar to Mithras, attended by legionaries and slaves.
And probably also there would be a synagogue where the Jews gathered to
read their Bible and uphold their faith in the unseen God of all the
Earth.
Sometimes there would be trouble with the Jews about the political side
of the state religion. They held that their God was a jealous God
intolerant of idolatry, and they would refuse to take part in the
public sacrifices to Cæsar. They would not even salute the Roman
standards for fear of idolatry.
In the East long before the time of Buddha there had been ascetics, men
and women who gave up most of the delights of life, who repudiated
marriage and property and sought spiritual powers and an escape from
the stresses and mortifications of the world in abstinence, pain and
solitude. Buddha himself set his face against ascetic extravagances,
but many of his disciples followed a monkish life of great severity.
Obscure Greek cults practised similar disciplines even to the extent of
self-mutilation. Asceticism appeared in the Jewish communities of
Judea and Alexandria also in the first century B.C. Communities of men
abandoned the world and gave themselves to austerities and mystical
contemplation. Such was the sect of the Essenes. Throughout the first
and second centuries A.D. there was an almost world-wide resort to such
repudiations of life, a universal search for “salvation” from the
distresses of the time. The old sense of an established order, the old
confidence in priest and temple and law and custom, had gone. Amidst
the prevailing slavery, cruelty, fear, anxiety, waste, display and
hectic self-indulgence, went this epidemic of self- disgust and mental
insecurity, this agonized search for peace even at the price of
renunciation and voluntary suffering. This it was that filled the
Serapeum with weeping penitents and brought the converts into the gloom
and gore of the Mithraic cave.