initial commit of ebook 1561HEADmain

12 files changed, 42487 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/1561-0.txt b/1561-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a36cedd
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1561-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10051 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pagan & Christian Creeds, by Edward Carpenter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Pagan & Christian Creeds
+       Their Origin and Meaning
+
+Author: Edward Carpenter
+
+Release Date: December, 1998 [eBook #1561]
+[Most recently updated: November 26, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS ***
+
+
+
+
+PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+
+By Edward Carpenter
+
+
+
+
+"The different religions being lame attempts to represent under various
+guises this one root-fact of the central universal life, men have at
+all times clung to the religious creeds and rituals and ceremonials as
+symbolising in some rude way the redemption and fulfilment of their own
+most intimate natures--and this whether consciously understanding
+the interpretations, or whether (as most often) only doing so in an
+unconscious or quite subconscious way."
+
+The Drama of Love and Death, p. 96.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I.    INTRODUCTORY
+     II.   SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+     III.  THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+     IV.   TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+     V.    FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+     VI.   MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+     VII.  RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+     VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+     IX.   MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+     X.    THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+     XI.   RITUAL DANCING
+     XII.  THE SEX-TABOO
+     XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+     XV.   THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+     XV.   THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+     XVI.  THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+     XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+     APPENDIX ON THE TEACHINGS OF THE UPANISHADS:
+     I.    REST
+     II.   THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+
+
+
+PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+
+
+
+
+I. INTRODUCTORY
+
+The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as the great
+multitude of books upon it, published in late years, tends to show.
+Indeed the great difficulty to-day in dealing with the subject, lies in
+the very mass of the material to hand--and that not only on account of
+the labor involved in sorting the material, but because the abundance
+itself of facts opens up temptation to a student in this department of
+Anthropology (as happens also in other branches of general Science) to
+rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts,
+statistics, and so forth, there are available in any investigation, the
+easier it is to pick out a considerable number which will fit a given
+theory. The other facts being neglected or ignored, the views put
+forward enjoy for a time a great vogue. Then inevitably, and at a later
+time, new or neglected facts alter the outlook, and a new perspective is
+established.
+
+There is also in these matters of Science (though many scientific men
+would doubtless deny this) a great deal of "Fashion". Such has been
+notoriously the case in Political Economy, Medicine, Geology, and even
+in such definite studies as Physics and Chemistry. In a comparatively
+recent science, like that with which we are now concerned, one would
+naturally expect variations. A hundred and fifty years ago, and since
+the time of Rousseau, the "Noble Savage" was extremely popular; and he
+lingers still in the story books of our children. Then the reaction from
+this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been the popular cue
+(largely, it must be said, among "armchair" travelers and explorers)
+to represent the religious rites and customs of primitive folk as a
+senseless mass of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of
+decent feeling and intelligence. Again, when the study of religious
+origins first began in modern times to be seriously taken up--say in the
+earlier part of last century--there was a great boom in Sungods. Every
+divinity in the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun--unless indeed
+(if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was
+a sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the
+same. C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795), F. Nork
+in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard Taylor in England (The
+Devil's Pulpit, (1) 1830), were among the first in modern times to put
+forward this view. A little later the PHALLIC explanation of everything
+came into fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs and
+powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art and Mythology,
+1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868)
+popularized this idea in England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again
+there was a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism--the theory
+that the gods and goddesses had actually once been men and women,
+historical characters round whom a halo of romance and remoteness
+had gathered. Later still, a school has arisen which thinks little of
+sungods, and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits, to gnomes
+and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the processes of Magic by
+which these (so it was supposed) could be enlisted in man's service if
+friendly, or exorcised if hostile.
+
+
+ (1) This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and
+containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the right
+lines. But it raised a storm of opposition--the more so because its
+author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the ministry, of course, and
+was sent to prison twice.
+
+
+It is easy to see of course that there is some truth in ALL these
+explanations; but naturally each school for the time being makes the
+most of its own contention. Mr. J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and
+Christianity and Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field,
+(1) relies chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though he does
+not altogether deny the others; Dr. Frazer, on the other hand--whose
+great work, The Golden Bough, is a monumental collection of primitive
+customs, and will be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students--is
+apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun and the
+stars, but concentrates his attention on the collection of innumerable
+details (2) of rites, chiefly magical, connected with food and
+vegetation. Still later writers, like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and
+E. A. Crowley, being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive
+peoples, like the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have
+confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and Witchcraft.
+
+ (1) If only he did not waste so much time, and so needlessly, in
+slaughtering opponents!
+
+ (2) To such a degree, indeed, that sometimes the connecting clue
+of the argument seems to be lost.
+
+
+Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations has kept itself
+severely apart--as of course representing a unique and divine revelation
+little concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and moreover (in
+this country at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public
+of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few people, even
+nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just the same root as
+Paganism, and that it shares by far the most part of its doctrines and
+rites with the latter. Till quite lately it was thought (in Britain)
+that only secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in
+sungods; and while it was true that learned professors might point to a
+belief in Magic as one of the first sources of Religion, it was easy in
+reply to say that this obviously had nothing to do with Christianity!
+The Secularists, too, rather spoilt their case by assuming, in their
+wrath against the Church, that all priests since the beginning of
+the world have been frauds and charlatans, and that all the rites of
+religion were merely devil's devices invented by them for the purpose of
+preying upon the superstitions of the ignorant, to their own enrichment.
+They (the Secularists) overleaped themselves by grossly exaggerating a
+thing that no doubt is partially true.
+
+Thus the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex, and yields
+many aspects for consideration. It is only, I think, by keeping a broad
+course and admitting contributions to the truth from various sides, that
+valuable results can be obtained. It is absurd to suppose that in this
+or any other science neat systems can be found which will cover all the
+facts. Nature and History do not deal in such things, or supply them for
+a sop to Man's vanity.
+
+It is clear that there have been three main lines, so far, along which
+human speculation and study have run. One connecting religious rites and
+observations with the movements of the Sun and the planets in the sky,
+and leading to the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods
+dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance; the second
+connecting religion with the changes of the season, on the Earth and
+with such practical things as the growth of vegetation and food, and
+leading to or mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical
+methods of influencing such spirits; and the third connecting religion
+with man's own body and the tremendous force of sex residing in
+it--emblem of undying life and all fertility and power. It is clear
+also--and all investigation confirms it--that the second-mentioned phase
+of religion arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned--that is, that
+men naturally thought about the very practical questions of food and
+vegetation, and the magical or other methods of encouraging the same,
+before they worried themselves about the heavenly bodies and the laws of
+THEIR movements, or about the sinister or favorable influences the stars
+might exert. And again it is extremely probable that the third-mentioned
+aspect--that which connected religion with the procreative desires and
+phenomena of human physiology--really came FIRST. These desires and
+physiological phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive mind
+long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky had been at all
+definitely observed or considered. Thus we find it probable that, in
+order to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of
+religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given
+in which they have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the
+Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of
+earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief
+in definite God-figures residing in heaven.
+
+At the base of the whole process by which divinities and demons were
+created, and rites for their propitiation and placation established, lay
+Fear--fear stimulating the imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in
+orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
+stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness.
+Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human
+mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature
+was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure
+or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were correspondingly no
+figures or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that self. So
+it was that the imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness,
+and from that imaginative power was unrolled the whole panorama of the
+gods and rites and creeds of Religion down the centuries.
+
+The immense force and domination of Fear in the first self-conscious
+stages of the human mind is a thing which can hardly be exaggerated, and
+which is even difficult for some of us moderns to realize. But naturally
+as soon as Man began to think about himself--a frail phantom and waif in
+the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature and mode of operation he
+was entirely ignorant--he was BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon
+him on all sides. Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the
+chief obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native races
+is sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the recognized word
+for a state of mind ("obsession of death") which will often cause a
+savage to perish from a mere scratch hardly to be called a wound.
+The natural defence against this state of mind was the creation of an
+enormous number of taboos--such as we find among all races and on every
+conceivable subject--and these taboos constituted practically a
+great body of warnings which regulated the lives and thoughts of the
+community, and ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some
+degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent Customs and Laws.
+Such taboos naturally in the beginning tended to include the avoidance
+not only of acts which might reasonably be considered dangerous, like
+touching a corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful in
+their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-in-law, or
+passing a lightning-struck tree; and (what is especially to be noticed)
+they tended to include acts which offered any special PLEASURE or
+temptation--like sex or marriage or the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos
+surrounded these things too, and the psychological connection is easy to
+divine: but I shall deal with this general subject later.
+
+It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations made life
+anything but easy to early peoples; but, preposterous and unreasonable
+as some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of
+compelling the growth of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy
+motive, but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely animal
+passions, and introduced order and restraint among them. Simultaneously
+it became itself, through the gradual increase of knowledge and
+observation, transmuted and etherealized into something more like wonder
+and awe and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
+Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings (in the
+Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a gradual
+development--from crass superstition, senseless and accidental, to
+rudimentary observation, and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
+and personification of nature-powers in more or less human form,
+as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of the tribe; and to
+placation of these powers by rites like Sacrifice and the Eucharist,
+which in their turn became the foundation of Morality. Graphic
+representations made for the encouragement of fertility--as on the
+walls of Bushmen's rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of
+Altamira--became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of plants
+or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal medicine-men for
+purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied some of the material of
+Science; and humanity emerged by faltering and hesitating steps on the
+borderland of those finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed
+to be characteristic of Civilization.
+
+The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies has in
+its main outlines been the same all over the world, as the reader will
+presently see--and this whether in connection with the numerous creeds
+of Paganism or the supposedly unique case of Christianity; and now the
+continuity and close intermixture of these great streams can no longer
+be denied--nor IS it indeed denied by those who have really studied the
+subject. It is seen that religious evolution through the ages has been
+practically One thing--that there has been in fact a World-religion,
+though with various phases and branches.
+
+And so in the present day a new problem arises, namely how to account
+for the appearance of this great Phenomenon, with its orderly phases
+of evolution, and its own spontaneous (1) growths in all corners of the
+globe--this phenomenon which has had such a strange sway over the hearts
+of men, which has attracted them with so weird a charm, which has drawn
+out their devotion, love and tenderness, which has consoled them in
+sorrow and affliction, and yet which has stained their history with such
+horrible sacrifices and persecutions and cruelties. What has been the
+instigating cause of it?
+
+ (1) For the question of spontaneity see chap. x and elsewhere.
+
+
+The answer which I propose to this question, and which is developed to
+some extent in the following chapters, is a psychological one. It is
+that the phenomenon proceeds from, and is a necessary accompaniment of,
+the growth of human Consciousness itself--its growth, namely, through
+the three great stages of its unfoldment. These stages are (1) that of
+the simple or animal consciousness, (2) that of SELF-consciousness, and
+(3) that of a third stage of consciousness which has not as yet been
+effectively named, but whose indications and precursive signs we here
+and there perceive in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of the
+early religions, and in the poetry and art and literature generally of
+the later civilizations. Though I do not expect or wish to catch Nature
+and History in the careful net of a phrase, yet I think that in the
+sequence from the above-mentioned first stage to the second, and then
+again in the sequence from the second to the third, there will be found
+a helpful explanation of the rites and aspirations of human religion. It
+is this idea, illustrated by details of ceremonial and so forth, which
+forms the main thesis of the present book. In this sequence of growth,
+Christianity enters as an episode, but no more than an episode. It does
+not amount to a disruption or dislocation of evolution. If it did, or
+if it stood as an unique or unclassifiable phenomenon (as some of its
+votaries contend), this would seem to be a misfortune--as it would
+obviously rob us of at any rate one promise of progress in the future.
+And the promise of something better than Paganism and better than
+Christianity is very precious. It is surely time that it should be
+fulfilled.
+
+The tracing, therefore, of the part that human self-consciousness has
+played, psychologically, in the evolution of religion, runs like a
+thread through the following chapters, and seeks illustration in a
+variety of details. The idea has been repeated under different aspects;
+sometimes, possibly, it has been repeated too often; but different
+aspects in such a case do help, as in a stereoscope, to give solidity to
+the thing seen. Though the worship of Sun-gods and divine figures in
+the sky came comparatively late in religious evolution, 1 have put this
+subject early in the book (chapters ii and iii), partly because (as I
+have already explained) it was the phase first studied in modern times,
+and therefore is the one most familiar to present-day readers, and
+partly because its astronomical data give great definiteness and
+"proveability" to it, in rebuttal to the common accusation that the
+whole study of religious origins is too vague and uncertain to have much
+value. Going backwards in Time, the two next chapters (iv and v) deal
+with Totem-sacraments and Magic, perhaps the earliest forms of religion.
+And these four lead on (in chapters vi to xi) to the consideration of
+rites and creeds common to Paganism and Christianity. XII and xiii deal
+especially with the evolution of Christianity itself; xiv and xv explain
+the inner Meaning of the whole process from the beginning; and xvi and
+xvii look to the Future.
+
+The appendix on the doctrines of the Upanishads may, I hope, serve to
+give an idea, intimate even though inadequate, of the third Stage--that
+which follows on the stage of self-consciousness; and to portray the
+mental attitudes which are characteristic of that stage. Here in this
+third stage, it would seem, one comes upon the real FACTS of the inner
+life--in contradistinction to the fancies and figments of the second
+stage; and so one reaches the final point of conjunction between Science
+and Religion.
+
+
+
+
+II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+
+To the ordinary public--notwithstanding the immense amount of work which
+has of late been done on this subject--the connection between Paganism
+and Christianity still seems rather remote. Indeed the common notion
+is that Christianity was really a miraculous interposition into and
+dislocation of the old order of the world; and that the pagan gods (as
+in Milton's Hymn on the Nativity) fled away in dismay before the sign of
+the Cross, and at the sound of the name of Jesus. Doubtless this was a
+view much encouraged by the early Church itself--if only to enhance its
+own authority and importance; yet, as is well known to every student, it
+is quite misleading and contrary to fact. The main Christian doctrines
+and festivals, besides a great mass of affiliated legend and ceremonial,
+are really quite directly derived from, and related to, preceding
+Nature worships; and it has only been by a good deal of deliberate
+mystification and falsification that this derivation has been kept out
+of sight.
+
+In these Nature-worships there may be discerned three fairly independent
+streams of religious or quasi-religious enthusiasm: (1) that connected
+with the phenomena of the heavens, the movements of the Sun, planets and
+stars, and the awe and wonderment they excited; (2) that connected with
+the seasons and the very important matter of the growth of vegetation
+and food on the Earth; and (3) that connected with the mysteries of Sex
+and reproduction. It is obvious that these three streams would mingle
+and interfuse with each other a good deal; but as far as they were
+separable the first would tend to create Solar heroes and Sun-myths;
+the second Vegetation-gods and personifications of Nature and the
+earth-life; while the third would throw its glamour over the other two
+and contribute to the projection of deities or demons worshipped with
+all sorts of sexual and phallic rites. All three systems of course have
+their special rites and times and ceremonies; but, as, I say, the rites
+and ceremonies of one system would rarely be found pure and unmixed with
+those belonging to the two others. The whole subject is a very large
+one; but for reasons given in the Introduction I shall in this and
+the following chapter--while not ignoring phases (2) and (3)--lay most
+stress on phase (1) of the question before us.
+
+At the time of the life or recorded appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, and
+for some centuries before, the Mediterranean and neighboring world had
+been the scene of a vast number of pagan creeds and rituals. There were
+Temples without end dedicated to gods like Apollo or Dionysus among the
+Greeks, Hercules among the Romans, Mithra among the Persians, Adonis and
+Attis in Syria and Phrygia, Osiris and Isis and Horus in Egypt, Baal
+and Astarte among the Babylonians and Carthaginians, and so forth.
+Societies, large or small, united believers and the devout in the
+service or ceremonials connected with their respective deities, and
+in the creeds which they confessed concerning these deities. And an
+extraordinarily interesting fact, for us, is that notwithstanding great
+geographical distances and racial differences between the adherents
+of these various cults, as well as differences in the details of their
+services, the general outlines of their creeds and ceremonials were--if
+not identical--so markedly similar as we find them.
+
+I cannot of course go at length into these different cults, but I may
+say roughly that of all or nearly all the deities above-mentioned it was
+said and believed that:
+
+
+(1) They were born on or very near our Christmas Day.
+
+(2) They were born of a Virgin-Mother.
+
+(3) And in a Cave or Underground Chamber.
+
+(4) They led a life of toil for Mankind.
+
+(5) And were called by the names of Light-bringer, Healer, Mediator,
+Savior, Deliverer.
+
+(6) They were however vanquished by the Powers of Darkness.
+
+(7) And descended into Hell or the Underworld.
+
+(8) They rose again from the dead, and became the pioneers of mankind to
+the Heavenly world.
+
+(9) They founded Communions of Saints, and Churches into which disciples
+were received by Baptism.
+
+(10) And they were commemorated by Eucharistic meals.
+
+
+Let me give a few brief examples.
+
+Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. (1) He was born of
+a Virgin. (2) He traveled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator
+of men. He slew the Bull (symbol of the gross Earth which the sunlight
+fructifies). His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring
+equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples
+(the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose
+again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings.
+He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and
+sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers.
+This legend is apparently partly astronomical and partly vegetational;
+and the same may be said of the following about Osiris.
+
+ (1) The birthfeast of Mithra was held in Rome on the 8th day
+before the Kalends of January, being also the day of the Circassian
+games, which were sacred to the Sun. (See F. Nork, Der Mystagog,
+Leipzig.)
+
+ (2) This at any rate was reported by his later disciples (see
+Robertson's Pagan Christs, p. 338).
+
+
+Osiris was born (Plutarch tells us) on the 361st day of the year,
+say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great
+traveler. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and "tamed them by
+music and gentleness, not by force of arms"; (1) he was the discoverer
+of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness,
+and slain and dismembered. "This happened," says Plutarch, "on the 17th
+of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion" (the sign of
+the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed
+in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in
+the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult
+of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin was brought out before the
+worshipers and saluted with glad cries of "Osiris is risen." (1) "His
+sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in
+a great mystery-play at Abydos." (2)
+
+ (1) See Plutarch on Isis and Osiris.
+
+ (2) Ancient Art and Ritual, by Jane E. Harrison, chap. i.
+
+
+The two following legends have more distinctly the character of
+Vegetation myths.
+
+Adonis or Tammuz, the Syrian god of vegetation, was a very beautiful
+youth, born of a Virgin (Nature), and so beautiful that Venus and
+Proserpine (the goddesses of the Upper and Underworlds) both fell in
+love with him. To reconcile their claims it was agreed that he should
+spend half the year (summer) in the upper world, and the winter half
+with Proserpine below. He was killed by a boar (Typhon) in the autumn.
+And every year the maidens "wept for Adonis" (see Ezekiel viii. 14). In
+the spring a festival of his resurrection was held--the women set out
+to seek him, and having found the supposed corpse placed it (a wooden
+image) in a coffin or hollow tree, and performed wild rites and
+lamentations, followed by even wilder rejoicings over his supposed
+resurrection. At Aphaca in the North of Syria, and halfway between
+Byblus and Baalbec, there was a famous grove and temple of Astarte,
+near which was a wild romantic gorge full of trees, the birthplace of
+a certain river Adonis--the water rushing from a Cavern, under lofty
+cliffs. Here (it was said) every year the youth Adonis was again wounded
+to death, and the river ran red with his blood, (1) while the scarlet
+anemone bloomed among the cedars and walnuts.
+
+ (1) A discoloration caused by red earth washed by rain from the
+mountains, and which has been observed by modern travelers. For the
+whole story of Adonis and of Attis see Frazer's Golden Bough, part iv.
+
+
+The story of Attis is very similar. He was a fair young shepherd or
+herdsman of Phrygia, beloved by Cybele (or Demeter), the Mother of the
+gods. He was born of a Virgin--Nana--who conceived by putting a ripe
+almond or pomegranate in her bosom. He died, either killed by a boar,
+the symbol of winter, like Adonis, or self-castrated (like his own
+priests); and he bled to death at the foot of a pine tree (the pine
+and pine-cone being symbols of fertility). The sacrifice of his blood
+renewed the fertility of the earth, and in the ritual celebration of
+his death and resurrection his image was fastened to the trunk of a
+pine-tree (compare the Crucifixion). But I shall return to this legend
+presently. The worship of Attis became very widespread and much honored,
+and was ultimately incorporated with the established religion at Rome
+somewhere about the commencement of our Era.
+
+The following two legends (dealing with Hercules and with Krishna) have
+rather more of the character of the solar, and less of the vegetational
+myth about them. Both heroes were regarded as great benefactors of
+humanity; but the former more on the material plane, and the latter on
+the spiritual.
+
+Hercules or Heracles was, like other Sun-gods and benefactors of
+mankind, a great Traveler. He was known in many lands, and everywhere
+he was invoked as Saviour. He was miraculously conceived from a divine
+Father; even in the cradle he strangled two serpents sent to destroy
+him. His many labors for the good of the world were ultimately
+epitomized into twelve, symbolized by the signs of the Zodiac. He slew
+the Nemxan Lion and the Hydra (offspring of Typhon) and the Boar. He
+overcame the Cretan Bull, and cleaned out the Stables of Augeas; he
+conquered Death and, descending into Hades, brought Cerberus thence and
+ascended into Heaven. On all sides he was followed by the gratitude and
+the prayers of mortals.
+
+As to Krishna, the Indian god, the points of agreement with the general
+divine career indicated above are too salient to be overlooked, and too
+numerous to be fully recorded. He also was born of a Virgin (Devaki)
+and in a Cave, (1) and his birth announced by a Star. It was sought to
+destroy him, and for that purpose a massacre of infants was ordered.
+Everywhere he performed miracles, raising the dead, healing lepers, and
+the deaf and the blind, and championing the poor and oppressed. He had
+a beloved disciple, Arjuna, (cf. John) before whom he was transfigured.
+(2) His death is differently related--as being shot by an arrow, or
+crucified on a tree. He descended into hell; and rose again from the
+dead, ascending into heaven in the sight of many people. He will return
+at the last day to be the judge of the quick and the dead.
+
+ (1) Cox's Myths of the Aryan Nations, p. 107.
+
+ (2) Bhagavat Gita, ch. xi.
+
+
+Such are some of the legends concerning the pagan and pre-Christian
+deities--only briefly sketched now, in order that we may get something
+like a true perspective of the whole subject; but to most of them, and
+more in detail, I shall return as the argument proceeds.
+
+What we chiefly notice so far are two points; on the one hand the
+general similarity of these stories with that of Jesus Christ; on the
+other their analogy with the yearly phenomena of Nature as illustrated
+by the course of the Sun in heaven and the changes of Vegetation on the
+earth.
+
+
+(1) The similarity of these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with
+Christian traditions was indeed so great that it excited the attention
+and the undisguised wrath of the early Christian fathers. They felt no
+doubt about the similarity, but not knowing how to explain it fell
+back upon the innocent theory that the Devil--in order to confound the
+Christians--had, CENTURIES BEFORE, caused the pagans to adopt certain
+beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil, but also
+very innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr for instance
+describes (1) the institution of the Lord's Supper as narrated in the
+Gospels, and then goes on to say: "Which the wicked devils have IMITATED
+in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For,
+that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in
+the mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know or can
+learn." Tertullian also says (2) that "the devil by the mysteries of
+his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries."...
+"He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes them believe that
+this purifies them from their crimes."... "Mithra sets his mark on the
+forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers
+an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the crown and the
+sword; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage; he even has his
+virgins and ascetics." (3) Cortez, too, it will be remembered complained
+that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things
+which God had taught to Christendom.
+
+ (1) I Apol. c. 66.
+
+ (2) De Praescriptione Hereticorum, c. 40; De Bapt. c. 3; De
+Corona, c. 15.
+
+ (3) For reference to both these examples see J. M. Robertson's
+Pagan Christs, pp. 321, 322.
+
+
+Justin Martyr again, in the Dialogue with Trypho says that the Birth in
+the Stable was the prototype (!) of the birth of Mithra in the Cave of
+Zoroastrianism; and boasts that Christ was born when the Sun takes its
+birth in the Augean Stable, (1) coming as a second Hercules to cleanse
+a foul world; and St. Augustine says "we hold this (Christmas) day holy,
+not like the pagans because of the birth of the Sun, but because of the
+birth of him who made it." There are plenty of other instances in the
+Early Fathers of their indignant ascription of these similarities to the
+work of devils; but we need not dwell over them. There is no need for
+US to be indignant. On the contrary we can now see that these
+animadversions of the Christian writers are the evidence of how and to
+what extent in the spread of Christianity over the world it had become
+fused with the Pagan cults previously existing.
+
+ (1) The Zodiacal sign of Capricornus, iii.
+
+
+It was not till the year A.D. 530 or so--five centuries after the
+supposed birth of Christ--that a Scythian Monk, Dionysius Exiguus, an
+abbot and astronomer of Rome, was commissioned to fix the day and the
+year of that birth. A nice problem, considering the historical science
+of the period! For year he assigned the date which we now adopt, (2) and
+for day and month he adopted the 25th December--a date which had been
+in popular use since about 350 B.C., and the very date, within a day or
+two, of the supposed birth of the previous Sungods. (3) From that
+fact alone we may fairly conclude that by the year 530 or earlier the
+existing Nature-worships had become largely fused into Christianity. In
+fact the dates of the main pagan religious festivals had by that time
+become so popular that Christianity was OBLIGED to accommodate itself to
+them. (1)
+
+ (1) As, for instance, the festival of John the Baptist in June
+took the place of the pagan midsummer festival of water and bathing;
+the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that of Diana in the
+same month; and the festival of All Souls early in November, that of the
+world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and their ghosts at the same season.
+
+ (2) See Encycl. Brit. art. "Chronology."
+
+ (3) "There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
+as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of the rainy
+season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds could have been at
+night in the fields of Bethlehem" (!). Encycl. Brit. art. "Christmas
+Day." According to Hastings's Encyclopaedia, art. "Christmas," "Usener
+says that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th
+January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to
+the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity
+taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D." It was not till 534
+A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as
+dies non.
+
+
+This brings us to the second point mentioned a few pages back--the
+analogy between the Christian festivals and the yearly phenomena of
+Nature in the Sun and the Vegetation.
+
+Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have seen, was reported
+to have been born on the 25th December (which in the Julian Calendar was
+reckoned as the day of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the
+Sun); Plutarch says (Isis and Osiris, c. 12) that Osiris was born on
+the 361st day of the year, when a Voice rang out proclaiming the Lord of
+All. Horus, he says, was born on the 362nd day. Apollo on the same.
+
+Why was all this? Why did the Druids at Yule Tide light roaring fires?
+Why was the cock supposed to crow all Christmas Eve ("The bird of
+dawning singeth all night long")? Why was Apollo born with only one hair
+(the young Sun with only one feeble ray)? Why did Samson (name derived
+from Shemesh, the sun) lose all his strength when he lost his hair? Why
+were so many of these gods--Mithra, Apollo, Krishna, Jesus, and others,
+born in caves or underground chambers? (1) Why, at the Easter Eve
+festival of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is a light brought from the
+grave and communicated to the candles of thousands who wait outside, and
+who rush forth rejoicing to carry the new glory over the world? (2) Why
+indeed? except that older than all history and all written records has
+been the fear and wonderment of the children of men over the failure of
+the Sun's strength in Autumn--the decay of their God; and the anxiety
+lest by any means he should not revive or reappear?
+
+
+ (1) This same legend of gods (or idols) being born in caves has,
+curiously enough, been reported from Mexico, Guatemala, the Antilles,
+and other places in Central America. See C. F. P. von Martius,
+Etknographie Amerika, etc. (Leipzig, 1867), vol. i, p. 758.
+
+ (2) Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and
+communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human
+victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the
+beginning of another--the constellation of the Pleiades being in the
+Zenith (Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 4).
+
+
+Think for a moment of a time far back when there were absolutely NO
+Almanacs or Calendars, either nicely printed or otherwise, when all that
+timid mortals could see was that their great source of Light and Warmth
+was daily failing, daily sinking lower in the sky. As everyone now knows
+there are about three weeks at the fag end of the year when the days are
+at their shortest and there is very little change. What was happening?
+Evidently the god had fallen upon evil times. Typhon, the prince of
+darkness, had betrayed him; Delilah, the queen of Night, had shorn his
+hair; the dreadful Boar had wounded him; Hercules was struggling
+with Death itself; he had fallen under the influence of those malign
+constellations--the Serpent and the Scorpion. Would the god grow weaker
+and weaker, and finally succumb, or would he conquer after all? We can
+imagine the anxiety with which those early men and women watched for the
+first indication of a lengthening day; and the universal joy when the
+Priest (the representative of primitive science) having made some
+simple observations, announced from the Temple steps that the day WAS
+lengthening--that the Sun was really born again to a new and glorious
+career. (1)
+
+ (1) It was such things as these which doubtless gave the
+Priesthood its power.
+
+
+Let us look at the elementary science of those days a little closer.
+How without Almanacs or Calendars could the day, or probable day, of the
+Sun's rebirth be fixed? Go out next Christmas Evening, and at midnight
+you will see the brightest of the fixed stars, Sirius, blazing in the
+southern sky--not however due south from you, but somewhat to the
+left of the Meridian line. Some three thousand years ago (owing to the
+Precession of the Equinoxes) that star at the winter solstice did
+not stand at midnight where you now see it, but almost exactly ON
+the meridian line. The coming of Sirius therefore to the meridian at
+midnight became the sign and assurance of the Sun having reached the
+very lowest point of his course, and therefore of having arrived at the
+moment of his re-birth. Where then was the Sun at that moment? Obviously
+in the underworld beneath our feet. Whatever views the ancients may have
+had about the shape of the earth, it was evident to the mass of people
+that the Sungod, after illuminating the world during the day, plunged
+down in the West, and remained there during the hours of darkness in
+some cavern under the earth. Here he rested and after bathing in the
+great ocean renewed his garments before reappearing in the East next
+morning.
+
+But in this long night of his greatest winter weakness, when all the
+world was hoping and praying for the renewal of his strength, it is
+evident that the new birth would come--if it came at all--at midnight.
+This then was the sacred hour when in the underworld (the Stable or the
+Cave or whatever it might be called) the child was born who was destined
+to be the Savior of men. At that moment Sirius stood on the southern
+meridian (and in more southern lands than ours this would be more nearly
+overhead); and that star--there is little doubt--is the Star in the East
+mentioned in the Gospels.
+
+To the right, as the supposed observer looks at Sirius on the midnight
+of Christmas Eve, stands the magnificent Orion, the mighty hunter. There
+are three stars in his belt which, as is well known, lie in a straight
+line pointing to Sirius. They are not so bright as Sirius, but they are
+sufficiently bright to attract attention. A long tradition gives them
+the name of the Three Kings. Dupuis (1) says: "Orion a trois belles
+etoiles vers le milieu, qui sont de seconde grandeur et posees en ligne
+droite, l'une pres de l'autre, le peuple les appelle les trois rois.
+On donne aux trois rois Magis les noms de Magalat, Galgalat, Saraim;
+et Athos, Satos, Paratoras. Les Catholiques les appellent Gaspard,
+Melchior, et Balthasar." The last-mentioned group of names comes in
+the Catholic Calendar in connection with the feast of the Epiphany (6th
+January); and the name "Trois Rois" is commonly to-day given to these
+stars by the French and Swiss peasants.
+
+ (1) Charles F. Dupuis (Origine de Tous les Cultes, Paris, 1822)
+was one of the earliest modern writers on these subjects.
+
+
+Immediately after Midnight then, on the 25th December, the Beloved Son
+(or Sun-god) is born. If we go back in thought to the period, some three
+thousand years ago, when at that moment of the heavenly birth Sirius,
+coming from the East, did actually stand on the Meridian, we shall come
+into touch with another curious astronomical coincidence. For at the
+same moment we shall see the Zodiacal constellation of the Virgin in
+the act of rising, and becoming visible in the East divided through the
+middle by the line of the horizon.
+
+The constellation Virgo is a Y-shaped group, of which [gr a], the star
+at the foot, is the well-known Spica, a star of the first magnitude. The
+other principal stars, [gr g] at the centre, and [gr b] and [gr e] at
+the extremities, are of the second magnitude. The whole resembles more a
+cup than the human figure; but when we remember the symbolic meaning
+of the cup, that seems to be an obvious explanation of the name Virgo,
+which the constellation has borne since the earliest times. (The three
+stars [gr b], [gr g] and [gr a], lie very nearly on the Ecliptic, that
+is, the Sun's path--a fact to which we shall return presently.)
+
+At the moment then when Sirius, the star from the East, by coming to the
+Meridian at midnight signalled the Sun's new birth, the Virgin was seen
+just rising on the Eastern sky--the horizon line passing through
+her centre. And many people think that this astronomical fact is the
+explanation of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth. I do not
+think that it is the sole explanation--for indeed in all or nearly all
+these cases the acceptance of a myth seems to depend not upon a single
+argument but upon the convergence of a number of meanings and reasons in
+the same symbol. But certainly the fact mentioned above is curious, and
+its importance is accentuated by the following considerations.
+
+In the Temple of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside of the dome,
+there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern
+hemisphere of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation
+is represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in
+her hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and
+explicatory figure--a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms,
+and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna and Child, except
+that she is sitting and the child is on her knee. This seems to show
+that--whatever other nations may have done in associating Virgo with
+Demeter, Ceres, Diana (2) etc.--the Egyptians made no doubt of the
+constellation's connection with Isis and Horus. But it is well known as
+a matter of history that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the
+early Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form of the
+worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior, and so passed into
+the European ceremonial. We have therefore the Virgin Mary connected by
+linear succession and descent with that remote Zodiacal cluster in the
+sky! Also it may be mentioned that on the Arabian and Persian globes of
+Abenezra and Abuazar a Virgin and Child are figured in connection with
+the same constellation. (3)
+
+ (1) Carefully described and mapped by Dupuis, see op. cit.
+
+ (2) For the harvest-festival of Diana, the Virgin, and her
+parallelism with the Virgin Mary, see The Golden Bough, vol. i, 14 and
+ii, 121.
+
+ (3) See F. Nork, Der Mystagog (Leipzig, 1838).
+
+
+A curious confirmation of the same astronomical connection is afforded
+by the Roman Catholic Calendar. For if this be consulted it will be
+found that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin is placed on the
+15th August, while the festival of the Birth of the Virgin is dated the
+8th September. I have already pointed out that the stars, [gr a], [gr
+b] and [gr g] of Virgo are almost exactly on the Ecliptic, or Sun's path
+through the sky; and a brief reference to the Zodiacal signs and the
+star-maps will show that the Sun each year enters the sign of Virgo
+about the first-mentioned date, and leaves it about the second date. At
+the present day the Zodiacal signs (owing to precession) have shifted
+some distance from the constellations of the same name. But at the time
+when the Zodiac was constituted and these names were given, the first
+date obviously would signalize the actual disappearance of the cluster
+Virgo in the Sun's rays--i. e. the Assumption of the Virgin into the
+glory of the God--while the second date would signalize the reappearance
+of the constellation or the Birth of the Virgin. The Church of Notre
+Dame at Paris is supposed to be on the original site of a Temple of
+Isis; and it is said (but I have not been able to verify this myself)
+that one of the side entrances--that, namely, on the left in entering
+from the North (cloister) side--is figured with the signs of the Zodiac
+EXCEPT that the sign Virgo is replaced by the figure of the Madonna and
+Child.
+
+So strange is the scripture of the sky! Innumerable legends and customs
+connect the rebirth of the Sun with a Virgin parturition. Dr. J. G.
+Frazer in his Part IV of The Golden Bough (1) says: "If we may trust the
+evidence of an obscure scholiast the Greeks (in the worship of Mithras
+at Rome) used to celebrate the birth of the luminary by a midnight
+service, coming out of the inner shrines and crying, 'The Virgin has
+brought forth! The light is waxing!' ([gr 'H parhenos tetoken, auzei
+pws].)" In Elie Reclus' little book Primitive Folk (2) it is said of the
+Esquimaux that "On the longest night of the year two angakout (priests),
+of whom one is disguised as a WOMAN, go from hut to hut extinguishing
+all the lights, rekindling them from a vestal flame, and crying out,
+'From the new sun cometh a new light!'"
+
+ (1) Book II, ch. vi.
+
+ (2) In the Contemporary Science Series, I. 92.
+
+
+All this above-written on the Solar or Astronomical origins of the myths
+does not of course imply that the Vegetational origins must be denied
+or ignored. These latter were doubtless the earliest, but there is no
+reason--as said in the Introduction (ch. i)--why the two elements should
+not to some extent have run side by side, or been fused with each other.
+In fact it is quite clear that they must have done so; and to separate
+them out too rigidly, or treat them as antagonistic, is a mistake. The
+Cave or Underworld in which the New Year is born is not only the place
+of the Sun's winter retirement, but also the hidden chamber beneath the
+Earth to which the dying Vegetation goes, and from which it re-arises
+in Spring. The amours of Adonis with Venus and Proserpine, the lovely
+goddesses of the upper and under worlds, or of Attis with Cybele, the
+blooming Earth-mother, are obvious vegetation-symbols; but they do not
+exclude the interpretation that Adonis (Adonai) may also figure as a
+Sun-god. The Zodiacal constellations of Aries and Taurus (to which I
+shall return presently) rule in heaven just when the Lamb and the Bull
+are in evidence on the earth; and the yearly sacrifice of those two
+animals and of the growing Corn for the good of mankind runs
+parallel with the drama of the sky, as it affects not only the said
+constellations but also Virgo (the Earth-mother who bears the sheaf of
+corn in her hand).
+
+I shall therefore continue (in the next chapter) to point out these
+astronomical references--which are full of significance and poetry; but
+with a recommendation at the same time to the reader not to forget the
+poetry and significance of the terrestrial interpretations.
+
+Between Christmas Day and Easter there are several minor festivals or
+holy days--such as the 28th December (the Massacre of the Innocents),
+the 6th January (the Epiphany), the 2nd February (Candlemas (1) Day),
+the period of Lent (German Lenz, the Spring), the Annunciation of the
+Blessed Virgin, and so forth--which have been commonly celebrated in
+the pagan cults before Christianity, and in which elements of Star and
+Nature worship can be traced; but to dwell on all these would take too
+long; so let us pass at once to the period of Easter itself.
+
+ (1) This festival of the Purification of the Virgin corresponds
+with the old Roman festival of Juno Februata (i. e. purified) which was
+held in the last month (February) of the Roman year, and which included
+a candle procession of Ceres, searching for Proserpine. (F. Nork, Der
+Mystagog.)
+
+
+
+
+III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+
+The Vernal Equinox has all over the ancient world, and from the earliest
+times, been a period of rejoicing and of festivals in honor of the
+Sungod. It is needless to labor a point which is so well known. Everyone
+understands and appreciates the joy of finding that the long darkness is
+giving way, that the Sun is growing in strength, and that the days are
+winning a victory over the nights. The birds and flowers reappear, and
+the promise of Spring is in the air. But it may be worth while to give
+an elementary explanation of the ASTRONOMICAL meaning of this period,
+because this is not always understood, and yet it is very important in
+its bearing on the rites and creeds of the early religions. The priests
+who were, as I have said, the early students and inquirers, had worked
+out this astronomical side, and in that way were able to fix dates and
+to frame for the benefit of the populace myths and legends, which were
+in a certain sense explanations of the order of Nature, and a kind of
+"popular science."
+
+The Equator, as everyone knows, is an imaginary line or circle girdling
+the Earth half-way between the North and South poles. If you imagine a
+transparent Earth with a light at its very centre, and also imagine the
+SHADOW of this equatorial line to be thrown on the vast concave of
+the Sky, this shadow would in astronomical parlance coincide with the
+Equator of the Sky--forming an imaginary circle half-way between the
+North and South celestial poles.
+
+The Equator, then, may be pictured as cutting across the sky either by
+day or by night, and always at the same elevation--that is, as seen from
+any one place. But the Ecliptic (the other important great circle of the
+heavens) can only be thought of as a line traversing the constellations
+as they are seen at NIGHT. It is in fact the Sun's path among the fixed
+stars. For (really owing to the Earth's motion in its orbit) the Sun
+appears to move round the heavens once a year--travelling, always to the
+left, from constellation to constellation. The exact path of the sun is
+called the Ecliptic; and the band of sky on either side of the Ecliptic
+which may be supposed to include the said constellations is called the
+Zodiac. How then--it will of course be asked--seeing that the Sun and
+the Stars can never be seen together--were the Priests ABLE to map out
+the path of the former among the latter? Into that question we need not
+go. Sufficient to say that they succeeded; and their success--even with
+the very primitive instruments they had--shows that their astronomical
+knowledge and acuteness of reasoning were of no mean order.
+
+To return to our Vernal Equinox. Let us suppose that the Equator and
+Ecliptic of the sky, at the Spring season, are represented by two lines
+Eq. and Ecl. crossing each other at the point P. The Sun, represented
+by the small circle, is moving slowly and in its annual course along the
+Ecliptic to the left. When it reaches the point P (the dotted circle)
+it stands on the Equator of the sky, and then for a day or two, being
+neither North nor South, it shines on the two terrestrial hemispheres
+alike, and day and night are equal. BEFORE that time, when the sun
+is low down in the heavens, night has the advantage, and the days are
+short; AFTERWARDS, when the Sun has travelled more to the left, the days
+triumph over the nights. It will be seen then that this point P where
+the Sun's path crosses the Equator is a very critical point. It is the
+astronomical location of the triumph of the Sungod and of the arrival of
+Spring.
+
+How was this location defined? Among what stars was the Sun moving at
+that critical moment? (For of course it was understood, or supposed,
+that the Sun was deeply influenced by the constellation through which it
+was, or appeared to be, moving.) It seems then that at the period when
+these questions were occupying men's minds--say about three thousand
+years ago--the point where the Ecliptic crossed the Equator was, as a
+matter of fact, in the region of the constellation Aries or the he-Lamb.
+The triumph of the Sungod was therefore, and quite naturally, ascribed
+to the influence of Aries. THE LAMB BECAME THE SYMBOL OF THE RISEN
+SAVIOR, AND OF HIS PASSAGE FROM THE UNDERWORLD INTO THE HEIGHT OF
+HEAVEN. At first such an explanation sounds hazardous; but a thousand
+texts and references confirm it; and it is only by the accumulation of
+evidence in these cases that the student becomes convinced of a theory's
+correctness. It must also be remembered (what I have mentioned before)
+that these myths and legends were commonly adopted not only for
+one strict reason but because they represented in a general way the
+convergence of various symbols and inferences.
+
+Let me enumerate a few points with regard to the Vernal Equinox. In the
+Bible the festival is called the Passover, and its supposed institution
+by Moses is related in Exodus, ch. xii. In every house a he-lamb was to
+be slain, and its blood to be sprinkled on the doorposts of the house.
+Then the Lord would pass over and not smite that house. The Hebrew word
+is pasach, to pass. (1) The lamb slain was called the Paschal Lamb. But
+what was that lamb? Evidently not an earthly lamb--(though certainly
+the earthly lambs on the hillsides WERE just then ready to be killed and
+eaten)--but the heavenly Lamb, which was slain or sacrificed when the
+Lord "passed over" the equator and obliterated the constellation Aries.
+This was the Lamb of God which was slain each year, and "Slain since the
+foundation of the world." This period of the Passover (about the 25th
+March) was to be (2) the beginning of a new year. The sacrifice of
+the Lamb, and its blood, were to be the promise of redemption. The
+door-frames of the houses--symbols of the entrance into a new life--were
+to be sprinkled with blood. (3) Later, the imagery of the saving power
+of the blood of the Lamb became more popular, more highly colored. (See
+St. Paul's epistles, and the early Fathers.) And we have the expression
+"washed in the blood of the Lamb" adopted into the Christian Church.
+
+ (1) It is said that pasach sometimes means not so much to pass
+over, as to hover over and so protect. Possibly both meanings enter in
+here. See Isaiah xxxi. 5.
+
+ (2) See Exodus xii. i.
+
+ (3) It is even said (see The Golden Bough, vol. iii, 185) that
+the doorways of houses and temples in Peru were at the Spring festival
+daubed with blood of the first-born children--commuted afterwards to the
+blood of the sacred animal, the Llama. And as to Mexico, Sahagun, the
+great Spanish missionary, tells us that it was a custom of the people
+there to "smear the outside of their houses and doors with blood drawn
+from their own ears and ankles, in order to propitiate the god of
+Harvest" (Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 235).
+
+
+In order fully to understand this extraordinary expression and its
+origin we must turn for a moment to the worship both of Mithra, the
+Persian Sungod, and of Attis the Syrian god, as throwing great light
+on the Christian cult and ceremonies. It must be remembered that in the
+early centuries of our era the Mithra-cult was spread over the whole
+Western world. It has left many monuments of itself here in Britain.
+At Rome the worship was extremely popular, and it may almost be said
+to have been a matter of chance whether Mithraism should overwhelm
+Christianity, or whether the younger religion by adopting many of the
+rites of the older one should establish itself (as it did) in the face
+of the latter.
+
+Now we have already mentioned that in the Mithra cult the slaying of a
+Bull by the Sungod occupies the same sort of place as the slaving of the
+Lamb in the Christian cult. It took place at the Vernal Equinox and the
+blood of the Bull acquired in men's minds a magic virtue. Mithraism was
+a greatly older religion than Christianity; but its genesis was similar.
+In fact, owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes, the crossing-place of
+the Ecliptic and Equator was different at the time of the establishment
+of Mithra-worship from what it was in the Christian period; and the
+Sun instead of standing in the He-lamb, or Aries, at the Vernal Equinox
+stood, about two thousand years earlier (as indicated by the dotted line
+in the diagram), in this very constellation of the Bull. (1) The bull
+therefore became the symbol of the triumphant God, and the sacrifice
+of the bull a holy mystery. (Nor must we overlook here the agricultural
+appropriateness of the bull as the emblem of Spring-plowings and of
+service to man.)
+
+ (1) With regard to this point, see an article in the Nineteenth
+Century for September 1900, by E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich
+Observatory on "The Oldest Picture Book" (the Zodiac). Mr. Maunder
+calculates that the Vernal Equinox was in the centre of the Sign of
+the Bull 5,000 years ago. (It would therefore be in the centre of Aries
+2,845 years ago--allowing 2,155 years for the time occupied in passing
+from one Sign to another.) At the earlier period the Summer solstice was
+in the centre of Leo, the Autumnal equinox in the centre of Scorpio, and
+the Winter solstice in the centre of Aquarius--corresponding roughly,
+Mr. Maunder points out, to the positions of the four "Royal Stars,"
+Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.
+
+
+The sacrifice of the Bull became the image of redemption. In a certain
+well-known Mithra-sculpture or group, the Sungod is represented as
+plunging his dagger into a bull, while a scorpion, a serpent, and other
+animals are sucking the latter's blood. From one point of view this may
+be taken as symbolic of the Sun fertilizing the gross Earth by plunging
+his rays into it and so drawing forth its blood for the sustenance of
+all creatures; while from another more astronomical aspect it symbolizes
+the conquest of the Sun over winter in the moment of "passing over" the
+sign of the Bull, and the depletion of the generative power of the Bull
+by the Scorpion--which of course is the autumnal sign of the Zodiac
+and herald of winter. One such Mithraic group was found at Ostia, where
+there was a large subterranean Temple "to the invincible god Mithras."
+
+In the worship of Attis there were (as I have already indicated) many
+points of resemblance to the Christian cult. On the 22nd March (the
+Vernal Equinox) a pinetree was cut in the woods and brought into the
+Temple of Cybele. It was treated almost as a divinity, was decked
+with violets, and the effigy of a young man tied to the stem (cf. the
+Crucifixion). The 24th was called the "Day of Blood"; the High Priest
+first drew blood from his own arms; and then the others gashed and
+slashed themselves, and spattered the altar and the sacred tree with
+blood; while novices made themselves eunuchs "for the kingdom of
+heaven's sake." The effigy was afterwards laid in a tomb. But when
+night fell, says Dr. Frazer, (1) sorrow was turned to joy. A light was
+brought, and the tomb was found to be empty. The next day, the 25th, was
+the festival of the Resurrection; and ended in carnival and license
+(the Hilaria). Further, says Dr. Frazer, these mysteries "seem to have
+included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood."
+
+ (1) See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Part IV of The Golden Bough, by
+J. G. Frazer, p. 229.
+
+
+"In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with
+fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a
+wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead
+glittering with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there
+stabbed to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood
+poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout
+eagerness by the worshiper on every part of his person and garments,
+till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head
+to foot, to receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows--as
+one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins
+in the blood of the bull." (1) And Frazer continuing says: "That the
+bath of blood derived from slaughter of the bull (tauro-bolium)
+was believed to regenerate the devotee for eternity is proved by an
+inscription found at Rome, which records that a certain Sextilius
+Agesilaus Aedesius, who dedicated an altar to Attis and the mother of
+the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio criobolio que in aeternum renatus."
+(2) "In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia," says Mr. J. M.
+Robertson, (3) "which grew very popular in the Roman world, we have the
+literal and original meaning of the phrase 'washed in the blood of the
+lamb' (4); the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal life
+were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a
+sacrificial bull or ram." (5) For the POPULARITY of the rite we may
+quote Franz Cumont, who says:--"Cette douche sacree (taurobolium) pareit
+avoir ete administree en Cappadoce dans un grand nombre de sanctuaires,
+et en particulier dans ceux de Ma la grande divinite indigene, et dans
+ceux: de Anahita."
+
+ (1) See vol. i, pp. 334 ff.
+
+ (2) Adonis, Attis and Osiris, p. 229. References to Prudentius,
+and to Firmicus Maternus, De errore 28. 8.
+
+ (3) That is, "By the slaughter of the bull and the slaughter of
+the ram born again into eternity."
+
+ (4) Pagan Christs, p. 315.
+
+ (5) Mysteres de Mithra, Bruxelles, 1902, p. 153.
+
+
+Whether Mr. Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests (as he
+appears to do) so materialistic a view of the potency of the actual
+blood is, I should say, doubtful. I do not myself see that there is
+any reason for supposing that the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded
+baptism by blood very differently from the way in which the Christian
+Church has generally regarded baptism by water--namely, as a SYMBOL of
+some inner regeneration. There may certainly have been a little more
+of the MAGICAL view and a little less of the symbolic, in the older
+religions; but the difference was probably on the whole more one of
+degree than of essential disparity. But however that may be, we cannot
+but be struck by the extraordinary analogy between the tombstone
+inscriptions of that period "born again into eternity by the blood of
+the Bull or the Ram," and the corresponding texts in our graveyards
+to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs
+aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives a great number of
+texts and epitaphs of the same character as that above-quoted, and they
+are well worth studying by those interested in the subject. Cumont, it
+may be noted (vol. i, p. 305), thinks that the story of Mithra and the
+slaying of the Bull must have originated among some pastoral people to
+whom the bull was the source of all life. The Bull in heaven--the symbol
+of the triumphant Sungod--and the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good
+of humanity were one and the same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF
+OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And Mithra was the hero who first won this
+conception of divinity for mankind--though of course it is in essence
+quite similar to the conception put forward by the Christian Church.
+
+As illustrating the belief that the Baptism by Blood was accompanied by
+a real regeneration of the devotee, Frazer quotes an ancient writer
+(1) who says that for some time after the ceremony the fiction of a new
+birth was kept up by dieting the devotee on MILK, like a new-born
+babe. And it is interesting in that connection to find that even in the
+present day a diet of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for six or eight
+weeks is by many doctors recommended as the only means of getting rid
+of deep-seated illnesses and enabling a patient's organism to make a
+completely new start in life.
+
+ (1) Sallustius philosophus. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, note,
+p. 229.
+
+
+"At Rome," he further says (p. 230), "the new birth and the remission
+of sins by the shedding of bull's blood appear to have been carried
+out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian Goddess (Cybele) on
+the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great basilica of St.
+Peter's now stands; for many inscriptions relating to the rites were
+found when the church was being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From
+the Vatican as a centre," he continues, "this barbarous system of
+superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman empire.
+Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial sanctuaries
+modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican."
+
+It would appear then that at Rome in the quiet early days of the
+Christian Church, the rites and ceremonials of Mithra and Cybele,
+probably much intermingled and blended, were exceedingly popular. Both
+religions had been recognized by the Roman State, and the Christians,
+persecuted and despised as they were, found it hard to make any headway
+against them--the more so perhaps because the Christian doctrines
+appeared in many respects to be merely faint replicas and copies of the
+older creeds. Robertson maintains (1) that a he-lamb was sacrificed in
+the Mithraic mysteries, and he quotes Porphyry as saying (2) that
+"a place near the equinoctial circle was assigned to Mithra as an
+appropriate seat; and on this account he bears the sword of the Ram
+(Aries) which is a sign of Mars (Ares)." Similarly among the early
+Christians, it is said, a ram or lamb was sacrificed in the Paschal
+mystery.
+
+ (1) Pagan Christs, p. 336.
+
+ (2) De Antro, xxiv.
+
+
+Many people think that the association of the Lamb-god with the Cross
+arose from the fact that the constellation Aries at that time WAS on the
+heavenly cross (the crossways of the Ecliptic and Equator-see diagram,
+ch. iii), and in the very place through which the Sungod had to pass
+just before his final triumph. And it is curious to find that Justin
+Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho (1) (a Jew) alludes to an old Jewish
+practice of roasting a Lamb on spits arranged in the form of a Cross.
+"The lamb," he says, meaning apparently the Paschal lamb, "is roasted
+and dressed up in the form of a cross. For one spit is transfixed right
+through the lower parts up to the head, and one across the back, to
+which are attached the legs (forelegs) of the lamb."
+
+ (1) Ch. xl.
+
+
+To-day in Morocco at the festival of Eid-el-Kebir, corresponding to the
+Christian Easter, the Mohammedans sacrifice a young ram and hurry it
+still bleeding to the precincts of the Mosque, while at the same time
+every household slays a lamb, as in the Biblical institution, for its
+family feast.
+
+But it will perhaps be said, "You are going too fast and proving too
+much. In the anxiety to show that the Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the
+Lamb were honored by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of
+the Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the Bull and
+the baptism in bull's blood were the salient features of the Persian and
+Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries earlier. How can you reconcile
+the existence side by side of divinities belonging to such different
+periods, or ascribe them both to an astronomical origin?" The answer
+is simple enough. As I have explained before, the Precession of the
+Equinoxes caused the Sun, at its moment of triumph over the powers of
+darkness, to stand at one period in the constellation of the Bull, and
+at a period some two thousand years later in the constellation of the
+Ram. It was perfectly natural therefore that a change in the sacred
+symbols should, in the course of time, take place; yet perfectly natural
+also that these symbols, having once been consecrated and adopted,
+should continue to be honored and clung to long after the time of their
+astronomical appropriateness had passed, and so to be found side by side
+in later centuries. The devotee of Mithra or Attis on the Vatican
+Hill at Rome in the year 200 A.D. probably had as little notion or
+comprehension of the real origin of the sacred Bull or Ram which he
+adored, as the Christian in St. Peter's to-day has of the origin of the
+Lamb-god whose vicegerent on earth is the Pope.
+
+It is indeed easy to imagine that the change from the worship of the
+Bull to the worship of the Lamb which undoubtedly took place among
+various peoples as time went on, was only a ritual change initiated
+by the priests in order to put on record and harmonize with the
+astronomical alteration. Anyhow it is curious that while Mithra in the
+early times was specially associated with the bull, his association with
+the lamb belonged more to the Roman period. Somewhat the same happened
+in the case of Attis. In the Bible we read of the indignation of
+Moses at the setting up by the Israelites of a Golden Calf, AFTER
+the sacrifice of the ram-lamb had been instituted--as if indeed the
+rebellious people were returning to the earlier cult of Apis which they
+ought to have left behind them in Egypt. In Egypt itself, too, we find
+the worship of Apis, as time went on, yielding place to that of the
+Ram-headed god Amun, or Jupiter Ammon. (1) So that both from the Bible
+and from Egyptian history we may conclude that the worship of the Lamb
+or Ram succeeded to the worship of the Bull.
+
+ (1) Tacitus (Hist. v. 4) speaks of ram-sacrifice by the Jews in
+honor of Jupiter Ammon. See also Herodotus (ii. 42) on the same in
+Egypt.
+
+
+Finally it has been pointed out, and there may be some real connection
+in the coincidence, that in the quite early years of Christianity the
+FISH came in as an accepted symbol of Jesus Christ. Considering that
+after the domination of Taurus and Aries, the Fish (Pisces) comes next
+in succession as the Zodiacal sign for the Vernal Equinox, and is now
+the constellation in which the Sun stands at that period, it seems
+not impossible that the astronomical change has been the cause of the
+adoption of this new symbol.
+
+Anyhow, and allowing for possible errors or exaggerations, it becomes
+clear that the travels of the Sun through the belt of constellations
+which forms the Zodiac must have had, from earliest times, a profound
+influence on the generation of religious myths and legends. To say that
+it was the only influence would certainly be a mistake. Other causes
+undoubtedly contributed. But it was a main and important influence. The
+origins of the Zodiac are obscure; we do not know with any certainty the
+reasons why the various names were given to its component sections, nor
+can we measure the exact antiquity of these names; but--pre-supposing
+the names of the signs as once given--it is not difficult to imagine the
+growth of legends connected with the Sun's course among them.
+
+Of all the ancient divinities perhaps Hercules is the one whose role
+as a Sungod is most generally admitted. The helper of gods and men, a
+mighty Traveller, and invoked everywhere as the Saviour, his labors
+for the good of the world became ultimately defined and systematized
+as twelve and corresponding in number to the signs of the Zodiac. It
+is true that this systematization only took place at a late period,
+probably in Alexandria; also that the identification of some of the
+Labors with the actual signs as we have them at present is not always
+clear. But considering the wide prevalence of the Hercules myth over
+the ancient world and the very various astronomical systems it must have
+been connected with in its origin, this lack of exact correspondence is
+hardly to be wondered at.
+
+The Labors of Hercules which chiefly interest us are: (1) The capture
+of the Bull, (2) the slaughter of the Lion, (3) the destruction of the
+Hydra, (4) of the Boar, (5) the cleansing of the stables of Augeas, (6)
+the descent into Hades and the taming of Cerberus. The first of these
+is in line with the Mithraic conquest of the Bull; the Lion is of course
+one of the most prominent constellations of the Zodiac, and its conquest
+is obviously the work of a Saviour of mankind; while the last four
+labors connect themselves very naturally with the Solar conflict in
+winter against the powers of darkness. The Boar (4) we have seen already
+as the image of Typhon, the prince of darkness; the Hydra (3) was said
+to be the offspring of Typhon; the descent into Hades (6)--generally
+associated with Hercules' struggle with and victory over Death--links on
+to the descent of the Sun into the underworld, and its long and doubtful
+strife with the forces of winter; and the cleansing of the stables
+of Augeas (5) has the same signification. It appears in fact that the
+stables of Augeas was another name for the sign of Capricorn through
+which the Sun passes at the Winter solstice (1)--the stable of course
+being an underground chamber--and the myth was that there, in this
+lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil
+influences of the sky were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them
+away (December was the height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse
+the year towards its rebirth.
+
+ (1) See diagram of Zodiac.
+
+
+It should not be forgotten too that even as a child in the cradle
+Hercules slew two serpents sent for his destruction--the serpent and the
+scorpion as autumnal constellations figuring always as enemies of the
+Sungod--to which may be compared the power given to his disciples by
+Jesus (1) "to tread on serpents and scorpions." Hercules also as a
+Sungod compares curiously with Samson (mentioned above, ii), but we
+need not dwell on all the elaborate analogies that have been traced (2)
+between these two heroes.
+
+ (1) Luke x. 19.
+
+ (2) See Doane's Bible Myths, ch. viii, (New York, 1882.)
+
+
+The Jesus-story, it will now be seen, has a great number of
+correspondences with the stories of former Sungods and with the actual
+career of the Sun through the heavens--so many indeed that they cannot
+well be attributed to mere coincidence or even to the blasphemous wiles
+of the Devil! Let us enumerate some of these. There are (1) the birth
+from a Virgin mother; (2) the birth in a stable (cave or underground
+chamber); and (3) on the 25th December (just after the winter solstice).
+There is (4) the Star in the East (Sirius) and (5) the arrival of the
+Magi (the "Three Kings"); there is (6) the threatened Massacre of the
+Innocents, and the consequent flight into a distant country (told also
+of Krishna and other Sungods). There are the Church festivals of (7)
+Candlemas (2nd February), with processions of candles to symbolize the
+growing light; of (8) Lent, or the arrival of Spring; of (9) Easter Day
+(normally on the 25th March) to celebrate the crossing of the Equator
+by the Sun; and (10) simultaneously the outburst of lights at the Holy
+Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There is (11) the Crucifixion and death of the
+Lamb-God, on Good Friday, three days before Easter; there are (12) the
+nailing to a tree, (13) the empty grave, (14) the glad Resurrection (as
+in the cases of Osiris, Attis and others); there are (15) the twelve
+disciples (the Zodiacal signs); and (16) the betrayal by one of the
+twelve. Then later there is (17) Midsummer Day, the 24th June, dedicated
+to the Nativity of John the Baptist, and corresponding to Christmas
+Day; there are the festivals of (18) the Assumption of the Virgin
+(15th August) and of (19) the Nativity of the Virgin (8th September),
+corresponding to the movement of the god through Virgo; there is the
+conflict of Christ and his disciples with the autumnal asterisms, (20)
+the Serpent and the Scorpion; and finally there is the curious fact that
+the Church (21) dedicates the very day of the winter solstice (when any
+one may very naturally doubt the rebirth of the Sun) to St. Thomas, who
+doubted the truth of the Resurrection!
+
+These are some of, and by no means all, the coincidences in question.
+But they are sufficient, I think, to prove--even allowing for possible
+margins of error--the truth of our general contention. To go into the
+parallelism of the careers of Krishna, the Indian Sungod, and
+Jesus would take too long; because indeed the correspondence is so
+extraordinarily close and elaborate. (1) I propose, however, at the
+close of this chapter, to dwell now for a moment on the Christian
+festival of the Eucharist, partly on account of its connection with the
+derivation from the astronomical rites and Nature-celebrations already
+alluded to, and partly on account of the light which the festival
+generally, whether Christian or Pagan, throws on the origins of
+Religious Magic--a subject I shall have to deal with in the next
+chapter.
+
+ (1) See Robertson's Christianity and Mythology, Part II, pp.
+129-302; also Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xxviii, p. 278.
+
+
+I have already (Ch. II) mentioned the Eucharistic rite held in
+commemoration of Mithra, and the indignant ascription of this by Justin
+Martyr to the wiles of the Devil. Justin Martyr clearly had no doubt
+about the resemblance of the Mithraic to the Christian ceremony. A
+Sacramental meal, as mentioned a few pages back, seems to have been held
+by the worshipers of Attis (1) in commemoration of their god; and
+the 'mysteries' of the Pagan cults generally appear to have included
+rites--sometimes half-savage, sometimes more aesthetic--in which a
+dismembered animal was eaten, or bread and wine (the spirits of the Corn
+and the Vine) were consumed, as representing the body of the god whom
+his devotees desired to honor. But the best example of this practice is
+afforded by the rites of Dionysus, to which I will devote a few lines.
+Dionysus, like other Sun or Nature deities, was born of a Virgin (Semele
+or Demeter) untainted by any earthly husband; and born on the 25th.
+December. He was nurtured in a Cave, and even at that early age was
+identified with the Ram or Lamb, into whose form he was for the time
+being changed. At times also he was worshiped in the form of a Bull.
+(2) He travelled far and wide; and brought the great gift of wine to
+mankind. (3) He was called Liberator, and Saviour. His grave "was shown
+at Delphi in the inmost shrine of the temple of Apollo. Secret offerings
+were brought thither, while the women who were celebrating the feast
+woke up the new-born god.... Festivals of this kind in celebration of
+the extinction and resurrection of the deity were held (by women and
+girls only) amid the mountains at night, every third year, about the
+time of the shortest day. The rites, intended to express the excess of
+grief and joy at the death and reappearance of the god, were wild even
+to savagery, and the women who performed them were hence known by
+the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads, and Thyiades. They wandered
+through woods and mountains, their flying locks crowned with ivy or
+snakes, brandishing wands and torches, to the hollow sounds of the drum,
+or the shrill notes of the flute, with wild dances and insane cries and
+jubilation."
+
+ (1) See Frazer's Golden Bough, Part IV, p. 229.
+
+ (2) The Golden Bough, Part II, Book II, p. 164.
+
+ (3) "I am the TRUE Vine," says the Jesus of the fourth gospel,
+perhaps with an implicit and hostile reference to the cult of
+Dionysus--in which Robertson suggests (Christianity and Mythology, p.
+357) there was a ritual miracle of turning water into wine.
+
+
+Oxen, goats, even fawns and roes from the forest were killed, torn to
+pieces, and eaten raw. This in imitation of the treatment of Dionysus by
+the Titans, (1)--who it was supposed had torn the god in pieces when a
+child.
+
+ (1) See art. Dionysus. Dictionary of Classical Antiquities,
+Nettleship and Sandys 3rd edn., London, 1898).
+
+
+Dupuis, one of the earliest writers (at the beginning of last century)
+on this subject, says, describing the mystic rites of Dionysus (1):
+"The sacred doors of the Temple in which the initiation took place were
+opened only once a year, and no stranger might ever enter. Night lent to
+these august mysteries a veil which was forbidden to be drawn aside--for
+whoever it might be. (2) It was the sole occasion for the representation
+of the passion of Bacchus (Dionysus) dead, descended into hell, and
+rearisen--in imitation of the representation of the sufferings of Osiris
+which, according to Herodotus, were commemorated at Sais in Egypt. It
+was in that place that the partition took place of the body of the god,
+(3) which was then eaten--the ceremony, in fact, of which our Eucharist
+is only a reflection; whereas in the mysteries of Bacchus actual raw
+flesh was distributed, which each of those present had to consume in
+commemoration of the death of Bacchus dismembered by the Titans, and
+whose passion, in Chios and Tenedos, was renewed each year by the
+sacrifice of a man who represented the god. (4) Possibly it is this last
+fact which made people believe that the Christians (whose hoc est corpus
+meum and sharing of an Eucharistic meal were no more than a shadow of a
+more ancient rite) did really sacrifice a child and devour its limbs."
+
+ (1) See Charles F. Dupuis, "Traite des Mysteres," ch. i.
+
+ (2) Pausan, Corinth, ch. 37.
+
+ (3) Clem, Prot. Eur. Bacch.
+
+ (4) See Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lii, Section 56.
+
+
+That Eucharistic rites were very very ancient is plain from the
+Totem-sacraments of savages; and to this subject we shall now turn.
+
+
+
+
+IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+
+Much has been written on the origin of the Totem-system--the system,
+that is, of naming a tribe or a portion of a tribe (say a CLAN)
+after some ANIMAL--or sometimes--also after some plant or tree or
+Nature-element, like fire or rain or thunder; but at best the subject is
+a difficult one for us moderns to understand. A careful study has been
+made of it by Salamon Reinach in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, (1)
+where he formulates his conclusions in twelve statements or definitions;
+but even so--though his suggestions are helpful--he throws very little
+light on the real origin of the system. (2)
+
+ (1) See English translation of certain chapters (published by
+David Nutt in 1912) entitled Cults, Myths and Religions, pp. 1-25. The
+French original is in three large volumes.
+
+ (2) The same may be said of the formulated statement of the
+subject in Morris Jastrow's Handbooks of the History of Religion, vol.
+iv.
+
+There are three main difficulties. The first is to understand why
+primitive Man should name his Tribe after an animal or object of nature
+at all; the second, to understand on what principle he selected the
+particular name (a lion, a crocodile, a lady bird, a certain tree); the
+third, why he should make of the said totem a divinity, and pay honor
+and worship to it. It may be worth while to pause for a moment over
+these.
+
+(1) The fact that the Tribe was one of the early things for which Man
+found it necessary to have a name is interesting, because it shows
+how early the solidarity and psychological actuality of the tribe
+was recognized; and as to the selection of a name from some animal or
+concrete object of Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason
+that there was nothing else for the savage to choose from. Plainly to
+call his tribe "The Wayfarers" or "The Pioneers" or the "Pacifists" or
+the "Invincibles," or by any of the thousand and one names which modern
+associations adopt, would have been impossible, since such abstract
+terms had little or no existence in his mind. And again to name it after
+an animal was the most obvious thing to do, simply because the animals
+were by far the most important features or accompaniments of his own
+life. As I am dealing in this book largely with certain psychological
+conditions of human evolution, it has to be pointed out that to
+primitive man the animal was the nearest and most closely related of all
+objects. Being of the same order of consciousness as himself, the animal
+appealed to him very closely as his mate and equal. He made with regard
+to it little or no distinction from himself. We see this very clearly in
+the case of children, who of course represent the savage mind, and who
+regard animals simply as their mates and equals, and come quickly into
+rapport with them, not differentiating themselves from them.
+
+(2) As to the particular animal or other object selected in order to
+give a name to the Tribe, this would no doubt be largely accidental. Any
+unusual incident might superstitiously precipitate a name. We can hardly
+imagine the Tribe scratching its congregated head in the deliberate
+effort to think out a suitable emblem for itself. That is not the way in
+which nicknames are invented in a school or anywhere else to-day. At the
+same time the heraldic appeal of a certain object of nature, animate or
+inanimate, would be deeply and widely felt. The strength of the lion,
+the fleetness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the flight of a
+bird, the awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily mesmerize a whole
+tribe. Reinach points out, with great justice, that many tribes placed
+themselves under the protection of animals which were supposed (rightly
+or wrongly) to act as guides and augurs, foretelling the future.
+"Diodorus," he says, "distinctly states that the hawk, in Egypt, was
+venerated because it foretold the future." (Birds generally act as
+ and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow and the owl premonish their fellow
+clansmen of events to come. At one time the Samoan warriors went so far
+as to rear owls for their prophetic qualities in war. (The jackal,
+or 'pathfinder'--whose tracks sometimes lead to the remains of a
+food-animal slain by a lion, and many birds and insects, have a value of
+this kind.) "The use of animal totems for purposes of augury is, in all
+likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must soon have realized that the
+senses of animals were acuter than their own; nor is it surprising that
+they should have expected their totems--that is to say, their natural
+allies--to forewarn them both of unsuspected dangers and of those
+provisions of nature, WELLS especially, which animals seem to scent
+by instinct." (1) And again, beyond all this, I have little doubt that
+there are subconscious affinities which unite certain tribes to certain
+animals or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace, though
+they are very real--the same affinities that we recognize as existing
+between individual PERSONS and certain objects of nature. W. H.
+Hudson--himself in many respects having this deep and primitive relation
+to nature--speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical volume (2)
+of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon him as a boy, not
+only by a snake, but by certain trees, and especially by a particular
+flowering-plant "not more than a foot in height, with downy soft
+pale green leaves, and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like
+valerian." ... "One of my sacred flowers," he calls it, and insists on
+the "inexplicable attraction" which it had for him. In various ways of
+this kind one can perceive how particular totems came to be selected by
+particular peoples.
+
+
+ (1) See Reinach, Eng. trans., op. cit., pp. 20, 21.
+
+ (2) Far away and Long ago (1918) chs. xvi and xvii.
+
+
+(3) As to the tendency to divinize these totems, this arises no doubt
+partly out of question (2). The animal or other object admired on
+account of its strength or swiftness, or adopted as guardian of the
+tribe because of its keen sight or prophetic quality, or infinitely
+prized on account of its food-value, or felt for any other reason to
+have a peculiar relation and affinity to the tribe, is by that fact SET
+APART. It becomes taboo. It must not be killed--except under necessity
+and by sanction of the whole tribe--nor injured; and all dealings with
+it must be fenced round with regulations. It is out of this taboo or
+system of taboos that, according to Reinach, religion arose. "I propose
+(he says) to define religion as: A SUM OF SCRUPLES (TABOOS) WHICH IMPEDE
+THE FREE EXERCISE OF OUR FACULTIES." (1) Obviously this definition is
+gravely deficient, simply because it is purely negative, and leaves
+out of account the positive aspect of the subject. In Man, the positive
+content of religion is the instinctive sense--whether conscious or
+subconscious--of an inner unity and continuity with the world around.
+This is the stuff out of which religion is made. The scruples or taboos
+which "impede the freedom" of this relation are the negative forces
+which give outline and form to the relation. These are the things which
+generate the RITES AND CEREMONIALS of religion; and as far as Reinach
+means by religion MERELY rites and ceremonies he is correct; but clearly
+he only covers half the subject. The tendency to divinize the totem is
+at least as much dependent on the positive sense of unity with it, as on
+the negative scruples which limit the relation in each particular case.
+But I shall return to this subject presently, and more than once, with
+the view of clarifying it. Just now it will be best to illustrate the
+nature of Totems generally, and in some detail.
+
+
+ (1) See Orpheus by S. Reinach, p. 3.
+
+
+As would be gathered from what I have just said, there is found among
+all the more primitive peoples, and in all parts of the world, an
+immense variety of totem-names. The Dinkas, for instance, are a rather
+intelligent well-grown people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Nile
+in the vicinity of the great swamps. According to Dr. Seligman their
+clans have for totems the lion, the elephant, the crocodile, the
+hippopotamus, the fox, and the hyena, as well as certain birds which
+infest and damage the corn, some plants and trees, and such things as
+rain, fire, etc. "Each clan speaks of its totem as its ancestor, and
+refrains (as a rule) from injuring or eating it." (1) The members of the
+Crocodile clan call themselves "brothers of the crocodile." The tribes
+of Bechuana-land have a very similar list of totem-names--the buffalo,
+the fish, the porcupine, the wild vine, etc. They too have a Crocodile
+clan, but they call the crocodile their FATHER! The tribes of Australia
+much the same again, with the differences suitable to their country; and
+the Red Indians of North America the same. Garcilasso, della Vega,
+the Spanish historian, son of an Inca princess by one of the Spanish
+conquerors of Peru and author of the well-known book Commentarias
+Reales, says in that book (i, 57), speaking of the pre-Inca period, "An
+Indian (of Peru) was not considered honorable unless he was descended
+from a fountain, river or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild
+animal, as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur
+(condor), or some other bird of prey." (2) According to Lewis Morgan,
+the North American Indians of various tribes had for totems the wolf,
+bear, beaver, turtle, deer, snipe, heron, hawk, crane, loon, turkey,
+muskrat; pike, catfish, carp; buffalo, elk, reindeer, eagle, hare,
+rabbit, snake; reed-grass, sand, rock, and tobacco-plant.
+
+ (1) See The Golden Bough, vol. iv, p. 31.
+
+ (2) See Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 104, also Myth, Ritual
+and Religion, vol. i, pp. 71, 76, etc.
+
+
+So we might go on rather indefinitely. I need hardly say that in more
+modern and civilized life, relics of the totem system are still to be
+found in the forms of the heraldic creatures adopted for their crests by
+different families, and in the bears, lions, eagles, the sun, moon and
+stars and so forth, which still adorn the flags and are flaunted as the
+insignia of the various nations. The names may not have been ORIGINALLY
+adopted from any definite belief in blood-relationship with the animal
+or other object in question; but when, as Robertson says (Pagan Christs,
+p. 104), a "savage learned that he was 'a Bear' and that his father
+and grandfather and forefathers were so before him, it was really
+impossible, after ages in which totem-names thus passed current, that he
+should fail to assume that his folk were DESCENDED from a bear."
+
+As a rule, as may be imagined, the savage tribesman will on no account
+EAT his tribal totem-animal. Such would naturally be deemed a kind of
+sacrilege. Also it must be remarked that some totems are hardly suitable
+for eating. Yet it is important to observe that occasionally, and
+guarding the ceremony with great precautions, it has been an almost
+universal custom for the tribal elders to call a feast at which
+an animal (either the totem or some other) IS killed and commonly
+eaten--and this in order that the tribesmen may absorb some virtue
+belonging to it, and may confirm their identity with the tribe and with
+each other. The eating of the bear or other animal, the sprinkling with
+its blood, and the general ritual in which the participants shared its
+flesh, or dressed and disguised themselves in its skin, or otherwise
+identified themselves with it, was to them a symbol of their community
+of life with each other, and a means of their renewal and salvation in
+the holy emblem. And this custom, as the reader will perceive, became
+the origin of the Eucharists and Holy Communions of the later religions.
+
+Professor Robertson-Smith's celebrated Camel affords an instance of
+this. (1) It appears that St. Nilus (fifth century) has left a detailed
+account of the occasional sacrifice in his time of a spotless white
+camel among the Arabs of the Sinai region, which closely resembles a
+totemic communion-feast. The uncooked blood and flesh of the animal had
+to be entirely consumed by the faithful before daybreak. "The slaughter
+of the victim, the sacramental drinking of the blood, and devouring in
+wild haste of the pieces of still quivering flesh, recall the details
+of the Dionysiac and other festivals." (2) Robertson-Smith himself
+says:--"The plain meaning is that the victim was devoured before its
+life had left the still warm blood and flesh... and that thus in the
+most literal way, all those who shared in the ceremony absorbed part of
+the victim's life into themselves. One sees how much more forcibly
+than any ordinary meal such a rite expresses the establishment or
+confirmation of a bond of common life between the worshipers, and also,
+since the blood is shed upon the altar itself, between the worshipers
+and their god. In this sacrifice, then, the significant factors are two:
+the conveyance of the living blood to the godhead, and the absorption of
+the living flesh and blood into the flesh and blood of the worshippers.
+Each of these is effected in the simplest and most direct manner, so
+that the meaning of the ritual is perfectly transparent."
+
+ (1) See his Religion of the Semites, p. 320.
+
+ (2) They also recall the rites of the Passover--though in this
+latter the blood was no longer drunk, nor the flesh eaten raw.
+
+
+It seems strange, of course, that men should eat their totems; and
+it must not by any means be supposed that this practice is (or was)
+universal; but it undoubtedly obtains in some cases. As Miss Harrison
+says (Themis, p. 123); "you do not as a rule eat your relations," and as
+a rule the eating of a totem is tabu and forbidden, but (Miss Harrison
+continues) "at certain times and under certain restrictions a man not
+only may, but MUST, eat of his totem, though only sparingly, as of a
+thing sacrosanct." The ceremonial carried out in a communal way by the
+tribe not only identifies the tribe with the totem (animal), but is
+held, according to early magical ideas, and when the animal is desired
+for food, to favor its manipulation. The human tribe partakes of the
+mana or life-force of the animal, and is strengthened; the animal tribe
+is sympathetically renewed by the ceremonial and multiplies exceedingly.
+The slaughter of the sacred animal and (often) the simultaneous
+outpouring of human blood seals the compact and confirms the magic. This
+is well illustrated by a ceremony of the 'Emu' tribe referred to by Dr.
+Frazer:--
+
+"In order to multiply Emus which are an important article of food, the
+men of the Emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed as follows: They clear
+a small spot of level ground, and opening veins in their arms they let
+the blood stream out until the surface of the ground for a space of
+about three square yards is soaked with it. When the blood has dried
+and caked, it forms a hard and fairly impermeable surface, on which they
+paint the sacred design of the emu totem, especially the parts of the
+bird which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round
+this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers wearing long
+head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic
+the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all
+directions." (1)
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough i, 85--with reference to Spencer and
+Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 179, 189.
+
+
+Thus blood sacrifice comes in; and--(whether this has ever actually
+happened in the case of the Central Australians I know not)--we can
+easily imagine a member of the Emu tribe, and disguised as an actual
+emu, having been ceremonially slaughtered as a firstfruits and promise
+of the expected and prayed-for emu-crop; just as the same certainly
+HAS happened in the case of men wearing beast-masks of Bulls or Rams
+or Bears being sacrificed in propitiation of Bull-gods, Ram-gods or
+Bear-gods or simply in pursuance of some kind of magic to favor the
+multiplication of these food-animals.
+
+"In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly enough the
+relation of man to food-animals. You need or at least desire flesh food,
+yet you shrink from slaughtering 'your brother the ox'; you desire his
+mana, yet you respect his tabu, for in you and him alike runs the common
+life-blood. On your own individual responsibility you would never kill
+him; but for the common weal, on great occasions, and in a fashion
+conducted with scrupulous care, it is expedient that he die for his
+people, and that they feast upon his flesh." (1)
+
+ (1) Themis, p. 140.
+
+
+In her little book Ancient Art and Ritual (1) Jane Harrison describes
+the dedication of a holy Bull, as conducted in Greece at Elis, and at
+Magnesia and other cities. "There at the annual fair year by year the
+stewards of the city bought a Bull 'the finest that could be got,' and
+at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seed-time (? April)
+ Bull was led in procession at the head of which went the chief priest
+and priestess of the city. With them went a herald and sacrificer,
+and two bands of youths and maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing
+unlucky might come near him. The herald pronounced aloud a prayer for
+'the safety of the city and the land, and the citizens, and the women
+and children, for peace and wealth, and for the bringing forth of grain
+and all other fruits, and of cattle.' All this longing for fertility,
+for food and children, focuses round the holy Bull, whose holiness is
+his strength and fruitfulness." The Bull is sacrificed. The flesh is
+divided in solemn feast among those who take part in the procession.
+"The holy flesh is not offered to a god, it is eaten--to every man his
+portion--by each and every citizen, that he may get his share of the
+strength of the Bull, of the luck of the State." But at Athens the
+Bouphonia, as it was called, was followed by a curious ceremony. "The
+hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal
+was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were ploughing.
+The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all important. We
+are accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the giving up, the
+renouncing of something. But SACRIFICE does not mean 'death' at all. It
+means MAKING HOLY, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man just
+special strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was just that
+special life and strength which all the year long they had put into him,
+and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood. They could not
+eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him. So he must
+die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him,
+not to 'sacrifice' him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him,
+live BY him and through him, by his grace."
+
+ (1) Home University Library, p. 87.
+
+
+We have already had to deal with instances of the ceremonial eating of
+the sacred he-Lamb or Ram, immolated in the Spring season of the year,
+and partaken of in a kind of communal feast--not without reference (at
+any rate in later times) to a supposed Lamb-god. Among the Ainos in the
+North of Japan, as also among the Gilyaks in Eastern Siberia, the Bear
+is the great food-animal, and is worshipped as the supreme giver of
+health and strength. There also a similar ritual of sacrifice occurs. A
+perfect Bear is caught and caged. He is fed up and even pampered to the
+day of his death. "Fish, brandy and other delicacies are offered to him.
+Some of the people prostrate themselves before him; his coming into
+a house brings a blessing, and if he sniffs at the food that brings a
+blessing too." Then he is led out and slain. A great feast takes place,
+the flesh is divided, cupfuls of the blood are drunk by the men;
+the tribe is united and strengthened, and the Bear-god blesses the
+ceremony--the ideal Bear that has given its life for the people. (1)
+
+
+ (1) See Art and Ritual, pp. 92-98; The Golden Bough, ii, 375
+seq.; Themis, pp. 140, 141; etc.
+
+
+That the eating of the flesh of an animal or a man conveys to you some
+of the qualities, the life-force, the mana, of that animal or man, is an
+idea which one often meets with among primitive folk. Hence the common
+tendency to eat enemy warriors slain in battle against your tribe. By
+doing so you absorb some of their valor and strength. Even the enemy
+scalps which an Apache Indian might hang from his belt were something
+magical to add to the Apache's power. As Gilbert Murray says, (1) "you
+devoured the holy animal to get its mana, its swiftness, its strength,
+its great endurance, just as the savage now will eat his enemy's brain
+or heart or hands to get some particular quality residing there."
+Even--as he explains on the earlier page--mere CONTACT was often
+considered sufficient--"we have holy pillars whose holiness consists
+in the fact that they have been touched by the blood of a bull." And in
+this connection we may note that nearly all the Christian Churches have
+a great belief in the virtue imparted by the mere 'laying on of hands.'
+
+ (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 36.
+
+
+In quite a different connection--we read (1) that among the Spartans a
+warrior-boy would often beg for the love of the elder warrior whom he
+admired (i. e. the contact with his body) in order to obtain in that
+way a portion of the latter's courage and prowess. That through the
+mediation of the lips one's spirit may be united to the spirit of
+another person is an idea not unfamiliar to the modern mind; while the
+exchange of blood, clothes, locks of hair, etc., by lovers is a custom
+known all over the world. (2)
+
+ (1) Aelian VII, iii, 12: [gr autoi goun (oi paides) deontai twn
+erastwn] [gr eispnein autois]. See also E. Bethe on "Die Dorische
+Knabenliebe" in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. 26, iii, 461.
+
+ (2) See Crawley's Mystic Rose, pp. 238, 242.
+
+
+To suppose that by eating another you absorb his or her soul is somewhat
+naive certainly. Perhaps it IS more native, more primitive. Yet there
+may be SOME truth even in that idea. Certainly the food that one eats
+has a psychological effect, and the flesh-eaters among the human race
+have a different temperament as a rule from the fruit and vegetable
+eaters, while among the animals (though other causes may come in
+here) the Carnivora are decidedly more cruel and less gentle than the
+Herbivora.
+
+To return to the rites of Dionysus, Gilbert Murray, speaking of
+Orphism--a great wave of religious reform which swept over Greece and
+South Italy in the sixth century B.C.--says: (1) "A curious relic of
+primitive superstition and cruelty remained firmly imbedded in Orphism,
+a doctrine irrational and unintelligible, and for that very reason
+wrapped in the deepest and most sacred mystery: a belief in the
+SACRIFICE OF DIONYSUS HIMSELF, AND THE PURIFICATION OF MAN BY HIS
+BLOOD. It seems possible that the savage Thracians, in the fury of their
+worship on the mountains, when they were possessed by the god and became
+'wild beasts,' actually tore with their teeth and hands any hares,
+goats, fawns or the like that they came across.... The Orphic
+congregations of later times, in their most holy gatherings, solemnly
+partook of the blood of a bull, which was by a mystery the blood of
+Dionysus-Zagreus himself, the Bull of God, slain in sacrifice for the
+purification of man." (2)
+
+ (1) See Notes to his translation of the Bacch[ae] of Euripides.
+
+ (2) For a description of this orgy see Theocritus, Idyll xxvi;
+also for explanations of it, Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii,
+pp, 241-260, on Dionysus. The Encyclop[ae]dia Brit., article "Orpheus,"
+says:--"Orpheus, in the manner of his death, was considered to personate
+the god Dionysus, and was thus representative of the god torn to pieces
+every year--a ceremony enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with
+a human victim, and afterwards with a bull, to represent the bull-formed
+god. A distinct feature of this ritual was [gr wmofagia] (eating the
+flesh of the victim raw), whereby the communicants imagined that they
+consumed and assimilated the god represented by the victim, and thus
+became filled with the divine ecstasy." Compare also the Hindu doctrine
+of Praj[pati, the dismembered Lord of Creation.
+
+
+Such instances of early communal feasts, which fulfilled the double part
+of confirming on the one hand the solidarity of the tribe, and on the
+other of bringing the tribe, by the shedding of the blood of a divine
+Victim into close relationship with the very source of its life,
+are plentiful to find. "The sacramental rite," says Professor
+Robertson-Smith, (1) "is also an atoning rite, which brings the
+community again into harmony with its alienated god--atonement being
+simply an act of communion designed to wipe out all memory of previous
+estrangement." With this subject I shall deal more specially in chapter
+vii below. Meanwhile as instances of early Eucharists we may mention the
+following cases, remembering always that as the blood is regarded as the
+Life, the drinking or partaking of, or sprinkling with, blood is always
+an acknowledgment of the common life; and that the juice of the grape
+being regarded as the blood of the Vine, wine in the later ceremonials
+quite easily and naturally takes the place of the blood in the early
+sacrifices.
+
+ (1) Religion of the Semites, p. 302.
+
+
+Thus P. Andrada La Crozius, a French missionary, and one of the first
+Christians who went to Nepaul and Thibet, says in his History of India:
+"Their Grand Lama celebrates a species of sacrifice with BREAD and WINE,
+in which, after taking a small quantity himself, he distributes the
+rest among the Lamas present at this ceremony." (1) "The old Egyptians
+celebrated the resurrection of Osiris by a sacrament, eating the sacred
+cake or wafer after it had been consecrated by the priest, and thereby
+becoming veritable flesh of his flesh." (2) As is well known, the eating
+of bread or dough sacramentally (sometimes mixed with blood or seed)
+as an emblem of community of life with the divinity, is an extremely
+ancient practice or ritual. Dr. Frazer (3) says of the Aztecs,
+that "twice a year, in May and December, an image of the great god
+Huitzilopochtli was made of dough, then broken in pieces and solemnly
+eaten by his worshipers." And Lord Kingsborough in his Mexican
+Antiquities (vol. vi, p. 220) gives a record of a "most Holy Supper"
+in which these people ate the flesh of their god. It was a cake made of
+certain seeds, "and having made it, they blessed it in their manner, and
+broke it into pieces, which the high priest put into certain very clean
+vessels, and took a thorn of maguey which resembles a very thick needle,
+with which he took up with the utmost reverence single morsels, which
+he put into the mouth of each individual in the manner of a communion."
+Acostas (4) confirms this and similar accounts. The Peruvians partook of
+a sacrament consisting of a pudding of coarsely ground maize, of which
+a portion had been smeared on the idol. The priest sprinkled it with the
+blood of the victim before distributing it to the people. Priest and
+people then all took their shares in turn, "with great care that no
+particle should be allowed to fall to the ground--this being looked upon
+as a great sin." (5)
+
+
+ (1) See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 306.
+
+ (2) From The Great Law, of religious origins: by W. Williamson
+(1899), p. 177.
+
+ (3) The Golden Bough, vol. ii, p. 79.
+
+ (4) Natural and Moral History of the Indies. London (1604).
+
+ (5) See Markham's Rites and laws of the Incas, p. 27.
+
+
+Moving from Peru to China (instead of 'from China to Peru') we find that
+"the Chinese pour wine (a very general substitute for blood) on a straw
+image of Confucius, and then all present drink of it, and taste the
+sacrificial victim, in order to participate in the grace of Confucius."
+(Here again the Corn and Wine are blended in one rite.) And of Tartary
+Father Grueber thus testifies: "This only I do affirm, that the devil so
+mimics the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian
+has ever been there, still in all essential things they agree so
+completely with the Roman Church, as even to celebrate the Host with
+bread and wine: with my own eyes I have seen it." (1) These few
+instances are sufficient to show the extraordinarily wide diffusion of
+Totem-sacraments and Eucharistic rites all over the world.
+
+ (1) For these two quotations see Jevons' Introduction to the
+History of Religion, pp. 148 and 219.
+
+
+
+
+V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+
+I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist, some way from
+the astronomical thread of Chapters II and III, and now it would appear
+that in order to understand religious origins we must wander still
+farther. The chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and
+astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period
+when there were no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest
+astronomical knowledge existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is
+best and safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things recent
+and fairly well known to things more ancient and less known. In this way
+we approach more securely to some understanding of the dim and remote
+past.
+
+It is clear that before any definite speculations on heaven-dwelling
+gods or divine beings had arisen in the human mind--or any clear
+theories of how the sun and moon and stars might be connected with the
+changes of the seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious
+things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned alike. One of
+these was the return of Vegetation, bringing with it the fruits or the
+promise of the fruits of the earth, for human food, and also bringing
+with it increase of animal life, for food in another form; and the other
+was the return of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food
+delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth delivering from
+the fear of danger and of cold. These were three glorious things which
+returned together and brought salvation and renewed life to man. The
+period of their return was 'Spring,' and though Spring and its benefits
+might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE of its
+return--though even so it may have been a long time in human evolution
+before man discovered that it really did always return, and (with
+certain allowances) at equal intervals of time.
+
+Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in, the return of
+the Vegetation must have enthralled man's attention, and filled him with
+hope and joy. Yet since its return was somewhat variable and uncertain
+the question, What could man do to assist that return? naturally
+became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the use of
+Magic--sympathetic magic--arose in this way. Sympathetic magic seems to
+have been generated by a belief that your own actions cause a similar
+response in things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not rest
+on any philosophy or argument, but was purely instinctive and sometimes
+of the nature of a mere corporeal reaction. Every schoolboy knows how
+in watching a comrade's high jump at the Sports he often finds himself
+lifting a knee at the moment 'to help him over'; at football matches
+quarrels sometimes arise among the spectators by reason of an
+ill-placed kick coming from a too enthusiastic on-looker, behind one;
+undergraduates running on the tow-path beside their College boat in
+the races will hurry even faster than the boat in order to increase its
+speed; there is in each case an automatic bodily response increased
+by one's own desire. A person ACTS the part which he desires to be
+successful. He thinks to transfer his energy in that way. Again, if by
+chance one witnesses a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not,
+it commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same part oneself--a
+sympathetic pain. What more natural than to suppose that the pain
+really is transferred from the one person to the other? and how easy the
+inference that by tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human
+victim in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or their
+sins atoned for?
+
+Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus,
+curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she
+prays that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is
+independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy.
+Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early
+man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct of his unity and
+continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close
+that his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world
+outside.
+
+Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival
+of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you
+must have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has
+been a MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite
+fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a
+raven's skin on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with
+red zigzags of lightning (1); but partly, no doubt, he had observed
+actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as,
+for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about
+its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on
+battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud
+clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour
+of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in
+the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate
+rain-clouds--and so quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking
+SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was on the track
+of elementary Science. And so he made "bull-roarers" to imitate the
+sound of wind and the blessed rain-bringing thunder, or clashed
+great bronze cymbals together with the same object. Bull-voices and
+thunder-drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this connection
+by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus (2); but the bull-roarer,
+in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems
+to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described
+with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44),
+where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in
+religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient
+Greece, and Africa."
+
+ (1) See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.
+
+ (2) Themis, p. 61.
+
+
+Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner
+causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than
+we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that
+the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and
+cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew
+Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as
+the manifestation of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would
+therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the
+rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known
+in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds
+or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or
+sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, (2) he would cut
+himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops
+suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the rain god was
+propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed
+abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that
+rain would also be abundant." (3) Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would
+WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for
+the same purpose.
+
+ (1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said
+to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up
+green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe
+(Australian).
+
+ (2) I Kings xviii.
+
+ (3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
+Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.
+
+
+In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which has been adopted by
+so many peoples under so many forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her
+daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation), carried
+down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and Winter.
+And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic for the
+purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the world
+again. Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and unnamable
+objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a sacrifice of
+pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains
+afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields."
+(1) Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male
+fertility; snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their own
+skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive of resurrection
+and re-vivification; pigs and sows by their exceeding fruitfulness would
+in their hour of sacrifice remind old mother Earth of what was expected
+from her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that the scattering of
+dead flesh over the ground or mixed with the seed, did bless the
+ground to a greater fertility; and so by a strange mixture of primitive
+observation with a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols
+and suggestions Nature could be appealed to and induced to answer to the
+desires and needs for her children this sort of ceremonial Magic arose.
+It was not exactly Science, and it was not exactly Religion; but it was
+a naive, and perhaps not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between
+Nature and Man.
+
+ (1) See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+
+
+For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously
+differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see that the tribal life was
+so strong that the individual seldom regarded himself as different or
+separate or opposed to the rest of the tribe; but that something of the
+same kind was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and to
+Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself, was also himself.
+His sub-conscious sense of unity was so great that it largely dominated
+his life. That brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern
+man to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals, or between
+himself and Nature, did not exist in the early man. Hence it was
+no difficulty to him to believe that he was a Bear or an Emu.
+Sub-consciously he was wiser than we are. He knew that he was a bear or
+an emu, or any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his
+mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed
+between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has
+been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very
+interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that
+the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any
+forcible subjugation of them by man, but from a natural amity with
+them which grew up in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and
+affections. Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma of Brazil)
+from far-back times took to hunting in the company of his two-legged and
+bow-and-arrow-armed friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson
+(2) declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and capable
+of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack man, but
+when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage, unresisting, with
+mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated
+in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit,
+but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant
+and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual
+relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse (3) (also the
+Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced.
+The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and
+still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisee
+Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes
+by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.
+
+
+ (1) Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
+1896.
+
+ (2) See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
+
+ (3) "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
+of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before
+it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to
+Hist. Religion, p. 119).
+
+
+And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception,
+which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their
+tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought
+them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees,
+the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their
+bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set
+in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like
+noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground,
+you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons
+it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to
+leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow
+tall." (1) Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly
+yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green
+boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an
+encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic
+Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself
+you naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do
+this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world
+the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with
+dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting
+or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the
+successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day,
+and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human
+thought.
+
+ (1) See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
+
+
+Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our
+academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and
+to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification
+with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look
+upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE
+know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things
+are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as
+to our perfect comprehension of them?
+
+And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really
+ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most
+superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D.
+Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a
+certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he
+does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree
+near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and
+graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
+throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could
+walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually
+once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around
+VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
+vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and
+still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its
+skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life
+(or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of
+heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same
+energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement
+in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or
+separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing
+and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing
+activity.
+
+ (1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.
+
+
+The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences.
+Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in
+half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little
+twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy
+and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two
+visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge
+sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the
+steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known
+that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and
+deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like
+himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.
+
+It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations
+like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
+incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
+their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
+book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like
+the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
+effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
+they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion
+with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally
+protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form
+of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and
+its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling,
+took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually
+emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific
+laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also
+are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these
+things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past
+and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
+knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to
+a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious
+product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of
+the animals--and the angels.
+
+
+To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in modern
+style on these things, I yet have no reasonable doubt that he felt (and
+FEELS, in those cases where we can still trace the workings of his
+mind) his essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more
+intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If the animals with
+all their wonderful gifts are (as we readily admit) a veritable part
+of Nature--so that they live and move and have their being more or less
+submerged in the spirit of the great world around them--then Man, when
+he first began to differentiate himself from them, must for a long
+time have remained in this SUBconscious unity, becoming only distinctly
+CONSCIOUS of it when he was already beginning to lose it. That early
+dawn of distinct consciousness corresponded to the period of belief
+in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every object was
+invested with a halo of mystery or terror or adoration. Things were
+either tabu, in which case they were dangerous, and often not to be
+touched or even looked upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace
+and influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite which released
+their influence was also holy. William Blake, that modern prophetic
+child, beheld a Tree full of angels; the Central Australian native
+believes bushes to be the abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of
+passing women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses
+saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame of fire, with
+Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put off his shoes for
+he felt that the place was holy; Osiris was at times regarded as a
+Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one
+in the acacia"--which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The
+same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil
+was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe;
+the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be
+cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is
+of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical use, (2) but so
+holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb it. The Burmese believe
+the things of nature, but especially the trees, to be the abode of
+spirits. "To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the Greek of long
+ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains
+are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of
+Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round
+about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree
+that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like
+fronds of the tamarind." (3)
+
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.
+
+ (2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.
+
+ (3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.
+
+
+There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women
+(and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very
+near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these,
+including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The
+well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to
+a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the
+Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god
+Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down
+to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant
+women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those
+who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are
+benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the
+Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to
+fertilize them. (2)
+
+ (1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.
+
+ (2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.
+
+
+One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite
+indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was
+instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day
+who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the
+world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is
+not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and
+intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction
+of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the
+first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was
+hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became more
+conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms of the gods and
+the creeds--but of that process I will speak more in detail presently.
+
+The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in
+the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which
+his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and
+assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its
+many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its
+timber, and other invaluable products--why should it not become the
+natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man's worship is ever
+drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in
+its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful
+of the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and
+Serpent is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so
+potent in the life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual
+most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds
+(or even the crops) is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent
+combined, and for all the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it
+reverence. In the Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance
+we have this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen
+Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness (as a cure for the
+fiery serpents of lust); illustrations of the same are said to be found
+in the temples of Egypt and of South India, and even in the ancient
+temples of Central America. (1) In the myth of Hercules the golden
+apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans,
+the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man
+through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And
+De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories,
+says "the legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs which
+yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which the life, the
+fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the hero have their
+beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan origin: in India,
+Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."
+
+ (1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
+Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.
+
+ (2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.
+
+
+Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting
+itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case
+of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away
+and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in
+the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a
+primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or
+semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake--the fascination
+of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its
+glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of
+Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason
+(from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who
+in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions.
+No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a
+gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies
+of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship
+of Zeus and the Olympian gods.
+
+ (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+
+
+Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people
+wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a
+Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so
+foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY
+LOOKED (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of
+all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any that thrills one
+more with a sense of wizardry than just this very thing--to observe,
+each year, this disclosure of the Ear within the Blade--first a swelling
+of the sheath, then a transparency and a whitey-green face within a
+hooded shroud, and then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself
+and spiring upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat with
+pale visage appearing out of the ground."
+
+ (1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
+approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the
+Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to
+the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect
+revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr
+stacon])."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.
+
+
+If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have
+aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world
+was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What
+wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation),
+what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
+sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior
+of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as
+an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would
+no doubt be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that where
+blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more
+generous?)--what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to
+propitiate the unseen power--even though the outline and form of the
+latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of
+the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character,
+says (1): "The primitive conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly
+out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated
+the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a
+festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman
+actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of
+the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites
+in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again
+with the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a charm to ensure the
+growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as
+such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his
+fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
+stately ritual of the temple." (2)
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.
+
+ (2) See ch. xv.
+
+
+The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of
+Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically
+poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also
+common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been
+offered at the grave of Osiris. We hear that the Indians in Ecuador used
+to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields
+when they sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same,
+allowing his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico
+girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes GRIND their
+(male) victim, like corn, between two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to
+make me bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were particularly
+given to this kind of ritual--the very TEARS of the sufferer were an
+incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain.
+(1)
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.
+
+
+And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his
+astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct
+role as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body.
+"The tremendous mana of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies
+almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual." (1) Even to us there is
+something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of this animal's
+glory of strength and fury and sexual power. No wonder the primitives
+worshiped him, or that they devised rituals which should convey his
+power and vitality by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts
+they ate his flesh and drank his blood as a magic symbol and means of
+salvation.
+
+ (1) Four Stages, p. 34.
+
+
+
+
+VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+
+It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a
+few more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic.
+Magic represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of
+Religion--i.e. the instinctive sense of Man's inner continuity with the
+world around him, TAKING SHAPE: a fanciful shape it is true, but with
+very real reaction on his practical life and feelings. (1) On the other
+side it represented the beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt
+not merely to FEEL but to UNDERSTAND the mystery of things.
