Comparative Religion. J. Estlin Carpenter

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      INTRODUCTORY

      Over the chancel-arch of the church at South Leigh, a few miles west of Oxford, is a fresco of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection, of the type well known in mediæval art. On the adjoining south wall stands the stately figure of the archangel Michael. In his right hand he holds a pair of scales. In one scale is the figure of a soul in the attitude of prayer; beside it is Our Lady carrying a rosary. The other contains an ox-headed demon blowing a horn. This scale rises steadily, though another demon has climbed to the beam above to weigh it down, and a third from hell's mouth below endeavours to drag it towards the abyss. The same theme recurs in several other English churches; and it is carved over the portals of many French cathedrals, as at Notre Dame in Paris.

      Unroll a papyrus from an Egyptian tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty before the days of Moses, and you will see a somewhat similar scene. The just and merciful judge Osiris, "lord of life and king of eternity," sits in the Hall of the two goddesses of Truth. Hither the soul is brought for the ordeal which will determine his future bliss or woe. Before forty-two assessors he declares his innocence of various offences: "I am not a doer of what is wrong; I am not a robber; I am not a slayer of men; I am not a niggard; I am not a teller of lies; I am not a monopoliser of food; I am no extortioner; I am not unchaste; I am not the causer of others' tears. … " Then he is led, sometimes supported by the two goddesses of Truth, to the actual trial. Resting on an upright post is the beam of a balance. It is guarded by a dog-headed ape, symbol of Thoth, "lord of the scales." Thoth has various functions in the ancient texts, and even rises into a kind of impersonation of the principle of intelligence in the whole universe. Here as the computer of time and the inventor of numbers he plays the part of secretary to Osiris. In one scale is placed the heart of the deceased, the organ of conscience. In the other is sometimes a square weight, sometimes an ostrich plume, symbol of truth or righteousness. Thoth stands beside the scales, tablet in hand, to record the issue as the soul passes to the great award.

      The scenes and the persons differ; but the fundamental conception of judgment is the same, and it is carried out by the same method. Is this an accidental coincidence of metaphor? The figure of the balance was naturally suggestive for the estimate of worth, and the Psalmist cried in bitterness of heart—

      Surely men of low degree are vanity,

       And men of high degree are a lie,

       In the balances they will go up;

       They are altogether lighter than vanity.

      The mysterious hand wrote upon the wall of Belshazzar's palace the strange word Tekel, which contained the dreadful sentence, "Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting." To early Indian imagination, before the days of the Buddha (500 B.C.), the ordeal of the balance was part of the outlook into the world beyond. In the ancient Persian teaching, Rashnu, the angel of justice, before the shining "Friend," the mediator Mithra, presided over the weighing of the spirits at the bridge of destiny, over which they would pass to heaven or hell.

      Is Michael the heir of Thoth or Rashnu? He passed into the Christian Church from the Jewish Synagogue, where he was specially connected with the destinies of the dead. He guided the souls of the just to the heavenly world, where he led them into the mystic city, the counterpart of Jerusalem below; or he stood at the gate as the angel of righteousness to decide who should be admitted. So for the Greeks Hermes was the guardian of the spirits of the departed, whom he conducted to the judgment in the under-world. In this respect, then, Hermes and Michael were akin. But Hermes also played many other parts, and the Greeks identified him with the Egyptian Thoth. When the destinies of Hector and Achilles were weighed against each other, ere the last mortal combat, the vase-painter could represent Hermes as holding the balance in the presence of Zeus, much as Thoth had presided over it before Osiris. The Etruscan artists depicted Mercury, the Italian equivalent of Hermes, fulfilling the same function. True, the purport of the test was different. But the symbol was the same; and when Hermes gave place to Michael, as Christianity was carried to the West, the scales passed from the Hellenic to the Jewish Christian figure, though they had in the one case been used to decide the allotment of fate, and in the other were employed for judgment. Why they remained so long unused in Christian symbolism is obscure. The revival of intercourse with the East through the Crusades may have given new force to the idea as part of the great judgment-process; and the figure to which it was most natural to assign it was that of Thoth-Hermes-Michael.

      The religion of the ancient Hindus was founded, as every one knows, upon the venerable hymns collected into one sacred book under the name of the Rig Veda. These hymns, 1017 in number, containing over 10,000 verses, are now arranged in ten books, twice the number of the divisions of the Hebrew Psalter. Like most of the Psalms they are traditionally ascribed to different poets, in whose families they were sung; and their authors were regarded as Rishis, bards, or sages. Of their real origin nothing is definitely known; their composition probably extends over many generations, perhaps over several centuries; and dim suggestions of their super-earthly origin already appear in some of the latest poems. They became the peculiar treasure of the priestly order; the most laborious efforts were devised for the study and preservation of the sacred text; the methods of pronunciation, the rules of grammar, the principles of metre, the derivations of words, were all elaborated with the utmost minuteness into different branches of Vedic lore. Two other smaller Vedas, collections of sacrificial formulæ and hymns, were very early placed beside the main work, and a fourth collection gained similar rank much later. With the development of the great schools of Hindu philosophy, especially after the decline of Buddhism, the whole question of authority as the foundation of belief and reasoning was forced to the front, and this in due time was applied to the Veda. Brahmanical speculation had been long concerned with its divine origin. It sprang from one of the mysterious figures in which the ancient theologians expressed their sense of the real unity of the heavenly powers, Prajāpati, the "lord of creatures," through the medium of Vach, or sacred Speech. As such it was "the firstborn