about Gothic piety if all its works had undergone the censorship of Puritans and Retioralists like Locke, Rousseau, and Wolff! And yet we treat the Confucian close of Chinese inwardness as its beginning — if, indeed, we do not go farther and describe the syncretism of Han times as "the" religion of China.[1]
We know nowadays that, contrary to the usual assumption, there was a powerful old-Chinese priesthood.[2] We know that in the text of the Shu-Ching, relics of the ancient hero-sagas and god-myths were worked over rationalistically, and were thus able to survive, and similarly the Hou-li, Ngi-li, and Shi-King[3] would still reveal a good deal more if only they were attacked with the conviction that there was in them something far deeper than Confucius and his like were capable of comprehending. We hear of chthonian and phallic cults in early Chóu times; of orgiastic rites in which the service of the gods was accompanied by ecstatic mass-dances; of mimic representations and dialogues between god and priestess, out of which probably (as in Greece) the Chinese drama evolved.[4] And we obtain an inkling finally of why the luxuriant growth of early Chinese god-figures and myths was necessarily swallowed up in an emperor-mythology. For not only all saga-emperors, but also most of the figures of the Hia and Shang dynasties before 1400 are — all dates and chronicles notwithstanding — nothing but nature transformed into history. The origins of such a process lie deep in the possibilities of every young Culture.[5] Ancestor-worship ever seeks to gain power over the nature-dæmons. All Homeric heroes, and Minos and Theseus and Romulus, are gods become kings. In the Heliand,[6] Christ is about to become so. Mary is the crowned Queen of Heaven. It is the supreme (and perfectly unconscious) mode which enables men of breeding to venerate something — that is, for them, what is great must have breeding, race, must be mighty and lordly, the ancestor of whole families. A strong priesthood is able to make short work of this mythology of Time, but it won through partially in the Classical and completely in China — exactly in proportion to the disappearance of the priestly element. The old gods are now emperors, princes, ministers, and retainers; natural events have become acts of rulers, and onsets of peoples social enterprises. Nothing could have suited the Confucians better. Here was a myth which could absorb social-ethical tendencies to an indefinite ex-
- ↑ As in De Groot's Universismus (1918), where, in fact, the systems of Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists are handled without a qualm as the religions of China. This amounts to the same as saying that the Classical religion dates from Caracalla.
- ↑ Conrady, in Wassiljew, Die Erschliessung Chinas (1909), p. 232; B. Schindler, Das Priestertum im alten China, I (1919).
- ↑ The Shu-Ching or Canon of History is a collection of ancient annals, the Shi-King a canonical anthology of rhymed tales made by Confucius. — Tr.
- ↑ Conrady, China, p. 516.
- ↑ Of which an outstanding example is the Edda. — Tr.
- ↑ See article "Heliand" in Ency. Brit., XI edit., and works there referred to. A handy edition of the text is included in the "Reclam" series. — Tr.