+
+ (1) For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion
+see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.
+
+
+Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very puerile, very
+superficial. As E. B. Tylor says (1) of primitive folk in general, "they
+mistook an imaginary for a real connection." And he instances the case
+of the inhabitants of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope, seven
+furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of Artemis, in order to
+place the former under the protection of the latter! WE should lay down
+a telephone wire, and consider that we established a much more efficient
+connection; but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men, like
+children, rely on surface associations. Among the Dyaks of Borneo (2)
+when the men are away fighting, the WOMEN must use a sort of telepathic
+magic in order to safeguard them--that is, they must themselves rise
+early and keep awake all day (lest darkness and sleep should give
+advantage to the enemy); they must not OIL their hair (lest their
+husbands should make any SLIPS); they must eat sparingly and put aside
+rice at every meal (so that the men may not want for food). And so on.
+Similar superstitions are common. But they gradually lead to a little
+thought, and then to a little more, and so to the discovery of actual
+and provable influences. Perhaps one day the cord connecting the temple
+with Ephesus was drawn TIGHT and it was found that messages could be, by
+tapping, transmitted along it. That way lay the discovery of a fact. In
+an age which worshiped fertility, whether in mankind or animals, TWINS
+were ever counted especially blest, and were credited with a magic
+power. (The Constellation of the Twins was thought peculiarly lucky.)
+Perhaps after a time it was discovered that twins sometimes run in
+families, and in such cases really do bring fertility with them. In
+cattle it is known nowadays that there are more twins of the female sex
+than of the male sex. (3)
+
+ (1) Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106.
+
+ (2) See The Golden Bough, i, 127.
+
+ (3) See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41,
+note.
+
+
+Observations of this kind were naturally made by the ablest members of
+the tribe--who were in all probability the medicine-men and wizards--and
+brought in consequence power into their hands. The road to power in
+fact--and especially was this the case in societies which had not
+yet developed wealth and property--lay through Magic. As far as magic
+represented early superstition and religion it laid hold of the _hearts_
+of men--their hopes and fears; as far as it represented science and the
+beginnings of actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a sense of
+power, and gave form to their lives and customs. We have no reason to
+suppose that the early magicians and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked
+or bent on mere self-aggrandizement--any more than we have to think the
+same of the average country vicar or country doctor of to-day. They
+were merely men a trifle wiser or more instructed than their flocks.
+But though probably in most cases their original intentions were decent
+enough, they were not proof against the temptations which the possession
+of power always brings, and as time went on they became liable to trade
+more and more upon this power for their own advancement. In the
+matter of Religion the history of the Christian priesthood through the
+centuries shows sufficiently to what misuse such power can be put; and
+in the matter of Science it is a warning to us of the dangers attending
+the formation of a scientific priesthood, such as we see growing up
+around us to-day. In both cases--whether Science or Religion--vanity,
+personal ambition, lust of domination and a hundred other vices, unless
+corrected by a real devotion to the public good, may easily bring as
+many evils in their train as those they profess to cure.
+
+The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly but
+necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there is much evidence to
+show that in the case of many tribes at any rate, it was HE who became
+ultimate chief and leader and laid the foundations of Kingship. The
+Basileus was always a sacred personality, and often united in himself as
+head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare and leader in priestly
+rites--like Agamemnon in Homer, or Saul or David in the Bible. As a
+magician he had influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the
+blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway
+
+                         "the dark earth beareth in season
+     Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and
+     alway
+      Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in
+     abundance." (1)
+
+ (1) Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.
+
+
+As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare; and
+Schoolcraft, in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang, (1) says of the Dacotah
+Indians "the war-chief who leads the party to war is always one of
+these medicine-men." This connection, however, by which the magician is
+transformed into the king has been abundantly studied, and need not be
+further dwelt upon here.
+
+And what of the transformation of the king into a god--or of the
+Magician or Priest directly into the same? Perhaps in order to
+appreciate this, one must make a further digression.
+
+For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two main objects
+in life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle and crops, for food; and (2)
+to placate or ward off Death; and it seemed very obvious--even before
+any distinct figures of gods, or any idea of prayer, had arisen--to
+attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism, of
+Initiation (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of a Second Birth,
+which we associate with fully-formed religions, did belong also to
+the age of Magic; and they all implied a belief in some kind of
+re-incarnation--in a life going forward continually and being renewed
+in birth again and again. It is curious that we find such a belief among
+the lowest savages even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Central
+Australian tribes, says the belief is firmly rooted among them "that the
+human soul undergoes an endless series of re-incarnations--the living
+men and women of one generation being nothing but the spirits of their
+ancestors come to life again, and destined themselves to be reborn
+in the persons of their descendants. During the interval between
+two re-incarnations the souls live in their nanja spots, or local
+totem-centres, which are always natural objects such as trees or rocks.
+Each totem-clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over the
+country. There the souls of the dead men and women of the totem, but no
+others, congregate, and are born again in human form when a favorable
+opportunity presents itself." (2)
+
+ (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.
+
+ (2) The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.
+
+
+And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of
+the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also. At the great
+Spring-ritual among the primitive Greeks "the tribe and the growing
+earth were renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead
+seeds, the tribe from its dead ancestors." And the whole process
+projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who "in the first
+stage is living, then dies with each year, and thirdly rises again from
+the dead, raising the whole dead world with him. The Greeks called him
+in this stage 'The Third One' (Tritos Soter) or 'the Saviour'; and the
+renovation ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the old year,
+the old garments, and everything that is polluted by the infection of
+death." (1) Thus the multiplication of the crops and the renovation of
+the tribe, and at the same time the evasion and placation of death, were
+all assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial magic. (2)
+
+ (1) Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.
+
+ (2) It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of
+the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male
+members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja
+spots--the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the
+seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for
+their re-incarnation.
+
+
+In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--of
+the magical worship of Bulls and Bears and Rams and Cats and Emus and
+Kangaroos, of Trees and Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the
+spirit of the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of the
+ground--there is still the same idea or moving inspiration, the sense
+mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the feeling (hardly yet conscious of
+its own meaning) of intimate relationship and unity with all this outer
+world, the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed by the
+spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual, the right
+word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An aura of emotion
+surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu, of fascination, of desire.
+The world, to these people, was transparent with presences related to
+themselves; and though hunger and sex may have been the dominant and
+overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their outlook on the
+world was essentially poetic and imaginative.
+
+Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and the belief in
+spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being
+alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed
+(1)--that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of
+supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of
+earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly
+evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being--though there
+might be orders and degrees of spirits (and of gods)--every such being
+was only conceived of, and could only be conceived of, as actually a
+part of Nature, dwelling in and interlaced with some phenomenon of Earth
+and Sky, and having no separate existence.
+
+ (1) For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,
+see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.
+
+
+How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and
+separable gods and goddesses--each with his or her well-marked outline
+and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of India,
+or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To
+this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an
+ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the
+Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the
+figures of the supranatural gods arose from a process in the human mind
+similar to that which the photographer adopts when by photographing a
+number of faces on the same plate, and so superposing their images on
+one another, he produces a so-called "composite" photograph or image.
+Thus, in the photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members
+of the same family superposed upon one another may produce a composite
+image or ideal of that family type, or the portraits of a number of
+Aztecs or of a number of Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the
+Aztec or of the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each member
+of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors or Priests or
+wise and gracious Women of that tribe did inevitably combine at last
+to composite figures of gods and goddesses--on whom the enthusiasm
+and adoration of the tribe was concentrated. (1) Miss Harrison has
+ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic rituals of
+the past--being the figures on which all eyes would be concentrated; and
+whose importance would be imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to
+this process. The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified,
+recurring year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand ritual
+processions, would at last be dramatized and idealized in the great
+race-consciousness into the form of a Suffering God--a Jesus Christ or
+a Dionysus or Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of
+mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the succession of Priests
+or Medicine-Men--whose figures would recur again and again as leaders
+and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the
+composite-image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic powers.
+"Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have shown us in abundance
+the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain."
+Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man
+may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual
+representative of the glorified and composite being who exists in the
+mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be unworthy, but is
+surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real
+[gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in
+clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the
+mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The
+medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some
+connection with the great god more intimate than that of other men... he
+knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him." (2) Thus
+did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but three
+names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the god.
+
+ (1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions
+of the Race-Life."
+
+ (2) The Four Stages, p. 140.
+
+
+And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in
+chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals
+and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of
+the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people
+whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear,
+and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there
+would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of
+emotions--emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and
+so forth--an image of a _divine Bear_ in whom they lived and moved and had
+their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or
+a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same
+way spring up the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred
+kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its
+presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these
+objects were and had been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly
+and seasonal Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo
+(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the totem-animal
+or priest or magician-chief gradually invested him with Awe and
+Divinity.
+
+According to this theory the god--the full-grown god in human shape,
+dwelling apart and beyond the earth--did not come first, but was a late
+and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of
+the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is much
+supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early
+cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The
+Egyptian religion was full of such divinities--the jackal-headed
+Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of
+darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in
+Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide
+and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that,
+following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or
+medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the
+skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask--this
+partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of
+the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic
+virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the
+crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered, wears the aegis, or goat-skin--said
+to be the hide of the goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy;
+there are a number of legends which connected the Arcadian Artemis with
+the worship of the bear, Apollo with the wolf, and so forth. And, most
+curious as showing similarity of rites between the Old and New Worlds,
+there are found plenty of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in
+religious processions among the native tribes of both North and South
+America. In the Atlas of Spix and Martius (who travelled together in
+the Amazonian forests about 1820) there is an understanding and
+characteristic picture of the men (and some women) of the tribe of the
+Tecunas moving in procession through the woods mostly naked, except for
+wearing animal heads and masks--the masks representing Cranes of various
+kinds, Ducks, the Opossum, the Jaguar, the Parrot, etc., probably
+symbolic of their respective clans.
+
+By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed, the forms of
+the Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual figures of men and women,
+of youths and girls, who year after year took part in the ancient
+rituals. Just as the Queen of the May or Father Christmas with us are
+idealized forms derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded
+old men who took leading parts in the May or December mummings and thus
+gained their apotheosis in our literature and tradition--so doubtless
+Zeus with his thunderbolts and arrows of lightning is the idealization
+into Heaven of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares the
+god of War, the similar idealization of the leading warrior in the
+ritual war-dance preceding an attack on a neighboring tribe; and Mercury
+of the foot-running Messenger whose swiftness in those days (devoid of
+steam or electricity) was so precious a tribal possession.
+
+And here it must be remembered that this explanation of the genesis of
+the gods only applies to the SHAPES and FIGURES of the various deities.
+It does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or
+a Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has
+quite another source. Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or
+'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the
+forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a
+kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored
+mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind." But I must confess
+that to me the "poor Indian" seems on the whole to show more good sense
+than his critics, and to have aimed his rude arrows at the philosophic
+mark more successfully than a vast number of his learned and scientific
+successors. A consideration of what we have said above would show that
+early people felt their unity with Nature so deeply and intimately
+that--like the animals themselves--they did not think consciously or
+theorize about it. It was just their life to be--like the beasts of the
+field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole flux of things,
+non-differentiated so to speak. What more natural or indeed more
+logically correct than for them to assume (when they first began to
+think or differentiate themselves) that these other creatures, these
+birds, beasts and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same
+blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and having the
+same interior nature? What more reasonable (if indeed they credited
+THEMSELVES with having some kind of soul or spirit) than to credit these
+other creatures with a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the
+Guiana Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with beings."
+Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored mind--unless
+indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense of the Schools--but rather a
+very directly perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing
+that these people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution) than
+that they should pay great reverence to some ideal animal--first cousin
+or ancestor--who played an important part in their tribal existence, and
+make of this animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?
+
+And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed
+to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more
+intelligent and emotional--more specially human in fact--than that
+of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and
+ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior
+and more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness of its
+own intimate quality, and still deeply penetrated with the sense of its
+kinship to external nature, it would inevitably and perfectly logically
+credit the latter with an inner life and intelligence, more
+distinctly human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE
+'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this is a
+process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding a
+certain parenthesis in the process, due to obvious elements in our
+'Civilization' and to the temporary and fallacious domination of
+a leaden-eyed so-called 'Science.' According to this view the true
+evolution of Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded not
+by the denial by man of his unity with the world, but by his seeing and
+understanding that unity more deeply. And the more deeply he understands
+himself the more certainly he will recognize in the external world a
+Being or beings resembling himself.
+
+W. H. Hudson--whose mind is certainly not of a quality to be jeered
+at--speaks of Animism as "the projection of ourselves into nature:
+the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more
+powerful, in all visible things"; and continues, "old as I am this same
+primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
+persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost
+afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it." (1) Nor will it be quite
+forgotten that Shelley once said:--
+
+     The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
+     Is active living spirit. Every grain
+     Is sentient both in unity and part,
+     And the minutest atom comprehends
+     A world of loves and hatreds.
+
+ (1) Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.
+
+
+The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism is I say
+inevitable, and perfectly logical. But the great value of the work done
+by some of those investigators whom I have quoted has been to show that
+among quite primitive people (whose interior life and 'soul-sense' was
+only very feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature were
+correspondingly feeble. The reflections of themselves projected into
+the world beyond could not reach the stature of eternal 'gods,' but
+were rather of the quality of ephemeral phantoms and ghosts; and the
+ceremonials and creeds of that period are consequently more properly
+described as Magic than as Religion. There have indeed been great
+controversies as to whether there has or has not been, in the course
+of religious evolution, a _pre_-animistic stage. Probably of course human
+evolution in this matter must have been perfectly continuous from stages
+presenting the very feeblest or an absolutely deficient animistic sense
+to the very highest manifestations of anthropomorphism; but as there is
+a good deal of evidence to show that _animals_ (notably dogs and horses)
+see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly to be enlarged so far as to
+include the pre-human species. Anyhow it must be remembered that the
+question is one of _consciousness_--that is, of how far and to what degree
+consciousness of self has been developed in the animal or the primitive
+man or the civilized man, and therefore how far and to what degree the
+animal or human creature has credited the outside world with a similar
+consciousness. It is not a question of whether there _is_ an inner life
+and _sub_-consciousness common to all these creatures of the earth and
+sky, because that, I take it, is a fact beyond question; they all emerge
+or have emerged from the same matrix, and are rooted in identity; but
+it is a question of how far they are _aware_ of this, and how far by
+separation (which is the genius of evolution) each individual creature
+has become conscious of the interior nature both of itself and of the
+other creatures _and_ of the great whole which includes them all.
+
+Finally, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that
+Anthropomorphism, in man's conception of the gods, is itself of course
+only a stage and destined to pass away. In so far, that is, as the
+term indicates a belief in divine beings corresponding to our PRESENT
+conception of ourselves--that is as separate personalities having each
+a separate and limited character and function, and animated by
+the separatist motives of ambition, possession, power, vainglory,
+superiority, patronage, self-greed, self-satisfaction, etc.--in so far
+as anthropomorphism is the expression of that kind of belief it is of
+course destined, with the illusion from which it springs, to pass away.
+When man arrives at the final consciousness in which the idea of such a
+self, superior or inferior or in any way antagonistic to others, ceases
+to operate, then he will return to his first and primal condition, and
+will cease to need ANY special religion or gods, knowing himself and all
+his fellows to be divine and the origin and perfect fruition of all.
+
+
+
+
+VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+
+There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably beautiful book
+The Story of my Heart--a passage well known to all lovers of that
+prose-poet--in which he figures himself standing "in front of the Royal
+Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory," and
+pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery of life. "Is there any
+theory, philosophy, or creed," he says, "is there any system of culture,
+any formulated method, able to meet and satisfy each separate item of
+this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
+they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving
+heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against
+which, like seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate
+personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something
+to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome that will leave
+more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real
+now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the
+sun burns.... Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side
+with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable
+belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to
+be found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought from the
+immense forces of the universe."
+
+In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand times No! there
+is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which
+will meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the
+human whirlpool." And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How
+terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew the history
+of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of
+human endeavor HAD been found absolutely correct and universally
+applicable--so that every human being would be compelled to pass
+through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under
+its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or
+system; and yet there is something--as Jefferies prophetically felt and
+with a great longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root
+of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the
+CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us:
+it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity.
+
+The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last
+chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic
+or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and
+abstract--are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt
+those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will
+catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the
+mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and
+having no real substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they
+will say) is a history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over
+it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced
+Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra
+and Agni and Kali and Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus
+Christ and Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards onto
+a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes them all tend to
+be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they each and all inevitably pass
+away. Why waste time over them?"
+
+And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at the matter.
+These gods and creeds ARE only projections of the human mind. But all
+the same it misses, does this view, the essential fact. It misses the
+fact that there is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of
+a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not directly see it) as
+well as the existence of a solid form which intercepts that light.
+Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of
+the world-consciousness--so deep indeed that the vast majority of
+individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned
+outwards is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions
+passing across their sky; they are unaware that the latter are only
+shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting their own minds. (1) The
+vast majority of people have never observed their own minds; their own
+mental forms. They have only observed the reflections cast by these.
+Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three degrees of
+reality. There are the mere shadows--the least real and most
+evanescent; there are the actual mental outlines of humanity (and of
+the individual), much more real, but themselves also of course slowly
+changing; and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which
+lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the glorious light
+of the world-consciousness. Of this last it may be said that it never
+changes. Every thing is known to it--even the very IMPEDIMENTS to its
+shining. But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light
+that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that the things of this
+world and of humanity, though real in their degree, have chiefly a
+kind of negative value; they are opaquenesses, clouds, materialisms,
+ignorances, and the inner light falling upon them gradually reveals
+their negative character and gradually dissolves them away till they
+are lost in the extreme and eternal Splendor. I think Jefferies, when
+he asked that question with which I have begun this chapter, was in some
+sense subconsciously, if not quite consciously, aware of the answer. His
+frequent references to the burning blazing sun throughout The Story of
+the Heart seem to be an indication of his real deep-down attitude of
+mind.
+
+ (1) See, in the same connection, Plato's allegory of the Cave,
+Republic, Book vii.
+
+
+The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away truly like
+ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent in their study is wasted,
+is a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much
+more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the
+human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and
+queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held
+sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or
+continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real
+formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and
+a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity.
+Certainly it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and a
+necessary step in the great process; and certainly it was opaque and
+brutish, but it is through the opaque things of the world, and not
+through the transparent, that we become aware of the light.
+
+It may be worth while to give instances of how some early rituals and
+creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous or preposterous, were really
+the indications of important moral and social conceptions evolving in
+the heart of man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected
+with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such innumerable
+examples are now to be found in the modern books on Anthropology. If we
+assume, as I have done more than once, that the earliest state of Man
+was one in which he did not consciously separate himself from the world,
+animate and inanimate, which surrounded him, then (as I have also said)
+it was perfectly natural for him to take some animal which bulked large
+on his horizon--some food-animal for instance--and to pay respect to it
+as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor and totem-symbol;
+or, seeing the boundless blessing of the cornfields, to believe in
+some kind of spirit of the corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical
+ghost) which, reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind
+from famine. But then no sooner had he done this than he was bound to
+perceive that in cutting down the corn or in eating his totem-bear
+or kangaroo he was slaying his own best self and benefactor. In
+that instant the consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some
+undefined yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in. If,
+before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the simple purpose of
+multiplying the animal or, vegetable forms of his food, now in addition
+his magical endeavor would be turned to averting the just wrath of the
+spirits who animated these forms--just indeed, for the rudest savage
+would perceive the wrong done and the probability of its retribution.
+Clearly the wrong done could only be expiated by an equivalent sacrifice
+of some kind on the part of the man, or the tribe--that is by the
+offering to the totem-animal or to the corn-spirit of some victim whom
+these nature powers in their turn could feed upon and assimilate. In
+this way the nature-powers would be appeased, the sense of unity would
+be restored, and the first At-one-ment effected.
+
+It is hardly necessary to recite in any detail the cruel and hideous
+sacrifices which have been perpetrated in this sense all over the world,
+sometimes in appeasement of a wrong committed or supposed to have been
+committed by the tribe or some member of it, sometimes in placation or
+for the averting of death, or defeat, or plague, sometimes merely
+in fulfilment of some long-standing custom of forgotten origin--the
+flayings and floggings and burnings and crucifixions of victims without
+end, carried out in all deliberation and solemnity of established
+ritual. I have mentioned some cases connected with the sowing of the
+corn. The Bible is full of such things, from the intended sacrifice of
+Isaac by his father Abraham, to the actual crucifixion of Jesus by
+the Jews. The first-born sons were claimed by a god who called himself
+"jealous" and were only to be redeemed by a substitute. (1) Of the
+Canaanites it was said that "even their daughters they have BURNT in the
+fire to their gods"; (2) and of the King of Moab, that when he saw
+his army in danger of defeat, "he took his eldest son that should have
+reigned in his stead and offered him for a burnt-offering on the wall!"
+(3) Dr. Frazer (4) mentions the similar case of the Carthaginians
+(about B.C. 300) sacrificing two hundred children of good family as a
+propitiation to Baal and to save their beloved city from the assaults
+of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles. And even so we hear that on that
+occasion three hundred more young folk VOLUNTEERED to die for the
+fatherland.
+
+ (1) Exodus xxxiv. 20.
+
+ (2) Deut. xii. 31.
+
+ (3) 2 Kings iii. 27.
+
+ (4) The Golden Bough, vol. "The Dying God," p. 167.
+
+
+The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to their gods
+Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are described in much detail
+by Sahagun, the Spanish missionary of the sixteenth century. The victims
+were mostly prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered by
+thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol or figure of the
+god as largely plated with gold and holding his hands palm upward and in
+a downward sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The
+children, who had previously been borne in triumphal state on litters
+over the crowd and decorated with every ornamental device of feathers
+and flowers and wings, were placed one by one on the vast hands and
+ROLLED DOWN into the flames--as if the god were himself offering them.
+(1) As the procession approached the temple, the members of it wept and
+danced and sang, and here again the abundance of tears was taken for a
+good augury of rain. (2)
+
+ (1) It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the
+sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is related
+concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage (see Diodorus
+Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould's Religious Belief, vol. i, p. 375).
+
+ (2) "A los ninos que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para
+llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevabos en unas literas sobre los hombros,
+estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores: iban tanendo,
+cantando y bailando delante de ellos... Cuando Ileviban los ninos a
+matar, si llevaban y echaban muchos lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los
+llevaban porque tomaban pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas
+en aquel ano." Sahagun, Historia Nueva Espana, Bk. II, ch. i.
+
+
+Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous figures--that
+of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid with gold and precious
+stones; and beside it were "braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three
+Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and
+the savor of incense were the sacrifice."
+
+Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account of the sacrifice
+of a perfect youth at Easter-time--which date Sahagun connects with the
+Christian festival of the Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had
+been held in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the
+god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every luxury
+and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four courtesans as he
+desired) had been granted him. At the last and on the fatal day, leaving
+his companions and his worshipers behind, be slowly ascended the Temple
+staircase; stripping on each step the ornaments from his body; and
+breaking and casting away his flutes and other musical instruments;
+till, reaching the summit, he was stretched, curved on his back, and
+belly upwards, over the altar stone, while the priest with obsidian
+knife cut his breast open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet
+beating, as an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and while the heart
+still lived, his successor for the next year was chosen.
+
+In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the similar
+offering of a woman to a goddess. In both cases (he explains) of young
+man or young woman, the victims were richly adorned in the guise of the
+god or goddess to whom they were offered, and at the same time great
+largesse of food was distributed to all who needed. (Here we see the
+connection in the general mind between the gift of food (by the gods)
+and the sacrifice of precious blood (by the people).) More than once
+Sahagun mentions that the victims in these Mexican ceremonials not
+infrequently offered THEMSELVES as a voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott
+says (1) that the offering of one's life to the gods was "sometimes
+voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening a sure passage
+into Paradise."
+
+ (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+
+
+Dr. Frazer describes (1) the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea
+in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's
+robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands
+he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the
+king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped
+of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly
+astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far
+removed in space and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D.
+and the Babylonians perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know
+that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim attired as a
+king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has especially made his own, and for
+further information on it his classic work should be consulted.
+
+ (1) Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. (See also S. Reinach,
+Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.
+
+
+Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes largely from
+Sahagun, and summarizes his conclusions in the following passage:
+"The general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by
+innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for
+the male gods, of a WOMAN for each goddess. (1) The latter victims were
+regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in, each
+case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the
+god with the sacrifice (? victim), and of both with the officiating priest.
+The connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins
+of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin
+or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the
+celebrants. Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this
+was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who
+communicated." (2)
+
+ (1) Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally
+connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and
+the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae.
+It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from all guilt and avert
+the wrath of the god (the Sun). A man and a woman, as representing
+the male and female population, were led about with a garland of figs
+(fertility) round their necks, to the sound of flutes and singing. They
+were then scourged, sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore.
+(Nettleship and Sandys.)
+
+ (2) A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.
+
+
+Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know a mere
+thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human sacrifice all over the
+world. We hold up our hands in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli
+dropping children from his fingers into the flames, but we have to
+remember that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content to
+describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about the floor of
+Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did Augustine worship? The Being who
+could condemn children to such a fate was certainly no better than the
+Mexican Idol.
+
+And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some by no means
+unworthy conceptions of the greatness of his God. In the same way the
+Aztecs were in many respects a refined and artistic people, and their
+religion was not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of them
+(1) that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord "omnipresent,
+knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without whom Man is as
+nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and
+purity, under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence." How can
+we reconcile St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the religious
+belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties? Perhaps we can
+only reconcile them by remembering out of what deeps of barbarism and
+what nightmares of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and is
+even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also that the ancient
+ceremonies and rituals of Magic and Fear remained on and were cultivated
+by the multitude in each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits
+had attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that even to the
+present day in each individual the Old and the New are for a long period
+thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to believe that the practice
+of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should
+have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe
+out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at any rate to
+the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and convincing. To-day
+(1918) we are witnessing in the Great European War a carnival of human
+slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke all
+the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical ages; and when
+we ask the why and wherefore of this horrid spectacle we are told,
+apparently in all sincerity, and by both the parties engaged, of the
+noble objects and commanding moralities which inspire and compel it. We
+can hardly, in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness
+of the plea, so why should we do so in the former case? In both cases we
+perceive that underneath the surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and
+was the great urging and commanding force.
+
+ (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+
+
+The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent--if you once allow for the
+overwhelming sway of fear--perfectly reasonable views of human conduct,
+adopted instinctively by mankind since the earliest times. If in a
+moment of danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your brother
+tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you 'sinned' against him; and
+naturally you expiated the sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind
+made to the one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice were
+the very foundation of social life and human morality, and must have
+sprung up as soon as ever, in the course of evolution, man became
+CAPABLE of differentiating himself from his fellows and regarding his
+own conduct as that of a 'separate self.' It was in the very conception
+of a separate self that 'sin' and disunity first began; and it was
+by 'sacrifice' that unity and harmony were restored, appeasement and
+atonement effected.
+
+But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated more than once,
+man felt himself intimately related not only to his brother tribesman,
+but to the animals and to general Nature. It was not so much that he
+THOUGHT thus as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously
+that he was a part of all this outer world. And so he adopted for his
+totems or presiding spirits every possible animal, as we have seen,
+and all sorts of nature-phenomena, such as rain and fire and water and
+clouds, and sun, moon and stars--which WE consider quite senseless and
+inanimate. Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he felt
+the same compunction as I have described him feeling towards his brother
+tribesmen. He could sin against them too. He could sin against his
+totem-animal by eating it; he could sin against his 'brother the ox' by
+consuming its strength in the labor of the plough; he could sin against
+the corn by cutting it down and grinding it into flour, or against the
+precious and beautiful pine-tree by laying his axe to its roots and
+converting it into mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he
+could sin against elemental nature. This might be more difficult to be
+certain of, but when the signs of elemental displeasure were not to be
+mistaken--when the rain withheld itself for months, or the storms and
+lightning dealt death and destruction, when the crops failed or evil
+plagues afflicted mankind--then there could be little uncertainty that
+he had sinned; and Fear, which had haunted him like a demon from the
+first day when he became conscious of his separation from his fellows
+and from Nature, stood over him and urged to dreadful propitiations.
+
+In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious thing.
+We have seen that to atone for the cutting-down of the corn a human
+victim would often be slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of
+this, for wherever the blood and remains of the victim were strewn the
+corn always sprang up more plentifully. The tribe or human group made
+reparation thus to the corn; the corn-spirit signified approval. The
+'sin' was expiated and harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was
+voluntarily offered by a tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot
+or otherwise; sometimes the victim was a slave, or a captive enemy;
+sometimes even an animal. All that did not so much matter. The main
+thing was that the formal expiation had been carried out, and the wrath
+of the spirits averted.
+
+It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the bear felt it
+necessary to kill and eat a bear occasionally; but they could not do
+this without a sense of guilt, and some fear of vengeance from the great
+Bear-spirit. So they ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which
+the tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community with their
+totem and with each other. And since they could not make any reparation
+directly to the slain animal itself AFTER its death, they made their
+reparation BEFORE, bringing all sorts of presents and food to it for a
+long anterior period, and paying every kind of worship and respect to
+it. The same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia,
+in some of the cities of Greece as I have already mentioned, the actual
+bull sacrificed was the handsomest and most carefully nurtured that
+could be obtained; it was crowned with flowers and led in procession
+with every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I have already
+pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead of a bull or a goat
+or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated, it was a custom (which can be
+traced very widely over the world) to feed and indulge and honor the
+victim to the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony,
+arraying him often as a king and placing a crown upon his head, by way
+of acknowledgment of the noble and necessary work he was doing for the
+general good.
+
+What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging especially
+to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and
+beloved a tree--the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of Attis!
+when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow
+an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis was
+placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the
+glorious youth--who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk
+of Winter--was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree? (1) At some
+earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his body
+bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the maidens
+to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and male
+enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice
+(as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their
+virile organs--symbols of fertility in return for the promised and
+expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For
+the ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and
+lamentation, but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a
+festival of resurrection, when it was discovered--just as in the case of
+Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had
+flown. How strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to
+the story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life made in order
+to bring salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the
+victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the
+binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection
+and the empty coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in
+what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable
+and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had
+ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat
+obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.
+
+ (1) See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris
+Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea
+caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis
+sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars
+subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis
+sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis
+formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta
+noctibus piangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur."
+
+
+Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it
+the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call gods, it is
+important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though
+it dealt in 'spirits'--the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the
+Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of
+totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea of gods. It
+had not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and
+governing the world in solemn conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus
+or the recesses of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its
+inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and Sacrifice, or of
+Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call it--was evolved perfectly
+naturally out of the human mind when brought face to face with Life
+and Nature) at some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was
+essentially the result of man's deep, original and instinctive sense of
+solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied and to some degree
+broken up by the growth and conscious insistence of the self-regarding
+impulses. It was the consciousness of disharmony and disunity,
+causing men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the need of
+reconciliation. It was a realization of union made clear by its very
+loss. It assumed of course, in a subconscious way as I have already
+indicated, that the external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds
+similar to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident that the
+particular theories current in this or that place about the nature of
+the world--the theories, as we should say, of science or theology--did
+not alter the general outlines of the creed; they only colored its
+details and gave its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental
+attitudes, for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the
+Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern and pious
+Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross are really almost
+exactly the same. I mention this because in tracing the origins or the
+evolution of religions it is important to distinguish clearly what is
+essential and universal from that which is merely local and temporary.
+Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons just made;
+but surely it is much more inspiriting and encouraging to think that
+whatever progress HAS been made in the religious outlook of the world
+has come about through the gradual mental growth and consent of the
+peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous event of a
+rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which indeed might never be
+repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious to suggest
+that it SHOULD be repeated.
+
+The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the
+whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to
+have disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and
+to have symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are
+shocked sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals,
+yet we must allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early
+people felt the solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we
+must allow too that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into
+rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifice, and
+with a result perhaps which could not have been compassed in any other
+way.
+
+For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social
+life. "It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people"; and not
+only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important)
+that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when
+the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and
+implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a
+perfectly reasonable thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it
+does. All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain
+and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in Nature or
+Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If
+Christianity has any real essence, that essence is perhaps expressed
+in some such ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim
+beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs of savages coming
+down from a time anterior to all recorded history.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+
+We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions of Sin and
+Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely remote past, and
+embodied among the various peoples of the world sometimes in crude and
+bloodthirsty rites, sometimes in symbols and rituals of a gentler and
+more gracious character, descended at last into Christianity and became
+a part of its creed and of the creed of the modern world. On the whole
+perhaps we may trace a slow amelioration in this process and may flatter
+ourselves that the Christian centuries exhibit a more philosophical
+understanding of what Sin is, and a more humane conception of what
+Sacrifice SHOULD be, than the centuries preceding. But I fear that any
+very decided statement or sweeping generalization to that effect would
+be--to say the least--rash. Perhaps there IS a very slow amelioration;
+but the briefest glance at the history of the Christian churches--the
+horrible rancours and revenges of the clergy and the sects against
+each other in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting
+crusades at Beziers and other places and the massacres of the Albigenses
+in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the witch-findings and
+burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth, the hideous science-urged and
+bishop-blessed warfare of the twentieth--horrors fully as great as any
+we can charge to the account of the Aztecs or the Babylonians--must give
+us pause. Nor must we forget that if there is by chance a substantial
+amelioration in our modern outlook with regard to these matters the same
+had begun already before the advent of Christianity and can by no means
+be ascribed to any miraculous influence of that religion. Abraham was
+prompted to slay a ram as a substitute for his son, long before the
+Christians were thought of; the rather savage Artemis of the old Greek
+rites was (according to Pausanias) (1) honored by the yearly sacrifice
+of a perfect boy and girl, but later it was deemed sufficient to draw a
+knife across their throats as a symbol, with the result of spilling only
+a few drops of their blood, or to flog the boys (with the same result)
+upon her altar. Among the Khonds in old days many victims (meriahs) were
+sacrificed to the gods, "but in time the man was replaced by a horse,
+the horse by a bull, the bull by a ram, the ram by a kid, the kid by
+fowls, and the fowls by many flowers." (2) At one time, according to the
+Yajur-Veda, there was a festival at which one hundred and twenty-five
+victims, men and women, boys and girls, were sacrificed; "but reform
+supervened, and now the victims were bound as before to the stake,
+but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (god) Narayana, the
+sacrificing priest brandished a knife and--severed the bonds of the
+captives." (3) At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to which I
+referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in later
+times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the sea,
+and after being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas a
+similar festival the fall of the victim was graciously broken by tying
+feathers and even living birds to his body. (4)
+
+ (1) vii. 19, and iii. 8, 16.
+
+ (2) Primitive Folk, by Elie Reclus (Contemp. Science Series), p.
+330.
+
+ (3) Ibid.
+
+ (4) Muller's Dorians Book II, ch. ii, par. 10.
+
+
+With the lapse of time and the general progress of mankind, we may,
+I think, perceive some such slow ameliorations in the matter of the
+brutality and superstition of the old religions. How far any later
+ameliorations were due to the direct influence of Christianity might
+be a difficult question; but what I think we can clearly see--and what
+especially interests us here--is that in respect to its main religious
+ideas, and the matter underlying them (exclusive of the MANNER of
+their treatment, which necessarily has varied among different peoples)
+Christianity is of one piece with the earlier pagan creeds and is
+for the most part a re-statement and renewed expression of world-wide
+doctrines whose first genesis is lost in the haze of the past, beyond
+all recorded history.
+
+I have illustrated this view with regard to the doctrine of Sin and
+Sacrifice. Let us take two or three other illustrations. Let us take the
+doctrine of Re-birth or Regeneration. The first few verses of St. John's
+Gospel are occupied with the subject of salvation through rebirth or
+regeneration. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
+God."... "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
+into the kingdom of God." Our Baptismal Service begins by saying that
+"forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin; and that our
+Saviour Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God except he
+be regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost"; therefore it
+is desirable that this child should be baptized, "received into Christ's
+Holy Church, and be made a lively member of the same." That, is to say,
+there is one birth, after the flesh, but a second birth is necessary, a
+birth after the Spirit and into the Church of Christ. Our Confirmation
+Service is simply a service repeating and confirming these views, at
+an age (fourteen to sixteen or so) when the boy or girl is capable of
+understanding what is being done.
+
+But our Baptismal and Confirmation ceremonies combined are clearly
+the exact correspondence and parallel of the old pagan ceremonies of
+Initiation, which are or have been observed in almost every primitive
+tribe over the world. "The rite of the second birth," says Jane
+Harrison, (1) "is widespread, universal, over half the savage world.
+With the savage to be twice-born is the rule. By his first birth he
+comes into the world; by his second he is born into his tribe. At his
+first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk; at his second
+he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the
+warriors of his tribe."... "These rites are very various, but they all
+point to one moral, that the former things are passed away and that
+the new-born man has entered upon a new life. Simplest of all, and most
+instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East
+Africa, who require that every boy, just before circumcision, must be
+born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she
+pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn
+cries like a babe and is washed." (2)
+
+ (1) Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.
+
+ (2) See also Themis, p. 21.
+
+
+Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one who "enters
+in." He enters into the Tribe; he enters into the revelation of certain
+Mysteries; he becomes an associate of a certain Totem, a certain God; a
+member of a new Society, or Church--a church of Mithra, or Dionysus or
+Christ. To do any of these things he must be born again; he must die
+to the old life; he must pass through ceremonials which symbolize the
+change. One of these ceremonials is washing. As the new-born babe is
+washed, so must the new-born initiate be washed; and as by primitive
+man (and not without reason) BLOOD was considered the most vital and
+regenerative of fluids, the very elixir of life, so in earliest times
+it was common to wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be
+born anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first die.
+So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged, and baptized with his
+own blood, or, in cases, one of the candidates was really killed and his
+blood used as a substitute for the blood of the others. No doubt HUMAN
+sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later it was sufficient
+to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as in the Mithra cult, (1)
+or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' as in the Christian phraseology.
+Finally, with a growing sense of decency and aesthetic perception
+among the various peoples, washing with pure water came in the
+initiation-ceremonies to take the place of blood; and our baptismal
+service has reduced the ceremony to a mere sprinkling with water. (2)
+
+ (1) See ch. iii.
+
+ (2) For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck's
+Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.
+
+
+To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: "More often the new birth
+is stimulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of
+the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at
+initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are
+assembled an old man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies down in a
+grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is
+smoothed over. The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems
+to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground
+round about. The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and
+a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the
+buried man begins to quiver. It moves more and more, and bit by bit the
+man himself starts up from the grave."
+
+Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the actual
+christening we read these words, "Then shall the Priest say: O merciful
+God, grant that old Adam in this child may be so BURIED that the new
+man may be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may die
+in him, and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow
+in him!" Can we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the
+graveside of the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to
+the young initiates as the priest does to-day to those assembled before
+him in church--for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations
+have always been before all things the occasions of moral and social
+teaching? Can we doubt that he said, in substance if not in actual
+words: "As this man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise
+from your old childish life of amusement and self-gratification and,
+ENTER INTO the life of the tribe, the life of the Spirit of the tribe."
+"In totemistic societies," to quote Miss Harrison again, "and in the
+animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is
+born again as THE SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians (1)
+when a man wants to become a Lulem or 'Bear,' however cold the season
+he tears off his clothes, puts on a bear-skin and dashes into the
+woods, where he will stay for three or four days. Every night his
+fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him. They cry out
+Yi! Kelulem (come on, Bear), and he answers with angry growls. Usually
+they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself. He is met, and
+conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there in company with the rest
+of the Bears dances solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and
+reappearance is as common a rite in initiation as stimulated killing and
+resurrection, and has the same object. Both are rites of transition,
+of passing from one to another." In the Christian ceremonies the boy or
+girl puts away childish things and puts on the new man, but instead
+of putting on a bear-skin he puts on Christ. There is not so much
+difference as may appear on the surface. To be identified with your
+Totem is to be identified with the sacred being who watches over your
+tribe, who has given his life for your tribe; it is to be born again,
+to be washed not only with water but with the Holy Spirit of all your
+fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be regenerated
+in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no doubt in cases it does mean
+this, but too often unfortunately it has only amounted to a pretence of
+religious sanction given to the meanest and bitterest quarrels of the
+Churches and the States.
+
+ (1) Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.
+
+
+This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the prevalent pagan
+custom of subjecting the initiates to serious ordeals, often painful and
+even dangerous. If one is to be born again, obviously one must be ready
+to face death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One must be
+able to endure pain, like the Red Indian braves; to go long periods
+fasting and without food or drink, like the choupan among the Western
+Inoits--who, wanders for whole nights over the ice-fields under the
+moon, scantily clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the
+very fear of death and danger, like the Australian novices who, at first
+terrified by the sound of the bull-roarer and threats of fire and the
+knife, learn finally to cast their fears away. (1) By so doing one
+puts off the old childish things, and qualifies oneself by firmness
+and courage to become a worthy member of the society into which one
+is called. (2) The rules of social life are taught--the duty to one's
+tribe, and to oneself, truth-speaking, defence of women and children,
+the care of cattle, the meaning of sex and marriage, and even the
+mysteries of such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe
+possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new life. Things of
+the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing
+the mysteries of the resurrection of Osiris, (3) says that when the
+worshipers had satiated themselves with lamentations over the death
+of the god then the priest would go round anointing them with oil and
+whispering, "Be of good cheer, O Neophytes of the new-arisen God, for to
+us too from our pains shall come salvation." (4)
+
+ (1) According to accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western
+Australia, in their initiations, the lads were frightened by a large
+fire being lighted near them, and hearing the awful sound of the
+bull-roarers, while they were told that Dhuramoolan was about to burn
+them; the legend being that Dhuramoolan, a powerful being, whose voice
+sounded like thunder, would take the boys into the bush and instruct
+them in all the laws, traditions and customs of the community. So he
+pretended that he always killed the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to
+ashes, after which he moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored
+them to life as new beings. (See R. H. Matthews, "The Wiradthuri
+tribes," Journal Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxv, 1896, pp. 297 sq.)
+
+ (2) See Catlin's North-American Indians, vol. i, for initiations
+and ordeals among the Mandans.
+
+ (3) De Errore, c. 22.
+
+ (4) [gr Qarreite, mustai ton qeou seswsmenou,]
+[gr Estai gar hmin ek ponwn swthria.]
+
+
+It would seem that at some very early time in the history of tribal and
+priestly initiations an attempt was made to impress upon the neophytes
+the existence and over-shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly
+beings. Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long
+fastings, the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains
+or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty.
+The developments of this faculty among the black and colored
+peoples--East-Indian, Burmese, African, American-Indian, etc.--are well
+known. Miss Alice Fletcher, who lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty
+years, gives a most interesting account (1) of the general philosophy
+of that people and their rites of initiation. "The Omahas regard all
+animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common
+life, which was continuous with and similar to the will-power they were
+conscious of in themselves. This mysterious power in all things they
+called Wakonda, and through it all things were related to man and
+to each other. In the idea of the continuity of life a relation was
+maintained between the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living,
+and also between the fragment of anything and its entirety." (2) Thus an
+Omaha novice might at any time seek to obtain Wakonda by what was called
+THE RITE OF THE VISION. He would go out alone, fast, chant incantations,
+and finally fall into a trance (much resembling what in modern times has
+been called COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) in which he would perceive the inner
+relations of all things and the solidarity of the least object with the
+rest of the universe.
+
+ (1) Summarized in Themis, pp. 68-71.
+
+ (2) A. C. Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-lock, Journal
+of Anthropological Studies, xxvii (1897-8), p. 436.
+
+
+Another rite in connection with initiation, and common all over
+the pagan world--in Greece, America, Africa, Australia, New Mexico,
+etc.--was the daubing of the novice all over with clay or chalk or even
+dung, and then after a while removing the same. (1) The novice must have
+looked a sufficiently ugly and uncomfortable object in this state; but
+later, when he was thoroughly WASHED, the ceremony must have afforded a
+thrilling illustration of the idea of a new birth, and one which would
+dwell in the minds of the spectators. When the daubing was done as not
+infrequently happened with white clay or gypsum, and the ritual took
+place at night, it can easily be imagined that the figures of young men
+and boys moving about in the darkness would lend support to the idea
+that they were spirits belonging to some intermediate world--who had
+already passed through death and were now waiting for their second birth
+on earth (or into the tribe) which would be signalized by their thorough
+and ceremonial washing. It will be remembered that Herodotus (viii)
+gives a circumstantial account of how the Phocians in a battle with the
+Thessalians smeared six hundred of their bravest warriors with white
+clay so that, looking like supernatural beings, and falling upon the
+Thessalians by night, they terrified the latter and put them to instant
+flight.
+
+ (1) See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 274 sq.
+
+
+Such then--though only very scantily described--were some of the rites
+of Initiation and Second Birth celebrated in the old Pagan world. The
+subject is far too large for adequate treatment within the present
+limits; but even so we cannot but be struck by the appropriateness in
+many cases of the teaching thus given to the young, the concreteness of
+the illustrations, the effectiveness of the symbols used, the dramatic
+character of the rites, the strong enforcement of lessons on the nature
+and duties of the life into which the candidates were about to enter.
+Christianity followed on, and inherited these traditions, but one feels
+that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation, which of course
+correspond to the Pagan Initiations, it falls short of the latter. Its
+ceremonies (certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries)
+are of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to and teaching on
+the immensely important subject of Sex is omitted, the details of social
+and industrial morality are passed by, and instruction is limited to a
+few rather commonplace lessons in general morality and religion.
+
+
+It may be appropriate here, before leaving the subject of the Second
+Birth, to inquire how it has come about that this doctrine--so remote
+and metaphysical as it might appear--has been taken up and embodied in
+their creeds and rituals by quite PRIMITIVE people all over the world,
+to such a degree indeed that it has ultimately been adopted and built
+into the foundations of the latter and more intellectual religions, like
+Hinduism, Mithraism, and the Egyptian and Christian cults. I think the
+answer to this question must be found in the now-familiar fact that the
+earliest peoples felt themselves so much a part of Nature and the animal
+and vegetable world around them that (whenever they thought about these
+matters at all) they never for a moment doubted that the things which
+were happening all round them in the external world were also happening
+within themselves. They saw the Sun, overclouded and nigh to death in
+winter, come to its birth again each year; they saw the Vegetation
+shoot forth anew in spring--the revival of the spirit of the Earth; the
+endless breeding of the Animals, the strange transformations of Worms
+and Insects; the obviously new life taken on by boys and girls at
+puberty; the same at a later age when the novice was transformed into
+the medicine-man--the choupan into the angakok among the Esquimaux, the
+Dacotah youth into the wakan among the Red Indians; and they felt in
+their sub-conscious way the same everlasting forces of rebirth and
+transformation working within themselves. In some of the Greek Mysteries
+the newly admitted Initiates were fed for some time after on milk only
+"as though we were being born again." (See Sallustius, quoted by Gilbert
+Murray.) When sub-conscious knowledge began to glimmer into direct
+consciousness one of the first aspects (and no doubt one of the truest)
+under which people saw life was just thus: as a series of rebirths and
+transformations. (1) The most modern science, I need hardly say, in
+biology as well as in chemistry and the field of inorganic Nature,
+supports that view. The savage in earliest times FELT the truth of some
+things which we to-day are only beginning intellectually to perceive and
+analyze.
+
+ (1) The fervent and widespread belief in animal metamorphoses
+among early peoples is well known.
+
+
+Christianity adopted and absorbed--as it was bound to do--this
+world-wide doctrine of the second birth. Passing over its physiological
+and biological applications, it gave to it a fine spiritual
+significance--or rather it insisted especially on its spiritual
+significance, which (as we have seen) had been widely recognized before.
+Only--as I suppose must happen with all local religions--it narrowed the
+application and outlook of the doctrine down to a special case--"As
+in Adam all die, so in CHRIST shall all be made alive." The Universal
+Spirit which can give rebirth and salvation to EVERY child of man to
+whom it comes, was offered only under a very special form--that of Jesus
+Christ. (1) In this respect it was no better than the religions
+which preceded it. In some respects--that is, where it was especially
+fanatical, blinkered, and hostile to other sects--it was WORSE. But
+to those who perceive that the Great Spirit may bring new birth and
+salvation to some under the form of Osiris, equally well as to others
+under the form of Jesus, or again to some under the form of a Siberian
+totem-Bear equally as to others under the form of Osiris, these
+questionings and narrowings fall away as of no importance. We in this
+latter day can see the main thing, namely that Christianity was and is
+just one phase of a world-old religion, slowly perhaps expanding its
+scope, but whose chief attitudes and orientations have been the same
+through the centuries.
+
+ (1) The same happened with regard to another great Pagan doctrine
+(to which I have just alluded), the doctrine of transformations and
+metamorphoses; and whereas the pagans believed in these things, as the
+common and possible heritage of EVERY man, the Christians only allowed
+themselves to entertain the idea in the special and unique instance of
+the Transfiguration of Christ.
+
+
+Many other illustrations might be taken of the truth of this view, but
+I will confine myself to two or three more. There is the instance of the
+Eucharist and its exceedingly widespread celebration (under very various
+forms) among the pagans all over the world--as well as among Christians.
+I have already said enough on this subject, and need not delay over it.
+By partaking of the sacramental meal, even in its wildest and crudest
+shapes, as in the mysteries of Dionysus, one was identified with and
+united to the god; in its milder and more spiritual aspects as in the
+Mithraic, Egyptian, Hindu and Christian cults, one passed behind the
+veil of maya and this ever-changing world, and entered into the region
+of divine peace and power. (1)
+
+
+ (1) Baring Gould in his Orig. Relig. Belief, I. 401,
+says:--"Among the ancient Hindus Soma was a chief deity; he is called
+the Giver of Life and Health.... He became incarnate among men, was
+taken by them and slain, and brayed in a mortar (a god of corn and wine
+apparently). But he rose in flame to heaven to be 'the Benefactor of the
+World' and the 'Mediator between God and Man!' Through communion with
+him in his sacrifice, man (who partook of this god) has an assurance of
+immortality, for by that sacrament he obtains union with his divinity."
+
+
+Or again the doctrine of the Saviour. That also is one on which I need
+not add much to what has been said already. The number of pagan deities
+(mostly virgin-born and done to death in some way or other in their
+efforts to save mankind) is so great (1) as to be difficult to keep
+account of. The god Krishna in India, the god Indra in Nepaul and
+Thibet, spilt their blood for the salvation of men; Buddha said,
+according to Max Muller, (2) "Let all the sins that were in the world
+fall on me, that the world may be delivered"; the Chinese Tien, the Holy
+One--"one with God and existing with him from all eternity"--died to
+save the world; the Egyptian Osiris was called Saviour, so was Horus;
+so was the Persian Mithras; so was the Greek Hercules who overcame Death
+though his body was consumed in the burning garment of mortality, out
+of which he rose into heaven. So also was the Phrygian Attis called
+Saviour, and the Syrian Tammuz or Adonis likewise--both of whom, as we
+have seen, were nailed or tied to a tree, and afterwards rose again
+from their biers, or coffins. Prometheus, the greatest and earliest
+benefactor of the human race, was NAILED BY THE HANDS and feet, and with
+arms extended, to the rocks of Mount Caucasus. Bacchus or Dionysus,
+born of the virgin Semele to be the Liberator of mankind (Dionysus
+Eleutherios as he was called), was torn to pieces, not unlike Osiris.
+Even in far Mexico Quetzalcoatl, the Saviour, was born of a virgin, was
+tempted, and fasted forty days, was done to death, and his second coming
+looked for so eagerly that (as is well known) when Cortes appeared, the
+Mexicans, poor things, greeted HIM as the returning god! (3) In Peru
+and among the American Indians, North and South of the Equator, similar
+legends are, or were, to be found.
+
+ (1) See for a considerable list Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xx.
+
+ (2) Hist. Sanskrit Literature, p. 80.
+
+ (3) See Kingsborough, Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi.
+
+
+Briefly sketched as all this is, it is enough to prove quite abundantly
+that the doctrine of the Saviour is world-wide and world-old, and that
+Christianity merely appropriated the same and (as the other cults did)
+gave it a special color. Probably the wide range of this doctrine would
+have been far better and more generally known, had not the Christian
+Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the greatest
+precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of pagan claims on
+the subject. There is much to show that the early Church took this line
+with regard to pre-Christian saviours; (1) and in later times the same
+policy is remarkably illustrated by the treatment in the sixteenth
+century of the writings of Sahagun the Spanish missionary--to whose work
+I have already referred. Sahagun was a wonderfully broad-minded and fine
+man who, while he did not conceal the barbarities of the Aztec religion,
+was truthful enough to point out redeeming traits in the manners and
+customs of the people and some resemblances to Christian doctrine and
+practice. This infuriated the bigoted Catholics of the newly formed
+Mexican Church. They purloined the manuscripts of Sahagun's Historia and
+scattered and hid them about the country, and it was only after infinite
+labor and an appeal to the Spanish Court that he got them together
+again. Finally, at the age of eighty, having translated them into
+Spanish (from the original Mexican) he sent them in two big volumes home
+to Spain for safety; but there almost immediately THEY DISAPPEARED, and
+could not be found! It was only after TWO CENTURIES that they ultimately
+turned up (1790) in a Convent at Tolosa in Navarre. Lord Kingsborough
+published them in England in 1830.
+
+ (1) See Tertullian's Apologia, c. 16; Ad Nationes, c. xii.
+
+
+I have thus dwelt upon several of the main doctrines of
+Christianity--namely, those of Sin and Sacrifice, the Eucharist, the
+Saviour, the Second Birth, and Transfiguration--as showing that they are
+by no means unique in our religion, but were common to nearly all the
+religions of the ancient world. The list might be much further extended,
+but there is no need to delay over a subject which is now very generally
+understood. I will, however, devote a page or two to one instance, which
+I think is very remarkable, and full of deep suggestion.
+
+There is no doctrine in Christianity which is more reverenced by the
+adherents of that religion, or held in higher estimation, than that God
+sacrificed his only Son for the salvation of the world; also that since
+the Son was not only of like nature but of the SAME nature with the
+Father, and equal to him as being the second Person of the Divine
+Trinity, the sacrifice amounted to an immolation of Himself for the good
+of mankind. The doctrine is so mystical, so remote, and in a sense so
+absurd and impossible, that it has been a favorite mark through the
+centuries for the ridicule of the scoffers and enemies of the Church;
+and here, it might easily be thought, is a belief which--whether it be
+considered glorious or whether contemptible--is at any rate unique, and
+peculiar to that Church.
+
+And yet the extraordinary fact is that a similar belief ranges all
+through the ancient religions, and can be traced back to the earliest
+times. The word host which is used in the Catholic Mass for the bread
+and wine on the Altar, supposed to be the transubstantiated body
+and blood of Christ, is from the Latin Hostia which the dictionary
+interprets as "an animal slain in sacrifice, a sin-offering." It takes
+us far far back to the Totem stage of folk-life, when the tribe, as I
+have already explained, crowned a victim-bull or bear or other animal
+with flowers, and honoring it with every offering of food and worship,
+sacrificed the victim to the Totem spirit of the tribe, and consumed it
+in an Eucharistic feast--the medicine-man or priest who conducted the
+ritual wearing a skin of the same beast as a sign that he represented
+the Totem-divinity, taking part in the sacrifice of 'himself to
+himself.' It reminds us of the Khonds of Bengal sacrificing their
+meriahs crowned and decorated as gods and goddesses; of the Aztecs doing
+the same; of Quetzalcoatl pricking his elbows and fingers so as to draw
+blood, which he offered on his own altar; or of Odin hanging by his own
+desire upon a tree. "I know I was hanged upon a tree shaken by the winds
+for nine long nights. I was transfixed by a spear; I was moved to Odin,
+myself to myself." And so on. The instances are endless. "I am the
+oblation," says the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, (1) "I am the
+sacrifice, I the ancestral offering." "In the truly orthodox conception
+of sacrifice," says Elie Reclus, (2) "the consecrated offering, be it
+man, woman or virgin, lamb or heifer, cock or dove, represents THE DEITY
+HIMSELF.... Brahma is the 'imperishable sacrifice'; Indra, Soma, Hari
+and the other gods, became incarnate in animals to the sole end that
+they might be immolated. Perusha, the Universal Being, caused himself to
+be slain by the Immortals, and from his substance were born the birds of
+the air, wild and domestic animals, the offerings of butter and curds.
+The world, declared the Rishis, is a series of sacrifices disclosing
+other sacrifices. To stop them would be to suspend the life of Nature.
+The god Siva, to whom the Tipperahs of Bengal are supposed to have
+sacrificed as many as a thousand human victims a year, said to the
+Brahamins: 'It is I that am the actual offering; it is I that you
+butcher upon my altars.'"
+
+ (1) Ch. ix, v. 16.
+
+ (2) Primitive Folk, ch. vi.
+
+
+It was in allusion to this doctrine that R. W. Emerson, paraphrasing the
+Katha-Upanishad, wrote that immortal verse of his:--
+
+     If the red slayer thinks he slays,
+          Or the slain thinks he is slain,
+     They know not well the subtle ways
+          I take, and pass, and turn again.
+
+
+I say it is an astonishing thing to think and realize that this profound
+and mystic doctrine of the eternal sacrifice of Himself, ordained by
+the Great Spirit for the creation and salvation of the world--a doctrine
+which has attracted and fascinated many of the great thinkers and nobler
+minds of Europe, which has also inspired the religious teachings of
+the Indian sages and to a less philosophical degree the writings of the
+Christian Saints--should have been seized in its general outline and
+essence by rude and primitive people before the dawn of history, and
+embodied in their rites and ceremonials. What is the explanation of this
+fact?
+
+It is very puzzling. The whole subject is puzzling. The world-wide
+adoption of similar creeds and rituals (and, we may add, legends and
+fairy tales) among early peoples, and in far-sundered places and times
+is so remarkable that it has given the students of these subjects
+'furiously to think' (1)--yet for the most part without great success in
+the way of finding a solution. The supposition that (1) the creed, rite
+or legend in question has sprung up, so to speak, accidentally, in one
+place, and then has travelled (owing to some inherent plausibility) over
+the rest of the world, is of course one that commends itself readily at
+first; but on closer examination the practical difficulties it presents
+are certainly very great. These include the migrations of customs and
+myths in quite early ages of the earth across trackless oceans and
+continents, and between races and peoples absolutely incapable of
+understanding each other. And if to avoid these difficulties it is
+assumed that the present human race all proceeds from one original
+stock which radiating from one centre--say in South-Eastern Asia
+(2)--overspread the world, carrying its rites and customs with it, why,
+then we are compelled to face the difficulty of supposing this radiation
+to have taken place at an enormous time ago (the continents being then
+all more or less conjoined) and at a period when it is doubtful if any
+religious rites and customs at all existed; not to mention the further
+difficulty of supposing all the four or five hundred languages now
+existing to be descended from one common source. The far tradition of
+the Island of Atlantis seems to afford a possible explanation of the
+community of rites and customs between the Old and New World, and
+this without assuming in any way that Atlantis (if it existed) was the
+original and SOLE cradle of the human race. (3) Anyhow it is clear that
+these origins of human culture must be of extreme antiquity, and that
+it would not be wise to be put off the track of the investigation of a
+possible common source merely by that fact of antiquity.
+
+ (1) See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii.
+
+ (2) See Hastings, Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "Ethnology."
+
+ (3) E. J. Payne, History of the New World called America (vol. i,
+p. 93) says: "It is certain that Europe and America once formed a single
+continent," but inroads of the sea "left a vast island or peninsula
+stretching from Iceland to the Azores--which gradually disappeared."
+Also he speaks (i. 93) of the "Miocene Bridge" between Siberia and the
+New World.
+
+
+A second supposition, however, is (2) that the natural psychological
+evolution of the human mind has in the various times and climes led folk
+of the most diverse surroundings and heredity--and perhaps even sprung
+from separate anthropoid stocks--to develop their social and religious
+ideas along the same general lines--and that even to the extent of
+exhibiting at times a remarkable similarity in minute details. This is a
+theory which commends itself greatly to a deeper and more philosophical
+consideration; but it brings us up point-blank against another most
+difficult question (which we have already raised), namely, how to
+account for extremely rude and primitive peoples in the far past, and on
+the very borderland of the animal life, having been SUSCEPTIBLE to the
+germs of great religious ideas (such as we have mentioned) and having
+been instinctively--though not of course by any process of conscious
+reasoning--moved to express them in symbols and rites and ceremonials,
+and (later no doubt) in myths and legends, which satisfied their
+FEELINGS and sense of fitness--though they may not have known WHY--and
+afterwards were capable of being taken up and embodied in the great
+philosophical religions.
+
+This difficulty almost compels us to a view of human knowledge which has
+found supporters among some able thinkers--the view, namely, that a vast
+store of knowledge is already contained in the subconscious mind of man
+(and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer experience
+to bring it to the surface; and that in the second stage of human
+psychology this process of crude and piecemeal externalization is
+taking place, in preparation for the final or third stage in which the
+knowledge will be re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a
+high and harmonious plane--something like the present intuition of the
+animals as we perceive it on the animal plane. However this general
+subject is one on which I shall touch again, and I do not propose to
+dwell on it at any length now.
+
+There is a third alternative theory (3)--a combination of (1) and
+(2)--namely, that if one accepts (2) and the idea that at any given
+stage of human development there is a PREDISPOSITION to certain symbols
+and rites belonging to that stage, then it is much more easy to accept
+theory (1) as an important factor in the spread of such symbols and
+rites; for clearly, then, the smallest germ of a custom or practice,
+transported from one country or people to another at the right time,
+would be sufficient to wake the development or growth in question
+and stimulate it into activity. It will be seen, therefore, that the
+important point towards the solution of this whole puzzling question is
+the discussion, of theory (2)--and to this theory, as illustrated by the
+world-wide myth of the Golden Age, I will now turn.
+
+
+
+
+IX. MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+
+The tradition of a "Golden Age" is widespread over the world, and it is
+not necessary to go at any length into the story of the Garden of Eden
+and the other legends which in almost every country illustrate this
+tradition. Without indulging in sentiment on the subject we may hold it
+not unlikely that the tradition is justified by the remembrance, among
+the people of every race, of a pre-civilization period of comparative
+harmony and happiness when two things, which to-day we perceive to be
+the prolific causes of discord and misery, were absent or only weakly
+developed--namely, PROPERTY and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. (1)
+
+ (1) For a fuller working out of this, see Civilisation: its Cause
+and Cure, by E. Carpenter, ch. i.
+
+
+During the first century B.C. there was a great spread of Messianic
+Ideas over the Roman world, and Virgil's 4th Eclogue, commonly called
+the Messianic Eclogue, reflects very clearly this state of the public
+mind. The expected babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian
+(Augustus) the first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded it
+in Virgil's verse. Unfortunately it turned out to be a GIRL! However
+there is little doubt that Virgil did--in that very sad age of the
+world, an age of "misery and massacre," and in common with thousands
+of others--look for the coming of a great 'redeemer.' It was only a few
+years earlier--about B.C. 70--that the great revolt of the shamefully
+maltreated Roman slaves occurred, and that in revenge six thousand
+prisoners from Spartacus' army were nailed on crosses all the way from
+Rome to Capua (150 miles). But long before this Hesiod had recorded a
+past Golden Age when life had been gracious in communal fraternity and
+joyful in peace, when human beings and animals spoke the same language,
+when death had followed on sleep, without old age or disease, and after
+death men had moved as good daimones or genii over the lands. Pindar,
+three hundred years after Hesiod, had confirmed the existence of the
+Islands of the Blest, where the good led a blameless, tearless, life.
+Plato the same, (1) with further references to the fabled island of
+Atlantis; the Egyptians believed in a former golden age under the god
+R[a^] to which they looked back with regret and envy; the Persians had
+a garden of Eden similar to that of the Hebrews; the Greeks a garden
+of the Hesperides, in which dwelt the serpent whose head was ultimately
+crushed beneath the heel of Hercules; and so on. The references to a
+supposed far-back state of peace and happiness are indeed numerous.
+
+ (1) See arts. by Margaret Scholes, Socialist Review, Nov. and
+Dec. 1912.
+
+
+So much so that latterly, and partly to explain their prevalence, a
+theory has been advanced which may be worth while mentioning. It is
+called the "Theory of intra-uterine Blessedness," and, remote as it may
+at first appear, it certainly has some claim for attention. The theory
+is that in the minds of mature people there still remain certain vague
+memories of their pre-natal days in the maternal womb--memories of a
+life which, though full of growing vigor and vitality, was yet at that
+time one of absolute harmony with the surroundings, and of perfect peace
+and contentment, spent within the body of the mother--the embryo indeed
+standing in the same relation to the mother as St. Paul says WE stand to
+God, "IN whom we live and move and have our being"; and that these vague
+memories of the intra-uterine life in the individual are referred back
+by the mature mind to a past age in the life of the RACE. Though it
+would not be easy at present to positively confirm this theory, yet one
+may say that it is neither improbable nor unworthy of consideration;
+also that it bears a certain likeness to the former ones about the
+Eden-gardens, etc. The well-known parallelism of the Individual history
+with the Race-history, the "recapitulation" by the embryo of the
+development of the race, does in fact afford an additional argument for
+its favorable reception.
+
+These considerations, and what we have said so often in the foregoing
+chapters about the unity of the Animals (and Early Man) with Nature, and
+their instinctive and age-long adjustment to the conditions of the
+world around them, bring us up hard and fast against the following
+conclusions, which I think we shall find difficult to avoid.
+
+We all recognize the extraordinary grace and beauty, in their different
+ways, of the (wild) animals; and not only their beauty but the extreme
+fitness of their actions and habits to their surroundings--their subtle
+and penetrating Intelligence in fact. Only we do not generally use
+the word "Intelligence." We use another word (Instinct)--and rightly
+perhaps, because their actions are plainly not the result of definite
+self-conscious reasoning, such as we use, carried out by each
+individual; but are (as has been abundantly proved by Samuel Butler and
+others) the systematic expression of experiences gathered up and sorted
+out and handed down from generation to generation in the bosom of the
+race--an Intelligence in fact, or Insight, of larger subtler scope than
+the other, and belonging to the tribal or racial Being rather than to
+the isolated individual--a super-consciousness in fact, ramifying afar
+in space and time.
+
+But if we allow (as we must) this unity and perfection of nature, and
+this somewhat cosmic character of the mind, to exist among the Animals,
+we can hardly refuse to believe that there must have been a period when
+Man, too, hardly as yet differentiated from them, did himself
+possess these same qualities--perhaps even in greater degree than the
+animals--of grace and beauty of body, perfection of movement and action,
+instinctive perception and knowledge (of course in limited spheres); and
+a period when he possessed above all a sense of unity with his fellows
+and with surrounding Nature which became the ground of a common
+consciousness between himself and his tribe, similar to that which
+Maeterlinck, in the case of the Bees, calls the Spirit of the Hive. (1)
+It would be difficult, nay impossible, to suppose that human beings
+on their first appearance formed an entire exception in the process of
+evolution, or that they were completely lacking in the very graces and
+faculties which we so admire in the animals--only of course we see that
+(LIKE the animals) they would not be SELF-conscious in these matters,
+and what perception they had of their relations to each other or to
+the world around them would be largely inarticulate and
+SUB-conscious--though none the less real for that.
+
+ (1) See The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck; and for
+numerous similar cases among other animals, P. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: a
+factor in Evolution.
+
+
+Let us then grant this preliminary assumption--and it clearly is not
+a large or hazardous one--and what follows? It follows--since to-day
+discord is the rule, and Man has certainly lost the grace, both physical
+and mental, of the animals--that at some period a break must have
+occurred in the evolution-process, a discontinuity--similar perhaps to
+that which occurs in the life of a child at the moment when it is born
+into the world. Humanity took a new departure; but a departure which for
+the moment was signalized as a LOSS--the loss of its former harmony and
+self-adjustment. And the cause or accompaniment of this change was the
+growth of Self-consciousness. Into the general consciousness of the
+tribe (in relation to its environment) which in fact had constituted
+the mentality of the animals and of man up to this stage, there now was
+intruded another kind of consciousness, a consciousness centering round
+each little individual self and concerned almost entirely with the
+interests of the latter. Here was evidently a threat to the continuance
+of the former happy conditions. It was like the appearance of
+innumerable little ulcers in a human body--a menace which if continued
+would inevitably lead to the break-up of the body. It meant loss of
+tribal harmony and nature-adjustment. It meant instead of unity a myriad
+conflicting centres; it meant alienation from the spirit of the tribe,
+the separation of man from man, discord, recrimination, and the fatal
+unfolding of the sense of sin. The process symbolized itself in the
+legend of the Fall. Man ate of the Tree of the knowledge of good and
+evil. Sometimes people wonder why knowledge of any kind--and especially
+the knowledge of good and evil--should have brought a curse. But the
+reason is obvious. Into, the placid and harmonious life of the animal
+and human tribes fulfilling their days in obedience to the slow
+evolutions and age-long mandates of nature, Self-consciousness broke
+with its inconvenient and impossible query: "How do these arrangements
+suit ME? Are they good for me, are they evil for me? I want to know. I
+WILL KNOW!" Evidently knowledge (such knowledge as we understand by
+the word) only began, and could only begin, by queries relating to the
+little local self. There was no other way for it to begin. Knowledge and
+self-consciousness were born, as twins, together. Knowledge therefore
+meant Sin (1); for self-consciousness meant sin (and it means sin
+to-day). Sin is Separation. That is probably (though disputed) the
+etymology of the word--that which sunders. (2) The essence of sin is
+one's separation from the whole (the tribe or the god) of which one is
+a part. And knowledge--which separates subject from object, and in its
+inception is necessarily occupied with the 'good and evil' of the little
+local self, is the great engine of this separation. (Mark! I say nothing
+AGAINST this association of Self-consciousness with 'Sin' (so-called)
+and 'Knowledge' (so-called). The growth of all three together is an
+absolutely necessary part of human evolution, and to rail against it
+would be absurd. But we may as well open our eyes and see the fact
+straight instead of blinking it.) The culmination of the process and the
+fulfilment of the 'curse' we may watch to-day in the towering expansion
+of the self-conscious individualized Intellect--science as the handmaid
+of human Greed devastating the habitable world and destroying its
+unworthy civilization. And the process must go on--necessarily must
+go on--until Self-consciousness, ceasing its vain quest (vain in both
+senses) for the separate domination of life, surrenders itself back
+again into the arms of the Mother-consciousness from which it originally
+sprang--surrenders itself back, not to be merged in nonentity, but to be
+affiliated in loving dependence on and harmony with the cosmic life.
+
+ (1) Compare also other myths, like Cupid and Psyche, Lohengrin
+etc., in which a fatal curiosity leads to tragedy.
+
+ (2) German Sunde, sin, and sonder, separated; Dutch zonde, sin;
+Latin sons, guilty. Not unlikely that the German root Suhn, expiation,
+is connected; Suhn-bock, a scape-goat.
+
+
+All this I have dealt with in far more detail in Civilization: its
+Cause and Cure, and in The Art of Creation; but I have only repeated the
+outline of it as above, because some such outline is necessary for the
+proper ordering and understanding of the points which follow.
+
+We are not concerned now with the ultimate effects of the 'Fall' of Man
+or with the present-day fulfilment of the Eden-curse. What we want to
+understand is how the 'Fall' into self-consciousness led to that great
+panorama of Ritual and Religion which we have very briefly described
+and summarized in the preceding chapters of this book. We want for the
+present to fix our attention on the COMMENCEMENT of that process by
+which man lapsed away from his living community with Nature and his
+fellows into the desert of discord and toil, while the angels of the
+flaming sword closed the gates of Paradise behind him.
+
+It is evident I think that in that 'golden' stage when man was simply
+the crown and perfection of the animals--and it is hardly possible
+to refuse the belief in such a stage--he possessed in reality all the
+essentials of Religion. (1) It is not necessary to sentimentalize over
+him; he was probably raw and crude in his lusts of hunger and of sex;
+he was certainly ignorant and superstitious; he loved fighting with
+and persecuting 'enemies' (which things of course all religions
+to-day--except perhaps the Buddhist--love to do); he was dominated often
+by unreasoning Fear, and was consequently cruel. Yet he was full of that
+Faith which the animals have to such an admirable degree--unhesitating
+faith in the inner promptings of his OWN nature; he had the joy which
+comes of abounding vitality, springing up like a fountain whose outlet
+is free and unhindered; he rejoiced in an untroubled and unbroken
+sense of unity with his Tribe, and in elaborate social and friendly
+institutions within its borders; he had a marvelous sense-acuteness
+towards Nature and a gift in that direction verging towards
+"second-sight"; strengthened by a conviction--which had never become
+CONSCIOUS because it had never been QUESTIONED--of his own personal
+relation to the things outside him, the Earth, the Sky, the Vegetation,
+the Animals. Of such a Man we get glimpses in the far past--though
+indeed only glimpses, for the simple reason that all our knowledge of
+him comes through civilized channels; and wherever civilization has
+touched these early peoples it has already withered and corrupted
+them, even before it has had the sense to properly observe them. It
+is sufficient, however, just to mention peoples like some of the early
+Pacific Islanders, the Zulus and Kafirs of South Africa, the Fans of the
+Congo Region (of whom Winwood Reade (2) speaks so highly), some of the
+Malaysian and Himalayan tribes, the primitive Chinese, and even the
+evidence with regard to the neolithic peoples of Europe, (3) in order to
+show what I mean.
+
+ (1) See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths, etc., introduction: "The
+primitive life of humanity, in so far as it is not purely animal, is
+religious. Religion is the parent stem which has thrown off, one by one,
+art, agriculture, law, morality, politics, etc."
+
+ (2) Savage Africa, ch. xxxvii.
+
+ (3) See Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, ch. iii.
+
+
+Perhaps one of the best ideas of the gulf of difference between the
+semi-civilized and the quite primal man is given by A. R. Wallace in
+his Life (Vol. i, p. 288): "A most unexpected sensation of surprise and
+delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature
+with absolute uncontaminated savages! This was on the Uaupes river....
+They were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing
+to do with the white men or their ways; they walked with the free step
+of the independent forest-dweller... original and self-sustaining as the
+wild animals of the forests, absolutely independent of civilization...
+living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless
+generations before America was discovered. Indeed the true denizen of
+the Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be
+forgotten." Elsewhere (3) Wallace speaks of the quiet, good-natured,
+inoffensive character of these copper-colored peoples, and of their
+quickness of hand and skill, and continues: "their figures are generally
+superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
+statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human
+form."
+
+
+ (3) Travels on the Amazon (1853), ch. xvii.
+
+
+Though some of the peoples just mentioned may be said to belong to
+different grades or stages of human evolution and physically some no
+doubt were far superior to others, yet they mostly exhibit this simple
+grace of the bodily and mental organism, as well as that closeness of
+tribal solidarity of which I have spoken. The immense antiquity, of
+the clan organization, as shown by investigations into early marriage,
+points to the latter conclusion. Travellers among Bushmen, Hottentots,
+Fuegians, Esquimaux, Papuans and other peoples--peoples who have been
+pushed aside into unfavorable areas by the invasion of more warlike
+and better-equipped races, and who have suffered physically in
+consequence--confirm this. Kropotkin, speaking of the Hottentots, quotes
+the German author P. Kolben who travelled among them in 1275 or so. "He
+knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence,
+but could not praise their tribal morality highly enough. Their word is
+sacred, he wrote, they know nothing of the corruption and faithless arts
+of Europe. They live in great tranquillity and are seldom at war with
+their neighbors, and are all kindness and goodwill to one another." (1)
+Kropotkin further says: "Let me remark that when Kolben says 'they are
+certainly the most friendly, the most liberal and the most benevolent
+people to one another that ever appeared on the earth' he wrote a
+sentence which has continually appeared since in the description of
+savages. When first meeting with primitive races, the Europeans usually
+make a caricature of their life; but when an intelligent man has
+stayed among them for a longer time he generally describes them as the
+'kindest' or the 'gentlest' race on the earth. These very same words
+have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dyaks,
+the Aleuts, the Papuans, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also
+remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the
+Sioux, and several others. The very frequency of that high commendation
+already speaks volumes in itself." (2)
+
+ (1) P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 90. W. J. Solias also speaks in
+terms of the highest praise of the Bushmen--"their energy, patience,
+courage, loyalty, affection, good manners and artistic sense" (Ancient
+Hunters, 1915, p. 425).
+
+ (2) Ibid, p. 91.
+
+
+Many of the tribes, like the Aleuts, Eskimos, Dyaks, Papuans, Fuegians,
+etc., are themselves in the Neolithic stage of culture--though for the
+reason given above probably degenerated physically from the standard of
+their neolithic ancestors; and so the conclusion is forced upon one
+that there must have been an IMMENSE PERIOD, (1) prior to the first
+beginnings of 'civilization,' in which the human tribes in general led a
+peaceful and friendly life on the earth, comparatively little broken
+up by dissensions, in close contact with Nature and in that degree
+of sympathy with and understanding of the Animals which led to the
+establishment of the Totem system. Though it would be absurd to credit
+these tribes with any great degree of comfort and well-being according
+to our modern standards, yet we may well suppose that the memory of
+this long period lingered on for generations and generations and was
+ultimately idealized into the Golden Age, in contrast to the succeeding
+period of everlasting warfare, rancor and strife, which came in with the
+growth of Property with its greeds and jealousies, and the accentuation
+of Self-consciousness with all its vanities and ambitions.
+
+ (1) See for estimates of periods ch. xiv; also, for the
+peacefulness of these early peoples, Havelock Ellis on "The Origin of
+War," where he says "We do not find the WEAPONS of warfare or the WOUNDS
+of warfare among these Palaeolithic remains ... it was with civilization
+that the art of killing developed, i. e. within the last 10,000 or
+12,000 years when Neolithic men (who became our ancestors) were just
+arriving."
+
+
+I say that each tribe at this early stage of development had within it
+the ESSENTIALS of what we call Religion--namely a bedrock sense of its
+community with Nature, and of the Common life among its members--a sense
+so intimate and fundamental that it was hardly aware of itself (any more
+than the fish is aware of the sea in which it lives), but yet was really
+the matrix of tribal thought and the spring of tribal action. It
+was this sense of unity which was destined by the growth of
+SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS to come to light and evidence in the shape of all
+manner of rituals and ceremonials; and by the growth of the IMAGINATIVE
+INTELLECT to embody itself in the figures and forms of all manner of
+deities.
+
+Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark soaring in the
+eye of the sun, and singing rapt between its "heaven and home" realizes
+no doubt in actual fact all that those two words mean to us; yet
+its realization is quite subconscious. It does not define its own
+experience: it FEELS but it does not THINK. In order to come to the
+stage of THINKING it would perhaps be necessary that the lark should
+be exiled from the earth and the sky, and confined in a cage. Early Man
+FELT the great truths and realities of Life--often I believe more purely
+than we do--but he could not give form to his experience. THAT stage
+came when he began to lose touch with these realities; and it showed
+itself in rites and ceremonials. The inbreak of self-consciousness
+brought OUT the facts of his inner life into ritualistic and afterwards
+into intellectual forms.
+
+Let me give examples. For a long time the Tribe is all in all; the
+individual is completely subject to the 'Spirit of the Hive'; he
+does not even THINK of contravening it. Then the day comes when
+self-interest, as apart from the Tribe, becomes sufficiently strong to
+drive him against some tribal custom. He breaks the tabu; he eats the
+forbidden apple; he sins against the tribe, and is cast out. Suddenly he
+finds himself an exile, lonely, condemned and deserted. A horrible sense
+of distress seizes him--something of which he had no experience before.
+He tries to think about it all, to understand the situation, but
+is dazed and cannot arrive at any conclusion. His one NECESSITY is
+Reconciliation, Atonement. He finds he cannot LIVE outside of and
+alienated from his tribe. He makes a Sacrifice, an offering to his
+fellows, as a seal of sincerity--an offering of his own bodily suffering
+or precious blood, or the blood of some food-animal, or some valuable
+gift or other--if only he may be allowed to return. The offering is
+accepted. The ritual is performed; and he is received back. I have
+already spoken of this perfectly natural evolution of the twin-ideas
+of Sin and Sacrifice, so I need not enlarge upon the subject. But two
+things we may note here: (1) that the ritual, being so concrete (and
+often severe), graves itself on the minds of those concerned, and
+expresses the feelings of the tribe, with an intensity and sharpness of
+outline which no words could rival, and (2) that such rituals may have,
+and probably did, come into use even while language itself was in an
+infantile condition and incapable of dealing with the psychological
+situation except by symbols. They, the rituals, were the first effort of
+the primitive mind to get beyond, subconscious feeling and emerge into a
+world of forms and definite thought.
+
+Let us carry the particular instance, given above, a stage farther, even
+to the confines of abstract Thought and Philosophy. I have spoken of
+"The Spirit of the Hive" as if the term were applicable to the Human as
+well as to the Bee tribe. The individual bee obviously has never THOUGHT
+about that 'Spirit,' nor mentally understood what Maeterlinck means by
+it; and yet in terms of actual experience it is an intense reality to
+the bee (ordaining for instance on some fateful day the slaughter of all
+the drones), controlling bee-movements and bee-morality generally. The
+individual tribesman similarly steeped in the age-long human life of his
+fellows has never thought of the Tribe as an ordaining being or Spirit,
+separate from himself--TILL that day when he is exiled and outcast from
+it. THEN he sees himself and the tribe as two opposing beings, himself
+of course an Intelligence or Spirit in his own limited degree, the Tribe
+as a much greater Intelligence or Spirit, standing against and over him.
+From that day the conception of a god arises on him. It may be only
+a totem-god--a divine Grizzly-Bear or what not--but still a god or
+supernatural Presence, embodied in the life of the tribe. This is
+what Sin has taught him. (1) This is what Fear, founded on
+self-consciousness, has revealed to him. The revelation may be true,
+or it may be fallacious (I do not prejudge it); but there it is--the
+beginning of that long series of human evolutions which we call
+Religion.
+
+ (1) It is to be noted, in that charming idyll of the Eden garden,
+that it is only AFTER eating of the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve
+perceive the Lord God walking in the garden, and converse with him
+(Genesis iii. 8).
+
+
+ (For when the human mind has reached that stage of
+consciousness in which each man realizes his own 'self' as a rational
+and consistent being, "looking before and after," then, as I have
+said already, the mind projects on the background of Nature similarly
+rational Presences which we may call 'Gods'; and at that stage
+'Religion' begins. Before that, when the mind is quite unformed and
+dream-like, and consists chiefly of broken and scattered rays, and when
+distinct self-consciousness is hardly yet developed, then the presences
+imagined in Nature are merely flickering and intermittent phantoms, and
+their propitiation and placation comes more properly under, the head of
+'Magic.')
+
+So much for the genesis of the religious ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, and
+the rites connected with these ideas--their genesis through the in-break
+of self-consciousness upon the corporate SUB-consciousness of the life
+of the Community. But an exactly similar process may be observed in the
+case of the other religious ideas.
+
+I spoke of the doctrine of the SECOND BIRTH, and the rites connected
+with it both in Paganism and in Christianity. There is much to show that
+among quite primitive peoples there is less of shrinking from death and
+more of certainty about a continued life after death than we generally
+find among more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has been,
+quite, common among many tribes for the old and decrepit, who are
+becoming a burden to their fellows, to offer themselves for happy
+dispatch, and to take willing part in the ceremonial preparations for
+their own extinction; and this readiness is encouraged by their
+na[i:]ve and untroubled belief in a speedy transference to "happy
+hunting-grounds" beyond the grave. The truth is that when, as in such
+cases, the tribal life is very whole and unbroken--each individual
+identifying himself completely with the tribe--the idea of the
+individual's being dropped out at death, and left behind by the tribe,
+hardly arises. The individual is the tribe, has no other existence.
+The tribe goes on, living a life which is eternal, and only changes its
+hunting-grounds; and the individual, identified with the tribe, feels in
+some subconscious way the same about himself.
+
+But when one member has broken faith with the tribe, when he has sinned
+against it and become an outcast--ah! then the terrors of death and
+extinction loom large upon him. "The wages of sin is death." There comes
+a period in the evolution of tribal life when the primitive bonds are
+loosening, when the tendency towards SELF-will and SELF-determination
+(so necessary of course in the long run for the evolution of humanity)
+becomes a real danger to the tribe, and a terror to the wise men and
+elders of the community. It is seen that the children inherit this
+tendency--even from their infancy. They are no longer mere animals,
+easily herded; it seems that they are born in sin--or at least in
+ignorance and neglect of their tribal life and calling. The only cure is
+that they MUST BE BORN AGAIN. They must deliberately and of set purpose
+be adopted into the tribe, and be made to realize, even severely,
+in their own persons what is happening. They must go through the
+initiations necessary to impress this upon them. Thus a whole series of
+solemn rites spring up, different no doubt in every locality, but all
+having the same object and purpose. (And one can understand how the
+necessity of such initiations and second birth may easily have been
+itself felt in every race, at some stage of its evolution--and THAT
+quite as a spontaneous growth, and independently of any contagion of
+example caught from other races.)
+
+The same may be said about the world-wide practice of the Eucharist.
+No more effective method exists for impressing on the members of a body
+their community of life with each other, and causing them to forget
+their jangling self-interests, than to hold a feast in common. It is a
+method which has been honored in all ages as well as to-day. But when
+the flesh partaken of at the feast is that of the Totem--the guardian
+and presiding genius of the tribe--or perhaps of one of its chief
+food-animals--then clearly the feast takes on a holy and solemn
+character. It becomes a sacrament of unity--of the unity of all with the
+tribe, and with each other. Self-interests and self-consciousness are
+for the time submerged, and the common life asserts itself; but here
+again we see that a custom like this would not come into being as a
+deliberate rite UNTIL self-consciousness and the divisions consequent
+thereon had grown to be an obvious evil. The herd-animals (cows, sheep,
+and so forth) do not have Eucharists, simply because they are sensible
+enough to feed along the same pastures without quarrelling over the
+richest tufts of grass.
+
+When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically) is not that
+of a divinized animal, but the flesh of a human-formed god--as in the
+mysteries of Dionysus or Osiris or Christ--then we are led to suspect
+(and of course this theory is widely held and supported) that the rites
+date from a very far-back period when a human being, as representative
+of the tribe, was actually slain, dismembered and partly devoured;
+though as time went on, the rite gradually became glossed over and
+mitigated into a love-communion through the sharing of bread and wine.
+
+It is curious anyhow that the dismemberment or division into fragments
+of the body of a god (as in the case of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis,
+Praj[a']pati and others) should be so frequent a tenet of the
+old religions, and so commonly associated with a love-feast of
+reconciliation and resurrection. It may be fairly interpreted as a
+symbol of Nature-dismemberment in Winter and resurrection in Spring; but
+we must also not forget that it may (and indeed must) have stood as
+an allegory of TRIBAL dismemberment and reconciliation--the tribe,
+conceived of as a divinity, having thus suffered and died through the
+inbreak of sin and the self-motive, and risen again into wholeness by
+the redemption of love and sacrifice. Whatever view the rank and file of
+the tribe may have taken of the matter, I think it is incontestable that
+the more thoughtful regarded these rites as full of mystic and spiritual
+meaning. It is of the nature, as I have said before, of these early
+symbols and ceremonies that they held so many meanings in solution; and
+it is this fact which gave them a poetic or creative quality, and their
+great hold upon the public mind.
+
+I use the word "tribe" in many places here as a matter of convenience;
+not forgetting however that in some cases "clan" might be more
+appropriate, as referring to a section of a tribe; or "people" or "folk"
+as referring to unions of SEVERAL tribes. It is impossible of course to
+follow out all the gradations of organization from tribal up to national
+life; but it may be remembered that while animal totems prevail as a
+rule in the earlier stages, human-formed gods become more conspicuous in
+the later developments. All through, the practice of the Eucharist goes
+on, in varying forms adapting itself to the surrounding conditions; and
+where in the later societies a religion like Mithraism or Christianity
+includes people of very various race, the Rite loses quite naturally
+its tribal significance and becomes a celebration of allegiance to a
+particular god--of unity within a special Church, in fact. Ultimately it
+may become--as for a brief moment in the history of the early Christians
+it seemed likely to do--a celebration of allegiance to all Humanity,
+irrespective of race or creed or color of skin or of mind: though
+unfortunately that day seems still far distant and remains yet
+unrealized. It must not be overlooked, however, that the religion of the
+Persian B[a^]b, first promulgated in 1845 to 1850--and a subject I shall
+deal with presently--had as a matter of fact this all embracing and
+universal scope.
+
+To return to the Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Our conclusion seems to
+be that there really was such a period of comparative harmony in human
+life--to which later generations were justified in looking back, and
+looking back with regret. It corresponded in the psychology of human
+Evolution to stage One. The second stage was that of the Fall; and so
+one is inevitably led to the conjecture and the hope that a third stage
+will redeem the earth and its inhabitants to a condition of comparative
+blessedness.
+
+
+
+
+X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+
+From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past Golden Age,
+and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist, in the sense indicated
+in the last chapter, to that of the equally widespread belief in a
+human-divine Saviour, is a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago,
+dealing with this subject, (1) I wrote as follows:--"The true Self of
+man consists in his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows;
+and when the man abandons his true Self he abandons also his true
+relation to his fellows. The mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else
+the unit-man will drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to
+separate himself from the inner, the unit-man from the mass-Man, then
+the reign of individuality begins--a false and impossible individuality
+of course, but the only means of coming to the consciousness of the true
+individuality." And further, "Thus this divinity in each creature,
+being that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was
+conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer--healer of wounds of
+body and wounds of heart--the Man within the man, whom it was not only
+possible to know, but whom to know and be united with was the alone
+salvation. This, I take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as
+accepted at some elder time of human history, and by us seen as through
+a glass darkly."
+
+ (1) See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.
+
+
+I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our pride of
+Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses of tribal
+life--that these elder people perceived as a matter of fact and direct
+consciousness the redeeming presence (within each unit-member of the
+group) of the larger life to which he belonged. This larger life was a
+reality--"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he called it by
+the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name of a Nature-divinity, or
+by the name of some gracious human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra,
+Attis, Orpheus, or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity
+itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living incarnate Being
+by the realization of whose presence the little mortal could be lifted
+out of exile and error and death and suffering into splendor and life
+eternal.
+
+It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship of
+"Saviours" all over the world, from China to Peru, can only be
+ascribed to the natural working of some such law of human and tribal
+psychology--from earliest times and in all races the same--springing up
+quite spontaneously and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the
+mere contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil, long
+before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into the heads of all
+these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great a compliment both to the
+power and the ingenuity of his Satanic Majesty--though the ingenuity
+with which the early Church DID itself suppress all information about
+these pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited to
+Satan! And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous and universal
+consent of belief to have sprung by mere contagion from one accidental
+source would seem equally far-fetched and unlikely.
+
+But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling belief in
+human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread legend of their birth
+from Virgin-mothers. There is hardly a god--as we have already had
+occasion to see--whose worship as a benefactor of mankind attained
+popularity in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and
+America--who was not reported to have been born from a Virgin, or at
+least from a mother who owed the Child not to any earthly father, but to
+an impregnation from Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more
+astonishing because the belief in the possibility of such a thing is so
+entirely out of the line of our modern thought. So that while it
+would seem not unnatural that such a legend should have, sprung up
+spontaneously in some odd benighted corner of the world, we find it
+very difficult to understand how in that case it should have spread
+so rapidly in every direction, or--if it did not spread--how we are
+to account for its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these widely sundered
+regions.
+
+I think here, and for the understanding of this problem, we are thrown
+back upon a very early age of human evolution--the age of Magic. Before
+any settled science or philosophy or religion existed, there were
+still certain Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had
+a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact affected it
+deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder'; to hear thunder, to
+imitate it, even to mention it, are sure ways of rousing superstitious
+attention and imagination. Such another word is 'Serpent,' another
+'Tree,' and so forth. There is no one who is insensible to the
+reverberation of these and other such words and images (1); and among
+them, standing prominently out, are the two 'Mother' and 'Virgin.'
+The word Mother touches the deepest springs of human feeling. As the
+earliest word learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with
+the heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor must we forget
+that in a primitive state of society (the Matriarchate) that influence
+was probably even greater than now; for the father of the child being
+(often as not) UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more
+intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about it which has
+remained even until to-day. But if that word rooted itself deep in the
+heart of the Child, the other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for
+the full grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too, has never
+lost.
+
+ (1) Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of
+such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the square,
+the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like 3, 4, 5, etc.,
+quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.
+
+
+There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human
+worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all
+things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the
+cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of
+all the gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored far and wide as the
+gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the
+same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms
+of Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The
+Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and
+to it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. (There are
+strange accounts of a huge fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in
+the midst, and of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep
+and corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames. (1)) It was,
+in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest
+and most spontaneous of cults--the worship of the Earth-mother,
+the all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her
+never-failing ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.
+
+ (1) See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.
+
+
+But when the Saviour-legend sprang up--as indeed I think it must
+have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and people after people,
+independently--then, whether it sprang from the divinization of some
+actual man who showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows
+"sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification of the tribe
+itself as a god, in either case the question of the hero's parentage was
+bound to arise. If the 'saviour' was plainly a personification of the
+tribe, it was obviously impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal
+mother. In that case--and if the tribe was generally traced in the
+legends to some primeval Animal or Mountain or thing of Nature--it was
+probably easy to think of him (the saviour) as, born out of Nature's
+womb, descended perhaps from that pure Virgin of the World who is
+the Earth and Nature, who rules the skies at night, and stands in the
+changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped (as we have seen) in
+the great constellation Virgo. If, on the other hand, he was the
+divinization of some actual man, more or less known either personally
+or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the name of his
+mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his father,
+that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very uncertain,
+it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the midnight
+visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.
+
+There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspiring to this
+conclusion. One is the condition of affairs in a remote matriarchial
+period, when descent was reckoned always through the maternal line, and
+the fatherhood in each generation was obscure or unknown or commonly
+left out of account; and the other is the fact--so strange and difficult
+for us to realize--that among some very primitive peoples, like the
+Australian aborigines, the necessity for a woman to have intercourse
+with a male, in order to bring about conception and child-birth, was
+actually not recognized. Scientific observation had not always got as
+far as that, and the matter was still under the domain of Magic! (1)
+A Virgin-Mother was therefore a quite imaginable (not to say
+'conceivable') thing; and indeed a very beautiful and fascinating thing,
+combining in one image the potent magic of two very wonderful words.
+It does not seem impossible that considerations of this kind led to the
+adoption of the doctrine or legend of the virgin-mother and the heavenly
+father among so many races and in so many localities--even without any
+contagion of tradition among them.
+
+ (1) Probably the long period (nine months) elapsing between
+cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the subject.
+Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by childbirth. And,
+more important still, the number of virgins of a mature age in primitive
+societies was so very minute that the fact of their childlessness
+attracted no attention--whereas in OUR societies the sterility of the
+whole class is patent to everyone.
+
+
+Anyhow, and as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination of the
+legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father of the gods, visited Semele, it
+will be remembered, in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to
+the great saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated Danae
+in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who slew the Gorgons
+(the powers of darkness) and saved Andromeda (the human soul (1)).
+Devaki, the radiant Virgin of the Hindu mythology, became the wife
+of the god Vishnu and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and prototype of
+Christ. With regard to Buddha St. Jerome says (2) "It is handed down
+among the Gymnosophists, of India that Buddha, the founder of their
+system, was brought forth by a Virgin from her side." The Egyptian Isis,
+with the child Horus, on her knee, was honored centuries before the
+Christian era, and worshiped under the names of "Our Lady," "Queen of
+Heaven," "Star of the Sea," "Mother of God," and so forth. Before her,
+Neith, the Virgin of the World, whose figure bends from the sky over the
+earthly plains and the children of men, was acclaimed as mother of the
+great god Osiris. The saviour Mithra, too, was born of a Virgin, as we
+have had occasion to notice before; and on the Mithrais monuments the
+mother suckling her child is a not uncommon figure. (3)
+
+ (1) For this interpretation of the word Andromeda see The Perfect
+Way by Edward Maitland, preface to First Edition, 1881.
+
+ (2) Contra Jovian, Book I; and quoted by Rhys Davids in his
+Buddhisim.
+
+ (3) See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 332, and Dupuis' Origins of
+Religious Beliefs.
+
+
+The old Teutonic goddess Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin, but was
+impregnated by the heavenly Spirit (the Sky); and her image with a child
+in her arms was to be seen in the sacred groves of Germany. (1) The
+Scandinavian Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the embraces
+of Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the blessed Balder,
+healer and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl, the (crucified) saviour of
+the Aztecs, was the son of Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. (2)
+Even the Chinese had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms
+(3); and the ancient Etruscans the same. (4)
+
+ (1) R. P. Knight's Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.
+
+ (2) See Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 176,
+where it is said "an ambassador was sent from heaven on an embassy to a
+Virgin of Tulan, called Chimalman... announcing that it was the will
+of the God that she should conceive a son; and having delivered her the
+message he rose and left the house; and as soon as he had left it
+she conceived a son, without connection with man, who was called
+Quetzalcoat, who they say is the god of air." Further, it is explained
+that Quetzalcoatl sacrificed himself, drawing forth his own blood with
+thorns; and that the word Quetzalcoatlotopitzin means "our well-beloved
+son."
+
+ (3) Doane, p. 327.
+
+ (4) See Inman's Pagan and Christian Symbolism, p. 27.
+
+
+Finally, we have the curiously large number of BLACK virgin mothers
+who are or have been worshiped. Not only cases like Devaki the Indian
+goddess, or Isis the Egyptian, who would naturally appear black-skinned
+or dark; but the large number of images and paintings of the same
+kind, yet extant--especially in the Italian churches--and passing for
+representations of Mary and the infant Jesus. Such are the well-known
+image in the chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in the
+churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other places. It is difficult
+not to regard these as very old Pagan or pre-Christian relics which
+lingered on into Christian times and were baptized anew--as indeed
+we know many relics and images actually were--into the service of the
+Church. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"; and there is I believe more
+than one black figure extant of this Diana, who, though of course a
+virgin, is represented with innumerable breasts (1)--not unlike some of
+the archaic statues of Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian
+times there was, it is said, on the site of the present Cathedral of
+Notre Dame, a Temple dedicated to 'our Lady' Isis; and images belonging
+to the earlier shrine would in all probability be preserved with altered
+name in the later.
+
+ (1) See illustration, p. 30, in Inman's Pagan and Christian
+Symbolism.
+
+
+All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine of the
+Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity. The subject is obscure, and
+worthy of more consideration than has yet been accorded it; and I do not
+feel able to add anything to the tentative explanations given a page or
+two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision of the Perfect Man
+hovered dimly over the mind of the human race on its first emergence
+from the purely animal stage; and that a quite natural speculation
+with regard to such a being was that he would be born from a Perfect
+Woman--who according to early ideas would necessarily be the Virgin
+Earth itself, mother of all things. Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition,
+slumbering as it would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great
+Earth after giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring
+forth a Child who should become the Saviour of the human race.
+
+There is of course the further theory, entertained by some, that
+virgin-parturition--a kind of Parthenogenesis--has as a matter of fact
+occasionally occurred among mortal women, and even still does occur. I
+should be the last to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of anything else
+in Nature), but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way of PROOF
+of any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any thoroughly
+attested and verified instance, it would, I think, be advisable to leave
+this theory out of account at present.
+
+But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right or wrong,
+and whatever explanation we adopt, there remains the FACT of the
+universality over the world of this legend--affording another instance
+of the practical solidarity and continuity of the Pagan Creeds with
+Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+XI. RITUAL DANCING
+
+It is unnecessary to labor the conclusion of the last two or three
+chapters, namely that Christianity grew out of the former Pagan Creeds
+and is in its general outlook and origins continuous and of one piece
+with them. I have not attempted to bring together ALL the evidence
+in favor of this contention, as such work would be too vast, but more
+illustrations of its truth will doubtless occur to readers, or will
+emerge as we proceed.
+
+I think we may take it as proved (1) that from the earliest ages, and
+before History, a great body of religious belief and ritual--first
+appearing among very primitive and unformed folk, whom we should call
+'savages'--has come slowly down, broadening and differentiating itself
+on the way into a great variety of forms, but embodying always certain
+main ideas which became in time the accepted doctrines of the later
+Churches--the Indian, the Egyptian, the Mithraic, the Christian, and
+so forth. What these ideas in their general outline have been we can
+perhaps best judge from our "Apostles' Creed," as it is recited every
+Sunday in our churches.
+
+"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in
+Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
+born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified,
+dead and buried. He descended into Hell; the third day he rose again
+from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand
+of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick
+and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church; the
+communion of Saints; the Forgiveness of sins; the Resurrection of the
+body, and the life everlasting. Amen."
+
+Here we have the All-Father and Creator, descending from the Sky in the
+form of a spirit to impregnate the earthly Virgin-mother, who thus gives
+birth to a Saviour-hero. The latter is slain by the powers of Evil, is
+buried and descends into the lower world, but arises again as God
+into heaven and becomes the leader and judge of mankind. We have the
+confirmation of the Church (or, in earlier times, of the Tribe) by means
+of a Eucharist or Communion which binds together all the members, living
+or dead, and restores errant individuals through the Sacrifice of the
+hero and the Forgiveness of their sins; and we have the belief in a
+bodily Resurrection and continued life of the members within the fold of
+the Church (or Tribe), itself regarded as eternal.
+
+One has only, instead of the word 'Jesus,' to read Dionysus or Krishna
+or Hercules or Osiris or Attis, and instead of 'Mary' to insert Semele
+or Devaki or Alcmene or Neith or Nana, and for Pontius Pilate to use the
+name of any terrestrial tyrant who comes into the corresponding story,
+and lo! the creed fits in all particulars into the rites and worship of
+a pagan god. I need not enlarge upon a thesis which is self-evident
+from all that has gone before. I do not say, of course, that ALL
+the religious beliefs of Paganism are included and summarized in our
+Apostles' Creed, for--as I shall have occasion to note in the next
+chapter--I think some very important religious elements are there
+OMITTED; but I do think that all the beliefs which ARE summarized in the
+said creed had already been fully represented and elaborately expressed
+in the non-Christian religions and rituals of Paganism.
