Search -
The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia
The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Author:Archibald Henry Sayce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTUEE III. THE IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD. It has sometimes been .asserted by travellers and ethnologists, that tribes exist who are a... more »bsolutely without any idea of God. It will usually be found that such assertions mean little more than that they are without any idea of what we mean by God: even the Zulus, who saw in a reed the creator of the world,1 nevertheless believed that the world had been created by a power outside themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race of man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in a power of the kind, or in a world which is separate from the visible world around us; statements to the contrary generally rest on ignorance or misconception. The very fact that the savage dreams, and gives to his dreams the reality of his waking moments, brings with it a belief in what, for the want of a better term, I will call " another world." This other world, it must be remembered, is material, as material as the " heavenly Jerusalem" to which so many good Christians have looked forward even in our own day. The savage has no experience of anything else than material existence, and he cannot, therefore, rise to the conception of what we mean by the spiritual, even if he were capable of forming so abstract an idea. Hisspiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not only to be interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols, but identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The Latin anima meant " breath " before it meant " the soul." 1 Callaway, Unku/unkidu; or, the Tradition of the Creation as exisliny amony the Amazulu and other Triln-s of Kovlh Africa, pt. i. pp. 2, 7, 8. This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual has lingered long in the human mind; indeed, it is questionable whether, a...« less