IX
OF THE THEOCRACY
IT SEEMS that the greater part of the ancient nations were governed by a kind of theocracy. To begin by India, you there find the Bramans have long been sovereigns: in Persia the Magi have the greatest authority. The story of Smerdis’s ears may very probably be a fable; but it will always follow that he was a magi upon the throne of Cyrus. Several Egyptian priests had so great a dominion over their kings, that they went so far as to prescribe to them how much they should eat and drink, brought up their children, tried them after their death, and often made themselves kings.
If we come down to the Greeks, however fabulous their history may be, do we not learn therefrom that the prophet Calcas had sufficient power in the army to sacrifice the daughter of the king of kings? Come still lower to the savage nations since the Greeks, the Druids governed the Gauls.
It does not seem to have been possible that in the first colonies, there could have been any other than a theocratic government; for as soon as a nation has chosen a tutelar god, this god has priests; these priests reign over the minds of the people, they cannot govern but in the name of God: they therefore always make him speak; they retail his oracles, and it is by an express order from God, that every thing is performed.
Hence the sacrifices of human blood, which have drenched almost all the earth. What father, what mother, would ever have abjured nature to that degree as to present their son or daughter to a priest, in order to be slain upon an altar, if they had not been certain that the god of their country had commanded the sacrifice.
Theocracy did not only reign for a long time, but it extended tyranny to the most shocking excess that human falsehood can prevail; and the more this government was called divine, the more it became abominable.
Almost every people have sacrificed their children to their gods; they therefore believed they received this unnatural mandate from the lips of those gods whom they adored.
Among the people who are so improperly called civilized, I see scarce any but the Chinese who have not been guilty of these shocking absurdities. China is the only one of all the ancient states which has not been under sacerdotal subjection. As to the Japanese they submitted to the laws imposed upon them by a priest, six hundred years before we were in being. Almost everywhere theocracy is so much established, so deeply rooted, that the first histories are those of gods themselves, who became incarnated to come and govern men. The gods, said the people of Thebes and Memphis, have reigned twelve thousand years in Egypt. Brama incarnated himself to reign in India, Samonocodom at Siam, the god Adad governed Syria, the goddess Cybele had been sovereign of Phrygia, Jupiter of Crete, Saturn of Greece and Italy. The same spirit runs through all these fables; it consists in a confused idea which men had, that the gods formerly descended upon earth.