+
+Further (2) I think we may safely say that there is no certain proof
+that the body of beliefs just mentioned sprang from any one particular
+centre far back and radiated thence by dissemination and mental
+contagion over the rest of the world; but the evidence rather shows that
+these beliefs were, for the most part, the SPONTANEOUS outgrowths
+(in various localities) of the human mind at certain stages of its
+evolution; that they appeared, in the different races and peoples, at
+different periods according to the degree of evolution, and were largely
+independent of intercourse and contagion, though of course, in cases,
+considerably influenced by it; and that one great and all-important
+occasion and provocative of these beliefs was actually the RISE OF
+SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS--that is, the coming of the mind to a more or
+less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and
+the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the
+Self-centred attitude in human thought and action.
+
+In the third place (3) I think we may see--and this is the special
+subject of the present chapter--that at a very early period, when
+humanity was hardly capable of systematic expression in what we call
+Philosophy or Science, it could not well rise to an ordered and literary
+expression of its beliefs, such as we find in the later religions
+and the 'Churches' (Babylonian, Jewish, East Indian, Christian, or
+what-not), and yet that it FELT these beliefs very intensely and was
+urged, almost compelled, to their utterance in some form or other. And
+so it came about that people expressed themselves in a vast mass of
+ritual and myth--customs, ceremonies, legends, stories--which on account
+of their popular and concrete form were handed down for generations, and
+some of which linger on still in the midst of our modern civilization.
+These rituals and legends were, many of them, absurd enough, rambling
+and childish in character, and preposterous in conception, yet they gave
+the expression needed; and some of them of course, as we have seen, were
+full of meaning and suggestion.
+
+A critical and commercial Civilization, such as ours, in which
+(notwithstanding much TALK about Art) the artistic sense is greatly
+lacking, or at any rate but little diffused, does not as a rule
+understand that poetic RITES, in the evolution of peoples, came
+naturally before anything like ordered poems or philosophy or
+systematized VIEWS about life and religion--such as WE love to wallow
+in! Things were FELT before they were spoken. The loading of diseases
+into disease-boats, of sins onto scape-goats, the propitiation of the
+forces of nature by victims, human or animal, sacrifices, ceremonies of
+re-birth, eucharistic feasts, sexual communions, orgiastic celebrations
+of the common life, and a host of other things--all SAID plainly enough
+what was meant, but not in WORDS. Partly no doubt it was that at some
+early time words were more difficult of command and less flexible in use
+than actions (and at all times are they not less expressive?). Partly it
+was that mankind was in the child-stage. The Child delights in ritual,
+in symbol, in expression through material objects and actions:
+
+      See, at his feet some little plan or chart,
+      Some fragment from his dream of human life,
+      Shaped by himself with newly learned art;
+          A wedding or a festival,
+          A mourning or a funeral;
+               And this hath now his heart.
+
+And primitive man in the child-stage felt a positive joy in ritual
+celebrations, and indulged in expressions which we but little
+understand; for these had then his heart.
+
+One of the most pregnant of these expressions was DANCING. Children
+dance instinctively. They dance with rage; they dance with joy, with
+sheer vitality; they dance with pain, or sometimes with savage glee at
+the suffering of others; they delight in mimic combats, or in animal
+plays and disguises. There are such things as Courting-dances, when
+the mature male and female go through a ritual together--not only in
+civilized ball-rooms and the back-parlors of inns, but in the farmyards
+where the rooster pays his addresses to the hen, or the yearling bull
+to the cow--with quite recognized formalities; there are elaborate
+ceremonials performed by the Australian bower-birds and many other
+animals. All these things--at any rate in children and animals--come
+before speech; and anyhow we may say that LOVE-RITES, even in mature
+and civilized man, hardly ADMIT of speech. Words only vulgarize love and
+blunt its edge.
+
+So Dance to the savage and the early man was not merely an amusement or
+a gymnastic exercise (as the books often try to make out), but it was
+also a serious and intimate part of life, an expression of religion and
+the relation of man to non-human Powers. Imagine a young dancer--and
+the admitted age for ritual dancing was commonly from about eighteen
+to thirty--coming forward on the dancing-ground or platform for the
+INVOCATION OF RAIN. We have unfortunately no kinematic records, but it
+is not impossible or very difficult to imagine the various gestures
+and movements which might be considered appropriate to such a rite in
+different localities or among different peoples. A modern student of
+Dalcroze Eurhythmics would find the problem easy. After a time a certain
+ritual dance (for rain) would become stereotyped and generally adopted.
+Or imagine a young Greek leading an invocation to Apollo to STAY SOME
+PLAGUE which was ravaging the country. He might as well be accompanied
+by a small body of co-dancers; but he would be the leader and chief
+representative. Or it might be a WAR-DANCE--as a more or less magical
+preparation for the raid or foray. We are familiar enough with accounts
+of war-dances among American Indians. C. O. Muller in his History and
+Antiquities of the Doric Race (1) gives the following account of the
+Pyrrhic dance among the Greeks, which was danced in full armor:--"Plato
+says that it imitated all the attitudes of defence, by avoiding a thrust
+or a cast, retreating, springing up, and crouching-as also the opposite
+movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also of every kind of
+thrust. So strong was the attachment to this dance at Sparta that, long
+after it had in the other Greek states degenerated into a Bacchanalian
+revel, it was still danced by the Spartans as a warlike exercise, and
+boys of fifteen were instructed in it." Of the Hunting-dance I have
+already given instances. (2) It always had the character of Magic about
+it, by which the game or quarry might presumably be influenced; and it
+can easily be understood that if the Hunt was not successful the blame
+might well be attributed to some neglect of the usual ritual mimes or
+movements--no laughing matter for the leader of the dance.
+
+ (1) Book IV, ch. 6, Section 7.
+
+ (2) See also Winwood Reade's Savage Africa, ch. xviii, in which
+he speaks of the "gorilla dance," before hunting gorillas, as a
+"religious festival."
+
+
+Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of Initiation--dances
+both by the initiators and the initiated. Jane E. Harrison in Themis (p.
+24) says, "Instruction among savage peoples is always imparted in more
+or less mimetic dances. At initiation you learn certain dances which
+confer on you definite social status. When a man is too old to dance,
+he hands over his dance to another and a younger, and he then among
+some tribes ceases to exist socially.... The dances taught to boys at
+initiation are frequently if not always ARMED dances. These are not
+necessarily warlike. The accoutrement of spear and shield was in part
+decorative, in part a provision for making the necessary hubbub." (Here
+Miss Harrison reproduces a photograph of an Initiation dance among the
+Akikuyu of British East Africa.) The Initiation-dances blend insensibly
+and naturally with the Mystery and Religion dances, for indeed
+initiation was for the most part an instruction in the mysteries and
+social rites of the Tribe. They were the expression of things which
+would be hard even for us, and which for rude folk would be impossible,
+to put into definite words. Hence arose the expression--whose meaning
+has been much discussed by the learned--"to dance out ([gr ezorceisqai])
+a mystery." (1) Lucian, in a much-quoted passage, (2) observes: "You
+cannot find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing ...
+and this much all men know, that most people say of the revealers of the
+mysteries that they 'dance them out.'" Andrew Lang, commenting on this
+passage, (3) continues: "Clement of Alexandria uses the same term when
+speaking of his own 'appalling revelations.' So closely connected are
+mysteries with dancing among savages that when Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the
+Bushman hunter, about some doctrines in which Qing was not initiated,
+he said: 'Only the initiated men of that dance know these things.' To
+'dance' this or that means to be acquainted with this or that
+myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d'action. So widely
+distributed is the practice that Acosta in an interesting passage
+mentions it as familiar to the people of Peru before and after the
+Spanish conquest." (And we may say that when the 'mysteries' are of a
+sexual nature it can easily be understood that to 'dance them out' is
+the only way of explaining them!)
+
+ (1) Meaning apparently either simply to represent, or, sometimes
+to DIVULGE, a mystery.
+
+ (2) [gr peri 'Orchsews], Ch. xv. 277.
+
+ (3) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 272.
+
+
+Thus we begin to appreciate the serious nature and the importance of the
+dance among primitive folk. To dub a youth "a good dancer" is to pay him
+a great compliment. Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in
+the island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which record in
+deeply graven letters the friendship and devotion to each other of
+Spartan warrior-comrades; it seems strange at first to find how often
+such an epithet of praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is
+a PERFECT DANCER ([gr aristos orcestas]). One hardly in general expects
+one warrior to praise another for his dancing! But when one realizes
+what is really meant--namely the fitness of the loved comrade to lead in
+religious and magical rituals--then indeed the compliment takes on a
+new complexion. Religious dances, in dedication to a god, have of course
+been honored in every country. Muller, in the work just cited, (1)
+describes a lively dance called the hyporchema which, accompanied by
+songs, was used in the worship of Apollo. "In this, besides the chorus
+of singers who usually danced around THE BLAZING ALTAR, several persons
+were appointed to accompany the action of the poem with an appropriate
+pantomimic display." It was probably some similar dance which is
+recorded in Exodus, ch. xxxii, when Aaron made the Israelites a golden
+Calf (image of the Egyptian Apis). There was an altar and a fire and
+burnt offerings for sacrifice, and the people dancing around. Whether in
+the Apollo ritual the dancers were naked I cannot say, but in the affair
+of the golden Calf they evidently were, for it will be remembered that
+it was just this which upset Moses' equanimity so badly--"when he SAW
+THAT THE PEOPLE WERE NAKED"--and led to the breaking of the two tables
+of stone and the slaughter of some thousands of folk. It will be
+remembered also that David on a sacrificial occasion danced naked before
+the Lord. (2)
+
+ (1) Book II, ch. viii, Section 14.
+
+ (2) 2 Sam. vi.
+
+
+It may seem strange that dances in honor of a god should be held naked;
+but there is abundant evidence that this was frequently the case, and it
+leads to an interesting speculation. Many of these rituals undoubtedly
+owed their sanctity and solemnity to their extreme antiquity. They came
+down in fact from very far back times when the average man or woman--as
+in some of the Central African tribes to-day--wore simply nothing at
+all; and like all religious ceremonies they tended to preserve their
+forms long after surrounding customs and conditions had altered.
+Consequently nakedness lingered on in sacrificial and other rites into
+periods when in ordinary life it had come to be abandoned or thought
+indecent and shameful. This comes out very clearly in both instances
+above--quoted from the Bible. For in Exodus xxxii. 25 it is said that
+"Aaron had made them (the dancers) naked UNTO THEIR SHAME among their
+enemies (READ opponents)," and in 2 Sam. vi. 20 we are told that Michal
+came out and sarcastically rebuked the "glorious king of Israel" for
+"shamelessly uncovering himself, like a vain fellow" (for which rebuke,
+I am sorry to say, David took a mean revenge on Michal). In both cases
+evidently custom had so far changed that to a considerable section of
+the population these naked exhibitions had become indecent, though as
+parts of an acknowledged ritual they were still retained and supported
+by others. The same conclusion may be derived from the commands recorded
+in Exodus xx. 26 and xxviii. 42, that the priests be not "uncovered"
+before the altar--commands which would hardly have been needed had not
+the practice been in vogue.
+
+Then there were dances (partly magical or religious) performed at rustic
+and agricultural festivals, like the Epilenios, celebrated in Greece at
+the gathering of the grapes. (1) Of such a dance we get a glimpse in the
+Bible (Judges xxi. 20) when the elders advised the children of Benjamin
+to go out and lie in wait in the vineyards, at the time of the yearly
+feast; and "when the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the
+dances, then come ye out of the vineyards and catch you every man a wife
+from the daughters of Shiloh"--a touching example apparently of early
+so-called 'marriage by capture'! Or there were dances, also partly or
+originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian character,
+like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by men and women in hideous
+masks, or the Deimalea by Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the
+Bibasis carried out by both men and women--a quite gymnastic exercise in
+which the performers took a special pride in striking their own buttocks
+with their heels! or others wilder still, which it would perhaps not be
+convenient to describe.
+
+ (1) [gr Epilhnioi umnoi]:  hymns sung over the winepress
+(Dictionary).
+
+
+We must see how important a part Dancing played in that great panorama
+of Ritual and Religion (spoken of in the last chapter) which, having
+originally been led up to by the 'Fall of Man,' has ever since the dawn
+of history gradually overspread the world with its strange procession of
+demons and deities, and its symbolic representations of human destiny.
+When it is remembered that ritual dancing was the matrix out of which
+the Drama sprang, and further that the drama in its inception (as still
+to-day in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in
+connection with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand how all
+this mass of ceremonial sacrifices, expiations, initiations, Sun and
+Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic communions and celebrations,
+mystery-plays, dramatic representations, myths and legends, etc., which
+I have touched upon in the preceding chapters--together with all the
+emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the wonderment which
+they represented--have practically sprung from the same root: a root
+deep and necessary in the psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show
+that they will all practically converge again in the end to one meaning,
+and prepare the way for one great Synthesis to come--an evolution also
+necessary and inevitable in human psychology.
+
+In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few pages back, occur
+those well-known words whose repetition now will, on account of their
+beauty, I am sure be excused:--
+
+      Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
+      The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
+          Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+               And cometh from afar;
+          Not in entire forgetfulness,
+          And not in utter nakedness,
+      But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+          From God, who is our home:
+      Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
+      Shades of the prison-house begin to close
+          Upon the growing Boy,
+      But He beholds the light and whence it flows
+          He sees it in his joy;
+      The youth who daily farther from the east
+          Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
+          And by the vision splendid
+          Is on his way attended;
+      At length the man perceives it die away
+      And fade into the light of common day.
+
+
+Wordsworth--though he had not the inestimable advantage of a
+nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian
+philosophy--does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child
+in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we
+scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that
+the Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of
+entire forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores
+of sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we
+all admit that a certain grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic
+quality, in the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these
+racial inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and that
+after birth the impact of the outer world serves rather to break up
+and disintegrate this harmony than to confirm and strengthen it. Some
+psychologists indeed nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child
+is not only 'Father of the man,' but superior to the man, (1) and that
+Boyhood and Youth and Maturity are attained to not by any addition but
+by a process of loss and subtraction. It will be seen that the last ten
+lines of the above quotation rather favor this view.
+
+ (1) "Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from
+the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in the
+course of his short life goes very much farther along the road of
+degradation and premature senility." (Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis,
+p. 24).
+
+
+But my object in making the quotation was not to insist on the truth
+of its application to the individual Child, but rather to point out
+the remarkable way in which it illustrates what I have said about the
+Childhood of the Race. In fact, if the quotation be read over again with
+this interpretation (which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that
+the 'birth' spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively
+self-conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured,
+unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the parable
+unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly. THAT birth
+certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace and intuition and
+instinctive perfection of the animals was lost. But the forgetfulness
+was not entire; the memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an
+Eden-garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance
+the first tribal men, on the edge of but not yet WITHIN the
+civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.
+
+As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-consciousness was
+also the period of the dawn of the practical and inquiring Intellect; it
+was the period of the babyhood of both; and so we perceive among these
+early people (as we also do among children) that while in the main the
+heart and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for a long period
+futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as the mind left the ancient
+bases of instinct and sub-conscious racial experience it fell into
+a hopeless bog, out of which it only slowly climbed by means of the
+painfully-gathered stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science.
+"Heaven lies about us in our infancy." Wordsworth perceived that
+wonderful world of inner experience and glory out of which the child
+emerges; and some even of us may perceive that similar world in which
+the untampered animals STILL dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man
+in the history of the race was long ago driven. But a curse went
+with the exile. As the Brain grew, the Heart withered. The inherited
+instincts and racially accumulated wisdom, on which the first men
+thrived and by means of which they achieved a kind of temporary
+Paradise, were broken up; delusions and disease and dissension set
+in. Cain turned upon his brother and slew him; and the shades of the
+prison-house began to close. The growing Boy, however, (by whom we may
+understand the early tribes of Mankind) had yet a radiance of Light and
+joy in his life; and the Youth--though travelling daily farther from the
+East--still remained Nature's priest, and by the vision splendid was on
+his way attended: but
+
+     At length the Man perceived it die away.
+     And fade into the light of common day.
+
+What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it
+so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic
+clinging to the tradition of the Eden-garden, its careless and vigorous
+boyhood, its meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless
+expiatory ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of
+salvation, and finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the
+world-slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!
+
+Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our main line of
+thought, we may point out that while early peoples were intellectually
+mere babies--with their endless yarns about heroes on horseback leaping
+over wide rivers or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles
+through the air, and their utter failure to understand the general
+concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their
+instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already said, by no
+means fools; certainly not such fools as many of the arm-chair students
+of these things delight to represent them. For just as, a few years
+ago, we modern civilizees studying outlying nations, the Chinese for
+instance, rejoiced (in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity
+and absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and failed
+entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently sensible
+people; so in the case of primitive men we have been, and even still
+are, far too prone to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and
+idiotic superstitions, and to miss the sane and balanced setting of
+their actual lives.
+
+Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance with his
+subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on "The
+Primitive Medicine Man" in which he shows that the latter is as a rule
+anything but a fool and a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he
+hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man's
+excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds and
+fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning or trephining--all of
+which operations, he admits, may be accompanied with grotesque and
+superstitious ceremonies, yet show real perception and ability. We all
+know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--what a
+considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which the modern art of
+healing owes to the ancient medicine-man, and it may be again mentioned
+that one of the most up-to-date treatments--the use of a prolonged and
+exclusive diet of MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start
+in severe cases--has really come down to us through the ages from this
+early source. (1) The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett says, is largely
+a 'faith-healer' and 'soul-doctor'; he believes in his vocation, and
+undergoes much for the sake of it: "The main point is to grasp that by
+his special initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises--not to
+speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and ecstasy, which
+he may inherit by nature and have improved by art--he HAS access to a
+wonder-working power.... And the great need of primitive folk is for
+this healer of souls." Our author further insists on the enormous play
+and influence of Fear in the savage mind--a point we have touched on
+already--and gives instances of Thanatomania, or cases where, after a
+quite slight and superficial wound, the patient becomes so depressed
+that he, quite needlessly, persists in dying! Such cases, obviously,
+can only be countered by Faith, or something (whatever it may be) which
+restores courage, hope and energy to the mind. Nor need I point out
+that the situation is exactly the same among a vast number of 'patients'
+to-day. As to the value, in his degree, of the medicine-man many modern
+observers and students quite agree with the above. (2) Also as the
+present chapter is on Ritual Dancing it may not be out of place to call
+attention to the supposed healing of sick people in Ceylon and other
+places by Devil-dancing--the enormous output of energy and noise in the
+ritual possibly having the effect of reanimating the patient (if it does
+not kill him), or of expelling the disease from his organism.
+
+ (1) Milk ("fast-milk" or vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only
+diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times
+(preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with ceremony
+from the milky and semen-like sap of certain plants, and much used in
+sacrificial offerings. (See Monier-Williams. Sanskrit Dictionary.)
+
+ (2) See Winwood Reade (Savage Africa), Salamon Reinach (Cults,
+Myths and Religions), and others.
+
+
+With regard to the practical intelligence of primitive peoples,
+derived from their close contact with life and nature, Bishop Colenso's
+experiences among the Zulus may appropriately be remembered. When
+expounding the Bible to these supposedly backward 'niggers' he was met
+at all points by practical interrogations and arguments which he was
+perfectly unable to answer--especially over the recorded passage of the
+Red Sea by the Israelites in a single night. From the statistics given
+in the Sacred Book these naughty savages proved to him absolutely
+conclusively that the numbers of fugitives were such that even supposing
+them to have marched--men, women and children--FIVE ABREAST and in close
+order, they would have formed a column 100 miles long, and this
+not including the baggage, sheep and cattle! Of course the feat was
+absolutely impossible. They could not have passed the Red Sea in a night
+or a week of nights.
+
+But the sequel is still more amusing and instructive. Colenso, in his
+innocent sincerity, took the side of the Zulus, and feeling sure the
+Church at home would be quite glad to have its views with regard to
+the accuracy of Bible statistics corrected, wrote a book embodying the
+amendments needed. Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of
+protest and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition for the
+time being from his bishopric! While at the same time an avalanche of
+books to oppose his heresy poured forth from the press. Lately I had the
+curiosity to look through the British Museum catalogue and found that
+in refutation of Colenso's Pentateuch Examined some 140 (a hundred and
+forty) volumes were at that time published! To-day, I need hardly
+say, all these arm-chair critics and their works have sunk into utter
+obscurity, but the arguments of the Zulus and their Bishop still stand
+unmoved and immovable.
+
+This is a case of searching intelligence shown by 'savages,' an
+intelligence founded on intimate knowledge of the needs of actual
+life. I think we may say that a similarly instinctive intelligence
+(sub-conscious if you like) has guided the tribes of men on the whole
+in their long passage through the Red Sea of the centuries, from those
+first days of which I speak even down to the present age, and has in
+some strange, even if fitful, way kept them along the path of that final
+emancipation towards which Humanity is inevitably moving.
+
+
+
+
+XII. THE SEX-TABOO
+
+In the course of the last few chapters I have spoken more than once
+of the solidarity and continuity of Christianity, in its essential
+doctrines, with the Pagan rites. There is, however, one notable
+exception to this statement. I refer of course to Christianity's
+treatment of Sex. It is certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan
+cults generally made a great deal of all sorts of sex-rites, laid much
+stress upon them, and introduced them in what we consider an unblushing
+and shameless way into the instincts connected with it. I say 'the
+Christian Church,' on the whole took quite the opposite line--ignored
+sex, condemned it, and did much despite to the perfectly natural
+instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,' because
+there is nothing to show that Jesus himself (if we admit his figure as
+historical) adopted any such extreme or doctrinaire attitude; and the
+quite early Christian teachers (with the chief exception of Paul) do not
+exhibit this bias to any great degree. In fact, as is well known, strong
+currents of pagan usage and belief ran through the Christian assemblies
+of the first three or four centuries. "The Christian art of this period
+remained delightfully pagan. In the catacombs we see the Saviour as a
+beardless youth, like a young Greek god; sometimes represented, like
+Hermes the guardian of the flocks, bearing a ram or lamb round his neck;
+sometimes as Orpheus tuning his lute among the wild animals." (1)
+The followers of Jesus were at times even accused--whether rightly
+or wrongly I know not--of celebrating sexual mysteries at their
+love-feasts. But as the Church through the centuries grew in power and
+scope--with its monks and their mutilations and asceticisms, and its
+celibate clergy, and its absolute refusal to recognize the sexual
+meaning of its own acclaimed symbols (like the Cross, the three fingers
+of Benediction, the Fleur de Lys and so forth)--it more and more
+consistently defined itself as anti-sexual in its outlook, and stood out
+in that way in marked contrast to the earlier Nature-religions.
+
+ (1) Angels' Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.
+
+
+It may be said of course that this anti-sexual tendency can be traced in
+other of the pre-Christian Churches, especially the later ones, like the
+Buddhist, the Egyptian, and so forth; and this is perfectly true; but it
+would seem that in many ways the Christian Church marked the culmination
+of the tendency; and the fact that other cults participated in the taboo
+makes us all the more ready and anxious to inquire into its real cause.
+
+To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-Christian
+religions would be 'a large order'--larger than I could attempt to fill;
+but the general facts in this connection are fairly patent. We know,
+of course, from the Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to
+sexual worships. There were erect images (phallic) and "groves" (sexual
+symbols) on every high hill and under every green tree; (1) and these
+same images and the rites connected with them crept into the Jewish
+Temple and were popular enough to maintain their footing there for a
+long period from King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of
+Josiah (2) and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover there were
+girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached during this period to
+the Jewish Temple as to the heathen Temples, for the rendering of sexual
+services, which were recognized in many cases as part of the ritual.
+Women were persuaded that it was an honor and a privilege to be
+fertilized by a 'holy man' (a priest or other man connected with the
+rites), and children resulting from such unions were often called
+"Children of God"--an appellation which no doubt sometimes led to a
+legend of miraculous birth! Girls who took their place as hierodouloi in
+the Temple or Temple-precincts were expected to surrender themselves
+to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the same way, probably, as
+Herodotus describes in the temple of the Babylonian Venus Mylitta, where
+every native woman, once in her life, was supposed to sit in the Temple
+and have intercourse with some stranger. (3) Indeed the Syrian and
+Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. "The Hebrews entering
+Syria," says Richard Burton (4) "found it religionized by Assyria and
+Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become
+Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician
+Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of
+Heaven and Love." The word translated "grove" as above, in our Bible,
+is in fact Asherah, which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian
+Queen of Heaven.
+
+ (1) 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.
+
+ (2) 2 Kings xxiii.
+
+ (3) See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the
+apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.
+
+ (4) The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.
+
+
+In India again, in connection with the Hindu Temples and their rites,
+we have exactly the same institution of girls attached to the Temple
+service--the Nautch-girls--whose functions in past times were certainly
+sexual, and whose dances in honor of the god are, even down to the
+present day, decidedly amatory in character. Then we have the very
+numerous lingams (conventional representations of the male organ) to
+be seen, scores and scores of them, in the arcades and cloisters of the
+Hindu Temples--to which women of all classes, especially those who
+wish to become mothers, resort, anointing them copiously with oil, and
+signalizing their respect and devotion to them in a very practical
+way. As to the lingam as representing the male organ, in some form or
+other--as upright stone or pillar or obelisk or slender round tower--it
+occurs all over the world, notably in Ireland, and forms such a
+memorial of the adoration paid by early folk to the great emblem and
+instrument of human fertility, as cannot be mistaken. The pillars set
+up by Solomon in front of his temple were obviously from their
+names--Jachin and Boaz (1)--meant to be emblems of this kind; and the
+fact that they were crowned with pomegranates--the universally accepted
+symbol of the female--confirms and clinches this interpretation. The
+obelisks before the Egyptians' temples were signs of the same character.
+The well-known T-shaped cross was in use in pagan lands long before
+Christianity, as a representation of the male member, and also at the
+same time of the 'tree' on which the god (Attis or Adonis or Krishna or
+whoever it might be) was crucified; and the same symbol combined with
+the oval (or yoni) formed THE Crux Ansata {Ankh} of the old Egyptian
+ritual--a figure which is to-day sold in Cairo as a potent charm, and
+confessedly indicates the conjunction of the two sexes in one design.
+(2) MacLennan in The Fortnightly Review (Oct. 1869) quotes with approval
+the words of Sanchoniathon, as saying that "men first worship plants,
+next the heavenly bodies, supposed to be animals, then 'pillars'
+(emblems of the Procreator), and last, the anthropomorphic gods."
+
+ (1) "He shall establish" and "In it is strength" are in the Bible
+the marginal interpretations of these two words.
+
+ (2) The connection between the production of fire by means of the
+fire-drill and the generation of life by sex-intercourse is a very
+obvious one, and lends itself to magical ideas. J. E. Hewitt in his
+Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (1894) says (vol. i, p. 8) that
+"Magha, the mother-goddess worshipped in Asia Minor, was originally the
+socket-block from which fire was generated by the fire-drill." Hence we
+have, he says, the Magi of Persia, and the Maghadas of Indian History,
+also the word "Magic."
+
+
+It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject. The facts of the
+connection of sexual rites with religious services nearly everywhere in
+the early world are, as I say, sufficiently patent to every inquirer.
+But it IS necessary to try to understand the rationale of this
+connection. To dispatch all such cases under the mere term "religious
+prostitution" is no explanation. The term suggests, of course, that the
+plea of religion was used simply as an excuse and a cover for sexual
+familiarities; but though this kind of explanation commends itself,
+no doubt, to the modern man--whose religion is as commercial as his
+sex-relationships are--and though in CASES no doubt it was a true
+explanation--yet it is obvious that among people who took religion
+seriously, as a matter of life and death and who did not need
+hypocritical excuses or covers for sex-relationships, it cannot be
+accepted as in general the RIGHT explanation. No, the real explanation
+is--and I will return to this presently--that sexual relationships are
+so deep and intimate a part of human nature that from the first it has
+been simply impossible to keep them OUT of religion--it being of
+course the object of religion to bring the whole human being into
+some intelligible relation with the physical, moral, and if you like
+supernatural order of the great world around him. Sex was felt from the
+first to be part, and a foundational part, of the great order of the
+world and of human nature; and therefore to separate it from Religion
+was unthinkable and a kind of contradiction in terms. (1)
+
+ (1) For further development of this subject see ch. xv.
+
+
+If that is true--it will be asked--how was it that that divorce DID take
+place--that the taboo did arise? How was it that the Jews, under the
+influence of Josiah and the Hebrew prophets, turned their faces away
+from sex and strenuously opposed the Syrian cults? How was it that this
+reaction extended into Christianity and became even more definite in the
+Christian Church--that monks went by thousands into the deserts of the
+Thebaid, and that the early Fathers and Christian apologists could
+not find terms foul enough to hurl at Woman as the symbol (to them) of
+nothing but sex-corruption and delusion? How was it that this contempt
+of the body and degradation of sex-things went on far into the Middle
+Ages of Europe, and ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy,
+and concealment and suppression of sex-instincts, which, acting as cover
+to a vile commercial Prostitution and as a breeding ground for horrible
+Disease, has lasted on even to the edge of the present day?
+
+This is a fair question, and one which demands an answer. There must
+have been a reason, and a deep-rooted one, for this remarkable reaction
+and volte-face which has characterized Christianity, and, perhaps to
+a lesser degree, other both earlier and later cults like those of the
+Buddhists, the Egyptians, the Aztecs, (1) and so forth.
+
+ (1) For the Aztecs, see Acosta, vol. ii, p. 324 (London, 1604).
+
+
+It may be said--and this is a fair answer on the SURFACE of the
+problem--that the main reason WAS something in the nature of a reaction.
+The excesses and corruptions of sex in Syria had evidently become pretty
+bad, and that very fact may have led to a pendulum-swing of the Jewish
+Church in the opposite direction; and again in the same way the general
+laxity of morals in the decay of the Roman empire may have confirmed the
+Church of early Christendom in its determination to keep along the
+great high road of asceticism. The Christian followed on the Jewish
+and Egyptian Churches, and in this way a great tradition of sexual
+continence and anti-pagan morality came right down the centuries even
+into modern times.
+
+This seems so far a reasonable theory; but I think we shall go farther
+and get nearer the heart of the problem if we revert to the general clue
+which I have followed already more than once--the clue of the necessary
+evolution of human Consciousnss. In the first or animal stage of
+human evolution, Sex was (as among the animals) a perfectly necessary,
+instinctive and unself-conscious activity. It was harmonious with
+itself, natural, and unproductive of evil. But when the second stage set
+in, in which man became preponderantly _self_-conscious, he inevitably
+set about deflecting sex-activities to his own private pleasure and
+advantage; he employed his budding intellect in scheming the derailment
+of passion and desire from tribal needs and Nature's uses to the poor
+details of his own gratification. If the first stage of harmonious
+sex-instinct and activity may be held as characteristic of the Golden
+Age, the second stage must be taken to represent the Fall of man and his
+expulsion from Paradise in the Garden of Eden story. The pleasure and
+glory of Sex having been turned to self-purposes, Sex itself became the
+great Sin. A sense of guilt overspread man's thoughts on the subject.
+"He knew that he was naked," and he fled from the voice and face of the
+Lord. From that moment one of the main objects of his life (in its inner
+and newer activities) came to be the _denial_ of Sex. Sex was conceived
+of as the great Antagonist, the old Serpent lying ever in wait to betray
+him; and there arrived a moment in the history of every race, and of
+every representative religion, when the sexual rites and ceremonies of
+the older time lost their naive and quasi-innocent character and became
+afflicted with a sense of guilt and indecency. This extraordinarily
+interesting and dramatic moment in human evolution was of course that in
+which self-consciousness grew powerful enough to penetrate to the centre
+of human vitality, the _sanctum_ of man's inner life, his sexual instinct,
+and to deal it a terrific blow--a blow from which it has never yet
+recovered, and from which indeed it will not recover, until the very
+nature of man's inner life is changed.
+
+It may be said that it was very foolish of Man to deny and to try
+to expel a perfectly natural and sensible thing, a necessary and
+indispensable part of his own nature. And that, as far as I can see, is
+perfectly true. But sometimes it is unavoidable, it would seem, to do
+foolish things--if only to convince oneself of one's own foolishness.
+On the other hand, this policy on the part of Man was certainly very
+wise--wiser than he knew--for in attempting to drive out Sex (which of
+course he could not do) he entered into a conflict which was bound
+to end in the expulsion of SOMETHING; and that something was the
+domination, within himself, of self-consciousness, the very thing which
+makes and ever has made sex detestable. Man did not succeed in driving
+the snake out of the Garden, but he drove himself out, taking the real
+old serpent of self-greed and self-gratification with him. When some day
+he returns to Paradise this latter will have died in his bosom and been
+cast away, but he will find the good Snake there as of old, full of
+healing and friendliness, among the branches of the Tree of Life.
+
+Besides it is evident from other considerations that this moment of the
+denial of sex HAD to come. When one thinks of the enormous power of this
+passion, and its age-long, hold upon the human race, one realizes that
+once liberated from the instinctive bonds of nature, and backed by a
+self-conscious and self-seeking human intelligence it was on the way to
+become a fearful curse.
+
+  A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth;
+  For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
+
+And this may have been all very well and appropriate in the
+carboniferous Epoch, but WE in the end of Time have no desire to fall
+under any such preposterous domination, or to return to the primal
+swamps from which organic nature has so slowly and painfully emerged.
+
+I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere of Sex, and
+the consequent use of the latter for private ends, which poisoned
+this great race-power at its root. For above all, Sex, as representing
+through Childbirth the life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you
+like, of Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from merely
+selfish aims, and therefore to use it only for such aims is indeed a
+desecration. And even if--as some maintain and I think rightly (1)--sex
+is not MERELY for child-birth and physical procreation, but for mutual
+vitalizing and invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism;
+and to use it egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed.
+It is to cast away and corrupt the very bond of life and fellowship. The
+ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination of religious (that is,
+of communal and public) value over sex-acts, and to a great extent made
+them into matters either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods,
+or of communal and pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and
+other similar festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these
+celebrations--of either kind--as insincere. They were, at any rate in
+their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal;
+and from either point of view they were far better than the secrecy
+of private indulgence which characterizes our modern world in these
+matters. The thorough and shameless commercialism of Sex has alas!
+been reserved for what is called "Christian civilization," and with
+it (perhaps as a necessary consequence) Prostitution and Syphilis have
+grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation of
+social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism and niaiserie.
+Love, in fact, having in this modern world-movement been denied, and its
+natural manifestations affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has
+really languished and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a
+vast number of people--both men and women, finding themselves barred or
+derailed from the main object of existence, have turned their energies
+to 'business' or 'money-making' or 'social advancement' or something
+equally futile, as the only poor substitute and pis aller open to them.
+
+ (1) See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet
+published by the "British Society for the Study of Sex-psychology."
+
+
+Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently great mistake?
+And again we must reply: Perhaps the mistake was not so great as
+it appears to be. Perhaps this was another case of the necessity of
+learning by loss. Love had to be denied, in the form of sex, in order
+that it might thus the better learn its own true values and needs. Sex
+had to be rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-seeking,
+in order that having cast out its defilement it might return one day,
+transformed in the embrace of love. The whole process has had a deep and
+strange world-significance. It has led to an immensely long period of
+suppression--suppression of two great instincts--the physical instinct
+of sex and the emotional instinct of love. Two things which should
+naturally be conjoined have been separated; and both have suffered.
+And we know from the Freudian teachings what suppressions in the
+root-instincts necessarily mean. We know that they inevitably terminate
+in diseases and distortions of proper action, either in the body or
+in the mind, or in both; and that these evils can only be cured by the
+liberation of the said instincts again to their proper expression and
+harmonious functioning in the whole organism. No wonder then that, with
+this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense though it may have
+been) which marks the Christian dispensation, there should have
+been associated endless Sickness and Crime and sordid Poverty, the
+Crucifixion of animals in the name of Science and of human workers in
+the name of Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules writhing
+in the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the rocks are only as
+figures of a toy miniature compared with this vision of the great and
+divine Spirit of Man caught in the clutches of those dread Diseases
+which through the centuries have been eating into his very heart and
+vitals.
+
+It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the blame for all
+this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the whole great scheme,
+namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it played the part very
+thoroughly and successfully. For it must be remembered (what I have
+again and again insisted on) that in the pagan cults it was always
+the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main
+consideration; the advantage of the individual took only a very
+secondary part. But in Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms
+of apostolic days and of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and
+sisterhoods had died down--religion occupied itself more and more with
+each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of what might
+happen to the community; till, with the rise of Protestantism and
+Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has
+said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a
+corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which might come
+to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regime
+became, as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: "Am _I_ saved?
+Am _I_ doing the right thing? Am _I_ winning the favor of God and man?
+Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did _I_ make a good bargain
+in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?" The poison of a diseased
+self-consciousness entered into the whole human system.
+
+As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for all
+this--partly because, AFTER the communal periods which I have just
+mentioned, Christianity was evidently deeply influenced by the rise
+of COMMERCIALISM, to which during the last two centuries it has so
+carefully and piously adapted itself; and partly because--if our view is
+anywhere near right--this microbial injection of self-consciousness was
+just the necessary work which (in conjunction with commercialism) it HAD
+to perform. But though one does not blame Christianity one cannot blind
+oneself to its defects--the defects necessarily arising from the part it
+had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual--say of Apollo or
+Dionysus--including its rude and crude sacrifices if you like, but also
+including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to the common
+life and welfare--with the morbid self-introspection of the Christian
+and the eternally recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"--the
+comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at any rate in
+modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude,
+and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though
+Nietzsche's blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one
+almost thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with one's
+head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and
+self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was entirely occupied with
+the question of one's own salvation. There is besides a lamentable want
+of grit and substance about the Christian doctrines and ceremonials.
+Somehow under the sex-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized
+out of all human use. Study the initiation-rites of any savage
+tribe--with their strict discipline of the young braves in fortitude,
+and the overcoming of pain and fear; with their very detailed lessons in
+the arts of war and life and the duties of the grown man to his tribe;
+and with their quite practical instruction in matters of Sex; and then
+read our little Baptismal and Confirmation services, which ought to
+correspond thereto. How thin and attenuated and weak the latter
+appear! Or compare the Holy Communion, as celebrated in the sentimental
+atmosphere of a Protestant Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of
+real jollity and community of life under the acknowledged presence
+of the god; or the Roman Catholic service of the Mass, including its
+genuflexions and mock oblations and droning ritual sing-song, with the
+actual sacrifice in early days of an animal-god-victim on a blazing
+altar; and I think my meaning will be clear. We do not want, of course,
+to return to all the crudities and barbarities of the past; but also we
+do not want to become attenuated and spiritualized out of all mundane
+sense and recognition, and to live in an otherworld Paradise void of
+application to earthly affairs.
+
+The sex-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have said, an effort
+of the human soul to wrest itself free from the entanglement of physical
+lust--which lust, though normal and appropriate and in a way gracious
+among the animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness
+become diseased and morbid or monstrous in Man. The work thus done has
+probably been of the greatest value to the human race; but, just as in
+other cases it has sometimes happened that the effort to do a certain
+work has resulted in the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We
+are beginning to see now the harmful side of the repression of sex, and
+are tentatively finding our way back again to a more pagan attitude.
+And as this return-movement is taking place at a time when, from many
+obvious signs, the self-conscious, grasping, commercial conception of
+life is preparing to go on the wane, and the sense of solidarity to
+re-establish itself, there is really good hope that our return-journey
+may prove in some degree successful.
+
+Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a sparrow, but
+by putting one leg forward first, and then the other. There was this
+advantage in the Christian taboo of sex that by discouraging the
+physical and sensual side of love it did for the time being allow the
+spiritual side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated,
+there is a limit to that process. We cannot always keep one leg first in
+walking, and we do not want, in life, always to put the spiritual first,
+nor always the material and sensual. The two sides in the long run have
+to keep pace with each other.
+
+And it may be that a great number of the very curious and seemingly
+senseless taboos that we find among the primitive peoples can be partly
+explained in this way: that is, that by ruling out certain directions
+of activity they enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for
+the time being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world,
+whose ways are puzzling enough in all conscience to us, must have been
+simply bewildering in its dangers and complications. It was an amazement
+of Fear and Ignorance. Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the
+blue sky, or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating plague
+out of a bad smell--or apparently even out of nothing at all! Under
+those circumstances it was perhaps wise, wherever there was the smallest
+SUSPICION of danger or ill-luck, to create a hard and fast TABOO--just
+as we tell our children ON NO ACCOUNT to walk under a ladder (thereby
+creating a superstition in their minds), partly because it would take
+too long to explain all about the real dangers of paint-pots and other
+things, and partly because for the children themselves it seems simpler
+to have a fixed and inviolable law than to argue over every case that
+occurs. The priests and elders among early folk no doubt took the
+line of FORBIDDAL of activities, as safer and simpler, even if
+carried sometimes too far, than the opposite, of easy permission and
+encouragement. Taboos multiplied--many of them quite senseless--but
+perhaps in this perilous maze of the world, of which I have spoken,
+it really WAS simpler to cut out a large part of the labyrinth, as
+forbidden ground, thus rendering it easier for the people to find their
+way in those portions of the labyrinth which remained. If you read in
+Deuteronomy (ch. xiv) the list of birds and beasts and fishes permitted
+for food among the Israelites, or tabooed, you will find the list on
+the whole reasonable, but you will be struck by some curious exceptions
+(according to our ideas), which are probably to be explained by the
+necessity of making the rules simple enough to be comprehended by
+everybody--even if they included the forbiddal of some quite eatable
+animals.
+
+At some early period, in Babylonia or Assyria, a very stringent taboo on
+the Sabbath arose, which, taken up in turn by the Jewish and Christian
+Churches, has ruled the Western World for three thousand years or more,
+and still survives in a quite senseless form among some of our rural
+populations, who will see their corn rot in the fields rather than save
+it on a Sunday. (1) It is quite likely that this taboo in its first
+beginning was due not to any need of a weekly rest-day (a need which
+could never be felt among nomad savages, but would only occur in
+some kind of industrial and stationary civilization), but to some
+superstitious fear, connected with such things as the changes of the
+Moon, and the probable ILL-LUCK of any enterprise undertaken on the
+seventh day, or any day of Moon-change. It is probable, however, that as
+time went on and Society became more complex, the advantages of a weekly
+REST-DAY (or market-day) became more obvious and that the priests and
+legislators deliberately turned the taboo to a social use. (2) The
+learned modern Ethnologists, however, will generally have none of this
+latter idea. As a rule they delight in representing early peoples as
+totally destitute of common sense (which is supposed to be a monopoly
+of us moderns!); and if the Sabbath-arrangement has had any value or
+use they insist on ascribing this to pure accident, and not to the
+application of any sane argument or reason.
+
+ (1) For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral
+Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.
+
+ (2) For a tracing of this taboo from useless superstition to
+practical utility see Hastings's Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "The
+Sabbath."
+
+
+It is true indeed that a taboo--in order to be a proper taboo--must not
+rest in the general mind on argument or reason. It may have had good
+sense in the past or even an underlying good sense in the present, but
+its foundation must rest on something beyond. It must be an absolute
+fiat--something of the nature of a Mystery (1) or of Religion or
+Magic-and not to be disputed. This gives it its blood-curdling quality.
+The rustic does not know what would happen to him if he garnered his
+corn on Sunday, nor does the diner-out in polite society know what
+would happen if he spooned up his food with his knife--but they both are
+stricken with a sort of paralysis at the very suggestion of infringing
+these taboos.
+
+ (1) See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.
+
+
+Marriage-customs have always been a fertile field for the generation
+of taboos. It seems doubtful whether anything like absolute promiscuity
+ever prevailed among the human race, but there is much to show that wide
+choice and intercourse were common among primitive folk and that the
+tendency of later marriage custom has been on the whole to LIMIT this
+range of choice. At some early period the forbiddal of marriage between
+those who bore the same totem-name took place. Thus in Australia "no man
+of the Emu stock might marry an Emu woman; no Blacksnake might marry a
+Blacksnake woman, and so forth." (1) Among the Kamilaroi and the Arunta
+of S. Australia the tribe was divided into classes or clans, sometimes
+four, sometimes eight, and a man of one particular clan was only
+marriageable with a woman of another particular clan--say (1) with (3)
+or (2) with (4), and so on. (2) Customs with a similar tendency, but
+different in detail, seem to have prevailed among native tribes in
+Central Africa and N. America. And the regulations in all this matter
+have been so (apparently) entirely arbitrary in the various cases that
+it would almost appear as if the bar of kinship through the Totem had
+been the EXCUSE, originating perhaps in some superstition, but that the
+real and more abiding object was simply limitation. And this perhaps was
+a wise line to take. A taboo on promiscuity had to be created, and for
+this purpose any current prejudice could be made use of. (3)
+
+ (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.
+
+ (2) See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.
+
+ (3) The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See
+p. 214 of that book.
+
+
+With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different complexion. When
+we consider the enormous amount of suffering and disease, both of mind
+and body, arising from the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken,
+especially among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos--which
+possibly had their place and use in the past--can be tolerated no
+longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight of reason and science on a
+number of superstitions which still linger in the dark and musty
+places of the Churches and the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown
+conclusively not only the foundational importance of sex in the
+evolution of each human being, but also the very great VARIETY of
+spontaneous manifestations in different individuals and the vital
+necessity that these should be recognized, if society is ever to expand
+into a rational human form. It is not my object here to sketch the
+future of marriage and sex-relations generally--a subject which is now
+being dealt with very effectively from many sides; but only to insist on
+our using our good sense in the whole matter, and refusing any longer to
+be bound by senseless pre-judgments.
+
+Something of the same kind may be said with regard to Nakedness, which
+in modern Civilization has become the object of a very serious and
+indeed harmful taboo; both of speech and act. As someone has said, it
+became in the end of the nineteenth century almost a crime to mention
+by name any portion of the human body within a radius of about twenty
+inches from its centre (!) and as a matter of fact a few dress-reformers
+of that period were actually brought into court and treated as criminals
+for going about with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest
+uncovered! Public follies such as these have been responsible for much
+of the bodily and mental disease and suppression just mentioned, and
+the sooner they are sent to limbo the better. No sensible person
+would advocate promiscuous nakedness any more than promiscuous
+sex-relationship; nor is it likely that aged and deformed people would
+at any time wish to expose themselves. But surely there is enough good
+sense and appreciation of grace and fitness in the average human mind
+for it to be able to liberate the body from senseless concealment, and
+give it its due expression. The Greeks of old, having on the whole
+clean bodies, treated them with respect and distinction. The young men
+appeared quite naked in the palaestra, and even the girls of Sparta ran
+races publicly in the same condition; (1) and some day when our
+bodies (and minds too) have become clean we shall return to similar
+institutions. But that will not be just yet. As long as the defilement
+of this commercial civilization is on us we shall prefer our dirt and
+concealment. The powers that be will protest against change. Heinrich
+Scham, in his charming little pamphlet Nackende Menschen, (2) describes
+the consternation of the commercial people at such ideas:
+
+"'What will become of us,' cried the tailors, 'if you go naked?'
+
+"And all the lot of them, hat, cravat, shirt, and shoemakers joined in
+the chorus.
+
+"'AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?' cried one who had just been made a
+director."
+
+
+ (1) See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.
+
+ (2) Published at Leipzig about 1893.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+Referring back to the existence of something resembling a great
+World-religion which has come down the centuries, continually expanding
+and branching in the process, we have now to consider the genesis of
+that special brand or branch of it which we call Christianity. Each
+religion or cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast
+amount in common with the general World-religion; yet each has had its
+own special characteristics. What have been the main characteristics of
+the Christian branch, as differentiating it from the other branches?
+
+We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic attitude towards Sex
+was one of the most salient marks of the Christian Church; and that
+whereas most of the pagan cults (though occasionally favoring frightful
+austerities and cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure
+and the world of the senses, Christianity--following largely on
+Judaism--displayed a tendency towards renunciation of the world and the
+flesh, and a withdrawal into the inner and more spiritual regions of the
+mind. The same tendency may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults
+of that period. It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI, 510-40)
+chaffs the priests of Cybele at Rome for making themselves "eunuchs for
+the kingdom of heaven's sake," or the rich Roman lady for plunging in
+the wintry Tiber for a propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later
+pagans "the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul" had
+become a very serious matter. But Christianity represented perhaps the
+most powerful reaction against this; and this reaction had, as indicated
+in the last chapter, the enormously valuable result that (for the time)
+it disentangled love from sex and established Love, pure and undefiled,
+as ruler of the world. "God is Love." But, as also indicated, the
+divorce between the two elements of human nature, carried to an extreme,
+led in time to a crippling of both elements and the development of a
+certain morbidity and self-consciousness which, it cannot be denied, is
+painfully marked among some sections of Christians--especially those of
+the altruistic and 'philanthropic' type.
+
+Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very fine in
+its way but has its limits of utility, has been its insistence on
+"morality." Some modern writers indeed have gone so far--forgetting, I
+suppose, the Stoics--as to claim that Christianity's chief mark is its
+high morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the
+moral sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that,
+in the true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been
+much more 'moral' as a rule--that is, ready as individuals to pay
+respect to the needs of the community--than the later and more civilized
+societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of
+the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on
+the just-mentioned kind of morality, which we should call _civic duty to
+one’s neighbor_, the Christian made morality to consist more especially
+in a man’s _duty to God_. It became with them a private affair between a
+man’s self and God, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end
+to a very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief
+inspiration was not the helping of one's fellow-man but the saving of
+one's own soul.
+
+There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between
+Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we
+may recognize these two--(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the
+world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b)
+the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of
+duty to God rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to
+society generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led
+to this differentiation.
+
+Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the
+effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known
+world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities,
+with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken
+up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially
+modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life
+and religion was already being traced. By the time of the founding of
+the first Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly
+extended and established the process. The Mediterranean had become a
+great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all
+directions; tourists visited its shores. The known world had become one.
+The numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of
+the Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs, religions,
+philosophies, were profoundly influencing each other. (1) A great fusion
+was taking place; and it was becoming inevitable that the next great
+religious movement would have a world-wide character.
+
+ (1) For an enlargement on this theme see Glover's Conflict of
+Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity (University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis worship, for
+instance (a resurrection-cult), "was still thriving in Syria and Cyprus
+when Paul preached there," and the worship of Isis and Serapis had
+already reached then, Rome and Naples.
+
+
+It was probable that this new religion would combine many elements from
+the preceding rituals in one cult. In connection with the fine temples
+and elaborate services of Isis and Cybele and Mithra there was growing
+up a powerful priesthood; Franz Cumont (1) speaks of "the learned
+priests of the Asiatic cults" as building up, on the foundations of old
+fetichism and superstition, a complete religious philosophy--just as
+the Brahmins had built the monism of the Vedanta on the "monstrous
+idolatries of Hinduism." And it was likely that a similar process would
+evolve the new religion expected. Toutain again calls attention to the
+patronage accorded to all these cults by the Roman Emperors, as favoring
+a new combination and synthesis:--"Hadrien, Commode, Septime Sévère,
+Julia Domna, Elagabal, Alexandre Sévère, en particulier ont contribué
+personnellement a la popularité et au succes des cultes qui se
+celebraient en l'honneur de Serapis et d'Isis, des divinités syriennes
+et de Mithra." (2)
+
+ (1) See Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain
+(Paris, 1906), p. 253.
+
+ (2) Cultes paiens dans l'Empire Romain (2 vols., 1911), vol. ii,
+p. 263.
+
+
+It was also probable that this new Religion would show (as indicated
+in the last chapter) a reaction against mere sex-indulgence; and,
+as regards its standard of Morality generally, that, among so many
+conflicting peoples with their various civic and local customs, it could
+not well identify itself with any ONE of these but would evolve an
+inner inspiration of its own which in its best form would be love of the
+neighbor, regardless of the race, creed or customs of the neighbor, and
+whose sanction would not reside in any of the external authorities
+thus conflicting with each other, but in the sense of the soul's direct
+responsibility to God.
+
+So much for what we might expect a priori as to the influence of the
+surroundings on the general form of the new Religion. And what about the
+kind of creed or creeds which that religion would favor? Here again
+we must see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a certain
+result. Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding
+chapters--doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the
+Trinity, the Virgin-birth, and so forth--were in their various forms
+seething, so to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new
+religious synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to
+appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its own. Thus
+it is into the midst of this germinating mass that we must imagine the
+various pagan cults, like fertilizing streams, descending. To trace all
+these streams would of course be an impossible task; but it may be of
+use, as an example of the process, to take the case of some particular
+belief. Let us take the belief in the coming of a Savior-god; and this
+will be the more suitable as it is a belief which has in the past been
+commonly held to be distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now
+that it is not in any sense distinctive, but that the long tradition of
+the Savior comes down from the remotest times, and perhaps from every
+country of the world. (1) The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the
+fifty-third chapter of Isaiah emptied themselves into the Christian
+teachings, and infected them to some degree with a Judaic tinge. The
+"Messiah" means of course the Anointed One. The Hebrew word occurs some
+40 times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint or Greek
+translation (made mainly in the third century BEFORE our era) the word
+is translated [gr cristos], or Christos, which again means Anointed.
+Thus we see that the idea or the word "The Christ" was in vogue in
+Alexandria as far back certainly as 280 B.C., or nearly three centuries
+before Jesus. And what the word "The Anointed" strictly speaking means,
+and from what the expression is probably derived, will appear later. In
+The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, (2) the Christ is
+spoken of as already existing in heaven, and about to come as judge
+of all men, and is definitely called "the Son of Man." The Book of
+Revelations is FULL of passages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of Paul;
+so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden Age that is
+to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven and Hell, and of Angels good
+and evil, and it speaks of a "garden of Righteousness" with the "Tree of
+Wisdom" in its midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first century
+B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.
+
+ (1) Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with
+prophecies of a coming Mahdi.
+
+ (2) See Edition by R. H. Charles (1893).
+
+
+But the Savior-god, as we also know, was a familiar figure in Egypt. The
+great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both in his life and death: in
+his life through the noble works he wrought for the benefit of mankind,
+and in his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness and
+his resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven. (1) The Egyptian
+doctrines descended through Alexandria into Christianity--and though
+they did not influence the latter deeply until about 300 A.D., yet they
+then succeeded in reaching the Christian Churches, giving a color to
+their teachings with regard to the Savior, and persuading them to accept
+and honor the Egyptian worship of Isis in the Christian form of the
+Virgin Mary.
+
+ (1) See ch. ii.
+
+
+Again, another great stream of influence descended from Persia in the
+form of the cult of Mithra. Mithra, as we have seen, (1) stood as a
+great Mediator between God and man. With his baptisms and eucharists,
+and his twelve disciples, and his birth in a cave, and so forth,
+he seemed to the early Fathers an invention of the devil and a most
+dangerous mockery on Christianity--and all the more so because his
+worship was becoming so exceedingly popular. The cult seems to have
+reached Rome about B.C. 70. It spread far and wide through the Empire.
+It extended to Great Britain, and numerous remains of Mithraic
+monuments and sculptures in this country--at York, Chester and other
+places--testify to its wide acceptance even here. At Rome the vogue of
+Mithraism became so great that in the third century A. D., it was quite
+doubtful (2) whether it OR Christianity would triumph; the Emperor
+Aurelian in 273 founded a cult of the Invincible Sun in connection with
+Mithraism; (3) and as St. Jerome tells us in his letters, (4) the latter
+cult had at a later time to be suppressed in Rome and Alexandria by
+PHYSICAL FORCE, so powerful was it.
+
+ (1) Ch. ii.
+
+ (2) See Cumont, op. cit., who says, p. 171:--"Jamais, pas meme a
+l'epoque des invasions mussulmanes, l'Europe ne sembla plus pres
+de devenir asiatique qu'au moment ou Diocletien reconnaissait
+officiellement en Mithra, le protecteur de l'empire reconstitue." See
+also Cumont's Mysteres de Mithra, preface. The Roman Army, in fact,
+stuck to Mithra throughout, as against Christianity; and so did the
+Roman nobility. (See S. Augustine's Confessions, Book VIII, ch. 2.)
+
+ (3) Cumont indeed says that the identification of Mithra with the
+Sun (the emblem of imperial power) formed one reason why Mithraism was
+NOT persecuted at that time.
+
+ (4) Epist. cvii, ad Laetam. See Robertson's Pagan Christs, p.
+350.
+
+
+Nor was force the only method employed. IMITATION is not only the
+sincerest flattery, but it is often the most subtle and effective way of
+defeating a rival. The priests of the rising Christian Church were, like
+the priests of ALL religions, not wanting in craft; and at this moment
+when the question of a World-religion was in the balance, it was an
+obvious policy for them to throw into their own scale as many elements
+as possible of the popular Pagan cults. Mithraism had been flourishing
+for 600 years; and it is, to say the least, CURIOUS that the Mithraic
+doctrines and legends which I have just mentioned should all have been
+adopted (quite unintentionally of course!) into Christianity; and still
+more so that some others from the same source, like the legend of the
+Shepherds at the Nativity and the doctrine of the Resurrection and
+Ascension, which are NOT mentioned at all in the original draft of the
+earliest Gospel (St. Mark), should have made their appearance, in the
+Christian writings at a later time, when Mithraism was making great
+forward strides. History shows that as a Church progresses and expands
+it generally feels compelled to enlarge and fortify its own foundations
+by inserting material which was not there at first. I shall shortly give
+another illustration of this; at present I will merely point out
+that the Christian writers, as time went on, not only introduced new
+doctrines, legends, miracles and so forth--most of which we can trace to
+antecedent pagan sources--but that they took especial pains to
+destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own
+dishonesty. We learn from Porphyry (1) that there were several elaborate
+treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra; and J. M. Robertson adds
+(Pagan Christs, p. 325): "everyone of these has been destroyed by the
+care of the Church, and it is remarkable that even the treatise of
+Firmicus is mutilated at a passage (v.) where he seems to be accusing
+Christians of following Mithraic usages." While again Professor Murray
+says, "The polemic literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant;
+the books of the Pagans have been DESTROYED." (2)
+
+ (1) De Abstinentia, ii. 56; iv. 16.
+
+ (2) Four Stages, p. 180. We have probably an instance of this
+destruction in the total disappearance of Celsus' lively attack
+on Christianity (180 A.D.), of which, however, portions have been
+fortunately preserved in Origen's rather prolix refutation of the same.
+
+
+Returning to the doctrine of the Savior, I have already in preceding
+chapters given so many instances of belief in such a deity among the
+pagans--whether he be called Krishna or Mithra or Osiris or Horus or
+Apollo or Hercules--that it is not necessary to dwell on the subject any
+further in order to persuade the reader that the doctrine was 'in the
+air' at the time of the advent of Christianity. Even Dionysus, then
+a prominent figure in the 'Mysteries,' was called Eleutherios, The
+Deliverer. But it may be of interest to trace the same doctrine among
+the PRE-CHRISTIAN sects of Gnostics. The Gnostics, says Professor
+Murray, (1) "are still commonly thought of as a body of CHRISTIAN
+heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the
+Hellenistic world BEFORE Christianity as well as after. They must have
+been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the
+days of Paul or Apollos. Their Savior, like the Jewish Messiah, was
+established in men's minds before the Savior of the Christians. 'If
+we look close,' says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with great
+clearness that the figure of the Redeemer as such did not wait for
+Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnosis, but was
+already present there under various forms.'"
+
+ (1) Four Stages, p. 143.
+
+
+This Gnostic Redeemer, continues Professor Murray, "is descended by a
+fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Soter' ('third Savior') (1) of
+early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis
+from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of
+the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name
+of Jesus or 'Christos,' 'the Anointed,' tends gradually to supersede.
+Above all, he is in some sense Man, or 'the second Man' or 'the Son of
+Man'... He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, of
+whom all bodily men are feeble copies." (2)
+
+ (1) There seems to be some doubt about the exact meaning of this
+expression. Even Zeus himself was sometimes called 'Soter,' and at
+feasts, it is said, the THIRD goblet was always drunk in his honor.
+
+ (2) See also The Gnostic Story of Jesus Christ, by Gilbert T.
+Sadler (C. W. Daniel, 1919).
+
+
+This passage brings vividly before the mind the process of which I
+have spoken, namely, the fusion and mutual interchange of ideas on the
+subject of the Savior during the period anterior to our era. Also it
+exemplifies to us through what an abstract sphere of Gnostic religious
+speculation the doctrine had to travel before reaching its expression in
+Christianity. (1) This exalted and high philosophical conception passed
+on and came out again to some degree in the Fourth Gospel and the
+Pauline Epistles (especially I Cor. xv); but I need hardly say it
+was not maintained. The enthusiasm of the little scattered Christian
+bodies--with their communism of practice with regard to THIS world and
+their intensity of faith with regard to the next--began to wane in the
+second and third centuries A.D. As the Church (with capital initial)
+grew, so was it less and less occupied with real religious feeling, and
+more and more with its battles against persecution from outside, and its
+quarrels and dissensions concerning heresies within its own borders. And
+when at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) it endeavored to establish an
+official creed, the strife and bitterness only increased. "There is no
+wild beast," said the Emperor Julian, "like an angry theologian." Where
+the fourth Evangelist had preached the gospel of Love, and Paul had
+announced redemption by an inner and spiritual identification with
+Christ, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive";
+and whereas some at any rate of the Pagan cults had taught a glorious
+salvation by the new birth of a divine being within each man: "Be of
+good cheer, O initiates in the mystery of the liberated god; For to
+you too out of all your labors and sorrows shall come Liberation"--the
+Nicene creed had nothing to propound except some extremely futile
+speculations about the relation to each other of the Father and the
+Son, and the relation of BOTH to the Holy Ghost, and of all THREE to the
+Virgin Mary--speculations which only served for the renewal of shameful
+strife and animosities--riots and bloodshed and murder--within the
+Church, and the mockery of the heathen without. And as far as it dealt
+with the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the Lord it did not
+differ from the score of preceding pagan creeds, except in the thorough
+materialism and lack of poetry in statement which it exhibits. After
+the Council of Nicaea, in fact, the Judaic tinge in the doctrines of the
+Church becomes more apparent, and more and more its Scheme of Salvation
+through Christ takes the character of a rather sordid and huckstering
+bargain by which Man gets the better of God by persuading the latter
+to sacrifice his own Son for the redemption of the world! With the
+exception of a few episodes like the formation during the Middle Ages of
+the noble brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Frairs and Nuns, dedicated to
+the help and healing of suffering humanity, and the appearance of a few
+real lovers of mankind (and the animals) like St. Francis--(and these
+manifestations can hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty
+consistently opposed them)--it may be said that after about the fourth
+century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm died
+away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the North and East, and
+later of Moors and Arabs from the South, familiarized the European
+peoples with the ideas of bloodshed and violence; gross and material
+conceptions of life were in the ascendant; and a romantic and aspiring
+Christianity gave place to a worldly and vulgar Churchianity.
+
+ (1) When travelling in India I found that the Gnanis or Wise Men
+there quite commonly maintained that Jesus (judging from his teaching)
+must have been initiated at some time in the esoteric doctrines of the
+Vedanta.
+
+
+I have in these two or three pages dealt only--and that very
+briefly--with the entry of the pagan doctrine of the Savior into the
+Christian field, showing its transformation there and how Christianity
+could not well escape having a doctrine of a Savior, or avoid giving a
+color of its own to that doctrine. To follow out the same course
+with other doctrines, like those which I have mentioned above, would
+obviously be an endless task--which must be left to each student or
+reader to pursue according to his opportunity and capacity. It is clear
+anyhow, that all these elements of the pagan religions--pouring down
+into the vast reservoir, or rather whirlpool, of the Roman Empire,
+and mixing among all these numerous brotherhoods, societies, collegia,
+mystery-clubs, and groups which were at that time looking out intently
+for some new revelation or inspiration--did more or less automatically
+act and react upon each other, and by the general conditions prevailing
+were modified, till they ultimately combined and took united shape
+in the movement which we call Christianity, but which only--as I have
+said--narrowly escaped being called Mithraism--so nearly related and
+closely allied were these cults with each other.
+
+
+At this point it will naturally be asked: "And where in this scheme of
+the Genesis of Christianity is the chief figure and accredited leader of
+the movement--namely Jesus Christ himself--for to all appearance in the
+account here given of the matter he is practically non-existent or a
+negligible quantity?" And the question is a very pertinent one, and very
+difficult to answer. "Where is the founder of the Religion?"--or to
+put it in another form: "Is it necessary to suppose a human and visible
+Founder at all?" A few years ago such a mere question would have been
+accounted rank blasphemy, and would only--if passed over--have been
+ignored on account of its supposed absurdity. To-day, however, owing to
+the enormous amount of work which has been done of late on the
+subject of Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different
+complexion. And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned
+body of critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as
+LEGENDARY. Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his
+celebrated book The Christ-Myth, (1) places David F. Strauss as first
+in the myth field--though he allows that Dupuis in L'origine de tous
+les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the whole idea. He then mentions
+Bruno Bauer (1877) as contending that Jesus was a pure invention
+of Mark's, and John M. Robertson as having in his Christianity and
+Mythology (1900) given the first thoroughly reasoned exposition of the
+legendary theory; also Emilio Bossi in Italy, who wrote Jesu Christo
+non e mai esistito, and similar authors in Holland, Poland, and other
+countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The
+Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in
+den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the
+Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list! (2) "But," continues
+Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he
+dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of
+tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly remark that, large and learned
+as the body of opinion here represented is, a still larger (but less
+learned) body fights desperately for the actual HISTORICITY of Jesus,
+and some even still for the old view of him as a quite unique and
+miraculous revelation of Godhood on earth.
+
+ (1) Die Christus-mythe: verbesserte und erweitezte Ausgabe, Jena,
+1910.
+
+ (2) To which we may also add Schweitzer's Quest of the historical
+Jesus (1910).
+
+
+At first, no doubt, the LEGENDARY theory seems a little TOO far-fetched.
+There is a fashion in all these things, and it MAY be that there is a
+fashion even here. But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even
+in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure
+of Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in
+the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a
+subject of controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to
+have lived some 300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in
+minutest detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost
+certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember--as
+mentioned earlier in this book (1)--that it was more than five hundred
+years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort
+was made to establish the date of that birth--and that then a purely
+mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new
+birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of
+Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for
+a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and
+the general standard of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like
+Syria, and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating
+from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous
+or imaginative;--why, then the legendary theory does not seem so
+improbable. There is no doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem
+(in A.D. 70), little groups of believers in a redeeming 'Christ' were
+formed there and in other places, just as there had certainly existed,
+in the first century B.C., groups of Gnostics, Therapeutae, Essenes and
+others whose teachings were very SIMILAR to the Christian, and there was
+now a demand from many of these groups for 'writings' and 'histories'
+which should hearten and confirm the young and growing Churches. The
+Gospels and Epistles, of which there are still extant a great abundance,
+both apocryphal and canonical, met this demand; but how far their
+records of the person of Jesus of Nazareth are reliable history, or how
+far they are merely imaginative pictures of the kind of man the Saviour
+might be expected to be, (2) is a question which, as I have already
+said, is a difficult one for skilled critics to answer, and one on which
+I certainly have no intention of giving a positive verdict. Personally I
+must say I think the 'legendary' solution quite likely, and in some ways
+more satisfactory than the opposite one--for the simple reason that
+it seems much more encouraging to suppose that the story of Jesus,
+(gracious and beautiful as it is) is a myth which gradually formed
+itself in the conscience of mankind, and thus points the way of
+humanity's future evolution, than to suppose it to be the mere record
+of an unique and miraculous interposition of Providence, which depended
+entirely on the powers above, and could hardly be expected to occur
+again.
+
+ (1) Ch. II.
+
+ (2) One of Celsus' accusations against the Christians was that
+their Gospels had been written "several times over" (see Origen, Contra
+Celsum, ii. 26, 27).
+
+
+However, the question is not what we desire, but what we can prove to be
+the actual fact. And certainly the difficulties in the way of regarding
+the Gospel story (or stories, for there is not one consistent story)
+as TRUE are enormous. If anyone will read, for instance, in the four
+Gospels, the events of the night preceding the crucifixion and reckon
+the time which they would necessarily have taken to enact--the Last
+Supper, the agony in the Garden, the betrayal by Judas, the haling
+before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, and then before Pilate in the Hall
+of judgment (though courts for the trial of malefactors do not GENERALLY
+sit in the middle of the night); then--in Luke--the interposed visit to
+Herod, and the RETURN to Pilate; Pilate's speeches and washing of hands
+before the crowd; then the scourging and the mocking and the arraying of
+Jesus in purple robe as a king; then the preparation of a Cross and the
+long and painful journey to Golgotha; and finally the Crucifixion at
+sunrise;--he will see--as has often been pointed out--that the whole
+story is physically impossible. As a record of actual events the story
+is impossible; but as a record or series of notes derived from the
+witnessing of a "mystery-play"--and such plays with VERY SIMILAR
+incidents were common enough in antiquity in connection with cults of
+a dying Savior, it very likely IS true (one can see the very dramatic
+character of the incidents: the washing of hands, the threefold denial
+by Peter, the purple robe and crown of thorns, and so forth); and as
+such it is now accepted by many well-qualified authorities. (1)
+
+ (1) Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough (vol. ix, "The Scapegoat," p.
+400) speaks of the frequency in antiquity of a Mystery-play relating
+to a God-man who gives his life and blood for the people; and he
+puts forward tentatively and by no means dogmatically the following
+note:--"Such a drama, if we are right, was the original story of Esther
+and Mordecai, or (to give their older names) Ishtar and Marduk. It was
+played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning Captives brought
+it to Judaea, where it was acted, rather as an historical than a
+mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim earnest on a
+cross or gallows, were naturally drawn from the gaol rather than the
+green-room. A chain of causes, which because we cannot follow them
+might--in the loose language of common life--be called an accident,
+determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should
+be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had made in high
+places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to put out of the way."
+See also vol. iv, "The Dying God," in the same book.
+
+
+There are many other difficulties. The raising of Lazarus, already dead
+three days, the turning of water into wine (a miracle attributed to
+Bacchus, of old), the feeding of the five thousand, and others of the
+marvels are, to say the least, not easy of digestion. The "Sermon on the
+Mount" which, with the "Lord's Prayer" embedded in it, forms the great
+and accepted repository of 'Christian' teaching and piety, is well known
+to be a collection of sayings from pre-christian writings, including the
+Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemonehesreh
+(a book of Hebrew prayers), and others; and the fact that this
+collection was really made AFTER the time of Jesus, and could not
+have originated from him, is clear from the stress which it lays on
+"persecutions" and "false prophets"--things which were certainly not a
+source of trouble at the time Jesus is supposed to be speaking, though
+they were at a later time--as well as from the occurrence of the word
+"Gentiles," which being here used apparently in contra-distinction to
+"Christians" could not well be appropriate at a time when no recognized
+Christian bodies as yet existed.
+
+But the most remarkable point in this connection is the absolute
+silence of the Gospel of Mark on the subject of the Resurrection and
+Ascension--that is, of the ORIGINAL Gospel, for it is now allowed on
+all hands that the twelve verses Mark xvi. 9 to the end, are a later
+insertion. Considering the nature of this event, astounding indeed, if
+physically true, and unique in the history of the world, it is strange
+that this Gospel--the earliest written of the four Gospels, and nearest
+in time to the actual evidence--makes no mention of it. The next Gospel
+in point of time--that of Matthew--mentions the matter rather briefly
+and timidly, and reports the story that the body had been STOLEN from
+the sepulchre. Luke enlarges considerably and gives a whole long chapter
+to the resurrection and ascension; while the Fourth Gospel, written
+fully twenty years later still--say about A. D. 120--gives two chapters
+and a GREAT VARIETY OF DETAILS!
+
+This increase of detail, however, as one gets farther and farther from
+the actual event is just what one always finds, as I have said before,
+in legendary traditions. A very interesting example of this has lately
+come to light in the case of the traditions concerning the life and
+death of the Persian Bab. The Bab, as most of my readers will know, was
+the Founder of a great religious movement which now numbers (or numbered
+before the Great War) some millions of adherents, chiefly Mahommedans,
+Christians, Jews and Parsees. The period of his missionary activity
+was from 1845 to 1850. His Gospel was singularly like that of Jesus--a
+gospel of love to mankind--only (as might be expected from the
+difference of date) with an even wider and more deliberate inclusion of
+all classes, creeds and races, sinners and saints; and the incidents and
+entourage of his ministry were also singularly similar. He was born at
+Shiraz in 1820, and growing up a promising boy and youth, fell at the
+age of 21 under the influence of a certain Seyyid Kazim, leader of a
+heterodox sect, and a kind of fore-runner or John the Baptist to the
+Bab. The result was a period of mental trouble (like the "temptation in
+the wilderness"), after which the youth returned to Shiraz and at the
+age of twenty-five began his own mission. His real name was Mirza Ali
+Muhammad, but he called himself thenceforth The Bab, i.e. the Gate ("I
+am the Way"); and gradually there gathered round him disciples, drawn
+by the fascination of his personality and the devotion of his character.
+But with the rapid increase of his following great jealousy and hatred
+were excited among the Mullahs, the upholders of a fanatical and
+narrow-minded Mahommedanism and quite corresponding to the Scribes and
+Pharisees of the New Testament. By them he was denounced to the
+Turkish Government. He was arrested on a charge of causing political
+disturbance, and was condemned to death. Among his disciples was one
+favorite, (1) who was absolutely devoted to his Master and refused to
+leave him at the last. So together they were suspended over the city
+wall (at Tabriz) and simultaneously shot. This was on the 8th July,
+1850.
+
+ (1) Mirza Muhammad Ali; and one should note the similarity of
+the two names.
+
+
+In November 1850--or between that date and October 1851, a book
+appeared, written by one of the B[a^]b's earliest and most enthusiastic
+disciples--a merchant of Kashan--and giving in quite simple and
+unpretending form a record of the above events. There is in it no
+account of miracles or of great pretensions to godhood and the like. It
+is just a plain history of the life and death of a beloved teacher.
+It was cordially received and circulated far and wide; and we have no
+reason for doubting its essential veracity. And even if proved now to be
+inaccurate in one or two details, this would not invalidate the moral of
+the rest of the story--which is as follows:
+
+After the death of the Bab a great persecution took place (in 1852);
+there were many Babi martyrs, and for some years the general followers
+were scattered. But in time they gathered themselves together again;
+successors to the original prophet were appointed--though not without
+dissensions--and a Babi church, chiefly at Acca or Acre in Syria, began
+to be formed. It was during this period that a great number of legends
+grew up--legends of miraculous babyhood and boyhood, legends of miracles
+performed by the mature Bab, and so forth; and when the newly-forming
+Church came to look into the matter it concluded (quite naturally!) that
+such a simple history as I have outlined above would never do for the
+foundation of its plans, now grown somewhat ambitious. So a new Gospel
+was framed, called the Tarikh-i-Jadid ("The new History" or "The new
+Way"), embodying and including a lot of legendary matter, and issued
+with the authority of "the Church." This was in 1881-2; and comparing
+this with the original record (called The point of Kaf) we get a
+luminous view of the growth of fable in those thirty brief years which
+had elapsed since the Bab's death. Meanwhile it became very necessary of
+course to withdraw from circulation as far as possible all copies of the
+original record, lest they should give the lie to the later 'Gospel';
+and this apparently was done very effectively--so effectively indeed
+that Professor Edward Browne (to whom the world owes so much on account
+of his labors in connection with Babism), after arduous search, came at
+one time to the conclusion that the original was no longer extant. Most
+fortunately, however, the well-known Comte de Gobineau had in the course
+of his studies on Eastern Religions acquired a copy of The point of Kaf;
+and this, after his death, was found among his literary treasures and
+identified (as was most fitting) by Professor Browne himself.
+
+Such in brief is the history of the early Babi Church (1)--a Church
+which has grown up and expanded greatly within the memory of many yet
+living. Much might be written about it, but the chief point at present
+is for us to note the well-verified and interesting example it gives of
+the rapid growth in Syria of a religious legend and the reasons which
+contributed to this growth--and to be warned how much more rapidly
+similar legends probably grew up in the same land in the middle of
+the First Century, A.D. The story of the Bab is also interesting to us
+because, while this mass of legend was formed around it, there is no
+possible doubt about the actual existence of a historical nucleus in the
+person of Mirza Ali Muhammad.
+
+ (1) For literature, see Edward G. Browne's Traveller's Narrative
+on the Episode of the Bab (1891), and his New History of the Bab
+translated from the Persian of the Tarikh-i-Jadid (Cambridge, 1893).
+Also Sermons and Essays by Herbert Rix (Williams and Norgate, 1907), pp.
+295-325, "The Persian Bab."
+
+
+On the whole, one is sometimes inclined to doubt whether any great
+movement ever makes itself felt in the world, without dating first from
+some powerful personality or group of personalities, ROUND which the
+idealizing and myth-making genius of mankind tends to crystallize. But
+one must not even here be too certain. Something of the Apostle Paul we
+know, and something of 'John' the Evangelist and writer of the Epistle
+I John; and that the 'Christian' doctrines dated largely from the
+preaching and teaching of these two we cannot doubt; but Paul never
+saw Jesus (except "in the Spirit"), nor does he ever mention the man
+personally, or any incident of his actual life (the "crucified Christ"
+being always an ideal figure); and 'John' who wrote the Gospel was
+certainly not the same as the disciple who "lay in Jesus' bosom"--though
+an intercalated verse, the last but one in the Gospel, asserts the
+identity. (1)
+
+ (1) It is obvious, in fact, that the WHOLE of the last chapter of
+St. John is a later insertion, and again that the two last verses of
+that chapter are later than the chapter itself!
+
+
+There may have been a historic Jesus--and if so, to get a reliable
+outline of his life would indeed be a treasure; but at present it would
+seem there is no sign of that. If the historicity of Jesus, in any
+degree, could be proved, it would give us reason for supposing--what I
+have personally always been inclined to believe--that there was also
+a historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra, Krishna,
+Hercules, Apollo and the rest. The question, in fact, narrows itself
+down to this, Have there been in the course of human evolution certain,
+so to speak, NODAL points or periods at which the psychologic currents
+ran together and condensed themselves for a new start; and has each such
+node or point of condensation been marked by the appearance of an actual
+and heroic man (or woman) who supplied a necessary impetus for the
+new departure, and gave his name to the resulting movement? OR is
+it sufficient to suppose the automatic formation of such nodes or
+starting-points without the intervention of any special hero or genius,
+and to imagine that in each case the myth-making tendency of mankind
+CREATED a legendary and inspiring figure and worshiped the same for a
+long period afterwards as a god?
+
+As I have said before, this is a question which, interesting as it is,
+is not really very important. The main thing being that the prophetic
+and creative spirit of mankind HAS from time to time evolved those
+figures as idealizations of its "heart's desire" and placed a halo
+round their heads. The long procession of them becomes a REAL piece of
+History--the history of the evolution of the human heart, and of human
+consciousness. But with the psychology of the whole subject I shall deal
+in the next chapter.
+
+
+I may here, however, dwell for a moment on two other points which belong
+properly to this chapter. I have already mentioned the great reliance
+placed by the advocates of a unique 'revelation' on the high morality
+taught in the Gospels and the New Testament generally. There is no need
+of course to challenge that morality or to depreciate it unduly; but the
+argument assumes that it is so greatly superior to anything of the kind
+that had been taught before that we are compelled to suppose something
+like a revelation to explain its appearance--whereas of course anyone
+familiar with the writings of antiquity, among the Greeks or Romans
+or Egyptians or Hindus or later Jews, knows perfectly well that the
+reported sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly
+from these sources. I have illustrated this already from the Sermon
+on the Mount. If anyone will glance at the Testament of the Twelve
+Patriarchs--a Jewish book composed about 120 B. C.--he will see that
+it is full of moral precepts, and especially precepts of love and
+forgiveness, so ardent and so noble that it hardly suffers in any way
+when compared with the New Testament teaching, and that consequently no
+special miracle is required to explain the appearance of the latter.
+
+The twelve Patriarchs in question are the twelve sons of Jacob, and the
+book consists of their supposed deathbed scenes, in which each patriarch
+in turn recites his own (more or less imaginary) life and deeds and
+gives pious counsel to his children and successors. It is composed in a
+fine and poetic style, and is full of lofty thought, remindful in scores
+of passages of the Gospels--words and all--the coincidences being too
+striking to be accidental. It evidently had a deep influence on the
+authors of the Gospels, as well as on St. Paul. It affirms a belief
+in the coming of a Messiah, and in salvation for the Gentiles. The
+following are some quotations from it: (1) Testament of Zebulun (p.
+116): "My children, I bid you keep the commands of the Lord, and show
+mercy to your neighbours, and have compassion towards all, not towards
+men only, but also towards beasts." Dan (p. 127): "Love the Lord through
+all your life, and one another with a true heart." Joseph (p. 173): "I
+was sick, and the Lord visited me; in prison, and my God showed favor
+unto me." Benjamin (p. 209): "For as the sun is not defiled by shining
+on dung and mire, but rather drieth up both and driveth away the evil
+smell, so also the pure mind, encompassed by the defilements of earth,
+rather cleanseth them and is not itself defiled."
+
+ (1) The references being to the Edition by R. H. Charles (1907).
+
+
+I think these quotations are sufficient to prove the high standard of
+this book, which was written in the Second Century B. C., and FROM which
+the New Testament authors copiously borrowed.
+
+The other point has to do with my statement at the beginning of this
+chapter that two of the main 'characteristics' of Christianity were its
+insistence on (a) a tendency towards renunciation of the world, and a
+consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love, and (b) on a morality
+whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to God rather than a
+public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to society generally. I
+think, however, that the last-mentioned characteristic ought to
+be viewed in relation to a third, namely, (c) the extraordinarily
+DEMOCRATIC tendency of the new Religion. (1) Celsus (A.D. 200) jeered
+at the early Christians for their extreme democracy: "It is only
+the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and
+children--whom they wish to persuade (to join their churches) or CAN
+persuade"--"wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated
+and vulgar persons," and "whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent or
+a fool, in a word, whoever is god-forsaken ([gr kakodaimwn]), him the
+Kingdom of God will receive." (2) Thus Celsus, the accomplished, clever,
+philosophic and withal humorous critic, laughed at the new religionists,
+and prophesied their speedy extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken.
+There is little doubt that just the inclusion of women and weaklings
+and outcasts did contribute LARGELY to the spread of Christianity (and
+Mithraism). It brought hope and a sense of human dignity to the despised
+and rejected of the earth. Of the immense numbers of lesser officials
+who carried on the vast organization of the Roman Empire, most perhaps,
+were taken from the ranks of the freedmen and quondam slaves, drawn from
+a great variety of races and already familiar with pagan cults of all
+kinds--Egyptian, Syrian, Chaldean, Iranian, and so forth. (3) This
+fact helped to give to Christianity--under the fine tolerance of the
+Empire--its democratic character and also its willingness to accept all.
+The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the
+notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in; and though this was
+doubtless, as time went on, a source of weakness to the Church, and a
+cause of dissension and superstition, yet it was in the inevitable
+line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis which I must now
+endeavor to explain.
+
+ (1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic
+tendency was very marked in Mithraism. "Il est certain," says Cumont,
+"qu'il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les classes inferieures de
+la societe et c'est l'a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste
+longtemps la religion des humbles." Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.
+
+ (2) See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire,
+ch. viii.
+
+ (3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+
+The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think,
+from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it
+will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repetition,
+to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the
+dawn of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands or perhaps
+a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a
+gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain
+stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena
+of religious belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in
+the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by
+step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution
+concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the
+strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all
+over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have
+been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
+
+And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those at any rate
+with which we are here concerned--are Three: the stage of Simple
+Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage
+which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal
+Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be
+analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--but at present I only
+desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that
+it is from them and from their passage one into another that there
+has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange
+panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superstitions and
+magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its
+incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and
+paintings and forms of art and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama
+indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with
+three great leading motives!
+
+
+And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of
+centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not
+radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably
+more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or
+reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the
+consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as
+separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.
+He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very
+near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal
+form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general
+world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such
+a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature.
+And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before,
+allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and
+perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now.
+It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same
+sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion.
+For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher
+animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional
+privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their
+surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There
+must have been a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at
+any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet
+'golden.'
+
+It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.
+The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates
+(including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that
+they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man
+fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.
+Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these
+beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse,
+or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
+despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them
+and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we
+could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired
+the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
+friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age
+of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.
+And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand)
+that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense
+of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties
+binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it
+is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed
+the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that
+he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of
+the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into
+consciousness.
+
+ (1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
+edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between
+man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be
+found among the lower races."
+
+
+Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution
+of a child--somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)--when the
+simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new
+element--SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that
+(in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So
+in the evolution of the human race there has been a period--also marked
+and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval
+of time--when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of
+THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance
+of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question
+arose: "How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can _I_
+do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the
+painful, and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added to life.
+The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little
+eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply
+concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with
+the larger life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life of
+the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken
+up.
+
+ (1) See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1
+and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--where the
+same age is tentatively suggested.
+
+
+I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important that the
+reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable severance, an
+inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting
+nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked
+across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually)
+became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows.
+Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property
+and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship and solidarity
+grew feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts
+were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-activity and
+self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were
+less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew
+louder and more insistent. Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered
+his brother and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the Golden Age
+closed their gates behind him. He entered upon a period of suffering--a
+period of labor and toil and sorrow such as he had never before
+known, and such as the animals certainly have never known. And in that
+distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage, he
+still remains to-day.
+
+Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work. It would be
+foolish and useless to rail against the process, or to blame any one for
+it. It had to be. Through this dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had
+to pass--if only in order at last to find the True Self which was (and
+still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed
+there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark
+the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul's return
+to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will
+arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of
+life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious
+long time about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and
+Self-conceit and Cruelty and Lust of oppression and domination, which
+marks the present period, is past--and it WILL pass--then Humanity will
+come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and
+peace which has for so long been prophesied.
+
+But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want
+the reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old
+psychologic unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led
+to the whole panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round
+himself, necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed
+the sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The
+sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization
+of himself as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his
+attributing a similar consciousness of some kind to the great Life
+around him. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may
+have felt before, it became clear to him now that beings more or less
+like himself--though doubtless vaster and more powerful--moved behind
+the veil of the visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and
+Demons and Gods arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of
+this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an
+alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin.
+If before, he had experienced fear--in the kind of automatic way of
+self-preservation in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered
+self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble
+degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were
+not always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived
+or thought he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate
+persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against
+him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by
+a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in
+other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and
+magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense
+of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual
+of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by
+the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue of
+ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn
+to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of
+his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic
+meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common life and
+remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and
+rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and
+demonic violence of passions which else indeed might easily rend the
+community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early
+stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting
+this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of
+SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet
+logical order a whole series of religious institutions and beliefs,
+which phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no
+means unreal to our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the
+psychological process was necessarily of similar general character in
+every branch of the human race and all over the world, so the religious
+evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much the same complexion
+everywhere; and, though they differed in details according to climate
+and other influences, ran on such remarkably parallel lines as we have
+noted.
+
+Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event,
+the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place,
+an enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age.
+I dwell on the word "began" because I think it is probable that in its
+beginnings, and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had
+an infantile and very innocent character, quite different from its later
+and more aggressive forms--just as we see self-consciousness in a little
+child has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful
+or grasping boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though
+self-consciousness may have begun to appear in the human race at this
+very early time (and more or less contemporaneously with the invention
+of very rude tools and unformed language), there probably did elapse
+a very long period--perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the
+evils of this second stage of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller
+has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various
+branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early
+period before the separation of these branches, there are not found
+the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of
+strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among
+mankind AFTER the first formation and use of language.
+
+That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were
+APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many
+thinkers; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so
+very protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact
+determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what
+might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like
+"go-hunting-kill-bear") without reference to individual personalities
+and relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like
+"I" and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up into "parts
+of speech" and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If
+true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal
+language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals,
+preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in
+the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and
+relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in
+grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection
+and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According
+to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, or
+in any particular race or section of the human family, must have been
+equally slow and hesitating; and it would be easy to imagine, as just
+said, that there may have been a very long and 'golden' period at its
+beginning, before the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher
+forms.
+
+ (1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their
+simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we
+should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not
+differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase
+and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.
+
+ (2) See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's
+Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World called
+America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness
+is associated with the break-up of the holophrase.
+
+ (3) Themis, p. 471.
+
+
+All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are
+notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we
+take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (homo
+primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000
+or 40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of
+the Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and
+inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples, and 5,000 years
+ago for the first actual historical records that have come down to us,
+we may perhaps get something like a proportion between the different
+periods. That is to say, half a million years for the purely animal man
+in his different forms and grades of evolution. Then somewhere
+towards the end of palaeolithic or commencement of neolithic times
+Self-consciousness dimly beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow
+germination and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic
+period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago, and to-day
+(we hope), reaching the climax which precedes or foretells its abatement
+and transformation.
+
+ (2) Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93
+and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.
+
+ (3) See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.
+"Ethnology"; and Havelock Ellis, "The Origin of War," in The Philosophy
+of Conflict and other Essays.
+
+
+No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor periods greatly
+LONGER than those here mentioned; but possibly there would be some
+agreement as to the RATIO to each other of the times concerned: that
+is, the said authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man
+(1)-period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter
+aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the Second
+Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or fiftieth of the time of
+the first period; and then--if they looked forward at all to a third
+stage--would be inclined for obvious reasons to attribute to that again
+a very extended duration.
+
+ (1) I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of
+contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used it, but
+with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as one feels towards
+the animals themselves.
+
+
+However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about
+Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate
+to the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist,
+it is clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means
+of expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in
+attitudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate ritual,
+in fact. (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt,
+placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community,
+sacramental Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be
+expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often
+so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.
+'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere
+flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements
+of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or
+of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became
+a most important part of ritual.
+
+ (1) See ch. ix and xi.
+
+
+So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pass on to
+the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and
+dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round
+about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on
+indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present
+moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous
+systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive
+self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society
+at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the
+domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and
+ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in
+the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching
+a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new
+inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which
+we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary
+element of regeneration?
+
+It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry into a further
+stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through
+some such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of
+suffering, the mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die. (1)
+Self-consciousness has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new
+form. Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring this
+about. (2) And what is this new form in which consciousness has to
+rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the world during countless
+centuries have dated from that fatal attempt to make the little personal
+SELF the centre of effort and activity, and since that attempt has
+inevitably led to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind
+itself and within the body of society, there is nothing left but
+the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as its
+foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the direct SENSE
+AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout creation. The simple mind of
+Early Man and the Animals was of that character--a consciousness, so
+to speak, continuous through nature, and though running to points of
+illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet at no
+point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments. (And
+it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have
+already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct
+and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but
+clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate character of the
+First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly extended
+by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of
+mentality--the consciousness of the Third Stage.
+
+ (1) "The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an
+end," says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.
+
+ (2) One may remember in this connection the tapas of the Hindu
+yogi, or the ordeals of initiates into the pagan Mysteries generally.
+
+
+In order to understand the operation and qualities of this Third
+Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now to consider in what more
+or less rudimentary way or ways it figured in the pagan rituals and in
+Christianity. We have seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or
+the 'Grizzly' tribes of North American Indians in the neighborhood of
+Mount Shasta paying their respects and adoration to a captive bear--at
+once the food-animal, and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had
+slain a bear--and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with
+all due ceremonies observed, but privately for his own satisfaction. He
+had committed, therefore, a sin theoretically unpardonable; for had he
+not--to gratify his personal desire for food--levelled a blow at the
+guardian spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from his
+fellows by destroying its very symbol? There was only one way by which
+he could regain the fellowship of his companions. He must make amends by
+some public sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal
+for himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan) in a common
+feast, while at the same time, tensest prayers and thanks are offered to
+the animal for the gift of his body for food. The Magic formula demanded
+nothing less than this--else dread disaster would fall upon the man who
+sinned, and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred similar
+rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology--the first, in which
+the individual member simply remains within the compass of the tribal
+mind, and only acts in harmony with it; the second, in which the
+individual steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an
+action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third, in which,
+to make amends and to prove his sincerity, he submits to some sacrifice,
+and by a common feast or some such ceremony is received back again
+into the unity of the fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is
+consumed, and the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh,
+the Savior of the tribe.
+
+In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit is no longer merely
+an Animal, or animal-headed Genius, but a quite human-formed Divinity,
+still the same general outline of ideas is preserved--only with gathered
+intensity owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The
+Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just an ordinary
+Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus or Jesus. He is betrayed
+by one of his own followers, and suffers death, but rises again
+redeeming all with himself in the one fellowship; and the corn and the
+wine and the wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the
+sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper of reconciliation.
+It is always the return to unity which is the ritual of Salvation, and
+of which the symbol is the Eucharist--the second birth, the formation of
+"a new creature when old things are passed away." For "Except a man be
+born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God"; and "the first man is of
+the earth, earthly, but the second man is the Lord from heaven." Like
+a strange refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this
+belief in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a
+new birth and the beginning of a new creature: "Rejoice, ye initiates
+in the mystery of the liberated god"--rejoice in the thought of the hero
+who died as a mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!
+
+Who then was this "Christos" for whom the world was waiting three
+centuries before our era (and indeed centuries before that)? Who was
+this "thrice Savior" whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the
+meaning of that "coming of the Son of Man" whom Daniel beheld in vision
+among the clouds of heaven? or of the "perfect man" who, Paul declared,
+should deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
+liberty of the children of God? What was this salvation which time after
+time and times again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and
+which the Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious
+dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy
+is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the
+hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source
+divine"; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally
+enthusiastic? (1)
+
+ (1) See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;
+also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London,
+1897).
+
+
+Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already said, what
+the answer to these questions is? As with the first blossoming of
+self-consciousness in the human mind came the dawn of an immense cycle
+of experience--a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil
+and blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely necessary
+and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the return, the restoration has
+to come through another forward step, in the same domain. Abandoning
+the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to
+return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this
+'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation, and which
+all the expressions which I have just cited have indicated. It is
+this presence which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and
+Liberator: the daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more
+glorious, than all that has gone before that the little candle of the
+local self is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the
+return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation from the
+long exile of separation, from the painful sense of isolation and
+the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can we doubt that this new
+birth--this third stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so--has
+to come, that it is indeed not merely a pious hope or a tentative
+theory, but a FACT testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the
+past--witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic
+light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among the arid and
+unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a
+summer night?
+
+Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness an immense
+period, as we have said--perhaps 30,000 years, perhaps even more--has
+elapsed. Now, in the present day this period is reaching its
+culmination, and though it will not terminate immediately, its end is,
+so to speak, in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age behind
+us--say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years--evidence has been coming in
+(partly in the religious rites recorded, partly in oracles, poems and
+prophetic literature) of the onset of this further illumination--"the
+light which never was on sea or land"--and the cloud of witnesses,
+scattered at first, has in these later centuries become so evident and
+so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to anticipate a great
+and general new birth, as now not so very far off. (1) (We should,
+however, do well to remember, in this connexion, that many a time
+already in the history the Millennium has been prophesied, and yet not
+arrived punctual to date, and to take to ourselves the words of
+'Peter,' who somewhat grievously disappointed at the long-delayed
+second coming of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of heaven, wrote in his
+second Epistle: "There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking
+after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?
+for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were
+from the beginning of the creation." (2))
+
+ (1) For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's
+remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published
+at Philadelphia, 1901).
+
+ (2) 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.
+
+
+I say that all through the historical age behind us there has been
+evidence--even though scattered--of salvation and the return of the
+Cosmic life. Man has never been so completely submerged in the bitter
+sea of self-centredness but what he has occasionally been able to dash
+the spray from his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of
+heaven. From how far back we cannot say, but from an immense antiquity
+come the beautiful myths which indicate this.
+
+ Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly hutch;
+ Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;
+ Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues
+     a garment of the sun and stars;
+ From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe,
+     and is wedded to the prince of heaven.
+
+
+How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown close to
+the Hearth-fire of the universe--herself indeed just a little spark from
+it; despised and rejected; rejected by the world, despised by her two
+elder sisters (the body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though
+latest-born, by far the most beautiful of the three. And of the Prince
+of Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her wedding garment the
+glory and beauty of all nature and of the heavens! The parables of
+Jesus are charming in their way, but they hardly reach this height of
+inspiration.
+
+Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange that here again
+there are three sisters (the three stages of human evolution), and the
+latest-born the most beautiful of the three, and the jealousies and
+persecutions heaped on the youngest by the others, and especially by
+Aphrodite the goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of the
+unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted for mortals to
+look; and the long, long tests and sufferings and trials which Psyche
+has to undergo before Eros may really take her to his arms and translate
+her to the heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these things
+were represented in the Mysteries the world flocked to see them, and the
+poets indeed said, "Happy are they that see and seeing can understand?"
+Can we not understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the
+second century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing the
+lesson that "the greatest of human blessings is fellowship and mutual
+trust"?
+
+
+
+
+XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+
+Thus we come to a thing which we must not pass over, because it throws
+great light on the meaning and interpretation of all these rites and
+ceremonies of the great World-religion. I mean the subject of the
+Ancient Mysteries. And to this I will give a few pages.
+
+These Mysteries were probably survivals of the oldest religious rites
+of the Greek races, and in their earlier forms consisted not so much
+in worship of the gods of Heaven as of the divinities of Earth, and
+of Nature and Death. Crude, no doubt, at first, they gradually became
+(especially in their Eleusinian form) more refined and philosophical;
+the rites were gradually thrown open, on certain conditions, not only
+to men generally, but also to women, and even to slaves; and in the end
+they influenced Christianity deeply. (1)
+
+ (1) See Edwin Hatch, D.D., The Influence of Greek Ideas and
+Usages on the Christian Church (London, 1890), pp. 283-5.
+
+
+There were apparently three forms of teaching made use of in these
+rites: these were [gr legomena], things SAID; [gr deiknumena], things
+SHOWN; and [gr drwmena], things PERFORMED or ACTED. (1) I have given
+already some instances of things said—texts whispered for consolation in
+the neophyte's ear, and so forth; of the THIRD group, things enacted,
+we have a fair amount of evidence. There were ritual dramas or
+passion-plays, of which an important one dealt with the descent of Kore
+or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations,
+(2) and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in Spring;
+another with the sufferings of Psyche and her rescue by Eros, as
+described by Apuleius (3)--himself an initiate in the cult of Isis.
+There is a parody by Lucian, which tells of the birth of Apollo, the
+marriage of Coronis, and the coming of Aesculapius as Savior; there was
+the dying and rising again of Dionysus (chief divinity of the Orphic
+cult); and sometimes the mystery of the birth of Dionysus as a holy
+child. (4) There was, every year at Eleusis, a solemn and lengthy
+procession or pilgrimage made, symbolic of the long pilgrimage of the
+human soul, its sufferings and deliverance.
+
+ (1) Cheetham, op. cit., pp. 49-61 sq.
+
+ (2) See Farnell, op. cit., iii. 158 sq.
+
+ (3) See The Golden Ass.
+
+ (4) Farnell, ii, 177.
+
+
+"Almost always," says Dr. Cheetham, "the suffering of a god--suffering
+followed by triumph--seems to have been the subject of the sacred
+drama." Then occasionally to the Neophytes, after taking part in the
+pilgrimage, and when their minds had been prepared by an ordeal of
+darkness and fatigue and terrors, was accorded a revelation of Paradise,
+and even a vision of Transfiguration--the form of the Hierophant
+himself, or teacher of the Mysteries, being seen half-lost in a blaze
+of light. (1) Finally, there was the eating of food and drinking
+of barley-drink from the sacred chest (2)--a kind of Communion or
+Eucharist.
+
+ (1) Ibid., 179 sq.
+
+ (2) Ibid., 186. Sacred chests, in which holy things were kept,
+figure frequently in early rites and legends--as in the case of the ark
+of the Jewish tabernacle, the ark or box carried in celebrations of the
+mysteries of Bacchus (Theocritus, Idyll xxvi), the legend of Pandora's
+box which contained the seeds of all good and evil, the ark of Noah
+which saved all living creatures from the flood, the Argo of the
+argonauts, the moonshaped boat in which Isis floating over the waters
+gathered together the severed limbs of Osiris, and so brought about his
+resurrection, and the many chests or coffins out of which the various
+gods (Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Jesus), having been laid there in death,
+rose again for the redemption of the world. They all evidently refer to
+the mystic womb of Nature and of Woman, and are symbols of salvation and
+redemption (For a full discussion of this subject, see The Great Law of
+religious origins, by W. Williamson, ch. iv.)
+
+
+Apuleius in The Golden Ass gives an interesting account of his induction
+into the mysteries of Isis: how, bidding farewell one evening to the
+general congregation outside, and clothed in a new linen garment, he was
+handed by the priest into the inner recesses of the temple itself; how
+he "approached the confines of death, and having trod on the threshold
+of Proserpine (the Underworld), returned therefrom, being borne through
+all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant
+light: and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath and the Gods
+above, and stood near and worshipped them." During the night things
+happened which must not be disclosed; but in the morning he came forth
+"consecrated by being dressed in twelve stoles painted with the figures
+of animals." (1) He ascended a pulpit in the midst of the Temple,
+carrying in his right hand a burning torch, while a chaplet encircled
+his head, from which palm-leaves projected like rays of light. "Thus
+arrayed like the Sun, and placed so as to resemble a statue, on a
+sudden the curtains being drawn aside, I was exposed to the gaze of the
+multitude. After this I celebrated the most joyful day of my initiation,
+as my natal day (day of the New Birth) and there was a joyous banquet
+and mirthful conversation."
+
+ (1) An allusion no doubt to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the
+pathway of the Sun, as well as to the practice of the ancient priests of
+wearing the skins of totem-animals in sign of their divinity.
+
+
+One can hardly refuse to recognize in this account the description of
+some kind of ceremony which was supposed to seal the illumination of a
+man and his new birth into divinity--the animal origin, the circling of
+all experience, the terrors of death, and the resurrection in the
+form of the Sun, the symbol of all light and life. The very word
+"illumination" carries the ideas of light and a new birth with it.
