and his mother, and his wife and his children, and his brethren and his sister, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” To the ordinary good citizen of antiquity, whose religion was the consecration of family ties, such a precept was no less scandalous than it is to a Chinaman or Hindu of to-day. Was not the duty of following the Messiah to supersede even that of burying one’s parents, the most sacred of all ancient obligations? The Church when it had once conquered the world allowed such precepts to lapse and fall into the background, and no one save monks or Manichaean heretics remembered them any more; indeed modern divines affect to believe that marriage rites and family ties were the peculiar concern of the Church from the very first; and few moderns will fail to sympathize with the misgivings of the barbarian chief who, having been converted and being about to receive Christian baptism, paused as he stepped down into the font, and asked the priests if in the heaven to which their rites admitted him he would meet and converse with his pagan ancestors. On being assured that he would not, he stepped out again and declined their methods of salvation.
In the above paragraphs we have drawn examples only from races organized on a patriarchal basis among whom the headship passes from father to son. But many primitive societies do not trace descent through males and yet may be said to worship ancestors. The aborigines of Australia furnish an example. The Aruntas among them are said to have no idea of paternity, but believe that local spirits of tree, rock or stream enter women as they pass by their haunts. In doing so they drop a wooden soul-token called a Churinga. This the elders of the tribe pick up or pretend to find, and carefully store up in a cleft of the hills or in a cave which no woman may approach. The souls of members of the tribe who have died survive in these slips of wood, which are treasured up for long generations and repaired if they decay. They are carried into battle to assist the tribe, are regularly anointed, fondled and invoked; for it is believed that the souls present in them are powerful to work weal and woe to friend and enemy respectively. They thus resemble the Chinese spirit tablet.
Reference has been made above to the possibility that the Roman imago of an ancestor actually embodied his ghost, at least on solemn occasions. The custom of providing a material abode or nidus for the ghost is found all over the earth; e.g. in New Ireland a carved chalk figure of the deceased, indicating the sex, is procured, and entrusted to the chief of a village, who sets it up in a funeral hut in the middle of a large taboo house adorned with plants. The survivors believe that the ghostly ogre, being so well provided for, will abstain from haunting them.
The Romans, as we remarked above, distinguished between the Lemures or wandering mischievous ghosts and the Manes snugly interred and tended in the cemetery which was part of every Italian settlement. The distinction, however, is one for which survivors alone are responsible and not one inherent in the nature of ghosts. No race at all, it would seem, except the Jews, has ever been able to regard a man’s death as the end of him; and except in the higher forms of Christianity the dead are everywhere supposed to need the same sort of food, equipment, tenement and gear which they enjoyed in life, and to molest the living unless they obtain it. It may be affection, or it may be fear, which prompts the survivor to feed and tend his dead; in general no doubt it is a mixture of both feelings.
In Africa and other savage countries a third motive sometimes operates, namely the desire to consult the dead—as Odysseus, anxious about his return home, was constrained to do—or to use them against the living; for negro magicians are reputed even to murder remarkable individuals in order to possess themselves of their power and to be able to use them as familiar spirits.
The question has often been raised, what is the relation of private cults of ancestors to public religion? Do men after death become gods? Euhemerus of Messenia tried of old to rationalize the Greek myths by supposing that the Olympian gods were deified men. Such a theory, like its modern rival of the sun-myth, may of course be pushed till it becomes absurd; yet in India critical observers, like Sir Alfred C. Lyall, attest innumerable examples of the gradual elevation into gods of human beings, the process even beginning in their lifetime. There a man wins local fame as an ascetic with abnormal powers, or a wife, because Alcestis-like she sacrificed herself for her husband and immolated herself on his pyre. Miracles occur at their shrines, and the surviving relatives who guard them wax rich off the offerings brought. “In the course of a very few years, as the recollection of the man’s personality becomes misty, his origin grows mysterious, his career takes a legendary hue, his birth and death were both supernatural; in the next generation the names of the elder gods get introduced into the story, and so the marvellous tradition works itself into a myth, until nothing but a personal incarnation can account for such a series of prodigies. The man was an Avatar of Vishnu or Siva; his supreme apotheosis is now complete, and the Brahmins feel warranted in providing for him a niche in the orthodox pantheon.”[1]
Authorities.—H. S. Maine, Ancient Law (London, 1906); E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1903); and article on the “Matriarchal Family System,” in the Nineteenth Century, xl. 81 (1896); W. W. Fowler, The Roman Calendar (London, 1906); Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (17th ed., 1900); L. André. Le Culte des morts chez les Hébreux (1895); C. Grüneisen, Der Ahnenkultus und die Urreligion Israels (Halle, 1900); Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God (London, 1897); F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion (London, 1896); Sir A. C. Lyall, Asiatic Studies (London, 1899 and 1907); D. G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (New York, 1897); H. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda (Berlin, 1894). (F. C. C.)
ANCHISES, in Greek legend, Trojan hero, son of Capys and Themis, grandson (according to Hyginus, son) of Assaracus, connected on both sides with the royal family of Troy, was king of Dardanus on Mt. Ida. Here Aphrodite met him and, enamoured of his beauty, bore him Aeneas. For revealing the name of the child’s mother, in spite of the warnings of the goddess, he was killed or struck blind by lightning (Hyginus, Fab. 94). In the more recent legend, adopted by Virgil in the Aeneid, he was conveyed out of Troy on the shoulders of his son Aeneas, whose wanderings he followed as far as Sicily, where he died and was buried on Mt. Eryx. On the other hand, there was a grave on Mt. Ida at Troy pointed out as his. From the name Assaracus, from the intercourse between the Phoenicians and the early inhabitants of the Troad, and from the connexion of Aphrodite, the protecting goddess of the Phoenicians, with Anchises, it has been inferred that his family was originally of Assyrian origin. His flight on the shoulders of Aeneas is frequently represented on engraved gems of the Roman period; and his visit from Aphrodite is rendered in a beautiful bronze relief, engraved in Millingen’s Unedited Gems.
ANCHOR (from the Greek ἄγκυρα, which Vossius considers is from ὄγκη, a crook or hook), an instrument of iron or other heavy material used for holding ships or boats in any locality required, and preventing them from drifting by winds, tides, currents or other causes. This is done by the anchor, after it is let go from the ship by means of the cable, fixing itself in the ground and there holding the vessel fast.
The word “anchor” is also used figuratively for anything which gives security, or for any ornament or appendage which takes the same form. Owing to a vessel’s safety depending upon the anchor, it is obviously an appliance of great importance, and too much care cannot be expended on its manufacture and proper construction. The most ancient anchors consisted of large stones, baskets full of stones, sacks filled with sand, or logs of wood loaded with lead. Of this kind were the anchors of the ancient Greeks, which, according to Apollonius Rhodius and Stephen of Byzantium, were formed of stone; and Athenaeus states that they were sometimes made of wood. Such anchors held the vessel merely by their weight and by the friction along the bottom. Iron was afterwards introduced for the construction of anchors, and an improvement was made by forming them with teeth or “flukes” to fasten themselves into the bottom;
- ↑ A. C. Lyall, Asiatic Studies (reprinted by Watts and Co., London, 1907), p. 19.
