The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c11.s3.42

v1.c11.s3.42

Yet another view of religion is that taken by Gilbert Murray,³ who finds the first deity in the medicine man himself, a theory which obviously stands in very sharp contrast, though apparently its author does not recognize the fact, with the view of Durkheim. The medicine man with his control over the fertility of the earth and his other superhuman powers is held gradually to abandon his claims to deity, and to invent other gods whose agent and spokesman he is. But if the earliest deity is human there is an easy road for theriomorphic conceptions to creep in: men are prone to devour animals for the sake of securing their power or cunning or some other quality, and in some undefined way this passes into the belief in theriomorphic and even animal gods: the dance of the tribesmen wearing the skin of the animal slain developes the goat-formed deity and so on.⁴ These speculations are acute and ingenious, but serious discussion they can hardly demand. The growth of a god from a magician, or from a rite, as the origin of religion, is a wholly superficial and unnatural conception: vegetation ritual cannot be said to create the conception of the dying and reviving god: the ritual rests on the conception of the death of the god and is inconceivable without the belief in a vegetation spirit, a conception for which Murray with Miss Harrison would substitute the monstrosity of an Eniautos Daimon, a view which yields the logical result that Here is found to be a old year spirit, her name being equated with the word ‘year.’¹