+Reitzenstein in his very interesting book on the Greek Mysteries (1)
+speaks over and over again of the illumination ([gr fwtismos]) which
+was held to attend Initiation and Salvation. The doctrine of Salvation
+indeed ([gr swthria]) was, as we have already seen, rife and widely
+current in the Second Century B. C. It represented a real experience,
+and the man who shared this experience became a [gr qeios] [gr anqrwpos]
+or divine man. (2) In the Orphic Tablets the phrase "I am a child of
+earth and the starry heaven, but my race is of heaven (alone)" occurs
+more than once. In one of the longest of them the dead man is instructed
+"after he has passed the waters (of Lethe) where the white Cypress and
+the House of Hades are" to address these very words to the guardians
+of the Lake of Memory while he asks for a drink of cold water from that
+Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail, thou
+who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou hadst never suffered
+before; thou hast become god from man!" (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the
+religious life; and, what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or
+the divine nature was open to all men--to all, that is, who should go
+through the necessary stages of preparation for it. (4)
+
+ (1) Die hellenistischen Mysterien-Religionen, by R. Reitzenstein,
+Leipzig, 1910.
+
+ (2) Reitzenstein, p. 12.
+
+ (3) These Tablets (so-called) are instructions to the dead as to
+their passage into the other world, and have been found in the tombs, in
+Italy and elsewhere, inscribed on very thin gold plates and buried with
+the departed. See Manual of Greek Antiquities by Percy Gardner and F.
+B. Jerome (1896); also Prolegomena to Greek Religion by Jane E. Harrison
+(1908).
+
+ (4) Reitzenstein, pp. 15 and 18; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity, p. 301.
+
+
+Reitzenstein contends (p. 26) that in the Mysteries, transfiguration
+([gr metamorfwsis]), salvation ([gr swthria]), and new birth ([gr
+paliggenesia]) were often conjoined. He says (p. 31), that in the
+Egyptian Osiris-cult, the Initiate acquires a nature "equal to God"
+([gr isoqeos]), the very same expression as that used of Christ Jesus in
+Philippians ii. 6; he mentions Apollonius of Tyana and Sergius Paulus
+as instances of men who by their contemporaries were considered to have
+attained this nature; and he quotes Akhnaton (Pharaoh of Egypt in 1375
+B.C.) as having said, "Thou art in my heart; none other knows Thee, save
+thy son Akhnaton; Thou hast initiated him into thy wisdom and into thy
+power." He also quotes the words of Hermes (Trismegistus)--"Come unto
+Me, even as children to their mother's bosom: Thou art I, and I am Thou;
+what is thine is mine, and what is mine is thine; for indeed I am thine
+image ([gr eidwlon])," and refers to the dialogue between Hermes and
+Tat, in which they speak of the great and mystic New Birth and Union
+with the All--with all Elements, Plants and Animals, Time and Space.
+
+"The Mysteries," says Dr. Cheetham very candidly, "influenced
+Christianity considerably and modified it in some important respects";
+and Dr. Hatch, as we have seen, not only supports this general view, but
+follows it out in detail. (1) He points out that the membership of the
+Mystery-societies was very numerous in the earliest times, A.D.; that
+their general aims were good, including a sense of true religion, decent
+life, and brotherhood; that cleanness from crime and confession were
+demanded from the neophyte; that confession was followed by baptism
+([gr kaqarsis]) and THAT by sacrifice; that the term [gr fwtismos]
+(illumination) was adopted by the Christian Church as the name for the
+new birth of baptism; that the Christian usage of placing a seal on the
+forehead came from the same source; that baptism itself after a time
+was called a mystery ([gr musihriou]); that the sacred cakes and
+barley-drink of the Mysteries became the milk and honey and bread
+and wine of the first Christian Eucharists, and that the occasional
+sacrifice of a lamb on the Christian altar ("whose mention is often
+suppressed") probably originated in the same way. Indeed, the conception
+of the communion-table AS an altar and many other points of ritual
+gradually established themselves from these sources as time went on. (2)
+It is hardly necessary to say more in proof of the extent to which
+in these ancient representations "things said" and "scenes enacted"
+forestalled the doctrines and ceremonials of Christianity.
+
+ (1) See Hatch, op. cit., pp. 290 sq.
+
+ (2) See Dionysus Areop. (end of fifth century), who describes the
+Christian rites generally in Mystery language (Hatch, 296).
+
+
+"But what of the second group above-mentioned, the "things SHOWN"? It
+is not so easy naturally to get exact information concerning these, but
+they seem to have been specially holy objects, probably things connected
+with very ancient rituals in the past--such as sacred stones, old and
+rude images of the gods, magic nature-symbols, like that half-disclosed
+ear of corn above-mentioned (Ch. V.). "In the Temple of Isis at Philae,"
+says Dr. Cheetham, "the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks
+of corn springing from it, which a priest waters from a vessel. An
+inscription says: 'This is the form of him whom we may not name, Osiris
+of the Mysteries who sprang from the returning waters' (the Nile)."
+Above all, no doubt, there were images of the phallus and the vulva, the
+great symbols of human fertility. We have seen (Ch. XII) that the lingam
+and the yoni are, even down to to-day, commonly retained and honored as
+holy objects in the S. Indian Temples, and anointed with oil (some
+of them) for a very practical reason. Sir J. G. Frazer, in his lately
+published volumes on The Folk-lore of the Old Testament, has a chapter
+(in vol. ii) on the very numerous sacred stones of various shapes and
+sizes found or spoken of in Palestine and other parts of the world.
+Though uncertain as to the meaning of these stones he mentions that they
+are "frequently, though not always, UPRIGHT." Anointing them with oil,
+he assures us, "is a widespread practice, sometimes by women who wish
+to obtain children." And he concludes the chapter by saying: "The holy
+stone at Bethel was probably one of those massive standing stones or
+rough pillars which the Hebrews called masseboth, and which, as we
+have seen, were regular adjuncts of Canaanite and early Israelitish
+sanctuaries." We have already mentioned the pillars Jachin and Boaz
+which stood before the Temple of Solomon, and which had an acknowledged
+sexual significance; and so it seems probable that a great number of
+these holy stones had a similar meaning. (1) Following this clue it
+would appear likely that the lingam thus anointed and worshipped in the
+Temples of India and elsewhere IS the original [gr cristos] (2) adored
+by the human race from the very beginning, and that at a later time,
+when the Priest and the King, as objects of worship, took the place of
+the Lingam, THEY also were anointed with the chrism of fertility.
+That the exhibition of these emblems should be part of the original
+'Mystery'-rituals was perfectly natural--especially because, as we have
+explained already (3) old customs often continued on in a quite naive
+fashion in the rituals, when they had come to be thought indecent or
+improper by a later public opinion; and (we may say) was perfectly
+in order, because there is plenty of evidence to show that in SAVAGE
+initiations, of which the Mysteries were the linear descendants, all
+these things WERE explained to the novices, and their use actually
+taught. (4) No doubt also there were some representations or dramatic
+incidents of a fairly coarse character, as deriving from these ancient
+sources. (5) It is, however, quaint to observe how the mere mention of
+such things has caused an almost hysterical commotion among the critics
+of the Mysteries--from the day of the early Christians who (in order
+to belaud their own religion) were never tired of abusing the Pagans,
+onward to the present day when modern scholars either on the one hand
+follow the early Christians in representing the Mysteries as sinks of
+iniquity or on the other (knowing this charge could not be substantiated
+except in the period of their final decadence) take the line of ignoring
+the sexual interest attaching to them as non-existent or at any rate
+unworthy of attention. The good Archdeacon Cheetham, for instance, while
+writing an interesting book on the Mysteries passes by this side of the
+subject ALMOST as if it did not exist; while the learned Dr. Farnell,
+overcome apparently by the weight of his learning, and unable to
+confront the alarming obstacle presented by these sexual rites and
+aspects, hides himself behind the rather non-committal remark (speaking
+of the Eleusinian rites) "we have no right to imagine any part of this
+solemn ceremony as coarse or obscene." (6) As Nature, however, has been
+known (quite frequently) to be coarse or obscene, and as the initiators
+of the Mysteries were probably neither 'good' nor 'learned,' but were
+simply anxious to interpret Nature as best they could, we cannot find
+fault with the latter for the way they handled the problem, nor indeed
+well see how they could have handled it better.
+
+ (1) F. Nork, Der Mystagog, mentions that the Roman Penates were
+commonly anointed with oil. J. Stuart Hay, in his Life of Elagabalus
+(1911), says that "Elagabal was worshipped under the symbol of a great
+black stone or meteorite, in the shape of a Phallus, which having fallen
+from the heavens represented a true portion of the Godhead, much after
+the style of those black stone images popularly venerated in Norway and
+other parts of Europe."
+
+ (2) J. E. Hewitt, in his Ruling Races of Pre-historic Times (p.
+64), gives a long list of pre-historic races who worshipped the lingam.
+
+ (3) See Ch. XI.
+
+ (4) See Ernest Crawley's Mystic Rose, ch. xiii, pp. 310 and 313:
+"In certain tribes of Central Africa both boys and girls after
+initiation must as soon as possible have intercourse." Initiation being
+not merely preliminary to, but often ACTUALLY marriage. The same
+among Kaffirs, Congo tribes, Senegalese, etc. Also among the Arunta of
+Australia.
+
+ (5) Professor Diederichs has said that "in much ancient ritual it
+was thought that mystic communion with the deity could be obtained
+through the semblance of sex-intercourse--as in the Attis-Cybele
+worship, and the Isis-ritual." (Farnell.) Reitzenstein says (op. cit.,
+p. 20.) that the Initiates, like some of the Christian Nuns at a later
+time, believed in union with God through receiving the seed.
+
+ (6) Farnell, op. cit., iii. 176. Messrs. Gardner and Jevons, in
+their Manual of Greek Antiquities, above-quoted, compare the Eleusinian
+Mysteries favorably with some of the others, like the Arcadian, the
+Troezenian, the Aeginaean, and the very primitive Samothracian:
+saying (p. 278) that of the last-mentioned "we know little, but safely
+conjecture that in them the ideas of sex and procreation dominated EVEN
+MORE than in those of Eleusis."
+
+
+After all it is pretty clear that the early peoples saw in Sex the great
+cohesive force which kept (we will not say Humanity but at any rate)
+the Tribe together, and sustained the race. In the stage of simple
+Consciousness this must have been one of the first things that the
+budding intellect perceived. Sex became one of the earliest divinities,
+and there is abundant evidence that its organs and processes generally
+were invested with a religious sense of awe and sanctity. It was in fact
+the symbol (or rather the actuality) of the permanent undying life
+of the race, and as such was sacred to the uses of the race. Whatever
+taboos may have, among different peoples, guarded its operations, it
+was not essentially a thing to be concealed, or ashamed of. Rather the
+contrary. For instance the early Christian writer, Hippolytus, Bishop of
+Pontus (A.D. 200), in his Refutation of all Heresies, Book V, says that
+the Samothracian Mysteries, just mentioned, celebrate Adam as the
+primal or archetypal Man eternal in the heavens; and he then continues:
+"Habitually there stand in the temple of the Samothracians two images
+of naked men having both hands stretched aloft towards heaven, and their
+pudenda turned upwards, as is also the case with the statue of Mercury
+on Mt. Cyllene. And the aforesaid images are figures of the primal man,
+and of that spiritual one that is born again, in every respect of the
+same substance with that (first) man."
+
+
+This extract from Hippolytus occurs in the long discourse in which he
+'exposes' the heresy of the so-called Naassene doctrines and mysteries.
+But the whole discourse should be read by those who wish to understand
+the Gnostic philosophy of the period contemporary with and anterior to
+the birth of Christianity. A translation of the discourse, carefully
+analyzed and annotated, is given in G. R. S. Mead's Thrice-greatest
+Hermes (1) (vol. i); and Mead himself, speaking of it, says (p. 141):
+"The claim of these Gnostics was practically that the good news of the
+Christ (the Christos) was the consummation of the inner doctrine of the
+Mystery-institutions of all the nations; the end of them all being the
+revelation of the Mystery of Man." Further, he explains that the Soul,
+in these doctrines, was regarded as synonymous with the Cause of All;
+and that its loves were twain--of Aphrodite (or Life), and of Persephone
+(or Death and the other world). Also that Attis, abandoning his sex in
+the worship of the Mother-Goddess (Dea Syria), ascends to Heaven--a new
+man, Male-female, and the origin of all things: the hidden Mystery being
+the Phallus itself, erected as Hermes in all roads and boundaries and
+temples, the Conductor and Reconductor of Souls.
+
+ (1) Reitzenstein, op. cit., quotes the discourse largely. The
+Thrice-greatest Hermes may also be consulted for a translation of
+Plutarch's Isis and Osiris.
+
+
+All this may sound strange, but one may fairly say that it represented
+in its degree, and in that first 'unfallen' stage of human thought
+and psychology, a true conception of the cosmic Life, and indeed a
+conception quite sensible and admirable, until, of course, the Second
+Stage brought corruption. No sooner was this great force of the cosmic
+life diverted from its true uses of Generation and Regeneration (1) and
+appropriated by the individual to his own private pleasure--no sooner
+was its religious character as a tribal service (2), (often rendered
+within the Temple precincts) lost sight of or degraded into a commercial
+transaction--than every kind of evil fell upon mankind. Corruptio optimi
+pessima. It must be remembered too that simultaneous with this sexual
+disruption occurred the disruption of other human relations; and
+we cease to be surprised that disease and selfish passions, greed,
+jealousy, slander, cruelty, and wholesale murder, raged--and have raged
+ever since.
+
+ (1) For the special meaning of these two terms, see The Drama of
+Love and Death, by E. Carpenter, pp. 59-61.
+
+ (2) Ernest Crawley in The Mystic Rose challenges this
+identification of Religion with tribal interests; yet his arguments
+are not very convincing. On p. 5 he admits that "there is a religious
+meaning inherent in the primitive conception and practice of ALL human
+relations"; and a large part of his ch. xii is taken up in showing that
+even such institutions as the Saturnalia were religious in confirming
+the sense of social union and leading to 'extended identity.'
+
+
+But for the human soul--whatever its fate, and whatever the dangers and
+disasters that threaten it--there is always redemption waiting. As we
+saw in the last chapter, this corruption of Sex led (quite naturally) to
+its denial and rejection; and its denial led to the differentiation from
+it of Love. Humanity gained by the enthronement and deification of Love,
+pure and undefiled, and (for the time being) exalted beyond this mortal
+world, and free from all earthly contracts. But again in the end, the
+divorce thus introduced between the physical and the spiritual led
+to the crippling of both. Love relegated, so to speak, to heaven as a
+purely philanthropical, pious and 'spiritual' affair, became exceedingly
+DULL; and sex, remaining on earth, but deserted by the redeeming
+presence, fell into mere "carnal curiosity and wretchedness of unclean
+living." Obviously for the human race there remains nothing, in the
+final event, but the reconciliation of the physical and the spiritual,
+and after many sufferings, the reunion of Eros and Psyche.
+
+
+There is still, however, much to be said about the Third State of
+Consciousness. Let us examine into it a little more closely. Clearly,
+since it is a new state, and not merely an extension of a former one,
+one cannot arrive at it by argument derived from the Second state, for
+all conscious Thought such as we habitually use simply keeps us IN the
+Second state. No animal or quite primitive man could possibly understand
+what we mean by Self-consciousness till he had experienced it. Mere
+argument would not enlighten him. And so no one in the Second state
+can quite realize the Third state till he has experienced it. Still,
+explanations may help us to perceive in what direction to look, and
+to recognize in some of our experiences an approach to the condition
+sought.
+
+Evidently it is a mental condition in some respects more similar to the
+first than to the second stage. The second stage of human psychologic
+evolution is an aberration, a divorce, a parenthesis. With its
+culmination and dismissal the mind passes back into the simple state of
+union with the Whole. (The state of Ekagrata in the Hindu philosophy:
+one-pointedness, singleness of mind.) And the consciousness of
+the Whole, and of things past and things to come and things far
+around--which consciousness had been shut out by the concentration on
+the local self--begins to return again. This is not to say, of course,
+that the excursus in the second stage has been a loss and a defect. On
+the contrary, it means that the Return is a bringing of all that
+has been gained during the period of exile (all sorts of mental and
+technical knowledge and skill, emotional developments, finesse and
+adaptability of mind) BACK into harmony with the Whole. It means
+ultimately a great gain. The Man, perfected, comes back to a vastly
+extended harmony. He enters again into a real understanding and
+confidential relationship with his physical body and with the body of
+the society in which he dwells--from both of which he has been sadly
+divorced; and he takes up again the broken thread of the Cosmic Life.
+
+Everyone has noticed the extraordinary consent sometimes observable
+among the members of an animal community--how a flock of 500 birds (e.
+g. starlings) will suddenly change its direction of flight--the light
+on the wings shifting INSTANTANEOUSLY, as if the impulse to veer came
+to all at the same identical moment; or how bees will swarm or otherwise
+act with one accord, or migrating creatures (lemmings, deer, gossamer
+spiders, winged ants) the same. Whatever explanation of these facts we
+favor--whether the possession of swifter and finer means of external
+communication than we can perceive, or whether a common and inner
+sensitivity to the genius of the Tribe (the "Spirit of the Hive") or to
+the promptings of great Nature around--in any case these facts of animal
+life appear to throw light on the possibilities of an accord and consent
+among the members of emaciated humanity, such as we dream of now, and
+seem to bid us have good hope for the future.
+
+It is here, perhaps, that the ancient worship of the Lingam comes in.
+The word itself is apparently connected with our word 'link,' and has
+originally the same meaning. (1) It is the link between the generations.
+Beginning with the worship of the physical Race-life, the course of
+psychologic evolution has been first to the worship of the Tribe (or
+of the Totem which represents the tribe); then to the worship of
+the human-formed God of the tribe--the God who dies and rises
+again eternally, as the tribe passes on eternal--though its members
+perpetually perish; then to the conception of an undying Savior, and the
+realization and distinct experience of some kind of Super-consciousness
+which does certainly reside, more or less hidden, in the deeps of the
+mind, and has been waiting through the ages for its disclosure and
+recognition. Then again to the recognition that in the sacrifices,
+the Slayer and the Slain are one--the strange and profoundly mystic
+perception that the God and the Victim are in essence the same--the
+dedication of 'Himself to Himself' (2) and simultaneously with this the
+interpretation of the Eucharist as meaning, even for the individual,
+the participation in Eternal Life--the continuing life of the Tribe,
+or ultimately of Humanity. (3) The Tribal order rises to Humanity; love
+ascends from the lingam to yogam, from physical union alone to the union
+with the Whole--which of course includes physical and all other kinds of
+union. No wonder that the good St. Paul, witnessing that extraordinary
+whirlpool of beliefs and practices, new and old, there in the first
+century A.D.--the unabashed adoration of sex side by side with the
+transcendental devotions of the Vedic sages and the Gnostics--became
+somewhat confused himself and even a little violent, scolding his
+disciples (I Cor. x. 21) for their undiscriminating acceptance, as it
+seemed to him, of things utterly alien and antagonistic. "Ye cannot
+drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers
+of the Lord's table and the table of devils."
+
+
+ (1) See Sanskrit Dictionary.
+
+ (2) See Ch. VIII.
+
+ (3) There are many indications in literature--in prophetic or
+poetic form--of this awareness and distinct conviction of an eternal
+life, reached through love and an inner sense of union with others and
+with humanity at large; indications which bear the mark of absolute
+genuineness and sincerity of feeling. See, for instance, Whitman's poem,
+"To the Garden the World" (Leaves of Grass, complete edition, p. 79).
+But an eternal life of the third order; not, thank heaven! an eternity
+of the meddling and muddling self-conscious Intellect!
+
+
+Every careful reader has noticed the confusedness of Paul's mind and
+arguments. Even taking only those Epistles (Galatians, Romans and
+Corinthians) which the critics assign to his pen, the thing is
+observable--and some learned Germans even speak of TWO Pauls. (1) But
+also the thing is quite natural. There can be little doubt that Paul of
+Tarsus, a Jew brought up in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, did at
+some time fall deeply under the influence of Greek thought, and quite
+possibly became an initiate in the Mysteries. It would be difficult
+otherwise to account for his constant use of the Mystery-language.
+Reitzenstein says (p. 59): "The hellenistic religious literature MUST
+have been read by him; he uses its terms, and is saturated with its
+thoughts (see Rom. vi. 1-14." And this conjoined with his Jewish
+experience gave him creative power. "A great deal in his sentiment and
+thought may have REMAINED Jewish, but to his Hellenism he was indebted
+for his love of freedom and his firm belief in his apostleship." He
+adopts terms (like [gr sarkikos], [gr yucikos] and [gr pneumatikos])
+(2) which were in use among the hellenistic sects of the time; and
+he writes, as in Romans vi. 4, 5, about being "buried" with Christ or
+"planted" in the likeness of his death, in words which might well have
+been used (with change of the name) by a follower of Attis or Osiris
+after witnessing the corresponding 'mysteries'; certainly the allusion
+to these ancient deities would have been understood by every religionist
+of that day. These few points are sufficient to acentuate{sic} the two
+elements in Paul, the Jewish and the Greek, and to explain (so far)
+the seeming confusion in his utterances. Further it is interesting to
+note--as showing the pagan influences in the N. T. writings--the degree
+to which the Epistle to Philemon (ascribed to Paul) is FULL--short as it
+is--of expressions like PRISONER of the Lord, FELLOW SOLDIER, CAPTIVE or
+BONDMAN, (3) which were so common at the time as to be almost a cant in
+Mithraism and the allied cults. In I Peter ii. 2 (4), we have the verse
+"As newborn babes, desire ye the sincere MILK of the word, that ye
+may grow thereby." And again we may say that no one in that day could
+mistake the reference herein contained to old initiation ceremonies and
+the new birth (as described in Chapter VIII above), for indeed milk was
+the well-known diet of the novice in the Isis mysteries, as well as (in
+some savage tribes) of the Medicine-man when practising his calling.
+
+ (1) "Die Mysterien-anschauungen, die bei Paulus im Hintergrunde
+stehen, drangen sich in dem sogenarmten Deuteropaulinismus machtig vor"
+(Reitzenstein).
+
+ (2) Remindful of our Three Stages: the Animal, the
+Self-conscious, and the Cosmic.
+
+ (3) [gr desmios, stratiwths, doulos].
+
+ (4) See also I Cor. iii. 2.
+
+
+And here too Democracy comes in--strangely foreboded from the first in
+all this matter. (1) Not only does the Third Stage bring illumination,
+intuitive understanding of processes in Nature and Humanity, sympathy
+with the animals, artistic capacity, and so forth, but it necessarily
+brings a new Order of Society. A preposterous--one may almost say a
+hideous--social Age is surely drawing to its end, The debacle we are
+witnessing to-day all over Europe (including the British Islands), the
+break-up of old institutions, the generally materialistic outlook on
+life, the coming to the surface of huge masses of diseased and fatuous
+populations, the scum and dregs created by the past order, all point to
+the End of a Dispensation. Protestantism and Commercialism, in the two
+fields of religion and daily life have, as I have indicated before,
+been occupied in concentrating the mind of each man solely on his OWN
+welfare, the salvation of his OWN soul or body. These two forces have
+therefore been disruptive to the last degree; they mark the culmination
+of the Self-conscious Age--a culmination in War, Greed, Materialism, and
+the general principle of Devil-take-the-hindmost--and the clearing of
+the ground for the new order which is to come. So there is hope for the
+human race. Its evolution is not all a mere formless craze and jumble.
+There is an inner necessity by which Humanity unfolds from one degree or
+plane of consciousness to another. And if there has been a great 'Fall'
+or Lapse into conflict and disease and 'sin' and misery, occupying the
+major part of the Historical period hitherto, we see that this period
+is only brief, so to speak, in comparison with the whole curve of growth
+and expansion. We see also that, as I have said before, the belief in a
+state of salvation or deliverance has in the past ages never left
+itself quite without a witness in the creeds and rituals and poems and
+prophecies of mankind. Art, in some form or other, as an activity or
+inspiration dating not from the conscious Intellect, but from deeper
+regions of sub-conscious feeling and intuition, has continually come to
+us as a message from and an evidence of the Third stage or state, and as
+a promise of its more complete realization under other conditions.
+
+ Through the long night-time where the Nations wander
+     From Eden past to Paradise to be,
+ Art's sacred flowers, like fair stars shining yonder,
+     Alone illumine Life's obscurity.
+
+ O gracious Artists, out of your deep hearts
+     'Tis some great Sun, I doubt, by men unguessed,
+ Whose rays come struggling thus, in slender darts,
+     To shadow what Is, till Time shall manifest.
+
+
+ (1) See the germs of Democracy in the yoga teaching of the
+Hindus, and in the Upanishads, the Bhagavat Gita, and other books.
+
+
+With the Cosmic stage comes also necessarily the rehabilitation of the
+WHOLE of Society in one fellowship (the true Democracy). Not the rule or
+domination of one class or caste--as of the Intellectual, the Pious,
+the Commercial or the Military--but the fusion or at least consentaneous
+organization of ALL (as in the corresponding functions of the human
+Body). Class rule has been the mark of that second period of human
+evolution, and has inevitably given birth during that period to wars and
+self-agrandizements of classes and sections, and their consequent greeds
+and tyrannies over other classes and sections. It is not found in the
+primitive human tribes and societies, and will not be found in the final
+forms of human association. The liberated and emancipated Man passes
+unconstrained and unconstraining through all grades and planes of human
+fellowship, equal and undisturbed, and never leaving his true home
+and abiding place in the heart of all. Equally necessarily with the
+rehabilitation of Society as an entirety will follow the rehabilitation
+of the entire physical body IN each member of Society. We have spoken
+already of Nakedness: its meaning and likely extent of adoption (Ch.
+XII). The idea that the head and the hands are the only seemly and
+presentable members of the organism, and that the other members are
+unworthy and indecent, is obviously as onesided and lopsided as that
+which honors certain classes in the commonwealth and despises others.
+Why should the head brag of its ascendancy and domination, and the heart
+be smothered up and hidden? It will only be a life far more in the open
+air than that which we lead at present, which will restore the balance
+and ultimately bring us back to sanity and health.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+We have dealt with the Genesis of Christianity; we now come to the
+Exodus. For that Christianity can CONTINUE to hold the field of Religion
+in the Western World is neither probable nor desirable. It is true, as
+I have remarked already, that there is a certain trouble about
+defining what we mean by "Christianity" similar to that about the word
+"Civilization." If we select out of the great mass of doctrines and
+rites favored by the various Christian Churches just those which commend
+themselves to the most modern and humane and rational human mind and
+choose to call that resulting (but rather small) body of belief and
+practice 'Christianity' we are, of course, entitled to do so, and to
+hope (as we do hope) that this residuum will survive and go forward into
+the future. But this sort of proceeding is hardly fair and certainly not
+logical. It enables Christianity to pose as an angel of light while at
+the same time keeping discreetly out of sight all its own abominations
+and deeds of darkness. The Church--which began its career by destroying,
+distorting and denying the pagan sources from which it sprang; whose
+bishops and other ecclesiastics assassinated each other in their
+theological rancour "of wild beasts," which encouraged the wicked folly
+of the Crusades--especially the Children's Crusades--and the shameful
+murders of the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and the Huguenots; which
+burned at the stake thousands and thousands of poor 'witches' and
+'heretics'; which has hardly ever spoken a generous word in favor or
+defence of the animals; which in modern times has supported vivisection
+as against the latter, Capitalism and Commercialism as against the
+poorer classes of mankind; and whose priests in the forms of its various
+sects, Greek or Catholic, Lutheran or Protestant, have in these last
+days rushed forth to urge the nations to slaughter each other with every
+diabolical device of Science, and to glorify the war-cry of Patriotism
+in defiance of the principle of universal Brotherhood--such a Church can
+hardly claim to have established the angelic character of its mission
+among mankind! And if it be said--as it often IS SAID: "Oh! but you must
+go back to the genuine article, and the Church's real origin and one
+foundation in the person and teaching of Jesus Christ," then indeed you
+come back to the point which this book, as above, enforces: namely, that
+as to the person of Jesus, there is no CERTAINTY at all that he ever
+existed; and as to the teaching credited to him, it is certain that that
+comes down from a period long anterior to 'Christianity' and is part of
+what may justly be called a very ancient World-religion. So, as in the
+case of 'Civilization,' we are compelled to see that it is useless to
+apply the word to some ideal state of affairs or doctrine (an ideal
+by no means the same in all people's minds, or in all localities and
+times), but that the only reasonable thing to do is to apply it in each
+case to a HISTORICAL PERIOD. In the case of Christianity the historical
+period has lasted nearly 2,000 years, and, as I say, we can hardly
+expect or wish that it should last much longer.
+
+The very thorough and careful investigation of religious origins which
+has been made during late years by a great number of students and
+observers undoubtedly tends to show that there has been something like
+a great World-religion coming down the centuries from the remotest times
+and gradually expanding and branching as it has come--that is to say
+that the similarity (in ESSENCE though not always in external detail)
+between the creeds and rituals of widely sundered tribes and peoples is
+so great as to justify the view--advanced in the present volume--that
+these creeds and rituals are the necessary outgrowths of human
+psychology, slowly evolving, and that consequently they have a common
+origin and in their various forms a common expression. Of this great
+World-religion, so coming down, Christianity is undoubtedly a branch,
+and an important branch. But there have been important branches before;
+and while it may be true that Christianity emphasizes some points which
+may have been overlooked or neglected in the Vedic teachings or in
+Buddhism, or in the Persian and Egyptian and Syrian cults, or in
+Mahommedanism, and so forth, it is also equally true that Christianity
+has itself overlooked or neglected valuable points in these religions.
+It has, in fact, the defects of its qualities. If the World-religion
+is like a great tree, one cannot expect or desire that all its branches
+should be directed towards the same point of the compass.
+
+Reinach, whose studies of religious origins are always interesting
+and characterized by a certain Gallic grace and nettete, though with a
+somewhat Jewish non-perception of the mystic element in life, defines
+Religion as a combination of animism and scruples. This is good in
+a way, because it gives the two aspects of the subject: the inner,
+animism, consisting of the sense of contact with more or less
+intelligent beings moving in Nature; and the outer, consisting in
+scruples or taboos. The one aspect shows the feeling which INSPIRES
+religion, the other, the checks and limitations which DEFINE it and give
+birth to ritual. But like most anthropologists he (Reinach) is a little
+TOO patronizing towards the "poor Indian with untutored mind." He is
+sorry for people so foolish as to be animistic in their outlook, and he
+is always careful to point out that the scruples and taboos were quite
+senseless in their origin, though occasionally (by accident) they turned
+out useful. Yet--as I have said before--Animism is a perfectly sensible,
+logical and NECESSARY attitude of the human mind. It is a necessary
+attribute of man's psychical nature, by which he projects into the great
+World around him the image of his own mind. When that mind is in a very
+primitive, inchoate, and fragmentary condition, the images so projected
+are those of fragmentary intelligences ('spirits,' gnomes, etc.--the age
+of magic); when the mind rises to distinct consciousness of itself the
+reflections of it are anthropomorphic 'gods'; when finally it reaches
+the universal or cosmic state it perceives the presence of a universal
+Being behind all phenomena--which Being is indeed itself--"Himself to
+Himself." If you like you may call the whole process by the name of
+Animism. It is perfectly sensible throughout. The only proviso is that
+you should also be sensible, and distinguish the different stages in the
+process.
+
+Jane Harrison makes considerable efforts to show that Religion is
+primarily a reflection of the SOCIAL Conscience (see Themis, pp.
+482-92)--that is, that the sense in Man of a "Power that makes for
+righteousness" outside (and also inside) him is derived from his feeling
+of continuity with the Tribe and his instinctive obedience to its
+behests, confirmed by ages of collective habit and experience. He
+cannot in fact sever the navel-string which connects him with his tribal
+Mother, even though he desires to do so. And no doubt this view of the
+origin of Religion is perfectly correct. But it must be pointed out that
+it does not by any means exclude the view that religion derives
+also from an Animism by which man recognizes in general Nature his
+foster-mother and feels himself in closest touch with HER. Which may
+have come first, the Social affiliation or the Nature affiliation, I
+leave to the professors to determine. The term Animism may, as far as I
+can see, be quite well applied to the social affiliation, for the latter
+is evidently only a case in which the individual projects his own degree
+of consciousness into the human group around him instead of into the
+animals or the trees, but it is a case of which the justice is so
+obvious that the modern man can intellectually seize and understand it,
+and consequently he does not tar it with the 'animistic' brush.
+
+And Miss Harrison, it must be noticed, does, in other passages of the
+same book (see Themis, pp. 68, 69), admit that Religion has its origin
+not only from unity with the Tribe but from the sense of affiliation to
+Nature--the sense of "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible
+universe, a world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of magical
+activity and the medium of mysticism. The mystical element, the oneness
+and continuousness comes out very clearly in the notion of Wakonda among
+the Sioux Indians.... The Omahas regarded all animate and inanimate
+forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous
+and similar to the will-power they were conscious of in themselves. This
+mysterious power in all things they called Wakonda, and through it
+all things were related to man, and to each other. In the idea of the
+continuity of life, a relation was maintained between the seen and
+the unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the fragment of
+anything and its entirety." Thus our general position is confirmed,
+that Religion in its origin has been INSPIRED by a deep instinctive
+conviction or actual sense of continuity with a being or beings in the
+world around, while it has derived its FORM and ritual by slow degrees
+from a vast number of taboos, generated in the first instance chiefly
+by superstitious fears, but gradually with the growth of reason and
+observation becoming simplified and rationalized into forms of use. On
+the one side there has been the positive impulse--of mere animal Desire
+and the animal urge of self-expression; on the other there has been
+the negative force of Fear based on ignorance--the latter continually
+carving, moulding and shaping the former. According to this an organized
+study and classification of taboos might yield some interesting results;
+because indeed it would throw light on the earliest forms of both
+religion and science. It would be seen that some taboos, like those
+of CONTACT (say with a menstruous woman, or a mother-in-law, or a
+lightning-struck tree) had an obvious basis of observation, justifiable
+but very crude; while others, like the taboo against harming an enemy
+who had contracted blood-friendship with one of your own tribe, or
+against giving decent burial to a murderer, were equally rough and rude
+expressions or indications of the growing moral sentiment of mankind.
+All the same there would be left, in any case, a large residuum of
+taboos which could only be judged as senseless, and the mere rubbish of
+the savage mind.
+
+So much for the first origins of the World-religion; and I think enough
+has been said in the various chapters of this book to show that the same
+general process has obtained throughout. Man, like the animals, began
+with this deep, subconscious sense of unity with surrounding Nature.
+When this became (in Man) fairly conscious, it led to Magic and
+Totemism. More conscious, and it branched, on the one hand, into figures
+of Gods and definite forms of Creeds, on the other into elaborate
+Scientific Theories--the latter based on a strong INTELLECTUAL belief in
+Unity, but fervently denying any 'anthropomorphic' or 'animistic'
+SENSE of that unity. Finally, it seems that we are now on the edge of
+a further stage when the theories and the creeds, scientific and
+religious, are on the verge of collapsing, but in such a way as to leave
+the sense and the perception of Unity--the real content of the whole
+process--not only undestroyed, but immensely heightened and illuminated.
+Meanwhile the taboos--of which there remain some still, both religious
+and scientific--have been gradually breaking up and merging themselves
+into a reasonable and humane order of life and philosophy.
+
+I have said that out of this World-religion Christianity really sprang.
+It is evident that the time has arrived when it must either acknowledge
+its source and frankly endeavor to affiliate itself to the same, or
+failing that must perish. In the first case it will probably have to
+change its name; in the second the question of its name 'will interest
+it no more.'
+
+With regard to the first of these alternatives, I might venture--though
+with indifference--to make a few suggestions. Why should we
+not have--instead of a Holy Roman Church--a Holy HUMAN Church,
+rehabilitating the ancient symbols and rituals, a Christianity (if you
+still desire to call it so) frankly and gladly acknowledging its own
+sources? This seems a reasonable and even feasible proposition. If such
+a church wished to celebrate a Mass or Communion or Eucharist it would
+have a great variety of rites and customs of that kind to select from;
+those that were not appropriate for use in our times or were connected
+with the worship of strange gods need not be rejected or condemned,
+but could still be commented on and explained as approaches to the same
+idea--the idea of dedication to the Common Life, and of reinvigoration
+in the partaking of it. If the Church wished to celebrate the
+Crucifixion or betrayal of its Founder, a hundred instances of such
+celebrations would be to hand, and still the thought that has underlain
+such celebrations since the beginning of the world could easily be
+disentangled and presented in concrete form anew. In the light of such
+teaching expressions like "I know that my Redeemer liveth" would be
+traced to their origin, and men would understand that notwithstanding
+the mass of rubbish, cant and humbug which has collected round them they
+really do mean something and represent the age-long instinct of Humanity
+feeling its way towards a more extended revelation, a new order of
+being, a third stage of consciousness and illumination. In such a Church
+or religious organization EVERY quality of human nature would have to
+be represented, every practice and custom allowed for and its place
+accorded--the magical and astronomical meanings, the rites connected
+with sun-worship, or with sex, or with the worship of animals; the
+consecration of corn and wine and other products of the ground,
+initiations, sacrifices, and so forth--all (if indeed it claimed to be
+a World-religion) would have to be represented and recognized. For they
+all have their long human origin and descent in and through the pagan
+creeds, and they all have penetrated into and become embodied to some
+degree in Christianity. Christianity therefore, as I say, must either
+now come frankly forward and, acknowledging its parentage from the great
+Order of the past, seek to rehabilitate THAT and carry mankind one step
+forward in the path of evolution--or else it must perish. There is no
+other alternative. (1)
+
+ (1) Comte in founding his philosophy of Positivism seems to have
+had in view some such Holy Human Church, but he succeeded in making it
+all so profoundly dull that it never flourished, The seed of Life was
+not in it.
+
+
+Let me give an instance of how a fragment of ancient ritual which has
+survived from the far Past and is still celebrated, but with little
+intelligence or understanding, in the Catholic Church of to-day, might
+be adopted in such a Church as I have spoken of, interpreted, and made
+eloquent of meaning to modern humanity. When I was in Ceylon nearly 30
+years ago I was fortunate enough to witness a night-festival in a Hindu
+Temple--the great festival of Taipusam, which takes place every year in
+January. Of course, it was full moon, and great was the blowing up of
+trumpets in the huge courtyard of the Temple. The moon shone down above
+from among the fronds of tall coco-palms, on a dense crowd of native
+worshipers--men and a few women--the men for the most part clad in
+little more than a loin-cloth, the women picturesque in their colored
+saris and jewelled ear and nose rings. The images of Siva and two other
+gods were carried in procession round and round the temple--three or
+four times; nautch girls danced before the images, musicians, blowing
+horns and huge shells, or piping on flageolets or beating tom-toms,
+accompanied them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with flaming
+coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each side, elated and
+excited with the sense of the present divinity, yet pleasantly free from
+any abject awe. The whole thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief
+of a Bacchanalian procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus--and
+especially so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly intimacy with
+the god. There were singing of hymns and the floating of the chief
+actors on a raft round a sacred lake. And then came the final Act. Siva,
+or his image, very weighty and borne on the shoulders of strong men, was
+carried into the first chamber or hall of the Temple and placed on an
+altar with a curtain hanging in front. The crowd followed with a rush;
+and then there was more music, recital of hymns, and reading from sacred
+books. From where we stood we could see the rite which was performed
+behind the curtain. Two five-branched candlesticks were lighted; and the
+manner of their lighting was as follows. Each branch ended in a
+little cup, and in the cups five pieces of camphor were placed, all
+approximately equal in size. After offerings had been made, of fruit,
+flowers and sandalwood, the five camphors in each candlestick were
+lighted. As the camphor flames burned out the music became more wild and
+exciting, and then at the moment of their extinction the curtains
+were drawn aside and the congregation outside suddenly beheld the god
+revealed and in a blaze of light. This burning of camphor was, like
+other things in the service, emblematic. The five lights represent
+the five senses. Just as camphor consumes itself and leaves no residue
+behind, so should the five senses, being offered to the god, consume
+themselves and disappear. When this is done, that happens in the soul
+which was now figured in the ritual--the God is revealed in the inner
+light. (1)
+
+ (1) For a more detailed account of this Temple-festival, see
+Adam's Peak to Elephanta by E. Carpenter, ch. vii.
+
+
+We are familiar with this parting or rending of the veil. We hear of it
+in the Jewish Temple, and in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries. It had
+a mystically religious, and also obviously sexual, signification. It
+occurs here and there in the Roman Catholic ritual. In Spain, some
+ancient Catholic ceremonials are kept up with a brilliance and splendor
+hardly found elsewhere in Europe. In the Cathedral, at Seville the
+service of the Passion, carried out on Good Friday with great
+solemnity and accompanied with fine music, culminates on the Saturday
+morning--i.e. in the interval between the Crucifixion and the
+Resurrection--in a spectacle similar to that described in Ceylon. A rich
+velvet-black curtain hangs before the High Altar. At the appropriate
+moment and as the very emotional strains of voices and instruments reach
+their climax in the "Gloria in Excelsis," the curtain with a sudden
+burst of sound (thunder and the ringing of all the bells) is rent
+asunder, and the crucified Jesus is seen hanging there revealed in a
+halo of glory.
+
+There is also held at Seville Cathedral and before the High Altar every
+year, the very curious Dance of the Seises (sixes), performed now by 16
+instead of (as of old) by 12 boys, quaintly dressed. It seems to be a
+survival of some very ancient ritual, probably astronomical, in which
+the two sets of six represent the signs of the Zodiac, and is celebrated
+during the festivals of Corpus Christi, the Immaculate Conception, and
+the Carnival.
+
+Numerous instances might of course be adduced of how a Church aspiring
+to be a real Church of Humanity might adopt and re-create the rituals
+of the past in the light of a modern inspiration. Indeed the difficulty
+would be to limit the process, for EVERY ancient ritual, we can now
+see, has had a meaning and a message, and it would be a real joy to
+disentangle these and to expose the profound solidarity of humanity and
+aspiration from the very dawn of civilization down to the present day.
+Nor would it be necessary to imagine any Act of Uniformity or dead
+level of ceremonial in the matter. Different groups might concentrate on
+different phases of religious thought and practice. The only necessity
+would be that they should approach the subject with a real love of
+Humanity in their hearts and a real desire to come into touch with the
+deep inner life and mystic growing-pains of the souls of men and women
+in all ages. In this direction M. Loisy has done noble and excellent
+work; but the dead weight and selfish blinkerdom of the Catholic
+organization has hampered him to that degree that he has been unable
+to get justice done to his liberalizing designs--or, perhaps, even to
+reveal the full extent of them. And the same difficulty will remain. On
+the one hand no spiritual movement which does not take up the attitude
+of a World-religion has now in this age, any chance of success; on the
+other, all the existing Churches--whether Roman Catholic, or Greek,
+or Protestant or Secularist--whether Christian or Jewish or Persian or
+Hindu--will in all probability adopt the same blind and blinkered and
+selfish attitude as that described above, and so disqualify themselves
+for the great role of world-wide emancipation, which some religion at
+some time will certainly have to play. It is the same difficulty which
+is looming large in modern World-politics, where the local selfishness
+and vainglorious "patriotisms" of the Nations are sadly impeding and
+obstructing the development of that sense of Internationalism and
+Brotherhood which is the clearly indicated form of the future, and
+which alone can give each nation deliverance from fear, and a promise of
+growth, and the confident assurance of power.
+
+I say that Christianity must either frankly adopt this generous attitude
+and confess itself a branch of the great World-religion, anxious only to
+do honor to its source--or else it must perish and pass away. There is
+no other alternative. The hour of its Exodus has come. It may be, of
+course, that neither the Christian Church nor any branch of it, nor any
+other religious organization, will step into the gap. It may be--but I
+do not think this is likely--that the time of rites and ceremonies and
+formal creeds is PAST, and churches of any kind will be no more needed
+in the world: not likely, I say, because of the still far backwardness
+of the human masses, and their considerable dependence yet on laws and
+forms and rituals. Still, if it should prove that that age of dependence
+IS really approaching its end, that would surely be a matter for
+congratulation. It would mean that mankind was moving into a knowledge
+of the REALITY which has underlain these outer shows--that it was coming
+into the Third stage of its Consciousness. Having found this there would
+be no need for it to dwell any longer in the land of superstitions and
+formulae. It would have come to the place of which these latter are only
+the outlying indications.
+
+It may, therefore, happen--and this quite independently of the growth of
+a World-cult such as I have described, though by no means in antagonism
+to it--that a religious philosophy or Theosophy might develop and
+spread, similar to the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the
+pre-Christian sects, which would become, first among individuals and
+afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion of--or
+perhaps one should say the religious approach to the Third State. Books
+like the Upanishads of the Vedic seers, and the Bhagavat Gita, though
+garbled and obscured by priestly interferences and mystifications, do
+undoubtedly represent and give expression to the highest utterance of
+religious experience to be found anywhere in the world. They are indeed
+the manuals of human entrance into the cosmic state. But as I say,
+and as has happened in the case of other sacred books, a vast deal of
+rubbish has accreted round their essential teachings, and has to be
+cleared away. To go into a serious explication of the meaning of these
+books would be far too large an affair, and would be foreign to the
+purpose of the present volume; but I have in the Appendix below inserted
+two papers, (on "Rest" and "The Nature of the Self") containing the
+substance of lectures given on the above books. These papers or lectures
+are couched in the very simplest language, free from Sanskrit terms and
+the usual 'jargon of the Schools,' and may, I hope, even on that account
+be of use in familiarizing readers who are not specially STUDENTS with
+the ideas and mental attitudes of the cosmic state. Non-differentiation
+(Advaita (1)) is the root attitude of the mind inculcated.
+
+ (1) The word means "not-two-ness." Here we see a great subtlety
+of definition. It is not to be "one" with others that is urged, but to
+be "not two."
+
+
+We have seen that there has been an age of non-differentiation in the
+_Past_—non-differentiation from other members of the Tribe, from the
+Animals, from Nature and the Spirit or Spirits of nature; why
+should there not arise a similar sense of non-differentiation in the
+_Future_--similar but more extended more intelligent? Certainly this _will_
+arrive, in its own appointed time. There will be a surpassing of the
+bounds of separation and division. There will be a surpassing of all
+Taboos. We have seen the use and function of Taboos in the early stages
+of Evolution and how progress and growth have been very much a matter
+of their gradual extinction and assimilation into the general body
+of rational thought and feeling. Unreasoning and idiotic taboos still
+linger, but they grow weaker. A new Morality will come which will shake
+itself free from them. The sense of kinship with the animals (as in the
+old rituals) (1) will be restored; the sense of kinship with all the
+races of mankind will grow and become consolidated; the sense of the
+defilement and impurity of the human body will (with the adoption of a
+generally clean and wholesome life) pass away; and the body itself will
+come to be regarded more as a collection of shrines in which the
+gods may be worshiped and less as a mere organ of trivial
+self-gratifications; (2) there will be no form of Nature, or of human
+life or of the lesser creatures, which will be barred from the approach
+of Man or from the intimate and penetrating invasion of his spirit; and
+as in certain ceremonies and after honorable toils and labors a citizen
+is sometimes received into the community of his own city, so the
+emancipated human being on the completion of his long long pilgrimage on
+Earth will be presented with the Freedom of the Universe.
+
+
+ (1) The record of the Roman Catholic Church has been sadly
+callous and inhuman in this matter of the animals.
+
+ (2) See The Art of Creation, by E. Carpenter.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+In conclusion there does not seem much to say, except to accentuate
+certain points which may still appear doubtful or capable of being
+understood.
+
+The fact that the main argument of this volume is along the lines of
+psychological evolution will no doubt commend it to some, while on the
+other hand it will discredit the book to others whose eyes, being fixed
+on purely MATERIAL causes, can see no impetus in History except through
+these. But it must be remembered that there is not the least reason
+for SEPARATING the two factors. The fact that psychologically man has
+evolved from simple consciousness to self-consciousness, and is now
+in process of evolution towards another and more extended kind of
+consciousness, does not in the least bar the simultaneous appearance and
+influence of material evolution. It is clear indeed that the two must
+largely go together, acting and reacting on each other. Whatever the
+physical conditions of the animal brain may be which connect themselves
+with simple (unreflected and unreflecting) consciousness, it is evident
+that these conditions--in animals and primitive man--lasted for an
+enormous period, before the distinct consciousness of the individual and
+separate SELF arose. This second order of consciousness seems to have
+germinated at or about the same period as the discovery of the use
+of Tools (tools of stone, copper, bronze, &c.), the adoption of
+picture-writing and the use of reflective words (like "I" and "Thou");
+and it led on to the appreciation of gold and of iron with their
+ornamental and practical values, the accumulation of Property, the
+establishment of slavery of various kinds, the subjection of Women,
+the encouragement of luxury and self-indulgence, the growth of crowded
+cities and the endless conflicts and wars so resulting. We can see
+plainly that the incoming of the self-motive exercised a direct stimulus
+on the pursuit of these material objects and adaptations; and that
+the material adaptations in their turn did largely accentuate the
+self-motive; but to insist that the real explanation of the whole
+process is only to be found along one channel--the material OR the
+psychical--is clearly quite unnecessary. Those who understand that all
+matter is conscious in some degree, and that all consciousness has a
+material form of some kind, will be the first to admit this.
+
+The same remarks apply to the Third Stage. We can see that in modern
+times the huge and unlimited powers of production by machinery, united
+with a growing tendency towards intelligent Birth-control, are
+preparing the way for an age of Communism and communal Plenty which will
+inevitably be associated (partly as cause and partly as effect) with
+a new general phase of consciousness, involving the mitigation of
+the struggle for existence, the growth of intuitional and psychical
+perception, the spread of amity and solidarity, the disappearance of
+War, and the realization (in degree) of the Cosmic life.
+
+Perhaps the greatest difficulty or stumbling-block to the general
+acceptance of the belief in a third (or 'Golden-Age') phase of human
+evolution is the obstinate and obdurate pre-judgment that the passing of
+Humanity out of the Second stage can only mean the entire ABANDONMENT
+OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS; and this people say--and quite rightly--is both
+impossible and undesirable. Throughout the preceding chapters I have
+striven, wherever feasible, to counter this misunderstanding--but I have
+little hope of success. The DETERMINATION of the world to misunderstand
+or misinterpret anything a little new or unfamiliar is a thing which
+perhaps only an author can duly appreciate. But while it is clear that
+self-consciousness originally came into being through a process of
+alienation and exile and fear which marked it with the Cain-like brand
+of loneliness and apartness, it is equally clear that to think of that
+apartness as an absolute and permanent separation is an illusion, since
+no being can really continue to live divorced from the source of its
+life. For a period in evolution the SELF took on this illusive form in
+consciousness, as of an ignis fatuus--the form of a being sundered from
+all other beings, atomic, lonely, without refuge, surrounded by dangers
+and struggling, for itself alone and for its own salvation in the midst
+of a hostile environment. Perhaps some such terrible imagination was
+necessary at first, as it were to start Humanity on its new path. But
+it had its compensation, for the sufferings and tortures, mental and
+bodily, the privations, persecutions, accusations, hatreds, the wars and
+conflicts--so endured by millions of individuals and whole races--have
+at length stamped upon the human mind a sense of individual
+responsibility which otherwise perhaps would never have emerged, and
+whose mark can now be effaced; ultimately, too, these things have
+searched our inner nature to its very depths and exposed its bed-rock
+foundation. They have convinced us that this idea of ultimate
+separation is an illusion, and that in truth we are all indefeasible and
+indestructible parts of one great Unity in which "we live and move and
+have our being." That being so, it is clear that there remains in the
+end a self-consciousness which need by no means be abandoned, which
+indeed only comes to its true fruition and understanding when
+it recognizes its affiliation with the Whole, and glories in an
+individuality which is an expression both of itself AND of the whole.
+The human child at its mother's knee probably comes first to know it
+HAS a 'self' on some fateful day when having wandered afar it goes
+lost among alien houses and streets or in the trackless fields. That
+appalling experience--the sense of danger, of fear, of loneliness--is
+never forgotten; it stamps some new sense of Being upon the childish
+mind, but that sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the
+prouder and more radiant in the hour of return to the mother's arms. The
+return, the salvation, for which humanity looks, is the return of the
+little individual self to harmony and union with the great Self of the
+universe, but by no means its extinction or abandonment--rather the
+finding of its own true nature as never before.
+
+
+There is another thing which may be said here: namely, that the
+disentanglement, as above, of three main stages of psychological
+evolution as great formative influences in the history of mankind, does
+not by any means preclude the establishment of lesser stages within the
+boundaries of these. In all probability subdivisions of all the three
+will come in time to be recognized and allowed for. To take the
+Second stage only, it MAY appear that Self-consciousness in its first
+development is characterized by an accentuation of Timidity; in its
+second development by a more deliberate pursuit of sensual Pleasure
+(lust, food, drink, &c.); in its third by the pursuit of mental
+gratifications (vanities, ambitions, enslavement of others); in its
+fourth by the pursuit of Property, as a means of attaining these
+objects; in its fifth by the access of enmities, jealousies, wars and so
+forth, consequent on all these things; and so on. I have no intention at
+present of following out this line of thought, but only wish to suggest
+its feasibility and the degree to which it may throw light on the social
+evolutions of the Past. (1)
+
+ (1) For an analysis of the nature of Self-consciousness see vol.
+iii, p. 375 sq. of the three ponderous tomes by Wilhelm
+Wundt--Grund-zuge der Physiologischen Psychologie--in which amid an
+enormous mass of verbiage occasional gleams of useful suggestion are to
+be found.
+
+
+As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that there are only two
+main factors in life, namely, Love and Ignorance. And of these we may
+also say that the two are not in the same plane: one is positive and
+substantial, the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be
+thought at first that Fear and Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are
+very positive things, but in the end we see that they are due merely to
+ABSENCE of perception, to dulness of understanding. Or we may put the
+statement in a rather less crude form, and say that there are only
+two factors in life: (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with
+Nature)--which covers Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth, and
+(2) Non-perception of the same--which covers Enmity, Fear, Hatred,
+Self-pity, Cruelty, Jealousy, Meanness and an endless similar list.
+The present world which we see around us, with its idiotic wars, its
+senseless jealousies of nations and classes, its fears and greeds
+and vanities and its futile endeavors--as of people struggling in a
+swamp--to find one's own salvation by treading others underfoot, is a
+negative phenomenon. Ignorance, non-perception, are at the root of it.
+But it is the blessed virtue of Ignorance and of non-perception that
+they inevitably—if only slowly and painfully--DESTROY THEMSELVES. All
+experience serves to dissipate them. The world, as it is, carries' the
+doom of its own transformation in its bosom; and in proportion as that
+which is negative disappears the positive element must establish itself
+more and more.
+
+So we come back to that with which we began, (1) to Fear bred by
+Ignorance. From that source has sprung the long catalogue of follies,
+cruelties and sufferings which mark the records of the human race since
+the dawn of history; and to the overcoming of this Fear we perforce
+must look for our future deliverance, and for the discovery, even in
+the midst of this world, of our true Home. The time is coming when the
+positive constructive element must dominate. It is inevitable that Man
+must ever build a state of society around him after the pattern and
+image of his own interior state. The whole futile and idiotic structure
+of commerce and industry in which we are now imprisoned springs from
+that falsehood of individualistic self-seeking which marks the second
+stage of human evolution. That stage is already tottering to its fall,
+destroyed by the very flood of egotistic passions and interests, of
+vanities, greeds, and cruelties, all warring with each other, which are
+the sure outcome and culmination of its operation. With the restoration
+of the sentiment of the Common Life, and the gradual growth of a mental
+attitude corresponding, there will emerge from the flood something like
+a solid earth--something on which it will be possible to build with good
+hope for the future. Schemes of reconstruction are well enough in their
+way, but if there is no ground of REAL HUMAN SOLIDARITY beneath, of what
+avail are they?
+
+ (1) See Introduction, Ch. I.
+
+
+An industrial system which is no real industrial order, but only (on
+the part of the employers) a devil's device for securing private profit
+under the guise of public utility, and (on the part of the employed) a
+dismal and poor-spirited renunciation--for the sake of a bare living--of
+all real interest in life and work: such a 'system' must infallibly
+pass away. It cannot in the nature of things be permanent. The first
+condition of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the
+Common Life. This sense, which instinctively underlay the whole Tribal
+order of the far past--which first came to consciousness in the
+worship of a thousand pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless
+sacrifices, initiations, redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which
+inspired the dreams of the Golden Age, and flashed out for a time in the
+Communism of the early Christians and in their adorations of the risen
+Savior--must in the end be the creative condition of a new order: it
+must provide the material of which the Golden City waits to be built.
+The long travail of the World-religion will not have been in vain, which
+assures this consummation. What the signs and conditions of any general
+advance into this new order of life and consciousness will be, we know
+not. It may be that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision
+often comes quite suddenly, and GENERALLY perhaps after a period of
+great suffering, so to society at large a similar revelation will
+arrive--like "the lightning which cometh out of the East and shineth
+even unto the West"--with unexpected swiftness. On the other hand
+it would perhaps be wise not to count too much on any such sudden
+transformation. When we look abroad (and at home) in this year of grace
+and hoped-for peace, 1919, and see the spirits of rancour and revenge,
+the fears, the selfish blindness and the ignorance, which still hold in
+their paralyzing grasp huge classes and coteries in every country in the
+world, we see that the second stage of human development is by no means
+yet at its full term, and that, as in some vast chrysalis, for the
+liberation of the creature within still more and more terrible struggles
+MAY be necessary. We can only pray that such may not be the case.
+Anyhow, if we have followed the argument of this book we can hardly
+doubt that the destruction (which is going on everywhere) of the
+outer form of the present society marks the first stage of man's final
+liberation; and that, sooner or later, and in its own good time, that
+further 'divine event' will surely be realized.
+
+
+Nor need we fear that Humanity, when it has once entered into the great
+Deliverance, will be again overpowered by evil. From Knowledge back to
+Ignorance there is no complete return. The nations that have come to
+enlightenment need entertain no dread of those others (however hostile
+they appear) who are still plunging darkly in the troubled waters
+of self-greed. The dastardly Fears which inspire all brutishness and
+cruelty of warfare--whether of White against White or it may be of White
+against Yellow or Black--may be dismissed for good and all by that blest
+race which once shall have gained the shore--since from the very nature
+of the case those who are on dry land can fear nothing and need fear
+nothing from the unfortunates who are yet tossing in the welter and
+turmoil of the waves.
+
+Dr. Frazer, in the conclusion of his great work The Golden Bough, (1)
+bids farewell to his readers with the following words: "The laws of
+Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting
+phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names
+of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion
+and science are nothing but theories (of thought); and as Science has
+supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by
+some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of
+looking at phenomena--of registering the shadows on the screen--of which
+we in this generation can form no idea." I imagine Dr. Frazer is right
+in thinking that "a way of looking at phenomena" different from the way
+of Science, may some day prevail. But I think this change will come,
+not so much by the growth of Science itself or the extension of its
+'hypotheses,' as by a growth and expansion of the human HEART and a
+change in its psychology and powers of perception. Perhaps some of the
+preceding chapters will help to show how much the outlook of humanity on
+the world has been guided through the centuries by the slow evolution of
+its inner consciousness. Gradually, out of an infinite mass of folly and
+delusion, the human soul has in this way disentangled itself, and will
+in the future disentangle itself, to emerge at length in the light of
+true FREEDOM. All the taboos, the insane terrors, the fatuous forbiddals
+of this and that (with their consequent heart-searchings and distress)
+may perhaps have been in their way necessary, in order to rivet and
+define the meaning and the understanding of that word. To-day
+these taboos and terrors still linger, many of them, in the form of
+conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience, doubts and
+desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge from all these
+things, FREE--familiar, that is, with them all, making use of all,
+allowing generously for the values of all, but hampered and bound by
+NONE. He will realize the inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of the
+ancient religions, and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far
+prophecy down the ages--finding after all the long-expected Saviour of
+the world within his own breast, and Paradise in the disclosure there of
+the everlasting peace of the soul.
+
+ (1) See "Balder," vol. ii, pp. 306, 307. ("Farewell to Nemi.")
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+THE TEACHING OF THE UPANISHADS
+
+BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF TWO LECTURES TO POPULAR AUDIENCES
+
+I. REST
+
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+
+
+I. REST
+
+To some, in the present whirlpool of life and affairs it may seem almost
+an absurdity to talk about Rest. For long enough now rest has seemed a
+thing far off and unattainable. With the posts knocking at our doors
+ten or twelve times a day, with telegrams arriving every hour, and the
+telephone bell constantly ringing; with motors rushing wildly about the
+streets, and aeroplanes whizzing overhead, with work speeded up in every
+direction, and the drive in the workshops becoming more intolerable
+every day; with the pace of the walkers and the pace of the talkers from
+hour to hour insanely increasing--what room, it may well be asked, is
+there for Rest? And now the issues of war, redoubling the urgency of all
+questions, are on us.
+
+The problem is obviously a serious one. So urgent is it that I think one
+may safely say the amount of insanity due to the pressure of daily life
+is increasing; nursing-homes have sprung up for the special purpose of
+treating such cases; and doctors are starting special courses of
+tuition in the art--now becoming very important--of systematically doing
+nothing! And yet it is difficult to see the outcome of it all. The clock
+of what is called Progress is not easily turned backward. We should
+not very readily agree nowadays to the abolition of telegrams or to a
+regulation compelling express trains to stop at every station! We can't
+ALL go to Nursing Homes, or afford to enjoy a winter's rest-cure in
+Egypt. And, if not, is the speeding-up process to go on indefinitely,
+incapable of being checked, and destined ultimately to land civilization
+in the mad-house?
+
+It is, I say, a serious and an urgent problem. And it is, I think,
+forcing a certain answer on us--which I will now endeavor to explain.
+
+If we cannot turn back and reverse this fatal onrush of modern life (and
+it is evident that we cannot do so in any very brief time--though of
+course ultimately we might succeed) then I think there are clearly only
+two alternatives left--either to go forward to general dislocation and
+madness, or--to learn to rest even in the very midst of the hurry and
+the scurry.
+
+To explain what I mean, let me use an illustration. The typhoons and
+cyclones of the China Seas are some of the most formidable storms that
+ships can encounter. Their paths in the past have been strewn with
+wrecks and disaster. But now with increased knowledge much of their
+danger has been averted. It is known that they are CIRCULAR in
+character, and that though the wind on their outskirts often reaches a
+speed of 100 miles an hour, in the centre of the storm there is a
+space of complete calm--not a calm of the SEA certainly, but a complete
+absence of wind. The skilled navigator, if he cannot escape the storm,
+steers right into the heart of it, and rests there. Even in the midst
+of the clatter he finds a place of quiet where he can trim his sails
+and adjust his future course. He knows too from his position in what
+direction at every point around him the wind is moving and where it will
+strike him when at last his ship emerges from the charmed circle.
+
+Is it not possible, we may ask, that in the very midst of the cyclone of
+daily life we may find a similar resting-place? If we can, our case is
+by no means hopeless. If we cannot, then indeed there is danger.
+
+Looking back in History we seem to see that in old times people took
+life much more leisurely than they do now. The elder generations gave
+more scope in their customs and their religions for contentment and
+peace of mind. We associate a certain quietism and passivity with the
+thought of the Eastern peoples. But as civilization traveled Westward
+external activity and the pace of life increased--less and less time was
+left for meditation and repose--till with the rise of Western Europe and
+America, the dominant note of life seems to have simply become one of
+feverish and ceaseless activity--of activity merely for the sake of
+activity, without any clear idea of its own purpose or object.
+
+Such a prospect does not at first seem very hopeful; but on second
+thoughts we see that we are not forced to draw any very pessimistic
+conclusion from it. The direction of human evolution need not remain
+always the same. The movement, in fact, of civilization from East to
+West has now clearly completed itself. The globe has been circled, and
+we cannot go any FARTHER to the West without coming round to the East
+again. It is a commonplace to say that our psychology, our philosophy
+and our religious sense are already taking on an Eastern color; nor is
+it difficult to imagine that with the end of the present dispensation a
+new era may perfectly naturally arrive in which the St. Vitus' dance of
+money-making and ambition will cease to be the chief end of existence.
+
+In the history of nations as in the history of individuals there
+are periods when the formative ideals of life (through some hidden
+influence) change; and the mode of life and evolution in consequence
+changes also. I remember when I was a boy wishing--like many other
+boys--to go to sea. I wanted to join the Navy. It was not, I am sure,
+that I was so very anxious to defend my country. No, there was a much
+simpler and more prosaic motive than that. The ships of those days with
+their complex rigging suggested a perfect paradise of CLIMBING, and I
+know that it was the thought of THAT which influenced me. To be able
+to climb indefinitely among those ropes and spars! How delightful! Of
+course I knew perfectly well that I should not always have free access
+to the rigging; but then--some day, no doubt, I should be an Admiral,
+and who then could prevent me? I remember seeing myself in my mind's
+eye, with cocked hat on my head and spy-glass under my arm, roaming at
+my own sweet will up aloft, regardless of the remonstrances which
+might reach me from below! Such was my childish ideal. But a time
+came--needless to say--when I conceived a different idea of the object
+of life.
+
+It is said that John Tyndall, whose lectures on Science were so much
+sought after in their time, being on one occasion in New York was
+accosted after his discourse by a very successful American business
+man, who urged him to devote his scientific knowledge and ability to
+commercial pursuits, promising that if he did so, he, Tyndall, would
+easily make "a big pile." Tyndall very calmly replied, "Well, I myself
+thought of that once, but I soon abandoned the idea, having come to
+the conclusion that I had NO TIME TO WASTE IN MAKING MONEY." The man of
+dollars nearly sank into the ground. Such a conception of life had never
+entered his head before. But to Tyndall no doubt it was obvious that if
+he chained himself to the commercial ideal all the joy and glory of his
+days would be gone.
+
+We sometimes hear of the awful doom of some of the Russian convicts in
+the quarries and mines of Siberia, who are (or were) chained permanently
+to their wheelbarrows. It is difficult to imagine a more dreadful fate:
+the despair, the disgust, the deadly loathing of the accursed thing from
+which there is no escape day or night--which is the companion not only
+of the prisoner's work but of his hours of rest--with which he has to
+sleep, to feed, to take his recreation if he has any, and to fulfil all
+the offices of nature. Could anything be more crushing? And yet, and
+yet... is it not true that we, most of us, in our various ways are
+chained to our wheelbarrows--is it not too often true that to these
+beggarly things we have for the most part chained OURSELVES?
+
+Let me be understood. Of course we all have (or ought to have) our work
+to do. We have our living to get, our families to support, our trade,
+our art, our profession to pursue. In that sense no doubt we are tied;
+but I take it that these things are like the wheelbarrow which a man
+uses while he is at work. It may irk him at times, but he sticks to it
+with a good heart, and with a certain joy because it is the instrument
+of a noble purpose. That is all right. But to be chained to it, not to
+be able to leave it when the work of the day is done--that is indeed
+an ignoble slavery. I would say, then, take care that even with these
+things, these necessary arts of life, you preserve your independence,
+that even if to some degree they may confine your body they do not
+enslave your mind.
+
+For it is the freedom of the mind which counts. We are all no doubt
+caught in the toils of the earth-life. One man is largely dominated
+by sensual indulgence, another by ambition, another by the pursuit
+of money. Well, these things are all right in themselves. Without the
+pleasures of the senses we should be dull mokes indeed; without ambition
+much of the zest and enterprise of life would be gone; gold, in the
+present order of affairs, is a very useful servant. These things are
+right enough--but to be CHAINED to them, to be unable to think of
+anything else--what a fate! The subject reminds one of a not uncommon
+spectacle. It is a glorious day; the sun is bright, small white clouds
+float in the transparent blue--a day when you linger perforce on the
+road to enjoy the scene. But suddenly here comes a man painfully running
+all hot and dusty and mopping his head, and with no eye, clearly, for
+anything around him. What is the matter? He is absorbed by one idea.
+He is running to catch a train! And one cannot help wondering what
+EXCEEDINGLY important business it must be for which all this glory and
+beauty is sacrificed, and passed by as if it did not exist.
+
+Further we must remember that in our foolishness we very commonly chain
+ourselves, not only to things like sense-pleasures and ambitions which
+are on the edge, so to speak, of being vices; but also to other things
+which are accounted virtues, and which as far as I can see are just as
+bad, if we once become enslaved to them. I have known people who were so
+exceedingly 'spiritual' and 'good' that one really felt quite depressed
+in their company; I have known others whose sense of duty, dear things,
+was so strong that they seemed quite unable to REST, or even to allow
+their friends to rest; and I have wondered whether, after all, worriting
+about one's duty might not be as bad--as deteriorating to oneself, as
+distressing to one's friends--as sinning a good solid sin. No, in this
+respect virtues MAY be no better than vices; and to be chained to a
+wheelbarrow made of alabaster is no way preferable to being chained to
+one of wood. To sacrifice the immortal freedom of the mind in order to
+become a prey to self-regarding cares and anxieties, self-estimating
+virtues and vices, self-chaining duties and indulgences, is a mistake.
+And I warn you, it is quite useless. For the destiny of Freedom is
+ultimately upon every one, and if refusing it for a time you heap your
+life persistently upon one object--however blameless in itself that
+object may be--Beware! For one day--and when you least expect it--the
+gods will send a thunderbolt upon you. One day the thing for which
+you have toiled and spent laborious days and sleepless nights will lie
+broken before you--your reputation will be ruined, your ambition will be
+dashed, your savings of years will be lost--and for the moment you will
+be inclined to think that your life has been in vain. But presently you
+will wake up and find that something quite different has happened. You
+will find that the thunderbolt which you thought was your ruin has been
+your salvation--that it has broken the chain which bound you to your
+wheelbarrow, and that you are free! --------
+
+I think you will now see what I mean by Rest. Rest is the loosing of the
+chains which bind us to the whirligig of the world, it is the passing
+into the centre of the Cyclone; it is the Stilling of Thought. For (with
+regard to this last) it is Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind,
+which binds us to outer things. The outer things themselves are all
+right. It is only through our thoughts that they make slaves of us.
+Obtain power over your thoughts and you are free. You can then use the
+outer things or dismiss them at your pleasure.
+
+There is nothing new of course in all this. It has been known for ages;
+and is part of the ancient philosophy of the world.
+
+In the Katha Upanishad you will find these words (Max Muller's
+translation): "As rainwater that has fallen on a mountain ridge runs
+down on all sides, thus does he who sees a difference between qualities
+run after them on all sides." This is the figure of the man who does NOT
+rest. And it is a powerful likeness. The thunder shower descends on the
+mountain top; torrents of water pour down the crags in every direction.
+Imagine the state of mind of a man--however thirsty he may be--who
+endeavors to pursue and intercept all these streams!
+
+But then the Upanishad goes on: "As pure water poured into pure water
+remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who
+knows." What a perfect image of rest! Imagine a cistern before you with
+transparent glass sides and filled with pure water. And then imagine
+some one comes with a phial, also of pure water, and pours the contents
+gently into the cistern. What will happen? Almost nothing. The pure
+water will glide into the pure water--"remaining the same." There will
+be no dislocation, no discoloration (as might happen if MUDDY water were
+poured in); there will be only perfect harmony.
+
+I imagine here that the meaning is something like this. The cistern is
+the great Reservoir of the Universe which contains the pure and
+perfect Spirit of all life. Each one of us, and every mortal creature,
+represents a drop from that reservoir--a drop indeed which is also pure
+and perfect (though the phial in which it is contained may not always
+be so). When we, each of us, descend into the world and meet the great
+Ocean of Life which dwells there behind all mortal forms, it is like the
+little phial being poured into the great reservoir. If the tiny canful
+which is our selves is pure and unsoiled, then when it meets the
+world it will blend with the Spirit which informs the world perfectly
+harmoniously, without distress or dislocation. It will pass through and
+be at one with it. How can one describe such a state of affairs? You
+will have the key to every person that you meet, because indeed you are
+conscious that the real essence of that person is the same as your own.
+You will have the solution of every event which happens. For every event
+is (and is felt to be) the touch of the great Spirit on yours. Can any
+description of Rest be more perfect than that? Pure water poured into
+pure water.... There is no need to hurry, for everything will come in
+its good time. There is no need to leave your place, for all you desire
+is close at hand.
+
+Here is another verse (from the Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad) embodying
+the same idea: "And he who beholds all beings in the Self, and the
+Self in all beings, he never turns away from It. When, to a man who
+understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble,
+can there be to him--having once beheld that Unity?"--What trouble,
+what sorrow, indeed, when the universe has become transparent with the
+presences of all we love, held firm in the One enfolding Presence?
+
+But it will be said: "Our minds are NOT pure and transparent. More often
+they are muddy and soiled--soiled, if not in their real essence, yet by
+reason of the mortal phial in which they are contained." And that alas!
+is true. If you pour a phial of muddy water into that reservoir which
+we described--what will you see? You will see a queer and ugly cloud
+formed. And to how many of us, in our dealings with the world, does life
+take on just such a form--of a queer and ugly cloud?
+
+Now not so very long after those Upanishads were written there lived
+in China that great Teacher, Lao-tze; and he too had considered these
+things. And he wrote--in the Tao-Teh-King--"Who is there who can make
+muddy water clear?" The question sounds like a conundrum. For a moment
+one hesitates to answer it. Lao-tze, however, has an answer ready. He
+says: "But if you LEAVE IT ALONE it will become clear of itself." That
+muddy water of the mind, muddied by all the foolish little thoughts
+which like a sediment infest it--but if you leave it alone it will
+become clear of itself. Sometimes walking along the common road after
+a shower you have seen pools of water lying here and there, dirty and
+unsightly with the mud stirred up by the hoofs of men and animals. And
+then returning some hours afterwards along the same road--in the evening
+and after the cessation of traffic--you have looked again, and lo!
+each pool has cleared itself to a perfect calm, and has become a lovely
+mirror reflecting the trees and the clouds and the sunset and the stars.
+
+So this mirror of the mind. Leave it alone. Let the ugly sediment
+of tiresome thoughts and anxieties, and of fussing over one's
+self-importances and duties, settle down--and presently you will look
+on it, and see something there which you never knew or imagined
+before--something more beautiful than you ever yet beheld--a reflection
+of the real and eternal world such is only given to the mind that rests.
+
+
+Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in
+that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
+
+But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so
+still;
+
+And let them become clear, so clear--so limpid, so mirror-like;
+
+At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful
+beauty,
+
+And the antelope shall descend to drink, and the lion to quench his
+thirst,
+
+And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his own likeness in
+you. (1)
+
+
+ (1) Towards Democracy, p. 373.
+
+
+Yes, there is this priceless thing within us, but hoofing along the
+roads in the mud we fail to find it; there is this region of calm,
+but the cyclone of the world raging around guards us from entering it.
+Perhaps it is best so--best that the access to it should not be made
+too easy. One day, some time ago, in the course of conversation with
+Rabindranath Tagore in London, I asked him what impressed him most in
+visiting the great city. He said, "The restless incessant movement of
+everybody." I said, "Yes, they seem as if they were all rushing about
+looking for something." He replied, "It is because each person does not
+know of the great treasure he has within himself." --------
+
+How then are we to reach this treasure and make it our own? How are we
+to attain to this Stilling of the Mind, which is the secret of all power
+and possession? The thing is difficult, no doubt; yet as I tried to show
+at the outset of this discourse, we Moderns MUST reach it; we have got
+to attain to it--for the penalty of failure is and must be widespread
+Madness.
+
+The power to still the mind--to be ABLE, mark you, when you want,
+to enter into the region of Rest, and to dismiss or command your
+Thoughts--is a condition of Health; it is a condition of all Power
+and Energy. For all health, whether of mind or body, resides in one's
+relation to the central Life within. If one cannot get into touch with
+THAT, then the life-forces cannot flow down into the organism. Most,
+perhaps all, disease arises from the disturbance of this connection. All
+mere hurry, all mere running after external things (as of the man after
+the water-streams on the mountain-top), inevitably breaks it. Let a pond
+be allowed calmly under the influence of frost to crystallize, and most
+beautiful flowers and spears of ice will be formed, but keep stirring
+the water all the time with a stick or a pole and nothing will result
+but an ugly brash of half-frozen stuff. The condition of the exercise of
+power and energy is that it should proceed from a center of Rest within
+one. So convinced am I of this, that whenever I find myself hurrying
+over my work, I pause and say, "Now you are not producing anything
+good!" and I generally find that that is true. It is curious, but I
+think very noticeable, that the places where people hurry most--as
+for instance the City of London or Wall Street, New York--are just the
+places where the work being done is of LEAST importance (being
+mostly money-gambling); whereas if you go and look at a ploughman
+ploughing--doing perhaps the most important of human work--you find
+all his movements most deliberate and leisurely, as if indeed he had
+infinite time at command; the truth being that in dealing (like a
+ploughman) with the earth and the horses and the weather and the things
+of Nature generally you can no more hurry than Nature herself hurries.
+
+Following this line of thought it might seem that one would arrive at a
+hopeless paradox. If it be true that the less one hurries the better
+the work resulting, then it might seem that by sitting still and merely
+twirling one's thumbs one would arrive at the very greatest activity and
+efficiency! And indeed (if understood aright) there is a truth even in
+this, which--like the other points I have mentioned--has been known and
+taught long ages ago. Says that humorous old sage, Lao-tze, whom I have
+already quoted: "By non-action there is nothing that cannot be done." At
+first this sounds like mere foolery or worse; but afterwards thinking on
+it one sees there is a meaning hidden. There is a secret by which Nature
+and the powers of the universal life will do all for you. The Bhagavat
+Gita also says, "He who discovers inaction in action and action in
+inaction is wise among mortals."
+
+It is worth while dwelling for a moment on these texts. We are all--as I
+said earlier on--involved in work belonging to our place and station; we
+are tied to some degree in the bonds of action. But that fact need not
+imprison our inner minds. While acting even with keenness and energy
+along the external and necessary path before us, it is perfectly
+possible to hold the mind free and untied--so that the RESULT of our
+action (which of course is not ours to command) shall remain indifferent
+and incapable of unduly affecting us. Similarly, when it is our part
+to remain externally INACTIVE, we may discover that underneath this
+apparent inaction we may be taking part in the currents of a deeper life
+which are moving on to a definite end, to an end or object which in a
+sense is ours and in a sense is NOT ours.
+
+The lighthouse beam flies over land and sea with incredible velocity,
+and you think the light itself must be in swiftest movement; but when
+you climb up thither you find the lamp absolutely stationary. It is only
+the reflection that is moving. The rider on horseback may gallop to and
+fro wherever he will, but it is hard to say that HE is acting. The horse
+guided by the slightest indication of the man's will performs an the
+action that is needed. If we can get into right touch with the immense,
+the incalculable powers of Nature, is there anything which we may not be
+able to do? If a man worship the Self only as his true state," says
+the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, "his work cannot fail, for whatever he
+desires, that he obtains from the Self." What a wonderful saying, and
+how infallibly true! For obviously if you succeed in identifying your
+true being with the great Self of the universe, then whatever you desire
+the great Self will also desire, and therefore every power of Nature
+will be at your service and will conspire to fulfil your need.
+
+There are marvelous things here "well wrapped up"--difficult to
+describe, yet not impossible to experience. And they all depend upon
+that power of stilling Thought, that ability to pass unharmed and
+undismayed through the grinning legions of the lower mind into the very
+heart of Paradise.
+
+The question inevitably arises, How can this power be obtained? And
+there is only one answer--the same answer which has to be given for the
+attainment of ANY power or faculty. There is no royal road. The only way
+is (however imperfectly) to DO the thing in question, to practice it. If
+you would learn to play cricket, the only way is to play cricket; if you
+would be able to speak a language, the only way is to speak it. If you
+would learn to swim, the only way is to practice swimming. Or would you
+wish to be like the man who when his companions were bathing and bidding
+him come and join them, said: "Yes, I am longing to join you, but I am
+not going to be such a fool as to go into the water TILL I KNOW HOW TO
+SWIM!"
+
+There is nothing but practice. If you want to obtain that priceless
+power of commanding Thought--of using it or dismissing it (for the
+two things go together) at will--there is no way but practice. And
+the practice consists in two exercises: (a) that of concentration--in
+holding the thought steadily for a time on one subject, or point of a
+subject; and (b) that of effacement--in effacing any given thought from
+the mind, and determining NOT to entertain it for such and such a
+time. Both these exercises are difficult. Failure in practicing them is
+certain--and may even extend over years. But the power equally certainly
+grows WITH practice. And ultimately there may come a time when the
+learner is not only able to efface from his mind any given thought
+(however importunate), but may even succeed in effacing, during short
+periods, ALL thought of any kind. When this stage is reached, the
+veil of illusion which surrounds all mortal things is pierced, and the
+entrance to the Paradise of Rest (and of universal power and knowledge)
+is found.
+
+Of indirect or auxiliary methods of reaching this great conclusion,
+there are more than one. I think of life in the open air, if not
+absolutely necessary, at least most important. The gods--though
+sometimes out of compassion they visit the interiors of houses--are not
+fond of such places and the evil effluvium they find there, and avoid
+them as much as they can. It is not merely a question of breathing
+oxygen instead of carbonic acid. There is a presence and an influence in
+Nature and the Open which expands the mind and causes brigand cares
+and worries to drop off--whereas in confined places foolish and futile
+thoughts of all kinds swarm like microbes and cloud and conceal the
+soul. Experto Crede. It is only necessary to try this experiment in
+order to prove its truth.
+
+Another thing which corresponds in some degree to living physically in
+the open air, is the living mentally and emotionally in the atmosphere
+of love. A large charity of mind, which refuses absolutely to shut
+itself in little secluded places of prejudice, bigotry and contempt for
+others, and which attains to a great and universal sympathy, helps, most
+obviously, to open the way to that region of calm and freedom of which
+we have spoken, while conversely all petty enmity, meanness and spite,
+conspire to imprison the soul and make its deliverance more difficult.
+
+It is not necessary to labor these points. As we said, the way to attain
+is to sincerely TRY to attain, to consistently PRACTICE attainment.
+Whoever does this will find that the way will open out by degrees, as
+of one emerging from a vast and gloomy forest, till out of darkness the
+path becomes clear. For whomsoever really TRIES there is no failure; for
+every effort in that region is success, and every onward push, however
+small, and however little result it may show, is really a move forward,
+and one step nearer the light.
+
+
+
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+The true nature of the Self is a matter by no means easy to compass. We
+have all probably at some time or other attempted to fathom the deeps of
+personality, and been baffled. Some people say they can quite distinctly
+remember a moment in early childhood, about the age of THREE (though the
+exact period is of course only approximate) when self-consciousness--the
+awareness of being a little separate Self--first dawned in the mind.
+It was generally at some moment of childish tension--alone perhaps in a
+garden, or lost from the mother's protecting hand--that this happened;
+and it was the beginning of a whole range of new experience. Before
+some such period there is in childhood strictly speaking no distinct
+self-consciousness. As Tennyson says (In Memoriam xliv):
+
+      The baby new to earth and sky,
+          What time his tender palm is prest
+          Against the circle of the breast,
+      Hath never thought that "This is I."
+
+It has consciousness truly, but no distinctive self-consciousness. It
+is this absence or deficiency which explains many things which at first
+sight seem obscure in the psychology of children and of animals. The
+baby (it has often been noticed) experiences little or no sense of FEAR.
+It does not know enough to be afraid; it has never formed any image of
+itself, as of a thing which might be injured. It may shrink from actual
+pain or discomfort, but it does not LOOK FORWARD--which is of the
+essence of fear--to pain in the future. Fear and self-consciousness are
+closely interlinked. Similarly with animals, we often wonder how a horse
+or a cow can endure to stand out in a field all night, exposed to cold
+and rain, in the lethargic patient way that they exhibit. It is not that
+they do not FEEL the discomfort, but it is that they do not envisage
+THEMSELVES as enduring this pain and suffering for all those coming
+hours; and as we know with ourselves that nine-tenths of our miseries
+really consist in looking forward to future miseries, so we understand
+that the absence or at any rate slight prevalence of self-consciousness
+in animals enables them to endure forms of distress which would drive us
+mad.
+
+In time then the babe arrives at self-consciousness; and, as one might
+expect, the growing boy or girl often becomes intensely aware of Self.
+His or her self-consciousness is crude, no doubt, but it has very little
+misgiving. If the question of the nature of the Self is propounded to
+the boy as a problem he has no difficulty in solving it. He says "I know
+well enough who I am: I am the boy with red hair what gave Jimmy Brown
+such a jolly good licking last Monday week." He knows well enough--or
+thinks he knows--who he is. And at a later age, though his definition
+may change and he may describe himself chiefly as a good cricketer or
+successful in certain examinations, his method is practically the same.
+He fixes his mind on a certain bundle of qualities and capacities which
+he is supposed to possess, and calls that bundle Himself. And in a more
+elaborate way we most of us, I imagine, do the same.
+
+Presently, however, with more careful thought, we begin to see
+difficulties in this view. I see that directly I think of myself as a
+certain bundle of qualities--and for that matter it is of no account
+whether the qualities are good or bad, or in what sort of charming
+confusion they are mixed--I see at once that I am merely looking at
+a bundle of qualities: and that the real "I," the Self, is not that
+bundle, but is the being INSPECTING the same--something beyond and
+behind, as it were. So I now concentrate my thoughts upon that inner
+Something, in order to find out what it really is. I imagine perhaps an
+inner being, of 'astral' or ethereal nature, and possessing a new
+range of much finer and more subtle qualities than the body--a being
+inhabiting the body and perceiving through its senses, but quite capable
+of surviving the tenement in which it dwells and I think of that as the
+Self. But no sooner have I taken this step than I perceive that I am
+committing the same mistake as before. I am only contemplating a new
+image or picture, and "I" still remain beyond and behind that which I
+contemplate. No sooner do I turn my attention on the subjective being
+than it becomes OBJECTIVE, and the real subject retires into the
+background. And so on indefinitely. I am baffled; and unable to say
+positively what the Self is.
+
+Meanwhile there are people who look upon the foregoing speculations
+about an interior Self as merely unpractical. Being perhaps of a more
+materialistic type of mind they fix their attention on the body. Frankly
+they try to define the Self by the body and all that is connected
+therewith--that is by the mental as well as corporeal qualities which
+exhibit themselves in that connection; and they say, "At any rate the
+Self--whatever it may be--is in some way limited by the body; each
+person studies the interest of his body and of the feelings, emotions
+and mentality directly associated with it, and you cannot get beyond
+that; it isn't in human nature to do so. The Self is limited by this
+corporeal phenomenon and doubtless it perishes when the body perishes."
+But here again the conclusion, though specious at first, soon appears to
+be quite inadequate. For though it is possibly true that a man, if left
+alone in a Robinson Crusoe life on a desert island, might ultimately
+subside into a mere gratification of his corporeal needs and of those
+mental needs which were directly concerned with the body, yet we know
+that such a case would by no means be representative. On the contrary we
+know that vast numbers of people spend their lives in considering other
+people, and often so far as to sacrifice their own bodily and mental
+comfort and well-being. The mother spends her life thinking almost
+day and night about her babe and the other children--spending all her
+thoughts and efforts on them. You may call her selfish if you will, but
+her selfishness clearly extends beyond her personal body and mind, and
+extends to the personalities of her children around her; her "body"--if
+you insist on your definition--must be held to include the bodies of all
+her children. And again, the husband who is toiling for the support of
+the family, he is thinking and working and toiling and suffering for a
+'self' which includes his wife and children. Do you mean that the whole
+family is his "body"? Or a man belongs to some society, to a church or
+to a social league of some kind, and his activities are largely ruled by
+the interests of this larger group. Or he sacrifices his life--as many
+have been doing of late--with extraordinary bravery and heroism for the
+sake of the nation to which he belongs. Must we say then that the whole
+nation is really a part of the man's body? Or again, he gives his life
+and goes to the stake for his religion. Whether his religion is right or
+wrong does not matter, the point is that there is that in him which can
+carry him far beyond his local self and the ordinary instincts of his
+physical organism, to dedicate his life and powers to a something of far
+wider circumference and scope.
+
+Thus in the FIRST of these two examples of a search for the nature of
+the Self we are led INWARDS from point to point, into interior and ever
+subtler regions of our being, and still in the end are baffled; while
+in the SECOND we are carried outwards into an ever wider and wider
+circumference in our quest of the Ego, and still feel that we have
+failed to reach its ultimate nature. We are driven in fact by these two
+arguments to the conclusion that that which we are seeking is indeed
+something very vast--something far extending around, yet also buried
+deep in the hidden recesses of our minds. How far, how deep, we do not
+know. We can only say that as far as the indications point the true self
+is profounder and more far-reaching than anything we have yet fathomed.
+
+In the ordinary commonplace life we shrink to ordinary commonplace
+selves, but it is one of the blessings of great experiences, even though
+they are tragic or painful, that they throw us out into that enormously
+greater self to which we belong. Sometimes, in moments of inspiration,
+of intense enthusiasm, of revelation, such as a man feels in the midst
+of a battle, in moments of love and dedication to another person, and
+in moments of religious ecstasy, an immense world is opened up to the
+astonished gaze of the inner man, who sees disclosed a self stretched
+far beyond anything he had ever imagined. We have all had experiences
+more or less of that kind. I have known quite a few people, and most of
+you have known some, who at some time, even if only once in their lives,
+have experienced such an extraordinary lifting of the veil, an opening
+out of the back of their minds as it were, and have had such a vision of
+the world, that they have never afterwards forgotten it. They have seen
+into the heart of creation, and have perceived their union with the rest
+of mankind. They have had glimpses of a strange immortality belonging to
+them, a glimpse of their belonging to a far greater being than they have
+ever imagined. Just once--and a man has never forgotten it, and even if
+it has not recurred it has colored all the rest of his life.
+
+Now, this subject has been thought about--since the beginning of the
+world, I was going to say--but it has been thought about since the
+beginnings of history. Some three thousand years ago certain groups
+of--I hardly like to call them philosophers--but, let us say, people who
+were meditating and thinking upon these problems, were in the habit of
+locating themselves in the forests of Northern India; and schools arose
+there. In the case of each school some teacher went into the woods and
+collected groups of disciples around him, who lived there in his company
+and listened to his words. Such schools were formed in very considerable
+numbers, and the doctrines of these teachers were gathered together,
+generally by their disciples, in notes, which notes were brought
+together into little pamphlets or tracts, forming the books which
+are called the 'Upanishads' of the Indian sages. They contain some
+extraordinary words of wisdom, some of which I want to bring before
+you. The conclusions arrived at were not so much what we should call
+philosophy in the modern sense. They were not so much the result of the
+analysis of the mind and the following out of concatenations of strict
+argument; but they were flashes of intuition and experience, and all
+through the 'Upanishads' you find these extraordinary flashes embedded
+in the midst of a great deal of what we should call a rather rubbishy
+kind of argument, and a good deal of merely conventional Brahmanical
+talk of those days. But the people who wrote and spoke thus had an
+intuition into the heart of things which I make bold to say very few
+people in modern life have. These 'Upanisihads,' however various their
+subject, practically agree on one point--in the definition of the
+"self." They agree in saying: that the self of each man is continuous
+with and in a sense identical with the Self of the universe. Now that
+seems an extraordinary conclusion, and one which almost staggers the
+modern mind to conceive of. But that is the conclusion, that is the
+thread which runs all through the 'Upanishads'--the identity of the self
+of each individual with the self of every other individual throughout
+mankind, and even with the selves of the animals and other creatures.
+
+Those who have read the Khandogya Upanishad remember how in that
+treatise the father instructs his son Svetakeitu on this very
+subject--pointing him out in succession the objects of Nature and
+on each occasion exhorting him to realize his identity with the
+very essence of the object--"Tat twam asi, THAT thou art." He calls
+Svetaketu's attention to a tree. What is the ESSENCE of the tree?
+When they have rejected the external characteristics--the leaves, the
+branches, etc.--and agreed that the SAP is the essence, then the father
+says, "TAT TWAM ASI--THAT thou art." He gives his son a crystal of salt,
+and asks him what is the essence of that. The son is puzzled. Clearly
+neither the form nor the transparent quality are essential. The father
+says, "Put the crystal in water." Then when it is melted he says, "Where
+is the crystal?" The son replies, "I do not know." "Dip your finger in
+the bowl," says the father, "and taste." Then Svetaketu dips here and
+there, and everywhere there is a salt flavor. They agree that THAT is
+the essence of salt; and the father says again, "TAt twam asi." I am of
+course neither defending nor criticizing the scientific attitude here
+adopted. I am only pointing out that this psychological identification
+of the observer with the object observed runs through the Upanishads,
+and is I think worthy of the deepest consideration.
+
+In the 'Bhagavat Gita,' which is a later book, the author speaks of
+"him whose soul is purified, whose self is the Self of all creatures." A
+phrase like that challenges opposition. It is so bold, so sweeping, and
+so immense, that we hesitate to give our adhesion to what it implies.
+But what does it mean--"whose soul is purified"? I believe that it means
+this, that with most of us our souls are anything but clean or
+purified, they are by no means transparent, so that all the time we are
+continually deceiving ourselves and making clouds between us and others.
+We are all the time grasping things from other people, and, if not in
+words, are mentally boasting ourselves against others, trying to think
+of our own superiority to the rest of the people around us. Sometimes we
+try to run our neighbors down a little, just to show that they are not
+quite equal to our level. We try to snatch from others some things which
+belong to them, or take credit to ourselves for things to which we are
+not fairly entitled. But all the time we are acting so it is perfectly
+obvious that we are weaving veils between ourselves and others. You
+cannot have dealings with another person in a purely truthful way, and
+be continually trying to cheat that person out of money, or out of his
+good name and reputation. If you are doing that, however much in the
+background you may be doing it, you are not looking the person fairly
+in the face--there is a cloud between you all the time. So long as your
+soul is not purified from all these really absurd and ridiculous little
+desires and superiorities and self-satisfactions, which make up so much
+of our lives, just so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see
+the truth. But when it happens to a person, as it does happen in times
+of great and deep and bitter experience; when it happens that all these
+trumpery little objects of life are swept away; then occasionally, with
+astonishment, the soul sees that. It is also the soul of the others
+around. Even if it does not become aware of an absolute identity, it
+perceives that there is a deep relationship and communion between itself
+and others, and it comes to understand how it may really be true that
+to him whose soul is purified the self is literally the Self of all
+creatures.
+
+Ordinary men and those who go on more intellectual and less intuitional
+lines will say that these ideas are really contrary to human nature and
+to nature generally. Yet I think that those people who say this in the
+name of Science are extremely unscientific, because a very superficial
+glance at nature reveals that the very same thing is taking place
+throughout nature. Consider the madrepores, corallines, or sponges. You
+find, for instance, that constantly the little self of the coralline
+or sponge is functioning at the end of a stem and casting forth its
+tentacles into the water to gain food and to breathe the air out of
+the water. That little animalcule there, which is living in that way,
+imagines no doubt that it is working all for itself, and yet it is
+united down the stem at whose extremity it stands, with the life of the
+whole madrepore or sponge to which it belongs. There is the common
+life of the whole and the individual life of each, and while the little
+creature at the end of the stem is thinking (if it is conscious at all)
+that its whole energies are absorbed in its own maintenance, it really
+is feeding the common life through the stem to which it belongs, and in
+its turn it is being fed by that common life.
+
+You have only to look at an ordinary tree to see the same thing going
+on. Each little leaf on a tree may very naturally have sufficient
+consciousness to believe that it is an entirely separate being
+maintaining itself in the sunlight and the air, withering away and dying
+when the winter comes on--and there is an end of it. It probably does
+not realize that all the time it is being supported by the sap which
+flows from the trunk of the tree, and that in its turn it is feeding
+the tree, too--that its self is the self of the whole tree. If the leaf
+could really understand itself, it would see that its self was deeply,
+intimately connected, practically one with the life of the whole tree.
+Therefore, I say that this Indian view is not unscientific. On the
+contrary, I am sure that it is thoroughly scientific.
+
+Let us take another passage, out of the 'Svetasvatara Upanishad,' which,
+speaking of the self says: "He is the one God, hidden in all creatures,
+all pervading, the self within all, watching over all works, shadowing
+all creatures, the witness, the perceiver, the only one free from
+qualities."
+
+And now we can return to the point where we left the argument at the
+beginning of this discourse. We said, you remember, that the Self is
+certainly no mere bundle of qualities--that the very nature of the mind
+forbids us thinking that. For however fine and subtle any quality or
+group of qualities may be, we are irresistibly compelled by the
+nature of the mind itself to look for the Self, not in any quality or
+qualities, but in the being that PERCEIVES those qualities. The passage
+I have just quoted says that being is "The one God, hidden in all
+creatures, all pervading, the self within all... the witness, the
+perceiver, the only one free from qualities." And the more you
+think about it the clearer I think you will see that this passage is
+correct--that there can be only ONE witness, ONE perceiver, and that
+is the one God hidden in all creatures, "Sarva Sakshi," the Universal
+Witness.
+
+Have you ever had that curious feeling, not uncommon, especially in
+moments of vivid experience and emotion, that there was at the back of
+your mind a witness, watching everything that was going on, yet too deep
+for your ordinary thought to grasp? Has it not occurred to you--in a
+moment say of great danger when the mind was agitated to the last degree
+by fears and anxieties--suddenly to become perfectly calm and collected,
+to realize that NOTHING can harm you, that you are identified with
+some great and universal being lifted far over this mortal world and
+unaffected by its storms? Is it not obvious that the real Self MUST be
+something of this nature, a being perceiving all, but itself remaining
+unperceived? For indeed if it were perceived it would fall under the
+head of some definable quality, and so becoming the object of thought
+would cease to be the subject, would cease to be the Self.
+
+The witness is and must be "free from qualities." For since it is
+capable of perceiving ALL qualities it must obviously not be itself
+imprisoned or tied in any quality--it must either be entirely without
+quality, or if it have the potentiality of quality in it, it must have
+the potentiality of EVERY quality; but in either case it cannot be in
+bondage to any quality, and in either case it would appear that there
+can be only ONE such ultimate Witness in the universe. For if there were
+two or more such Witnesses, then we should be compelled to suppose them
+distinguished from one another by something, and that something could
+only be a difference of qualities, which would be contrary to our
+conclusion that such a Witness cannot be in bondage to any quality.
+
+There is then I take it--as the text in question says--only one Witness,
+one Self, throughout the universe. It is hidden in all living things,
+men and animals and plants; it pervades all creation. In every thing
+that has consciousness it is the Self; it watches over all operations,
+it overshadows all creatures, it moves in the depths of our hearts, the
+perceiver, the only being that is cognizant of all and yet free from
+all.
+
+Once you really appropriate this truth, and assimilate it in the depths
+of your mind, a vast change (you can easily imagine) will take place
+within you. The whole world will be transformed, and every thought
+and act of which you are capable will take on a different color and
+complexion. Indeed the revolution will be so vast that it would be quite
+impossible for me within the limits of this discourse to describe it.
+I will, however, occupy the rest of my time in dealing with some points
+and conclusions, and some mental changes which will flow perfectly
+naturally from this axiomatic change taking place at the very root of
+life.
+
+"Free from qualities." We generally pride ourselves a little on our
+qualities. Some of us think a great deal of our good qualities, and some
+of us are rather ashamed of our bad ones! I would say: "Do not trouble
+very much about all that. What good qualities you have--well you may be
+quite sure they do not really amount to much; and what bad qualities,
+you may be sure they are not very important! Do not make too much fuss
+about either. Do you see? The thing is that you, you yourself, are not
+ANY of your qualities--you are the being that perceives them. The thing
+to see to is that they should not confuse you, bamboozle you, and hide
+you from the knowledge of yourself--that they should not be erected into
+a screen, to hide you from others, or the others from you. If you cease
+from running after qualities, then after a little time your soul will
+become purified, and you will KNOW that your self is the Self of all
+creatures; and when you can feel that you will know that the other
+things do not much matter.
+
+Sometimes people are so awfully good that their very goodness hides them
+from other people. They really cannot be on a level with others,
+and they feel that the others are far below them. Consequently their
+'selves' are blinded or hidden by their 'goodness.' It is a sad end to
+come to! And sometimes it happens that very 'bad' people--just because
+they are so bad--do not erect any screens or veils between themselves
+and others. Indeed they are only too glad if others will recognize them,
+or if they may be allowed to recognize others. And so, after all, they
+come nearer the truth than the very good people.
+
+"The Self is free from qualities." That thing which is so deep, which
+belongs to all, it either--as I have already said--has ALL qualities,
+or it has none. You, to whom I am speaking now, your qualities, good and
+bad, are all mine. I am perfectly willing to accept them. They are all
+right enough and in place--if one can only find the places for them. But
+I know that in most cases they have got so confused and mixed up that
+they cause great conflict and pain in the souls that harbor them. If
+you attain to knowing yourself to be other than and separate from the
+qualities, then you will pass below and beyond them all. You will be
+able to accept ALL your qualities and harmonize them, and your soul
+will be at peace. You will be free from the domination of qualities then
+because you will know that among all the multitudes of them there are
+none of any importance!
+
+If you should happen some day to reach that state of mind in connection
+with which this revelation comes, then you will find the experience
+a most extraordinary one. You will become conscious that there is no
+barrier in your path; that the way is open in all directions; that all
+men and women belong to you, are part of you. You will feel that there
+is a great open immense world around, which you had never suspected
+before, which belongs to you, and the riches of which are all yours,
+waiting for you. It may, of course, take centuries and thousands of
+years to realize this thoroughly, but there it is. You are just at the
+threshold, peeping in at the door. What did Shakespeare say? "To thine
+own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou can'st
+not then be false to any man." What a profound bit of philosophy in
+three lines! I doubt if anywhere the basis of all human life has been
+expressed more perfectly and tersely.
+
+One of the Upanishads (the Maitrayana-Brahmana) says: "The
+happiness belonging to a mind, which through deep inwardness (1) (or
+understanding) has been washed clean and has entered into the Self, is a
+thing beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be perceived by
+an inner faculty." Observe the conviction, the intensity with which this
+joy, this happiness is described, which comes to those whose minds have
+been washed clean (from all the silly trumpery sediment of self-thought)
+and have become transparent, so that the great universal Being residing
+there in the depths can be perceived. What sorrow indeed, what, grief,
+can come to such an one who has seen this vision? It is truly a thing
+beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be PERCEIVED--and
+that by an inner faculty. The external apparatus of thought is of no
+use. Argument is of no use. But experience and direct perception are
+possible; and probably all the experiences of life and of mankind
+through the ages are gradually deepening our powers of perception to
+that point where the vision will at last rise upon the inward eye.
