aries have remarked this difference in the views of more and less intelligent members of the same tribe; and it is emphatically true of a large part of Christendom, that the images and pictures, which, to the more instructed, serve merely as a help to realise religious ideas and to suggest devotional thoughts, are looked upon by the uneducated and superstitious crowd as beings endowed not only with a sort of life, but with miraculous influences.[1]
The line between the cases in which the connexion between object and figure is supposed to be real, and those in which it is known to be imaginary, is often very difficult to draw. Thus idols and figures of saints are beaten and abused for not granting the prayers of their worshippers, which may be a mere expression of spite towards their originals, but then two rival gods may be knocked together when their oracles disagree, that the one which breaks first may be discarded, and here a material connexion must certainly be supposed to exist. To the most difficult class belong the symbolic sacrifices of models of men and animals in Italy and Greece, and the economical paper-offerings of Eastern Asia. The Chinese perform the rite of burning money and clothes for the use of the dead; but the real things are too valuable to be wasted by a thrifty people, so paper figures do duty for them. Thus they set burning junks adrift as sacrifices to get a favourable wind, but they are only paper ones. Perhaps the neatest illustration of this kind of offerings, and of the state of mind in which the offerer makes them, is to be found in Hue and Gabet's story of the Tibetan lamas, who sent horses flying from the mountain-top in a gale of wind, for the relief of wornout pilgrims who could get no further on their way. The horses were bits of paper, with a horse printed on each, saddled, bridled, and galloping at full speed.[2]
Hanging and burning in effigy is a proceeding which, in civilized countries at any rate, at last comes fairly out into pure symbolism. The idea that the burning of the straw and rag
- ↑ For discussion of image-worship or idolatry, where the image is considered to be actually animated by a human soul or divine spirit which has taken up its abode in it as a body, see Tylor, 'Primitive Culture,' chap. xiv. [Note to 3rd Edition.]
- ↑ Hue and Gabet, 'Voy. dans la Tartarie, etc.;' Paris, 1850, vol. ii. p. 136.
