THE RELIGIOUS ARTS.
In the foregoing pages we have classified the art-products of man with reference to the motives which led to their manufacture and the purpose for which they were designed, whether for use or to give pleasure. But this arrangement omits an active branch of artistic industry which min isters to neither of these purposes—to wit, the religious arts. These are inspired by the religions sentiment, a part of the psychological nature of man which will come up for examination later, and have throughout all historic time and in all branches of the race claimed a large share of the industrial activity of man.
Their Early traces of religious arts appear in remains long anterior to the beginnings of recorded history, they are not discovered in those of the earliest dates. Nothing has been exhumed, for example, among the relics of the Drift men of France and England which has any resemblance to an amulet or charm or other religious object. There is no indication that they disposed of their dead in any manner which would lead us to believe that they were given to the worship of ancestors or expected a life after death, ideas frequent in the rudest religions.
After these Drift men, contemporaries of the mammoth, had disap peared along with this huge animal, the Belgian caves were inhabited by a hardy race whom we have referred to as successfully combating the cave bear and the sabre-toothed tiger (see pp. 38, 62). Here we find for the first time what may be construed as indications of objects used for relig ious purposes. There was found among the bones, ashes, and stone implements around one of their hearths, and is still preserved in the Royal Museum of Brussels, the huge thigh-bone of a mammoth. That animal had long been extinct, and this hone had evidently been found somewhere, brought to the cave, and kept there for some purpose. It is not worn or chipped, as would have been the case if it had subserved some useful end, as a block, seat, or primitive anvil. Therefore, antiqua ries have concluded that it was a " fetich," that it was revered as the relic of sonic mighty and divine Being, and was carried to the cave to become its guardian and protector.
Primitive earliest idols of many nations were just such massive hones or some rough stone, which for some peculiarity in color, shape, or position had attracted the attention of the horde. Thus, until a late day the Egyptians preserved certain bones at Sais alleged to be those of Osiris (Herodotus), and at Athens those of (Edipus were among the sacred treasures. Saturn is said to have been worshipped by the
Sabceans under the form of a black stone (Gorres), and the Holy Kaaba in Mecca appears to be nothing more than such an unhewn block. The inhabitants of the Ladrone Islands adore a prominent rock as the ancestor of their race (Ellis); and such instances could be multiplied indefinitely.
These superstitious associations early led the worshippers to shaping and adorning the "stocks and stones" which were or which represented their gods. The Indians of the United States were observed by the early travellers to adorn certain rocks with " crowns of oak and pine branches," to daub them with their paints, and sometimes to chip them with their stone hammers into a resemblance of a man or animal, at first merely increasing an accidental similarity of shape (Kendall, La Hontan). This was the beginning of painting and sculpture applied to the religious arts.
Charms and rude tribes many minor articles are found which have exercised the ingenuity of their makers with none other than a religious purpose. Such are the charms, amulets, " medi cine-bags," votive offerings, and fetiches which in some way are supposed to protect the wearer or to aid him in his undertakings. They are often among the most elaborate and laborious products of native art.
Funeral objects connected with funeral ceremonies or used in the disposal of the dead are understood by antiquaries to belong to the religious arts. Were the mental horizon of a nation absolutely bounded by the present life, there would be no motive to take the slight est care of the dead other than for sanitary reasons, which would not apply any more to human bodies than to those of other animals. But almost universally the corpse is the object of special and often elaborate attentions on the part of the survivors. Even when nothing more formal in the way of funeral ceremony is carried out than that of a tribe of Lower California, who were wont to tie a pair of moccasins on the feet of the deceased and leave the body in the woods (Bogaert), it indicates that there is some obscure, half-recognized notion of a life hereafter and a journey to some other sphere of action. It is the beginning of those theories which were so materially construed by the Egyptians and Peru vians, who devised laborious and costly methods of preserving the body against decay, and whose mummies by millions are preserved after the lapse of many generations as perfect almost as when placed in their tombs (see bl. 5o, figs. 5-8).