+
+ (1) The word in the Max Muller translation is "meditation." But
+that is, I think, a somewhat misleading word. It suggests to most people
+the turning inward of the THINKING faculty to grope and delve in the
+interior of the mind. This is just what should NOT be done. Meditation
+in the proper sense should mean the inward deepening of FEELING and
+consciousness till the region of the universal self is reached; but
+THOUGHT should not interfere there. That should be turned on outward
+things to mould them into expression of the inner consciousness.
+
+
+Another text, from the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (which I have already
+quoted in the paper on "Rest"), says: "If a man worship the Self only as
+his true state, his work cannot fail, for whatever he desires, that he
+obtains from the Self." Is that not magnificent? If you truly realize
+your identity and union with the great Self who inspires and informs the
+world, then obviously whatever you desire the great Self win desire, and
+the whole world will conspire to bring it to you. "He maketh the winds
+his angels, and the flaming fires his ministers." (I need not say that
+I am not asking you to try and identify yourself with the great Self
+universal IN ORDER to get riches, "opulence," and other things of that
+kind which you desire; because in that quest you will probably not
+succeed. The Great Self is not such a fool as to be taken in in that
+way. It may be true--and it is true--that if ye seek FIRST the Kingdom
+of Heaven all these things shall be added unto you; but you must seek it
+first, not second.)
+
+Here is a passage from Towards Democracy: "As space spreads everywhere,
+and all things move and change within it, but it moves not nor changes,
+
+"So I am the space within the soul, of which the space without is but
+the similitude and mental image;
+
+"Comest thou to inhabit me, thou hast the entrance to all life--death
+shall no longer divide thee from whom thou lovest.
+
+"I am the Sun that shines upon all creatures from within--gazest thou
+upon me, thou shalt be filled with joy eternal."
+
+Yes, this great sun is there, always shining, but most of the time it is
+hidden from us by the clouds of which I have spoken, and we fail to see
+it. We complain of being out in the cold; and in the cold, for the time
+being, no doubt we are; but our return to the warmth and the light has
+now become possible.
+
+
+Thus at last the Ego, the mortal immortal self--disclosed at first in
+darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe--FINDS ITS TRUE
+IDENTITY. For a long period it is baffled in trying to understand what
+it is. It goes through a vast experience. It is tormented by the
+sense of separation and alienation--alienation from other people, and
+persecution by all the great powers and forces of the universe; and it
+is pursued by a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable.
+The hour of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds
+at last ITS OWN TRUE BEING.
+
+
+We are accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty
+tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works
+by a "law of cussedness"--so that, whichever way we want to go, that way
+seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without
+making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from
+ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, which at present looks
+so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing immediately we
+have passed it--once we have found the open secret of identity--then the
+way is indeed open in every direction.
+
+The world in which we live--the world into which we are tumbled as
+children at the first onset of self-consciousness--denies this great
+fact of unity. It is a world in which the principle of separation
+rules. Instead of a common life and union with each other, the contrary
+principle (especially in the later civilizations) has been the one
+recognized--and to such an extent that always there prevails the
+obsession of separation, and the conviction that each person is an
+isolated unit. The whole of our modern society has been founded on this
+delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's
+hand is against the others--that is the ruling principle. You go into
+the Law Courts where justice is, or should be, administered, and you
+find that the principle which denies unity is the one that prevails.
+The criminal (whose actions have really been determined by the society
+around him) is cast out, disacknowledged, and condemned to further
+isolation in a prison cell. 'Property' again is the principle which
+rules and determines our modern civilization--namely that which is
+proper to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as AGAINST the
+others.
+
+In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the shape of
+the sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually (and that
+is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the
+non-acknowledgment of unity. And so it has come about that during all
+this civilization-period the sense of sin has ruled and ranged to such
+an extraordinary degree. Society has been built on a false base, not
+true to fact or life--and has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its
+falseness. Meanwhile at the heart of it all--and within all the frantic
+external strife and warfare--there is all the time this real great life
+brooding. The kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is still within.
+
+The word Democracy indicates something of the kind--the rule of the
+Demos, that is of the common life. The coming of that will transform,
+not only our Markets and our Law Courts and our sense of Property, and
+other institutions, into something really great and glorious instead
+of the dismal masses of rubbish which they at present are; but it will
+transform our sense of Morality.
+
+Our Morality at present consists in the idea of self-goodness--one of
+the most pernicious and disgusting ideas which has ever infested the
+human brain. If any one should follow and assimilate what I have just
+said about the true nature of the Self he will realize that it will
+never again be possible for him to congratulate himself on his own
+goodness or morality or superiority; for the moment he does so he will
+separate himself from the universal life, and proclaim the sin of his
+own separation. I agree that this conclusion is for some people a most
+sad and disheartening one--but it cannot be helped! A man may truly be
+'good' and 'moral' in some real sense; but only on the condition that
+he is not aware of it. He can only BE good when not thinking about the
+matter; to be conscious of one's own goodness is already to have fallen!
+
+We began by thinking of the self as just a little local self; then we
+extended it to the family, the cause, the nation--ever to a larger and
+vaster being. At last there comes a time when we recognize--or see that
+we SHALL have to recognize--an inner Equality between ourselves and all
+others; not of course an external equality--for that would be absurd and
+impossible--but an inner and profound and universal Equality. And so we
+come again to the mystic root-conception of Democracy.
+
+And now it will be said: "But after all this talk you have not defined
+the Self, or given us any intellectual outline of what you mean by the
+word." No--and I do not intend to. If I could, by any sort of copybook
+definition, describe and show the boundaries of myself, I should
+obviously lose all interest in the subject. Nothing more dull could be
+imagined. I may be able to define and describe fairly exhaustively
+this inkpot on the table; but for you or for me to give the limits and
+boundaries of ourselves is, I am glad to say, impossible. That does not,
+however, mean that we cannot FEEL and be CONSCIOUS of ourselves, and of
+our relations to other selves, and to the great Whole. On the contrary
+I think it is clear that the more vividly we feel our organic unity with
+the whole, the less shall we be able to separate off the local self and
+enclose it within any definition. I take it that we can and do become
+ever more vividly conscious of our true Self, but that the mental
+statement of it always does and probably always will lie beyond us.
+All life and all our action and experience consist in the gradual
+manifestation of that which is within us--of our inner being. In that
+sense--and reading its handwriting on the outer world--we come to know
+the soul's true nature more and more intimately; we enter into the mind
+of that great artist who beholds himself in his own creation.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS ***
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
+be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the
+United States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+
+START: FULL LICENSE
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
+person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
+1.E.8.
+
+1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
+Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
+on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+
+  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
+  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
+  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
+  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
+  United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
+  you are located before using this eBook.
+
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
+other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
+Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+provided that:
+
+* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
+  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+  Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
+  works.
+
+* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+  receipt of the work.
+
+* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
+www.gutenberg.org
+
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation's website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without
+widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
+state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: www.gutenberg.org
+
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
diff --git a/1561-0.zip b/1561-0.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1510dd1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1561-0.zip
diff --git a/1561-h.zip b/1561-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e45917e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1561-h.zip
diff --git a/1561-h/1561-h.htm b/1561-h/1561-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a380741
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1561-h/1561-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,10750 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning, by Edward Carpenter</title>
+<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+<style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+    
+body { margin-left: 20%;
+       margin-right: 20%;
+       text-align: justify; }
+
+h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {text-align: center; font-style: normal; font-weight:
+normal; line-height: 1.5; margin-top: .5em; margin-bottom: .5em;}
+
+h1 {font-size: 300%;
+    margin-top: 0.6em;
+    margin-bottom: 0.6em;
+    letter-spacing: 0.12em;
+    word-spacing: 0.2em;
+    text-indent: 0em;}
+h2 {font-size: 150%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;}
+h3 {font-size: 130%; margin-top: 1em;}
+h4 {font-size: 120%;}
+h5 {font-size: 110%;}
+
+.no-break {page-break-before: avoid;} /* for epubs */
+
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always; margin-top: 4em;}
+
+hr {width: 80%; margin-top: 2em; margin-bottom: 2em;}
+
+p {text-indent: 1em;
+   margin-top: 0.25em;
+   margin-bottom: 0.25em; }
+
+p.poem {text-indent: 0%;
+        margin-left: 10%;
+        font-size: 90%;
+        margin-top: 1em;
+        margin-bottom: 1em; }
+
+p.noindent {text-indent: 0% }
+
+p.center  {text-align: center;
+           text-indent: 0em;
+           margin-top: 1em;
+           margin-bottom: 1em; }
+
+p.footnote {font-size: 90%;
+           text-indent: 0%;
+           margin-left: 10%;
+           margin-right: 10%;
+           margin-top: 1em;
+           margin-bottom: 1em; }
+  
+a:link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+a:hover {color:red}
+  
+</style>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pagan &amp; Christian Creeds, by Edward Carpenter</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Pagan &amp; Christian Creeds<br />
+  Their Origin and Meaning</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Edward Carpenter</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: December, 1998 [eBook #1561]<br />
+[Most recently updated: November 26, 2022]</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN &amp; CHRISTIAN CREEDS ***</div>
+
+<h1>Pagan &amp; Christian Creeds:<br />
+Their Origin and Meaning</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">By Edward Carpenter</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p>
+“The different religions being lame attempts to represent under various guises
+this one root-fact of the central universal life, men have at all times clung
+to the religious creeds and rituals and ceremonials as symbolising in some rude
+way the redemption and fulfilment of their own most intimate natures&mdash;and
+this whether consciously understanding the interpretations, or whether (as most
+often) only doing so in an unconscious or quite subconscious way.”
+</p>
+<p>
+The Drama of Love and Death, p. 96.
+</p>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap00"><b>PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING</b></a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">I. INTRODUCTORY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">IX. MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">XI. RITUAL DANCING</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">XII. THE SEX-TABOO</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">XVI. THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">XVII. CONCLUSION</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">APPENDIX</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<hr />
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap00"></a>
+PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS:<br/>
+THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+</h2>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>
+I.<br/>
+INTRODUCTORY
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as the great
+      multitude of books upon it, published in late years, tends to show. Indeed
+      the great difficulty to-day in dealing with the subject, lies in the very
+      mass of the material to hand&mdash;and that not only on account of the
+      labor involved in sorting the material, but because the abundance itself
+      of facts opens up temptation to a student in this department of
+      Anthropology (as happens also in other branches of general Science) to
+      rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts,
+      statistics, and so forth, there are available in any investigation, the
+      easier it is to pick out a considerable number which will fit a given
+      theory. The other facts being neglected or ignored, the views put forward
+      enjoy for a time a great vogue. Then inevitably, and at a later time, new
+      or neglected facts alter the outlook, and a new perspective is
+      established.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is also in these matters of Science (though many scientific men
+      would doubtless deny this) a great deal of “Fashion”. Such has been
+      notoriously the case in Political Economy, Medicine, Geology, and even in
+      such definite studies as Physics and Chemistry. In a comparatively recent
+      science, like that with which we are now concerned, one would naturally
+      expect variations. A hundred and fifty years ago, and since the time of
+      Rousseau, the “Noble Savage” was extremely popular; and he lingers still
+      in the story books of our children. Then the reaction from this extreme
+      view set in, and of late years it has been the popular cue (largely, it
+      must be said, among “armchair” travelers and explorers) to represent the
+      religious rites and customs of primitive folk as a senseless mass of
+      superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of decent feeling and
+      intelligence. Again, when the study of religious origins first began in
+      modern times to be seriously taken up&mdash;say in the earlier part of
+      last century&mdash;there was a great boom in Sungods. Every divinity in
+      the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun&mdash;unless indeed (if
+      feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was a
+      sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the same.
+      C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795), F. Nork in
+      Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard Taylor in England (The
+      Devil’s Pulpit, (1) 1830), were among the first in modern times to put
+      forward this view. A little later the PHALLIC explanation of everything
+      came into fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs and
+      powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art and Mythology, 1818) and
+      Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868) popularized this
+      idea in England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again there was a period of
+      what is sometimes called Euhemerism&mdash;the theory that the gods and
+      goddesses had actually once been men and women, historical characters
+      round whom a halo of romance and remoteness had gathered. Later still, a
+      school has arisen which thinks little of sungods, and pays more attention
+      to Earth and Nature spirits, to gnomes and demons and vegetation-sprites,
+      and to the processes of Magic by which these (so it was supposed) could be
+      enlisted in man’s service if friendly, or exorcised if hostile.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and
+containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the right
+lines. But it raised a storm of opposition&mdash;the more so because its
+author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the ministry, of course, and
+was sent to prison twice.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It is easy to see of course that there is some truth in ALL these
+      explanations; but naturally each school for the time being makes the most
+      of its own contention. Mr. J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and Christianity
+      and Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field, (1) relies
+      chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though he does not
+      altogether deny the others; Dr. Frazer, on the other hand&mdash;whose
+      great work, The Golden Bough, is a monumental collection of primitive
+      customs, and will be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students&mdash;is
+      apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun and the
+      stars, but concentrates his attention on the collection of innumerable
+      details (2) of rites, chiefly magical, connected with food and vegetation.
+      Still later writers, like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and E. A. Crowley,
+      being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive peoples, like the
+      Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have confined themselves
+      (necessarily) even more to Magic and Witchcraft.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) If only he did not waste so much time, and so needlessly, in
+slaughtering opponents!
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) To such a degree, indeed, that sometimes the connecting clue
+of the argument seems to be lost.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations has kept itself
+      severely apart&mdash;as of course representing a unique and divine
+      revelation little concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and
+      moreover (in this country at any rate) has managed to persuade the general
+      public of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few people, even
+      nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just the same root as Paganism,
+      and that it shares by far the most part of its doctrines and rites with
+      the latter. Till quite lately it was thought (in Britain) that only
+      secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in sungods; and
+      while it was true that learned professors might point to a belief in Magic
+      as one of the first sources of Religion, it was easy in reply to say that
+      this obviously had nothing to do with Christianity! The Secularists, too,
+      rather spoilt their case by assuming, in their wrath against the Church,
+      that all priests since the beginning of the world have been frauds and
+      charlatans, and that all the rites of religion were merely devil’s devices
+      invented by them for the purpose of preying upon the superstitions of the
+      ignorant, to their own enrichment. They (the Secularists) overleaped
+      themselves by grossly exaggerating a thing that no doubt is partially
+      true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex, and yields many
+      aspects for consideration. It is only, I think, by keeping a broad course
+      and admitting contributions to the truth from various sides, that valuable
+      results can be obtained. It is absurd to suppose that in this or any other
+      science neat systems can be found which will cover all the facts. Nature
+      and History do not deal in such things, or supply them for a sop to Man’s
+      vanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is clear that there have been three main lines, so far, along which
+      human speculation and study have run. One connecting religious rites and
+      observations with the movements of the Sun and the planets in the sky, and
+      leading to the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods
+      dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance; the second
+      connecting religion with the changes of the season, on the Earth and with
+      such practical things as the growth of vegetation and food, and leading to
+      or mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical methods of
+      influencing such spirits; and the third connecting religion with man’s own
+      body and the tremendous force of sex residing in it&mdash;emblem of
+      undying life and all fertility and power. It is clear also&mdash;and all
+      investigation confirms it&mdash;that the second-mentioned phase of
+      religion arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned&mdash;that is, that
+      men naturally thought about the very practical questions of food and
+      vegetation, and the magical or other methods of encouraging the same,
+      before they worried themselves about the heavenly bodies and the laws of
+      THEIR movements, or about the sinister or favorable influences the stars
+      might exert. And again it is extremely probable that the third-mentioned
+      aspect&mdash;that which connected religion with the procreative desires
+      and phenomena of human physiology&mdash;really came FIRST. These desires
+      and physiological phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive mind
+      long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky had been at all
+      definitely observed or considered. Thus we find it probable that, in order
+      to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of
+      religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given in
+      which they have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the Phallic
+      cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of
+      earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief in
+      definite God-figures residing in heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the base of the whole process by which divinities and demons were
+      created, and rites for their propitiation and placation established, lay
+      Fear&mdash;fear stimulating the imagination to fantastic activity. Primus
+      in orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
+      stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness.
+      Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human
+      mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature
+      was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure
+      or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were correspondingly no figures
+      or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that self. So it was
+      that the imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness, and from
+      that imaginative power was unrolled the whole panorama of the gods and
+      rites and creeds of Religion down the centuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immense force and domination of Fear in the first self-conscious
+      stages of the human mind is a thing which can hardly be exaggerated, and
+      which is even difficult for some of us moderns to realize. But naturally
+      as soon as Man began to think about himself&mdash;a frail phantom and waif
+      in the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature and mode of operation he
+      was entirely ignorant&mdash;he was BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon
+      him on all sides. Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the
+      chief obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native races is
+      sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the recognized word for a
+      state of mind (“obsession of death”) which will often cause a savage to
+      perish from a mere scratch hardly to be called a wound. The natural
+      defence against this state of mind was the creation of an enormous number
+      of taboos&mdash;such as we find among all races and on every conceivable
+      subject&mdash;and these taboos constituted practically a great body of
+      warnings which regulated the lives and thoughts of the community, and
+      ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some degree simplified,
+      hardened down into very stringent Customs and Laws. Such taboos naturally
+      in the beginning tended to include the avoidance not only of acts which
+      might reasonably be considered dangerous, like touching a corpse, but also
+      things much more remote and fanciful in their relation to danger, like
+      merely looking at a mother-in-law, or passing a lightning-struck tree; and
+      (what is especially to be noticed) they tended to include acts which
+      offered any special PLEASURE or temptation&mdash;like sex or marriage or
+      the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos surrounded these things too, and the
+      psychological connection is easy to divine: but I shall deal with this
+      general subject later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations made life
+      anything but easy to early peoples; but, preposterous and unreasonable as
+      some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of compelling the
+      growth of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy motive, but in
+      the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely animal passions, and
+      introduced order and restraint among them. Simultaneously it became
+      itself, through the gradual increase of knowledge and observation,
+      transmuted and etherealized into something more like wonder and awe and
+      (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence. Anyhow we seem to
+      perceive that from the early beginnings (in the Stone Age) of
+      self-consciousness in Man there has been a gradual development&mdash;from
+      crass superstition, senseless and accidental, to rudimentary observation,
+      and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism and personification of
+      nature-powers in more or less human form, as earth-divinities or sky-gods
+      or embodiments of the tribe; and to placation of these powers by rites
+      like Sacrifice and the Eucharist, which in their turn became the
+      foundation of Morality. Graphic representations made for the encouragement
+      of fertility&mdash;as on the walls of Bushmen’s rock-dwellings or the
+      ceilings of the caverns of Altamira&mdash;became the nurse of pictorial
+      Art; observations of plants or of the weather or the stars, carried on by
+      tribal medicine-men for purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied some
+      of the material of Science; and humanity emerged by faltering and
+      hesitating steps on the borderland of those finer perceptions and
+      reasonings which are supposed to be characteristic of Civilization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies has in its
+      main outlines been the same all over the world, as the reader will
+      presently see&mdash;and this whether in connection with the numerous
+      creeds of Paganism or the supposedly unique case of Christianity; and now
+      the continuity and close intermixture of these great streams can no longer
+      be denied&mdash;nor IS it indeed denied by those who have really studied
+      the subject. It is seen that religious evolution through the ages has been
+      practically One thing&mdash;that there has been in fact a World-religion,
+      though with various phases and branches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so in the present day a new problem arises, namely how to account for
+      the appearance of this great Phenomenon, with its orderly phases of
+      evolution, and its own spontaneous (1) growths in all corners of the globe&mdash;this
+      phenomenon which has had such a strange sway over the hearts of men, which
+      has attracted them with so weird a charm, which has drawn out their
+      devotion, love and tenderness, which has consoled them in sorrow and
+      affliction, and yet which has stained their history with such horrible
+      sacrifices and persecutions and cruelties. What has been the instigating
+      cause of it?
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For the question of spontaneity see chap. x and elsewhere.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The answer which I propose to this question, and which is developed to
+      some extent in the following chapters, is a psychological one. It is that
+      the phenomenon proceeds from, and is a necessary accompaniment of, the
+      growth of human Consciousness itself&mdash;its growth, namely, through the
+      three great stages of its unfoldment. These stages are (1) that of the
+      simple or animal consciousness, (2) that of SELF-consciousness, and (3)
+      that of a third stage of consciousness which has not as yet been
+      effectively named, but whose indications and precursive signs we here and
+      there perceive in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of the early
+      religions, and in the poetry and art and literature generally of the later
+      civilizations. Though I do not expect or wish to catch Nature and History
+      in the careful net of a phrase, yet I think that in the sequence from the
+      above-mentioned first stage to the second, and then again in the sequence
+      from the second to the third, there will be found a helpful explanation of
+      the rites and aspirations of human religion. It is this idea, illustrated
+      by details of ceremonial and so forth, which forms the main thesis of the
+      present book. In this sequence of growth, Christianity enters as an
+      episode, but no more than an episode. It does not amount to a disruption
+      or dislocation of evolution. If it did, or if it stood as an unique or
+      unclassifiable phenomenon (as some of its votaries contend), this would
+      seem to be a misfortune&mdash;as it would obviously rob us of at any rate
+      one promise of progress in the future. And the promise of something better
+      than Paganism and better than Christianity is very precious. It is surely
+      time that it should be fulfilled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tracing, therefore, of the part that human self-consciousness has
+      played, psychologically, in the evolution of religion, runs like a thread
+      through the following chapters, and seeks illustration in a variety of
+      details. The idea has been repeated under different aspects; sometimes,
+      possibly, it has been repeated too often; but different aspects in such a
+      case do help, as in a stereoscope, to give solidity to the thing seen.
+      Though the worship of Sun-gods and divine figures in the sky came
+      comparatively late in religious evolution, 1 have put this subject early
+      in the book (chapters ii and iii), partly because (as I have already
+      explained) it was the phase first studied in modern times, and therefore
+      is the one most familiar to present-day readers, and partly because its
+      astronomical data give great definiteness and “proveability” to it, in
+      rebuttal to the common accusation that the whole study of religious
+      origins is too vague and uncertain to have much value. Going backwards in
+      Time, the two next chapters (iv and v) deal with Totem-sacraments and
+      Magic, perhaps the earliest forms of religion. And these four lead on (in
+      chapters vi to xi) to the consideration of rites and creeds common to
+      Paganism and Christianity. XII and xiii deal especially with the evolution
+      of Christianity itself; xiv and xv explain the inner Meaning of the whole
+      process from the beginning; and xvi and xvii look to the Future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The appendix on the doctrines of the Upanishads may, I hope, serve to give
+      an idea, intimate even though inadequate, of the third Stage&mdash;that
+      which follows on the stage of self-consciousness; and to portray the
+      mental attitudes which are characteristic of that stage. Here in this
+      third stage, it would seem, one comes upon the real FACTS of the inner
+      life&mdash;in contradistinction to the fancies and figments of the second
+      stage; and so one reaches the final point of conjunction between Science
+      and Religion.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>
+II.<br/>
+SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      To the ordinary public&mdash;notwithstanding the immense amount of work
+      which has of late been done on this subject&mdash;the connection between
+      Paganism and Christianity still seems rather remote. Indeed the common
+      notion is that Christianity was really a miraculous interposition into and
+      dislocation of the old order of the world; and that the pagan gods (as in
+      Milton’s Hymn on the Nativity) fled away in dismay before the sign of the
+      Cross, and at the sound of the name of Jesus. Doubtless this was a view
+      much encouraged by the early Church itself&mdash;if only to enhance its
+      own authority and importance; yet, as is well known to every student, it
+      is quite misleading and contrary to fact. The main Christian doctrines and
+      festivals, besides a great mass of affiliated legend and ceremonial, are
+      really quite directly derived from, and related to, preceding Nature
+      worships; and it has only been by a good deal of deliberate mystification
+      and falsification that this derivation has been kept out of sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In these Nature-worships there may be discerned three fairly independent
+      streams of religious or quasi-religious enthusiasm: (1) that connected
+      with the phenomena of the heavens, the movements of the Sun, planets and
+      stars, and the awe and wonderment they excited; (2) that connected with
+      the seasons and the very important matter of the growth of vegetation and
+      food on the Earth; and (3) that connected with the mysteries of Sex and
+      reproduction. It is obvious that these three streams would mingle and
+      interfuse with each other a good deal; but as far as they were separable
+      the first would tend to create Solar heroes and Sun-myths; the second
+      Vegetation-gods and personifications of Nature and the earth-life; while
+      the third would throw its glamour over the other two and contribute to the
+      projection of deities or demons worshipped with all sorts of sexual and
+      phallic rites. All three systems of course have their special rites and
+      times and ceremonies; but, as, I say, the rites and ceremonies of one
+      system would rarely be found pure and unmixed with those belonging to the
+      two others. The whole subject is a very large one; but for reasons given
+      in the Introduction I shall in this and the following chapter&mdash;while
+      not ignoring phases (2) and (3)&mdash;lay most stress on phase (1) of the
+      question before us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the time of the life or recorded appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, and
+      for some centuries before, the Mediterranean and neighboring world had
+      been the scene of a vast number of pagan creeds and rituals. There were
+      Temples without end dedicated to gods like Apollo or Dionysus among the
+      Greeks, Hercules among the Romans, Mithra among the Persians, Adonis and
+      Attis in Syria and Phrygia, Osiris and Isis and Horus in Egypt, Baal and
+      Astarte among the Babylonians and Carthaginians, and so forth. Societies,
+      large or small, united believers and the devout in the service or
+      ceremonials connected with their respective deities, and in the creeds
+      which they confessed concerning these deities. And an extraordinarily
+      interesting fact, for us, is that notwithstanding great geographical
+      distances and racial differences between the adherents of these various
+      cults, as well as differences in the details of their services, the
+      general outlines of their creeds and ceremonials were&mdash;if not
+      identical&mdash;so markedly similar as we find them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot of course go at length into these different cults, but I may say
+      roughly that of all or nearly all the deities above-mentioned it was said
+      and believed that:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) They were born on or very near our Christmas Day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) They were born of a Virgin-Mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (3) And in a Cave or Underground Chamber.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (4) They led a life of toil for Mankind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (5) And were called by the names of Light-bringer, Healer, Mediator,
+      Savior, Deliverer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (6) They were however vanquished by the Powers of Darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (7) And descended into Hell or the Underworld.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (8) They rose again from the dead, and became the pioneers of mankind to
+      the Heavenly world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (9) They founded Communions of Saints, and Churches into which disciples
+      were received by Baptism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (10) And they were commemorated by Eucharistic meals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me give a few brief examples.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. (1) He was born of a
+      Virgin. (2) He traveled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator of men.
+      He slew the Bull (symbol of the gross Earth which the sunlight
+      fructifies). His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring
+      equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples (the
+      twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose again;
+      and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings. He was
+      called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and
+      sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers. This
+      legend is apparently partly astronomical and partly vegetational; and the
+      same may be said of the following about Osiris.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The birthfeast of Mithra was held in Rome on the 8th day
+before the Kalends of January, being also the day of the Circassian
+games, which were sacred to the Sun. (See F. Nork, Der Mystagog,
+Leipzig.)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) This at any rate was reported by his later disciples (see
+Robertson’s Pagan Christs, p. 338).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Osiris was born (Plutarch tells us) on the 361st day of the year, say the
+      27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great traveler. As
+      King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and “tamed them by music and
+      gentleness, not by force of arms”; (1) he was the discoverer of corn and
+      wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness, and slain and
+      dismembered. “This happened,” says Plutarch, “on the 17th of the month
+      Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion” (the sign of the Zodiac
+      which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed in a box, but
+      afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in the cults of
+      Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult of Osiris, an image
+      placed in a coffin was brought out before the worshipers and saluted with
+      glad cries of “Osiris is risen.” (1) “His sufferings, his death and his
+      resurrection were enacted year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos.”
+      (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Plutarch on Isis and Osiris.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Ancient Art and Ritual, by Jane E. Harrison, chap. i.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The two following legends have more distinctly the character of Vegetation
+      myths.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Adonis or Tammuz, the Syrian god of vegetation, was a very beautiful
+      youth, born of a Virgin (Nature), and so beautiful that Venus and
+      Proserpine (the goddesses of the Upper and Underworlds) both fell in love
+      with him. To reconcile their claims it was agreed that he should spend
+      half the year (summer) in the upper world, and the winter half with
+      Proserpine below. He was killed by a boar (Typhon) in the autumn. And
+      every year the maidens “wept for Adonis” (see Ezekiel viii. 14). In the
+      spring a festival of his resurrection was held&mdash;the women set out to
+      seek him, and having found the supposed corpse placed it (a wooden image)
+      in a coffin or hollow tree, and performed wild rites and lamentations,
+      followed by even wilder rejoicings over his supposed resurrection. At
+      Aphaca in the North of Syria, and halfway between Byblus and Baalbec,
+      there was a famous grove and temple of Astarte, near which was a wild
+      romantic gorge full of trees, the birthplace of a certain river Adonis&mdash;the
+      water rushing from a Cavern, under lofty cliffs. Here (it was said) every
+      year the youth Adonis was again wounded to death, and the river ran red
+      with his blood, (1) while the scarlet anemone bloomed among the cedars and
+      walnuts.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) A discoloration caused by red earth washed by rain from the
+mountains, and which has been observed by modern travelers. For the
+whole story of Adonis and of Attis see Frazer’s Golden Bough, part iv.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The story of Attis is very similar. He was a fair young shepherd or
+      herdsman of Phrygia, beloved by Cybele (or Demeter), the Mother of the
+      gods. He was born of a Virgin&mdash;Nana&mdash;who conceived by putting a
+      ripe almond or pomegranate in her bosom. He died, either killed by a boar,
+      the symbol of winter, like Adonis, or self-castrated (like his own
+      priests); and he bled to death at the foot of a pine tree (the pine and
+      pine-cone being symbols of fertility). The sacrifice of his blood renewed
+      the fertility of the earth, and in the ritual celebration of his death and
+      resurrection his image was fastened to the trunk of a pine-tree (compare
+      the Crucifixion). But I shall return to this legend presently. The worship
+      of Attis became very widespread and much honored, and was ultimately
+      incorporated with the established religion at Rome somewhere about the
+      commencement of our Era.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The following two legends (dealing with Hercules and with Krishna) have
+      rather more of the character of the solar, and less of the vegetational
+      myth about them. Both heroes were regarded as great benefactors of
+      humanity; but the former more on the material plane, and the latter on the
+      spiritual.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hercules or Heracles was, like other Sun-gods and benefactors of mankind,
+      a great Traveler. He was known in many lands, and everywhere he was
+      invoked as Saviour. He was miraculously conceived from a divine Father;
+      even in the cradle he strangled two serpents sent to destroy him. His many
+      labors for the good of the world were ultimately epitomized into twelve,
+      symbolized by the signs of the Zodiac. He slew the Nemxan Lion and the
+      Hydra (offspring of Typhon) and the Boar. He overcame the Cretan Bull, and
+      cleaned out the Stables of Augeas; he conquered Death and, descending into
+      Hades, brought Cerberus thence and ascended into Heaven. On all sides he
+      was followed by the gratitude and the prayers of mortals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As to Krishna, the Indian god, the points of agreement with the general
+      divine career indicated above are too salient to be overlooked, and too
+      numerous to be fully recorded. He also was born of a Virgin (Devaki) and
+      in a Cave, (1) and his birth announced by a Star. It was sought to destroy
+      him, and for that purpose a massacre of infants was ordered. Everywhere he
+      performed miracles, raising the dead, healing lepers, and the deaf and the
+      blind, and championing the poor and oppressed. He had a beloved disciple,
+      Arjuna, (cf. John) before whom he was transfigured. (2) His death is
+      differently related&mdash;as being shot by an arrow, or crucified on a
+      tree. He descended into hell; and rose again from the dead, ascending into
+      heaven in the sight of many people. He will return at the last day to be
+      the judge of the quick and the dead.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Cox’s Myths of the Aryan Nations, p. 107.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Bhagavat Gita, ch. xi.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Such are some of the legends concerning the pagan and pre-Christian
+      deities&mdash;only briefly sketched now, in order that we may get
+      something like a true perspective of the whole subject; but to most of
+      them, and more in detail, I shall return as the argument proceeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What we chiefly notice so far are two points; on the one hand the general
+      similarity of these stories with that of Jesus Christ; on the other their
+      analogy with the yearly phenomena of Nature as illustrated by the course
+      of the Sun in heaven and the changes of Vegetation on the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) The similarity of these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with
+      Christian traditions was indeed so great that it excited the attention and
+      the undisguised wrath of the early Christian fathers. They felt no doubt
+      about the similarity, but not knowing how to explain it fell back upon the
+      innocent theory that the Devil&mdash;in order to confound the Christians&mdash;had,
+      CENTURIES BEFORE, caused the pagans to adopt certain beliefs and
+      practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil, but also very innocent
+      of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr for instance describes (1)
+      the institution of the Lord’s Supper as narrated in the Gospels, and then
+      goes on to say: “Which the wicked devils have IMITATED in the mysteries of
+      Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of
+      water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who
+      is being initiated you either know or can learn.” Tertullian also says (2)
+      that “the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part
+      of the divine mysteries.”... “He baptizes his worshippers in water and
+      makes them believe that this purifies them from their crimes.”... “Mithra
+      sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation
+      of bread; he offers an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the
+      crown and the sword; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage; he
+      even has his virgins and ascetics.” (3) Cortez, too, it will be remembered
+      complained that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same
+      things which God had taught to Christendom.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) I Apol. c. 66.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) De Praescriptione Hereticorum, c. 40; De Bapt. c. 3; De
+Corona, c. 15.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) For reference to both these examples see J. M. Robertson’s
+Pagan Christs, pp. 321, 322.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Justin Martyr again, in the Dialogue with Trypho says that the Birth in
+      the Stable was the prototype (!) of the birth of Mithra in the Cave of
+      Zoroastrianism; and boasts that Christ was born when the Sun takes its
+      birth in the Augean Stable, (1) coming as a second Hercules to cleanse a
+      foul world; and St. Augustine says “we hold this (Christmas) day holy, not
+      like the pagans because of the birth of the Sun, but because of the birth
+      of him who made it.” There are plenty of other instances in the Early
+      Fathers of their indignant ascription of these similarities to the work of
+      devils; but we need not dwell over them. There is no need for US to be
+      indignant. On the contrary we can now see that these animadversions of the
+      Christian writers are the evidence of how and to what extent in the spread
+      of Christianity over the world it had become fused with the Pagan cults
+      previously existing.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The Zodiacal sign of Capricornus, iii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It was not till the year A.D. 530 or so&mdash;five centuries after the
+      supposed birth of Christ&mdash;that a Scythian Monk, Dionysius Exiguus, an
+      abbot and astronomer of Rome, was commissioned to fix the day and the year
+      of that birth. A nice problem, considering the historical science of the
+      period! For year he assigned the date which we now adopt, (2) and for day
+      and month he adopted the 25th December&mdash;a date which had been in
+      popular use since about 350 B.C., and the very date, within a day or two,
+      of the supposed birth of the previous Sungods. (3) From that fact alone we
+      may fairly conclude that by the year 530 or earlier the existing
+      Nature-worships had become largely fused into Christianity. In fact the
+      dates of the main pagan religious festivals had by that time become so
+      popular that Christianity was OBLIGED to accommodate itself to them. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) As, for instance, the festival of John the Baptist in June
+took the place of the pagan midsummer festival of water and bathing;
+the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that of Diana in the
+same month; and the festival of All Souls early in November, that of the
+world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and their ghosts at the same season.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Encycl. Brit. art. “Chronology.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) “There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
+as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of the rainy
+season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds could have been at
+night in the fields of Bethlehem” (!). Encycl. Brit. art. “Christmas
+Day.” According to Hastings’s Encyclopaedia, art. “Christmas,” “Usener
+says that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th
+January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to
+the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity
+taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D.” It was not till 534
+A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as
+dies non.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      This brings us to the second point mentioned a few pages back&mdash;the
+      analogy between the Christian festivals and the yearly phenomena of Nature
+      in the Sun and the Vegetation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have seen, was reported to
+      have been born on the 25th December (which in the Julian Calendar was
+      reckoned as the day of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the
+      Sun); Plutarch says (Isis and Osiris, c. 12) that Osiris was born on the
+      361st day of the year, when a Voice rang out proclaiming the Lord of All.
+      Horus, he says, was born on the 362nd day. Apollo on the same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why was all this? Why did the Druids at Yule Tide light roaring fires? Why
+      was the cock supposed to crow all Christmas Eve (“The bird of dawning
+      singeth all night long”)? Why was Apollo born with only one hair (the
+      young Sun with only one feeble ray)? Why did Samson (name derived from
+      Shemesh, the sun) lose all his strength when he lost his hair? Why were so
+      many of these gods&mdash;Mithra, Apollo, Krishna, Jesus, and others, born
+      in caves or underground chambers? (1) Why, at the Easter Eve festival of
+      the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is a light brought from the grave and
+      communicated to the candles of thousands who wait outside, and who rush
+      forth rejoicing to carry the new glory over the world? (2) Why indeed?
+      except that older than all history and all written records has been the
+      fear and wonderment of the children of men over the failure of the Sun’s
+      strength in Autumn&mdash;the decay of their God; and the anxiety lest by
+      any means he should not revive or reappear?
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) This same legend of gods (or idols) being born in caves has,
+curiously enough, been reported from Mexico, Guatemala, the Antilles,
+and other places in Central America. See C. F. P. von Martius,
+Etknographie Amerika, etc. (Leipzig, 1867), vol. i, p. 758.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and
+communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human
+victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the
+beginning of another&mdash;the constellation of the Pleiades being in the
+Zenith (Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 4).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Think for a moment of a time far back when there were absolutely NO
+      Almanacs or Calendars, either nicely printed or otherwise, when all that
+      timid mortals could see was that their great source of Light and Warmth
+      was daily failing, daily sinking lower in the sky. As everyone now knows
+      there are about three weeks at the fag end of the year when the days are
+      at their shortest and there is very little change. What was happening?
+      Evidently the god had fallen upon evil times. Typhon, the prince of
+      darkness, had betrayed him; Delilah, the queen of Night, had shorn his
+      hair; the dreadful Boar had wounded him; Hercules was struggling with
+      Death itself; he had fallen under the influence of those malign
+      constellations&mdash;the Serpent and the Scorpion. Would the god grow
+      weaker and weaker, and finally succumb, or would he conquer after all? We
+      can imagine the anxiety with which those early men and women watched for
+      the first indication of a lengthening day; and the universal joy when the
+      Priest (the representative of primitive science) having made some simple
+      observations, announced from the Temple steps that the day WAS lengthening&mdash;that
+      the Sun was really born again to a new and glorious career. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) It was such things as these which doubtless gave the
+Priesthood its power.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Let us look at the elementary science of those days a little closer. How
+      without Almanacs or Calendars could the day, or probable day, of the Sun’s
+      rebirth be fixed? Go out next Christmas Evening, and at midnight you will
+      see the brightest of the fixed stars, Sirius, blazing in the southern sky&mdash;not
+      however due south from you, but somewhat to the left of the Meridian line.
+      Some three thousand years ago (owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes)
+      that star at the winter solstice did not stand at midnight where you now
+      see it, but almost exactly ON the meridian line. The coming of Sirius
+      therefore to the meridian at midnight became the sign and assurance of the
+      Sun having reached the very lowest point of his course, and therefore of
+      having arrived at the moment of his re-birth. Where then was the Sun at
+      that moment? Obviously in the underworld beneath our feet. Whatever views
+      the ancients may have had about the shape of the earth, it was evident to
+      the mass of people that the Sungod, after illuminating the world during
+      the day, plunged down in the West, and remained there during the hours of
+      darkness in some cavern under the earth. Here he rested and after bathing
+      in the great ocean renewed his garments before reappearing in the East
+      next morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in this long night of his greatest winter weakness, when all the world
+      was hoping and praying for the renewal of his strength, it is evident that
+      the new birth would come&mdash;if it came at all&mdash;at midnight. This
+      then was the sacred hour when in the underworld (the Stable or the Cave or
+      whatever it might be called) the child was born who was destined to be the
+      Savior of men. At that moment Sirius stood on the southern meridian (and
+      in more southern lands than ours this would be more nearly overhead); and
+      that star&mdash;there is little doubt&mdash;is the Star in the East
+      mentioned in the Gospels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the right, as the supposed observer looks at Sirius on the midnight of
+      Christmas Eve, stands the magnificent Orion, the mighty hunter. There are
+      three stars in his belt which, as is well known, lie in a straight line
+      pointing to Sirius. They are not so bright as Sirius, but they are
+      sufficiently bright to attract attention. A long tradition gives them the
+      name of the Three Kings. Dupuis (1) says: “Orion a trois belles etoiles
+      vers le milieu, qui sont de seconde grandeur et posees en ligne droite,
+      l’une pres de l’autre, le peuple les appelle les trois rois. On donne aux
+      trois rois Magis les noms de Magalat, Galgalat, Saraim; et Athos, Satos,
+      Paratoras. Les Catholiques les appellent Gaspard, Melchior, et Balthasar.”
+      The last-mentioned group of names comes in the Catholic Calendar in
+      connection with the feast of the Epiphany (6th January); and the name
+      “Trois Rois” is commonly to-day given to these stars by the French and
+      Swiss peasants.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Charles F. Dupuis (Origine de Tous les Cultes, Paris, 1822)
+was one of the earliest modern writers on these subjects.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after Midnight then, on the 25th December, the Beloved Son (or
+      Sun-god) is born. If we go back in thought to the period, some three
+      thousand years ago, when at that moment of the heavenly birth Sirius,
+      coming from the East, did actually stand on the Meridian, we shall come
+      into touch with another curious astronomical coincidence. For at the same
+      moment we shall see the Zodiacal constellation of the Virgin in the act of
+      rising, and becoming visible in the East divided through the middle by the
+      line of the horizon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The constellation Virgo is a Y-shaped group, of which [gr a], the star at
+      the foot, is the well-known Spica, a star of the first magnitude. The
+      other principal stars, [gr g] at the centre, and [gr b] and [gr e] at the
+      extremities, are of the second magnitude. The whole resembles more a cup
+      than the human figure; but when we remember the symbolic meaning of the
+      cup, that seems to be an obvious explanation of the name Virgo, which the
+      constellation has borne since the earliest times. (The three stars [gr b],
+      [gr g] and [gr a], lie very nearly on the Ecliptic, that is, the Sun’s
+      path&mdash;a fact to which we shall return presently.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment then when Sirius, the star from the East, by coming to the
+      Meridian at midnight signalled the Sun’s new birth, the Virgin was seen
+      just rising on the Eastern sky&mdash;the horizon line passing through her
+      centre. And many people think that this astronomical fact is the
+      explanation of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth. I do not
+      think that it is the sole explanation&mdash;for indeed in all or nearly
+      all these cases the acceptance of a myth seems to depend not upon a single
+      argument but upon the convergence of a number of meanings and reasons in
+      the same symbol. But certainly the fact mentioned above is curious, and
+      its importance is accentuated by the following considerations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Temple of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside of the dome, there
+      is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern hemisphere
+      of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation is
+      represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in her
+      hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and
+      explicatory figure&mdash;a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her
+      arms, and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna and Child,
+      except that she is sitting and the child is on her knee. This seems to
+      show that&mdash;whatever other nations may have done in associating Virgo
+      with Demeter, Ceres, Diana (2) etc.&mdash;the Egyptians made no doubt of
+      the constellation’s connection with Isis and Horus. But it is well known
+      as a matter of history that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the
+      early Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form of the
+      worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior, and so passed into the
+      European ceremonial. We have therefore the Virgin Mary connected by linear
+      succession and descent with that remote Zodiacal cluster in the sky! Also
+      it may be mentioned that on the Arabian and Persian globes of Abenezra and
+      Abuazar a Virgin and Child are figured in connection with the same
+      constellation. (3)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Carefully described and mapped by Dupuis, see op. cit.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) For the harvest-festival of Diana, the Virgin, and her
+parallelism with the Virgin Mary, see The Golden Bough, vol. i, 14 and
+ii, 121.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See F. Nork, Der Mystagog (Leipzig, 1838).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      A curious confirmation of the same astronomical connection is afforded by
+      the Roman Catholic Calendar. For if this be consulted it will be found
+      that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin is placed on the 15th
+      August, while the festival of the Birth of the Virgin is dated the 8th
+      September. I have already pointed out that the stars, [gr a], [gr b] and
+      [gr g] of Virgo are almost exactly on the Ecliptic, or Sun’s path through
+      the sky; and a brief reference to the Zodiacal signs and the star-maps
+      will show that the Sun each year enters the sign of Virgo about the
+      first-mentioned date, and leaves it about the second date. At the present
+      day the Zodiacal signs (owing to precession) have shifted some distance
+      from the constellations of the same name. But at the time when the Zodiac
+      was constituted and these names were given, the first date obviously would
+      signalize the actual disappearance of the cluster Virgo in the Sun’s rays&mdash;i.
+      e. the Assumption of the Virgin into the glory of the God&mdash;while the
+      second date would signalize the reappearance of the constellation or the
+      Birth of the Virgin. The Church of Notre Dame at Paris is supposed to be
+      on the original site of a Temple of Isis; and it is said (but I have not
+      been able to verify this myself) that one of the side entrances&mdash;that,
+      namely, on the left in entering from the North (cloister) side&mdash;is
+      figured with the signs of the Zodiac EXCEPT that the sign Virgo is
+      replaced by the figure of the Madonna and Child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So strange is the scripture of the sky! Innumerable legends and customs
+      connect the rebirth of the Sun with a Virgin parturition. Dr. J. G. Frazer
+      in his Part IV of The Golden Bough (1) says: “If we may trust the evidence
+      of an obscure scholiast the Greeks (in the worship of Mithras at Rome)
+      used to celebrate the birth of the luminary by a midnight service, coming
+      out of the inner shrines and crying, ‘The Virgin has brought forth! The
+      light is waxing!’ ([gr ‘H parhenos tetoken, auzei pws].)” In Elie Reclus’
+      little book Primitive Folk (2) it is said of the Esquimaux that “On the
+      longest night of the year two angakout (priests), of whom one is disguised
+      as a WOMAN, go from hut to hut extinguishing all the lights, rekindling
+      them from a vestal flame, and crying out, ‘From the new sun cometh a new
+      light!’”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Book II, ch. vi.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) In the Contemporary Science Series, I. 92.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      All this above-written on the Solar or Astronomical origins of the myths
+      does not of course imply that the Vegetational origins must be denied or
+      ignored. These latter were doubtless the earliest, but there is no reason&mdash;as
+      said in the Introduction (ch. i)&mdash;why the two elements should not to
+      some extent have run side by side, or been fused with each other. In fact
+      it is quite clear that they must have done so; and to separate them out
+      too rigidly, or treat them as antagonistic, is a mistake. The Cave or
+      Underworld in which the New Year is born is not only the place of the
+      Sun’s winter retirement, but also the hidden chamber beneath the Earth to
+      which the dying Vegetation goes, and from which it re-arises in Spring.
+      The amours of Adonis with Venus and Proserpine, the lovely goddesses of
+      the upper and under worlds, or of Attis with Cybele, the blooming
+      Earth-mother, are obvious vegetation-symbols; but they do not exclude the
+      interpretation that Adonis (Adonai) may also figure as a Sun-god. The
+      Zodiacal constellations of Aries and Taurus (to which I shall return
+      presently) rule in heaven just when the Lamb and the Bull are in evidence
+      on the earth; and the yearly sacrifice of those two animals and of the
+      growing Corn for the good of mankind runs parallel with the drama of the
+      sky, as it affects not only the said constellations but also Virgo (the
+      Earth-mother who bears the sheaf of corn in her hand).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall therefore continue (in the next chapter) to point out these
+      astronomical references&mdash;which are full of significance and poetry;
+      but with a recommendation at the same time to the reader not to forget the
+      poetry and significance of the terrestrial interpretations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between Christmas Day and Easter there are several minor festivals or holy
+      days&mdash;such as the 28th December (the Massacre of the Innocents), the
+      6th January (the Epiphany), the 2nd February (Candlemas (1) Day), the
+      period of Lent (German Lenz, the Spring), the Annunciation of the Blessed
+      Virgin, and so forth&mdash;which have been commonly celebrated in the
+      pagan cults before Christianity, and in which elements of Star and Nature
+      worship can be traced; but to dwell on all these would take too long; so
+      let us pass at once to the period of Easter itself.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) This festival of the Purification of the Virgin corresponds
+with the old Roman festival of Juno Februata (i. e. purified) which was
+held in the last month (February) of the Roman year, and which included
+a candle procession of Ceres, searching for Proserpine. (F. Nork, Der
+Mystagog.)
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>
+III.<br/>
+THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      The Vernal Equinox has all over the ancient world, and from the earliest
+      times, been a period of rejoicing and of festivals in honor of the Sungod.
+      It is needless to labor a point which is so well known. Everyone
+      understands and appreciates the joy of finding that the long darkness is
+      giving way, that the Sun is growing in strength, and that the days are
+      winning a victory over the nights. The birds and flowers reappear, and the
+      promise of Spring is in the air. But it may be worth while to give an
+      elementary explanation of the ASTRONOMICAL meaning of this period, because
+      this is not always understood, and yet it is very important in its bearing
+      on the rites and creeds of the early religions. The priests who were, as I
+      have said, the early students and inquirers, had worked out this
+      astronomical side, and in that way were able to fix dates and to frame for
+      the benefit of the populace myths and legends, which were in a certain
+      sense explanations of the order of Nature, and a kind of “popular
+      science.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Equator, as everyone knows, is an imaginary line or circle girdling
+      the Earth half-way between the North and South poles. If you imagine a
+      transparent Earth with a light at its very centre, and also imagine the
+      SHADOW of this equatorial line to be thrown on the vast concave of the
+      Sky, this shadow would in astronomical parlance coincide with the Equator
+      of the Sky&mdash;forming an imaginary circle half-way between the North
+      and South celestial poles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Equator, then, may be pictured as cutting across the sky either by day
+      or by night, and always at the same elevation&mdash;that is, as seen from
+      any one place. But the Ecliptic (the other important great circle of the
+      heavens) can only be thought of as a line traversing the constellations as
+      they are seen at NIGHT. It is in fact the Sun’s path among the fixed
+      stars. For (really owing to the Earth’s motion in its orbit) the Sun
+      appears to move round the heavens once a year&mdash;travelling, always to
+      the left, from constellation to constellation. The exact path of the sun
+      is called the Ecliptic; and the band of sky on either side of the Ecliptic
+      which may be supposed to include the said constellations is called the
+      Zodiac. How then&mdash;it will of course be asked&mdash;seeing that the
+      Sun and the Stars can never be seen together&mdash;were the Priests ABLE
+      to map out the path of the former among the latter? Into that question we
+      need not go. Sufficient to say that they succeeded; and their success&mdash;even
+      with the very primitive instruments they had&mdash;shows that their
+      astronomical knowledge and acuteness of reasoning were of no mean order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to our Vernal Equinox. Let us suppose that the Equator and
+      Ecliptic of the sky, at the Spring season, are represented by two lines
+      Eq. and Ecl. crossing each other at the point P. The Sun, represented by
+      the small circle, is moving slowly and in its annual course along the
+      Ecliptic to the left. When it reaches the point P (the dotted circle) it
+      stands on the Equator of the sky, and then for a day or two, being neither
+      North nor South, it shines on the two terrestrial hemispheres alike, and
+      day and night are equal. BEFORE that time, when the sun is low down in the
+      heavens, night has the advantage, and the days are short; AFTERWARDS, when
+      the Sun has travelled more to the left, the days triumph over the nights.
+      It will be seen then that this point P where the Sun’s path crosses the
+      Equator is a very critical point. It is the astronomical location of the
+      triumph of the Sungod and of the arrival of Spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How was this location defined? Among what stars was the Sun moving at that
+      critical moment? (For of course it was understood, or supposed, that the
+      Sun was deeply influenced by the constellation through which it was, or
+      appeared to be, moving.) It seems then that at the period when these
+      questions were occupying men’s minds&mdash;say about three thousand years
+      ago&mdash;the point where the Ecliptic crossed the Equator was, as a
+      matter of fact, in the region of the constellation Aries or the he-Lamb.
+      The triumph of the Sungod was therefore, and quite naturally, ascribed to
+      the influence of Aries. THE LAMB BECAME THE SYMBOL OF THE RISEN SAVIOR,
+      AND OF HIS PASSAGE FROM THE UNDERWORLD INTO THE HEIGHT OF HEAVEN. At first
+      such an explanation sounds hazardous; but a thousand texts and references
+      confirm it; and it is only by the accumulation of evidence in these cases
+      that the student becomes convinced of a theory’s correctness. It must also
+      be remembered (what I have mentioned before) that these myths and legends
+      were commonly adopted not only for one strict reason but because they
+      represented in a general way the convergence of various symbols and
+      inferences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me enumerate a few points with regard to the Vernal Equinox. In the
+      Bible the festival is called the Passover, and its supposed institution by
+      Moses is related in Exodus, ch. xii. In every house a he-lamb was to be
+      slain, and its blood to be sprinkled on the doorposts of the house. Then
+      the Lord would pass over and not smite that house. The Hebrew word is
+      pasach, to pass. (1) The lamb slain was called the Paschal Lamb. But what
+      was that lamb? Evidently not an earthly lamb&mdash;(though certainly the
+      earthly lambs on the hillsides WERE just then ready to be killed and
+      eaten)&mdash;but the heavenly Lamb, which was slain or sacrificed when the
+      Lord “passed over” the equator and obliterated the constellation Aries.
+      This was the Lamb of God which was slain each year, and “Slain since the
+      foundation of the world.” This period of the Passover (about the 25th
+      March) was to be (2) the beginning of a new year. The sacrifice of the
+      Lamb, and its blood, were to be the promise of redemption. The door-frames
+      of the houses&mdash;symbols of the entrance into a new life&mdash;were to
+      be sprinkled with blood. (3) Later, the imagery of the saving power of the
+      blood of the Lamb became more popular, more highly colored. (See St.
+      Paul’s epistles, and the early Fathers.) And we have the expression
+      “washed in the blood of the Lamb” adopted into the Christian Church.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) It is said that pasach sometimes means not so much to pass
+over, as to hover over and so protect. Possibly both meanings enter in
+here. See Isaiah xxxi. 5.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Exodus xii. i.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) It is even said (see The Golden Bough, vol. iii, 185) that
+the doorways of houses and temples in Peru were at the Spring festival
+daubed with blood of the first-born children&mdash;commuted afterwards to the
+blood of the sacred animal, the Llama. And as to Mexico, Sahagun, the
+great Spanish missionary, tells us that it was a custom of the people
+there to “smear the outside of their houses and doors with blood drawn
+from their own ears and ankles, in order to propitiate the god of
+Harvest” (Kingsborough’s Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 235).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In order fully to understand this extraordinary expression and its origin
+      we must turn for a moment to the worship both of Mithra, the Persian
+      Sungod, and of Attis the Syrian god, as throwing great light on the
+      Christian cult and ceremonies. It must be remembered that in the early
+      centuries of our era the Mithra-cult was spread over the whole Western
+      world. It has left many monuments of itself here in Britain. At Rome the
+      worship was extremely popular, and it may almost be said to have been a
+      matter of chance whether Mithraism should overwhelm Christianity, or
+      whether the younger religion by adopting many of the rites of the older
+      one should establish itself (as it did) in the face of the latter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now we have already mentioned that in the Mithra cult the slaying of a
+      Bull by the Sungod occupies the same sort of place as the slaving of the
+      Lamb in the Christian cult. It took place at the Vernal Equinox and the
+      blood of the Bull acquired in men’s minds a magic virtue. Mithraism was a
+      greatly older religion than Christianity; but its genesis was similar. In
+      fact, owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes, the crossing-place of the
+      Ecliptic and Equator was different at the time of the establishment of
+      Mithra-worship from what it was in the Christian period; and the Sun
+      instead of standing in the He-lamb, or Aries, at the Vernal Equinox stood,
+      about two thousand years earlier (as indicated by the dotted line in the
+      diagram), in this very constellation of the Bull. (1) The bull therefore
+      became the symbol of the triumphant God, and the sacrifice of the bull a
+      holy mystery. (Nor must we overlook here the agricultural appropriateness
+      of the bull as the emblem of Spring-plowings and of service to man.)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) With regard to this point, see an article in the Nineteenth
+Century for September 1900, by E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich
+Observatory on “The Oldest Picture Book” (the Zodiac). Mr. Maunder
+calculates that the Vernal Equinox was in the centre of the Sign of
+the Bull 5,000 years ago. (It would therefore be in the centre of Aries
+2,845 years ago&mdash;allowing 2,155 years for the time occupied in passing
+from one Sign to another.) At the earlier period the Summer solstice was
+in the centre of Leo, the Autumnal equinox in the centre of Scorpio, and
+the Winter solstice in the centre of Aquarius&mdash;corresponding roughly,
+Mr. Maunder points out, to the positions of the four “Royal Stars,”
+Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The sacrifice of the Bull became the image of redemption. In a certain
+      well-known Mithra-sculpture or group, the Sungod is represented as
+      plunging his dagger into a bull, while a scorpion, a serpent, and other
+      animals are sucking the latter’s blood. From one point of view this may be
+      taken as symbolic of the Sun fertilizing the gross Earth by plunging his
+      rays into it and so drawing forth its blood for the sustenance of all
+      creatures; while from another more astronomical aspect it symbolizes the
+      conquest of the Sun over winter in the moment of “passing over” the sign
+      of the Bull, and the depletion of the generative power of the Bull by the
+      Scorpion&mdash;which of course is the autumnal sign of the Zodiac and
+      herald of winter. One such Mithraic group was found at Ostia, where there
+      was a large subterranean Temple “to the invincible god Mithras.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the worship of Attis there were (as I have already indicated) many
+      points of resemblance to the Christian cult. On the 22nd March (the Vernal
+      Equinox) a pinetree was cut in the woods and brought into the Temple of
+      Cybele. It was treated almost as a divinity, was decked with violets, and
+      the effigy of a young man tied to the stem (cf. the Crucifixion). The 24th
+      was called the “Day of Blood”; the High Priest first drew blood from his
+      own arms; and then the others gashed and slashed themselves, and spattered
+      the altar and the sacred tree with blood; while novices made themselves
+      eunuchs “for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” The effigy was afterwards laid
+      in a tomb. But when night fell, says Dr. Frazer, (1) sorrow was turned to
+      joy. A light was brought, and the tomb was found to be empty. The next
+      day, the 25th, was the festival of the Resurrection; and ended in carnival
+      and license (the Hilaria). Further, says Dr. Frazer, these mysteries “seem
+      to have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Part IV of The Golden Bough, by
+J. G. Frazer, p. 229.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      “In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets,
+      descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a wooden
+      grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering
+      with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed to
+      death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents
+      through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the
+      worshiper on every part of his person and garments, till he emerged from
+      the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to receive the
+      homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows&mdash;as one who had been born
+      again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the
+      bull.” (1) And Frazer continuing says: “That the bath of blood derived
+      from slaughter of the bull (tauro-bolium) was believed to regenerate the
+      devotee for eternity is proved by an inscription found at Rome, which
+      records that a certain Sextilius Agesilaus Aedesius, who dedicated an
+      altar to Attis and the mother of the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio
+      criobolio que in aeternum renatus.” (2) “In the procedure of the
+      Taurobolia and Criobolia,” says Mr. J. M. Robertson, (3) “which grew very
+      popular in the Roman world, we have the literal and original meaning of
+      the phrase ‘washed in the blood of the lamb’ (4); the doctrine being that
+      resurrection and eternal life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with
+      the actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram.” (5) For the POPULARITY of
+      the rite we may quote Franz Cumont, who says:&mdash;“Cette douche sacree
+      (taurobolium) pareit avoir ete administree en Cappadoce dans un grand
+      nombre de sanctuaires, et en particulier dans ceux de Ma la grande
+      divinite indigene, et dans ceux: de Anahita.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See vol. i, pp. 334 ff.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Adonis, Attis and Osiris, p. 229. References to Prudentius,
+and to Firmicus Maternus, De errore 28. 8.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) That is, “By the slaughter of the bull and the slaughter of
+the ram born again into eternity.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) Pagan Christs, p. 315.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (5) Mysteres de Mithra, Bruxelles, 1902, p. 153.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Whether Mr. Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests (as he appears
+      to do) so materialistic a view of the potency of the actual blood is, I
+      should say, doubtful. I do not myself see that there is any reason for
+      supposing that the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded baptism by blood
+      very differently from the way in which the Christian Church has generally
+      regarded baptism by water&mdash;namely, as a SYMBOL of some inner
+      regeneration. There may certainly have been a little more of the MAGICAL
+      view and a little less of the symbolic, in the older religions; but the
+      difference was probably on the whole more one of degree than of essential
+      disparity. But however that may be, we cannot but be struck by the
+      extraordinary analogy between the tombstone inscriptions of that period
+      “born again into eternity by the blood of the Bull or the Ram,” and the
+      corresponding texts in our graveyards to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate
+      work, Textes et Monuments relatifs aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols.,
+      Brussels, 1899) gives a great number of texts and epitaphs of the same
+      character as that above-quoted, and they are well worth studying by those
+      interested in the subject. Cumont, it may be noted (vol. i, p. 305),
+      thinks that the story of Mithra and the slaying of the Bull must have
+      originated among some pastoral people to whom the bull was the source of
+      all life. The Bull in heaven&mdash;the symbol of the triumphant Sungod&mdash;and
+      the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good of humanity were one and the
+      same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And
+      Mithra was the hero who first won this conception of divinity for mankind&mdash;though
+      of course it is in essence quite similar to the conception put forward by
+      the Christian Church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As illustrating the belief that the Baptism by Blood was accompanied by a
+      real regeneration of the devotee, Frazer quotes an ancient writer (1) who
+      says that for some time after the ceremony the fiction of a new birth was
+      kept up by dieting the devotee on MILK, like a new-born babe. And it is
+      interesting in that connection to find that even in the present day a diet
+      of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for six or eight weeks is by many doctors
+      recommended as the only means of getting rid of deep-seated illnesses and
+      enabling a patient’s organism to make a completely new start in life.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Sallustius philosophus. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, note,
+p. 229.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      “At Rome,” he further says (p. 230), “the new birth and the remission of
+      sins by the shedding of bull’s blood appear to have been carried out above
+      all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian Goddess (Cybele) on the Vatican Hill,
+      at or near the spot where the great basilica of St. Peter’s now stands;
+      for many inscriptions relating to the rites were found when the church was
+      being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre,” he
+      continues, “this barbarous system of superstition seems to have spread to
+      other parts of the Roman empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany
+      prove that provincial sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the
+      Vatican.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would appear then that at Rome in the quiet early days of the Christian
+      Church, the rites and ceremonials of Mithra and Cybele, probably much
+      intermingled and blended, were exceedingly popular. Both religions had
+      been recognized by the Roman State, and the Christians, persecuted and
+      despised as they were, found it hard to make any headway against them&mdash;the
+      more so perhaps because the Christian doctrines appeared in many respects
+      to be merely faint replicas and copies of the older creeds. Robertson
+      maintains (1) that a he-lamb was sacrificed in the Mithraic mysteries, and
+      he quotes Porphyry as saying (2) that “a place near the equinoctial circle
+      was assigned to Mithra as an appropriate seat; and on this account he
+      bears the sword of the Ram (Aries) which is a sign of Mars (Ares).”
+      Similarly among the early Christians, it is said, a ram or lamb was
+      sacrificed in the Paschal mystery.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Pagan Christs, p. 336.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) De Antro, xxiv.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Many people think that the association of the Lamb-god with the Cross
+      arose from the fact that the constellation Aries at that time WAS on the
+      heavenly cross (the crossways of the Ecliptic and Equator-see diagram, ch.
+      iii), and in the very place through which the Sungod had to pass just
+      before his final triumph. And it is curious to find that Justin Martyr in
+      his Dialogue with Trypho (1) (a Jew) alludes to an old Jewish practice of
+      roasting a Lamb on spits arranged in the form of a Cross. “The lamb,” he
+      says, meaning apparently the Paschal lamb, “is roasted and dressed up in
+      the form of a cross. For one spit is transfixed right through the lower
+      parts up to the head, and one across the back, to which are attached the
+      legs (forelegs) of the lamb.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Ch. xl.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      To-day in Morocco at the festival of Eid-el-Kebir, corresponding to the
+      Christian Easter, the Mohammedans sacrifice a young ram and hurry it still
+      bleeding to the precincts of the Mosque, while at the same time every
+      household slays a lamb, as in the Biblical institution, for its family
+      feast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it will perhaps be said, “You are going too fast and proving too much.
+      In the anxiety to show that the Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the Lamb
+      were honored by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of the
+      Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the Bull and the
+      baptism in bull’s blood were the salient features of the Persian and
+      Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries earlier. How can you reconcile the
+      existence side by side of divinities belonging to such different periods,
+      or ascribe them both to an astronomical origin?” The answer is simple
+      enough. As I have explained before, the Precession of the Equinoxes caused
+      the Sun, at its moment of triumph over the powers of darkness, to stand at
+      one period in the constellation of the Bull, and at a period some two
+      thousand years later in the constellation of the Ram. It was perfectly
+      natural therefore that a change in the sacred symbols should, in the
+      course of time, take place; yet perfectly natural also that these symbols,
+      having once been consecrated and adopted, should continue to be honored
+      and clung to long after the time of their astronomical appropriateness had
+      passed, and so to be found side by side in later centuries. The devotee of
+      Mithra or Attis on the Vatican Hill at Rome in the year 200 A.D. probably
+      had as little notion or comprehension of the real origin of the sacred
+      Bull or Ram which he adored, as the Christian in St. Peter’s to-day has of
+      the origin of the Lamb-god whose vicegerent on earth is the Pope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is indeed easy to imagine that the change from the worship of the Bull
+      to the worship of the Lamb which undoubtedly took place among various
+      peoples as time went on, was only a ritual change initiated by the priests
+      in order to put on record and harmonize with the astronomical alteration.
+      Anyhow it is curious that while Mithra in the early times was specially
+      associated with the bull, his association with the lamb belonged more to
+      the Roman period. Somewhat the same happened in the case of Attis. In the
+      Bible we read of the indignation of Moses at the setting up by the
+      Israelites of a Golden Calf, AFTER the sacrifice of the ram-lamb had been
+      instituted&mdash;as if indeed the rebellious people were returning to the
+      earlier cult of Apis which they ought to have left behind them in Egypt.
+      In Egypt itself, too, we find the worship of Apis, as time went on,
+      yielding place to that of the Ram-headed god Amun, or Jupiter Ammon. (1)
+      So that both from the Bible and from Egyptian history we may conclude that
+      the worship of the Lamb or Ram succeeded to the worship of the Bull.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Tacitus (Hist. v. 4) speaks of ram-sacrifice by the Jews in
+honor of Jupiter Ammon. See also Herodotus (ii. 42) on the same in
+Egypt.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Finally it has been pointed out, and there may be some real connection in
+      the coincidence, that in the quite early years of Christianity the FISH
+      came in as an accepted symbol of Jesus Christ. Considering that after the
+      domination of Taurus and Aries, the Fish (Pisces) comes next in succession
+      as the Zodiacal sign for the Vernal Equinox, and is now the constellation
+      in which the Sun stands at that period, it seems not impossible that the
+      astronomical change has been the cause of the adoption of this new symbol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anyhow, and allowing for possible errors or exaggerations, it becomes
+      clear that the travels of the Sun through the belt of constellations which
+      forms the Zodiac must have had, from earliest times, a profound influence
+      on the generation of religious myths and legends. To say that it was the
+      only influence would certainly be a mistake. Other causes undoubtedly
+      contributed. But it was a main and important influence. The origins of the
+      Zodiac are obscure; we do not know with any certainty the reasons why the
+      various names were given to its component sections, nor can we measure the
+      exact antiquity of these names; but&mdash;pre-supposing the names of the
+      signs as once given&mdash;it is not difficult to imagine the growth of
+      legends connected with the Sun’s course among them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the ancient divinities perhaps Hercules is the one whose role as a
+      Sungod is most generally admitted. The helper of gods and men, a mighty
+      Traveller, and invoked everywhere as the Saviour, his labors for the good
+      of the world became ultimately defined and systematized as twelve and
+      corresponding in number to the signs of the Zodiac. It is true that this
+      systematization only took place at a late period, probably in Alexandria;
+      also that the identification of some of the Labors with the actual signs
+      as we have them at present is not always clear. But considering the wide
+      prevalence of the Hercules myth over the ancient world and the very
+      various astronomical systems it must have been connected with in its
+      origin, this lack of exact correspondence is hardly to be wondered at.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Labors of Hercules which chiefly interest us are: (1) The capture of
+      the Bull, (2) the slaughter of the Lion, (3) the destruction of the Hydra,
+      (4) of the Boar, (5) the cleansing of the stables of Augeas, (6) the
+      descent into Hades and the taming of Cerberus. The first of these is in
+      line with the Mithraic conquest of the Bull; the Lion is of course one of
+      the most prominent constellations of the Zodiac, and its conquest is
+      obviously the work of a Saviour of mankind; while the last four labors
+      connect themselves very naturally with the Solar conflict in winter
+      against the powers of darkness. The Boar (4) we have seen already as the
+      image of Typhon, the prince of darkness; the Hydra (3) was said to be the
+      offspring of Typhon; the descent into Hades (6)&mdash;generally associated
+      with Hercules’ struggle with and victory over Death&mdash;links on to the
+      descent of the Sun into the underworld, and its long and doubtful strife
+      with the forces of winter; and the cleansing of the stables of Augeas (5)
+      has the same signification. It appears in fact that the stables of Augeas
+      was another name for the sign of Capricorn through which the Sun passes at
+      the Winter solstice (1)&mdash;the stable of course being an underground
+      chamber&mdash;and the myth was that there, in this lowest tract and
+      backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil influences of the sky
+      were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them away (December was the
+      height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse the year towards its
+      rebirth.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See diagram of Zodiac.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It should not be forgotten too that even as a child in the cradle Hercules
+      slew two serpents sent for his destruction&mdash;the serpent and the
+      scorpion as autumnal constellations figuring always as enemies of the
+      Sungod&mdash;to which may be compared the power given to his disciples by
+      Jesus (1) “to tread on serpents and scorpions.” Hercules also as a Sungod
+      compares curiously with Samson (mentioned above, ii), but we need not
+      dwell on all the elaborate analogies that have been traced (2) between
+      these two heroes.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Luke x. 19.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Doane’s Bible Myths, ch. viii, (New York, 1882.)
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The Jesus-story, it will now be seen, has a great number of
+      correspondences with the stories of former Sungods and with the actual
+      career of the Sun through the heavens&mdash;so many indeed that they
+      cannot well be attributed to mere coincidence or even to the blasphemous
+      wiles of the Devil! Let us enumerate some of these. There are (1) the
+      birth from a Virgin mother; (2) the birth in a stable (cave or underground
+      chamber); and (3) on the 25th December (just after the winter solstice).
+      There is (4) the Star in the East (Sirius) and (5) the arrival of the Magi
+      (the “Three Kings”); there is (6) the threatened Massacre of the
+      Innocents, and the consequent flight into a distant country (told also of
+      Krishna and other Sungods). There are the Church festivals of (7)
+      Candlemas (2nd February), with processions of candles to symbolize the
+      growing light; of (8) Lent, or the arrival of Spring; of (9) Easter Day
+      (normally on the 25th March) to celebrate the crossing of the Equator by
+      the Sun; and (10) simultaneously the outburst of lights at the Holy
+      Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There is (11) the Crucifixion and death of the
+      Lamb-God, on Good Friday, three days before Easter; there are (12) the
+      nailing to a tree, (13) the empty grave, (14) the glad Resurrection (as in
+      the cases of Osiris, Attis and others); there are (15) the twelve
+      disciples (the Zodiacal signs); and (16) the betrayal by one of the
+      twelve. Then later there is (17) Midsummer Day, the 24th June, dedicated
+      to the Nativity of John the Baptist, and corresponding to Christmas Day;
+      there are the festivals of (18) the Assumption of the Virgin (15th August)
+      and of (19) the Nativity of the Virgin (8th September), corresponding to
+      the movement of the god through Virgo; there is the conflict of Christ and
+      his disciples with the autumnal asterisms, (20) the Serpent and the
+      Scorpion; and finally there is the curious fact that the Church (21)
+      dedicates the very day of the winter solstice (when any one may very
+      naturally doubt the rebirth of the Sun) to St. Thomas, who doubted the
+      truth of the Resurrection!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are some of, and by no means all, the coincidences in question. But
+      they are sufficient, I think, to prove&mdash;even allowing for possible
+      margins of error&mdash;the truth of our general contention. To go into the
+      parallelism of the careers of Krishna, the Indian Sungod, and Jesus would
+      take too long; because indeed the correspondence is so extraordinarily
+      close and elaborate. (1) I propose, however, at the close of this chapter,
+      to dwell now for a moment on the Christian festival of the Eucharist,
+      partly on account of its connection with the derivation from the
+      astronomical rites and Nature-celebrations already alluded to, and partly
+      on account of the light which the festival generally, whether Christian or
+      Pagan, throws on the origins of Religious Magic&mdash;a subject I shall
+      have to deal with in the next chapter.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Robertson’s Christianity and Mythology, Part II, pp.
+129-302; also Doane’s Bible Myths, ch. xxviii, p. 278.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I have already (Ch. II) mentioned the Eucharistic rite held in
+      commemoration of Mithra, and the indignant ascription of this by Justin
+      Martyr to the wiles of the Devil. Justin Martyr clearly had no doubt about
+      the resemblance of the Mithraic to the Christian ceremony. A Sacramental
+      meal, as mentioned a few pages back, seems to have been held by the
+      worshipers of Attis (1) in commemoration of their god; and the ‘mysteries’
+      of the Pagan cults generally appear to have included rites&mdash;sometimes
+      half-savage, sometimes more aesthetic&mdash;in which a dismembered animal
+      was eaten, or bread and wine (the spirits of the Corn and the Vine) were
+      consumed, as representing the body of the god whom his devotees desired to
+      honor. But the best example of this practice is afforded by the rites of
+      Dionysus, to which I will devote a few lines. Dionysus, like other Sun or
+      Nature deities, was born of a Virgin (Semele or Demeter) untainted by any
+      earthly husband; and born on the 25th. December. He was nurtured in a
+      Cave, and even at that early age was identified with the Ram or Lamb, into
+      whose form he was for the time being changed. At times also he was
+      worshiped in the form of a Bull. (2) He travelled far and wide; and
+      brought the great gift of wine to mankind. (3) He was called Liberator,
+      and Saviour. His grave “was shown at Delphi in the inmost shrine of the
+      temple of Apollo. Secret offerings were brought thither, while the women
+      who were celebrating the feast woke up the new-born god.... Festivals of
+      this kind in celebration of the extinction and resurrection of the deity
+      were held (by women and girls only) amid the mountains at night, every
+      third year, about the time of the shortest day. The rites, intended to
+      express the excess of grief and joy at the death and reappearance of the
+      god, were wild even to savagery, and the women who performed them were
+      hence known by the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads, and Thyiades.
+      They wandered through woods and mountains, their flying locks crowned with
+      ivy or snakes, brandishing wands and torches, to the hollow sounds of the
+      drum, or the shrill notes of the flute, with wild dances and insane cries
+      and jubilation.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Frazer’s Golden Bough, Part IV, p. 229.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) The Golden Bough, Part II, Book II, p. 164.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) “I am the TRUE Vine,” says the Jesus of the fourth gospel,
+perhaps with an implicit and hostile reference to the cult of
+Dionysus&mdash;in which Robertson suggests (Christianity and Mythology, p.
+357) there was a ritual miracle of turning water into wine.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Oxen, goats, even fawns and roes from the forest were killed, torn to
+      pieces, and eaten raw. This in imitation of the treatment of Dionysus by
+      the Titans, (1)&mdash;who it was supposed had torn the god in pieces when
+      a child.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See art. Dionysus. Dictionary of Classical Antiquities,
+Nettleship and Sandys 3rd edn., London, 1898).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Dupuis, one of the earliest writers (at the beginning of last century) on
+      this subject, says, describing the mystic rites of Dionysus (1): “The
+      sacred doors of the Temple in which the initiation took place were opened
+      only once a year, and no stranger might ever enter. Night lent to these
+      august mysteries a veil which was forbidden to be drawn aside&mdash;for
+      whoever it might be. (2) It was the sole occasion for the representation
+      of the passion of Bacchus (Dionysus) dead, descended into hell, and
+      rearisen&mdash;in imitation of the representation of the sufferings of
+      Osiris which, according to Herodotus, were commemorated at Sais in Egypt.
+      It was in that place that the partition took place of the body of the god,
+      (3) which was then eaten&mdash;the ceremony, in fact, of which our
+      Eucharist is only a reflection; whereas in the mysteries of Bacchus actual
+      raw flesh was distributed, which each of those present had to consume in
+      commemoration of the death of Bacchus dismembered by the Titans, and whose
+      passion, in Chios and Tenedos, was renewed each year by the sacrifice of a
+      man who represented the god. (4) Possibly it is this last fact which made
+      people believe that the Christians (whose hoc est corpus meum and sharing
+      of an Eucharistic meal were no more than a shadow of a more ancient rite)
+      did really sacrifice a child and devour its limbs.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Charles F. Dupuis, “Traite des Mysteres,” ch. i.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Pausan, Corinth, ch. 37.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Clem, Prot. Eur. Bacch.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) See Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lii, Section 56.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      That Eucharistic rites were very very ancient is plain from the
+      Totem-sacraments of savages; and to this subject we shall now turn.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>
+IV.<br/>
+TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+</h2>
+
+    <p>
+      Much has been written on the origin of the Totem-system&mdash;the system,
+      that is, of naming a tribe or a portion of a tribe (say a CLAN) after some
+      ANIMAL&mdash;or sometimes&mdash;also after some plant or tree or
+      Nature-element, like fire or rain or thunder; but at best the subject is a
+      difficult one for us moderns to understand. A careful study has been made
+      of it by Salamon Reinach in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, (1) where he
+      formulates his conclusions in twelve statements or definitions; but even
+      so&mdash;though his suggestions are helpful&mdash;he throws very little
+      light on the real origin of the system. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See English translation of certain chapters (published by
+David Nutt in 1912) entitled Cults, Myths and Religions, pp. 1-25. The
+French original is in three large volumes.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) The same may be said of the formulated statement of the
+subject in Morris Jastrow’s Handbooks of the History of Religion, vol.
+iv.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      There are three main difficulties. The first is to understand why
+      primitive Man should name his Tribe after an animal or object of nature at
+      all; the second, to understand on what principle he selected the
+      particular name (a lion, a crocodile, a lady bird, a certain tree); the
+      third, why he should make of the said totem a divinity, and pay honor and
+      worship to it. It may be worth while to pause for a moment over these.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (1) The fact that the Tribe was one of the early things for which Man
+      found it necessary to have a name is interesting, because it shows how
+      early the solidarity and psychological actuality of the tribe was
+      recognized; and as to the selection of a name from some animal or concrete
+      object of Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason that there
+      was nothing else for the savage to choose from. Plainly to call his tribe
+      “The Wayfarers” or “The Pioneers” or the “Pacifists” or the “Invincibles,”
+      or by any of the thousand and one names which modern associations adopt,
+      would have been impossible, since such abstract terms had little or no
+      existence in his mind. And again to name it after an animal was the most
+      obvious thing to do, simply because the animals were by far the most
+      important features or accompaniments of his own life. As I am dealing in
+      this book largely with certain psychological conditions of human
+      evolution, it has to be pointed out that to primitive man the animal was
+      the nearest and most closely related of all objects. Being of the same
+      order of consciousness as himself, the animal appealed to him very closely
+      as his mate and equal. He made with regard to it little or no distinction
+      from himself. We see this very clearly in the case of children, who of
+      course represent the savage mind, and who regard animals simply as their
+      mates and equals, and come quickly into rapport with them, not
+      differentiating themselves from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (2) As to the particular animal or other object selected in order to give
+      a name to the Tribe, this would no doubt be largely accidental. Any
+      unusual incident might superstitiously precipitate a name. We can hardly
+      imagine the Tribe scratching its congregated head in the deliberate effort
+      to think out a suitable emblem for itself. That is not the way in which
+      nicknames are invented in a school or anywhere else to-day. At the same
+      time the heraldic appeal of a certain object of nature, animate or
+      inanimate, would be deeply and widely felt. The strength of the lion, the
+      fleetness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the flight of a bird, the
+      awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily mesmerize a whole tribe. Reinach
+      points out, with great justice, that many tribes placed themselves under
+      the protection of animals which were supposed (rightly or wrongly) to act
+      as guides and augurs, foretelling the future. “Diodorus,” he says,
+      “distinctly states that the hawk, in Egypt, was venerated because it
+      foretold the future.” (Birds generally act as and Samoa the kangaroo, the
+      crow and the owl premonish their fellow clansmen of events to come. At one
+      time the Samoan warriors went so far as to rear owls for their prophetic
+      qualities in war. (The jackal, or ‘pathfinder’&mdash;whose tracks
+      sometimes lead to the remains of a food-animal slain by a lion, and many
+      birds and insects, have a value of this kind.) “The use of animal totems
+      for purposes of augury is, in all likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must
+      soon have realized that the senses of animals were acuter than their own;
+      nor is it surprising that they should have expected their totems&mdash;that
+      is to say, their natural allies&mdash;to forewarn them both of unsuspected
+      dangers and of those provisions of nature, WELLS especially, which animals
+      seem to scent by instinct.” (1) And again, beyond all this, I have little
+      doubt that there are subconscious affinities which unite certain tribes to
+      certain animals or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace,
+      though they are very real&mdash;the same affinities that we recognize as
+      existing between individual PERSONS and certain objects of nature. W. H.
+      Hudson&mdash;himself in many respects having this deep and primitive
+      relation to nature&mdash;speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical
+      volume (2) of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon him as a boy,
+      not only by a snake, but by certain trees, and especially by a particular
+      flowering-plant “not more than a foot in height, with downy soft pale
+      green leaves, and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like valerian.”
+      ... “One of my sacred flowers,” he calls it, and insists on the
+      “inexplicable attraction” which it had for him. In various ways of this
+      kind one can perceive how particular totems came to be selected by
+      particular peoples.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Reinach, Eng. trans., op. cit., pp. 20, 21.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Far away and Long ago (1918) chs. xvi and xvii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      (3) As to the tendency to divinize these totems, this arises no doubt
+      partly out of question (2). The animal or other object admired on account
+      of its strength or swiftness, or adopted as guardian of the tribe because
+      of its keen sight or prophetic quality, or infinitely prized on account of
+      its food-value, or felt for any other reason to have a peculiar relation
+      and affinity to the tribe, is by that fact SET APART. It becomes taboo. It
+      must not be killed&mdash;except under necessity and by sanction of the
+      whole tribe&mdash;nor injured; and all dealings with it must be fenced
+      round with regulations. It is out of this taboo or system of taboos that,
+      according to Reinach, religion arose. “I propose (he says) to define
+      religion as: A SUM OF SCRUPLES (TABOOS) WHICH IMPEDE THE FREE EXERCISE OF
+      OUR FACULTIES.” (1) Obviously this definition is gravely deficient, simply
+      because it is purely negative, and leaves out of account the positive
+      aspect of the subject. In Man, the positive content of religion is the
+      instinctive sense&mdash;whether conscious or subconscious&mdash;of an
+      inner unity and continuity with the world around. This is the stuff out of
+      which religion is made. The scruples or taboos which “impede the freedom”
+      of this relation are the negative forces which give outline and form to
+      the relation. These are the things which generate the RITES AND
+      CEREMONIALS of religion; and as far as Reinach means by religion MERELY
+      rites and ceremonies he is correct; but clearly he only covers half the
+      subject. The tendency to divinize the totem is at least as much dependent
+      on the positive sense of unity with it, as on the negative scruples which
+      limit the relation in each particular case. But I shall return to this
+      subject presently, and more than once, with the view of clarifying it.
+      Just now it will be best to illustrate the nature of Totems generally, and
+      in some detail.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Orpheus by S. Reinach, p. 3.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      As would be gathered from what I have just said, there is found among all
+      the more primitive peoples, and in all parts of the world, an immense
+      variety of totem-names. The Dinkas, for instance, are a rather intelligent
+      well-grown people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Nile in the vicinity
+      of the great swamps. According to Dr. Seligman their clans have for totems
+      the lion, the elephant, the crocodile, the hippopotamus, the fox, and the
+      hyena, as well as certain birds which infest and damage the corn, some
+      plants and trees, and such things as rain, fire, etc. “Each clan speaks of
+      its totem as its ancestor, and refrains (as a rule) from injuring or
+      eating it.” (1) The members of the Crocodile clan call themselves
+      “brothers of the crocodile.” The tribes of Bechuana-land have a very
+      similar list of totem-names&mdash;the buffalo, the fish, the porcupine,
+      the wild vine, etc. They too have a Crocodile clan, but they call the
+      crocodile their FATHER! The tribes of Australia much the same again, with
+      the differences suitable to their country; and the Red Indians of North
+      America the same. Garcilasso, della Vega, the Spanish historian, son of an
+      Inca princess by one of the Spanish conquerors of Peru and author of the
+      well-known book Commentarias Reales, says in that book (i, 57), speaking
+      of the pre-Inca period, “An Indian (of Peru) was not considered honorable
+      unless he was descended from a fountain, river or lake, or even from the
+      sea, or from a wild animal, as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird
+      they call cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey.” (2) According to
+      Lewis Morgan, the North American Indians of various tribes had for totems
+      the wolf, bear, beaver, turtle, deer, snipe, heron, hawk, crane, loon,
+      turkey, muskrat; pike, catfish, carp; buffalo, elk, reindeer, eagle, hare,
+      rabbit, snake; reed-grass, sand, rock, and tobacco-plant.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See The Golden Bough, vol. iv, p. 31.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 104, also Myth, Ritual
+and Religion, vol. i, pp. 71, 76, etc.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      So we might go on rather indefinitely. I need hardly say that in more
+      modern and civilized life, relics of the totem system are still to be
+      found in the forms of the heraldic creatures adopted for their crests by
+      different families, and in the bears, lions, eagles, the sun, moon and
+      stars and so forth, which still adorn the flags and are flaunted as the
+      insignia of the various nations. The names may not have been ORIGINALLY
+      adopted from any definite belief in blood-relationship with the animal or
+      other object in question; but when, as Robertson says (Pagan Christs, p.
+      104), a “savage learned that he was ‘a Bear’ and that his father and
+      grandfather and forefathers were so before him, it was really impossible,
+      after ages in which totem-names thus passed current, that he should fail
+      to assume that his folk were DESCENDED from a bear.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As a rule, as may be imagined, the savage tribesman will on no account EAT
+      his tribal totem-animal. Such would naturally be deemed a kind of
+      sacrilege. Also it must be remarked that some totems are hardly suitable
+      for eating. Yet it is important to observe that occasionally, and guarding
+      the ceremony with great precautions, it has been an almost universal
+      custom for the tribal elders to call a feast at which an animal (either
+      the totem or some other) IS killed and commonly eaten&mdash;and this in
+      order that the tribesmen may absorb some virtue belonging to it, and may
+      confirm their identity with the tribe and with each other. The eating of
+      the bear or other animal, the sprinkling with its blood, and the general
+      ritual in which the participants shared its flesh, or dressed and
+      disguised themselves in its skin, or otherwise identified themselves with
+      it, was to them a symbol of their community of life with each other, and a
+      means of their renewal and salvation in the holy emblem. And this custom,
+      as the reader will perceive, became the origin of the Eucharists and Holy
+      Communions of the later religions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Professor Robertson-Smith’s celebrated Camel affords an instance of this.
+      (1) It appears that St. Nilus (fifth century) has left a detailed account
+      of the occasional sacrifice in his time of a spotless white camel among
+      the Arabs of the Sinai region, which closely resembles a totemic
+      communion-feast. The uncooked blood and flesh of the animal had to be
+      entirely consumed by the faithful before daybreak. “The slaughter of the
+      victim, the sacramental drinking of the blood, and devouring in wild haste
+      of the pieces of still quivering flesh, recall the details of the
+      Dionysiac and other festivals.” (2) Robertson-Smith himself says:&mdash;“The
+      plain meaning is that the victim was devoured before its life had left the
+      still warm blood and flesh... and that thus in the most literal way, all
+      those who shared in the ceremony absorbed part of the victim’s life into
+      themselves. One sees how much more forcibly than any ordinary meal such a
+      rite expresses the establishment or confirmation of a bond of common life
+      between the worshipers, and also, since the blood is shed upon the altar
+      itself, between the worshipers and their god. In this sacrifice, then, the
+      significant factors are two: the conveyance of the living blood to the
+      godhead, and the absorption of the living flesh and blood into the flesh
+      and blood of the worshippers. Each of these is effected in the simplest
+      and most direct manner, so that the meaning of the ritual is perfectly
+      transparent.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See his Religion of the Semites, p. 320.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) They also recall the rites of the Passover&mdash;though in this
+latter the blood was no longer drunk, nor the flesh eaten raw.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It seems strange, of course, that men should eat their totems; and it must
+      not by any means be supposed that this practice is (or was) universal; but
+      it undoubtedly obtains in some cases. As Miss Harrison says (Themis, p.
+      123); “you do not as a rule eat your relations,” and as a rule the eating
+      of a totem is tabu and forbidden, but (Miss Harrison continues) “at
+      certain times and under certain restrictions a man not only may, but MUST,
+      eat of his totem, though only sparingly, as of a thing sacrosanct.” The
+      ceremonial carried out in a communal way by the tribe not only identifies
+      the tribe with the totem (animal), but is held, according to early magical
+      ideas, and when the animal is desired for food, to favor its manipulation.
+      The human tribe partakes of the mana or life-force of the animal, and is
+      strengthened; the animal tribe is sympathetically renewed by the
+      ceremonial and multiplies exceedingly. The slaughter of the sacred animal
+      and (often) the simultaneous outpouring of human blood seals the compact
+      and confirms the magic. This is well illustrated by a ceremony of the
+      ‘Emu’ tribe referred to by Dr. Frazer:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In order to multiply Emus which are an important article of food, the men
+      of the Emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed as follows: They clear a
+      small spot of level ground, and opening veins in their arms they let the
+      blood stream out until the surface of the ground for a space of about
+      three square yards is soaked with it. When the blood has dried and caked,
+      it forms a hard and fairly impermeable surface, on which they paint the
+      sacred design of the emu totem, especially the parts of the bird which
+      they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round this painting
+      the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers wearing long head-dresses to
+      represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of
+      the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions.” (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The Golden Bough i, 85&mdash;with reference to Spencer and
+Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 179, 189.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Thus blood sacrifice comes in; and&mdash;(whether this has ever actually
+      happened in the case of the Central Australians I know not)&mdash;we can
+      easily imagine a member of the Emu tribe, and disguised as an actual emu,
+      having been ceremonially slaughtered as a firstfruits and promise of the
+      expected and prayed-for emu-crop; just as the same certainly HAS happened
+      in the case of men wearing beast-masks of Bulls or Rams or Bears being
+      sacrificed in propitiation of Bull-gods, Ram-gods or Bear-gods or simply
+      in pursuance of some kind of magic to favor the multiplication of these
+      food-animals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly enough the
+      relation of man to food-animals. You need or at least desire flesh food,
+      yet you shrink from slaughtering ‘your brother the ox’; you desire his
+      mana, yet you respect his tabu, for in you and him alike runs the common
+      life-blood. On your own individual responsibility you would never kill
+      him; but for the common weal, on great occasions, and in a fashion
+      conducted with scrupulous care, it is expedient that he die for his
+      people, and that they feast upon his flesh.” (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Themis, p. 140.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In her little book Ancient Art and Ritual (1) Jane Harrison describes the
+      dedication of a holy Bull, as conducted in Greece at Elis, and at Magnesia
+      and other cities. “There at the annual fair year by year the stewards of
+      the city bought a Bull ‘the finest that could be got,’ and at the new moon
+      of the month at the beginning of seed-time (? April) Bull was led in
+      procession at the head of which went the chief priest and priestess of the
+      city. With them went a herald and sacrificer, and two bands of youths and
+      maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing unlucky might come near him.
+      The herald pronounced aloud a prayer for ‘the safety of the city and the
+      land, and the citizens, and the women and children, for peace and wealth,
+      and for the bringing forth of grain and all other fruits, and of cattle.’
+      All this longing for fertility, for food and children, focuses round the
+      holy Bull, whose holiness is his strength and fruitfulness.” The Bull is
+      sacrificed. The flesh is divided in solemn feast among those who take part
+      in the procession. “The holy flesh is not offered to a god, it is eaten&mdash;to
+      every man his portion&mdash;by each and every citizen, that he may get his
+      share of the strength of the Bull, of the luck of the State.” But at
+      Athens the Bouphonia, as it was called, was followed by a curious
+      ceremony. “The hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the
+      stuffed animal was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were
+      ploughing. The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all
+      important. We are accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the
+      giving up, the renouncing of something. But SACRIFICE does not mean
+      ‘death’ at all. It means MAKING HOLY, sanctifying; and holiness was to
+      primitive man just special strength and life. What they wanted from the
+      Bull was just that special life and strength which all the year long they
+      had put into him, and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood.
+      They could not eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him.
+      So he must die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed
+      him, not to ‘sacrifice’ him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat
+      him, live BY him and through him, by his grace.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Home University Library, p. 87.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      We have already had to deal with instances of the ceremonial eating of the
+      sacred he-Lamb or Ram, immolated in the Spring season of the year, and
+      partaken of in a kind of communal feast&mdash;not without reference (at
+      any rate in later times) to a supposed Lamb-god. Among the Ainos in the
+      North of Japan, as also among the Gilyaks in Eastern Siberia, the Bear is
+      the great food-animal, and is worshipped as the supreme giver of health
+      and strength. There also a similar ritual of sacrifice occurs. A perfect
+      Bear is caught and caged. He is fed up and even pampered to the day of his
+      death. “Fish, brandy and other delicacies are offered to him. Some of the
+      people prostrate themselves before him; his coming into a house brings a
+      blessing, and if he sniffs at the food that brings a blessing too.” Then
+      he is led out and slain. A great feast takes place, the flesh is divided,
+      cupfuls of the blood are drunk by the men; the tribe is united and
+      strengthened, and the Bear-god blesses the ceremony&mdash;the ideal Bear
+      that has given its life for the people. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Art and Ritual, pp. 92-98; The Golden Bough, ii, 375
+seq.; Themis, pp. 140, 141; etc.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      That the eating of the flesh of an animal or a man conveys to you some of
+      the qualities, the life-force, the mana, of that animal or man, is an idea
+      which one often meets with among primitive folk. Hence the common tendency
+      to eat enemy warriors slain in battle against your tribe. By doing so you
+      absorb some of their valor and strength. Even the enemy scalps which an
+      Apache Indian might hang from his belt were something magical to add to
+      the Apache’s power. As Gilbert Murray says, (1) “you devoured the holy
+      animal to get its mana, its swiftness, its strength, its great endurance,
+      just as the savage now will eat his enemy’s brain or heart or hands to get
+      some particular quality residing there.” Even&mdash;as he explains on the
+      earlier page&mdash;mere CONTACT was often considered sufficient&mdash;“we
+      have holy pillars whose holiness consists in the fact that they have been
+      touched by the blood of a bull.” And in this connection we may note that
+      nearly all the Christian Churches have a great belief in the virtue
+      imparted by the mere ‘laying on of hands.’
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 36.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In quite a different connection&mdash;we read (1) that among the Spartans
+      a warrior-boy would often beg for the love of the elder warrior whom he
+      admired (i. e. the contact with his body) in order to obtain in that way a
+      portion of the latter’s courage and prowess. That through the mediation of
+      the lips one’s spirit may be united to the spirit of another person is an
+      idea not unfamiliar to the modern mind; while the exchange of blood,
+      clothes, locks of hair, etc., by lovers is a custom known all over the
+      world. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Aelian VII, iii, 12: [gr autoi goun (oi paides) deontai twn
+erastwn] [gr eispnein autois]. See also E. Bethe on “Die Dorische
+Knabenliebe” in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. 26, iii, 461.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Crawley’s Mystic Rose, pp. 238, 242.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      To suppose that by eating another you absorb his or her soul is somewhat
+      naive certainly. Perhaps it IS more native, more primitive. Yet there may
+      be SOME truth even in that idea. Certainly the food that one eats has a
+      psychological effect, and the flesh-eaters among the human race have a
+      different temperament as a rule from the fruit and vegetable eaters, while
+      among the animals (though other causes may come in here) the Carnivora are
+      decidedly more cruel and less gentle than the Herbivora.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to the rites of Dionysus, Gilbert Murray, speaking of Orphism&mdash;a
+      great wave of religious reform which swept over Greece and South Italy in
+      the sixth century B.C.&mdash;says: (1) “A curious relic of primitive
+      superstition and cruelty remained firmly imbedded in Orphism, a doctrine
+      irrational and unintelligible, and for that very reason wrapped in the
+      deepest and most sacred mystery: a belief in the SACRIFICE OF DIONYSUS
+      HIMSELF, AND THE PURIFICATION OF MAN BY HIS BLOOD. It seems possible that
+      the savage Thracians, in the fury of their worship on the mountains, when
+      they were possessed by the god and became ‘wild beasts,’ actually tore
+      with their teeth and hands any hares, goats, fawns or the like that they
+      came across.... The Orphic congregations of later times, in their most
+      holy gatherings, solemnly partook of the blood of a bull, which was by a
+      mystery the blood of Dionysus-Zagreus himself, the Bull of God, slain in
+      sacrifice for the purification of man.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Notes to his translation of the Bacch[ae] of Euripides.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) For a description of this orgy see Theocritus, Idyll xxvi;
+also for explanations of it, Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii,
+pp, 241-260, on Dionysus. The Encyclop[ae]dia Brit., article “Orpheus,”
+says:&mdash;“Orpheus, in the manner of his death, was considered to personate
+the god Dionysus, and was thus representative of the god torn to pieces
+every year&mdash;a ceremony enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with
+a human victim, and afterwards with a bull, to represent the bull-formed
+god. A distinct feature of this ritual was [gr wmofagia] (eating the
+flesh of the victim raw), whereby the communicants imagined that they
+consumed and assimilated the god represented by the victim, and thus
+became filled with the divine ecstasy.” Compare also the Hindu doctrine
+of Praj[pati, the dismembered Lord of Creation.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Such instances of early communal feasts, which fulfilled the double part
+      of confirming on the one hand the solidarity of the tribe, and on the
+      other of bringing the tribe, by the shedding of the blood of a divine
+      Victim into close relationship with the very source of its life, are
+      plentiful to find. “The sacramental rite,” says Professor Robertson-Smith,
+      (1) “is also an atoning rite, which brings the community again into
+      harmony with its alienated god&mdash;atonement being simply an act of
+      communion designed to wipe out all memory of previous estrangement.” With
+      this subject I shall deal more specially in chapter vii below. Meanwhile
+      as instances of early Eucharists we may mention the following cases,
+      remembering always that as the blood is regarded as the Life, the drinking
+      or partaking of, or sprinkling with, blood is always an acknowledgment of
+      the common life; and that the juice of the grape being regarded as the
+      blood of the Vine, wine in the later ceremonials quite easily and
+      naturally takes the place of the blood in the early sacrifices.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Religion of the Semites, p. 302.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Thus P. Andrada La Crozius, a French missionary, and one of the first
+      Christians who went to Nepaul and Thibet, says in his History of India:
+      “Their Grand Lama celebrates a species of sacrifice with BREAD and WINE,
+      in which, after taking a small quantity himself, he distributes the rest
+      among the Lamas present at this ceremony.” (1) “The old Egyptians
+      celebrated the resurrection of Osiris by a sacrament, eating the sacred
+      cake or wafer after it had been consecrated by the priest, and thereby
+      becoming veritable flesh of his flesh.” (2) As is well known, the eating
+      of bread or dough sacramentally (sometimes mixed with blood or seed) as an
+      emblem of community of life with the divinity, is an extremely ancient
+      practice or ritual. Dr. Frazer (3) says of the Aztecs, that “twice a year,
+      in May and December, an image of the great god Huitzilopochtli was made of
+      dough, then broken in pieces and solemnly eaten by his worshipers.” And
+      Lord Kingsborough in his Mexican Antiquities (vol. vi, p. 220) gives a
+      record of a “most Holy Supper” in which these people ate the flesh of
+      their god. It was a cake made of certain seeds, “and having made it, they
+      blessed it in their manner, and broke it into pieces, which the high
+      priest put into certain very clean vessels, and took a thorn of maguey
+      which resembles a very thick needle, with which he took up with the utmost
+      reverence single morsels, which he put into the mouth of each individual
+      in the manner of a communion.” Acostas (4) confirms this and similar
+      accounts. The Peruvians partook of a sacrament consisting of a pudding of
+      coarsely ground maize, of which a portion had been smeared on the idol.
+      The priest sprinkled it with the blood of the victim before distributing
+      it to the people. Priest and people then all took their shares in turn,
+      “with great care that no particle should be allowed to fall to the ground&mdash;this
+      being looked upon as a great sin.” (5)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Doane’s Bible Myths, p. 306.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) From The Great Law, of religious origins: by W. Williamson
+(1899), p. 177.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) The Golden Bough, vol. ii, p. 79.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) Natural and Moral History of the Indies. London (1604).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (5) See Markham’s Rites and laws of the Incas, p. 27.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Moving from Peru to China (instead of ‘from China to Peru’) we find that
+      “the Chinese pour wine (a very general substitute for blood) on a straw
+      image of Confucius, and then all present drink of it, and taste the
+      sacrificial victim, in order to participate in the grace of Confucius.”
