offerings in baskets, is a recognized manner of expelling disease-spirits.[1] In the image-worship of modern India, there crop up traces of the embodiment-theory. It is possible for the intelligent Hindu to attach as little real personality to a divine image, as to the man of straw which he makes in order to celebrate the funeral rites of a relative whose body cannot be recovered. He can even protest against being treated as an idolater at all, declaring the images of his gods to be but symbols, bringing to his mind thoughts of the real deities, as a portrait reminds one of a friend no longer to be seen in the body. Yet in the popular religion of his country, what could be more in conformity with the fetish-theory than the practice of making temporary hollow clay idols by tens of thousands, which receive no veneration for themselves, and only become objects of worship when the officiating brahman has invited the deity to dwell in the image, performing the ceremony of the 'adhivâsa' or inhabitation, after which he puts in the eyes and the 'prâna,' i.e., breath, life, or soul.[2]
Nowhere, perhaps, in the wide history of religion, can we find definitions more full and absolute of the theory of deities actually animating their images, than in those passages from early Christian writers which describe the nature and operation of the heathen idols. Arnobius introduces the heathen as declaring that it is not the bronze or gold and silver material they consider to be gods, but they worship in them those beings which sacred dedication introduces, and causes to inhabit the artificial images.[3] Augustine cites as follows the opinions attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. This Egyptian, he tells us, considers some gods as made by the highest Deity, and some by men; 'he asserts the visible and tangible images to be as it were bodies of
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth,' p. 193, &c.; Bastian, 'Psych.' p. 34, 208, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. pp. 293, 486. See 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 350 (Chinese).
- ↑ Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. i. p. xvii.; Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 198, vol. ii. pp. xxxv. 164, 234, 292, 485.
- ↑ Arnobius Adversus Gentes, vi. 17-19.