+      (Here again the Corn and Wine are blended in one rite.) And of Tartary
+      Father Grueber thus testifies: “This only I do affirm, that the devil so
+      mimics the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian
+      has ever been there, still in all essential things they agree so
+      completely with the Roman Church, as even to celebrate the Host with bread
+      and wine: with my own eyes I have seen it.” (1) These few instances are
+      sufficient to show the extraordinarily wide diffusion of Totem-sacraments
+      and Eucharistic rites all over the world.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For these two quotations see Jevons’ Introduction to the
+History of Religion, pp. 148 and 219.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>
+V.<br/>
+FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist, some way from the
+      astronomical thread of Chapters II and III, and now it would appear that
+      in order to understand religious origins we must wander still farther. The
+      chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and astronomical
+      phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period when there were
+      no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest astronomical
+      knowledge existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is best and safest
+      to move thus backwards in Time, from the things recent and fairly well
+      known to things more ancient and less known. In this way we approach more
+      securely to some understanding of the dim and remote past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is clear that before any definite speculations on heaven-dwelling gods
+      or divine beings had arisen in the human mind&mdash;or any clear theories
+      of how the sun and moon and stars might be connected with the changes of
+      the seasons on the earth&mdash;there were still certain obvious things
+      which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned alike. One of these was
+      the return of Vegetation, bringing with it the fruits or the promise of
+      the fruits of the earth, for human food, and also bringing with it
+      increase of animal life, for food in another form; and the other was the
+      return of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food
+      delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth delivering from
+      the fear of danger and of cold. These were three glorious things which
+      returned together and brought salvation and renewed life to man. The
+      period of their return was ‘Spring,’ and though Spring and its benefits
+      might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE of its return&mdash;though
+      even so it may have been a long time in human evolution before man
+      discovered that it really did always return, and (with certain allowances)
+      at equal intervals of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in, the return of
+      the Vegetation must have enthralled man’s attention, and filled him with
+      hope and joy. Yet since its return was somewhat variable and uncertain the
+      question, What could man do to assist that return? naturally became a
+      pressing one. It is now generally held that the use of Magic&mdash;sympathetic
+      magic&mdash;arose in this way. Sympathetic magic seems to have been
+      generated by a belief that your own actions cause a similar response in
+      things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not rest on any
+      philosophy or argument, but was purely instinctive and sometimes of the
+      nature of a mere corporeal reaction. Every schoolboy knows how in watching
+      a comrade’s high jump at the Sports he often finds himself lifting a knee
+      at the moment ‘to help him over’; at football matches quarrels sometimes
+      arise among the spectators by reason of an ill-placed kick coming from a
+      too enthusiastic on-looker, behind one; undergraduates running on the
+      tow-path beside their College boat in the races will hurry even faster
+      than the boat in order to increase its speed; there is in each case an
+      automatic bodily response increased by one’s own desire. A person ACTS the
+      part which he desires to be successful. He thinks to transfer his energy
+      in that way. Again, if by chance one witnesses a painful accident, a
+      crushed foot or what-not, it commonly happens that one feels a pain in the
+      same part oneself&mdash;a sympathetic pain. What more natural than to
+      suppose that the pain really is transferred from the one person to the
+      other? and how easy the inference that by tormenting a wretched scape-goat
+      or crucifying a human victim in some cases the sufferings of people may be
+      relieved or their sins atoned for?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus, curses
+      her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she prays
+      that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is
+      independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy.
+      Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early man&mdash;to
+      which I have already alluded&mdash;the instinct of his unity and
+      continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close that
+      his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world
+      outside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival of
+      Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you must
+      have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has been a
+      MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite fanciful
+      associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a raven’s skin
+      on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with red zigzags of
+      lightning (1); but partly, no doubt, he had observed actual facts, or had
+      had the knowledge of them transmitted to him&mdash;as, for instance that
+      when rain is impending loud noises will bring about its speedy downfall, a
+      fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on battlefields. He had
+      observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud clap of thunder is
+      generally followed by a greatly increased downpour of rain. He had even
+      noticed (a thing which I have often verified in the vicinity of Sheffield)
+      that the copious smoke of fires will generate rain-clouds&mdash;and so
+      quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking SACRIFICES which had
+      that desirable effect. So far he was on the track of elementary Science.
+      And so he made “bull-roarers” to imitate the sound of wind and the blessed
+      rain-bringing thunder, or clashed great bronze cymbals together with the
+      same object. Bull-voices and thunder-drums and the clashing of cymbals
+      were used in this connection by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus
+      (2); but the bull-roarer, in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the
+      end of a string, seems to be known, or to have been known, all over the
+      world. It is described with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and
+      Myth (pp. 29-44), where he says “it is found always as a sacred instrument
+      employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand,
+      ancient Greece, and Africa.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Catlin’s North American Indians, Letter 19.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Themis, p. 61.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner
+      causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than we
+      are! His main idea was a more specially ‘magical’ one&mdash;namely, that
+      the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and cause
+      them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew Bath-Kol,
+      “the daughter of the Voice”) was everywhere regarded as the manifestation
+      of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally
+      call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker, might make
+      sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known in ever so many parts of
+      the world) in which he rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most
+      beguiling and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of Baal
+      in the Bible, (2) he would cut himself with knives till the blood fell
+      upon the ground in great drops suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower.
+      “In Mexico the rain god was propitiated with sacrifices of children. If
+      the children wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced,
+      being convinced that rain would also be abundant.” (3) Sometimes he, the
+      rain-maker, would WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap
+      his blankets for the same purpose.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: “The muttering of the thunder is said
+to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up
+green.” Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe
+(Australian).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) I Kings xviii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
+Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone&mdash;which has been adopted
+      by so many peoples under so many forms&mdash;Demeter the Earth-mother
+      loses her daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation),
+      carried down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and
+      Winter. And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic
+      for the purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the
+      world again. Women carried certain charms, “fir-cones and snakes and
+      unnamable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a
+      sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and
+      their remains afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the
+      fields.” (1) Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of
+      male fertility; snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their own
+      skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive of resurrection
+      and re-vivification; pigs and sows by their exceeding fruitfulness would
+      in their hour of sacrifice remind old mother Earth of what was expected
+      from her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that the scattering of
+      dead flesh over the ground or mixed with the seed, did bless the ground to
+      a greater fertility; and so by a strange mixture of primitive observation
+      with a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols and suggestions
+      Nature could be appealed to and induced to answer to the desires and needs
+      for her children this sort of ceremonial Magic arose. It was not exactly
+      Science, and it was not exactly Religion; but it was a naive, and perhaps
+      not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between Nature and Man.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Gilbert Murray’s Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously
+      differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see that the tribal life was so
+      strong that the individual seldom regarded himself as different or
+      separate or opposed to the rest of the tribe; but that something of the
+      same kind was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and to
+      Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself, was also himself.
+      His sub-conscious sense of unity was so great that it largely dominated
+      his life. That brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern man
+      to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals, or between himself
+      and Nature, did not exist in the early man. Hence it was no difficulty to
+      him to believe that he was a Bear or an Emu. Sub-consciously he was wiser
+      than we are. He knew that he was a bear or an emu, or any other such
+      animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his mind upon. Hence we find that
+      a familiarity and common consent existed between primitive man and many of
+      his companion animals such as has been lost or much attenuated in modern
+      times. Elisee Reclus in his very interesting paper La Grande Famille (1)
+      gives support to the idea that the so-called domestication of animals did
+      not originally arise from any forcible subjugation of them by man, but
+      from a natural amity with them which grew up in the beginning from common
+      interests, pursuits and affections. Thus the chetah of India (and probably
+      the puma of Brazil) from far-back times took to hunting in the company of
+      his two-legged and bow-and-arrow-armed friend, with whom he divided the
+      spoil. W. H. Hudson (2) declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it
+      is, and capable of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack
+      man, but when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage,
+      unresisting, with mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama,
+      though domesticated in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the
+      whip or the bit, but may still be seen walking by the side of the
+      Brazilian peasant and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud
+      companionship. The mutual relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and
+      the Horse (3) (also the Elephant) reach so far into the past that their
+      origin cannot be traced. The Swallow still loves to make its home under
+      the cottage eaves and still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of
+      good fortune. Elisee Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile
+      calls to certain snakes by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
+1896.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) “It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
+of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before
+it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them” (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to
+Hist. Religion, p. 119).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception, which
+      made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their tribe, and
+      their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought them also so
+      close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees, the vegetation,
+      the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their bodies, part of
+      themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set in. To cause rain or
+      thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like noises; to encourage
+      Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground, you had to leap and
+      dance. “In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons it is a common custom
+      (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to leap high in the field in
+      the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall.” (1) Native May-pole
+      dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly yet died out&mdash;even in this
+      most civilized England. The bower of green boughs, the music of pipes, the
+      leaping and the twirling, were all an encouragement to the arrival of
+      Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic Magic. When you felt full of life
+      and energy and virility in yourself you naturally leapt and danced, so why
+      should you not sympathetically do this for the energizing of the crops? In
+      every country of the world the vernal season and the resurrection of the
+      Sun has been greeted with dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted
+      success in hunting or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances
+      suggesting the successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children
+      do to-day, and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in
+      human thought.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our academical
+      and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and to understand
+      the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification with the world
+      around which characterized the primitive man&mdash;or to look upon Nature
+      with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE know so well
+      from our botany and natural history books what these things are. Why
+      should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as to our
+      perfect comprehension of them?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really
+      ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have&mdash;except most
+      superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D.
+      Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a
+      certain tree, miles away&mdash;but what or whom he saw when he got there,
+      he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a
+      tulip-tree near which he sometimes sat&mdash;“the Apollo of the woods&mdash;tall
+      and graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
+      throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could
+      walk, if it only would”; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually
+      once saw his “favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around
+      VERY CURIOUSLY.” (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
+      vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still
+      leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its
+      skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life (or
+      electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of heaven, and
+      of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same energies from
+      below. The day was quite still and there was no movement in the branches,
+      but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or separable
+      organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting
+      the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing activity.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences.
+      Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in half
+      a gale in June&mdash;the wind and the sun streaming over every little twig
+      and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy and
+      bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two visitants;
+      or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge sycamore with
+      ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain
+      brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known that these creatures
+      are but likenesses of himself, intimately and deeply-related to him in
+      their love and hunger longing, and, like himself too, unfathomed and
+      unfathomable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations like
+      these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
+      incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
+      their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere book
+      knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like the
+      animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
+      effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
+      they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion with
+      them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally protoplasmic;
+      and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form of Magic. When
+      at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and its
+      observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling, took
+      clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually emerged
+      into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific laws and
+      doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also are the gods
+      and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these things, with
+      their set and angular outlines, have served in the past and will serve in
+      the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of knowledge of which
+      at present we only dream, and will lead us on to a renewed power of
+      perception which again will not be the laborious product of thought but a
+      direct and instantaneous intuition like that of the animals&mdash;and the
+      angels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in modern
+      style on these things, I yet have no reasonable doubt that he felt (and
+      FEELS, in those cases where we can still trace the workings of his mind)
+      his essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more intimately,
+      if less analytically, than we do to-day. If the animals with all their
+      wonderful gifts are (as we readily admit) a veritable part of Nature&mdash;so
+      that they live and move and have their being more or less submerged in the
+      spirit of the great world around them&mdash;then Man, when he first began
+      to differentiate himself from them, must for a long time have remained in
+      this SUBconscious unity, becoming only distinctly CONSCIOUS of it when he
+      was already beginning to lose it. That early dawn of distinct
+      consciousness corresponded to the period of belief in Magic. In that first
+      mystic illumination almost every object was invested with a halo of
+      mystery or terror or adoration. Things were either tabu, in which case
+      they were dangerous, and often not to be touched or even looked upon&mdash;or
+      they were overflowing with magic grace and influence, in which case they
+      were holy, and any rite which released their influence was also holy.
+      William Blake, that modern prophetic child, beheld a Tree full of angels;
+      the Central Australian native believes bushes to be the abode of spirits
+      which leap into the bodies of passing women and are the cause of the
+      conception of children; Moses saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the
+      mimosa) like a flame of fire, with Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it,
+      and he put off his shoes for he felt that the place was holy; Osiris was
+      at times regarded as a Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to
+      as “the solitary one in the acacia”&mdash;which reminds us curiously of
+      the “burning bush.” The same is true of others of the gods; in the old
+      Norse mythology Ygdrasil was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the
+      soul of the universe; the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and
+      must on no account be cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among
+      its branches. It is of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no
+      practical use, (2) but so holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb
+      it. The Burmese believe the things of nature, but especially the trees, to
+      be the abode of spirits. “To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the
+      Greek of long ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the
+      mountains are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all
+      kinds of Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living
+      round about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge
+      figtree that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the
+      fern-like fronds of the tamarind.” (3)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women
+      (and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very near
+      akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these,
+      including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The
+      well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to a
+      Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization&mdash;the
+      Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god
+      Krishna’s marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down to
+      the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant
+      women&mdash;the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those
+      who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are
+      benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the Clove
+      plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to fertilize
+      them. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite indefinitely.
+      There is no end to them. They all indicate&mdash;what was instinctively
+      felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day who are not
+      blinded by “civilization” (and Herbert Spencer!) that the world outside us
+      is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is not dead and senseless
+      but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and intelligence resembling
+      our own. It is this perception, this conviction of our essential unity
+      with the whole of creation, which lay from the first at the base of all
+      Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was hardly a conscious perception.
+      Only later, when it gradually became more conscious, did it evolve itself
+      into the definite forms of the gods and the creeds&mdash;but of that
+      process I will speak more in detail presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in the
+      very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which his
+      tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and
+      assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its many
+      gifts to mankind&mdash;its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its
+      timber, and other invaluable products&mdash;why should it not become the
+      natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man’s worship is ever
+      drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in
+      its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful of
+      the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and Serpent
+      is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so potent in the
+      life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual most obviously
+      fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds (or even the crops)
+      is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent combined, and for all
+      the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it reverence. In the Bible
+      with more or less veiled sexual significance we have this combination in
+      the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen Serpent and Pole which Moses set
+      up in the wilderness (as a cure for the fiery serpents of lust);
+      illustrations of the same are said to be found in the temples of Egypt and
+      of South India, and even in the ancient temples of Central America. (1) In
+      the myth of Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides garden are
+      guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans, the Persians and the Babylonians had
+      also legends of the Fall of man through a serpent tempting him to taste of
+      the fruit of a holy Tree. And De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic
+      meaning of these stories, says “the legends concerning the tree of golden
+      apples or figs which yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in
+      which the life, the fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the
+      hero have their beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan
+      origin: in India, Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and
+      Italy.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
+Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting itself.
+      To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case of the
+      Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago,
+      speaks of “that sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which
+      appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of
+      culture, and still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous
+      countries.” The fascination of the Snake&mdash;the fascination of its
+      mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its glittering eye,
+      its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of Death&mdash;is a
+      thing felt even more by women than by men&mdash;and for a reason (from
+      what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who in the
+      story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions. No wonder
+      that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a gigantic snake
+      (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies of appeasement,
+      and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship of Zeus and the
+      Olympian gods.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people wonder&mdash;hearing
+      nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a Corn-spirit or Corn-god&mdash;wonder
+      that any human beings could have been so foolish. But probably the good
+      people who wonder thus have never REALLY LOOKED (with their town-dazed
+      eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of all the wonderful things in
+      Nature I hardly know any that thrills one more with a sense of wizardry
+      than just this very thing&mdash;to observe, each year, this disclosure of
+      the Ear within the Blade&mdash;first a swelling of the sheath, then a
+      transparency and a whitey-green face within a hooded shroud, and then the
+      perfect spike of grain disengaging itself and spiring upward towards the
+      sky&mdash;“the resurrection of the wheat with pale visage appearing out of
+      the ground.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
+approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) “speaks of the
+Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to
+the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect
+revelation&mdash;in solemn silence&mdash;a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr
+stacon]).”&mdash;Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have
+      aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world was
+      so much more direct than ours&mdash;more ‘animistic’ if you like! What
+      wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation),
+      what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
+      sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior of
+      men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as an
+      acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would no
+      doubt be graciously accepted!&mdash;(for was it not well known that where
+      blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more
+      generous?)&mdash;what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to
+      propitiate the unseen power&mdash;even though the outline and form of the
+      latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of
+      the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character,
+      says (1): “The primitive conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly
+      out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated
+      the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a
+      festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman
+      actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of
+      the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites in
+      the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again with
+      the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a charm to ensure the growth of
+      the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was
+      practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields long
+      before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the stately
+      ritual of the temple.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See ch. xv.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of
+      Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically
+      poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also
+      common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been offered
+      at the grave of Osiris. We hear that the Indians in Ecuador used to
+      sacrifice men’s hearts and pour out human blood on their fields when they
+      sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same, allowing his
+      blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico girls were
+      sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes GRIND their (male)
+      victim, like corn, between two stones. (“I’ll grind his bones to make me
+      bread.”) Among the Khonds of East India&mdash;who were particularly given
+      to this kind of ritual&mdash;the very TEARS of the sufferer were an
+      incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The Golden Bough, vol. vii, “The Corn-Spirit,” pp. 236 sq.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his
+      astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct
+      role as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body.
+      “The tremendous mana of the wild bull,” says Gilbert Murray, “occupies
+      almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual.” (1) Even to us there is
+      something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of this animal’s glory of
+      strength and fury and sexual power. No wonder the primitives worshiped
+      him, or that they devised rituals which should convey his power and
+      vitality by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts they ate his flesh
+      and drank his blood as a magic symbol and means of salvation.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Four Stages, p. 34.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>
+VI.<br/>
+MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a few
+      more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic. Magic
+      represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of Religion&mdash;i.e.
+      the instinctive sense of Man’s inner continuity with the world around him,
+      TAKING SHAPE: a fanciful shape it is true, but with very real reaction on
+      his practical life and feelings. (1) On the other side it represented the
+      beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt not merely to FEEL but to
+      UNDERSTAND the mystery of things.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion
+see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very puerile, very
+      superficial. As E. B. Tylor says (1) of primitive folk in general, “they
+      mistook an imaginary for a real connection.” And he instances the case of
+      the inhabitants of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope, seven
+      furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of Artemis, in order to
+      place the former under the protection of the latter! WE should lay down a
+      telephone wire, and consider that we established a much more efficient
+      connection; but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men, like children,
+      rely on surface associations. Among the Dyaks of Borneo (2) when the men
+      are away fighting, the WOMEN must use a sort of telepathic magic in order
+      to safeguard them&mdash;that is, they must themselves rise early and keep
+      awake all day (lest darkness and sleep should give advantage to the
+      enemy); they must not OIL their hair (lest their husbands should make any
+      SLIPS); they must eat sparingly and put aside rice at every meal (so that
+      the men may not want for food). And so on. Similar superstitions are
+      common. But they gradually lead to a little thought, and then to a little
+      more, and so to the discovery of actual and provable influences. Perhaps
+      one day the cord connecting the temple with Ephesus was drawn TIGHT and it
+      was found that messages could be, by tapping, transmitted along it. That
+      way lay the discovery of a fact. In an age which worshiped fertility,
+      whether in mankind or animals, TWINS were ever counted especially blest,
+      and were credited with a magic power. (The Constellation of the Twins was
+      thought peculiarly lucky.) Perhaps after a time it was discovered that
+      twins sometimes run in families, and in such cases really do bring
+      fertility with them. In cattle it is known nowadays that there are more
+      twins of the female sex than of the male sex. (3)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See The Golden Bough, i, 127.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41,
+note.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Observations of this kind were naturally made by the ablest members of the
+      tribe&mdash;who were in all probability the medicine-men and wizards&mdash;and
+      brought in consequence power into their hands. The road to power in fact&mdash;and
+      especially was this the case in societies which had not yet developed
+      wealth and property&mdash;lay through Magic. As far as magic represented
+      early superstition and religion it laid hold of the <i>hearts</i> of men&mdash;their
+      hopes and fears; as far as it represented science and the beginnings of
+      actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a sense of power, and gave
+      form to their lives and customs. We have no reason to suppose that the
+      early magicians and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked or bent on mere
+      self-aggrandizement&mdash;any more than we have to think the same of the
+      average country vicar or country doctor of to-day. They were merely men a
+      trifle wiser or more instructed than their flocks. But though probably in
+      most cases their original intentions were decent enough, they were not
+      proof against the temptations which the possession of power always brings,
+      and as time went on they became liable to trade more and more upon this
+      power for their own advancement. In the matter of Religion the history of
+      the Christian priesthood through the centuries shows sufficiently to what
+      misuse such power can be put; and in the matter of Science it is a warning
+      to us of the dangers attending the formation of a scientific priesthood,
+      such as we see growing up around us to-day. In both cases&mdash;whether
+      Science or Religion&mdash;vanity, personal ambition, lust of domination
+      and a hundred other vices, unless corrected by a real devotion to the
+      public good, may easily bring as many evils in their train as those they
+      profess to cure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly but
+      necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there is much evidence to
+      show that in the case of many tribes at any rate, it was HE who became
+      ultimate chief and leader and laid the foundations of Kingship. The
+      Basileus was always a sacred personality, and often united in himself as
+      head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare and leader in priestly
+      rites&mdash;like Agamemnon in Homer, or Saul or David in the Bible. As a
+      magician he had influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the
+      blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+                    “the dark earth beareth in season<br/>
+     Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and alway<br/>
+      Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in abundance.” (1)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare; and Schoolcraft,
+      in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang, (1) says of the Dacotah Indians “the
+      war-chief who leads the party to war is always one of these medicine-men.”
+      This connection, however, by which the magician is transformed into the
+      king has been abundantly studied, and need not be further dwelt upon here.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And what of the transformation of the king into a god&mdash;or of the
+      Magician or Priest directly into the same? Perhaps in order to appreciate
+      this, one must make a further digression.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two main objects in
+      life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle and crops, for food; and (2) to
+      placate or ward off Death; and it seemed very obvious&mdash;even before
+      any distinct figures of gods, or any idea of prayer, had arisen&mdash;to
+      attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism, of Initiation
+      (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of a Second Birth, which we
+      associate with fully-formed religions, did belong also to the age of
+      Magic; and they all implied a belief in some kind of re-incarnation&mdash;in
+      a life going forward continually and being renewed in birth again and
+      again. It is curious that we find such a belief among the lowest savages
+      even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Central Australian tribes, says
+      the belief is firmly rooted among them “that the human soul undergoes an
+      endless series of re-incarnations&mdash;the living men and women of one
+      generation being nothing but the spirits of their ancestors come to life
+      again, and destined themselves to be reborn in the persons of their
+      descendants. During the interval between two re-incarnations the souls
+      live in their nanja spots, or local totem-centres, which are always
+      natural objects such as trees or rocks. Each totem-clan has a number of
+      such totem-centres scattered over the country. There the souls of the dead
+      men and women of the totem, but no others, congregate, and are born again
+      in human form when a favorable opportunity presents itself.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of
+      the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also. At the great
+      Spring-ritual among the primitive Greeks “the tribe and the growing earth
+      were renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds, the
+      tribe from its dead ancestors.” And the whole process projects itself in
+      the idea of a spirit of the year, who “in the first stage is living, then
+      dies with each year, and thirdly rises again from the dead, raising the
+      whole dead world with him. The Greeks called him in this stage ‘The Third
+      One’ (Tritos Soter) or ‘the Saviour’; and the renovation ceremonies were
+      accompanied by a casting-off of the old year, the old garments, and
+      everything that is polluted by the infection of death.” (1) Thus the
+      multiplication of the crops and the renovation of the tribe, and at the
+      same time the evasion and placation of death, were all assured by similar
+      rites and befitting ceremonial magic. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of
+the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male
+members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja
+spots&mdash;the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the
+seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for
+their re-incarnation.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned&mdash;of the
+      magical worship of Bulls and Bears and Rams and Cats and Emus and
+      Kangaroos, of Trees and Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the spirit
+      of the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of the ground&mdash;there
+      is still the same idea or moving inspiration, the sense mentioned in the
+      foregoing chapter, the feeling (hardly yet conscious of its own meaning)
+      of intimate relationship and unity with all this outer world, the
+      instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed by the spirit of Man,
+      if the man can only find the right ritual, the right word, the right
+      spell, wherewith to move it. An aura of emotion surrounded everything&mdash;of
+      terror, of tabu, of fascination, of desire. The world, to these people,
+      was transparent with presences related to themselves; and though hunger
+      and sex may have been the dominant and overwhelmingly practical needs of
+      their life, yet their outlook on the world was essentially poetic and
+      imaginative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and the belief in
+      spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being alive, the
+      gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed (1)&mdash;that
+      is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane
+      beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as it were from
+      a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly evolving, but it was only
+      incipient. For the time being&mdash;though there might be orders and
+      degrees of spirits (and of gods)&mdash;every such being was only conceived
+      of, and could only be conceived of, as actually a part of Nature, dwelling
+      in and interlaced with some phenomenon of Earth and Sky, and having no
+      separate existence.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,
+see Westermarck’s Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and
+      separable gods and goddesses&mdash;each with his or her well-marked
+      outline and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of
+      India, or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To
+      this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an
+      ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the
+      Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the
+      figures of the supranatural gods arose from a process in the human mind
+      similar to that which the photographer adopts when by photographing a
+      number of faces on the same plate, and so superposing their images on one
+      another, he produces a so-called “composite” photograph or image. Thus, in
+      the photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members of the same
+      family superposed upon one another may produce a composite image or ideal
+      of that family type, or the portraits of a number of Aztecs or of a number
+      of Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the Aztec or of the Apache
+      types. And so in the mental sphere of each member of a tribe the many
+      images of the well-known Warriors or Priests or wise and gracious Women of
+      that tribe did inevitably combine at last to composite figures of gods and
+      goddesses&mdash;on whom the enthusiasm and adoration of the tribe was
+      concentrated. (1) Miss Harrison has ingeniously suggested how the leading
+      figures in the magic rituals of the past&mdash;being the figures on which
+      all eyes would be concentrated; and whose importance would be imprinted on
+      every mind&mdash;lent themselves to this process. The suffering Victim,
+      bound and scourged and crucified, recurring year after year as the
+      centre-figure of a thousand ritual processions, would at last be
+      dramatized and idealized in the great race-consciousness into the form of
+      a Suffering God&mdash;a Jesus Christ or a Dionysus or Osiris&mdash;dismembered
+      or crucified for the salvation of mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man&mdash;or
+      rather the succession of Priests or Medicine-Men&mdash;whose figures would
+      recur again and again as leaders and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be
+      glorified at last into the composite-image of a God in whom were
+      concentrated all magic powers. “Recent researches,” says Gilbert Murray,
+      “have shown us in abundance the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder
+      and lightning and rain.” Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The
+      particular medicine-man may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only
+      the individual representative of the glorified and composite being who
+      exists in the mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be
+      unworthy, but is surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of
+      Royalty). “The real [gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far
+      away, hidden in clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible
+      mountain. If the mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper
+      sky. The medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He
+      has some connection with the great god more intimate than that of other
+      men... he knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him.”
+      (2) Thus did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but
+      three names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the
+      god.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, “The Gods as Apparitions
+of the Race-Life.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) The Four Stages, p. 140.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in
+      chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals
+      and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of
+      the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people
+      whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear, and
+      who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there would
+      grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of emotions&mdash;emotions
+      of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and so forth&mdash;an
+      image of a <i>divine Bear</i> in whom they lived and moved and had their being.
+      For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or a Lamb or a
+      Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same way spring up the
+      image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred kangaroo. Another group
+      again might come to worship a Serpent as its presiding genius, or a
+      particular kind of Tree, simply because these objects were and had been
+      for centuries prominent factors in its yearly and seasonal Magic. As
+      Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo (bred by Fear) which by first
+      forbidding contact with the totem-animal or priest or magician-chief
+      gradually invested him with Awe and Divinity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to this theory the god&mdash;the full-grown god in human shape,
+      dwelling apart and beyond the earth&mdash;did not come first, but was a
+      late and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out
+      of the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is
+      much supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early
+      cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The
+      Egyptian religion was full of such divinities&mdash;the jackal-headed
+      Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of
+      darkness, clad in a vulture’s skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in
+      Greece, Athena with an owl’s head, or Herakles masked in the hide and jaws
+      of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that, following on
+      the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or medicine-man or
+      actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the skin and head of
+      that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask&mdash;this partly in
+      order to appear to the people as the true representative of the totem, and
+      partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic virtues and mana of
+      the beast, which he could then duly impart to the crowd? Zeus, it must be
+      remembered, wears the aegis, or goat-skin&mdash;said to be the hide of the
+      goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy; there are a number of
+      legends which connected the Arcadian Artemis with the worship of the bear,
+      Apollo with the wolf, and so forth. And, most curious as showing
+      similarity of rites between the Old and New Worlds, there are found plenty
+      of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in religious processions among
+      the native tribes of both North and South America. In the Atlas of Spix
+      and Martius (who travelled together in the Amazonian forests about 1820)
+      there is an understanding and characteristic picture of the men (and some
+      women) of the tribe of the Tecunas moving in procession through the woods
+      mostly naked, except for wearing animal heads and masks&mdash;the masks
+      representing Cranes of various kinds, Ducks, the Opossum, the Jaguar, the
+      Parrot, etc., probably symbolic of their respective clans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed, the forms of the
+      Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual figures of men and women, of
+      youths and girls, who year after year took part in the ancient rituals.
+      Just as the Queen of the May or Father Christmas with us are idealized
+      forms derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded old men who
+      took leading parts in the May or December mummings and thus gained their
+      apotheosis in our literature and tradition&mdash;so doubtless Zeus with
+      his thunderbolts and arrows of lightning is the idealization into Heaven
+      of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares the god of War, the
+      similar idealization of the leading warrior in the ritual war-dance
+      preceding an attack on a neighboring tribe; and Mercury of the
+      foot-running Messenger whose swiftness in those days (devoid of steam or
+      electricity) was so precious a tribal possession.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And here it must be remembered that this explanation of the genesis of the
+      gods only applies to the SHAPES and FIGURES of the various deities. It
+      does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or a
+      Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has quite
+      another source. Some people have jeered at the ‘animistic’ or
+      ‘anthropomorphic’ tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the
+      forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a kind
+      of superior pity they speak of “the poor Indian whose untutored mind sees
+      God in clouds and hears him in the wind.” But I must confess that to me
+      the “poor Indian” seems on the whole to show more good sense than his
+      critics, and to have aimed his rude arrows at the philosophic mark more
+      successfully than a vast number of his learned and scientific successors.
+      A consideration of what we have said above would show that early people
+      felt their unity with Nature so deeply and intimately that&mdash;like the
+      animals themselves&mdash;they did not think consciously or theorize about
+      it. It was just their life to be&mdash;like the beasts of the field and
+      the trees of the forest&mdash;a part of the whole flux of things,
+      non-differentiated so to speak. What more natural or indeed more logically
+      correct than for them to assume (when they first began to think or
+      differentiate themselves) that these other creatures, these birds, beasts
+      and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same blood as
+      themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and having the same interior
+      nature? What more reasonable (if indeed they credited THEMSELVES with
+      having some kind of soul or spirit) than to credit these other creatures
+      with a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the Guiana Indians,
+      says that for them “the whole world swarms with beings.” Surely this could
+      not be taken to indicate an untutored mind&mdash;unless indeed a mind
+      untutored in the nonsense of the Schools&mdash;but rather a very directly
+      perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing that these people
+      themselves were in the animal stage of evolution) than that they should
+      pay great reverence to some ideal animal&mdash;first cousin or ancestor&mdash;who
+      played an important part in their tribal existence, and make of this
+      animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed to
+      some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more
+      intelligent and emotional&mdash;more specially human in fact&mdash;than
+      that of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and
+      ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior and
+      more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness of its own
+      intimate quality, and still deeply penetrated with the sense of its
+      kinship to external nature, it would inevitably and perfectly logically
+      credit the latter with an inner life and intelligence, more distinctly
+      human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE
+      ‘anthropomorphic’ instead of less so; and one sees that this is a process
+      that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding a certain parenthesis
+      in the process, due to obvious elements in our ‘Civilization’ and to the
+      temporary and fallacious domination of a leaden-eyed so-called ‘Science.’
+      According to this view the true evolution of Religion and Man’s outlook on
+      the world has proceeded not by the denial by man of his unity with the
+      world, but by his seeing and understanding that unity more deeply. And the
+      more deeply he understands himself the more certainly he will recognize in
+      the external world a Being or beings resembling himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      W. H. Hudson&mdash;whose mind is certainly not of a quality to be jeered
+      at&mdash;speaks of Animism as “the projection of ourselves into nature:
+      the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more
+      powerful, in all visible things”; and continues, “old as I am this same
+      primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
+      persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost afraid
+      to say how deeply I was moved by it.” (1) Nor will it be quite forgotten
+      that Shelley once said:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+     The moveless pillar of a mountain’s weight<br/>
+     Is active living spirit. Every grain<br/>
+     Is sentient both in unity and part,<br/>
+     And the minutest atom comprehends<br/>
+     A world of loves and hatreds.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism is I say inevitable,
+      and perfectly logical. But the great value of the work done by some of
+      those investigators whom I have quoted has been to show that among quite
+      primitive people (whose interior life and ‘soul-sense’ was only very
+      feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature were correspondingly
+      feeble. The reflections of themselves projected into the world beyond
+      could not reach the stature of eternal ‘gods,’ but were rather of the
+      quality of ephemeral phantoms and ghosts; and the ceremonials and creeds
+      of that period are consequently more properly described as Magic than as
+      Religion. There have indeed been great controversies as to whether there
+      has or has not been, in the course of religious evolution, a <i>pre</i>-animistic
+      stage. Probably of course human evolution in this matter must have been
+      perfectly continuous from stages presenting the very feeblest or an
+      absolutely deficient animistic sense to the very highest manifestations of
+      anthropomorphism; but as there is a good deal of evidence to show that
+      <i>animals</i> (notably dogs and horses) see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly
+      to be enlarged so far as to include the pre-human species. Anyhow it must
+      be remembered that the question is one of <i>consciousness</i>&mdash;that is, of
+      how far and to what degree consciousness of self has been developed in the
+      animal or the primitive man or the civilized man, and therefore how far
+      and to what degree the animal or human creature has credited the outside
+      world with a similar consciousness. It is not a question of whether there
+      <i>is</i> an inner life and <i>sub</i>-consciousness common to all these creatures of
+      the earth and sky, because that, I take it, is a fact beyond question;
+      they all emerge or have emerged from the same matrix, and are rooted in
+      identity; but it is a question of how far they are <i>aware</i> of this, and how
+      far by separation (which is the genius of evolution) each individual
+      creature has become conscious of the interior nature both of itself and of
+      the other creatures <i>and</i> of the great whole which includes them all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that Anthropomorphism,
+      in man’s conception of the gods, is itself of course only a stage and
+      destined to pass away. In so far, that is, as the term indicates a belief
+      in divine beings corresponding to our PRESENT conception of ourselves&mdash;that
+      is as separate personalities having each a separate and limited character
+      and function, and animated by the separatist motives of ambition,
+      possession, power, vainglory, superiority, patronage, self-greed,
+      self-satisfaction, etc.&mdash;in so far as anthropomorphism is the
+      expression of that kind of belief it is of course destined, with the
+      illusion from which it springs, to pass away. When man arrives at the
+      final consciousness in which the idea of such a self, superior or inferior
+      or in any way antagonistic to others, ceases to operate, then he will
+      return to his first and primal condition, and will cease to need ANY
+      special religion or gods, knowing himself and all his fellows to be divine
+      and the origin and perfect fruition of all.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>
+VII.<br/>
+RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      There is a passage in Richard Jefferies’ imperishably beautiful book The
+      Story of my Heart&mdash;a passage well known to all lovers of that
+      prose-poet&mdash;in which he figures himself standing “in front of the
+      Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory,” and
+      pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery of life. “Is there any theory,
+      philosophy, or creed,” he says, “is there any system of culture, any
+      formulated method, able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this
+      agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which they
+      may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving heart&mdash;something
+      real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like seaweed, they
+      are dashed; something to give each separate personality sunshine and a
+      flower in its own existence now; something to shape this million-handed
+      labor to an end and outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers
+      to those who must succeed? Something real now, and not in the spirit-land;
+      in this hour now, as I stand and the sun burns.... Full well aware that
+      all has failed, yet, side by side with the sadness of that knowledge,
+      there lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun,
+      that there is yet something to be found.... It must be dragged forth by
+      the might of thought from the immense forces of the universe.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In answer to this passage we may say “No,&mdash;a thousand times No! there
+      is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which will
+      meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the human
+      whirlpool.” And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How terrible
+      if one of these bloodless ‘systems’ which strew the history of religion
+      and philosophy and the political and social paths of human endeavor HAD
+      been found absolutely correct and universally applicable&mdash;so that
+      every human being would be compelled to pass through its machine-like maw,
+      every personality to be crushed under its Juggernath wheels! No, thank
+      Heaven! there is no theory or creed or system; and yet there is something&mdash;as
+      Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great longing desired&mdash;that
+      CAN satisfy; and that, the root of all religion, has been hinted at in the
+      last chapter. It is the CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing,
+      deep down within us: it is the Soul’s intuition of its roots in
+      Omnipresence and Eternity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last chapter&mdash;whatever
+      they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic or transcendental,
+      whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and abstract&mdash;are
+      essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are
+      anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will catch at this,
+      saying “Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the mind, ephemeral
+      dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and having no real
+      substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they will say) is a
+      history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over it? These divine
+      grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced Pashts, this Isis,
+      queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra and Agni and Kali and
+      Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus Christ and Satan and the
+      Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards onto a screen; the constitution
+      of the human mind makes them all tend to be anthropomorphic; but that is
+      all; they each and all inevitably pass away. Why waste time over them?”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at the matter.
+      These gods and creeds ARE only projections of the human mind. But all the
+      same it misses, does this view, the essential fact. It misses the fact
+      that there is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of a
+      shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not directly see it) as
+      well as the existence of a solid form which intercepts that light. Deep,
+      deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of the
+      world-consciousness&mdash;so deep indeed that the vast majority of
+      individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned outwards
+      is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions passing across
+      their sky; they are unaware that the latter are only shadows&mdash;silhouettes
+      of the forms inhabiting their own minds. (1) The vast majority of people
+      have never observed their own minds; their own mental forms. They have
+      only observed the reflections cast by these. Thus it may be said, in this
+      matter, that there are three degrees of reality. There are the mere
+      shadows&mdash;the least real and most evanescent; there are the actual
+      mental outlines of humanity (and of the individual), much more real, but
+      themselves also of course slowly changing; and most real of all, and
+      permanent, there is the light “which lighteth every man that cometh into
+      the world”&mdash;the glorious light of the world-consciousness. Of this
+      last it may be said that it never changes. Every thing is known to it&mdash;even
+      the very IMPEDIMENTS to its shining. But as it is from the impediments to
+      the shining of a light that shadows are cast, so we now may understand
+      that the things of this world and of humanity, though real in their
+      degree, have chiefly a kind of negative value; they are opaquenesses,
+      clouds, materialisms, ignorances, and the inner light falling upon them
+      gradually reveals their negative character and gradually dissolves them
+      away till they are lost in the extreme and eternal Splendor. I think
+      Jefferies, when he asked that question with which I have begun this
+      chapter, was in some sense subconsciously, if not quite consciously, aware
+      of the answer. His frequent references to the burning blazing sun
+      throughout The Story of the Heart seem to be an indication of his real
+      deep-down attitude of mind.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See, in the same connection, Plato’s allegory of the Cave,
+Republic, Book vii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away truly like
+      ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent in their study is wasted, is
+      a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much more
+      real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human
+      mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or
+      a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a
+      considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the
+      world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the
+      time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite stage in their
+      evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly it was destined to pass
+      away, but it was a step, and a necessary step in the great process; and
+      certainly it was opaque and brutish, but it is through the opaque things
+      of the world, and not through the transparent, that we become aware of the
+      light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be worth while to give instances of how some early rituals and
+      creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous or preposterous, were really
+      the indications of important moral and social conceptions evolving in the
+      heart of man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected with the
+      ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such innumerable examples are now
+      to be found in the modern books on Anthropology. If we assume, as I have
+      done more than once, that the earliest state of Man was one in which he
+      did not consciously separate himself from the world, animate and
+      inanimate, which surrounded him, then (as I have also said) it was
+      perfectly natural for him to take some animal which bulked large on his
+      horizon&mdash;some food-animal for instance&mdash;and to pay respect to it
+      as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor and totem-symbol;
+      or, seeing the boundless blessing of the cornfields, to believe in some
+      kind of spirit of the corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical ghost)
+      which, reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind from famine. But
+      then no sooner had he done this than he was bound to perceive that in
+      cutting down the corn or in eating his totem-bear or kangaroo he was
+      slaying his own best self and benefactor. In that instant the
+      consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some undefined yet no less
+      disturbing and alarming form would come in. If, before, his ritual magic
+      had been concentrated on the simple purpose of multiplying the animal or,
+      vegetable forms of his food, now in addition his magical endeavor would be
+      turned to averting the just wrath of the spirits who animated these forms&mdash;just
+      indeed, for the rudest savage would perceive the wrong done and the
+      probability of its retribution. Clearly the wrong done could only be
+      expiated by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind on the part of the man,
+      or the tribe&mdash;that is by the offering to the totem-animal or to the
+      corn-spirit of some victim whom these nature powers in their turn could
+      feed upon and assimilate. In this way the nature-powers would be appeased,
+      the sense of unity would be restored, and the first At-one-ment effected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is hardly necessary to recite in any detail the cruel and hideous
+      sacrifices which have been perpetrated in this sense all over the world,
+      sometimes in appeasement of a wrong committed or supposed to have been
+      committed by the tribe or some member of it, sometimes in placation or for
+      the averting of death, or defeat, or plague, sometimes merely in
+      fulfilment of some long-standing custom of forgotten origin&mdash;the
+      flayings and floggings and burnings and crucifixions of victims without
+      end, carried out in all deliberation and solemnity of established ritual.
+      I have mentioned some cases connected with the sowing of the corn. The
+      Bible is full of such things, from the intended sacrifice of Isaac by his
+      father Abraham, to the actual crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews. The
+      first-born sons were claimed by a god who called himself “jealous” and
+      were only to be redeemed by a substitute. (1) Of the Canaanites it was
+      said that “even their daughters they have BURNT in the fire to their
+      gods”; (2) and of the King of Moab, that when he saw his army in danger of
+      defeat, “he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead and
+      offered him for a burnt-offering on the wall!” (3) Dr. Frazer (4) mentions
+      the similar case of the Carthaginians (about B.C. 300) sacrificing two
+      hundred children of good family as a propitiation to Baal and to save
+      their beloved city from the assaults of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles.
+      And even so we hear that on that occasion three hundred more young folk
+      VOLUNTEERED to die for the fatherland.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Exodus xxxiv. 20.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Deut. xii. 31.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) 2 Kings iii. 27.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) The Golden Bough, vol. “The Dying God,” p. 167.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to their gods
+      Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are described in much detail by
+      Sahagun, the Spanish missionary of the sixteenth century. The victims were
+      mostly prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered by
+      thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol or figure of the
+      god as largely plated with gold and holding his hands palm upward and in a
+      downward sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The
+      children, who had previously been borne in triumphal state on litters over
+      the crowd and decorated with every ornamental device of feathers and
+      flowers and wings, were placed one by one on the vast hands and ROLLED
+      DOWN into the flames&mdash;as if the god were himself offering them. (1)
+      As the procession approached the temple, the members of it wept and danced
+      and sang, and here again the abundance of tears was taken for a good
+      augury of rain. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the
+sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is related
+concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage (see Diodorus
+Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould’s Religious Belief, vol. i, p. 375).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) “A los ninos que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para
+llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevabos en unas literas sobre los hombros,
+estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores: iban tanendo,
+cantando y bailando delante de ellos... Cuando Ileviban los ninos a
+matar, si llevaban y echaban muchos lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los
+llevaban porque tomaban pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas
+en aquel ano.” Sahagun, Historia Nueva Espana, Bk. II, ch. i.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous figures&mdash;that
+      of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid with gold and precious
+      stones; and beside it were “braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three
+      Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and
+      the savor of incense were the sacrifice.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account of the sacrifice of
+      a perfect youth at Easter-time&mdash;which date Sahagun connects with the
+      Christian festival of the Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had
+      been held in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the god
+      (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every luxury and
+      fulfilment of his last wish (including such four courtesans as he desired)
+      had been granted him. At the last and on the fatal day, leaving his
+      companions and his worshipers behind, be slowly ascended the Temple
+      staircase; stripping on each step the ornaments from his body; and
+      breaking and casting away his flutes and other musical instruments; till,
+      reaching the summit, he was stretched, curved on his back, and belly
+      upwards, over the altar stone, while the priest with obsidian knife cut
+      his breast open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet beating, as
+      an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and while the heart still lived,
+      his successor for the next year was chosen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the similar offering
+      of a woman to a goddess. In both cases (he explains) of young man or young
+      woman, the victims were richly adorned in the guise of the god or goddess
+      to whom they were offered, and at the same time great largesse of food was
+      distributed to all who needed. (Here we see the connection in the general
+      mind between the gift of food (by the gods) and the sacrifice of precious
+      blood (by the people).) More than once Sahagun mentions that the victims
+      in these Mexican ceremonials not infrequently offered THEMSELVES as a
+      voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott says (1) that the offering of one’s life
+      to the gods was “sometimes voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death
+      opening a sure passage into Paradise.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Frazer describes (1) the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea in
+      which “a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king’s robes,
+      seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he
+      pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the king’s
+      concubines.” But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal
+      robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly astonishing to
+      find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far removed in space
+      and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D. and the Babylonians
+      perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know that this subject of the
+      yearly sacrifice of a victim attired as a king or god is one that Dr.
+      Frazer has especially made his own, and for further information on it his
+      classic work should be consulted.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Golden Bough, “The Dying God,” p. 114. (See also S. Reinach,
+Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes largely from Sahagun,
+      and summarizes his conclusions in the following passage: “The general
+      theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human
+      sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for the male gods, of a
+      WOMAN for each goddess. (1) The latter victims were regarded as the living
+      images or incarnations of the divinities in, each case; for no system of
+      worship carried farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice
+      (? victim), and of both with the officiating priest. The connection was emphasized
+      by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims&mdash;just as
+      in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin or bull-hide or goat-skin or
+      fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an image of
+      the god was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten
+      in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally
+connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and
+the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae.
+It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from all guilt and avert
+the wrath of the god (the Sun). A man and a woman, as representing
+the male and female population, were led about with a garland of figs
+(fertility) round their necks, to the sound of flutes and singing. They
+were then scourged, sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore.
+(Nettleship and Sandys.)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know a mere
+      thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human sacrifice all over the
+      world. We hold up our hands in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli
+      dropping children from his fingers into the flames, but we have to
+      remember that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content to
+      describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about the floor of Hell!
+      What sort of god, we may ask, did Augustine worship? The Being who could
+      condemn children to such a fate was certainly no better than the Mexican
+      Idol.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some by no means
+      unworthy conceptions of the greatness of his God. In the same way the
+      Aztecs were in many respects a refined and artistic people, and their
+      religion was not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of them (1)
+      that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord “omnipresent, knowing all
+      thoughts, giving all gifts, without whom Man is as nothing&mdash;invisible,
+      incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and purity, under whose wings
+      we find repose and a sure defence.” How can we reconcile St. Augustine
+      with his own devilish creed, or the religious belief of the Aztecs with
+      their unspeakable cruelties? Perhaps we can only reconcile them by
+      remembering out of what deeps of barbarism and what nightmares of haunting
+      Fear, man has slowly emerged&mdash;and is even now only slowly emerging;
+      by remembering also that the ancient ceremonies and rituals of Magic and
+      Fear remained on and were cultivated by the multitude in each nation long
+      after the bolder and nobler spirits had attained to breathe a purer air;
+      by remembering that even to the present day in each individual the Old and
+      the New are for a long period thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to
+      believe that the practice of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever
+      revolting details) should have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human
+      race over the globe out of sheer perversity and without some reason which
+      at any rate to the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and
+      convincing. To-day (1918) we are witnessing in the Great European War a
+      carnival of human slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in
+      one stroke all the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical ages;
+      and when we ask the why and wherefore of this horrid spectacle we are
+      told, apparently in all sincerity, and by both the parties engaged, of the
+      noble objects and commanding moralities which inspire and compel it. We
+      can hardly, in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness of
+      the plea, so why should we do so in the former case? In both cases we
+      perceive that underneath the surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and
+      was the great urging and commanding force.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent&mdash;if you once allow for
+      the overwhelming sway of fear&mdash;perfectly reasonable views of human
+      conduct, adopted instinctively by mankind since the earliest times. If in
+      a moment of danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your brother
+      tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you ‘sinned’ against him; and
+      naturally you expiated the sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind
+      made to the one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice were the
+      very foundation of social life and human morality, and must have sprung up
+      as soon as ever, in the course of evolution, man became CAPABLE of
+      differentiating himself from his fellows and regarding his own conduct as
+      that of a ‘separate self.’ It was in the very conception of a separate
+      self that ‘sin’ and disunity first began; and it was by ‘sacrifice’ that
+      unity and harmony were restored, appeasement and atonement effected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated more than once,
+      man felt himself intimately related not only to his brother tribesman, but
+      to the animals and to general Nature. It was not so much that he THOUGHT
+      thus as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously that he
+      was a part of all this outer world. And so he adopted for his totems or
+      presiding spirits every possible animal, as we have seen, and all sorts of
+      nature-phenomena, such as rain and fire and water and clouds, and sun,
+      moon and stars&mdash;which WE consider quite senseless and inanimate.
+      Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he felt the same
+      compunction as I have described him feeling towards his brother tribesmen.
+      He could sin against them too. He could sin against his totem-animal by
+      eating it; he could sin against his ‘brother the ox’ by consuming its
+      strength in the labor of the plough; he could sin against the corn by
+      cutting it down and grinding it into flour, or against the precious and
+      beautiful pine-tree by laying his axe to its roots and converting it into
+      mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he could sin against
+      elemental nature. This might be more difficult to be certain of, but when
+      the signs of elemental displeasure were not to be mistaken&mdash;when the
+      rain withheld itself for months, or the storms and lightning dealt death
+      and destruction, when the crops failed or evil plagues afflicted mankind&mdash;then
+      there could be little uncertainty that he had sinned; and Fear, which had
+      haunted him like a demon from the first day when he became conscious of
+      his separation from his fellows and from Nature, stood over him and urged
+      to dreadful propitiations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious thing. We
+      have seen that to atone for the cutting-down of the corn a human victim
+      would often be slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of this, for
+      wherever the blood and remains of the victim were strewn the corn always
+      sprang up more plentifully. The tribe or human group made reparation thus
+      to the corn; the corn-spirit signified approval. The ‘sin’ was expiated
+      and harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was voluntarily offered by a
+      tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot or otherwise; sometimes the
+      victim was a slave, or a captive enemy; sometimes even an animal. All that
+      did not so much matter. The main thing was that the formal expiation had
+      been carried out, and the wrath of the spirits averted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the bear felt it
+      necessary to kill and eat a bear occasionally; but they could not do this
+      without a sense of guilt, and some fear of vengeance from the great
+      Bear-spirit. So they ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which the
+      tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community with their totem
+      and with each other. And since they could not make any reparation directly
+      to the slain animal itself AFTER its death, they made their reparation
+      BEFORE, bringing all sorts of presents and food to it for a long anterior
+      period, and paying every kind of worship and respect to it. The same with
+      the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia, in some of the
+      cities of Greece as I have already mentioned, the actual bull sacrificed
+      was the handsomest and most carefully nurtured that could be obtained; it
+      was crowned with flowers and led in procession with every mark of
+      reverence and worship. And when&mdash;as I have already pointed out&mdash;at
+      the great Spring festival, instead of a bull or a goat or a ram, a HUMAN
+      victim was immolated, it was a custom (which can be traced very widely
+      over the world) to feed and indulge and honor the victim to the last
+      degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony, arraying him often as a
+      king and placing a crown upon his head, by way of acknowledgment of the
+      noble and necessary work he was doing for the general good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that&mdash;belonging especially
+      to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and
+      beloved a tree&mdash;the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of
+      Attis! when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the
+      hollow an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis
+      was placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the
+      glorious youth&mdash;who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude
+      tusk of Winter&mdash;was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree? (1)
+      At some earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his
+      body bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the
+      maidens to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and
+      male enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice
+      (as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their
+      virile organs&mdash;symbols of fertility in return for the promised and
+      expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For the
+      ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and lamentation,
+      but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a festival of
+      resurrection, when it was discovered&mdash;just as in the case of Osiris&mdash;that
+      the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had flown. How
+      strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the story of
+      Jesus in the Gospels&mdash;the sacrifice of a life made in order to bring
+      salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the victim, and
+      arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or
+      nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty
+      coffin!&mdash;or how not at all strange when we consider in what numerous
+      forms and among how many peoples, this same parable and ritual had as a
+      matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had ultimately come down to
+      bring its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian city, in
+      the special shape with which we are familiar.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): “in sacris
+Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea
+caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis
+sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars
+subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis
+sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis
+formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta
+noctibus piangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it
+      the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call gods, it is
+      important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though it
+      dealt in ‘spirits’&mdash;the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the
+      Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of
+      totem-animals&mdash;it had not yet quite risen to the idea of gods. It had
+      not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and governing
+      the world in solemn conclave&mdash;as from the slopes of Olympus or the
+      recesses of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its inception,
+      to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and Sacrifice, or of Guilt and
+      Expiation&mdash;whatever we like to call it&mdash;was evolved perfectly
+      naturally out of the human mind when brought face to face with Life and
+      Nature) at some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was essentially
+      the result of man’s deep, original and instinctive sense of solidarity
+      with Nature, now denied and belied and to some degree broken up by the
+      growth and conscious insistence of the self-regarding impulses. It was the
+      consciousness of disharmony and disunity, causing men to feel all the more
+      poignantly the desire and the need of reconciliation. It was a realization
+      of union made clear by its very loss. It assumed of course, in a
+      subconscious way as I have already indicated, that the external world was
+      the HABITAT of a mind or minds similar to man’s own; but THAT being
+      granted, it is evident that the particular theories current in this or
+      that place about the nature of the world&mdash;the theories, as we should
+      say, of science or theology&mdash;did not alter the general outlines of
+      the creed; they only colored its details and gave its ritual different
+      dramatic settings. The mental attitudes, for instance, of Abraham
+      sacrificing the ram, or of the Siberian angakout slaughtering a
+      totem-bear, or of a modern and pious Christian contemplating the Saviour
+      on the Cross are really almost exactly the same. I mention this because in
+      tracing the origins or the evolution of religions it is important to
+      distinguish clearly what is essential and universal from that which is
+      merely local and temporary. Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the
+      comparisons just made; but surely it is much more inspiriting and
+      encouraging to think that whatever progress HAS been made in the religious
+      outlook of the world has come about through the gradual mental growth and
+      consent of the peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous
+      event of a rather arbitrary and unexplained character&mdash;which indeed
+      might never be repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious
+      to suggest that it SHOULD be repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the
+      whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to have
+      disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and to have
+      symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are shocked
+      sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals, yet we must
+      allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early people felt the
+      solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we must allow too that
+      the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into rude and ignorant minds
+      with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifice, and with a result perhaps which
+      could not have been compassed in any other way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social
+      life. “It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people”; and not
+      only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important)
+      that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when the
+      occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and
+      implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a perfectly
+      reasonable thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it does. All we
+      have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain and suffering in
+      others, and&mdash;if there is any justice in Nature or Humanity&mdash;it
+      demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If Christianity has
+      any real essence, that essence is perhaps expressed in some such ritual or
+      practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim beginnings of this idea
+      date from the far-back customs of savages coming down from a time anterior
+      to all recorded history.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>
+VIII.<br/>
+PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions of Sin and
+      Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely remote past, and embodied
+      among the various peoples of the world sometimes in crude and bloodthirsty
+      rites, sometimes in symbols and rituals of a gentler and more gracious
+      character, descended at last into Christianity and became a part of its
+      creed and of the creed of the modern world. On the whole perhaps we may
+      trace a slow amelioration in this process and may flatter ourselves that
+      the Christian centuries exhibit a more philosophical understanding of what
+      Sin is, and a more humane conception of what Sacrifice SHOULD be, than the
+      centuries preceding. But I fear that any very decided statement or
+      sweeping generalization to that effect would be&mdash;to say the least&mdash;rash.
+      Perhaps there IS a very slow amelioration; but the briefest glance at the
+      history of the Christian churches&mdash;the horrible rancours and revenges
+      of the clergy and the sects against each other in the fourth and fifth
+      centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting crusades at Beziers and other places
+      and the massacres of the Albigenses in the twelfth and thirteenth
+      centuries, the witch-findings and burnings of the sixteenth and
+      seventeenth, the hideous science-urged and bishop-blessed warfare of the
+      twentieth&mdash;horrors fully as great as any we can charge to the account
+      of the Aztecs or the Babylonians&mdash;must give us pause. Nor must we
+      forget that if there is by chance a substantial amelioration in our modern
+      outlook with regard to these matters the same had begun already before the
+      advent of Christianity and can by no means be ascribed to any miraculous
+      influence of that religion. Abraham was prompted to slay a ram as a
+      substitute for his son, long before the Christians were thought of; the
+      rather savage Artemis of the old Greek rites was (according to Pausanias)
+      (1) honored by the yearly sacrifice of a perfect boy and girl, but later
+      it was deemed sufficient to draw a knife across their throats as a symbol,
+      with the result of spilling only a few drops of their blood, or to flog
+      the boys (with the same result) upon her altar. Among the Khonds in old
+      days many victims (meriahs) were sacrificed to the gods, “but in time the
+      man was replaced by a horse, the horse by a bull, the bull by a ram, the
+      ram by a kid, the kid by fowls, and the fowls by many flowers.” (2) At one
+      time, according to the Yajur-Veda, there was a festival at which one
+      hundred and twenty-five victims, men and women, boys and girls, were
+      sacrificed; “but reform supervened, and now the victims were bound as
+      before to the stake, but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (god)
+      Narayana, the sacrificing priest brandished a knife and&mdash;severed the
+      bonds of the captives.” (3) At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to
+      which I referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in
+      later times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the
+      sea, and after being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas
+      a similar festival the fall of the victim was graciously broken by tying
+      feathers and even living birds to his body. (4)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) vii. 19, and iii. 8, 16.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Primitive Folk, by Elie Reclus (Contemp. Science Series), p.
+330.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Ibid.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) Muller’s Dorians Book II, ch. ii, par. 10.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      With the lapse of time and the general progress of mankind, we may, I
+      think, perceive some such slow ameliorations in the matter of the
+      brutality and superstition of the old religions. How far any later
+      ameliorations were due to the direct influence of Christianity might be a
+      difficult question; but what I think we can clearly see&mdash;and what
+      especially interests us here&mdash;is that in respect to its main
+      religious ideas, and the matter underlying them (exclusive of the MANNER
+      of their treatment, which necessarily has varied among different peoples)
+      Christianity is of one piece with the earlier pagan creeds and is for the
+      most part a re-statement and renewed expression of world-wide doctrines
+      whose first genesis is lost in the haze of the past, beyond all recorded
+      history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have illustrated this view with regard to the doctrine of Sin and
+      Sacrifice. Let us take two or three other illustrations. Let us take the
+      doctrine of Re-birth or Regeneration. The first few verses of St. John’s
+      Gospel are occupied with the subject of salvation through rebirth or
+      regeneration. “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
+      God.”... “Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
+      into the kingdom of God.” Our Baptismal Service begins by saying that
+      “forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin; and that our Saviour
+      Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God except he be
+      regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost”; therefore it is
+      desirable that this child should be baptized, “received into Christ’s Holy
+      Church, and be made a lively member of the same.” That, is to say, there
+      is one birth, after the flesh, but a second birth is necessary, a birth
+      after the Spirit and into the Church of Christ. Our Confirmation Service
+      is simply a service repeating and confirming these views, at an age
+      (fourteen to sixteen or so) when the boy or girl is capable of
+      understanding what is being done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But our Baptismal and Confirmation ceremonies combined are clearly the
+      exact correspondence and parallel of the old pagan ceremonies of
+      Initiation, which are or have been observed in almost every primitive
+      tribe over the world. “The rite of the second birth,” says Jane Harrison,
+      (1) “is widespread, universal, over half the savage world. With the savage
+      to be twice-born is the rule. By his first birth he comes into the world;
+      by his second he is born into his tribe. At his first birth he belongs to
+      his mother and the women-folk; at his second he becomes a full-fledged man
+      and passes into the society of the warriors of his tribe.”... “These rites
+      are very various, but they all point to one moral, that the former things
+      are passed away and that the new-born man has entered upon a new life.
+      Simplest of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu
+      tribe of British East Africa, who require that every boy, just before
+      circumcision, must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy
+      crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labour pains,
+      and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See also Themis, p. 21.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one who “enters in.”
+      He enters into the Tribe; he enters into the revelation of certain
+      Mysteries; he becomes an associate of a certain Totem, a certain God; a
+      member of a new Society, or Church&mdash;a church of Mithra, or Dionysus
+      or Christ. To do any of these things he must be born again; he must die to
+      the old life; he must pass through ceremonials which symbolize the change.
+      One of these ceremonials is washing. As the new-born babe is washed, so
+      must the new-born initiate be washed; and as by primitive man (and not
+      without reason) BLOOD was considered the most vital and regenerative of
+      fluids, the very elixir of life, so in earliest times it was common to
+      wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be born anew, it
+      would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first die. So, not
+      unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged, and baptized with his own
+      blood, or, in cases, one of the candidates was really killed and his blood
+      used as a substitute for the blood of the others. No doubt HUMAN sacrifice
+      attended the earliest initiations. But later it was sufficient to be
+      half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as in the Mithra cult, (1) or ‘washed
+      in the blood of the Lamb’ as in the Christian phraseology. Finally, with a
+      growing sense of decency and aesthetic perception among the various
+      peoples, washing with pure water came in the initiation-ceremonies to take
+      the place of blood; and our baptismal service has reduced the ceremony to
+      a mere sprinkling with water. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See ch. iii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck’s
+Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: “More often the new birth is
+      stimulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of the boys
+      themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at initiation among
+      some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are assembled an old
+      man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies down in a grave. He is covered up
+      lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is smoothed over. The buried
+      man holds in his hand a small bush which seems to be growing from the
+      ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground round about. The novices
+      are then brought to the edge of the grave and a song is sung. Gradually,
+      as the song goes on, the bush held by the buried man begins to quiver. It
+      moves more and more, and bit by bit the man himself starts up from the
+      grave.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the actual
+      christening we read these words, “Then shall the Priest say: O merciful
+      God, grant that old Adam in this child may be so BURIED that the new man
+      may be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may die in him,
+      and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow in him!” Can
+      we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the graveside of
+      the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to the young
+      initiates as the priest does to-day to those assembled before him in
+      church&mdash;for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations have
+      always been before all things the occasions of moral and social teaching?
+      Can we doubt that he said, in substance if not in actual words: “As this
+      man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise from your old
+      childish life of amusement and self-gratification and, ENTER INTO the life
+      of the tribe, the life of the Spirit of the tribe.” “In totemistic
+      societies,” to quote Miss Harrison again, “and in the animal secret
+      societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is born again as THE
+      SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians (1) when a man wants to
+      become a Lulem or ‘Bear,’ however cold the season he tears off his
+      clothes, puts on a bear-skin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay
+      for three or four days. Every night his fellow-villagers will go out in
+      search parties to find him. They cry out Yi! Kelulem (come on, Bear), and
+      he answers with angry growls. Usually they fail to find him, but he comes
+      back at last himself. He is met, and conducted to the ceremonial lodge,
+      and there in company with the rest of the Bears dances solemnly his first
+      appearance. Disappearance and reappearance is as common a rite in
+      initiation as stimulated killing and resurrection, and has the same
+      object. Both are rites of transition, of passing from one to another.” In
+      the Christian ceremonies the boy or girl puts away childish things and
+      puts on the new man, but instead of putting on a bear-skin he puts on
+      Christ. There is not so much difference as may appear on the surface. To
+      be identified with your Totem is to be identified with the sacred being
+      who watches over your tribe, who has given his life for your tribe; it is
+      to be born again, to be washed not only with water but with the Holy
+      Spirit of all your fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be
+      regenerated in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no doubt in cases it
+      does mean this, but too often unfortunately it has only amounted to a
+      pretence of religious sanction given to the meanest and bitterest quarrels
+      of the Churches and the States.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the prevalent pagan custom
+      of subjecting the initiates to serious ordeals, often painful and even
+      dangerous. If one is to be born again, obviously one must be ready to face
+      death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One must be able to
+      endure pain, like the Red Indian braves; to go long periods fasting and
+      without food or drink, like the choupan among the Western Inoits&mdash;who,
+      wanders for whole nights over the ice-fields under the moon, scantily
+      clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the very fear of death
+      and danger, like the Australian novices who, at first terrified by the
+      sound of the bull-roarer and threats of fire and the knife, learn finally
+      to cast their fears away. (1) By so doing one puts off the old childish
+      things, and qualifies oneself by firmness and courage to become a worthy
+      member of the society into which one is called. (2) The rules of social
+      life are taught&mdash;the duty to one’s tribe, and to oneself,
+      truth-speaking, defence of women and children, the care of cattle, the
+      meaning of sex and marriage, and even the mysteries of such religious
+      ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe possesses. And by so doing one
+      really enters into a new life. Things of the spiritual world begin to
+      dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing the mysteries of the resurrection of
+      Osiris, (3) says that when the worshipers had satiated themselves with
+      lamentations over the death of the god then the priest would go round
+      anointing them with oil and whispering, “Be of good cheer, O Neophytes of
+      the new-arisen God, for to us too from our pains shall come salvation.”
+      (4)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) According to accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western
+Australia, in their initiations, the lads were frightened by a large
+fire being lighted near them, and hearing the awful sound of the
+bull-roarers, while they were told that Dhuramoolan was about to burn
+them; the legend being that Dhuramoolan, a powerful being, whose voice
+sounded like thunder, would take the boys into the bush and instruct
+them in all the laws, traditions and customs of the community. So he
+pretended that he always killed the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to
+ashes, after which he moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored
+them to life as new beings. (See R. H. Matthews, “The Wiradthuri
+tribes,” Journal Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxv, 1896, pp. 297 sq.)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Catlin’s North-American Indians, vol. i, for initiations
+and ordeals among the Mandans.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) De Errore, c. 22.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) [gr Qarreite, mustai ton qeou seswsmenou,]
+[gr Estai gar hmin ek ponwn swthria.]
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It would seem that at some very early time in the history of tribal and
+      priestly initiations an attempt was made to impress upon the neophytes the
+      existence and over-shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly beings.
+      Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long fastings, the
+      silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains or among the
+      ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty. The developments of this
+      faculty among the black and colored peoples&mdash;East-Indian, Burmese,
+      African, American-Indian, etc.&mdash;are well known. Miss Alice Fletcher,
+      who lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty years, gives a most
+      interesting account (1) of the general philosophy of that people and their
+      rites of initiation. “The Omahas regard all animate and inanimate forms,
+      all phenomena, as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous with and
+      similar to the will-power they were conscious of in themselves. This
+      mysterious power in all things they called Wakonda, and through it all
+      things were related to man and to each other. In the idea of the
+      continuity of life a relation was maintained between the seen and the
+      unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the fragment of anything
+      and its entirety.” (2) Thus an Omaha novice might at any time seek to
+      obtain Wakonda by what was called THE RITE OF THE VISION. He would go out
+      alone, fast, chant incantations, and finally fall into a trance (much
+      resembling what in modern times has been called COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) in
+      which he would perceive the inner relations of all things and the
+      solidarity of the least object with the rest of the universe.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Summarized in Themis, pp. 68-71.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) A. C. Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-lock, Journal
+of Anthropological Studies, xxvii (1897-8), p. 436.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Another rite in connection with initiation, and common all over the pagan
+      world&mdash;in Greece, America, Africa, Australia, New Mexico, etc.&mdash;was
+      the daubing of the novice all over with clay or chalk or even dung, and
+      then after a while removing the same. (1) The novice must have looked a
+      sufficiently ugly and uncomfortable object in this state; but later, when
+      he was thoroughly WASHED, the ceremony must have afforded a thrilling
+      illustration of the idea of a new birth, and one which would dwell in the
+      minds of the spectators. When the daubing was done as not infrequently
+      happened with white clay or gypsum, and the ritual took place at night, it
+      can easily be imagined that the figures of young men and boys moving about
+      in the darkness would lend support to the idea that they were spirits
+      belonging to some intermediate world&mdash;who had already passed through
+      death and were now waiting for their second birth on earth (or into the
+      tribe) which would be signalized by their thorough and ceremonial washing.
+      It will be remembered that Herodotus (viii) gives a circumstantial account
+      of how the Phocians in a battle with the Thessalians smeared six hundred
+      of their bravest warriors with white clay so that, looking like
+      supernatural beings, and falling upon the Thessalians by night, they
+      terrified the latter and put them to instant flight.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See A. Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 274 sq.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Such then&mdash;though only very scantily described&mdash;were some of the
+      rites of Initiation and Second Birth celebrated in the old Pagan world.
+      The subject is far too large for adequate treatment within the present
+      limits; but even so we cannot but be struck by the appropriateness in many
+      cases of the teaching thus given to the young, the concreteness of the
+      illustrations, the effectiveness of the symbols used, the dramatic
+      character of the rites, the strong enforcement of lessons on the nature
+      and duties of the life into which the candidates were about to enter.
+      Christianity followed on, and inherited these traditions, but one feels
+      that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation, which of course
+      correspond to the Pagan Initiations, it falls short of the latter. Its
+      ceremonies (certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries) are
+      of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to and teaching on the
+      immensely important subject of Sex is omitted, the details of social and
+      industrial morality are passed by, and instruction is limited to a few
+      rather commonplace lessons in general morality and religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be appropriate here, before leaving the subject of the Second
+      Birth, to inquire how it has come about that this doctrine&mdash;so remote
+      and metaphysical as it might appear&mdash;has been taken up and embodied
+      in their creeds and rituals by quite PRIMITIVE people all over the world,
+      to such a degree indeed that it has ultimately been adopted and built into
+      the foundations of the latter and more intellectual religions, like
+      Hinduism, Mithraism, and the Egyptian and Christian cults. I think the
+      answer to this question must be found in the now-familiar fact that the
+      earliest peoples felt themselves so much a part of Nature and the animal
+      and vegetable world around them that (whenever they thought about these
+      matters at all) they never for a moment doubted that the things which were
+      happening all round them in the external world were also happening within
+      themselves. They saw the Sun, overclouded and nigh to death in winter,
+      come to its birth again each year; they saw the Vegetation shoot forth
+      anew in spring&mdash;the revival of the spirit of the Earth; the endless
+      breeding of the Animals, the strange transformations of Worms and Insects;
+      the obviously new life taken on by boys and girls at puberty; the same at
+      a later age when the novice was transformed into the medicine-man&mdash;the
+      choupan into the angakok among the Esquimaux, the Dacotah youth into the
+      wakan among the Red Indians; and they felt in their sub-conscious way the
+      same everlasting forces of rebirth and transformation working within
+      themselves. In some of the Greek Mysteries the newly admitted Initiates
+      were fed for some time after on milk only “as though we were being born
+      again.” (See Sallustius, quoted by Gilbert Murray.) When sub-conscious
+      knowledge began to glimmer into direct consciousness one of the first
+      aspects (and no doubt one of the truest) under which people saw life was
+      just thus: as a series of rebirths and transformations. (1) The most
+      modern science, I need hardly say, in biology as well as in chemistry and
+      the field of inorganic Nature, supports that view. The savage in earliest
+      times FELT the truth of some things which we to-day are only beginning
+      intellectually to perceive and analyze.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The fervent and widespread belief in animal metamorphoses
+among early peoples is well known.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Christianity adopted and absorbed&mdash;as it was bound to do&mdash;this
+      world-wide doctrine of the second birth. Passing over its physiological
+      and biological applications, it gave to it a fine spiritual significance&mdash;or
+      rather it insisted especially on its spiritual significance, which (as we
+      have seen) had been widely recognized before. Only&mdash;as I suppose must
+      happen with all local religions&mdash;it narrowed the application and
+      outlook of the doctrine down to a special case&mdash;“As in Adam all die,
+      so in CHRIST shall all be made alive.” The Universal Spirit which can give
+      rebirth and salvation to EVERY child of man to whom it comes, was offered
+      only under a very special form&mdash;that of Jesus Christ. (1) In this
+      respect it was no better than the religions which preceded it. In some
+      respects&mdash;that is, where it was especially fanatical, blinkered, and
+      hostile to other sects&mdash;it was WORSE. But to those who perceive that
+      the Great Spirit may bring new birth and salvation to some under the form
+      of Osiris, equally well as to others under the form of Jesus, or again to
+      some under the form of a Siberian totem-Bear equally as to others under
+      the form of Osiris, these questionings and narrowings fall away as of no
+      importance. We in this latter day can see the main thing, namely that
+      Christianity was and is just one phase of a world-old religion, slowly
+      perhaps expanding its scope, but whose chief attitudes and orientations
+      have been the same through the centuries.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The same happened with regard to another great Pagan doctrine
+(to which I have just alluded), the doctrine of transformations and
+metamorphoses; and whereas the pagans believed in these things, as the
+common and possible heritage of EVERY man, the Christians only allowed
+themselves to entertain the idea in the special and unique instance of
+the Transfiguration of Christ.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Many other illustrations might be taken of the truth of this view, but I
+      will confine myself to two or three more. There is the instance of the
+      Eucharist and its exceedingly widespread celebration (under very various
+      forms) among the pagans all over the world&mdash;as well as among
+      Christians. I have already said enough on this subject, and need not delay
+      over it. By partaking of the sacramental meal, even in its wildest and
+      crudest shapes, as in the mysteries of Dionysus, one was identified with
+      and united to the god; in its milder and more spiritual aspects as in the
+      Mithraic, Egyptian, Hindu and Christian cults, one passed behind the veil
+      of maya and this ever-changing world, and entered into the region of
+      divine peace and power. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Baring Gould in his Orig. Relig. Belief, I. 401,
+says:&mdash;“Among the ancient Hindus Soma was a chief deity; he is called
+the Giver of Life and Health.... He became incarnate among men, was
+taken by them and slain, and brayed in a mortar (a god of corn and wine
+apparently). But he rose in flame to heaven to be ‘the Benefactor of the
+World’ and the ‘Mediator between God and Man!’ Through communion with
+him in his sacrifice, man (who partook of this god) has an assurance of
+immortality, for by that sacrament he obtains union with his divinity.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Or again the doctrine of the Saviour. That also is one on which I need not
+      add much to what has been said already. The number of pagan deities
+      (mostly virgin-born and done to death in some way or other in their
+      efforts to save mankind) is so great (1) as to be difficult to keep
+      account of. The god Krishna in India, the god Indra in Nepaul and Thibet,
+      spilt their blood for the salvation of men; Buddha said, according to Max
+      Muller, (2) “Let all the sins that were in the world fall on me, that the
+      world may be delivered”; the Chinese Tien, the Holy One&mdash;“one with
+      God and existing with him from all eternity”&mdash;died to save the world;
+      the Egyptian Osiris was called Saviour, so was Horus; so was the Persian
+      Mithras; so was the Greek Hercules who overcame Death though his body was
+      consumed in the burning garment of mortality, out of which he rose into
+      heaven. So also was the Phrygian Attis called Saviour, and the Syrian
+      Tammuz or Adonis likewise&mdash;both of whom, as we have seen, were nailed
+      or tied to a tree, and afterwards rose again from their biers, or coffins.
+      Prometheus, the greatest and earliest benefactor of the human race, was
+      NAILED BY THE HANDS and feet, and with arms extended, to the rocks of
+      Mount Caucasus. Bacchus or Dionysus, born of the virgin Semele to be the
+      Liberator of mankind (Dionysus Eleutherios as he was called), was torn to
+      pieces, not unlike Osiris. Even in far Mexico Quetzalcoatl, the Saviour,
+      was born of a virgin, was tempted, and fasted forty days, was done to
+      death, and his second coming looked for so eagerly that (as is well known)
+      when Cortes appeared, the Mexicans, poor things, greeted HIM as the
+      returning god! (3) In Peru and among the American Indians, North and South
+      of the Equator, similar legends are, or were, to be found.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See for a considerable list Doane’s Bible Myths, ch. xx.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Hist. Sanskrit Literature, p. 80.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Kingsborough, Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Briefly sketched as all this is, it is enough to prove quite abundantly
+      that the doctrine of the Saviour is world-wide and world-old, and that
+      Christianity merely appropriated the same and (as the other cults did)
+      gave it a special color. Probably the wide range of this doctrine would
+      have been far better and more generally known, had not the Christian
+      Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the greatest
+      precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of pagan claims on
+      the subject. There is much to show that the early Church took this line
+      with regard to pre-Christian saviours; (1) and in later times the same
+      policy is remarkably illustrated by the treatment in the sixteenth century
+      of the writings of Sahagun the Spanish missionary&mdash;to whose work I
+      have already referred. Sahagun was a wonderfully broad-minded and fine man
+      who, while he did not conceal the barbarities of the Aztec religion, was
+      truthful enough to point out redeeming traits in the manners and customs
+      of the people and some resemblances to Christian doctrine and practice.
+      This infuriated the bigoted Catholics of the newly formed Mexican Church.
+      They purloined the manuscripts of Sahagun’s Historia and scattered and hid
+      them about the country, and it was only after infinite labor and an appeal
+      to the Spanish Court that he got them together again. Finally, at the age
+      of eighty, having translated them into Spanish (from the original Mexican)
+      he sent them in two big volumes home to Spain for safety; but there almost
+      immediately THEY DISAPPEARED, and could not be found! It was only after
+      TWO CENTURIES that they ultimately turned up (1790) in a Convent at Tolosa
+      in Navarre. Lord Kingsborough published them in England in 1830.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Tertullian’s Apologia, c. 16; Ad Nationes, c. xii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I have thus dwelt upon several of the main doctrines of Christianity&mdash;namely,
+      those of Sin and Sacrifice, the Eucharist, the Saviour, the Second Birth,
+      and Transfiguration&mdash;as showing that they are by no means unique in
+      our religion, but were common to nearly all the religions of the ancient
+      world. The list might be much further extended, but there is no need to
+      delay over a subject which is now very generally understood. I will,
+      however, devote a page or two to one instance, which I think is very
+      remarkable, and full of deep suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no doctrine in Christianity which is more reverenced by the
+      adherents of that religion, or held in higher estimation, than that God
+      sacrificed his only Son for the salvation of the world; also that since
+      the Son was not only of like nature but of the SAME nature with the
+      Father, and equal to him as being the second Person of the Divine Trinity,
+      the sacrifice amounted to an immolation of Himself for the good of
+      mankind. The doctrine is so mystical, so remote, and in a sense so absurd
+      and impossible, that it has been a favorite mark through the centuries for
+      the ridicule of the scoffers and enemies of the Church; and here, it might
+      easily be thought, is a belief which&mdash;whether it be considered
+      glorious or whether contemptible&mdash;is at any rate unique, and peculiar
+      to that Church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet the extraordinary fact is that a similar belief ranges all through
+      the ancient religions, and can be traced back to the earliest times. The
+      word host which is used in the Catholic Mass for the bread and wine on the
+      Altar, supposed to be the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ, is
+      from the Latin Hostia which the dictionary interprets as “an animal slain
+      in sacrifice, a sin-offering.” It takes us far far back to the Totem stage
+      of folk-life, when the tribe, as I have already explained, crowned a
+      victim-bull or bear or other animal with flowers, and honoring it with
+      every offering of food and worship, sacrificed the victim to the Totem
+      spirit of the tribe, and consumed it in an Eucharistic feast&mdash;the
+      medicine-man or priest who conducted the ritual wearing a skin of the same
+      beast as a sign that he represented the Totem-divinity, taking part in the
+      sacrifice of ‘himself to himself.’ It reminds us of the Khonds of Bengal
+      sacrificing their meriahs crowned and decorated as gods and goddesses; of
+      the Aztecs doing the same; of Quetzalcoatl pricking his elbows and fingers
+      so as to draw blood, which he offered on his own altar; or of Odin hanging
+      by his own desire upon a tree. “I know I was hanged upon a tree shaken by
+      the winds for nine long nights. I was transfixed by a spear; I was moved
+      to Odin, myself to myself.” And so on. The instances are endless. “I am
+      the oblation,” says the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, (1) “I am the
+      sacrifice, I the ancestral offering.” “In the truly orthodox conception of
+      sacrifice,” says Elie Reclus, (2) “the consecrated offering, be it man,
+      woman or virgin, lamb or heifer, cock or dove, represents THE DEITY
+      HIMSELF.... Brahma is the ‘imperishable sacrifice’; Indra, Soma, Hari and
+      the other gods, became incarnate in animals to the sole end that they
+      might be immolated. Perusha, the Universal Being, caused himself to be
+      slain by the Immortals, and from his substance were born the birds of the
+      air, wild and domestic animals, the offerings of butter and curds. The
+      world, declared the Rishis, is a series of sacrifices disclosing other
+      sacrifices. To stop them would be to suspend the life of Nature. The god
+      Siva, to whom the Tipperahs of Bengal are supposed to have sacrificed as
+      many as a thousand human victims a year, said to the Brahamins: ‘It is I
+      that am the actual offering; it is I that you butcher upon my altars.’”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Ch. ix, v. 16.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Primitive Folk, ch. vi.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It was in allusion to this doctrine that R. W. Emerson, paraphrasing the
+      Katha-Upanishad, wrote that immortal verse of his:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+If the red slayer thinks he slays,<br/>
+    Or the slain thinks he is slain,<br/>
+They know not well the subtle ways<br/>
+    I take, and pass, and turn again.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I say it is an astonishing thing to think and realize that this profound
+      and mystic doctrine of the eternal sacrifice of Himself, ordained by the
+      Great Spirit for the creation and salvation of the world&mdash;a doctrine
+      which has attracted and fascinated many of the great thinkers and nobler
+      minds of Europe, which has also inspired the religious teachings of the
+      Indian sages and to a less philosophical degree the writings of the
+      Christian Saints&mdash;should have been seized in its general outline and
+      essence by rude and primitive people before the dawn of history, and
+      embodied in their rites and ceremonials. What is the explanation of this
+      fact?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is very puzzling. The whole subject is puzzling. The world-wide
+      adoption of similar creeds and rituals (and, we may add, legends and fairy
+      tales) among early peoples, and in far-sundered places and times is so
+      remarkable that it has given the students of these subjects ‘furiously to
+      think’ (1)&mdash;yet for the most part without great success in the way of
+      finding a solution. The supposition that (1) the creed, rite or legend in
+      question has sprung up, so to speak, accidentally, in one place, and then
+      has travelled (owing to some inherent plausibility) over the rest of the
+      world, is of course one that commends itself readily at first; but on
+      closer examination the practical difficulties it presents are certainly
+      very great. These include the migrations of customs and myths in quite
+      early ages of the earth across trackless oceans and continents, and
+      between races and peoples absolutely incapable of understanding each
+      other. And if to avoid these difficulties it is assumed that the present
+      human race all proceeds from one original stock which radiating from one
+      centre&mdash;say in South-Eastern Asia (2)&mdash;overspread the world,
+      carrying its rites and customs with it, why, then we are compelled to face
+      the difficulty of supposing this radiation to have taken place at an
+      enormous time ago (the continents being then all more or less conjoined)
+      and at a period when it is doubtful if any religious rites and customs at
+      all existed; not to mention the further difficulty of supposing all the
+      four or five hundred languages now existing to be descended from one
+      common source. The far tradition of the Island of Atlantis seems to afford
+      a possible explanation of the community of rites and customs between the
+      Old and New World, and this without assuming in any way that Atlantis (if
+      it existed) was the original and SOLE cradle of the human race. (3) Anyhow
+      it is clear that these origins of human culture must be of extreme
+      antiquity, and that it would not be wise to be put off the track of the
+      investigation of a possible common source merely by that fact of
+      antiquity.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See A. Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Hastings, Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. “Ethnology.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) E. J. Payne, History of the New World called America (vol. i,
+p. 93) says: “It is certain that Europe and America once formed a single
+continent,” but inroads of the sea “left a vast island or peninsula
+stretching from Iceland to the Azores&mdash;which gradually disappeared.”
+Also he speaks (i. 93) of the “Miocene Bridge” between Siberia and the
+New World.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      A second supposition, however, is (2) that the natural psychological
+      evolution of the human mind has in the various times and climes led folk
+      of the most diverse surroundings and heredity&mdash;and perhaps even
+      sprung from separate anthropoid stocks&mdash;to develop their social and
+      religious ideas along the same general lines&mdash;and that even to the
+      extent of exhibiting at times a remarkable similarity in minute details.
+      This is a theory which commends itself greatly to a deeper and more
+      philosophical consideration; but it brings us up point-blank against
+      another most difficult question (which we have already raised), namely,
+      how to account for extremely rude and primitive peoples in the far past,
+      and on the very borderland of the animal life, having been SUSCEPTIBLE to
+      the germs of great religious ideas (such as we have mentioned) and having
+      been instinctively&mdash;though not of course by any process of conscious
+      reasoning&mdash;moved to express them in symbols and rites and
+      ceremonials, and (later no doubt) in myths and legends, which satisfied
+      their FEELINGS and sense of fitness&mdash;though they may not have known
+      WHY&mdash;and afterwards were capable of being taken up and embodied in
+      the great philosophical religions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This difficulty almost compels us to a view of human knowledge which has
+      found supporters among some able thinkers&mdash;the view, namely, that a
+      vast store of knowledge is already contained in the subconscious mind of
+      man (and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer experience
+      to bring it to the surface; and that in the second stage of human
+      psychology this process of crude and piecemeal externalization is taking
+      place, in preparation for the final or third stage in which the knowledge
+      will be re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a high and
+      harmonious plane&mdash;something like the present intuition of the animals
+      as we perceive it on the animal plane. However this general subject is one
+      on which I shall touch again, and I do not propose to dwell on it at any
+      length now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a third alternative theory (3)&mdash;a combination of (1) and (2)&mdash;namely,
+      that if one accepts (2) and the idea that at any given stage of human
+      development there is a PREDISPOSITION to certain symbols and rites
+      belonging to that stage, then it is much more easy to accept theory (1) as
+      an important factor in the spread of such symbols and rites; for clearly,
+      then, the smallest germ of a custom or practice, transported from one
+      country or people to another at the right time, would be sufficient to
+      wake the development or growth in question and stimulate it into activity.
+      It will be seen, therefore, that the important point towards the solution
+      of this whole puzzling question is the discussion, of theory (2)&mdash;and
+      to this theory, as illustrated by the world-wide myth of the Golden Age, I
+      will now turn.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>
+IX.<br/>
+MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      The tradition of a “Golden Age” is widespread over the world, and it is
+      not necessary to go at any length into the story of the Garden of Eden and
+      the other legends which in almost every country illustrate this tradition.
+      Without indulging in sentiment on the subject we may hold it not unlikely
+      that the tradition is justified by the remembrance, among the people of
+      every race, of a pre-civilization period of comparative harmony and
+      happiness when two things, which to-day we perceive to be the prolific
+      causes of discord and misery, were absent or only weakly developed&mdash;namely,
+      PROPERTY and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For a fuller working out of this, see Civilisation: its Cause
+and Cure, by E. Carpenter, ch. i.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      During the first century B.C. there was a great spread of Messianic Ideas
+      over the Roman world, and Virgil’s 4th Eclogue, commonly called the
+      Messianic Eclogue, reflects very clearly this state of the public mind.
+      The expected babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian (Augustus) the
+      first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded it in Virgil’s verse.
+      Unfortunately it turned out to be a GIRL! However there is little doubt
+      that Virgil did&mdash;in that very sad age of the world, an age of “misery
+      and massacre,” and in common with thousands of others&mdash;look for the
+      coming of a great ‘redeemer.’ It was only a few years earlier&mdash;about
+      B.C. 70&mdash;that the great revolt of the shamefully maltreated Roman
+      slaves occurred, and that in revenge six thousand prisoners from
+      Spartacus’ army were nailed on crosses all the way from Rome to Capua (150
+      miles). But long before this Hesiod had recorded a past Golden Age when
+      life had been gracious in communal fraternity and joyful in peace, when
+      human beings and animals spoke the same language, when death had followed
+      on sleep, without old age or disease, and after death men had moved as
+      good daimones or genii over the lands. Pindar, three hundred years after
+      Hesiod, had confirmed the existence of the Islands of the Blest, where the
+      good led a blameless, tearless, life. Plato the same, (1) with further
+      references to the fabled island of Atlantis; the Egyptians believed in a
+      former golden age under the god R[a^] to which they looked back with
+      regret and envy; the Persians had a garden of Eden similar to that of the
+      Hebrews; the Greeks a garden of the Hesperides, in which dwelt the serpent
+      whose head was ultimately crushed beneath the heel of Hercules; and so on.
+      The references to a supposed far-back state of peace and happiness are
+      indeed numerous.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See arts. by Margaret Scholes, Socialist Review, Nov. and
+Dec. 1912.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      So much so that latterly, and partly to explain their prevalence, a theory
+      has been advanced which may be worth while mentioning. It is called the
+      “Theory of intra-uterine Blessedness,” and, remote as it may at first
+      appear, it certainly has some claim for attention. The theory is that in
+      the minds of mature people there still remain certain vague memories of
+      their pre-natal days in the maternal womb&mdash;memories of a life which,
+      though full of growing vigor and vitality, was yet at that time one of
+      absolute harmony with the surroundings, and of perfect peace and
+      contentment, spent within the body of the mother&mdash;the embryo indeed
+      standing in the same relation to the mother as St. Paul says WE stand to
+      God, “IN whom we live and move and have our being”; and that these vague
+      memories of the intra-uterine life in the individual are referred back by
+      the mature mind to a past age in the life of the RACE. Though it would not
+      be easy at present to positively confirm this theory, yet one may say that
+      it is neither improbable nor unworthy of consideration; also that it bears
+      a certain likeness to the former ones about the Eden-gardens, etc. The
+      well-known parallelism of the Individual history with the Race-history,
+      the “recapitulation” by the embryo of the development of the race, does in
+      fact afford an additional argument for its favorable reception.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These considerations, and what we have said so often in the foregoing
+      chapters about the unity of the Animals (and Early Man) with Nature, and
+      their instinctive and age-long adjustment to the conditions of the world
+      around them, bring us up hard and fast against the following conclusions,
+      which I think we shall find difficult to avoid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all recognize the extraordinary grace and beauty, in their different
+      ways, of the (wild) animals; and not only their beauty but the extreme
+      fitness of their actions and habits to their surroundings&mdash;their
+      subtle and penetrating Intelligence in fact. Only we do not generally use
+      the word “Intelligence.” We use another word (Instinct)&mdash;and rightly
+      perhaps, because their actions are plainly not the result of definite
+      self-conscious reasoning, such as we use, carried out by each individual;
+      but are (as has been abundantly proved by Samuel Butler and others) the
+      systematic expression of experiences gathered up and sorted out and handed
+      down from generation to generation in the bosom of the race&mdash;an
+      Intelligence in fact, or Insight, of larger subtler scope than the other,
+      and belonging to the tribal or racial Being rather than to the isolated
+      individual&mdash;a super-consciousness in fact, ramifying afar in space
+      and time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But if we allow (as we must) this unity and perfection of nature, and this
+      somewhat cosmic character of the mind, to exist among the Animals, we can
+      hardly refuse to believe that there must have been a period when Man, too,
+      hardly as yet differentiated from them, did himself possess these same
+      qualities&mdash;perhaps even in greater degree than the animals&mdash;of
+      grace and beauty of body, perfection of movement and action, instinctive
+      perception and knowledge (of course in limited spheres); and a period when
+      he possessed above all a sense of unity with his fellows and with
+      surrounding Nature which became the ground of a common consciousness
+      between himself and his tribe, similar to that which Maeterlinck, in the
+      case of the Bees, calls the Spirit of the Hive. (1) It would be difficult,
+      nay impossible, to suppose that human beings on their first appearance
+      formed an entire exception in the process of evolution, or that they were
+      completely lacking in the very graces and faculties which we so admire in
+      the animals&mdash;only of course we see that (LIKE the animals) they would
+      not be SELF-conscious in these matters, and what perception they had of
+      their relations to each other or to the world around them would be largely
+      inarticulate and SUB-conscious&mdash;though none the less real for that.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck; and for
+numerous similar cases among other animals, P. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: a
+factor in Evolution.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Let us then grant this preliminary assumption&mdash;and it clearly is not
+      a large or hazardous one&mdash;and what follows? It follows&mdash;since
+      to-day discord is the rule, and Man has certainly lost the grace, both
+      physical and mental, of the animals&mdash;that at some period a break must
+      have occurred in the evolution-process, a discontinuity&mdash;similar
+      perhaps to that which occurs in the life of a child at the moment when it
+      is born into the world. Humanity took a new departure; but a departure
+      which for the moment was signalized as a LOSS&mdash;the loss of its former
+      harmony and self-adjustment. And the cause or accompaniment of this change
+      was the growth of Self-consciousness. Into the general consciousness of
+      the tribe (in relation to its environment) which in fact had constituted
+      the mentality of the animals and of man up to this stage, there now was
+      intruded another kind of consciousness, a consciousness centering round
+      each little individual self and concerned almost entirely with the
+      interests of the latter. Here was evidently a threat to the continuance of
+      the former happy conditions. It was like the appearance of innumerable
+      little ulcers in a human body&mdash;a menace which if continued would
+      inevitably lead to the break-up of the body. It meant loss of tribal
+      harmony and nature-adjustment. It meant instead of unity a myriad
+      conflicting centres; it meant alienation from the spirit of the tribe, the
+      separation of man from man, discord, recrimination, and the fatal
+      unfolding of the sense of sin. The process symbolized itself in the legend
+      of the Fall. Man ate of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+      Sometimes people wonder why knowledge of any kind&mdash;and especially the
+      knowledge of good and evil&mdash;should have brought a curse. But the
+      reason is obvious. Into, the placid and harmonious life of the animal and
+      human tribes fulfilling their days in obedience to the slow evolutions and
+      age-long mandates of nature, Self-consciousness broke with its
+      inconvenient and impossible query: “How do these arrangements suit ME? Are
+      they good for me, are they evil for me? I want to know. I WILL KNOW!”
+      Evidently knowledge (such knowledge as we understand by the word) only
+      began, and could only begin, by queries relating to the little local self.
+      There was no other way for it to begin. Knowledge and self-consciousness
+      were born, as twins, together. Knowledge therefore meant Sin (1); for
+      self-consciousness meant sin (and it means sin to-day). Sin is Separation.
+      That is probably (though disputed) the etymology of the word&mdash;that
+      which sunders. (2) The essence of sin is one’s separation from the whole
+      (the tribe or the god) of which one is a part. And knowledge&mdash;which
+      separates subject from object, and in its inception is necessarily
+      occupied with the ‘good and evil’ of the little local self, is the great
+      engine of this separation. (Mark! I say nothing AGAINST this association
+      of Self-consciousness with ‘Sin’ (so-called) and ‘Knowledge’ (so-called).
+      The growth of all three together is an absolutely necessary part of human
+      evolution, and to rail against it would be absurd. But we may as well open
+      our eyes and see the fact straight instead of blinking it.) The
+      culmination of the process and the fulfilment of the ‘curse’ we may watch
+      to-day in the towering expansion of the self-conscious individualized
+      Intellect&mdash;science as the handmaid of human Greed devastating the
+      habitable world and destroying its unworthy civilization. And the process
+      must go on&mdash;necessarily must go on&mdash;until Self-consciousness,
+      ceasing its vain quest (vain in both senses) for the separate domination
+      of life, surrenders itself back again into the arms of the
+      Mother-consciousness from which it originally sprang&mdash;surrenders
+      itself back, not to be merged in nonentity, but to be affiliated in loving
+      dependence on and harmony with the cosmic life.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Compare also other myths, like Cupid and Psyche, Lohengrin
+etc., in which a fatal curiosity leads to tragedy.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) German Sunde, sin, and sonder, separated; Dutch zonde, sin;
+Latin sons, guilty. Not unlikely that the German root Suhn, expiation,
+is connected; Suhn-bock, a scape-goat.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      All this I have dealt with in far more detail in Civilization: its Cause
+      and Cure, and in The Art of Creation; but I have only repeated the outline
+      of it as above, because some such outline is necessary for the proper
+      ordering and understanding of the points which follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are not concerned now with the ultimate effects of the ‘Fall’ of Man or
+      with the present-day fulfilment of the Eden-curse. What we want to
+      understand is how the ‘Fall’ into self-consciousness led to that great
+      panorama of Ritual and Religion which we have very briefly described and
+      summarized in the preceding chapters of this book. We want for the present
+      to fix our attention on the COMMENCEMENT of that process by which man
+      lapsed away from his living community with Nature and his fellows into the
+      desert of discord and toil, while the angels of the flaming sword closed
+      the gates of Paradise behind him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is evident I think that in that ‘golden’ stage when man was simply the
+      crown and perfection of the animals&mdash;and it is hardly possible to
+      refuse the belief in such a stage&mdash;he possessed in reality all the
+      essentials of Religion. (1) It is not necessary to sentimentalize over
+      him; he was probably raw and crude in his lusts of hunger and of sex; he
+      was certainly ignorant and superstitious; he loved fighting with and
+      persecuting ‘enemies’ (which things of course all religions to-day&mdash;except
+      perhaps the Buddhist&mdash;love to do); he was dominated often by
+      unreasoning Fear, and was consequently cruel. Yet he was full of that
+      Faith which the animals have to such an admirable degree&mdash;unhesitating
+      faith in the inner promptings of his OWN nature; he had the joy which
+      comes of abounding vitality, springing up like a fountain whose outlet is
+      free and unhindered; he rejoiced in an untroubled and unbroken sense of
+      unity with his Tribe, and in elaborate social and friendly institutions
+      within its borders; he had a marvelous sense-acuteness towards Nature and
+      a gift in that direction verging towards “second-sight”; strengthened by a
+      conviction&mdash;which had never become CONSCIOUS because it had never
+      been QUESTIONED&mdash;of his own personal relation to the things outside
+      him, the Earth, the Sky, the Vegetation, the Animals. Of such a Man we get
+      glimpses in the far past&mdash;though indeed only glimpses, for the simple
+      reason that all our knowledge of him comes through civilized channels; and
+      wherever civilization has touched these early peoples it has already
+      withered and corrupted them, even before it has had the sense to properly
+      observe them. It is sufficient, however, just to mention peoples like some
+      of the early Pacific Islanders, the Zulus and Kafirs of South Africa, the
+      Fans of the Congo Region (of whom Winwood Reade (2) speaks so highly),
+      some of the Malaysian and Himalayan tribes, the primitive Chinese, and
+      even the evidence with regard to the neolithic peoples of Europe, (3) in
+      order to show what I mean.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths, etc., introduction: “The
+primitive life of humanity, in so far as it is not purely animal, is
+religious. Religion is the parent stem which has thrown off, one by one,
+art, agriculture, law, morality, politics, etc.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Savage Africa, ch. xxxvii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, ch. iii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps one of the best ideas of the gulf of difference between the
+      semi-civilized and the quite primal man is given by A. R. Wallace in his
+      Life (Vol. i, p. 288): “A most unexpected sensation of surprise and
+      delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature with
+      absolute uncontaminated savages! This was on the Uaupes river.... They
+      were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing to do
+      with the white men or their ways; they walked with the free step of the
+      independent forest-dweller... original and self-sustaining as the wild
+      animals of the forests, absolutely independent of civilization... living
+      their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless
+      generations before America was discovered. Indeed the true denizen of the
+      Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be
+      forgotten.” Elsewhere (3) Wallace speaks of the quiet, good-natured,
+      inoffensive character of these copper-colored peoples, and of their
+      quickness of hand and skill, and continues: “their figures are generally
+      superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
+      statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human form.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Travels on the Amazon (1853), ch. xvii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Though some of the peoples just mentioned may be said to belong to
+      different grades or stages of human evolution and physically some no doubt
+      were far superior to others, yet they mostly exhibit this simple grace of
+      the bodily and mental organism, as well as that closeness of tribal
+      solidarity of which I have spoken. The immense antiquity, of the clan
+      organization, as shown by investigations into early marriage, points to
+      the latter conclusion. Travellers among Bushmen, Hottentots, Fuegians,
+      Esquimaux, Papuans and other peoples&mdash;peoples who have been pushed
+      aside into unfavorable areas by the invasion of more warlike and
+      better-equipped races, and who have suffered physically in consequence&mdash;confirm
+      this. Kropotkin, speaking of the Hottentots, quotes the German author P.
+      Kolben who travelled among them in 1275 or so. “He knew the Hottentots
+      well and did not pass by their defects in silence, but could not praise
+      their tribal morality highly enough. Their word is sacred, he wrote, they
+      know nothing of the corruption and faithless arts of Europe. They live in
+      great tranquillity and are seldom at war with their neighbors, and are all
+      kindness and goodwill to one another.” (1) Kropotkin further says: “Let me
+      remark that when Kolben says ‘they are certainly the most friendly, the
+      most liberal and the most benevolent people to one another that ever
+      appeared on the earth’ he wrote a sentence which has continually appeared
+      since in the description of savages. When first meeting with primitive
+      races, the Europeans usually make a caricature of their life; but when an
+      intelligent man has stayed among them for a longer time he generally
+      describes them as the ‘kindest’ or the ‘gentlest’ race on the earth. These
+      very same words have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the
+      Eskimos, the Dyaks, the Aleuts, the Papuans, and so on, by the highest
+      authorities. I also remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the
+      Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and several others. The very frequency of that high
+      commendation already speaks volumes in itself.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 90. W. J. Solias also speaks in
+terms of the highest praise of the Bushmen&mdash;“their energy, patience,
+courage, loyalty, affection, good manners and artistic sense” (Ancient
+Hunters, 1915, p. 425).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Ibid, p. 91.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Many of the tribes, like the Aleuts, Eskimos, Dyaks, Papuans, Fuegians,
+      etc., are themselves in the Neolithic stage of culture&mdash;though for
+      the reason given above probably degenerated physically from the standard
+      of their neolithic ancestors; and so the conclusion is forced upon one
+      that there must have been an IMMENSE PERIOD, (1) prior to the first
+      beginnings of ‘civilization,’ in which the human tribes in general led a
+      peaceful and friendly life on the earth, comparatively little broken up by
+      dissensions, in close contact with Nature and in that degree of sympathy
+      with and understanding of the Animals which led to the establishment of
+      the Totem system. Though it would be absurd to credit these tribes with
+      any great degree of comfort and well-being according to our modern
+      standards, yet we may well suppose that the memory of this long period
+      lingered on for generations and generations and was ultimately idealized
+      into the Golden Age, in contrast to the succeeding period of everlasting
+      warfare, rancor and strife, which came in with the growth of Property with
+      its greeds and jealousies, and the accentuation of Self-consciousness with
+      all its vanities and ambitions.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See for estimates of periods ch. xiv; also, for the
+peacefulness of these early peoples, Havelock Ellis on “The Origin of
+War,” where he says “We do not find the WEAPONS of warfare or the WOUNDS
+of warfare among these Palaeolithic remains ... it was with civilization
+that the art of killing developed, i. e. within the last 10,000 or
+12,000 years when Neolithic men (who became our ancestors) were just
+arriving.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I say that each tribe at this early stage of development had within it the
+      ESSENTIALS of what we call Religion&mdash;namely a bedrock sense of its
+      community with Nature, and of the Common life among its members&mdash;a
+      sense so intimate and fundamental that it was hardly aware of itself (any
+      more than the fish is aware of the sea in which it lives), but yet was
+      really the matrix of tribal thought and the spring of tribal action. It
+      was this sense of unity which was destined by the growth of
+      SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS to come to light and evidence in the shape of all
+      manner of rituals and ceremonials; and by the growth of the IMAGINATIVE
+      INTELLECT to embody itself in the figures and forms of all manner of
+      deities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark soaring in the eye
+      of the sun, and singing rapt between its “heaven and home” realizes no
+      doubt in actual fact all that those two words mean to us; yet its
+      realization is quite subconscious. It does not define its own experience:
+      it FEELS but it does not THINK. In order to come to the stage of THINKING
+      it would perhaps be necessary that the lark should be exiled from the
+      earth and the sky, and confined in a cage. Early Man FELT the great truths
+      and realities of Life&mdash;often I believe more purely than we do&mdash;but
+      he could not give form to his experience. THAT stage came when he began to
+      lose touch with these realities; and it showed itself in rites and
+      ceremonials. The inbreak of self-consciousness brought OUT the facts of
+      his inner life into ritualistic and afterwards into intellectual forms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me give examples. For a long time the Tribe is all in all; the
+      individual is completely subject to the ‘Spirit of the Hive’; he does not
+      even THINK of contravening it. Then the day comes when self-interest, as
+      apart from the Tribe, becomes sufficiently strong to drive him against
+      some tribal custom. He breaks the tabu; he eats the forbidden apple; he
+      sins against the tribe, and is cast out. Suddenly he finds himself an
+      exile, lonely, condemned and deserted. A horrible sense of distress seizes
+      him&mdash;something of which he had no experience before. He tries to
+      think about it all, to understand the situation, but is dazed and cannot
+      arrive at any conclusion. His one NECESSITY is Reconciliation, Atonement.
+      He finds he cannot LIVE outside of and alienated from his tribe. He makes
+      a Sacrifice, an offering to his fellows, as a seal of sincerity&mdash;an
+      offering of his own bodily suffering or precious blood, or the blood of
+      some food-animal, or some valuable gift or other&mdash;if only he may be
+      allowed to return. The offering is accepted. The ritual is performed; and
+      he is received back. I have already spoken of this perfectly natural
+      evolution of the twin-ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, so I need not enlarge
+      upon the subject. But two things we may note here: (1) that the ritual,
+      being so concrete (and often severe), graves itself on the minds of those
+      concerned, and expresses the feelings of the tribe, with an intensity and
+      sharpness of outline which no words could rival, and (2) that such rituals
+      may have, and probably did, come into use even while language itself was
+      in an infantile condition and incapable of dealing with the psychological
+      situation except by symbols. They, the rituals, were the first effort of
+      the primitive mind to get beyond, subconscious feeling and emerge into a
+      world of forms and definite thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us carry the particular instance, given above, a stage farther, even
+      to the confines of abstract Thought and Philosophy. I have spoken of “The
+      Spirit of the Hive” as if the term were applicable to the Human as well as
+      to the Bee tribe. The individual bee obviously has never THOUGHT about
+      that ‘Spirit,’ nor mentally understood what Maeterlinck means by it; and
+      yet in terms of actual experience it is an intense reality to the bee
+      (ordaining for instance on some fateful day the slaughter of all the
+      drones), controlling bee-movements and bee-morality generally. The
+      individual tribesman similarly steeped in the age-long human life of his
+      fellows has never thought of the Tribe as an ordaining being or Spirit,
+      separate from himself&mdash;TILL that day when he is exiled and outcast
+      from it. THEN he sees himself and the tribe as two opposing beings,
+      himself of course an Intelligence or Spirit in his own limited degree, the
+      Tribe as a much greater Intelligence or Spirit, standing against and over
+      him. From that day the conception of a god arises on him. It may be only a
+      totem-god&mdash;a divine Grizzly-Bear or what not&mdash;but still a god or
+      supernatural Presence, embodied in the life of the tribe. This is what Sin
+      has taught him. (1) This is what Fear, founded on self-consciousness, has
+      revealed to him. The revelation may be true, or it may be fallacious (I do
+      not prejudge it); but there it is&mdash;the beginning of that long series
+      of human evolutions which we call Religion.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) It is to be noted, in that charming idyll of the Eden garden,
+that it is only AFTER eating of the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve
+perceive the Lord God walking in the garden, and converse with him
+(Genesis iii. 8).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      (For when the human mind has reached that stage of consciousness in which
+      each man realizes his own ‘self’ as a rational and consistent being,
+      “looking before and after,” then, as I have said already, the mind
+      projects on the background of Nature similarly rational Presences which we
+      may call ‘Gods’; and at that stage ‘Religion’ begins. Before that, when
+      the mind is quite unformed and dream-like, and consists chiefly of broken
+      and scattered rays, and when distinct self-consciousness is hardly yet
+      developed, then the presences imagined in Nature are merely flickering and
+      intermittent phantoms, and their propitiation and placation comes more
+      properly under, the head of ‘Magic.’)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the genesis of the religious ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, and
+      the rites connected with these ideas&mdash;their genesis through the
+      in-break of self-consciousness upon the corporate SUB-consciousness of the
+      life of the Community. But an exactly similar process may be observed in
+      the case of the other religious ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I spoke of the doctrine of the SECOND BIRTH, and the rites connected with
+      it both in Paganism and in Christianity. There is much to show that among
+      quite primitive peoples there is less of shrinking from death and more of
+      certainty about a continued life after death than we generally find among
+      more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has been, quite, common
+      among many tribes for the old and decrepit, who are becoming a burden to
+      their fellows, to offer themselves for happy dispatch, and to take willing
+      part in the ceremonial preparations for their own extinction; and this
+      readiness is encouraged by their na[i:]ve and untroubled belief in a
+      speedy transference to “happy hunting-grounds” beyond the grave. The truth
+      is that when, as in such cases, the tribal life is very whole and unbroken&mdash;each
+      individual identifying himself completely with the tribe&mdash;the idea of
+      the individual’s being dropped out at death, and left behind by the tribe,
+      hardly arises. The individual is the tribe, has no other existence. The
+      tribe goes on, living a life which is eternal, and only changes its
+      hunting-grounds; and the individual, identified with the tribe, feels in
+      some subconscious way the same about himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when one member has broken faith with the tribe, when he has sinned
+      against it and become an outcast&mdash;ah! then the terrors of death and
+      extinction loom large upon him. “The wages of sin is death.” There comes a
+      period in the evolution of tribal life when the primitive bonds are
+      loosening, when the tendency towards SELF-will and SELF-determination (so
+      necessary of course in the long run for the evolution of humanity) becomes
+      a real danger to the tribe, and a terror to the wise men and elders of the
+      community. It is seen that the children inherit this tendency&mdash;even
+      from their infancy. They are no longer mere animals, easily herded; it
+      seems that they are born in sin&mdash;or at least in ignorance and neglect
+      of their tribal life and calling. The only cure is that they MUST BE BORN
+      AGAIN. They must deliberately and of set purpose be adopted into the
+      tribe, and be made to realize, even severely, in their own persons what is
+      happening. They must go through the initiations necessary to impress this
+      upon them. Thus a whole series of solemn rites spring up, different no
+      doubt in every locality, but all having the same object and purpose. (And
+      one can understand how the necessity of such initiations and second birth
+      may easily have been itself felt in every race, at some stage of its
+      evolution&mdash;and THAT quite as a spontaneous growth, and independently
+      of any contagion of example caught from other races.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same may be said about the world-wide practice of the Eucharist. No
+      more effective method exists for impressing on the members of a body their
+      community of life with each other, and causing them to forget their
+      jangling self-interests, than to hold a feast in common. It is a method
+      which has been honored in all ages as well as to-day. But when the flesh
+      partaken of at the feast is that of the Totem&mdash;the guardian and
+      presiding genius of the tribe&mdash;or perhaps of one of its chief
+      food-animals&mdash;then clearly the feast takes on a holy and solemn
+      character. It becomes a sacrament of unity&mdash;of the unity of all with
+      the tribe, and with each other. Self-interests and self-consciousness are
+      for the time submerged, and the common life asserts itself; but here again
+      we see that a custom like this would not come into being as a deliberate
+      rite UNTIL self-consciousness and the divisions consequent thereon had
+      grown to be an obvious evil. The herd-animals (cows, sheep, and so forth)
+      do not have Eucharists, simply because they are sensible enough to feed
+      along the same pastures without quarrelling over the richest tufts of
+      grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically) is not that
+      of a divinized animal, but the flesh of a human-formed god&mdash;as in the
+      mysteries of Dionysus or Osiris or Christ&mdash;then we are led to suspect
+      (and of course this theory is widely held and supported) that the rites
+      date from a very far-back period when a human being, as representative of
+      the tribe, was actually slain, dismembered and partly devoured; though as
+      time went on, the rite gradually became glossed over and mitigated into a
+      love-communion through the sharing of bread and wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is curious anyhow that the dismemberment or division into fragments of
+      the body of a god (as in the case of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, Praj[a’]pati
+      and others) should be so frequent a tenet of the old religions, and so
+      commonly associated with a love-feast of reconciliation and resurrection.
+      It may be fairly interpreted as a symbol of Nature-dismemberment in Winter
+      and resurrection in Spring; but we must also not forget that it may (and
+      indeed must) have stood as an allegory of TRIBAL dismemberment and
+      reconciliation&mdash;the tribe, conceived of as a divinity, having thus
+      suffered and died through the inbreak of sin and the self-motive, and
+      risen again into wholeness by the redemption of love and sacrifice.
+      Whatever view the rank and file of the tribe may have taken of the matter,
+      I think it is incontestable that the more thoughtful regarded these rites
+      as full of mystic and spiritual meaning. It is of the nature, as I have
+      said before, of these early symbols and ceremonies that they held so many
+      meanings in solution; and it is this fact which gave them a poetic or
+      creative quality, and their great hold upon the public mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I use the word “tribe” in many places here as a matter of convenience; not
+      forgetting however that in some cases “clan” might be more appropriate, as
+      referring to a section of a tribe; or “people” or “folk” as referring to
+      unions of SEVERAL tribes. It is impossible of course to follow out all the
+      gradations of organization from tribal up to national life; but it may be
+      remembered that while animal totems prevail as a rule in the earlier
+      stages, human-formed gods become more conspicuous in the later
+      developments. All through, the practice of the Eucharist goes on, in
+      varying forms adapting itself to the surrounding conditions; and where in
+      the later societies a religion like Mithraism or Christianity includes
+      people of very various race, the Rite loses quite naturally its tribal
+      significance and becomes a celebration of allegiance to a particular god&mdash;of
+      unity within a special Church, in fact. Ultimately it may become&mdash;as
+      for a brief moment in the history of the early Christians it seemed likely
+      to do&mdash;a celebration of allegiance to all Humanity, irrespective of
+      race or creed or color of skin or of mind: though unfortunately that day
+      seems still far distant and remains yet unrealized. It must not be
+      overlooked, however, that the religion of the Persian B[a^]b, first
+      promulgated in 1845 to 1850&mdash;and a subject I shall deal with
+      presently&mdash;had as a matter of fact this all embracing and universal
+      scope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To return to the Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Our conclusion seems to be
+      that there really was such a period of comparative harmony in human life&mdash;to
+      which later generations were justified in looking back, and looking back
+      with regret. It corresponded in the psychology of human Evolution to stage
+      One. The second stage was that of the Fall; and so one is inevitably led
+      to the conjecture and the hope that a third stage will redeem the earth
+      and its inhabitants to a condition of comparative blessedness.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>
+X.<br/>
+THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past Golden Age, and
+      the world-wide practice of the Eucharist, in the sense indicated in the
+      last chapter, to that of the equally widespread belief in a human-divine
+      Saviour, is a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago, dealing with
+      this subject, (1) I wrote as follows:&mdash;“The true Self of man consists
+      in his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows; and when the
+      man abandons his true Self he abandons also his true relation to his
+      fellows. The mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man will
+      drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to separate himself from
+      the inner, the unit-man from the mass-Man, then the reign of individuality
+      begins&mdash;a false and impossible individuality of course, but the only
+      means of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality.” And
+      further, “Thus this divinity in each creature, being that which
+      constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was conceived of as that
+      creature’s saviour, healer&mdash;healer of wounds of body and wounds of
+      heart&mdash;the Man within the man, whom it was not only possible to know,
+      but whom to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This, I take
+      it, was the law of health&mdash;and of holiness&mdash;as accepted at some
+      elder time of human history, and by us seen as through a glass darkly.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I think it is impossible not to see&mdash;however much in our pride of
+      Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses of tribal life&mdash;that
+      these elder people perceived as a matter of fact and direct consciousness
+      the redeeming presence (within each unit-member of the group) of the
+      larger life to which he belonged. This larger life was a reality&mdash;“a
+      Presence to be felt and known”; and whether he called it by the name of a
+      Totem-animal, or by the name of a Nature-divinity, or by the name of some
+      gracious human-limbed God&mdash;some Hercules, Mithra, Attis, Orpheus, or
+      what-not&mdash;or even by the great name of Humanity itself, it was still
+      in any case the Saviour, the living incarnate Being by the realization of
+      whose presence the little mortal could be lifted out of exile and error
+      and death and suffering into splendor and life eternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship of
+      “Saviours” all over the world, from China to Peru, can only be ascribed to
+      the natural working of some such law of human and tribal psychology&mdash;from
+      earliest times and in all races the same&mdash;springing up quite
+      spontaneously and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the mere
+      contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil, long before the
+      advent of Christianity, put the idea into the heads of all these earlier
+      folk, is really to pay TOO great a compliment both to the power and the
+      ingenuity of his Satanic Majesty&mdash;though the ingenuity with which the
+      early Church DID itself suppress all information about these pre-Christian
+      Saviours almost rivals that which it credited to Satan! And on the other
+      hand to suppose this marvellous and universal consent of belief to have
+      sprung by mere contagion from one accidental source would seem equally
+      far-fetched and unlikely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling belief in
+      human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread legend of their birth from
+      Virgin-mothers. There is hardly a god&mdash;as we have already had
+      occasion to see&mdash;whose worship as a benefactor of mankind attained
+      popularity in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and America&mdash;who
+      was not reported to have been born from a Virgin, or at least from a
+      mother who owed the Child not to any earthly father, but to an
+      impregnation from Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more
+      astonishing because the belief in the possibility of such a thing is so
+      entirely out of the line of our modern thought. So that while it would
+      seem not unnatural that such a legend should have, sprung up spontaneously
+      in some odd benighted corner of the world, we find it very difficult to
+      understand how in that case it should have spread so rapidly in every
+      direction, or&mdash;if it did not spread&mdash;how we are to account for
+      its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these widely sundered regions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think here, and for the understanding of this problem, we are thrown
+      back upon a very early age of human evolution&mdash;the age of Magic.
+      Before any settled science or philosophy or religion existed, there were
+      still certain Things&mdash;and consequently also certain Words&mdash;which
+      had a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact affected it
+      deeply. Such a word, for instance, is ‘Thunder’; to hear thunder, to
+      imitate it, even to mention it, are sure ways of rousing superstitious
+      attention and imagination. Such another word is ‘Serpent,’ another ‘Tree,’
+      and so forth. There is no one who is insensible to the reverberation of
+      these and other such words and images (1); and among them, standing
+      prominently out, are the two ‘Mother’ and ‘Virgin.’ The word Mother
+      touches the deepest springs of human feeling. As the earliest word learnt
+      and clung to by the child, it twines itself with the heart-strings of the
+      man even to his latest day. Nor must we forget that in a primitive state
+      of society (the Matriarchate) that influence was probably even greater
+      than now; for the father of the child being (often as not) UNKNOWN the
+      attachment to the mother was all the more intense and undivided. The word
+      Mother had a magic about it which has remained even until to-day. But if
+      that word rooted itself deep in the heart of the Child, the other word
+      ‘virgin’ had an obvious magic for the full grown and sexually mature Man&mdash;a
+      magic which it, too, has never lost.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of
+such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the square,
+the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like 3, 4, 5, etc.,
+quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human
+      worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all
+      things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the
+      cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was “mother of
+      all the gods.” Demeter (“earth mother”) was honored far and wide as the
+      gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the
+      same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms of
+      Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The
+      Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and to
+      it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. (There are
+      strange accounts of a huge fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in the
+      midst, and of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep and
+      corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames. (1)) It was, in a
+      way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest and most
+      spontaneous of cults&mdash;the worship of the Earth-mother, the
+      all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her never-failing
+      ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      But when the Saviour-legend sprang up&mdash;as indeed I think it must have
+      sprung up, in tribe after tribe and people after people, independently&mdash;then,
+      whether it sprang from the divinization of some actual man who showed the
+      way of light and deliverance to his fellows “sitting in darkness,” or
+      whether from the personification of the tribe itself as a god, in either
+      case the question of the hero’s parentage was bound to arise. If the
+      ‘saviour’ was plainly a personification of the tribe, it was obviously
+      impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal mother. In that case&mdash;and
+      if the tribe was generally traced in the legends to some primeval Animal
+      or Mountain or thing of Nature&mdash;it was probably easy to think of him
+      (the saviour) as, born out of Nature’s womb, descended perhaps from that
+      pure Virgin of the World who is the Earth and Nature, who rules the skies
+      at night, and stands in the changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped
+      (as we have seen) in the great constellation Virgo. If, on the other hand,
+      he was the divinization of some actual man, more or less known either
+      personally or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the
+      name of his mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his
+      father, that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very
+      uncertain, it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the
+      midnight visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspiring to this
+      conclusion. One is the condition of affairs in a remote matriarchial
+      period, when descent was reckoned always through the maternal line, and
+      the fatherhood in each generation was obscure or unknown or commonly left
+      out of account; and the other is the fact&mdash;so strange and difficult
+      for us to realize&mdash;that among some very primitive peoples, like the
+      Australian aborigines, the necessity for a woman to have intercourse with
+      a male, in order to bring about conception and child-birth, was actually
+      not recognized. Scientific observation had not always got as far as that,
+      and the matter was still under the domain of Magic! (1) A Virgin-Mother
+      was therefore a quite imaginable (not to say ‘conceivable’) thing; and
+      indeed a very beautiful and fascinating thing, combining in one image the
+      potent magic of two very wonderful words. It does not seem impossible that
+      considerations of this kind led to the adoption of the doctrine or legend
+      of the virgin-mother and the heavenly father among so many races and in so
+      many localities&mdash;even without any contagion of tradition among them.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Probably the long period (nine months) elapsing between
+cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the subject.
+Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by childbirth. And,
+more important still, the number of virgins of a mature age in primitive
+societies was so very minute that the fact of their childlessness
+attracted no attention&mdash;whereas in OUR societies the sterility of the
+whole class is patent to everyone.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Anyhow, and as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination of the
+      legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father of the gods, visited Semele, it
+      will be remembered, in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to
+      the great saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated Danae
+      in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who slew the Gorgons (the
+      powers of darkness) and saved Andromeda (the human soul (1)). Devaki, the
+      radiant Virgin of the Hindu mythology, became the wife of the god Vishnu
+      and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and prototype of Christ. With regard to
+      Buddha St. Jerome says (2) “It is handed down among the Gymnosophists, of
+      India that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth by a
+      Virgin from her side.” The Egyptian Isis, with the child Horus, on her
+      knee, was honored centuries before the Christian era, and worshiped under
+      the names of “Our Lady,” “Queen of Heaven,” “Star of the Sea,” “Mother of
+      God,” and so forth. Before her, Neith, the Virgin of the World, whose
+      figure bends from the sky over the earthly plains and the children of men,
+      was acclaimed as mother of the great god Osiris. The saviour Mithra, too,
+      was born of a Virgin, as we have had occasion to notice before; and on the
+      Mithrais monuments the mother suckling her child is a not uncommon figure.
+      (3)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For this interpretation of the word Andromeda see The Perfect
+Way by Edward Maitland, preface to First Edition, 1881.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Contra Jovian, Book I; and quoted by Rhys Davids in his
+Buddhisim.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Doane’s Bible Myths, p. 332, and Dupuis’ Origins of
+Religious Beliefs.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      The old Teutonic goddess Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin, but was
+      impregnated by the heavenly Spirit (the Sky); and her image with a child
+      in her arms was to be seen in the sacred groves of Germany. (1) The
+      Scandinavian Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the embraces of
+      Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the blessed Balder, healer
+      and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl, the (crucified) saviour of the
+      Aztecs, was the son of Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. (2) Even the
+      Chinese had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms (3); and
+      the ancient Etruscans the same. (4)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) R. P. Knight’s Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Kingsborough’s Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 176,
+where it is said “an ambassador was sent from heaven on an embassy to a
+Virgin of Tulan, called Chimalman... announcing that it was the will
+of the God that she should conceive a son; and having delivered her the
+message he rose and left the house; and as soon as he had left it
+she conceived a son, without connection with man, who was called
+Quetzalcoat, who they say is the god of air.” Further, it is explained
+that Quetzalcoatl sacrificed himself, drawing forth his own blood with
+thorns; and that the word Quetzalcoatlotopitzin means “our well-beloved
+son.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Doane, p. 327.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) See Inman’s Pagan and Christian Symbolism, p. 27.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, we have the curiously large number of BLACK virgin mothers who
+      are or have been worshiped. Not only cases like Devaki the Indian goddess,
+      or Isis the Egyptian, who would naturally appear black-skinned or dark;
+      but the large number of images and paintings of the same kind, yet extant&mdash;especially
+      in the Italian churches&mdash;and passing for representations of Mary and
+      the infant Jesus. Such are the well-known image in the chapel at Loretto,
+      and images and paintings besides in the churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua,
+      Munich and other places. It is difficult not to regard these as very old
+      Pagan or pre-Christian relics which lingered on into Christian times and
+      were baptized anew&mdash;as indeed we know many relics and images actually
+      were&mdash;into the service of the Church. “Great is Diana of the
+      Ephesians”; and there is I believe more than one black figure extant of
+      this Diana, who, though of course a virgin, is represented with
+      innumerable breasts (1)&mdash;not unlike some of the archaic statues of
+      Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian times there was, it is
+      said, on the site of the present Cathedral of Notre Dame, a Temple
+      dedicated to ‘our Lady’ Isis; and images belonging to the earlier shrine
+      would in all probability be preserved with altered name in the later.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See illustration, p. 30, in Inman’s Pagan and Christian
+Symbolism.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine of the
+      Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity. The subject is obscure, and
+      worthy of more consideration than has yet been accorded it; and I do not
+      feel able to add anything to the tentative explanations given a page or
+      two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision of the Perfect Man
+      hovered dimly over the mind of the human race on its first emergence from
+      the purely animal stage; and that a quite natural speculation with regard
+      to such a being was that he would be born from a Perfect Woman&mdash;who
+      according to early ideas would necessarily be the Virgin Earth itself,
+      mother of all things. Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition, slumbering as
+      it would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great Earth after
+      giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring forth a Child who
+      should become the Saviour of the human race.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is of course the further theory, entertained by some, that
+      virgin-parturition&mdash;a kind of Parthenogenesis&mdash;has as a matter
+      of fact occasionally occurred among mortal women, and even still does
+      occur. I should be the last to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of
+      anything else in Nature), but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way
+      of PROOF of any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any
+      thoroughly attested and verified instance, it would, I think, be advisable
+      to leave this theory out of account at present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right or wrong, and
+      whatever explanation we adopt, there remains the FACT of the universality
+      over the world of this legend&mdash;affording another instance of the
+      practical solidarity and continuity of the Pagan Creeds with Christianity.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>
+XI.<br/>
+RITUAL DANCING
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      It is unnecessary to labor the conclusion of the last two or three
+      chapters, namely that Christianity grew out of the former Pagan Creeds and
+      is in its general outlook and origins continuous and of one piece with
+      them. I have not attempted to bring together ALL the evidence in favor of
+      this contention, as such work would be too vast, but more illustrations of
+      its truth will doubtless occur to readers, or will emerge as we proceed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think we may take it as proved (1) that from the earliest ages, and
+      before History, a great body of religious belief and ritual&mdash;first
+      appearing among very primitive and unformed folk, whom we should call
+      ‘savages’&mdash;has come slowly down, broadening and differentiating
+      itself on the way into a great variety of forms, but embodying always
+      certain main ideas which became in time the accepted doctrines of the
+      later Churches&mdash;the Indian, the Egyptian, the Mithraic, the
+      Christian, and so forth. What these ideas in their general outline have
+      been we can perhaps best judge from our “Apostles’ Creed,” as it is
+      recited every Sunday in our churches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in
+      Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
+      born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified,
+      dead and buried. He descended into Hell; the third day he rose again from
+      the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God
+      the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the
+      dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church; the communion
+      of Saints; the Forgiveness of sins; the Resurrection of the body, and the
+      life everlasting. Amen.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here we have the All-Father and Creator, descending from the Sky in the
+      form of a spirit to impregnate the earthly Virgin-mother, who thus gives
+      birth to a Saviour-hero. The latter is slain by the powers of Evil, is
+      buried and descends into the lower world, but arises again as God into
+      heaven and becomes the leader and judge of mankind. We have the
+      confirmation of the Church (or, in earlier times, of the Tribe) by means
+      of a Eucharist or Communion which binds together all the members, living
+      or dead, and restores errant individuals through the Sacrifice of the hero
+      and the Forgiveness of their sins; and we have the belief in a bodily
+      Resurrection and continued life of the members within the fold of the
+      Church (or Tribe), itself regarded as eternal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One has only, instead of the word ‘Jesus,’ to read Dionysus or Krishna or
+      Hercules or Osiris or Attis, and instead of ‘Mary’ to insert Semele or
+      Devaki or Alcmene or Neith or Nana, and for Pontius Pilate to use the name
+      of any terrestrial tyrant who comes into the corresponding story, and lo!
+      the creed fits in all particulars into the rites and worship of a pagan
+      god. I need not enlarge upon a thesis which is self-evident from all that
+      has gone before. I do not say, of course, that ALL the religious beliefs
+      of Paganism are included and summarized in our Apostles’ Creed, for&mdash;as
+      I shall have occasion to note in the next chapter&mdash;I think some very
+      important religious elements are there OMITTED; but I do think that all
+      the beliefs which ARE summarized in the said creed had already been fully
+      represented and elaborately expressed in the non-Christian religions and
+      rituals of Paganism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further (2) I think we may safely say that there is no certain proof that
+      the body of beliefs just mentioned sprang from any one particular centre
+      far back and radiated thence by dissemination and mental contagion over
+      the rest of the world; but the evidence rather shows that these beliefs
+      were, for the most part, the SPONTANEOUS outgrowths (in various
+      localities) of the human mind at certain stages of its evolution; that
+      they appeared, in the different races and peoples, at different periods
+      according to the degree of evolution, and were largely independent of
+      intercourse and contagion, though of course, in cases, considerably
+      influenced by it; and that one great and all-important occasion and
+      provocative of these beliefs was actually the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS&mdash;that
+      is, the coming of the mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself
+      and of its own operation, and the consequent development and growth of
+      Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude in human thought and
+      action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the third place (3) I think we may see&mdash;and this is the special
+      subject of the present chapter&mdash;that at a very early period, when
+      humanity was hardly capable of systematic expression in what we call
+      Philosophy or Science, it could not well rise to an ordered and literary
+      expression of its beliefs, such as we find in the later religions and the
+      ‘Churches’ (Babylonian, Jewish, East Indian, Christian, or what-not), and
+      yet that it FELT these beliefs very intensely and was urged, almost
+      compelled, to their utterance in some form or other. And so it came about
+      that people expressed themselves in a vast mass of ritual and myth&mdash;customs,
+      ceremonies, legends, stories&mdash;which on account of their popular and
+      concrete form were handed down for generations, and some of which linger
+      on still in the midst of our modern civilization. These rituals and
+      legends were, many of them, absurd enough, rambling and childish in
+      character, and preposterous in conception, yet they gave the expression
+      needed; and some of them of course, as we have seen, were full of meaning
+      and suggestion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A critical and commercial Civilization, such as ours, in which
+      (notwithstanding much TALK about Art) the artistic sense is greatly
+      lacking, or at any rate but little diffused, does not as a rule understand
+      that poetic RITES, in the evolution of peoples, came naturally before
+      anything like ordered poems or philosophy or systematized VIEWS about life
+      and religion&mdash;such as WE love to wallow in! Things were FELT before
+      they were spoken. The loading of diseases into disease-boats, of sins onto
+      scape-goats, the propitiation of the forces of nature by victims, human or
+      animal, sacrifices, ceremonies of re-birth, eucharistic feasts, sexual
+      communions, orgiastic celebrations of the common life, and a host of other
+      things&mdash;all SAID plainly enough what was meant, but not in WORDS.
+      Partly no doubt it was that at some early time words were more difficult
+      of command and less flexible in use than actions (and at all times are
+      they not less expressive?). Partly it was that mankind was in the
+      child-stage. The Child delights in ritual, in symbol, in expression
+      through material objects and actions:
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+See, at his feet some little plan or chart,<br/>
+Some fragment from his dream of human life,<br/>
+Shaped by himself with newly learned art;<br/>
+    A wedding or a festival,<br/>
+    A mourning or a funeral;<br/>
+          And this hath now his heart.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+      And primitive man in the child-stage felt a positive joy in ritual
+      celebrations, and indulged in expressions which we but little understand;
+      for these had then his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the most pregnant of these expressions was DANCING. Children dance
+      instinctively. They dance with rage; they dance with joy, with sheer
+      vitality; they dance with pain, or sometimes with savage glee at the
+      suffering of others; they delight in mimic combats, or in animal plays and
+      disguises. There are such things as Courting-dances, when the mature male
+      and female go through a ritual together&mdash;not only in civilized
+      ball-rooms and the back-parlors of inns, but in the farmyards where the
+      rooster pays his addresses to the hen, or the yearling bull to the cow&mdash;with
+      quite recognized formalities; there are elaborate ceremonials performed by
+      the Australian bower-birds and many other animals. All these things&mdash;at
+      any rate in children and animals&mdash;come before speech; and anyhow we
+      may say that LOVE-RITES, even in mature and civilized man, hardly ADMIT of
+      speech. Words only vulgarize love and blunt its edge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So Dance to the savage and the early man was not merely an amusement or a
+      gymnastic exercise (as the books often try to make out), but it was also a
+      serious and intimate part of life, an expression of religion and the
+      relation of man to non-human Powers. Imagine a young dancer&mdash;and the
+      admitted age for ritual dancing was commonly from about eighteen to thirty&mdash;coming
+      forward on the dancing-ground or platform for the INVOCATION OF RAIN. We
+      have unfortunately no kinematic records, but it is not impossible or very
+      difficult to imagine the various gestures and movements which might be
+      considered appropriate to such a rite in different localities or among
+      different peoples. A modern student of Dalcroze Eurhythmics would find the
+      problem easy. After a time a certain ritual dance (for rain) would become
+      stereotyped and generally adopted. Or imagine a young Greek leading an
+      invocation to Apollo to STAY SOME PLAGUE which was ravaging the country.
+      He might as well be accompanied by a small body of co-dancers; but he
+      would be the leader and chief representative. Or it might be a WAR-DANCE&mdash;as
+      a more or less magical preparation for the raid or foray. We are familiar
+      enough with accounts of war-dances among American Indians. C. O. Muller in
+      his History and Antiquities of the Doric Race (1) gives the following
+      account of the Pyrrhic dance among the Greeks, which was danced in full
+      armor:&mdash;“Plato says that it imitated all the attitudes of defence, by
+      avoiding a thrust or a cast, retreating, springing up, and crouching-as
+      also the opposite movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also of
+      every kind of thrust. So strong was the attachment to this dance at Sparta
+      that, long after it had in the other Greek states degenerated into a
+      Bacchanalian revel, it was still danced by the Spartans as a warlike
+      exercise, and boys of fifteen were instructed in it.” Of the Hunting-dance
+      I have already given instances. (2) It always had the character of Magic
+      about it, by which the game or quarry might presumably be influenced; and
+      it can easily be understood that if the Hunt was not successful the blame
+      might well be attributed to some neglect of the usual ritual mimes or
+      movements&mdash;no laughing matter for the leader of the dance.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Book IV, ch. 6, Section 7.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See also Winwood Reade’s Savage Africa, ch. xviii, in which
+he speaks of the “gorilla dance,” before hunting gorillas, as a
+“religious festival.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of Initiation&mdash;dances
+      both by the initiators and the initiated. Jane E. Harrison in Themis (p.
+      24) says, “Instruction among savage peoples is always imparted in more or
+      less mimetic dances. At initiation you learn certain dances which confer
+      on you definite social status. When a man is too old to dance, he hands
+      over his dance to another and a younger, and he then among some tribes
+      ceases to exist socially.... The dances taught to boys at initiation are
+      frequently if not always ARMED dances. These are not necessarily warlike.
+      The accoutrement of spear and shield was in part decorative, in part a
+      provision for making the necessary hubbub.” (Here Miss Harrison reproduces
+      a photograph of an Initiation dance among the Akikuyu of British East
+      Africa.) The Initiation-dances blend insensibly and naturally with the
+      Mystery and Religion dances, for indeed initiation was for the most part
+      an instruction in the mysteries and social rites of the Tribe. They were
+      the expression of things which would be hard even for us, and which for
+      rude folk would be impossible, to put into definite words. Hence arose the
+      expression&mdash;whose meaning has been much discussed by the learned&mdash;“to
+      dance out ([gr ezorceisqai]) a mystery.” (1) Lucian, in a much-quoted
+      passage, (2) observes: “You cannot find a single ancient mystery in which
+      there is not dancing ... and this much all men know, that most people say
+      of the revealers of the mysteries that they ‘dance them out.’” Andrew
+      Lang, commenting on this passage, (3) continues: “Clement of Alexandria
+      uses the same term when speaking of his own ‘appalling revelations.’ So
+      closely connected are mysteries with dancing among savages that when Mr.
+      Orpen asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about some doctrines in which Qing
+      was not initiated, he said: ‘Only the initiated men of that dance know
+      these things.’ To ‘dance’ this or that means to be acquainted with this or
+      that myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d’action. So widely
+      distributed is the practice that Acosta in an interesting passage mentions
+      it as familiar to the people of Peru before and after the Spanish
+      conquest.” (And we may say that when the ‘mysteries’ are of a sexual
+      nature it can easily be understood that to ‘dance them out’ is the only
+      way of explaining them!)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Meaning apparently either simply to represent, or, sometimes
+to DIVULGE, a mystery.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) [gr peri ‘Orchsews], Ch. xv. 277.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 272.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Thus we begin to appreciate the serious nature and the importance of the
+      dance among primitive folk. To dub a youth “a good dancer” is to pay him a
+      great compliment. Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in the
+      island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which record in deeply
+      graven letters the friendship and devotion to each other of Spartan
+      warrior-comrades; it seems strange at first to find how often such an
+      epithet of praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is a PERFECT
+      DANCER ([gr aristos orcestas]). One hardly in general expects one warrior
+      to praise another for his dancing! But when one realizes what is really
+      meant&mdash;namely the fitness of the loved comrade to lead in religious
+      and magical rituals&mdash;then indeed the compliment takes on a new
+      complexion. Religious dances, in dedication to a god, have of course been
+      honored in every country. Muller, in the work just cited, (1) describes a
+      lively dance called the hyporchema which, accompanied by songs, was used
+      in the worship of Apollo. “In this, besides the chorus of singers who
+      usually danced around THE BLAZING ALTAR, several persons were appointed to
+      accompany the action of the poem with an appropriate pantomimic display.”
+      It was probably some similar dance which is recorded in Exodus, ch. xxxii,
+      when Aaron made the Israelites a golden Calf (image of the Egyptian Apis).
+      There was an altar and a fire and burnt offerings for sacrifice, and the
+      people dancing around. Whether in the Apollo ritual the dancers were naked
+      I cannot say, but in the affair of the golden Calf they evidently were,
+      for it will be remembered that it was just this which upset Moses’
+      equanimity so badly&mdash;“when he SAW THAT THE PEOPLE WERE NAKED”&mdash;and
+      led to the breaking of the two tables of stone and the slaughter of some
+      thousands of folk. It will be remembered also that David on a sacrificial
+      occasion danced naked before the Lord. (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Book II, ch. viii, Section 14.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) 2 Sam. vi.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It may seem strange that dances in honor of a god should be held naked;
+      but there is abundant evidence that this was frequently the case, and it
+      leads to an interesting speculation. Many of these rituals undoubtedly
+      owed their sanctity and solemnity to their extreme antiquity. They came
+      down in fact from very far back times when the average man or woman&mdash;as
+      in some of the Central African tribes to-day&mdash;wore simply nothing at
+      all; and like all religious ceremonies they tended to preserve their forms
+      long after surrounding customs and conditions had altered. Consequently
+      nakedness lingered on in sacrificial and other rites into periods when in
+      ordinary life it had come to be abandoned or thought indecent and
+      shameful. This comes out very clearly in both instances above&mdash;quoted
+      from the Bible. For in Exodus xxxii. 25 it is said that “Aaron had made
+      them (the dancers) naked UNTO THEIR SHAME among their enemies (READ
+      opponents),” and in 2 Sam. vi. 20 we are told that Michal came out and
+      sarcastically rebuked the “glorious king of Israel” for “shamelessly
+      uncovering himself, like a vain fellow” (for which rebuke, I am sorry to
+      say, David took a mean revenge on Michal). In both cases evidently custom
+      had so far changed that to a considerable section of the population these
+      naked exhibitions had become indecent, though as parts of an acknowledged
+      ritual they were still retained and supported by others. The same
+      conclusion may be derived from the commands recorded in Exodus xx. 26 and
+      xxviii. 42, that the priests be not “uncovered” before the altar&mdash;commands
+      which would hardly have been needed had not the practice been in vogue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there were dances (partly magical or religious) performed at rustic
+      and agricultural festivals, like the Epilenios, celebrated in Greece at
+      the gathering of the grapes. (1) Of such a dance we get a glimpse in the
+      Bible (Judges xxi. 20) when the elders advised the children of Benjamin to
+      go out and lie in wait in the vineyards, at the time of the yearly feast;
+      and “when the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then
+      come ye out of the vineyards and catch you every man a wife from the
+      daughters of Shiloh”&mdash;a touching example apparently of early
+      so-called ‘marriage by capture’! Or there were dances, also partly or
+      originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian character,
+      like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by men and women in hideous masks,
+      or the Deimalea by Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the Bibasis
+      carried out by both men and women&mdash;a quite gymnastic exercise in
+      which the performers took a special pride in striking their own buttocks
+      with their heels! or others wilder still, which it would perhaps not be
+      convenient to describe.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) [gr Epilhnioi umnoi]:  hymns sung over the winepress
+(Dictionary).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      We must see how important a part Dancing played in that great panorama of
+      Ritual and Religion (spoken of in the last chapter) which, having
+      originally been led up to by the ‘Fall of Man,’ has ever since the dawn of
+      history gradually overspread the world with its strange procession of
+      demons and deities, and its symbolic representations of human destiny.
+      When it is remembered that ritual dancing was the matrix out of which the
+      Drama sprang, and further that the drama in its inception (as still to-day
+      in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in connection
+      with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand how all this mass of
+      ceremonial sacrifices, expiations, initiations, Sun and Nature festivals,
+      eucharistic and orgiastic communions and celebrations, mystery-plays,
+      dramatic representations, myths and legends, etc., which I have touched
+      upon in the preceding chapters&mdash;together with all the emotions, the
+      desires, the fears, the yearnings and the wonderment which they
+      represented&mdash;have practically sprung from the same root: a root deep
+      and necessary in the psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show that they
+      will all practically converge again in the end to one meaning, and prepare
+      the way for one great Synthesis to come&mdash;an evolution also necessary
+      and inevitable in human psychology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few pages back, occur
+      those well-known words whose repetition now will, on account of their
+      beauty, I am sure be excused:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:<br/>
+The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,<br/>
+    Hath had elsewhere its setting,<br/>
+        And cometh from afar;<br/>
+    Not in entire forgetfulness,<br/>
+    And not in utter nakedness,<br/>
+But trailing clouds of glory do we come<br/>
+    From God, who is our home:<br/>
+Heaven lies about us in our infancy!<br/>
+Shades of the prison-house begin to close<br/>
+    Upon the growing Boy,<br/>
+But He beholds the light and whence it flows<br/>
+    He sees it in his joy;<br/>
+The youth who daily farther from the east<br/>
+    Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,<br/>
+    And by the vision splendid<br/>
+    Is on his way attended;<br/>
+At length the man perceives it die away<br/>
+And fade into the light of common day.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Wordsworth&mdash;though he had not the inestimable advantage of a
+      nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian
+      philosophy&mdash;does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the
+      Child in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we
+      scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that the
+      Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of entire
+      forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores of
+      sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we all
+      admit that a certain grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic
+      quality, in the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these racial
+      inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and that after birth
+      the impact of the outer world serves rather to break up and disintegrate
+      this harmony than to confirm and strengthen it. Some psychologists indeed
+      nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child is not only ‘Father of
+      the man,’ but superior to the man, (1) and that Boyhood and Youth and
+      Maturity are attained to not by any addition but by a process of loss and
+      subtraction. It will be seen that the last ten lines of the above
+      quotation rather favor this view.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) “Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from
+the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in the
+course of his short life goes very much farther along the road of
+degradation and premature senility.” (Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis,
+p. 24).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      But my object in making the quotation was not to insist on the truth of
+      its application to the individual Child, but rather to point out the
+      remarkable way in which it illustrates what I have said about the
+      Childhood of the Race. In fact, if the quotation be read over again with
+      this interpretation (which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that the
+      ‘birth’ spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively
+      self-conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured,
+      unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the parable unfolds
+      itself perfectly naturally and convincingly. THAT birth certainly was
+      sleep and a forgetting; the grace and intuition and instinctive perfection
+      of the animals was lost. But the forgetfulness was not entire; the memory
+      lingered long of an age of harmony, of an Eden-garden left behind. And
+      trailing clouds of this remembrance the first tribal men, on the edge of
+      but not yet WITHIN the civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-consciousness was
+      also the period of the dawn of the practical and inquiring Intellect; it
+      was the period of the babyhood of both; and so we perceive among these
+      early people (as we also do among children) that while in the main the
+      heart and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for a long period
+      futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as the mind left the ancient
+      bases of instinct and sub-conscious racial experience it fell into a
+      hopeless bog, out of which it only slowly climbed by means of the
+      painfully-gathered stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science.
+      “Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Wordsworth perceived that wonderful
+      world of inner experience and glory out of which the child emerges; and
+      some even of us may perceive that similar world in which the untampered
+      animals STILL dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man in the history of
+      the race was long ago driven. But a curse went with the exile. As the
+      Brain grew, the Heart withered. The inherited instincts and racially
+      accumulated wisdom, on which the first men thrived and by means of which
+      they achieved a kind of temporary Paradise, were broken up; delusions and
+      disease and dissension set in. Cain turned upon his brother and slew him;
+      and the shades of the prison-house began to close. The growing Boy,
+      however, (by whom we may understand the early tribes of Mankind) had yet a
+      radiance of Light and joy in his life; and the Youth&mdash;though
+      travelling daily farther from the East&mdash;still remained Nature’s
+      priest, and by the vision splendid was on his way attended: but
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+     At length the Man perceived it die away.<br/>
+     And fade into the light of common day.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+      What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it so) of
+      the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic clinging to
+      the tradition of the Eden-garden, its careless and vigorous boyhood, its
+      meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless expiatory ritual
+      in Nature’s bosom, its fleeting visions of salvation, and finally its
+      complete disillusionment and despair in the world-slaughter and unbelief
+      of the twentieth century!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our main line of thought,
+      we may point out that while early peoples were intellectually mere babies&mdash;with
+      their endless yarns about heroes on horseback leaping over wide rivers or
+      clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles through the air, and their
+      utter failure to understand the general concatenations of cause and effect&mdash;yet
+      practically and in their instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have
+      already said, by no means fools; certainly not such fools as many of the
+      arm-chair students of these things delight to represent them. For just as,
+      a few years ago, we modern civilizees studying outlying nations, the
+      Chinese for instance, rejoiced (in our vanity) to pick out every quaint
+      peculiarity and absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and
+      failed entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently sensible
+      people; so in the case of primitive men we have been, and even still are,
+      far too prone to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and idiotic
+      superstitions, and to miss the sane and balanced setting of their actual
+      lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance with his subject,
+      had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on “The Primitive
+      Medicine Man” in which he shows that the latter is as a rule anything but
+      a fool and a knave&mdash;although like ‘medicals’ in all ages he
+      hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man’s
+      excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds and
+      fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning or trephining&mdash;all of
+      which operations, he admits, may be accompanied with grotesque and
+      superstitious ceremonies, yet show real perception and ability. We all
+      know&mdash;though I think the article does not mention the matter&mdash;what
+      a considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which the modern art of
+      healing owes to the ancient medicine-man, and it may be again mentioned
+      that one of the most up-to-date treatments&mdash;the use of a prolonged
+      and exclusive diet of MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start
+      in severe cases&mdash;has really come down to us through the ages from
+      this early source. (1) The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett says, is largely
+      a ‘faith-healer’ and ‘soul-doctor’; he believes in his vocation, and
+      undergoes much for the sake of it: “The main point is to grasp that by his
+      special initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises&mdash;not to
+      speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and ecstasy, which he
+      may inherit by nature and have improved by art&mdash;he HAS access to a
+      wonder-working power.... And the great need of primitive folk is for this
+      healer of souls.” Our author further insists on the enormous play and
+      influence of Fear in the savage mind&mdash;a point we have touched on
+      already&mdash;and gives instances of Thanatomania, or cases where, after a
+      quite slight and superficial wound, the patient becomes so depressed that
+      he, quite needlessly, persists in dying! Such cases, obviously, can only
+      be countered by Faith, or something (whatever it may be) which restores
+      courage, hope and energy to the mind. Nor need I point out that the
+      situation is exactly the same among a vast number of ‘patients’ to-day. As
+      to the value, in his degree, of the medicine-man many modern observers and
+      students quite agree with the above. (2) Also as the present chapter is on
+      Ritual Dancing it may not be out of place to call attention to the
+      supposed healing of sick people in Ceylon and other places by
+      Devil-dancing&mdash;the enormous output of energy and noise in the ritual
+      possibly having the effect of reanimating the patient (if it does not kill
+      him), or of expelling the disease from his organism.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Milk (“fast-milk” or vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only
+diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times
+(preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with ceremony
+from the milky and semen-like sap of certain plants, and much used in
+sacrificial offerings. (See Monier-Williams. Sanskrit Dictionary.)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Winwood Reade (Savage Africa), Salamon Reinach (Cults,
+Myths and Religions), and others.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      With regard to the practical intelligence of primitive peoples, derived
+      from their close contact with life and nature, Bishop Colenso’s
+      experiences among the Zulus may appropriately be remembered. When
+      expounding the Bible to these supposedly backward ‘niggers’ he was met at
+      all points by practical interrogations and arguments which he was
+      perfectly unable to answer&mdash;especially over the recorded passage of
+      the Red Sea by the Israelites in a single night. From the statistics given
+      in the Sacred Book these naughty savages proved to him absolutely
+      conclusively that the numbers of fugitives were such that even supposing
+      them to have marched&mdash;men, women and children&mdash;FIVE ABREAST and
+      in close order, they would have formed a column 100 miles long, and this
+      not including the baggage, sheep and cattle! Of course the feat was
+      absolutely impossible. They could not have passed the Red Sea in a night
+      or a week of nights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the sequel is still more amusing and instructive. Colenso, in his
+      innocent sincerity, took the side of the Zulus, and feeling sure the
+      Church at home would be quite glad to have its views with regard to the
+      accuracy of Bible statistics corrected, wrote a book embodying the
+      amendments needed. Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of
+      protest and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition for the
+      time being from his bishopric! While at the same time an avalanche of
+      books to oppose his heresy poured forth from the press. Lately I had the
+      curiosity to look through the British Museum catalogue and found that in
+      refutation of Colenso’s Pentateuch Examined some 140 (a hundred and forty)
+      volumes were at that time published! To-day, I need hardly say, all these
+      arm-chair critics and their works have sunk into utter obscurity, but the
+      arguments of the Zulus and their Bishop still stand unmoved and immovable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a case of searching intelligence shown by ‘savages,’ an
+      intelligence founded on intimate knowledge of the needs of actual life. I
+      think we may say that a similarly instinctive intelligence (sub-conscious
+      if you like) has guided the tribes of men on the whole in their long
+      passage through the Red Sea of the centuries, from those first days of
+      which I speak even down to the present age, and has in some strange, even
+      if fitful, way kept them along the path of that final emancipation towards
+      which Humanity is inevitably moving.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>
+XII.<br/>
+THE SEX-TABOO
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      In the course of the last few chapters I have spoken more than once of the
+      solidarity and continuity of Christianity, in its essential doctrines,
+      with the Pagan rites. There is, however, one notable exception to this
+      statement. I refer of course to Christianity’s treatment of Sex. It is
+      certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan cults generally made a
+      great deal of all sorts of sex-rites, laid much stress upon them, and
+      introduced them in what we consider an unblushing and shameless way into
+      the instincts connected with it. I say ‘the Christian Church,’ on the
+      whole took quite the opposite line&mdash;ignored sex, condemned it, and
+      did much despite to the perfectly natural instincts connected with it. I
+      say ‘the Christian Church,’ because there is nothing to show that Jesus
+      himself (if we admit his figure as historical) adopted any such extreme or
+      doctrinaire attitude; and the quite early Christian teachers (with the
+      chief exception of Paul) do not exhibit this bias to any great degree. In
+      fact, as is well known, strong currents of pagan usage and belief ran
+      through the Christian assemblies of the first three or four centuries.
+      “The Christian art of this period remained delightfully pagan. In the
+      catacombs we see the Saviour as a beardless youth, like a young Greek god;
+      sometimes represented, like Hermes the guardian of the flocks, bearing a
+      ram or lamb round his neck; sometimes as Orpheus tuning his lute among the
+      wild animals.” (1) The followers of Jesus were at times even accused&mdash;whether
+      rightly or wrongly I know not&mdash;of celebrating sexual mysteries at
+      their love-feasts. But as the Church through the centuries grew in power
+      and scope&mdash;with its monks and their mutilations and asceticisms, and
+      its celibate clergy, and its absolute refusal to recognize the sexual
+      meaning of its own acclaimed symbols (like the Cross, the three fingers of
+      Benediction, the Fleur de Lys and so forth)&mdash;it more and more
+      consistently defined itself as anti-sexual in its outlook, and stood out
+      in that way in marked contrast to the earlier Nature-religions.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Angels’ Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It may be said of course that this anti-sexual tendency can be traced in
+      other of the pre-Christian Churches, especially the later ones, like the
+      Buddhist, the Egyptian, and so forth; and this is perfectly true; but it
+      would seem that in many ways the Christian Church marked the culmination
+      of the tendency; and the fact that other cults participated in the taboo
+      makes us all the more ready and anxious to inquire into its real cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-Christian
+      religions would be ‘a large order’&mdash;larger than I could attempt to
+      fill; but the general facts in this connection are fairly patent. We know,
+      of course, from the Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to
+      sexual worships. There were erect images (phallic) and “groves” (sexual
+      symbols) on every high hill and under every green tree; (1) and these same
+      images and the rites connected with them crept into the Jewish Temple and
+      were popular enough to maintain their footing there for a long period from
+      King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of Josiah (2) and other
+      reformers to extirpate them. Moreover there were girls and men
+      (hierodouloi) regularly attached during this period to the Jewish Temple
+      as to the heathen Temples, for the rendering of sexual services, which
+      were recognized in many cases as part of the ritual. Women were persuaded
+      that it was an honor and a privilege to be fertilized by a ‘holy man’ (a
+      priest or other man connected with the rites), and children resulting from
+      such unions were often called “Children of God”&mdash;an appellation which
+      no doubt sometimes led to a legend of miraculous birth! Girls who took
+      their place as hierodouloi in the Temple or Temple-precincts were expected
+      to surrender themselves to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the same
+      way, probably, as Herodotus describes in the temple of the Babylonian
+      Venus Mylitta, where every native woman, once in her life, was supposed to
+      sit in the Temple and have intercourse with some stranger. (3) Indeed the
+      Syrian and Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. “The Hebrews
+      entering Syria,” says Richard Burton (4) “found it religionized by Assyria
+      and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become
+      Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician
+      Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of
+      Heaven and Love.” The word translated “grove” as above, in our Bible, is
+      in fact Asherah, which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian
+      Queen of Heaven.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) 2 Kings xxiii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the
+apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In India again, in connection with the Hindu Temples and their rites, we
+      have exactly the same institution of girls attached to the Temple service&mdash;the
+      Nautch-girls&mdash;whose functions in past times were certainly sexual,
+      and whose dances in honor of the god are, even down to the present day,
+      decidedly amatory in character. Then we have the very numerous lingams
+      (conventional representations of the male organ) to be seen, scores and
+      scores of them, in the arcades and cloisters of the Hindu Temples&mdash;to
+      which women of all classes, especially those who wish to become mothers,
+      resort, anointing them copiously with oil, and signalizing their respect
+      and devotion to them in a very practical way. As to the lingam as
+      representing the male organ, in some form or other&mdash;as upright stone
+      or pillar or obelisk or slender round tower&mdash;it occurs all over the
+      world, notably in Ireland, and forms such a memorial of the adoration paid
+      by early folk to the great emblem and instrument of human fertility, as
+      cannot be mistaken. The pillars set up by Solomon in front of his temple
+      were obviously from their names&mdash;Jachin and Boaz (1)&mdash;meant to
+      be emblems of this kind; and the fact that they were crowned with
+      pomegranates&mdash;the universally accepted symbol of the female&mdash;confirms
+      and clinches this interpretation. The obelisks before the Egyptians’
+      temples were signs of the same character. The well-known T-shaped cross
+      was in use in pagan lands long before Christianity, as a representation of
+      the male member, and also at the same time of the ‘tree’ on which the god
+      (Attis or Adonis or Krishna or whoever it might be) was crucified; and the
+      same symbol combined with the oval (or yoni) formed THE Crux Ansata {Ankh}
+      of the old Egyptian ritual&mdash;a figure which is to-day sold in Cairo as
+      a potent charm, and confessedly indicates the conjunction of the two sexes
+      in one design. (2) MacLennan in The Fortnightly Review (Oct. 1869) quotes
+      with approval the words of Sanchoniathon, as saying that “men first
+      worship plants, next the heavenly bodies, supposed to be animals, then
+      ‘pillars’ (emblems of the Procreator), and last, the anthropomorphic
+      gods.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) “He shall establish” and “In it is strength” are in the Bible
+the marginal interpretations of these two words.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) The connection between the production of fire by means of the
+fire-drill and the generation of life by sex-intercourse is a very
+obvious one, and lends itself to magical ideas. J. E. Hewitt in his
+Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (1894) says (vol. i, p. 8) that
+“Magha, the mother-goddess worshipped in Asia Minor, was originally the
+socket-block from which fire was generated by the fire-drill.” Hence we
+have, he says, the Magi of Persia, and the Maghadas of Indian History,
+also the word “Magic.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject. The facts of the
+      connection of sexual rites with religious services nearly everywhere in
+      the early world are, as I say, sufficiently patent to every inquirer. But
+      it IS necessary to try to understand the rationale of this connection. To
+      dispatch all such cases under the mere term “religious prostitution” is no
+      explanation. The term suggests, of course, that the plea of religion was
+      used simply as an excuse and a cover for sexual familiarities; but though
+      this kind of explanation commends itself, no doubt, to the modern man&mdash;whose
+      religion is as commercial as his sex-relationships are&mdash;and though in
+      CASES no doubt it was a true explanation&mdash;yet it is obvious that
+      among people who took religion seriously, as a matter of life and death
+      and who did not need hypocritical excuses or covers for sex-relationships,
+      it cannot be accepted as in general the RIGHT explanation. No, the real
+      explanation is&mdash;and I will return to this presently&mdash;that sexual
+      relationships are so deep and intimate a part of human nature that from
+      the first it has been simply impossible to keep them OUT of religion&mdash;it
+      being of course the object of religion to bring the whole human being into
+      some intelligible relation with the physical, moral, and if you like
+      supernatural order of the great world around him. Sex was felt from the
+      first to be part, and a foundational part, of the great order of the world
+      and of human nature; and therefore to separate it from Religion was
+      unthinkable and a kind of contradiction in terms. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For further development of this subject see ch. xv.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      If that is true&mdash;it will be asked&mdash;how was it that that divorce
+      DID take place&mdash;that the taboo did arise? How was it that the Jews,
+      under the influence of Josiah and the Hebrew prophets, turned their faces
+      away from sex and strenuously opposed the Syrian cults? How was it that
+      this reaction extended into Christianity and became even more definite in
+      the Christian Church&mdash;that monks went by thousands into the deserts
+      of the Thebaid, and that the early Fathers and Christian apologists could
+      not find terms foul enough to hurl at Woman as the symbol (to them) of
+      nothing but sex-corruption and delusion? How was it that this contempt of
+      the body and degradation of sex-things went on far into the Middle Ages of
+      Europe, and ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy, and
+      concealment and suppression of sex-instincts, which, acting as cover to a
+      vile commercial Prostitution and as a breeding ground for horrible
+      Disease, has lasted on even to the edge of the present day?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is a fair question, and one which demands an answer. There must have
+      been a reason, and a deep-rooted one, for this remarkable reaction and
+      volte-face which has characterized Christianity, and, perhaps to a lesser
+      degree, other both earlier and later cults like those of the Buddhists,
+      the Egyptians, the Aztecs, (1) and so forth.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For the Aztecs, see Acosta, vol. ii, p. 324 (London, 1604).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It may be said&mdash;and this is a fair answer on the SURFACE of the
+      problem&mdash;that the main reason WAS something in the nature of a
+      reaction. The excesses and corruptions of sex in Syria had evidently
+      become pretty bad, and that very fact may have led to a pendulum-swing of
+      the Jewish Church in the opposite direction; and again in the same way the
+      general laxity of morals in the decay of the Roman empire may have
+      confirmed the Church of early Christendom in its determination to keep
+      along the great high road of asceticism. The Christian followed on the
+      Jewish and Egyptian Churches, and in this way a great tradition of sexual
+      continence and anti-pagan morality came right down the centuries even into
+      modern times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This seems so far a reasonable theory; but I think we shall go farther and
+      get nearer the heart of the problem if we revert to the general clue which
+      I have followed already more than once&mdash;the clue of the necessary
+      evolution of human Consciousnss. In the first or animal stage of human
+      evolution, Sex was (as among the animals) a perfectly necessary,
+      instinctive and unself-conscious activity. It was harmonious with itself,
+      natural, and unproductive of evil. But when the second stage set in, in
+      which man became preponderantly <i>self</i>-conscious, he inevitably set about
+      deflecting sex-activities to his own private pleasure and advantage; he
+      employed his budding intellect in scheming the derailment of passion and
+      desire from tribal needs and Nature’s uses to the poor details of his own
+      gratification. If the first stage of harmonious sex-instinct and activity
+      may be held as characteristic of the Golden Age, the second stage must be
+      taken to represent the Fall of man and his expulsion from Paradise in the
+      Garden of Eden story. The pleasure and glory of Sex having been turned to
+      self-purposes, Sex itself became the great Sin. A sense of guilt
+      overspread man’s thoughts on the subject. “He knew that he was naked,” and
+      he fled from the voice and face of the Lord. From that moment one of the
+      main objects of his life (in its inner and newer activities) came to be
+      the <i>denial</i> of Sex. Sex was conceived of as the great Antagonist, the old
+      Serpent lying ever in wait to betray him; and there arrived a moment in
+      the history of every race, and of every representative religion, when the
+      sexual rites and ceremonies of the older time lost their naive and
+      quasi-innocent character and became afflicted with a sense of guilt and
+      indecency. This extraordinarily interesting and dramatic moment in human
+      evolution was of course that in which self-consciousness grew powerful
+      enough to penetrate to the centre of human vitality, the <i>sanctum</i> of man’s
+      inner life, his sexual instinct, and to deal it a terrific blow&mdash;a
+      blow from which it has never yet recovered, and from which indeed it will
+      not recover, until the very nature of man’s inner life is changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be said that it was very foolish of Man to deny and to try to expel
+      a perfectly natural and sensible thing, a necessary and indispensable part
+      of his own nature. And that, as far as I can see, is perfectly true. But
+      sometimes it is unavoidable, it would seem, to do foolish things&mdash;if
+      only to convince oneself of one’s own foolishness. On the other hand, this
+      policy on the part of Man was certainly very wise&mdash;wiser than he knew&mdash;for
+      in attempting to drive out Sex (which of course he could not do) he
+      entered into a conflict which was bound to end in the expulsion of
+      SOMETHING; and that something was the domination, within himself, of
+      self-consciousness, the very thing which makes and ever has made sex
+      detestable. Man did not succeed in driving the snake out of the Garden,
+      but he drove himself out, taking the real old serpent of self-greed and
+      self-gratification with him. When some day he returns to Paradise this
+      latter will have died in his bosom and been cast away, but he will find
+      the good Snake there as of old, full of healing and friendliness, among
+      the branches of the Tree of Life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Besides it is evident from other considerations that this moment of the
+      denial of sex HAD to come. When one thinks of the enormous power of this
+      passion, and its age-long, hold upon the human race, one realizes that
+      once liberated from the instinctive bonds of nature, and backed by a
+      self-conscious and self-seeking human intelligence it was on the way to
+      become a fearful curse.
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+  A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth;<br/>
+  For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+      And this may have been all very well and appropriate in the carboniferous
+      Epoch, but WE in the end of Time have no desire to fall under any such
+      preposterous domination, or to return to the primal swamps from which
+      organic nature has so slowly and painfully emerged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere of Sex, and
+      the consequent use of the latter for private ends, which poisoned this
+      great race-power at its root. For above all, Sex, as representing through
+      Childbirth the life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you like, of
+      Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from merely selfish aims,
+      and therefore to use it only for such aims is indeed a desecration. And
+      even if&mdash;as some maintain and I think rightly (1)&mdash;sex is not
+      MERELY for child-birth and physical procreation, but for mutual vitalizing
+      and invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism; and to use it
+      egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed. It is to cast
+      away and corrupt the very bond of life and fellowship. The ancient peoples
+      at any rate threw an illumination of religious (that is, of communal and
+      public) value over sex-acts, and to a great extent made them into matters
+      either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods, or of communal and
+      pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and other similar festivals. We
+      have certainly no right to regard these celebrations&mdash;of either kind&mdash;as
+      insincere. They were, at any rate in their inception, genuinely religious
+      or genuinely social and festal; and from either point of view they were
+      far better than the secrecy of private indulgence which characterizes our
+      modern world in these matters. The thorough and shameless commercialism of
+      Sex has alas! been reserved for what is called “Christian civilization,”
+      and with it (perhaps as a necessary consequence) Prostitution and Syphilis
+      have grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation of
+      social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism and niaiserie. Love,
+      in fact, having in this modern world-movement been denied, and its natural
+      manifestations affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has really
+      languished and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a vast number
+      of people&mdash;both men and women, finding themselves barred or derailed
+      from the main object of existence, have turned their energies to
+      ‘business’ or ‘money-making’ or ‘social advancement’ or something equally
+      futile, as the only poor substitute and pis aller open to them.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet
+published by the “British Society for the Study of Sex-psychology.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently great mistake?
+      And again we must reply: Perhaps the mistake was not so great as it
+      appears to be. Perhaps this was another case of the necessity of learning
+      by loss. Love had to be denied, in the form of sex, in order that it might
+      thus the better learn its own true values and needs. Sex had to be
+      rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-seeking, in order
+      that having cast out its defilement it might return one day, transformed
+      in the embrace of love. The whole process has had a deep and strange
+      world-significance. It has led to an immensely long period of suppression&mdash;suppression
+      of two great instincts&mdash;the physical instinct of sex and the
+      emotional instinct of love. Two things which should naturally be conjoined
+      have been separated; and both have suffered. And we know from the Freudian
+      teachings what suppressions in the root-instincts necessarily mean. We
+      know that they inevitably terminate in diseases and distortions of proper
+      action, either in the body or in the mind, or in both; and that these
+      evils can only be cured by the liberation of the said instincts again to
+      their proper expression and harmonious functioning in the whole organism.
+      No wonder then that, with this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense
+      though it may have been) which marks the Christian dispensation, there
+      should have been associated endless Sickness and Crime and sordid Poverty,
+      the Crucifixion of animals in the name of Science and of human workers in
+      the name of Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules writhing in
+      the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the rocks are only as figures of
+      a toy miniature compared with this vision of the great and divine Spirit
+      of Man caught in the clutches of those dread Diseases which through the
+      centuries have been eating into his very heart and vitals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the blame for all
+      this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the whole great scheme,
+      namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it played the part very
+      thoroughly and successfully. For it must be remembered (what I have again
+      and again insisted on) that in the pagan cults it was always the salvation
+      of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main consideration; the
+      advantage of the individual took only a very secondary part. But in
+      Christendom&mdash;after the communal enthusiasms of apostolic days and of
+      the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and sisterhoods had died down&mdash;religion
+      occupied itself more and more with each man or woman’s INDIVIDUAL
+      salvation, regardless of what might happen to the community; till, with
+      the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached such an
+      extreme that, as some one has said, each man was absorbed in polishing up
+      his own little soul in a corner to himself, in entire disregard to the
+      damnation which might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too,
+      under the commercial regime became, as was natural, perfectly selfish. It
+      was always: “Am <i>I</i> saved? Am <i>I</i> doing the right thing? Am <i>I</i>
+      winning the favor of God and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed?
+      Did <i>I</i> make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified for
+      me?” The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered into the whole
+      human system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for all this&mdash;partly
+      because, AFTER the communal periods which I have just mentioned,
+      Christianity was evidently deeply influenced by the rise of COMMERCIALISM,
+      to which during the last two centuries it has so carefully and piously
+      adapted itself; and partly because&mdash;if our view is anywhere near
+      right&mdash;this microbial injection of self-consciousness was just the
+      necessary work which (in conjunction with commercialism) it HAD to
+      perform. But though one does not blame Christianity one cannot blind
+      oneself to its defects&mdash;the defects necessarily arising from the part
+      it had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual&mdash;say of
+      Apollo or Dionysus&mdash;including its rude and crude sacrifices if you
+      like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to
+      the common life and welfare&mdash;with the morbid self-introspection of
+      the Christian and the eternally recurring question “What shall I do to be
+      saved?”&mdash;the comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at
+      any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian
+      attitude, and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant;
+      and though Nietzsche’s blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal,
+      one almost thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with
+      one’s head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and
+      self-sacrifice, while in reality one’s heart was entirely occupied with
+      the question of one’s own salvation. There is besides a lamentable want of
+      grit and substance about the Christian doctrines and ceremonials. Somehow
+      under the sex-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized out of all
+      human use. Study the initiation-rites of any savage tribe&mdash;with their
+      strict discipline of the young braves in fortitude, and the overcoming of
+      pain and fear; with their very detailed lessons in the arts of war and
+      life and the duties of the grown man to his tribe; and with their quite
+      practical instruction in matters of Sex; and then read our little
+      Baptismal and Confirmation services, which ought to correspond thereto.
+      How thin and attenuated and weak the latter appear! Or compare the Holy
+      Communion, as celebrated in the sentimental atmosphere of a Protestant
+      Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of real jollity and community of
+      life under the acknowledged presence of the god; or the Roman Catholic
+      service of the Mass, including its genuflexions and mock oblations and
+      droning ritual sing-song, with the actual sacrifice in early days of an
+      animal-god-victim on a blazing altar; and I think my meaning will be
+      clear. We do not want, of course, to return to all the crudities and
+      barbarities of the past; but also we do not want to become attenuated and
+      spiritualized out of all mundane sense and recognition, and to live in an
+      otherworld Paradise void of application to earthly affairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sex-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have said, an effort of
+      the human soul to wrest itself free from the entanglement of physical lust&mdash;which
+      lust, though normal and appropriate and in a way gracious among the
+      animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness become diseased
+      and morbid or monstrous in Man. The work thus done has probably been of
+      the greatest value to the human race; but, just as in other cases it has
+      sometimes happened that the effort to do a certain work has resulted in
+      the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We are beginning to see now
+      the harmful side of the repression of sex, and are tentatively finding our
+      way back again to a more pagan attitude. And as this return-movement is
+      taking place at a time when, from many obvious signs, the self-conscious,
+      grasping, commercial conception of life is preparing to go on the wane,
+      and the sense of solidarity to re-establish itself, there is really good
+      hope that our return-journey may prove in some degree successful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a sparrow, but by
+      putting one leg forward first, and then the other. There was this
+      advantage in the Christian taboo of sex that by discouraging the physical
+      and sensual side of love it did for the time being allow the spiritual
+      side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated, there is a limit
+      to that process. We cannot always keep one leg first in walking, and we do
+      not want, in life, always to put the spiritual first, nor always the
+      material and sensual. The two sides in the long run have to keep pace with
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And it may be that a great number of the very curious and seemingly
+      senseless taboos that we find among the primitive peoples can be partly
+      explained in this way: that is, that by ruling out certain directions of
+      activity they enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for the time
+      being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world, whose ways
+      are puzzling enough in all conscience to us, must have been simply
+      bewildering in its dangers and complications. It was an amazement of Fear
+      and Ignorance. Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the blue sky,
+      or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating plague out of a bad
+      smell&mdash;or apparently even out of nothing at all! Under those
+      circumstances it was perhaps wise, wherever there was the smallest
+      SUSPICION of danger or ill-luck, to create a hard and fast TABOO&mdash;just
+      as we tell our children ON NO ACCOUNT to walk under a ladder (thereby
+      creating a superstition in their minds), partly because it would take too
+      long to explain all about the real dangers of paint-pots and other things,
+      and partly because for the children themselves it seems simpler to have a
+      fixed and inviolable law than to argue over every case that occurs. The
+      priests and elders among early folk no doubt took the line of FORBIDDAL of
+      activities, as safer and simpler, even if carried sometimes too far, than
+      the opposite, of easy permission and encouragement. Taboos multiplied&mdash;many
+      of them quite senseless&mdash;but perhaps in this perilous maze of the
+      world, of which I have spoken, it really WAS simpler to cut out a large
+      part of the labyrinth, as forbidden ground, thus rendering it easier for
+      the people to find their way in those portions of the labyrinth which
+      remained. If you read in Deuteronomy (ch. xiv) the list of birds and
+      beasts and fishes permitted for food among the Israelites, or tabooed, you
+      will find the list on the whole reasonable, but you will be struck by some
+      curious exceptions (according to our ideas), which are probably to be
+      explained by the necessity of making the rules simple enough to be
+      comprehended by everybody&mdash;even if they included the forbiddal of
+      some quite eatable animals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At some early period, in Babylonia or Assyria, a very stringent taboo on
+      the Sabbath arose, which, taken up in turn by the Jewish and Christian
+      Churches, has ruled the Western World for three thousand years or more,
+      and still survives in a quite senseless form among some of our rural
+      populations, who will see their corn rot in the fields rather than save it
+      on a Sunday. (1) It is quite likely that this taboo in its first beginning
+      was due not to any need of a weekly rest-day (a need which could never be
+      felt among nomad savages, but would only occur in some kind of industrial
+      and stationary civilization), but to some superstitious fear, connected
+      with such things as the changes of the Moon, and the probable ILL-LUCK of
+      any enterprise undertaken on the seventh day, or any day of Moon-change.
+      It is probable, however, that as time went on and Society became more
+      complex, the advantages of a weekly REST-DAY (or market-day) became more
+      obvious and that the priests and legislators deliberately turned the taboo
+      to a social use. (2) The learned modern Ethnologists, however, will
+      generally have none of this latter idea. As a rule they delight in
+      representing early peoples as totally destitute of common sense (which is
+      supposed to be a monopoly of us moderns!); and if the Sabbath-arrangement
+      has had any value or use they insist on ascribing this to pure accident,
+      and not to the application of any sane argument or reason.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral
+Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) For a tracing of this taboo from useless superstition to
+practical utility see Hastings’s Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. “The
+Sabbath.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It is true indeed that a taboo&mdash;in order to be a proper taboo&mdash;must
+      not rest in the general mind on argument or reason. It may have had good
+      sense in the past or even an underlying good sense in the present, but its
+      foundation must rest on something beyond. It must be an absolute fiat&mdash;something
+      of the nature of a Mystery (1) or of Religion or Magic-and not to be
+      disputed. This gives it its blood-curdling quality. The rustic does not
+      know what would happen to him if he garnered his corn on Sunday, nor does
+      the diner-out in polite society know what would happen if he spooned up
+      his food with his knife&mdash;but they both are stricken with a sort of
+      paralysis at the very suggestion of infringing these taboos.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Marriage-customs have always been a fertile field for the generation of
+      taboos. It seems doubtful whether anything like absolute promiscuity ever
+      prevailed among the human race, but there is much to show that wide choice
+      and intercourse were common among primitive folk and that the tendency of
+      later marriage custom has been on the whole to LIMIT this range of choice.
+      At some early period the forbiddal of marriage between those who bore the
+      same totem-name took place. Thus in Australia “no man of the Emu stock
+      might marry an Emu woman; no Blacksnake might marry a Blacksnake woman,
+      and so forth.” (1) Among the Kamilaroi and the Arunta of S. Australia the
+      tribe was divided into classes or clans, sometimes four, sometimes eight,
+      and a man of one particular clan was only marriageable with a woman of
+      another particular clan&mdash;say (1) with (3) or (2) with (4), and so on.
+      (2) Customs with a similar tendency, but different in detail, seem to have
+      prevailed among native tribes in Central Africa and N. America. And the
+      regulations in all this matter have been so (apparently) entirely
+      arbitrary in the various cases that it would almost appear as if the bar
+      of kinship through the Totem had been the EXCUSE, originating perhaps in
+      some superstition, but that the real and more abiding object was simply
+      limitation. And this perhaps was a wise line to take. A taboo on
+      promiscuity had to be created, and for this purpose any current prejudice
+      could be made use of. (3)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See
+p. 214 of that book.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different complexion. When we
+      consider the enormous amount of suffering and disease, both of mind and
+      body, arising from the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken,
+      especially among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos&mdash;which
+      possibly had their place and use in the past&mdash;can be tolerated no
+      longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight of reason and science on a
+      number of superstitions which still linger in the dark and musty places of
+      the Churches and the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown conclusively not
+      only the foundational importance of sex in the evolution of each human
+      being, but also the very great VARIETY of spontaneous manifestations in
+      different individuals and the vital necessity that these should be
+      recognized, if society is ever to expand into a rational human form. It is
+      not my object here to sketch the future of marriage and sex-relations
+      generally&mdash;a subject which is now being dealt with very effectively
+      from many sides; but only to insist on our using our good sense in the
+      whole matter, and refusing any longer to be bound by senseless
+      pre-judgments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of the same kind may be said with regard to Nakedness, which in
+      modern Civilization has become the object of a very serious and indeed
+      harmful taboo; both of speech and act. As someone has said, it became in
+      the end of the nineteenth century almost a crime to mention by name any
+      portion of the human body within a radius of about twenty inches from its
+      centre (!) and as a matter of fact a few dress-reformers of that period
+      were actually brought into court and treated as criminals for going about
+      with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest uncovered! Public
+      follies such as these have been responsible for much of the bodily and
+      mental disease and suppression just mentioned, and the sooner they are
+      sent to limbo the better. No sensible person would advocate promiscuous
+      nakedness any more than promiscuous sex-relationship; nor is it likely
+      that aged and deformed people would at any time wish to expose themselves.
+      But surely there is enough good sense and appreciation of grace and
+      fitness in the average human mind for it to be able to liberate the body
+      from senseless concealment, and give it its due expression. The Greeks of
+      old, having on the whole clean bodies, treated them with respect and
+      distinction. The young men appeared quite naked in the palaestra, and even
+      the girls of Sparta ran races publicly in the same condition; (1) and some
+      day when our bodies (and minds too) have become clean we shall return to
+      similar institutions. But that will not be just yet. As long as the
+      defilement of this commercial civilization is on us we shall prefer our
+      dirt and concealment. The powers that be will protest against change.
+      Heinrich Scham, in his charming little pamphlet Nackende Menschen, (2)
+      describes the consternation of the commercial people at such ideas:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘What will become of us,’ cried the tailors, ‘if you go naked?’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And all the lot of them, hat, cravat, shirt, and shoemakers joined in the
+      chorus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “‘AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?’ cried one who had just been made a
+      director.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Published at Leipzig about 1893.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap13"></a>
+XIII.<br/>
+THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      Referring back to the existence of something resembling a great
+      World-religion which has come down the centuries, continually expanding
+      and branching in the process, we have now to consider the genesis of that
+      special brand or branch of it which we call Christianity. Each religion or
+      cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast amount in
+      common with the general World-religion; yet each has had its own special
+      characteristics. What have been the main characteristics of the Christian
+      branch, as differentiating it from the other branches?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic attitude towards Sex was
+      one of the most salient marks of the Christian Church; and that whereas
+      most of the pagan cults (though occasionally favoring frightful
+      austerities and cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure and
+      the world of the senses, Christianity&mdash;following largely on Judaism&mdash;displayed
+      a tendency towards renunciation of the world and the flesh, and a
+      withdrawal into the inner and more spiritual regions of the mind. The same
+      tendency may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults of that period.
+      It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI, 510-40) chaffs the priests of
+      Cybele at Rome for making themselves “eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s
+      sake,” or the rich Roman lady for plunging in the wintry Tiber for a
+      propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later pagans “the long
+      intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul” had become a very serious
+      matter. But Christianity represented perhaps the most powerful reaction
+      against this; and this reaction had, as indicated in the last chapter, the
+      enormously valuable result that (for the time) it disentangled love from
+      sex and established Love, pure and undefiled, as ruler of the world. “God
+      is Love.” But, as also indicated, the divorce between the two elements of
+      human nature, carried to an extreme, led in time to a crippling of both
+      elements and the development of a certain morbidity and self-consciousness
+      which, it cannot be denied, is painfully marked among some sections of
+      Christians&mdash;especially those of the altruistic and ‘philanthropic’
+      type.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very fine in its way
+      but has its limits of utility, has been its insistence on “morality.” Some
+      modern writers indeed have gone so far&mdash;forgetting, I suppose, the
+      Stoics&mdash;as to claim that Christianity’s chief mark is its high
+      morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the moral
+      sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that, in the
+      true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been much more
+      ‘moral’ as a rule&mdash;that is, ready as individuals to pay respect to
+      the needs of the community&mdash;than the later and more civilized
+      societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of
+      the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on
+      the just-mentioned kind of morality, which we should call <i>civic duty to
+      one’s neighbor</i>, the Christian made morality to consist more especially in
+      a man’s <i>duty to God</i>. It became with them a private affair between a man’s
+      self and God, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end to a
+      very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief
+      inspiration was not the helping of one’s fellow-man but the saving of
+      one’s own soul.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between
+      Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we may
+      recognize these two&mdash;(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the
+      world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b)
+      the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of duty
+      to God rather than a public sense of duty to one’s neighbor and to society
+      generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led to this
+      differentiation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the
+      effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known
+      world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities, with
+      their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken up, or
+      at least brought into contact with each other and partially modified and
+      hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life and religion
+      was already being traced. By the time of the founding of the first
+      Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly extended and
+      established the process. The Mediterranean had become a great Roman lake.
+      Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all directions;
+      tourists visited its shores. The known world had become one. The
+      numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of the
+      Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs, religions,
+      philosophies, were profoundly influencing each other. (1) A great fusion
+      was taking place; and it was becoming inevitable that the next great
+      religious movement would have a world-wide character.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For an enlargement on this theme see Glover’s Conflict of
+Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity (University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis worship, for
+instance (a resurrection-cult), “was still thriving in Syria and Cyprus
+when Paul preached there,” and the worship of Isis and Serapis had
+already reached then, Rome and Naples.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It was probable that this new religion would combine many elements from
+      the preceding rituals in one cult. In connection with the fine temples and
+      elaborate services of Isis and Cybele and Mithra there was growing up a
+      powerful priesthood; Franz Cumont (1) speaks of “the learned priests of
+      the Asiatic cults” as building up, on the foundations of old fetichism and
+      superstition, a complete religious philosophy&mdash;just as the Brahmins
+      had built the monism of the Vedanta on the “monstrous idolatries of
+      Hinduism.” And it was likely that a similar process would evolve the new
+      religion expected. Toutain again calls attention to the patronage accorded
+      to all these cults by the Roman Emperors, as favoring a new combination
+      and synthesis:&mdash;“Hadrien, Commode, Septime Sévère, Julia Domna,
+      Elagabal, Alexandre Sévère, en particulier ont contribué personnellement a
+      la popularité et au succes des cultes qui se celebraient en l’honneur de
+      Serapis et d’Isis, des divinités syriennes et de Mithra.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain
+(Paris, 1906), p. 253.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Cultes paiens dans l’Empire Romain (2 vols., 1911), vol. ii,
+p. 263.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      It was also probable that this new Religion would show (as indicated in
+      the last chapter) a reaction against mere sex-indulgence; and, as regards
+      its standard of Morality generally, that, among so many conflicting
+      peoples with their various civic and local customs, it could not well
+      identify itself with any ONE of these but would evolve an inner
+      inspiration of its own which in its best form would be love of the
+      neighbor, regardless of the race, creed or customs of the neighbor, and
+      whose sanction would not reside in any of the external authorities thus
+      conflicting with each other, but in the sense of the soul’s direct
+      responsibility to God.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for what we might expect a priori as to the influence of the
+      surroundings on the general form of the new Religion. And what about the
+      kind of creed or creeds which that religion would favor? Here again we
+      must see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a certain
+      result. Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding chapters&mdash;doctrines
+      of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the Trinity, the
+      Virgin-birth, and so forth&mdash;were in their various forms seething, so
+      to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new religious synthesis to
+      escape them; all it could do would be to appropriate them, and to give
+      them perhaps a color of its own. Thus it is into the midst of this
+      germinating mass that we must imagine the various pagan cults, like
+      fertilizing streams, descending. To trace all these streams would of
+      course be an impossible task; but it may be of use, as an example of the
+      process, to take the case of some particular belief. Let us take the
+      belief in the coming of a Savior-god; and this will be the more suitable
+      as it is a belief which has in the past been commonly held to be
+      distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now that it is not in any
+      sense distinctive, but that the long tradition of the Savior comes down
+      from the remotest times, and perhaps from every country of the world. (1)
+      The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah
+      emptied themselves into the Christian teachings, and infected them to some
+      degree with a Judaic tinge. The “Messiah” means of course the Anointed
+      One. The Hebrew word occurs some 40 times in the Old Testament; and each
+      time in the Septuagint or Greek translation (made mainly in the third
+      century BEFORE our era) the word is translated [gr cristos], or Christos,
+      which again means Anointed. Thus we see that the idea or the word “The
+      Christ” was in vogue in Alexandria as far back certainly as 280 B.C., or
+      nearly three centuries before Jesus. And what the word “The Anointed”
+      strictly speaking means, and from what the expression is probably derived,
+      will appear later. In The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170,
+      (2) the Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven, and about to
+      come as judge of all men, and is definitely called “the Son of Man.” The
+      Book of Revelations is FULL of passages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of
+      Paul; so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden Age that
+      is to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven and Hell, and of Angels
+      good and evil, and it speaks of a “garden of Righteousness” with the “Tree
+      of Wisdom” in its midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first
+      century B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with
+prophecies of a coming Mahdi.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Edition by R. H. Charles (1893).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      But the Savior-god, as we also know, was a familiar figure in Egypt. The
+      great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both in his life and death: in
+      his life through the noble works he wrought for the benefit of mankind,
+      and in his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness and his
+      resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven. (1) The Egyptian
+      doctrines descended through Alexandria into Christianity&mdash;and though
+      they did not influence the latter deeply until about 300 A.D., yet they
+      then succeeded in reaching the Christian Churches, giving a color to their
+      teachings with regard to the Savior, and persuading them to accept and
+      honor the Egyptian worship of Isis in the Christian form of the Virgin
+      Mary.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See ch. ii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Again, another great stream of influence descended from Persia in the form
+      of the cult of Mithra. Mithra, as we have seen, (1) stood as a great
+      Mediator between God and man. With his baptisms and eucharists, and his
+      twelve disciples, and his birth in a cave, and so forth, he seemed to the
+      early Fathers an invention of the devil and a most dangerous mockery on
+      Christianity&mdash;and all the more so because his worship was becoming so
+      exceedingly popular. The cult seems to have reached Rome about B.C. 70. It
+      spread far and wide through the Empire. It extended to Great Britain, and
+      numerous remains of Mithraic monuments and sculptures in this country&mdash;at
+      York, Chester and other places&mdash;testify to its wide acceptance even
+      here. At Rome the vogue of Mithraism became so great that in the third
+      century A. D., it was quite doubtful (2) whether it OR Christianity would
+      triumph; the Emperor Aurelian in 273 founded a cult of the Invincible Sun
+      in connection with Mithraism; (3) and as St. Jerome tells us in his
+      letters, (4) the latter cult had at a later time to be suppressed in Rome
+      and Alexandria by PHYSICAL FORCE, so powerful was it.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Ch. ii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Cumont, op. cit., who says, p. 171:&mdash;“Jamais, pas meme a
+l’epoque des invasions mussulmanes, l’Europe ne sembla plus pres
+de devenir asiatique qu’au moment ou Diocletien reconnaissait
+officiellement en Mithra, le protecteur de l’empire reconstitue.” See
+also Cumont’s Mysteres de Mithra, preface. The Roman Army, in fact,
+stuck to Mithra throughout, as against Christianity; and so did the
+Roman nobility. (See S. Augustine’s Confessions, Book VIII, ch. 2.)
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Cumont indeed says that the identification of Mithra with the
+Sun (the emblem of imperial power) formed one reason why Mithraism was
+NOT persecuted at that time.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) Epist. cvii, ad Laetam. See Robertson’s Pagan Christs, p.
+350.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was force the only method employed. IMITATION is not only the
+      sincerest flattery, but it is often the most subtle and effective way of
+      defeating a rival. The priests of the rising Christian Church were, like
+      the priests of ALL religions, not wanting in craft; and at this moment
+      when the question of a World-religion was in the balance, it was an
+      obvious policy for them to throw into their own scale as many elements as
+      possible of the popular Pagan cults. Mithraism had been flourishing for
+      600 years; and it is, to say the least, CURIOUS that the Mithraic
+      doctrines and legends which I have just mentioned should all have been
+      adopted (quite unintentionally of course!) into Christianity; and still
+      more so that some others from the same source, like the legend of the
+      Shepherds at the Nativity and the doctrine of the Resurrection and
+      Ascension, which are NOT mentioned at all in the original draft of the
+      earliest Gospel (St. Mark), should have made their appearance, in the
+      Christian writings at a later time, when Mithraism was making great
+      forward strides. History shows that as a Church progresses and expands it
+      generally feels compelled to enlarge and fortify its own foundations by
+      inserting material which was not there at first. I shall shortly give
+      another illustration of this; at present I will merely point out that the
+      Christian writers, as time went on, not only introduced new doctrines,
+      legends, miracles and so forth&mdash;most of which we can trace to
+      antecedent pagan sources&mdash;but that they took especial pains to
+      destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own
+      dishonesty. We learn from Porphyry (1) that there were several elaborate
+      treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra; and J. M. Robertson adds
+      (Pagan Christs, p. 325): “everyone of these has been destroyed by the care
+      of the Church, and it is remarkable that even the treatise of Firmicus is
+      mutilated at a passage (v.) where he seems to be accusing Christians of
+      following Mithraic usages.” While again Professor Murray says, “The
+      polemic literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant; the books of
+      the Pagans have been DESTROYED.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) De Abstinentia, ii. 56; iv. 16.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Four Stages, p. 180. We have probably an instance of this
+destruction in the total disappearance of Celsus’ lively attack
+on Christianity (180 A.D.), of which, however, portions have been
+fortunately preserved in Origen’s rather prolix refutation of the same.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Returning to the doctrine of the Savior, I have already in preceding
+      chapters given so many instances of belief in such a deity among the
+      pagans&mdash;whether he be called Krishna or Mithra or Osiris or Horus or
+      Apollo or Hercules&mdash;that it is not necessary to dwell on the subject
+      any further in order to persuade the reader that the doctrine was ‘in the
+      air’ at the time of the advent of Christianity. Even Dionysus, then a
+      prominent figure in the ‘Mysteries,’ was called Eleutherios, The
+      Deliverer. But it may be of interest to trace the same doctrine among the
+      PRE-CHRISTIAN sects of Gnostics. The Gnostics, says Professor Murray, (1)
+      “are still commonly thought of as a body of CHRISTIAN heretics. In reality
+      there were Gnostic sects scattered over the Hellenistic world BEFORE
+      Christianity as well as after. They must have been established in Antioch
+      and probably in Tarsus well before the days of Paul or Apollos. Their
+      Savior, like the Jewish Messiah, was established in men’s minds before the
+      Savior of the Christians. ‘If we look close,’ says Professor Bousset, ‘the
+      result emerges with great clearness that the figure of the Redeemer as
+      such did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion of
+      Gnosis, but was already present there under various forms.’”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Four Stages, p. 143.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      This Gnostic Redeemer, continues Professor Murray, “is descended by a
+      fairly clear genealogy from the ‘Tritos Soter’ (‘third Savior’) (1) of
+      early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis
+      from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of
+      the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name of
+      Jesus or ‘Christos,’ ‘the Anointed,’ tends gradually to supersede. Above
+      all, he is in some sense Man, or ‘the second Man’ or ‘the Son of Man’...
+      He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, of whom all
+      bodily men are feeble copies.” (2)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) There seems to be some doubt about the exact meaning of this
+expression. Even Zeus himself was sometimes called ‘Soter,’ and at
+feasts, it is said, the THIRD goblet was always drunk in his honor.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See also The Gnostic Story of Jesus Christ, by Gilbert T.
+Sadler (C. W. Daniel, 1919).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      This passage brings vividly before the mind the process of which I have
+      spoken, namely, the fusion and mutual interchange of ideas on the subject
+      of the Savior during the period anterior to our era. Also it exemplifies
+      to us through what an abstract sphere of Gnostic religious speculation the
+      doctrine had to travel before reaching its expression in Christianity. (1)
+      This exalted and high philosophical conception passed on and came out
+      again to some degree in the Fourth Gospel and the Pauline Epistles
+      (especially I Cor. xv); but I need hardly say it was not maintained. The
+      enthusiasm of the little scattered Christian bodies&mdash;with their
+      communism of practice with regard to THIS world and their intensity of
+      faith with regard to the next&mdash;began to wane in the second and third
+      centuries A.D. As the Church (with capital initial) grew, so was it less
+      and less occupied with real religious feeling, and more and more with its
+      battles against persecution from outside, and its quarrels and dissensions
+      concerning heresies within its own borders. And when at the Council of
+      Nicaea (325 A.D.) it endeavored to establish an official creed, the strife
+      and bitterness only increased. “There is no wild beast,” said the Emperor
+      Julian, “like an angry theologian.” Where the fourth Evangelist had
+      preached the gospel of Love, and Paul had announced redemption by an inner
+      and spiritual identification with Christ, “As in Adam all die, so in
+      Christ shall all be made alive”; and whereas some at any rate of the Pagan
+      cults had taught a glorious salvation by the new birth of a divine being
+      within each man: “Be of good cheer, O initiates in the mystery of the
+      liberated god; For to you too out of all your labors and sorrows shall
+      come Liberation”&mdash;the Nicene creed had nothing to propound except
+      some extremely futile speculations about the relation to each other of the
+      Father and the Son, and the relation of BOTH to the Holy Ghost, and of all
+      THREE to the Virgin Mary&mdash;speculations which only served for the
+      renewal of shameful strife and animosities&mdash;riots and bloodshed and
+      murder&mdash;within the Church, and the mockery of the heathen without.
+      And as far as it dealt with the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the
+      Lord it did not differ from the score of preceding pagan creeds, except in
+      the thorough materialism and lack of poetry in statement which it
+      exhibits. After the Council of Nicaea, in fact, the Judaic tinge in the
+      doctrines of the Church becomes more apparent, and more and more its
+      Scheme of Salvation through Christ takes the character of a rather sordid
+      and huckstering bargain by which Man gets the better of God by persuading
+      the latter to sacrifice his own Son for the redemption of the world! With
+      the exception of a few episodes like the formation during the Middle Ages
+      of the noble brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Frairs and Nuns, dedicated to
+      the help and healing of suffering humanity, and the appearance of a few
+      real lovers of mankind (and the animals) like St. Francis&mdash;(and these
+      manifestations can hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty
+      consistently opposed them)&mdash;it may be said that after about the
+      fourth century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm
+      died away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the North and East, and
+      later of Moors and Arabs from the South, familiarized the European peoples
+      with the ideas of bloodshed and violence; gross and material conceptions
+      of life were in the ascendant; and a romantic and aspiring Christianity
+      gave place to a worldly and vulgar Churchianity.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) When travelling in India I found that the Gnanis or Wise Men
+there quite commonly maintained that Jesus (judging from his teaching)
+must have been initiated at some time in the esoteric doctrines of the
+Vedanta.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I have in these two or three pages dealt only&mdash;and that very briefly&mdash;with
+      the entry of the pagan doctrine of the Savior into the Christian field,
+      showing its transformation there and how Christianity could not well
+      escape having a doctrine of a Savior, or avoid giving a color of its own
+      to that doctrine. To follow out the same course with other doctrines, like
+      those which I have mentioned above, would obviously be an endless task&mdash;which
+      must be left to each student or reader to pursue according to his
+      opportunity and capacity. It is clear anyhow, that all these elements of
+      the pagan religions&mdash;pouring down into the vast reservoir, or rather
+      whirlpool, of the Roman Empire, and mixing among all these numerous
+      brotherhoods, societies, collegia, mystery-clubs, and groups which were at
+      that time looking out intently for some new revelation or inspiration&mdash;did
+      more or less automatically act and react upon each other, and by the
+      general conditions prevailing were modified, till they ultimately combined
+      and took united shape in the movement which we call Christianity, but
+      which only&mdash;as I have said&mdash;narrowly escaped being called
+      Mithraism&mdash;so nearly related and closely allied were these cults with
+      each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point it will naturally be asked: “And where in this scheme of the
+      Genesis of Christianity is the chief figure and accredited leader of the
+      movement&mdash;namely Jesus Christ himself&mdash;for to all appearance in
+      the account here given of the matter he is practically non-existent or a
+      negligible quantity?” And the question is a very pertinent one, and very
+      difficult to answer. “Where is the founder of the Religion?”&mdash;or to
+      put it in another form: “Is it necessary to suppose a human and visible
+      Founder at all?” A few years ago such a mere question would have been
+      accounted rank blasphemy, and would only&mdash;if passed over&mdash;have
+      been ignored on account of its supposed absurdity. To-day, however, owing
+      to the enormous amount of work which has been done of late on the subject
+      of Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different complexion.
+      And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned body of
+      critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as LEGENDARY.
+      Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his celebrated
+      book The Christ-Myth, (1) places David F. Strauss as first in the myth
+      field&mdash;though he allows that Dupuis in L’origine de tous les cultes
+      (1795) had given the clue to the whole idea. He then mentions Bruno Bauer
+      (1877) as contending that Jesus was a pure invention of Mark’s, and John
+      M. Robertson as having in his Christianity and Mythology (1900) given the
+      first thoroughly reasoned exposition of the legendary theory; also Emilio
+      Bossi in Italy, who wrote Jesu Christo non e mai esistito, and similar
+      authors in Holland, Poland, and other countries, including W. Benjamin
+      Smith, the American author of The Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P.
+      Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the
+      Jesus-story a variant of the Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong
+      list! (2) “But,” continues Drews, “ordinary historians still ignore all
+      this.” Finally, he dismisses Jesus as “a figure swimming obscurely in the
+      mists of tradition.” Nevertheless I need hardly remark that, large and
+      learned as the body of opinion here represented is, a still larger (but
+      less learned) body fights desperately for the actual HISTORICITY of Jesus,
+      and some even still for the old view of him as a quite unique and
+      miraculous revelation of Godhood on earth.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Die Christus-mythe: verbesserte und erweitezte Ausgabe, Jena,
+1910.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) To which we may also add Schweitzer’s Quest of the historical
+Jesus (1910).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      At first, no doubt, the LEGENDARY theory seems a little TOO far-fetched.
+      There is a fashion in all these things, and it MAY be that there is a
+      fashion even here. But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even
+      in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure of
+      Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in the mist of
+      Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a subject of
+      controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to have lived some
+      300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in minutest detail
+      have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost certainly a pure
+      invention, and never existed; when you remember&mdash;as mentioned earlier
+      in this book (1)&mdash;that it was more than five hundred years after the
+      supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish
+      the date of that birth&mdash;and that then a purely mythical date was
+      chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN’S new birth after the winter
+      solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the
+      other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state of
+      historical criticism must have been, and the general standard of
+      credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like Syria, and among an
+      ignorant population, where any story circulating from lip to lip was
+      assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous or imaginative;&mdash;why,
+      then the legendary theory does not seem so improbable. There is no doubt
+      that after the destruction of Jerusalem (in A.D. 70), little groups of
+      believers in a redeeming ‘Christ’ were formed there and in other places,
+      just as there had certainly existed, in the first century B.C., groups of
+      Gnostics, Therapeutae, Essenes and others whose teachings were very
+      SIMILAR to the Christian, and there was now a demand from many of these
+      groups for ‘writings’ and ‘histories’ which should hearten and confirm the
+      young and growing Churches. The Gospels and Epistles, of which there are
+      still extant a great abundance, both apocryphal and canonical, met this
+      demand; but how far their records of the person of Jesus of Nazareth are
+      reliable history, or how far they are merely imaginative pictures of the
+      kind of man the Saviour might be expected to be, (2) is a question which,
+      as I have already said, is a difficult one for skilled critics to answer,
+      and one on which I certainly have no intention of giving a positive
+      verdict. Personally I must say I think the ‘legendary’ solution quite
+      likely, and in some ways more satisfactory than the opposite one&mdash;for
+      the simple reason that it seems much more encouraging to suppose that the
+      story of Jesus, (gracious and beautiful as it is) is a myth which
+      gradually formed itself in the conscience of mankind, and thus points the
+      way of humanity’s future evolution, than to suppose it to be the mere
+      record of an unique and miraculous interposition of Providence, which
+      depended entirely on the powers above, and could hardly be expected to
+      occur again.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Ch. II.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) One of Celsus’ accusations against the Christians was that
+their Gospels had been written “several times over” (see Origen, Contra
+Celsum, ii. 26, 27).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      However, the question is not what we desire, but what we can prove to be
+      the actual fact. And certainly the difficulties in the way of regarding
+      the Gospel story (or stories, for there is not one consistent story) as
+      TRUE are enormous. If anyone will read, for instance, in the four Gospels,
+      the events of the night preceding the crucifixion and reckon the time
+      which they would necessarily have taken to enact&mdash;the Last Supper,
+      the agony in the Garden, the betrayal by Judas, the haling before Caiaphas
+      and the Sanhedrin, and then before Pilate in the Hall of judgment (though
+      courts for the trial of malefactors do not GENERALLY sit in the middle of
+      the night); then&mdash;in Luke&mdash;the interposed visit to Herod, and
+      the RETURN to Pilate; Pilate’s speeches and washing of hands before the
+      crowd; then the scourging and the mocking and the arraying of Jesus in
+      purple robe as a king; then the preparation of a Cross and the long and
+      painful journey to Golgotha; and finally the Crucifixion at sunrise;&mdash;he
+      will see&mdash;as has often been pointed out&mdash;that the whole story is
+      physically impossible. As a record of actual events the story is
+      impossible; but as a record or series of notes derived from the witnessing
+      of a “mystery-play”&mdash;and such plays with VERY SIMILAR incidents were
+      common enough in antiquity in connection with cults of a dying Savior, it
+      very likely IS true (one can see the very dramatic character of the
+      incidents: the washing of hands, the threefold denial by Peter, the purple
+      robe and crown of thorns, and so forth); and as such it is now accepted by
+      many well-qualified authorities. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough (vol. ix, “The Scapegoat,” p.
+400) speaks of the frequency in antiquity of a Mystery-play relating
+to a God-man who gives his life and blood for the people; and he
+puts forward tentatively and by no means dogmatically the following
+note:&mdash;“Such a drama, if we are right, was the original story of Esther
+and Mordecai, or (to give their older names) Ishtar and Marduk. It was
+played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning Captives brought
+it to Judaea, where it was acted, rather as an historical than a
+mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim earnest on a
+cross or gallows, were naturally drawn from the gaol rather than the
+green-room. A chain of causes, which because we cannot follow them
+might&mdash;in the loose language of common life&mdash;be called an accident,
+determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should
+be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had made in high
+places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to put out of the way.”
+See also vol. iv, “The Dying God,” in the same book.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      There are many other difficulties. The raising of Lazarus, already dead
+      three days, the turning of water into wine (a miracle attributed to
+      Bacchus, of old), the feeding of the five thousand, and others of the
+      marvels are, to say the least, not easy of digestion. The “Sermon on the
+      Mount” which, with the “Lord’s Prayer” embedded in it, forms the great and
+      accepted repository of ‘Christian’ teaching and piety, is well known to be
+      a collection of sayings from pre-christian writings, including the Psalms,
+      Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemonehesreh (a book of
+      Hebrew prayers), and others; and the fact that this collection was really
+      made AFTER the time of Jesus, and could not have originated from him, is
+      clear from the stress which it lays on “persecutions” and “false prophets”&mdash;things
+      which were certainly not a source of trouble at the time Jesus is supposed
+      to be speaking, though they were at a later time&mdash;as well as from the
+      occurrence of the word “Gentiles,” which being here used apparently in
+      contra-distinction to “Christians” could not well be appropriate at a time
+      when no recognized Christian bodies as yet existed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the most remarkable point in this connection is the absolute silence
+      of the Gospel of Mark on the subject of the Resurrection and Ascension&mdash;that
+      is, of the ORIGINAL Gospel, for it is now allowed on all hands that the
+      twelve verses Mark xvi. 9 to the end, are a later insertion. Considering
+      the nature of this event, astounding indeed, if physically true, and
+      unique in the history of the world, it is strange that this Gospel&mdash;the
+      earliest written of the four Gospels, and nearest in time to the actual
+      evidence&mdash;makes no mention of it. The next Gospel in point of time&mdash;that
+      of Matthew&mdash;mentions the matter rather briefly and timidly, and
+      reports the story that the body had been STOLEN from the sepulchre. Luke
+      enlarges considerably and gives a whole long chapter to the resurrection
+      and ascension; while the Fourth Gospel, written fully twenty years later
+      still&mdash;say about A. D. 120&mdash;gives two chapters and a GREAT
+      VARIETY OF DETAILS!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This increase of detail, however, as one gets farther and farther from the
+      actual event is just what one always finds, as I have said before, in
+      legendary traditions. A very interesting example of this has lately come
+      to light in the case of the traditions concerning the life and death of
+      the Persian Bab. The Bab, as most of my readers will know, was the Founder
+      of a great religious movement which now numbers (or numbered before the
+      Great War) some millions of adherents, chiefly Mahommedans, Christians,
+      Jews and Parsees. The period of his missionary activity was from 1845 to
+      1850. His Gospel was singularly like that of Jesus&mdash;a gospel of love
+      to mankind&mdash;only (as might be expected from the difference of date)
+      with an even wider and more deliberate inclusion of all classes, creeds
+      and races, sinners and saints; and the incidents and entourage of his
+      ministry were also singularly similar. He was born at Shiraz in 1820, and
+      growing up a promising boy and youth, fell at the age of 21 under the
+      influence of a certain Seyyid Kazim, leader of a heterodox sect, and a
+      kind of fore-runner or John the Baptist to the Bab. The result was a
+      period of mental trouble (like the “temptation in the wilderness”), after
+      which the youth returned to Shiraz and at the age of twenty-five began his
+      own mission. His real name was Mirza Ali Muhammad, but he called himself
+      thenceforth The Bab, i.e. the Gate (“I am the Way”); and gradually there
+      gathered round him disciples, drawn by the fascination of his personality
+      and the devotion of his character. But with the rapid increase of his
+      following great jealousy and hatred were excited among the Mullahs, the
+      upholders of a fanatical and narrow-minded Mahommedanism and quite
+      corresponding to the Scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament. By them
+      he was denounced to the Turkish Government. He was arrested on a charge of
+      causing political disturbance, and was condemned to death. Among his
+      disciples was one favorite, (1) who was absolutely devoted to his Master
+      and refused to leave him at the last. So together they were suspended over
+      the city wall (at Tabriz) and simultaneously shot. This was on the 8th
+      July, 1850.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Mirza Muhammad Ali; and one should note the similarity of
+the two names.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In November 1850&mdash;or between that date and October 1851, a book
+      appeared, written by one of the B[a^]b’s earliest and most enthusiastic
+      disciples&mdash;a merchant of Kashan&mdash;and giving in quite simple and
+      unpretending form a record of the above events. There is in it no account
+      of miracles or of great pretensions to godhood and the like. It is just a
+      plain history of the life and death of a beloved teacher. It was cordially
+      received and circulated far and wide; and we have no reason for doubting
+      its essential veracity. And even if proved now to be inaccurate in one or
+      two details, this would not invalidate the moral of the rest of the story&mdash;which
+      is as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the death of the Bab a great persecution took place (in 1852); there
+      were many Babi martyrs, and for some years the general followers were
+      scattered. But in time they gathered themselves together again; successors
+      to the original prophet were appointed&mdash;though not without
+      dissensions&mdash;and a Babi church, chiefly at Acca or Acre in Syria,
+      began to be formed. It was during this period that a great number of
+      legends grew up&mdash;legends of miraculous babyhood and boyhood, legends
+      of miracles performed by the mature Bab, and so forth; and when the
+      newly-forming Church came to look into the matter it concluded (quite
+      naturally!) that such a simple history as I have outlined above would
+      never do for the foundation of its plans, now grown somewhat ambitious. So
+      a new Gospel was framed, called the Tarikh-i-Jadid (“The new History” or
+      “The new Way”), embodying and including a lot of legendary matter, and
+      issued with the authority of “the Church.” This was in 1881-2; and
+      comparing this with the original record (called The point of Kaf) we get a
+      luminous view of the growth of fable in those thirty brief years which had
+      elapsed since the Bab’s death. Meanwhile it became very necessary of
+      course to withdraw from circulation as far as possible all copies of the
+      original record, lest they should give the lie to the later ‘Gospel’; and
+      this apparently was done very effectively&mdash;so effectively indeed that
+      Professor Edward Browne (to whom the world owes so much on account of his
+      labors in connection with Babism), after arduous search, came at one time
+      to the conclusion that the original was no longer extant. Most
+      fortunately, however, the well-known Comte de Gobineau had in the course
+      of his studies on Eastern Religions acquired a copy of The point of Kaf;
+      and this, after his death, was found among his literary treasures and
+      identified (as was most fitting) by Professor Browne himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such in brief is the history of the early Babi Church (1)&mdash;a Church
+      which has grown up and expanded greatly within the memory of many yet
+      living. Much might be written about it, but the chief point at present is
+      for us to note the well-verified and interesting example it gives of the
+      rapid growth in Syria of a religious legend and the reasons which
+      contributed to this growth&mdash;and to be warned how much more rapidly
+      similar legends probably grew up in the same land in the middle of the
+      First Century, A.D. The story of the Bab is also interesting to us
+      because, while this mass of legend was formed around it, there is no
+      possible doubt about the actual existence of a historical nucleus in the
+      person of Mirza Ali Muhammad.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For literature, see Edward G. Browne’s Traveller’s Narrative
+on the Episode of the Bab (1891), and his New History of the Bab
+translated from the Persian of the Tarikh-i-Jadid (Cambridge, 1893).
+Also Sermons and Essays by Herbert Rix (Williams and Norgate, 1907), pp.
+295-325, “The Persian Bab.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      On the whole, one is sometimes inclined to doubt whether any great
+      movement ever makes itself felt in the world, without dating first from
+      some powerful personality or group of personalities, ROUND which the
+      idealizing and myth-making genius of mankind tends to crystallize. But one
+      must not even here be too certain. Something of the Apostle Paul we know,
+      and something of ‘John’ the Evangelist and writer of the Epistle I John;
+      and that the ‘Christian’ doctrines dated largely from the preaching and
+      teaching of these two we cannot doubt; but Paul never saw Jesus (except
+      “in the Spirit”), nor does he ever mention the man personally, or any
+      incident of his actual life (the “crucified Christ” being always an ideal
+      figure); and ‘John’ who wrote the Gospel was certainly not the same as the
+      disciple who “lay in Jesus’ bosom”&mdash;though an intercalated verse, the
+      last but one in the Gospel, asserts the identity. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) It is obvious, in fact, that the WHOLE of the last chapter of
+St. John is a later insertion, and again that the two last verses of
+that chapter are later than the chapter itself!
+</p>
+    <p>
+      There may have been a historic Jesus&mdash;and if so, to get a reliable
+      outline of his life would indeed be a treasure; but at present it would
+      seem there is no sign of that. If the historicity of Jesus, in any degree,
+      could be proved, it would give us reason for supposing&mdash;what I have
+      personally always been inclined to believe&mdash;that there was also a
+      historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra, Krishna,
+      Hercules, Apollo and the rest. The question, in fact, narrows itself down
+      to this, Have there been in the course of human evolution certain, so to
+      speak, NODAL points or periods at which the psychologic currents ran
+      together and condensed themselves for a new start; and has each such node
+      or point of condensation been marked by the appearance of an actual and
+      heroic man (or woman) who supplied a necessary impetus for the new
+      departure, and gave his name to the resulting movement? OR is it
+      sufficient to suppose the automatic formation of such nodes or
+      starting-points without the intervention of any special hero or genius,
+      and to imagine that in each case the myth-making tendency of mankind
+      CREATED a legendary and inspiring figure and worshiped the same for a long
+      period afterwards as a god?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said before, this is a question which, interesting as it is, is
+      not really very important. The main thing being that the prophetic and
+      creative spirit of mankind HAS from time to time evolved those figures as
+      idealizations of its “heart’s desire” and placed a halo round their heads.
+      The long procession of them becomes a REAL piece of History&mdash;the
+      history of the evolution of the human heart, and of human consciousness.
+      But with the psychology of the whole subject I shall deal in the next
+      chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I may here, however, dwell for a moment on two other points which belong
+      properly to this chapter. I have already mentioned the great reliance
+      placed by the advocates of a unique ‘revelation’ on the high morality
+      taught in the Gospels and the New Testament generally. There is no need of
+      course to challenge that morality or to depreciate it unduly; but the
+      argument assumes that it is so greatly superior to anything of the kind
+      that had been taught before that we are compelled to suppose something
+      like a revelation to explain its appearance&mdash;whereas of course anyone
+      familiar with the writings of antiquity, among the Greeks or Romans or
+      Egyptians or Hindus or later Jews, knows perfectly well that the reported
+      sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly from these
+      sources. I have illustrated this already from the Sermon on the Mount. If
+      anyone will glance at the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs&mdash;a
+      Jewish book composed about 120 B. C.&mdash;he will see that it is full of
+      moral precepts, and especially precepts of love and forgiveness, so ardent
+      and so noble that it hardly suffers in any way when compared with the New
+      Testament teaching, and that consequently no special miracle is required
+      to explain the appearance of the latter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The twelve Patriarchs in question are the twelve sons of Jacob, and the
+      book consists of their supposed deathbed scenes, in which each patriarch
+      in turn recites his own (more or less imaginary) life and deeds and gives
+      pious counsel to his children and successors. It is composed in a fine and
+      poetic style, and is full of lofty thought, remindful in scores of
+      passages of the Gospels&mdash;words and all&mdash;the coincidences being
+      too striking to be accidental. It evidently had a deep influence on the
+      authors of the Gospels, as well as on St. Paul. It affirms a belief in the
+      coming of a Messiah, and in salvation for the Gentiles. The following are
+      some quotations from it: (1) Testament of Zebulun (p. 116): “My children,
+      I bid you keep the commands of the Lord, and show mercy to your
+      neighbours, and have compassion towards all, not towards men only, but
+      also towards beasts.” Dan (p. 127): “Love the Lord through all your life,
+      and one another with a true heart.” Joseph (p. 173): “I was sick, and the
+      Lord visited me; in prison, and my God showed favor unto me.” Benjamin (p.
+      209): “For as the sun is not defiled by shining on dung and mire, but
+      rather drieth up both and driveth away the evil smell, so also the pure
+      mind, encompassed by the defilements of earth, rather cleanseth them and
+      is not itself defiled.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The references being to the Edition by R. H. Charles (1907).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I think these quotations are sufficient to prove the high standard of this
+      book, which was written in the Second Century B. C., and FROM which the
+      New Testament authors copiously borrowed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other point has to do with my statement at the beginning of this
+      chapter that two of the main ‘characteristics’ of Christianity were its
+      insistence on (a) a tendency towards renunciation of the world, and a
+      consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love, and (b) on a morality
+      whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to God rather than a public
+      sense of duty to one’s neighbor and to society generally. I think,
+      however, that the last-mentioned characteristic ought to be viewed in
+      relation to a third, namely, (c) the extraordinarily DEMOCRATIC tendency
+      of the new Religion. (1) Celsus (A.D. 200) jeered at the early Christians
+      for their extreme democracy: “It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the
+      senseless&mdash;slaves and womenfolk and children&mdash;whom they wish to
+      persuade (to join their churches) or CAN persuade”&mdash;“wool-dressers
+      and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons,” and
+      “whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent or a fool, in a word, whoever is
+      god-forsaken ([gr kakodaimwn]), him the Kingdom of God will receive.” (2)
+      Thus Celsus, the accomplished, clever, philosophic and withal humorous
+      critic, laughed at the new religionists, and prophesied their speedy
+      extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken. There is little doubt that just
+      the inclusion of women and weaklings and outcasts did contribute LARGELY
+      to the spread of Christianity (and Mithraism). It brought hope and a sense
+      of human dignity to the despised and rejected of the earth. Of the immense
+      numbers of lesser officials who carried on the vast organization of the
+      Roman Empire, most perhaps, were taken from the ranks of the freedmen and
+      quondam slaves, drawn from a great variety of races and already familiar
+      with pagan cults of all kinds&mdash;Egyptian, Syrian, Chaldean, Iranian,
+      and so forth. (3) This fact helped to give to Christianity&mdash;under the
+      fine tolerance of the Empire&mdash;its democratic character and also its
+      willingness to accept all. The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto
+      been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in; and
+      though this was doubtless, as time went on, a source of weakness to the
+      Church, and a cause of dissension and superstition, yet it was in the
+      inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis which I
+      must now endeavor to explain.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic
+tendency was very marked in Mithraism. “Il est certain,” says Cumont,
+“qu’il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les classes inferieures de
+la societe et c’est l’a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste
+longtemps la religion des humbles.” Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Glover’s Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire,
+ch. viii.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap14"></a>
+XIV.<br/>
+THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think, from
+      many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it will be
+      well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repetition, to bring the
+      whole argument together. And the argument is that since the dawn of
+      humanity on the earth&mdash;many hundreds of thousands or perhaps a
+      million years ago&mdash;there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a
+      gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain
+      stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena of
+      religious belief and religious ritual&mdash;these phenomena (whether in
+      the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by step,
+      a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution
+      concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the strange
+      similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all over the
+      world and in places far remote from each other, and which have been
+      briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the main stages of this psychologic evolution&mdash;those at any rate
+      with which we are here concerned&mdash;are Three: the stage of Simple
+      Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage which
+      for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal
+      Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be
+      analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result&mdash;but at present I
+      only desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show
+      that it is from them and from their passage one into another that there
+      has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange
+      panorama of humanity’s religious evolution&mdash;its superstitions and
+      magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its
+      incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and
+      paintings and forms of art and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama
+      indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with
+      three great leading motives!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of
+      centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not
+      radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably more
+      quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or
+      reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the
+      consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as
+      separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.
+      He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very
+      near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal form
+      is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general world
+      consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such a
+      marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature. And
+      primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before, allow
+      that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and perfection
+      of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now. It would be
+      quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same sense of
+      creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion. For a long
+      period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher animals, must have
+      been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional privations and sufferings
+      and conflicts) well adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the
+      earth and with each other. There must have been a period resembling a
+      Golden Age&mdash;some condition at any rate which, compared with
+      subsequent miseries, merited the epithet ‘golden.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose. The
+      tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates
+      (including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that they
+      adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man fairly
+      worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them. Of course
+      we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these beautiful
+      creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse, or a melancholy
+      milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and despondent lion or
+      eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them and have only
+      wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we could extract
+      from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals; they
+      domesticated many of them by the force of a natural friendship, (1) and
+      accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age of tribal solidarity
+      and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature. And the point of it all
+      is (with regard to the subject we have in hand) that this was also the age
+      from which by a natural evolution the sense of Religion came to mankind.
+      If Religion in man is the sense of ties binding his inner self to the
+      powers of the universe around him, then it is evident I think that
+      primitive man as I have described him possessed the REALITY of this sense&mdash;though
+      so far buried and subconscious that he was hardly aware of it. It was only
+      later, and with the coming of the Second Stage, that this sense began to
+      rise distinctly into consciousness.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
+edn. 1903) says: “The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between
+man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be
+found among the lower races.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution
+      of a child&mdash;somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)&mdash;when
+      the simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a
+      new element&mdash;SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so
+      definite, that (in the depth of the infant’s eyes) you can almost SEE it
+      take place. So in the evolution of the human race there has been a period&mdash;also
+      marked and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval of
+      time&mdash;when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of
+      THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance
+      of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question
+      arose: “How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can <i>I</i>
+      do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the
+      painful, and so on?” From that moment a new motive was added to life. The
+      mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little eddy
+      round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply concerned
+      about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with the larger
+      life which once dominated it&mdash;the life of Nature, the life of the
+      Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken up.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1
+and 39; also W. McDougall’s Social Psychology (1908), p. 146&mdash;where the
+same age is tentatively suggested.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important that the
+      reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable severance, an
+      inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting
+      nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked
+      across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually) became
+      alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows.
+      Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property
+      and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship and solidarity grew
+      feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts were
+      less and less sure&mdash;and that in proportion as brain-activity and
+      self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were
+      less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew louder
+      and more insistent. Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered his brother
+      and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the Golden Age closed their
+      gates behind him. He entered upon a period of suffering&mdash;a period of
+      labor and toil and sorrow such as he had never before known, and such as
+      the animals certainly have never known. And in that distressful state, in
+      that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage, he still remains to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work. It would be
+      foolish and useless to rail against the process, or to blame any one for
+      it. It had to be. Through this dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had to
+      pass&mdash;if only in order at last to find the True Self which was (and
+      still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed
+      there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark
+      the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul’s return
+      to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will
+      arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of life
+      which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious long time
+      about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and Self-conceit
+      and Cruelty and Lust of oppression and domination, which marks the present
+      period, is past&mdash;and it WILL pass&mdash;then Humanity will come again
+      to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and peace which has
+      for so long been prophesied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want the
+      reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old psychologic
+      unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led to the whole
+      panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round himself,
+      necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed the sin (if
+      it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The sense of
+      loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization of himself
+      as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his attributing a similar
+      consciousness of some kind to the great Life around him. Action and
+      reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may have felt before, it
+      became clear to him now that beings more or less like himself&mdash;though
+      doubtless vaster and more powerful&mdash;moved behind the veil of the
+      visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and Demons and Gods
+      arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of this turmoil of
+      perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an alien and an
+      exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin. If before, he
+      had experienced fear&mdash;in the kind of automatic way of
+      self-preservation in which the animals feel it&mdash;he now, with fevered
+      self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble
+      degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were not
+      always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived or thought
+      he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate persecution of the
+      powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against him for some neglect
+      or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by a perfectly logical and
+      natural sequence there arose the belief in other-world or supernatural
+      powers, whether purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational
+      and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of offence against these
+      powers; there arose a complex ritual of Expiation&mdash;whether by
+      personal sacrifice and suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There
+      arose too a whole catalogue of ceremonies&mdash;ceremonies of Initiation,
+      by which the novice should learn to keep within the good grace of the
+      Powers, and under the blessing of his Tribe and the protection of its
+      Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic meals which should restore the lost
+      sanctity of the common life and remove the sense of guilt and isolation;
+      ceremonies of Marriage and rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to
+      curb the terrific and demonic violence of passions which else indeed might
+      easily rend the community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that
+      granted an early stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and
+      granting this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of
+      SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet
+      logical order a whole series of religious institutions and beliefs, which
+      phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no means unreal to
+      our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the psychological process
+      was necessarily of similar general character in every branch of the human
+      race and all over the world, so the religious evolutions&mdash;the creeds
+      and rituals&mdash;took on much the same complexion everywhere; and, though
+      they differed in details according to climate and other influences, ran on
+      such remarkably parallel lines as we have noted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event,
+      the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place, an
+      enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age. I dwell
+      on the word “began” because I think it is probable that in its beginnings,
+      and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had an infantile
+      and very innocent character, quite different from its later and more
+      aggressive forms&mdash;just as we see self-consciousness in a little child
+      has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful or grasping
+      boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though self-consciousness
+      may have begun to appear in the human race at this very early time (and
+      more or less contemporaneously with the invention of very rude tools and
+      unformed language), there probably did elapse a very long period&mdash;perhaps
+      the whole of the Neolithic Age&mdash;before the evils of this second stage
+      of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller has pointed out that among
+      the words which are common to the various branches of Aryan language, and
+      which therefore belong to the very early period before the separation of
+      these branches, there are not found the words denoting war and conflict
+      and the weapons and instruments of strife&mdash;a fact which suggests a
+      long continuance of peaceful habit among mankind AFTER the first formation
+      and use of language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were
+      APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many
+      thinkers; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so very
+      protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact
+      determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what
+      might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like
+      “go-hunting-kill-bear”) without reference to individual personalities and
+      relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like “I”
+      and “Thou” came into use, and the holophrases broke up into “parts of
+      speech” and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If true, these
+      facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal language,
+      something like though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding
+      or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in the forms of
+      “I” and “Thou” and the grammar of personal actions and relations. “They
+      show that the plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by
+      multiplication of an original ‘I,’ but by selection and gradual EXCLUSION
+      from an original collective ‘we.’” (3) According to this view the birth of
+      self-consciousness in the human family, or in any particular race or
+      section of the human family, must have been equally slow and hesitating;
+      and it would be easy to imagine, as just said, that there may have been a
+      very long and ‘golden’ period at its beginning, before the new
+      consciousness took on its maturer and harsher forms.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their
+simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we
+should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not
+differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase
+and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See A. E. Crawley’s Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison’s
+Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne’s History of the New World called
+America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness
+is associated with the break-up of the holophrase.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) Themis, p. 471.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are
+      notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we
+      take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (homo
+      primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000 or
+      40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of the
+      Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and
+      inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples, and 5,000 years
+      ago for the first actual historical records that have come down to us, we
+      may perhaps get something like a proportion between the different periods.
+      That is to say, half a million years for the purely animal man in his
+      different forms and grades of evolution. Then somewhere towards the end of
+      palaeolithic or commencement of neolithic times Self-consciousness dimly
+      beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow germination and
+      pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic period and the
+      dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago, and to-day (we hope),
+      reaching the climax which precedes or foretells its abatement and
+      transformation.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93
+and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings’s Encycl. art.
+“Ethnology”; and Havelock Ellis, “The Origin of War,” in The Philosophy
+of Conflict and other Essays.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor periods greatly
+      LONGER than those here mentioned; but possibly there would be some
+      agreement as to the RATIO to each other of the times concerned: that is,
+      the said authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man
+      (1)-period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter
+      aggressively ‘self conscious’ period, corresponding to the Second Stage&mdash;perhaps
+      lasting only one thirtieth or fiftieth of the time of the first period;
+      and then&mdash;if they looked forward at all to a third stage&mdash;would
+      be inclined for obvious reasons to attribute to that again a very extended
+      duration.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) I use the phrase ‘animal-man’ here, not with any flavor of
+contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used it, but
+with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as one feels towards
+the animals themselves.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about
+      Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate to
+      the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist, it is
+      clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means of
+      expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in attitudes,
+      in ceremonial ACTIONS&mdash;in a more or less elaborate ritual, in fact.
+      (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt, placation
+      of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community, sacramental
+      Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be expressed by
+      appropriate rites&mdash;and as a matter of fact are often so expressed
+      even now&mdash;MORE readily and directly than by language. ‘Dancing’&mdash;when
+      that word came to be invented&mdash;did not mean a mere flinging about of
+      the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements of the body which
+      might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or of the audience whom
+      he represented. And so the ‘religious dance’ became a most important part
+      of ritual.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See ch. ix and xi.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pass on to the
+      Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and dissolution&mdash;disruption
+      both of the human mind, and of society round about it, due to the action
+      of the Second Stage&mdash;could not go on indefinitely. There are hundreds
+      of thousands of people at the present moment who are dying of mental or
+      bodily disease&mdash;their nervous systems broken down by troubles
+      connected with excessive self-consciousness&mdash;selfish fears and
+      worries and restlessness. Society at large is perishing both in industry
+      and in warfare through the domination in its organism of the self-motives
+      of greed and vanity and ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must
+      either continue in the same strain, in which case it is evident that we
+      are approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter
+      in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of
+      which we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and
+      necessary element of regeneration?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is evident that it must be a new birth&mdash;the entry into a further
+      stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through some
+      such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of suffering, the
+      mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die. (1) Self-consciousness
+      has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new form. Probably nothing
+      but the extreme of suffering can bring this about. (2) And what is this
+      new form in which consciousness has to rearise? Obviously, since the
+      miseries of the world during countless centuries have dated from that
+      fatal attempt to make the little personal SELF the centre of effort and
+      activity, and since that attempt has inevitably led to disunity and
+      discord and death, both within the mind itself and within the body of
+      society, there is nothing left but the return to a Consciousness which
+      shall have Unity as its foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from
+      the direct SENSE AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout creation. The
+      simple mind of Early Man and the Animals was of that character&mdash;a
+      consciousness, so to speak, continuous through nature, and though running
+      to points of illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet
+      at no point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments.
+      (And it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I
+      have already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct
+      and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but
+      clearly it will be&mdash;it is not&mdash;of the simple inchoate character
+      of the First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly
+      extended by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order
+      of mentality&mdash;the consciousness of the Third Stage.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) “The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an
+end,” says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) One may remember in this connection the tapas of the Hindu
+yogi, or the ordeals of initiates into the pagan Mysteries generally.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In order to understand the operation and qualities of this Third
+      Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now to consider in what more
+      or less rudimentary way or ways it figured in the pagan rituals and in
+      Christianity. We have seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or the
+      ‘Grizzly’ tribes of North American Indians in the neighborhood of Mount
+      Shasta paying their respects and adoration to a captive bear&mdash;at once
+      the food-animal, and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had slain a
+      bear&mdash;and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with all due
+      ceremonies observed, but privately for his own satisfaction. He had
+      committed, therefore, a sin theoretically unpardonable; for had he not&mdash;to
+      gratify his personal desire for food&mdash;levelled a blow at the guardian
+      spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from his fellows by
+      destroying its very symbol? There was only one way by which he could
+      regain the fellowship of his companions. He must make amends by some
+      public sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal for
+      himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan) in a common feast,
+      while at the same time, tensest prayers and thanks are offered to the
+      animal for the gift of his body for food. The Magic formula demanded
+      nothing less than this&mdash;else dread disaster would fall upon the man
+      who sinned, and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred similar
+      rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology&mdash;the first, in
+      which the individual member simply remains within the compass of the
+      tribal mind, and only acts in harmony with it; the second, in which the
+      individual steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an
+      action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third, in which, to
+      make amends and to prove his sincerity, he submits to some sacrifice, and
+      by a common feast or some such ceremony is received back again into the
+      unity of the fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is consumed, and
+      the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh, the Savior of the
+      tribe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit is no longer merely
+      an Animal, or animal-headed Genius, but a quite human-formed Divinity,
+      still the same general outline of ideas is preserved&mdash;only with
+      gathered intensity owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The
+      Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just an ordinary
+      Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus or Jesus. He is betrayed by
+      one of his own followers, and suffers death, but rises again redeeming all
+      with himself in the one fellowship; and the corn and the wine and the wild
+      flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the sustenance of
+      mankind, are consumed in a holy supper of reconciliation. It is always the
+      return to unity which is the ritual of Salvation, and of which the symbol
+      is the Eucharist&mdash;the second birth, the formation of “a new creature
+      when old things are passed away.” For “Except a man be born again, he
+      cannot see the Kingdom of God”; and “the first man is of the earth,
+      earthly, but the second man is the Lord from heaven.” Like a strange
+      refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this belief in a
+      god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a new birth and
+      the beginning of a new creature: “Rejoice, ye initiates in the mystery of
+      the liberated god”&mdash;rejoice in the thought of the hero who died as a
+      mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who then was this “Christos” for whom the world was waiting three
+      centuries before our era (and indeed centuries before that)? Who was this
+      “thrice Savior” whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the meaning of
+      that “coming of the Son of Man” whom Daniel beheld in vision among the
+      clouds of heaven? or of the “perfect man” who, Paul declared, should
+      deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the
+      children of God? What was this salvation which time after time and times
+      again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and which the
+      Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious dramas with
+      such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say “Happy is he who has
+      seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the hollow earth: that
+      man knows the true end of life and its source divine”; and concerning
+      which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally enthusiastic? (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Farnell’s Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;
+also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London,
+1897).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already said, what the
+      answer to these questions is? As with the first blossoming of
+      self-consciousness in the human mind came the dawn of an immense cycle of
+      experience&mdash;a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil
+      and blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely necessary
+      and unavoidable&mdash;so now the redemption, the return, the restoration
+      has to come through another forward step, in the same domain. Abandoning
+      the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to
+      return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this
+      ‘new’ life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation, and which all the
+      expressions which I have just cited have indicated. It is this presence
+      which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and Liberator: the
+      daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more glorious, than
+      all that has gone before that the little candle of the local self is
+      swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the return into direct
+      touch with Nature and Man&mdash;the liberation from the long exile of
+      separation, from the painful sense of isolation and the odious nightmare
+      of guilt and ‘sin.’ Can we doubt that this new birth&mdash;this third
+      stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so&mdash;has to come, that
+      it is indeed not merely a pious hope or a tentative theory, but a FACT
+      testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the past&mdash;witnesses
+      shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic light, yet for the
+      most part isolated from each other among the arid and unfruitful wastes of
+      Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a summer night?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness an immense
+      period, as we have said&mdash;perhaps 30,000 years, perhaps even
+      more&mdash;has elapsed. Now, in the present day this period is reaching
+      its culmination, and though it will not terminate immediately, its end
+      is, so to speak, in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age
+      behind us&mdash;say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years&mdash;evidence has
+      been coming in (partly in the religious rites recorded, partly in
+      oracles, poems and prophetic literature) of the onset of this further
+      illumination&mdash;“the light which never was on sea or land”&mdash;and
+      the cloud of witnesses, scattered at first, has in these later centuries
+      become so evident and so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to
+      anticipate a great and general new birth, as now not so very far off. (1)
+      (We should, however, do well to remember, in this connexion, that many a
+      time already in the history the Millennium has been prophesied, and yet
+      not arrived punctual to date, and to take to ourselves the words of
+      ‘Peter,’ who somewhat grievously disappointed at the long-delayed second
+      coming of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of heaven, wrote in his second
+      Epistle: “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their
+      own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the
+      fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning
+      of the creation.” (2))
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke’s
+remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published
+at Philadelphia, 1901).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      I say that all through the historical age behind us there has been
+      evidence&mdash;even though scattered&mdash;of salvation and the return of
+      the Cosmic life. Man has never been so completely submerged in the bitter
+      sea of self-centredness but what he has occasionally been able to dash the
+      spray from his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of heaven.
+      From how far back we cannot say, but from an immense antiquity come the
+      beautiful myths which indicate this.
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly hutch;<br/>
+Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;<br/>
+Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues a garment of the sun and stars;<br/>
+From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe, and is wedded to the prince of heaven.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown close to the
+      Hearth-fire of the universe&mdash;herself indeed just a little spark from
+      it; despised and rejected; rejected by the world, despised by her two
+      elder sisters (the body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though
+      latest-born, by far the most beautiful of the three. And of the Prince of
+      Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her wedding garment the glory
+      and beauty of all nature and of the heavens! The parables of Jesus are
+      charming in their way, but they hardly reach this height of inspiration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange that here again
+      there are three sisters (the three stages of human evolution), and the
+      latest-born the most beautiful of the three, and the jealousies and
+      persecutions heaped on the youngest by the others, and especially by
+      Aphrodite the goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of the
+      unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted for mortals to
+      look; and the long, long tests and sufferings and trials which Psyche has
+      to undergo before Eros may really take her to his arms and translate her
+      to the heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these things were
+      represented in the Mysteries the world flocked to see them, and the poets
+      indeed said, “Happy are they that see and seeing can understand?” Can we
+      not understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the second
+      century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing the lesson that
+      “the greatest of human blessings is fellowship and mutual trust”?
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap15"></a>
+XV.<br/>
+THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      Thus we come to a thing which we must not pass over, because it throws
+      great light on the meaning and interpretation of all these rites and
+      ceremonies of the great World-religion. I mean the subject of the Ancient
+      Mysteries. And to this I will give a few pages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These Mysteries were probably survivals of the oldest religious rites of
+      the Greek races, and in their earlier forms consisted not so much in
+      worship of the gods of Heaven as of the divinities of Earth, and of Nature
+      and Death. Crude, no doubt, at first, they gradually became (especially in
+      their Eleusinian form) more refined and philosophical; the rites were
+      gradually thrown open, on certain conditions, not only to men generally,
+      but also to women, and even to slaves; and in the end they influenced
+      Christianity deeply. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Edwin Hatch, D.D., The Influence of Greek Ideas and
+Usages on the Christian Church (London, 1890), pp. 283-5.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      There were apparently three forms of teaching made use of in these rites:
+      these were [gr legomena], things SAID; [gr deiknumena], things SHOWN; and
+      [gr drwmena], things PERFORMED or ACTED. (1) I have given already some
+      instances of things said—texts whispered for consolation in the neophyte’s
+      ear, and so forth; of the THIRD group, things enacted, we have a fair
+      amount of evidence. There were ritual dramas or passion-plays, of which an
+      important one dealt with the descent of Kore or Proserpine into the
+      underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations, (2) and her redemption
+      and restoration to the upper world in Spring; another with the sufferings
+      of Psyche and her rescue by Eros, as described by Apuleius (3)&mdash;himself
+      an initiate in the cult of Isis. There is a parody by Lucian, which tells
+      of the birth of Apollo, the marriage of Coronis, and the coming of
+      Aesculapius as Savior; there was the dying and rising again of Dionysus
+      (chief divinity of the Orphic cult); and sometimes the mystery of the
+      birth of Dionysus as a holy child. (4) There was, every year at Eleusis, a
+      solemn and lengthy procession or pilgrimage made, symbolic of the long
+      pilgrimage of the human soul, its sufferings and deliverance.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Cheetham, op. cit., pp. 49-61 sq.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Farnell, op. cit., iii. 158 sq.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See The Golden Ass.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) Farnell, ii, 177.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      “Almost always,” says Dr. Cheetham, “the suffering of a god&mdash;suffering
+      followed by triumph&mdash;seems to have been the subject of the sacred
+      drama.” Then occasionally to the Neophytes, after taking part in the
+      pilgrimage, and when their minds had been prepared by an ordeal of
+      darkness and fatigue and terrors, was accorded a revelation of Paradise,
+      and even a vision of Transfiguration&mdash;the form of the Hierophant
+      himself, or teacher of the Mysteries, being seen half-lost in a blaze of
+      light. (1) Finally, there was the eating of food and drinking of
+      barley-drink from the sacred chest (2)&mdash;a kind of Communion or
+      Eucharist.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Ibid., 179 sq.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Ibid., 186. Sacred chests, in which holy things were kept,
+figure frequently in early rites and legends&mdash;as in the case of the ark
+of the Jewish tabernacle, the ark or box carried in celebrations of the
+mysteries of Bacchus (Theocritus, Idyll xxvi), the legend of Pandora’s
+box which contained the seeds of all good and evil, the ark of Noah
+which saved all living creatures from the flood, the Argo of the
+argonauts, the moonshaped boat in which Isis floating over the waters
+gathered together the severed limbs of Osiris, and so brought about his
+resurrection, and the many chests or coffins out of which the various
+gods (Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Jesus), having been laid there in death,
+rose again for the redemption of the world. They all evidently refer to
+the mystic womb of Nature and of Woman, and are symbols of salvation and
+redemption (For a full discussion of this subject, see The Great Law of
+religious origins, by W. Williamson, ch. iv.)
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Apuleius in The Golden Ass gives an interesting account of his induction
+      into the mysteries of Isis: how, bidding farewell one evening to the
+      general congregation outside, and clothed in a new linen garment, he was
+      handed by the priest into the inner recesses of the temple itself; how he
+      “approached the confines of death, and having trod on the threshold of
+      Proserpine (the Underworld), returned therefrom, being borne through all
+      the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant light:
+      and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath and the Gods above, and
+      stood near and worshipped them.” During the night things happened which
+      must not be disclosed; but in the morning he came forth “consecrated by
+      being dressed in twelve stoles painted with the figures of animals.” (1)
+      He ascended a pulpit in the midst of the Temple, carrying in his right
+      hand a burning torch, while a chaplet encircled his head, from which
+      palm-leaves projected like rays of light. “Thus arrayed like the Sun, and
+      placed so as to resemble a statue, on a sudden the curtains being drawn
+      aside, I was exposed to the gaze of the multitude. After this I celebrated
+      the most joyful day of my initiation, as my natal day (day of the New
+      Birth) and there was a joyous banquet and mirthful conversation.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) An allusion no doubt to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the
+pathway of the Sun, as well as to the practice of the ancient priests of
+wearing the skins of totem-animals in sign of their divinity.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      One can hardly refuse to recognize in this account the description of some
+      kind of ceremony which was supposed to seal the illumination of a man and
+      his new birth into divinity&mdash;the animal origin, the circling of all
+      experience, the terrors of death, and the resurrection in the form of the
+      Sun, the symbol of all light and life. The very word “illumination”
+      carries the ideas of light and a new birth with it. Reitzenstein in his
+      very interesting book on the Greek Mysteries (1) speaks over and over
+      again of the illumination ([gr fwtismos]) which was held to attend
+      Initiation and Salvation. The doctrine of Salvation indeed ([gr swthria])
+      was, as we have already seen, rife and widely current in the Second
+      Century B. C. It represented a real experience, and the man who shared
+      this experience became a [gr qeios] [gr anqrwpos] or divine man. (2) In
+      the Orphic Tablets the phrase “I am a child of earth and the starry
+      heaven, but my race is of heaven (alone)” occurs more than once. In one of
+      the longest of them the dead man is instructed “after he has passed the
+      waters (of Lethe) where the white Cypress and the House of Hades are” to
+      address these very words to the guardians of the Lake of Memory while he
+      asks for a drink of cold water from that Lake. In another the dead person
+      himself is thus addressed: “Hail, thou who hast endured the Suffering,
+      such as indeed thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from
+      man!” (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the religious life; and, what is
+      especially interesting to us, Salvation or the divine nature was open to
+      all men&mdash;to all, that is, who should go through the necessary stages
+      of preparation for it. (4)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Die hellenistischen Mysterien-Religionen, by R. Reitzenstein,
+Leipzig, 1910.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Reitzenstein, p. 12.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) These Tablets (so-called) are instructions to the dead as to
+their passage into the other world, and have been found in the tombs, in
+Italy and elsewhere, inscribed on very thin gold plates and buried with
+the departed. See Manual of Greek Antiquities by Percy Gardner and F.
+B. Jerome (1896); also Prolegomena to Greek Religion by Jane E. Harrison
+(1908).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) Reitzenstein, pp. 15 and 18; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity, p. 301.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Reitzenstein contends (p. 26) that in the Mysteries, transfiguration ([gr
+      metamorfwsis]), salvation ([gr swthria]), and new birth ([gr
+      paliggenesia]) were often conjoined. He says (p. 31), that in the Egyptian
+      Osiris-cult, the Initiate acquires a nature “equal to God” ([gr isoqeos]),
+      the very same expression as that used of Christ Jesus in Philippians ii.
+      6; he mentions Apollonius of Tyana and Sergius Paulus as instances of men
+      who by their contemporaries were considered to have attained this nature;
+      and he quotes Akhnaton (Pharaoh of Egypt in 1375 B.C.) as having said,
+      “Thou art in my heart; none other knows Thee, save thy son Akhnaton; Thou
+      hast initiated him into thy wisdom and into thy power.” He also quotes the
+      words of Hermes (Trismegistus)&mdash;“Come unto Me, even as children to
+      their mother’s bosom: Thou art I, and I am Thou; what is thine is mine,
+      and what is mine is thine; for indeed I am thine image ([gr eidwlon]),”
+      and refers to the dialogue between Hermes and Tat, in which they speak of
+      the great and mystic New Birth and Union with the All&mdash;with all
+      Elements, Plants and Animals, Time and Space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Mysteries,” says Dr. Cheetham very candidly, “influenced Christianity
+      considerably and modified it in some important respects”; and Dr. Hatch,
+      as we have seen, not only supports this general view, but follows it out
+      in detail. (1) He points out that the membership of the Mystery-societies
+      was very numerous in the earliest times, A.D.; that their general aims
+      were good, including a sense of true religion, decent life, and
+      brotherhood; that cleanness from crime and confession were demanded from
+      the neophyte; that confession was followed by baptism ([gr kaqarsis]) and
+      THAT by sacrifice; that the term [gr fwtismos] (illumination) was adopted
+      by the Christian Church as the name for the new birth of baptism; that the
+      Christian usage of placing a seal on the forehead came from the same
+      source; that baptism itself after a time was called a mystery ([gr
+      musihriou]); that the sacred cakes and barley-drink of the Mysteries
+      became the milk and honey and bread and wine of the first Christian
+      Eucharists, and that the occasional sacrifice of a lamb on the Christian
+      altar (“whose mention is often suppressed”) probably originated in the
+      same way. Indeed, the conception of the communion-table AS an altar and
+      many other points of ritual gradually established themselves from these
+      sources as time went on. (2) It is hardly necessary to say more in proof
+      of the extent to which in these ancient representations “things said” and
+      “scenes enacted” forestalled the doctrines and ceremonials of
+      Christianity.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Hatch, op. cit., pp. 290 sq.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Dionysus Areop. (end of fifth century), who describes the
+Christian rites generally in Mystery language (Hatch, 296).
+</p>
+    <p>
+      “But what of the second group above-mentioned, the “things SHOWN”? It is
+      not so easy naturally to get exact information concerning these, but they
+      seem to have been specially holy objects, probably things connected with
+      very ancient rituals in the past&mdash;such as sacred stones, old and rude
+      images of the gods, magic nature-symbols, like that half-disclosed ear of
+      corn above-mentioned (Ch. V.). “In the Temple of Isis at Philae,” says Dr.
+      Cheetham, “the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks of corn
+      springing from it, which a priest waters from a vessel. An inscription
+      says: ‘This is the form of him whom we may not name, Osiris of the
+      Mysteries who sprang from the returning waters’ (the Nile).” Above all, no
+      doubt, there were images of the phallus and the vulva, the great symbols
+      of human fertility. We have seen (Ch. XII) that the lingam and the yoni
+      are, even down to to-day, commonly retained and honored as holy objects in
+      the S. Indian Temples, and anointed with oil (some of them) for a very
+      practical reason. Sir J. G. Frazer, in his lately published volumes on The
+      Folk-lore of the Old Testament, has a chapter (in vol. ii) on the very
+      numerous sacred stones of various shapes and sizes found or spoken of in
+      Palestine and other parts of the world. Though uncertain as to the meaning
+      of these stones he mentions that they are “frequently, though not always,
+      UPRIGHT.” Anointing them with oil, he assures us, “is a widespread
+      practice, sometimes by women who wish to obtain children.” And he
+      concludes the chapter by saying: “The holy stone at Bethel was probably
+      one of those massive standing stones or rough pillars which the Hebrews
+      called masseboth, and which, as we have seen, were regular adjuncts of
+      Canaanite and early Israelitish sanctuaries.” We have already mentioned
+      the pillars Jachin and Boaz which stood before the Temple of Solomon, and
+      which had an acknowledged sexual significance; and so it seems probable
+      that a great number of these holy stones had a similar meaning. (1)
+      Following this clue it would appear likely that the lingam thus anointed
+      and worshipped in the Temples of India and elsewhere IS the original [gr
+      cristos] (2) adored by the human race from the very beginning, and that at
+      a later time, when the Priest and the King, as objects of worship, took
+      the place of the Lingam, THEY also were anointed with the chrism of
+      fertility. That the exhibition of these emblems should be part of the
+      original ‘Mystery’-rituals was perfectly natural&mdash;especially because,
+      as we have explained already (3) old customs often continued on in a quite
+      naive fashion in the rituals, when they had come to be thought indecent or
+      improper by a later public opinion; and (we may say) was perfectly in
+      order, because there is plenty of evidence to show that in SAVAGE
+      initiations, of which the Mysteries were the linear descendants, all these
+      things WERE explained to the novices, and their use actually taught. (4)
+      No doubt also there were some representations or dramatic incidents of a
+      fairly coarse character, as deriving from these ancient sources. (5) It
+      is, however, quaint to observe how the mere mention of such things has
+      caused an almost hysterical commotion among the critics of the Mysteries&mdash;from
+      the day of the early Christians who (in order to belaud their own
+      religion) were never tired of abusing the Pagans, onward to the present
+      day when modern scholars either on the one hand follow the early
+      Christians in representing the Mysteries as sinks of iniquity or on the
+      other (knowing this charge could not be substantiated except in the period
+      of their final decadence) take the line of ignoring the sexual interest
+      attaching to them as non-existent or at any rate unworthy of attention.
+      The good Archdeacon Cheetham, for instance, while writing an interesting
+      book on the Mysteries passes by this side of the subject ALMOST as if it
+      did not exist; while the learned Dr. Farnell, overcome apparently by the
+      weight of his learning, and unable to confront the alarming obstacle
+      presented by these sexual rites and aspects, hides himself behind the
+      rather non-committal remark (speaking of the Eleusinian rites) “we have no
+      right to imagine any part of this solemn ceremony as coarse or obscene.”
+      (6) As Nature, however, has been known (quite frequently) to be coarse or
+      obscene, and as the initiators of the Mysteries were probably neither
+      ‘good’ nor ‘learned,’ but were simply anxious to interpret Nature as best
+      they could, we cannot find fault with the latter for the way they handled
+      the problem, nor indeed well see how they could have handled it better.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) F. Nork, Der Mystagog, mentions that the Roman Penates were
+commonly anointed with oil. J. Stuart Hay, in his Life of Elagabalus
+(1911), says that “Elagabal was worshipped under the symbol of a great
+black stone or meteorite, in the shape of a Phallus, which having fallen
+from the heavens represented a true portion of the Godhead, much after
+the style of those black stone images popularly venerated in Norway and
+other parts of Europe.”
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) J. E. Hewitt, in his Ruling Races of Pre-historic Times (p.
+64), gives a long list of pre-historic races who worshipped the lingam.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) See Ch. XI.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) See Ernest Crawley’s Mystic Rose, ch. xiii, pp. 310 and 313:
+“In certain tribes of Central Africa both boys and girls after
+initiation must as soon as possible have intercourse.” Initiation being
+not merely preliminary to, but often ACTUALLY marriage. The same
+among Kaffirs, Congo tribes, Senegalese, etc. Also among the Arunta of
+Australia.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (5) Professor Diederichs has said that “in much ancient ritual it
+was thought that mystic communion with the deity could be obtained
+through the semblance of sex-intercourse&mdash;as in the Attis-Cybele
+worship, and the Isis-ritual.” (Farnell.) Reitzenstein says (op. cit.,
+p. 20.) that the Initiates, like some of the Christian Nuns at a later
+time, believed in union with God through receiving the seed.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (6) Farnell, op. cit., iii. 176. Messrs. Gardner and Jevons, in
+their Manual of Greek Antiquities, above-quoted, compare the Eleusinian
+Mysteries favorably with some of the others, like the Arcadian, the
+Troezenian, the Aeginaean, and the very primitive Samothracian:
+saying (p. 278) that of the last-mentioned “we know little, but safely
+conjecture that in them the ideas of sex and procreation dominated EVEN
+MORE than in those of Eleusis.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      After all it is pretty clear that the early peoples saw in Sex the great
+      cohesive force which kept (we will not say Humanity but at any rate) the
+      Tribe together, and sustained the race. In the stage of simple
+      Consciousness this must have been one of the first things that the budding
+      intellect perceived. Sex became one of the earliest divinities, and there
+      is abundant evidence that its organs and processes generally were invested
+      with a religious sense of awe and sanctity. It was in fact the symbol (or
+      rather the actuality) of the permanent undying life of the race, and as
+      such was sacred to the uses of the race. Whatever taboos may have, among
+      different peoples, guarded its operations, it was not essentially a thing
+      to be concealed, or ashamed of. Rather the contrary. For instance the
+      early Christian writer, Hippolytus, Bishop of Pontus (A.D. 200), in his
+      Refutation of all Heresies, Book V, says that the Samothracian Mysteries,
+      just mentioned, celebrate Adam as the primal or archetypal Man eternal in
+      the heavens; and he then continues: “Habitually there stand in the temple
+      of the Samothracians two images of naked men having both hands stretched
+      aloft towards heaven, and their pudenda turned upwards, as is also the
+      case with the statue of Mercury on Mt. Cyllene. And the aforesaid images
+      are figures of the primal man, and of that spiritual one that is born
+      again, in every respect of the same substance with that (first) man.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This extract from Hippolytus occurs in the long discourse in which he
+      ‘exposes’ the heresy of the so-called Naassene doctrines and mysteries.
+      But the whole discourse should be read by those who wish to understand the
+      Gnostic philosophy of the period contemporary with and anterior to the
+      birth of Christianity. A translation of the discourse, carefully analyzed
+      and annotated, is given in G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice-greatest Hermes (1)
+      (vol. i); and Mead himself, speaking of it, says (p. 141): “The claim of
+      these Gnostics was practically that the good news of the Christ (the
+      Christos) was the consummation of the inner doctrine of the
+      Mystery-institutions of all the nations; the end of them all being the
+      revelation of the Mystery of Man.” Further, he explains that the Soul, in
+      these doctrines, was regarded as synonymous with the Cause of All; and
+      that its loves were twain&mdash;of Aphrodite (or Life), and of Persephone
+      (or Death and the other world). Also that Attis, abandoning his sex in the
+      worship of the Mother-Goddess (Dea Syria), ascends to Heaven&mdash;a new
+      man, Male-female, and the origin of all things: the hidden Mystery being
+      the Phallus itself, erected as Hermes in all roads and boundaries and
+      temples, the Conductor and Reconductor of Souls.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Reitzenstein, op. cit., quotes the discourse largely. The
+Thrice-greatest Hermes may also be consulted for a translation of
+Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      All this may sound strange, but one may fairly say that it represented in
+      its degree, and in that first ‘unfallen’ stage of human thought and
+      psychology, a true conception of the cosmic Life, and indeed a conception
+      quite sensible and admirable, until, of course, the Second Stage brought
+      corruption. No sooner was this great force of the cosmic life diverted
+      from its true uses of Generation and Regeneration (1) and appropriated by
+      the individual to his own private pleasure&mdash;no sooner was its
+      religious character as a tribal service (2), (often rendered within the
+      Temple precincts) lost sight of or degraded into a commercial transaction&mdash;than
+      every kind of evil fell upon mankind. Corruptio optimi pessima. It must be
+      remembered too that simultaneous with this sexual disruption occurred the
+      disruption of other human relations; and we cease to be surprised that
+      disease and selfish passions, greed, jealousy, slander, cruelty, and
+      wholesale murder, raged&mdash;and have raged ever since.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For the special meaning of these two terms, see The Drama of
+Love and Death, by E. Carpenter, pp. 59-61.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Ernest Crawley in The Mystic Rose challenges this
+identification of Religion with tribal interests; yet his arguments
+are not very convincing. On p. 5 he admits that “there is a religious
+meaning inherent in the primitive conception and practice of ALL human
+relations”; and a large part of his ch. xii is taken up in showing that
+even such institutions as the Saturnalia were religious in confirming
+the sense of social union and leading to ‘extended identity.’
+</p>
+    <p>
+      But for the human soul&mdash;whatever its fate, and whatever the dangers
+      and disasters that threaten it&mdash;there is always redemption waiting.
+      As we saw in the last chapter, this corruption of Sex led (quite
+      naturally) to its denial and rejection; and its denial led to the
+      differentiation from it of Love. Humanity gained by the enthronement and
+      deification of Love, pure and undefiled, and (for the time being) exalted
+      beyond this mortal world, and free from all earthly contracts. But again
+      in the end, the divorce thus introduced between the physical and the
+      spiritual led to the crippling of both. Love relegated, so to speak, to
+      heaven as a purely philanthropical, pious and ‘spiritual’ affair, became
+      exceedingly DULL; and sex, remaining on earth, but deserted by the
+      redeeming presence, fell into mere “carnal curiosity and wretchedness of
+      unclean living.” Obviously for the human race there remains nothing, in
+      the final event, but the reconciliation of the physical and the spiritual,
+      and after many sufferings, the reunion of Eros and Psyche.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is still, however, much to be said about the Third State of
+      Consciousness. Let us examine into it a little more closely. Clearly,
+      since it is a new state, and not merely an extension of a former one, one
+      cannot arrive at it by argument derived from the Second state, for all
+      conscious Thought such as we habitually use simply keeps us IN the Second
+      state. No animal or quite primitive man could possibly understand what we
+      mean by Self-consciousness till he had experienced it. Mere argument would
+      not enlighten him. And so no one in the Second state can quite realize the
+      Third state till he has experienced it. Still, explanations may help us to
+      perceive in what direction to look, and to recognize in some of our
+      experiences an approach to the condition sought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Evidently it is a mental condition in some respects more similar to the
+      first than to the second stage. The second stage of human psychologic
+      evolution is an aberration, a divorce, a parenthesis. With its culmination
+      and dismissal the mind passes back into the simple state of union with the
+      Whole. (The state of Ekagrata in the Hindu philosophy: one-pointedness,
+      singleness of mind.) And the consciousness of the Whole, and of things
+      past and things to come and things far around&mdash;which consciousness
+      had been shut out by the concentration on the local self&mdash;begins to
+      return again. This is not to say, of course, that the excursus in the
+      second stage has been a loss and a defect. On the contrary, it means that
+      the Return is a bringing of all that has been gained during the period of
+      exile (all sorts of mental and technical knowledge and skill, emotional
+      developments, finesse and adaptability of mind) BACK into harmony with the
+      Whole. It means ultimately a great gain. The Man, perfected, comes back to
+      a vastly extended harmony. He enters again into a real understanding and
+      confidential relationship with his physical body and with the body of the
+      society in which he dwells&mdash;from both of which he has been sadly
+      divorced; and he takes up again the broken thread of the Cosmic Life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone has noticed the extraordinary consent sometimes observable among
+      the members of an animal community&mdash;how a flock of 500 birds (e. g.
+      starlings) will suddenly change its direction of flight&mdash;the light on
+      the wings shifting INSTANTANEOUSLY, as if the impulse to veer came to all
+      at the same identical moment; or how bees will swarm or otherwise act with
+      one accord, or migrating creatures (lemmings, deer, gossamer spiders,
+      winged ants) the same. Whatever explanation of these facts we favor&mdash;whether
+      the possession of swifter and finer means of external communication than
+      we can perceive, or whether a common and inner sensitivity to the genius
+      of the Tribe (the “Spirit of the Hive”) or to the promptings of great
+      Nature around&mdash;in any case these facts of animal life appear to throw
+      light on the possibilities of an accord and consent among the members of
+      emaciated humanity, such as we dream of now, and seem to bid us have good
+      hope for the future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is here, perhaps, that the ancient worship of the Lingam comes in. The
+      word itself is apparently connected with our word ‘link,’ and has
+      originally the same meaning. (1) It is the link between the generations.
+      Beginning with the worship of the physical Race-life, the course of
+      psychologic evolution has been first to the worship of the Tribe (or of
+      the Totem which represents the tribe); then to the worship of the
+      human-formed God of the tribe&mdash;the God who dies and rises again
+      eternally, as the tribe passes on eternal&mdash;though its members
+      perpetually perish; then to the conception of an undying Savior, and the
+      realization and distinct experience of some kind of Super-consciousness
+      which does certainly reside, more or less hidden, in the deeps of the
+      mind, and has been waiting through the ages for its disclosure and
+      recognition. Then again to the recognition that in the sacrifices, the
+      Slayer and the Slain are one&mdash;the strange and profoundly mystic
+      perception that the God and the Victim are in essence the same&mdash;the
+      dedication of ‘Himself to Himself’ (2) and simultaneously with this the
+      interpretation of the Eucharist as meaning, even for the individual, the
+      participation in Eternal Life&mdash;the continuing life of the Tribe, or
+      ultimately of Humanity. (3) The Tribal order rises to Humanity; love
+      ascends from the lingam to yogam, from physical union alone to the union
+      with the Whole&mdash;which of course includes physical and all other kinds
+      of union. No wonder that the good St. Paul, witnessing that extraordinary
+      whirlpool of beliefs and practices, new and old, there in the first
+      century A.D.&mdash;the unabashed adoration of sex side by side with the
+      transcendental devotions of the Vedic sages and the Gnostics&mdash;became
+      somewhat confused himself and even a little violent, scolding his
+      disciples (I Cor. x. 21) for their undiscriminating acceptance, as it
+      seemed to him, of things utterly alien and antagonistic. “Ye cannot drink
+      the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the
+      Lord’s table and the table of devils.”
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Sanskrit Dictionary.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See Ch. VIII.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) There are many indications in literature&mdash;in prophetic or
+poetic form&mdash;of this awareness and distinct conviction of an eternal
+life, reached through love and an inner sense of union with others and
+with humanity at large; indications which bear the mark of absolute
+genuineness and sincerity of feeling. See, for instance, Whitman’s poem,
+“To the Garden the World” (Leaves of Grass, complete edition, p. 79).
+But an eternal life of the third order; not, thank heaven! an eternity
+of the meddling and muddling self-conscious Intellect!
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Every careful reader has noticed the confusedness of Paul’s mind and
+      arguments. Even taking only those Epistles (Galatians, Romans and
+      Corinthians) which the critics assign to his pen, the thing is observable&mdash;and
+      some learned Germans even speak of TWO Pauls. (1) But also the thing is
+      quite natural. There can be little doubt that Paul of Tarsus, a Jew
+      brought up in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, did at some time fall
+      deeply under the influence of Greek thought, and quite possibly became an
+      initiate in the Mysteries. It would be difficult otherwise to account for
+      his constant use of the Mystery-language. Reitzenstein says (p. 59): “The
+      hellenistic religious literature MUST have been read by him; he uses its
+      terms, and is saturated with its thoughts (see Rom. vi. 1-14.” And this
+      conjoined with his Jewish experience gave him creative power. “A great
+      deal in his sentiment and thought may have REMAINED Jewish, but to his
+      Hellenism he was indebted for his love of freedom and his firm belief in
+      his apostleship.” He adopts terms (like [gr sarkikos], [gr yucikos] and
+      [gr pneumatikos]) (2) which were in use among the hellenistic sects of the
+      time; and he writes, as in Romans vi. 4, 5, about being “buried” with
+      Christ or “planted” in the likeness of his death, in words which might
+      well have been used (with change of the name) by a follower of Attis or
+      Osiris after witnessing the corresponding ‘mysteries’; certainly the
+      allusion to these ancient deities would have been understood by every
+      religionist of that day. These few points are sufficient to acentuate{sic}
+      the two elements in Paul, the Jewish and the Greek, and to explain (so
+      far) the seeming confusion in his utterances. Further it is interesting to
+      note&mdash;as showing the pagan influences in the N. T. writings&mdash;the
+      degree to which the Epistle to Philemon (ascribed to Paul) is FULL&mdash;short
+      as it is&mdash;of expressions like PRISONER of the Lord, FELLOW SOLDIER,
+      CAPTIVE or BONDMAN, (3) which were so common at the time as to be almost a
+      cant in Mithraism and the allied cults. In I Peter ii. 2 (4), we have the
+      verse “As newborn babes, desire ye the sincere MILK of the word, that ye
+      may grow thereby.” And again we may say that no one in that day could
+      mistake the reference herein contained to old initiation ceremonies and
+      the new birth (as described in Chapter VIII above), for indeed milk was
+      the well-known diet of the novice in the Isis mysteries, as well as (in
+      some savage tribes) of the Medicine-man when practising his calling.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) “Die Mysterien-anschauungen, die bei Paulus im Hintergrunde
+stehen, drangen sich in dem sogenarmten Deuteropaulinismus machtig vor”
+(Reitzenstein).
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) Remindful of our Three Stages: the Animal, the
+Self-conscious, and the Cosmic.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (3) [gr desmios, stratiwths, doulos].
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (4) See also I Cor. iii. 2.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      And here too Democracy comes in&mdash;strangely foreboded from the first
+      in all this matter. (1) Not only does the Third Stage bring illumination,
+      intuitive understanding of processes in Nature and Humanity, sympathy with
+      the animals, artistic capacity, and so forth, but it necessarily brings a
+      new Order of Society. A preposterous&mdash;one may almost say a hideous&mdash;social
+      Age is surely drawing to its end, The debacle we are witnessing to-day all
+      over Europe (including the British Islands), the break-up of old
+      institutions, the generally materialistic outlook on life, the coming to
+      the surface of huge masses of diseased and fatuous populations, the scum
+      and dregs created by the past order, all point to the End of a
+      Dispensation. Protestantism and Commercialism, in the two fields of
+      religion and daily life have, as I have indicated before, been occupied in
+      concentrating the mind of each man solely on his OWN welfare, the
+      salvation of his OWN soul or body. These two forces have therefore been
+      disruptive to the last degree; they mark the culmination of the
+      Self-conscious Age&mdash;a culmination in War, Greed, Materialism, and the
+      general principle of Devil-take-the-hindmost&mdash;and the clearing of the
+      ground for the new order which is to come. So there is hope for the human
+      race. Its evolution is not all a mere formless craze and jumble. There is
+      an inner necessity by which Humanity unfolds from one degree or plane of
+      consciousness to another. And if there has been a great ‘Fall’ or Lapse
+      into conflict and disease and ‘sin’ and misery, occupying the major part
+      of the Historical period hitherto, we see that this period is only brief,
+      so to speak, in comparison with the whole curve of growth and expansion.
+      We see also that, as I have said before, the belief in a state of
+      salvation or deliverance has in the past ages never left itself quite
+      without a witness in the creeds and rituals and poems and prophecies of
+      mankind. Art, in some form or other, as an activity or inspiration dating
+      not from the conscious Intellect, but from deeper regions of sub-conscious
+      feeling and intuition, has continually come to us as a message from and an
+      evidence of the Third stage or state, and as a promise of its more
+      complete realization under other conditions.
+    </p>
+<p class="poem">
+ Through the long night-time where the Nations wander<br/>
+    From Eden past to Paradise to be,<br/>
+ Art’s sacred flowers, like fair stars shining yonder,<br/>
+    Alone illumine Life’s obscurity.<br/>
+<br/>
+ O gracious Artists, out of your deep hearts<br/>
+    ’Tis some great Sun, I doubt, by men unguessed,<br/>
+ Whose rays come struggling thus, in slender darts,<br/>
+    To shadow what Is, till Time shall manifest.<br/>
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See the germs of Democracy in the yoga teaching of the
+Hindus, and in the Upanishads, the Bhagavat Gita, and other books.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      With the Cosmic stage comes also necessarily the rehabilitation of the
+      WHOLE of Society in one fellowship (the true Democracy). Not the rule or
+      domination of one class or caste&mdash;as of the Intellectual, the Pious,
+      the Commercial or the Military&mdash;but the fusion or at least
+      consentaneous organization of ALL (as in the corresponding functions of
+      the human Body). Class rule has been the mark of that second period of
+      human evolution, and has inevitably given birth during that period to wars
+      and self-agrandizements of classes and sections, and their consequent
+      greeds and tyrannies over other classes and sections. It is not found in
+      the primitive human tribes and societies, and will not be found in the
+      final forms of human association. The liberated and emancipated Man passes
+      unconstrained and unconstraining through all grades and planes of human
+      fellowship, equal and undisturbed, and never leaving his true home and
+      abiding place in the heart of all. Equally necessarily with the
+      rehabilitation of Society as an entirety will follow the rehabilitation of
+      the entire physical body IN each member of Society. We have spoken already
+      of Nakedness: its meaning and likely extent of adoption (Ch. XII). The
+      idea that the head and the hands are the only seemly and presentable
+      members of the organism, and that the other members are unworthy and
+      indecent, is obviously as onesided and lopsided as that which honors
+      certain classes in the commonwealth and despises others. Why should the
+      head brag of its ascendancy and domination, and the heart be smothered up
+      and hidden? It will only be a life far more in the open air than that
+      which we lead at present, which will restore the balance and ultimately
+      bring us back to sanity and health.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap16"></a>
+XVI.<br/>
+THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      We have dealt with the Genesis of Christianity; we now come to the Exodus.
+      For that Christianity can CONTINUE to hold the field of Religion in the
+      Western World is neither probable nor desirable. It is true, as I have
+      remarked already, that there is a certain trouble about defining what we
+      mean by “Christianity” similar to that about the word “Civilization.” If
+      we select out of the great mass of doctrines and rites favored by the
+      various Christian Churches just those which commend themselves to the most
+      modern and humane and rational human mind and choose to call that
+      resulting (but rather small) body of belief and practice ‘Christianity’ we
+      are, of course, entitled to do so, and to hope (as we do hope) that this
+      residuum will survive and go forward into the future. But this sort of
+      proceeding is hardly fair and certainly not logical. It enables
+      Christianity to pose as an angel of light while at the same time keeping
+      discreetly out of sight all its own abominations and deeds of darkness.
+      The Church&mdash;which began its career by destroying, distorting and
+      denying the pagan sources from which it sprang; whose bishops and other
+      ecclesiastics assassinated each other in their theological rancour “of
+      wild beasts,” which encouraged the wicked folly of the Crusades&mdash;especially
+      the Children’s Crusades&mdash;and the shameful murders of the Manicheans,
+      the Albigenses, and the Huguenots; which burned at the stake thousands and
+      thousands of poor ‘witches’ and ‘heretics’; which has hardly ever spoken a
+      generous word in favor or defence of the animals; which in modern times
+      has supported vivisection as against the latter, Capitalism and
+      Commercialism as against the poorer classes of mankind; and whose priests
+      in the forms of its various sects, Greek or Catholic, Lutheran or
+      Protestant, have in these last days rushed forth to urge the nations to
+      slaughter each other with every diabolical device of Science, and to
+      glorify the war-cry of Patriotism in defiance of the principle of
+      universal Brotherhood&mdash;such a Church can hardly claim to have
+      established the angelic character of its mission among mankind! And if it
+      be said&mdash;as it often IS SAID: “Oh! but you must go back to the
+      genuine article, and the Church’s real origin and one foundation in the
+      person and teaching of Jesus Christ,” then indeed you come back to the
+      point which this book, as above, enforces: namely, that as to the person
+      of Jesus, there is no CERTAINTY at all that he ever existed; and as to the
+      teaching credited to him, it is certain that that comes down from a period
+      long anterior to ‘Christianity’ and is part of what may justly be called a
+      very ancient World-religion. So, as in the case of ‘Civilization,’ we are
+      compelled to see that it is useless to apply the word to some ideal state
+      of affairs or doctrine (an ideal by no means the same in all people’s
+      minds, or in all localities and times), but that the only reasonable thing
+      to do is to apply it in each case to a HISTORICAL PERIOD. In the case of
+      Christianity the historical period has lasted nearly 2,000 years, and, as
+      I say, we can hardly expect or wish that it should last much longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The very thorough and careful investigation of religious origins which has
+      been made during late years by a great number of students and observers
+      undoubtedly tends to show that there has been something like a great
+      World-religion coming down the centuries from the remotest times and
+      gradually expanding and branching as it has come&mdash;that is to say that
+      the similarity (in ESSENCE though not always in external detail) between
+      the creeds and rituals of widely sundered tribes and peoples is so great
+      as to justify the view&mdash;advanced in the present volume&mdash;that
+      these creeds and rituals are the necessary outgrowths of human psychology,
+      slowly evolving, and that consequently they have a common origin and in
+      their various forms a common expression. Of this great World-religion, so
+      coming down, Christianity is undoubtedly a branch, and an important
+      branch. But there have been important branches before; and while it may be
+      true that Christianity emphasizes some points which may have been
+      overlooked or neglected in the Vedic teachings or in Buddhism, or in the
+      Persian and Egyptian and Syrian cults, or in Mahommedanism, and so forth,
+      it is also equally true that Christianity has itself overlooked or
+      neglected valuable points in these religions. It has, in fact, the defects
+      of its qualities. If the World-religion is like a great tree, one cannot
+      expect or desire that all its branches should be directed towards the same
+      point of the compass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reinach, whose studies of religious origins are always interesting and
+      characterized by a certain Gallic grace and nettete, though with a
+      somewhat Jewish non-perception of the mystic element in life, defines
+      Religion as a combination of animism and scruples. This is good in a way,
+      because it gives the two aspects of the subject: the inner, animism,
+      consisting of the sense of contact with more or less intelligent beings
+      moving in Nature; and the outer, consisting in scruples or taboos. The one
+      aspect shows the feeling which INSPIRES religion, the other, the checks
+      and limitations which DEFINE it and give birth to ritual. But like most
+      anthropologists he (Reinach) is a little TOO patronizing towards the “poor
+      Indian with untutored mind.” He is sorry for people so foolish as to be
+      animistic in their outlook, and he is always careful to point out that the
+      scruples and taboos were quite senseless in their origin, though
+      occasionally (by accident) they turned out useful. Yet&mdash;as I have
+      said before&mdash;Animism is a perfectly sensible, logical and NECESSARY
+      attitude of the human mind. It is a necessary attribute of man’s psychical
+      nature, by which he projects into the great World around him the image of
+      his own mind. When that mind is in a very primitive, inchoate, and
+      fragmentary condition, the images so projected are those of fragmentary
+      intelligences (‘spirits,’ gnomes, etc.&mdash;the age of magic); when the
+      mind rises to distinct consciousness of itself the reflections of it are
+      anthropomorphic ‘gods’; when finally it reaches the universal or cosmic
+      state it perceives the presence of a universal Being behind all phenomena&mdash;which
+      Being is indeed itself&mdash;“Himself to Himself.” If you like you may
+      call the whole process by the name of Animism. It is perfectly sensible
+      throughout. The only proviso is that you should also be sensible, and
+      distinguish the different stages in the process.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jane Harrison makes considerable efforts to show that Religion is
+      primarily a reflection of the SOCIAL Conscience (see Themis, pp. 482-92)&mdash;that
+      is, that the sense in Man of a “Power that makes for righteousness”
+      outside (and also inside) him is derived from his feeling of continuity
+      with the Tribe and his instinctive obedience to its behests, confirmed by
+      ages of collective habit and experience. He cannot in fact sever the
+      navel-string which connects him with his tribal Mother, even though he
+      desires to do so. And no doubt this view of the origin of Religion is
+      perfectly correct. But it must be pointed out that it does not by any
+      means exclude the view that religion derives also from an Animism by which
+      man recognizes in general Nature his foster-mother and feels himself in
+      closest touch with HER. Which may have come first, the Social affiliation
+      or the Nature affiliation, I leave to the professors to determine. The
+      term Animism may, as far as I can see, be quite well applied to the social
+      affiliation, for the latter is evidently only a case in which the
+      individual projects his own degree of consciousness into the human group
+      around him instead of into the animals or the trees, but it is a case of
+      which the justice is so obvious that the modern man can intellectually
+      seize and understand it, and consequently he does not tar it with the
+      ‘animistic’ brush.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Miss Harrison, it must be noticed, does, in other passages of the same
+      book (see Themis, pp. 68, 69), admit that Religion has its origin not only
+      from unity with the Tribe but from the sense of affiliation to Nature&mdash;the
+      sense of “a world of unseen power lying behind the visible universe, a
+      world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of magical activity and the
+      medium of mysticism. The mystical element, the oneness and continuousness
+      comes out very clearly in the notion of Wakonda among the Sioux
+      Indians.... The Omahas regarded all animate and inanimate forms, all
+      phenomena, as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous and similar
+      to the will-power they were conscious of in themselves. This mysterious
+      power in all things they called Wakonda, and through it all things were
+      related to man, and to each other. In the idea of the continuity of life,
+      a relation was maintained between the seen and the unseen, the dead and
+      the living, and also between the fragment of anything and its entirety.”
+      Thus our general position is confirmed, that Religion in its origin has
+      been INSPIRED by a deep instinctive conviction or actual sense of
+      continuity with a being or beings in the world around, while it has
+      derived its FORM and ritual by slow degrees from a vast number of taboos,
+      generated in the first instance chiefly by superstitious fears, but
+      gradually with the growth of reason and observation becoming simplified
+      and rationalized into forms of use. On the one side there has been the
+      positive impulse&mdash;of mere animal Desire and the animal urge of
+      self-expression; on the other there has been the negative force of Fear
+      based on ignorance&mdash;the latter continually carving, moulding and
+      shaping the former. According to this an organized study and
+      classification of taboos might yield some interesting results; because
+      indeed it would throw light on the earliest forms of both religion and
+      science. It would be seen that some taboos, like those of CONTACT (say
+      with a menstruous woman, or a mother-in-law, or a lightning-struck tree)
+      had an obvious basis of observation, justifiable but very crude; while
+      others, like the taboo against harming an enemy who had contracted
+      blood-friendship with one of your own tribe, or against giving decent
+      burial to a murderer, were equally rough and rude expressions or
+      indications of the growing moral sentiment of mankind. All the same there
+      would be left, in any case, a large residuum of taboos which could only be
+      judged as senseless, and the mere rubbish of the savage mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So much for the first origins of the World-religion; and I think enough
+      has been said in the various chapters of this book to show that the same
+      general process has obtained throughout. Man, like the animals, began with
+      this deep, subconscious sense of unity with surrounding Nature. When this
+      became (in Man) fairly conscious, it led to Magic and Totemism. More
+      conscious, and it branched, on the one hand, into figures of Gods and
+      definite forms of Creeds, on the other into elaborate Scientific Theories&mdash;the
+      latter based on a strong INTELLECTUAL belief in Unity, but fervently
+      denying any ‘anthropomorphic’ or ‘animistic’ SENSE of that unity. Finally,
+      it seems that we are now on the edge of a further stage when the theories
+      and the creeds, scientific and religious, are on the verge of collapsing,
+      but in such a way as to leave the sense and the perception of Unity&mdash;the
+      real content of the whole process&mdash;not only undestroyed, but
+      immensely heightened and illuminated. Meanwhile the taboos&mdash;of which
+      there remain some still, both religious and scientific&mdash;have been
+      gradually breaking up and merging themselves into a reasonable and humane
+      order of life and philosophy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have said that out of this World-religion Christianity really sprang. It
+      is evident that the time has arrived when it must either acknowledge its
+      source and frankly endeavor to affiliate itself to the same, or failing
+      that must perish. In the first case it will probably have to change its
+      name; in the second the question of its name ‘will interest it no more.’
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With regard to the first of these alternatives, I might venture&mdash;though
+      with indifference&mdash;to make a few suggestions. Why should we not have&mdash;instead
+      of a Holy Roman Church&mdash;a Holy HUMAN Church, rehabilitating the
+      ancient symbols and rituals, a Christianity (if you still desire to call
+      it so) frankly and gladly acknowledging its own sources? This seems a
+      reasonable and even feasible proposition. If such a church wished to
+      celebrate a Mass or Communion or Eucharist it would have a great variety
+      of rites and customs of that kind to select from; those that were not
+      appropriate for use in our times or were connected with the worship of
+      strange gods need not be rejected or condemned, but could still be
+      commented on and explained as approaches to the same idea&mdash;the idea
+      of dedication to the Common Life, and of reinvigoration in the partaking
+      of it. If the Church wished to celebrate the Crucifixion or betrayal of
+      its Founder, a hundred instances of such celebrations would be to hand,
+      and still the thought that has underlain such celebrations since the
+      beginning of the world could easily be disentangled and presented in
+      concrete form anew. In the light of such teaching expressions like “I know
+      that my Redeemer liveth” would be traced to their origin, and men would
+      understand that notwithstanding the mass of rubbish, cant and humbug which
+      has collected round them they really do mean something and represent the
+      age-long instinct of Humanity feeling its way towards a more extended
+      revelation, a new order of being, a third stage of consciousness and
+      illumination. In such a Church or religious organization EVERY quality of
+      human nature would have to be represented, every practice and custom
+      allowed for and its place accorded&mdash;the magical and astronomical
+      meanings, the rites connected with sun-worship, or with sex, or with the
+      worship of animals; the consecration of corn and wine and other products
+      of the ground, initiations, sacrifices, and so forth&mdash;all (if indeed
+      it claimed to be a World-religion) would have to be represented and
+      recognized. For they all have their long human origin and descent in and
+      through the pagan creeds, and they all have penetrated into and become
+      embodied to some degree in Christianity. Christianity therefore, as I say,
+      must either now come frankly forward and, acknowledging its parentage from
+      the great Order of the past, seek to rehabilitate THAT and carry mankind
+      one step forward in the path of evolution&mdash;or else it must perish.
+      There is no other alternative. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Comte in founding his philosophy of Positivism seems to have
+had in view some such Holy Human Church, but he succeeded in making it
+all so profoundly dull that it never flourished, The seed of Life was
+not in it.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Let me give an instance of how a fragment of ancient ritual which has
+      survived from the far Past and is still celebrated, but with little
+      intelligence or understanding, in the Catholic Church of to-day, might be
+      adopted in such a Church as I have spoken of, interpreted, and made
+      eloquent of meaning to modern humanity. When I was in Ceylon nearly 30
+      years ago I was fortunate enough to witness a night-festival in a Hindu
+      Temple&mdash;the great festival of Taipusam, which takes place every year
+      in January. Of course, it was full moon, and great was the blowing up of
+      trumpets in the huge courtyard of the Temple. The moon shone down above
+      from among the fronds of tall coco-palms, on a dense crowd of native
+      worshipers&mdash;men and a few women&mdash;the men for the most part clad
+      in little more than a loin-cloth, the women picturesque in their colored
+      saris and jewelled ear and nose rings. The images of Siva and two other
+      gods were carried in procession round and round the temple&mdash;three or
+      four times; nautch girls danced before the images, musicians, blowing
+      horns and huge shells, or piping on flageolets or beating tom-toms,
+      accompanied them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with flaming
+      coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each side, elated and excited
+      with the sense of the present divinity, yet pleasantly free from any
+      abject awe. The whole thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief of a
+      Bacchanalian procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus&mdash;and especially
+      so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly intimacy with the god. There
+      were singing of hymns and the floating of the chief actors on a raft round
+      a sacred lake. And then came the final Act. Siva, or his image, very
+      weighty and borne on the shoulders of strong men, was carried into the
+      first chamber or hall of the Temple and placed on an altar with a curtain
+      hanging in front. The crowd followed with a rush; and then there was more
+      music, recital of hymns, and reading from sacred books. From where we
+      stood we could see the rite which was performed behind the curtain. Two
+      five-branched candlesticks were lighted; and the manner of their lighting
+      was as follows. Each branch ended in a little cup, and in the cups five
+      pieces of camphor were placed, all approximately equal in size. After
+      offerings had been made, of fruit, flowers and sandalwood, the five
+      camphors in each candlestick were lighted. As the camphor flames burned
+      out the music became more wild and exciting, and then at the moment of
+      their extinction the curtains were drawn aside and the congregation
+      outside suddenly beheld the god revealed and in a blaze of light. This
+      burning of camphor was, like other things in the service, emblematic. The
+      five lights represent the five senses. Just as camphor consumes itself and
+      leaves no residue behind, so should the five senses, being offered to the
+      god, consume themselves and disappear. When this is done, that happens in
+      the soul which was now figured in the ritual&mdash;the God is revealed in
+      the inner light. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For a more detailed account of this Temple-festival, see
+Adam’s Peak to Elephanta by E. Carpenter, ch. vii.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      We are familiar with this parting or rending of the veil. We hear of it in
+      the Jewish Temple, and in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries. It had a
+      mystically religious, and also obviously sexual, signification. It occurs
+      here and there in the Roman Catholic ritual. In Spain, some ancient
+      Catholic ceremonials are kept up with a brilliance and splendor hardly
+      found elsewhere in Europe. In the Cathedral, at Seville the service of the
+      Passion, carried out on Good Friday with great solemnity and accompanied
+      with fine music, culminates on the Saturday morning&mdash;i.e. in the
+      interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection&mdash;in a spectacle
+      similar to that described in Ceylon. A rich velvet-black curtain hangs
+      before the High Altar. At the appropriate moment and as the very emotional
+      strains of voices and instruments reach their climax in the “Gloria in
+      Excelsis,” the curtain with a sudden burst of sound (thunder and the
+      ringing of all the bells) is rent asunder, and the crucified Jesus is seen
+      hanging there revealed in a halo of glory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is also held at Seville Cathedral and before the High Altar every
+      year, the very curious Dance of the Seises (sixes), performed now by 16
+      instead of (as of old) by 12 boys, quaintly dressed. It seems to be a
+      survival of some very ancient ritual, probably astronomical, in which the
+      two sets of six represent the signs of the Zodiac, and is celebrated
+      during the festivals of Corpus Christi, the Immaculate Conception, and the
+      Carnival.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Numerous instances might of course be adduced of how a Church aspiring to
+      be a real Church of Humanity might adopt and re-create the rituals of the
+      past in the light of a modern inspiration. Indeed the difficulty would be
+      to limit the process, for EVERY ancient ritual, we can now see, has had a
+      meaning and a message, and it would be a real joy to disentangle these and
+      to expose the profound solidarity of humanity and aspiration from the very
+      dawn of civilization down to the present day. Nor would it be necessary to
+      imagine any Act of Uniformity or dead level of ceremonial in the matter.
+      Different groups might concentrate on different phases of religious
+      thought and practice. The only necessity would be that they should
+      approach the subject with a real love of Humanity in their hearts and a
+      real desire to come into touch with the deep inner life and mystic
+      growing-pains of the souls of men and women in all ages. In this direction
+      M. Loisy has done noble and excellent work; but the dead weight and
+      selfish blinkerdom of the Catholic organization has hampered him to that
+      degree that he has been unable to get justice done to his liberalizing
+      designs&mdash;or, perhaps, even to reveal the full extent of them. And the
+      same difficulty will remain. On the one hand no spiritual movement which
+      does not take up the attitude of a World-religion has now in this age, any
+      chance of success; on the other, all the existing Churches&mdash;whether
+      Roman Catholic, or Greek, or Protestant or Secularist&mdash;whether
+      Christian or Jewish or Persian or Hindu&mdash;will in all probability
+      adopt the same blind and blinkered and selfish attitude as that described
+      above, and so disqualify themselves for the great role of world-wide
+      emancipation, which some religion at some time will certainly have to
+      play. It is the same difficulty which is looming large in modern
+      World-politics, where the local selfishness and vainglorious “patriotisms”
+      of the Nations are sadly impeding and obstructing the development of that
+      sense of Internationalism and Brotherhood which is the clearly indicated
+      form of the future, and which alone can give each nation deliverance from
+      fear, and a promise of growth, and the confident assurance of power.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I say that Christianity must either frankly adopt this generous attitude
+      and confess itself a branch of the great World-religion, anxious only to
+      do honor to its source&mdash;or else it must perish and pass away. There
+      is no other alternative. The hour of its Exodus has come. It may be, of
+      course, that neither the Christian Church nor any branch of it, nor any
+      other religious organization, will step into the gap. It may be&mdash;but
+      I do not think this is likely&mdash;that the time of rites and ceremonies
+      and formal creeds is PAST, and churches of any kind will be no more needed
+      in the world: not likely, I say, because of the still far backwardness of
+      the human masses, and their considerable dependence yet on laws and forms
+      and rituals. Still, if it should prove that that age of dependence IS
+      really approaching its end, that would surely be a matter for
+      congratulation. It would mean that mankind was moving into a knowledge of
+      the REALITY which has underlain these outer shows&mdash;that it was coming
+      into the Third stage of its Consciousness. Having found this there would
+      be no need for it to dwell any longer in the land of superstitions and
+      formulae. It would have come to the place of which these latter are only
+      the outlying indications.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may, therefore, happen&mdash;and this quite independently of the growth
+      of a World-cult such as I have described, though by no means in antagonism
+      to it&mdash;that a religious philosophy or Theosophy might develop and
+      spread, similar to the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the
+      pre-Christian sects, which would become, first among individuals and
+      afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion of&mdash;or
+      perhaps one should say the religious approach to the Third State. Books
+      like the Upanishads of the Vedic seers, and the Bhagavat Gita, though
+      garbled and obscured by priestly interferences and mystifications, do
+      undoubtedly represent and give expression to the highest utterance of
+      religious experience to be found anywhere in the world. They are indeed
+      the manuals of human entrance into the cosmic state. But as I say, and as
+      has happened in the case of other sacred books, a vast deal of rubbish has
+      accreted round their essential teachings, and has to be cleared away. To
+      go into a serious explication of the meaning of these books would be far
+      too large an affair, and would be foreign to the purpose of the present
+      volume; but I have in the Appendix below inserted two papers, (on “Rest”
+      and “The Nature of the Self”) containing the substance of lectures given
+      on the above books. These papers or lectures are couched in the very
+      simplest language, free from Sanskrit terms and the usual ‘jargon of the
+      Schools,’ and may, I hope, even on that account be of use in familiarizing
+      readers who are not specially STUDENTS with the ideas and mental attitudes
+      of the cosmic state. Non-differentiation (Advaita (1)) is the root
+      attitude of the mind inculcated.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The word means “not-two-ness.” Here we see a great subtlety
+of definition. It is not to be “one” with others that is urged, but to
+be “not two.”
+</p>
+    <p>
+      We have seen that there has been an age of non-differentiation in the
+      <i>Past</i>—non-differentiation from other members of the Tribe, from the
+      Animals, from Nature and the Spirit or Spirits of nature; why should there
+      not arise a similar sense of non-differentiation in the <i>Future</i>&mdash;similar
+      but more extended more intelligent? Certainly this <i>will</i> arrive, in its own
+      appointed time. There will be a surpassing of the bounds of separation and
+      division. There will be a surpassing of all Taboos. We have seen the use
+      and function of Taboos in the early stages of Evolution and how progress
+      and growth have been very much a matter of their gradual extinction and
+      assimilation into the general body of rational thought and feeling.
+      Unreasoning and idiotic taboos still linger, but they grow weaker. A new
+      Morality will come which will shake itself free from them. The sense of
+      kinship with the animals (as in the old rituals) (1) will be restored; the
+      sense of kinship with all the races of mankind will grow and become
+      consolidated; the sense of the defilement and impurity of the human body
+      will (with the adoption of a generally clean and wholesome life) pass
+      away; and the body itself will come to be regarded more as a collection of
+      shrines in which the gods may be worshiped and less as a mere organ of
+      trivial self-gratifications; (2) there will be no form of Nature, or of
+      human life or of the lesser creatures, which will be barred from the
+      approach of Man or from the intimate and penetrating invasion of his
+      spirit; and as in certain ceremonies and after honorable toils and labors
+      a citizen is sometimes received into the community of his own city, so the
+      emancipated human being on the completion of his long long pilgrimage on
+      Earth will be presented with the Freedom of the Universe.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The record of the Roman Catholic Church has been sadly
+callous and inhuman in this matter of the animals.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (2) See The Art of Creation, by E. Carpenter.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap17"></a>
+XVII.<br/>
+CONCLUSION
+</h2>
+    <p>
+      In conclusion there does not seem much to say, except to accentuate
+      certain points which may still appear doubtful or capable of being
+      understood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that the main argument of this volume is along the lines of
+      psychological evolution will no doubt commend it to some, while on the
+      other hand it will discredit the book to others whose eyes, being fixed on
+      purely MATERIAL causes, can see no impetus in History except through
+      these. But it must be remembered that there is not the least reason for
+      SEPARATING the two factors. The fact that psychologically man has evolved
+      from simple consciousness to self-consciousness, and is now in process of
+      evolution towards another and more extended kind of consciousness, does
+      not in the least bar the simultaneous appearance and influence of material
+      evolution. It is clear indeed that the two must largely go together,
+      acting and reacting on each other. Whatever the physical conditions of the
+      animal brain may be which connect themselves with simple (unreflected and
+      unreflecting) consciousness, it is evident that these conditions&mdash;in
+      animals and primitive man&mdash;lasted for an enormous period, before the
+      distinct consciousness of the individual and separate SELF arose. This
+      second order of consciousness seems to have germinated at or about the
+      same period as the discovery of the use of Tools (tools of stone, copper,
+      bronze, &amp;c.), the adoption of picture-writing and the use of
+      reflective words (like “I” and “Thou”); and it led on to the appreciation
+      of gold and of iron with their ornamental and practical values, the
+      accumulation of Property, the establishment of slavery of various kinds,
+      the subjection of Women, the encouragement of luxury and self-indulgence,
+      the growth of crowded cities and the endless conflicts and wars so
+      resulting. We can see plainly that the incoming of the self-motive
+      exercised a direct stimulus on the pursuit of these material objects and
+      adaptations; and that the material adaptations in their turn did largely
+      accentuate the self-motive; but to insist that the real explanation of the
+      whole process is only to be found along one channel&mdash;the material OR
+      the psychical&mdash;is clearly quite unnecessary. Those who understand
+      that all matter is conscious in some degree, and that all consciousness
+      has a material form of some kind, will be the first to admit this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same remarks apply to the Third Stage. We can see that in modern times
+      the huge and unlimited powers of production by machinery, united with a
+      growing tendency towards intelligent Birth-control, are preparing the way
+      for an age of Communism and communal Plenty which will inevitably be
+      associated (partly as cause and partly as effect) with a new general phase
+      of consciousness, involving the mitigation of the struggle for existence,
+      the growth of intuitional and psychical perception, the spread of amity
+      and solidarity, the disappearance of War, and the realization (in degree)
+      of the Cosmic life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the greatest difficulty or stumbling-block to the general
+      acceptance of the belief in a third (or ‘Golden-Age’) phase of human
+      evolution is the obstinate and obdurate pre-judgment that the passing of
+      Humanity out of the Second stage can only mean the entire ABANDONMENT OF
+      SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS; and this people say&mdash;and quite rightly&mdash;is
+      both impossible and undesirable. Throughout the preceding chapters I have
+      striven, wherever feasible, to counter this misunderstanding&mdash;but I
+      have little hope of success. The DETERMINATION of the world to
+      misunderstand or misinterpret anything a little new or unfamiliar is a
+      thing which perhaps only an author can duly appreciate. But while it is
+      clear that self-consciousness originally came into being through a process
+      of alienation and exile and fear which marked it with the Cain-like brand
+      of loneliness and apartness, it is equally clear that to think of that
+      apartness as an absolute and permanent separation is an illusion, since no
+      being can really continue to live divorced from the source of its life.
+      For a period in evolution the SELF took on this illusive form in
+      consciousness, as of an ignis fatuus&mdash;the form of a being sundered
+      from all other beings, atomic, lonely, without refuge, surrounded by
+      dangers and struggling, for itself alone and for its own salvation in the
+      midst of a hostile environment. Perhaps some such terrible imagination was
+      necessary at first, as it were to start Humanity on its new path. But it
+      had its compensation, for the sufferings and tortures, mental and bodily,
+      the privations, persecutions, accusations, hatreds, the wars and conflicts&mdash;so
+      endured by millions of individuals and whole races&mdash;have at length
+      stamped upon the human mind a sense of individual responsibility which
+      otherwise perhaps would never have emerged, and whose mark can now be
+      effaced; ultimately, too, these things have searched our inner nature to
+      its very depths and exposed its bed-rock foundation. They have convinced
+      us that this idea of ultimate separation is an illusion, and that in truth
+      we are all indefeasible and indestructible parts of one great Unity in
+      which “we live and move and have our being.” That being so, it is clear
+      that there remains in the end a self-consciousness which need by no means
+      be abandoned, which indeed only comes to its true fruition and
+      understanding when it recognizes its affiliation with the Whole, and
+      glories in an individuality which is an expression both of itself AND of
+      the whole. The human child at its mother’s knee probably comes first to
+      know it HAS a ‘self’ on some fateful day when having wandered afar it goes
+      lost among alien houses and streets or in the trackless fields. That
+      appalling experience&mdash;the sense of danger, of fear, of loneliness&mdash;is
+      never forgotten; it stamps some new sense of Being upon the childish mind,
+      but that sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the prouder and
+      more radiant in the hour of return to the mother’s arms. The return, the
+      salvation, for which humanity looks, is the return of the little
+      individual self to harmony and union with the great Self of the universe,
+      but by no means its extinction or abandonment&mdash;rather the finding of
+      its own true nature as never before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is another thing which may be said here: namely, that the
+      disentanglement, as above, of three main stages of psychological evolution
+      as great formative influences in the history of mankind, does not by any
+      means preclude the establishment of lesser stages within the boundaries of
+      these. In all probability subdivisions of all the three will come in time
+      to be recognized and allowed for. To take the Second stage only, it MAY
+      appear that Self-consciousness in its first development is characterized
+      by an accentuation of Timidity; in its second development by a more
+      deliberate pursuit of sensual Pleasure (lust, food, drink, &amp;c.); in
+      its third by the pursuit of mental gratifications (vanities, ambitions,
+      enslavement of others); in its fourth by the pursuit of Property, as a
+      means of attaining these objects; in its fifth by the access of enmities,
+      jealousies, wars and so forth, consequent on all these things; and so on.
+      I have no intention at present of following out this line of thought, but
+      only wish to suggest its feasibility and the degree to which it may throw
+      light on the social evolutions of the Past. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) For an analysis of the nature of Self-consciousness see vol.
+iii, p. 375 sq. of the three ponderous tomes by Wilhelm
+Wundt&mdash;Grund-zuge der Physiologischen Psychologie&mdash;in which amid an
+enormous mass of verbiage occasional gleams of useful suggestion are to
+be found.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that there are only two
+      main factors in life, namely, Love and Ignorance. And of these we may also
+      say that the two are not in the same plane: one is positive and
+      substantial, the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be thought
+      at first that Fear and Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are very positive
+      things, but in the end we see that they are due merely to ABSENCE of
+      perception, to dulness of understanding. Or we may put the statement in a
+      rather less crude form, and say that there are only two factors in life:
+      (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with Nature)&mdash;which covers
+      Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth, and (2) Non-perception of the
+      same&mdash;which covers Enmity, Fear, Hatred, Self-pity, Cruelty,
+      Jealousy, Meanness and an endless similar list. The present world which we
+      see around us, with its idiotic wars, its senseless jealousies of nations
+      and classes, its fears and greeds and vanities and its futile endeavors&mdash;as
+      of people struggling in a swamp&mdash;to find one’s own salvation by
+      treading others underfoot, is a negative phenomenon. Ignorance,
+      non-perception, are at the root of it. But it is the blessed virtue of
+      Ignorance and of non-perception that they inevitably—if only slowly and
+      painfully&mdash;DESTROY THEMSELVES. All experience serves to dissipate
+      them. The world, as it is, carries’ the doom of its own transformation in
+      its bosom; and in proportion as that which is negative disappears the
+      positive element must establish itself more and more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we come back to that with which we began, (1) to Fear bred by
+      Ignorance. From that source has sprung the long catalogue of follies,
+      cruelties and sufferings which mark the records of the human race since
+      the dawn of history; and to the overcoming of this Fear we perforce must
+      look for our future deliverance, and for the discovery, even in the midst
+      of this world, of our true Home. The time is coming when the positive
+      constructive element must dominate. It is inevitable that Man must ever
+      build a state of society around him after the pattern and image of his own
+      interior state. The whole futile and idiotic structure of commerce and
+      industry in which we are now imprisoned springs from that falsehood of
+      individualistic self-seeking which marks the second stage of human
+      evolution. That stage is already tottering to its fall, destroyed by the
+      very flood of egotistic passions and interests, of vanities, greeds, and
+      cruelties, all warring with each other, which are the sure outcome and
+      culmination of its operation. With the restoration of the sentiment of the
+      Common Life, and the gradual growth of a mental attitude corresponding,
+      there will emerge from the flood something like a solid earth&mdash;something
+      on which it will be possible to build with good hope for the future.
+      Schemes of reconstruction are well enough in their way, but if there is no
+      ground of REAL HUMAN SOLIDARITY beneath, of what avail are they?
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See Introduction, Ch. I.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      An industrial system which is no real industrial order, but only (on the
+      part of the employers) a devil’s device for securing private profit under
+      the guise of public utility, and (on the part of the employed) a dismal
+      and poor-spirited renunciation&mdash;for the sake of a bare living&mdash;of
+      all real interest in life and work: such a ‘system’ must infallibly pass
+      away. It cannot in the nature of things be permanent. The first condition
+      of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the Common Life.
+      This sense, which instinctively underlay the whole Tribal order of the far
+      past&mdash;which first came to consciousness in the worship of a thousand
+      pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless sacrifices, initiations,
+      redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which inspired the dreams of the
+      Golden Age, and flashed out for a time in the Communism of the early
+      Christians and in their adorations of the risen Savior&mdash;must in the
+      end be the creative condition of a new order: it must provide the material
+      of which the Golden City waits to be built. The long travail of the
+      World-religion will not have been in vain, which assures this
+      consummation. What the signs and conditions of any general advance into
+      this new order of life and consciousness will be, we know not. It may be
+      that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision often comes quite
+      suddenly, and GENERALLY perhaps after a period of great suffering, so to
+      society at large a similar revelation will arrive&mdash;like “the
+      lightning which cometh out of the East and shineth even unto the West”&mdash;with
+      unexpected swiftness. On the other hand it would perhaps be wise not to
+      count too much on any such sudden transformation. When we look abroad (and
+      at home) in this year of grace and hoped-for peace, 1919, and see the
+      spirits of rancour and revenge, the fears, the selfish blindness and the
+      ignorance, which still hold in their paralyzing grasp huge classes and
+      coteries in every country in the world, we see that the second stage of
+      human development is by no means yet at its full term, and that, as in
+      some vast chrysalis, for the liberation of the creature within still more
+      and more terrible struggles MAY be necessary. We can only pray that such
+      may not be the case. Anyhow, if we have followed the argument of this book
+      we can hardly doubt that the destruction (which is going on everywhere) of
+      the outer form of the present society marks the first stage of man’s final
+      liberation; and that, sooner or later, and in its own good time, that
+      further ‘divine event’ will surely be realized.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor need we fear that Humanity, when it has once entered into the great
+      Deliverance, will be again overpowered by evil. From Knowledge back to
+      Ignorance there is no complete return. The nations that have come to
+      enlightenment need entertain no dread of those others (however hostile
+      they appear) who are still plunging darkly in the troubled waters of
+      self-greed. The dastardly Fears which inspire all brutishness and cruelty
+      of warfare&mdash;whether of White against White or it may be of White
+      against Yellow or Black&mdash;may be dismissed for good and all by that
+      blest race which once shall have gained the shore&mdash;since from the
+      very nature of the case those who are on dry land can fear nothing and
+      need fear nothing from the unfortunates who are yet tossing in the welter
+      and turmoil of the waves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dr. Frazer, in the conclusion of his great work The Golden Bough, (1) bids
+      farewell to his readers with the following words: “The laws of Nature are
+      merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of
+      thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the
+      Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but
+      theories (of thought); and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so
+      it may hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis,
+      perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at phenomena&mdash;of
+      registering the shadows on the screen&mdash;of which we in this generation
+      can form no idea.” I imagine Dr. Frazer is right in thinking that “a way
+      of looking at phenomena” different from the way of Science, may some day
+      prevail. But I think this change will come, not so much by the growth of
+      Science itself or the extension of its ‘hypotheses,’ as by a growth and
+      expansion of the human HEART and a change in its psychology and powers of
+      perception. Perhaps some of the preceding chapters will help to show how
+      much the outlook of humanity on the world has been guided through the
+      centuries by the slow evolution of its inner consciousness. Gradually, out
+      of an infinite mass of folly and delusion, the human soul has in this way
+      disentangled itself, and will in the future disentangle itself, to emerge
+      at length in the light of true FREEDOM. All the taboos, the insane
+      terrors, the fatuous forbiddals of this and that (with their consequent
+      heart-searchings and distress) may perhaps have been in their way
+      necessary, in order to rivet and define the meaning and the understanding
+      of that word. To-day these taboos and terrors still linger, many of them,
+      in the form of conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience,
+      doubts and desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge from
+      all these things, FREE&mdash;familiar, that is, with them all, making use
+      of all, allowing generously for the values of all, but hampered and bound
+      by NONE. He will realize the inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of
+      the ancient religions, and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far
+      prophecy down the ages&mdash;finding after all the long-expected Saviour
+      of the world within his own breast, and Paradise in the disclosure there
+      of the everlasting peace of the soul.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) See “Balder,” vol. ii, pp. 306, 307. (“Farewell to Nemi.”)
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap18"></a>
+APPENDIX
+</h2>
+    <h3>
+      THE TEACHING OF THE UPANISHADS
+    </h3>
+
+<p class="center">
+BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF TWO LECTURES TO POPULAR AUDIENCES
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+      I. REST<br/>
+      II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF<br/>
+</p>
+
+<h3>I. REST</h3>
+
+    <p>
+      To some, in the present whirlpool of life and affairs it may seem almost
+      an absurdity to talk about Rest. For long enough now rest has seemed a
+      thing far off and unattainable. With the posts knocking at our doors ten
+      or twelve times a day, with telegrams arriving every hour, and the
+      telephone bell constantly ringing; with motors rushing wildly about the
+      streets, and aeroplanes whizzing overhead, with work speeded up in every
+      direction, and the drive in the workshops becoming more intolerable every
+      day; with the pace of the walkers and the pace of the talkers from hour to
+      hour insanely increasing&mdash;what room, it may well be asked, is there
+      for Rest? And now the issues of war, redoubling the urgency of all
+      questions, are on us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The problem is obviously a serious one. So urgent is it that I think one
+      may safely say the amount of insanity due to the pressure of daily life is
+      increasing; nursing-homes have sprung up for the special purpose of
+      treating such cases; and doctors are starting special courses of tuition
+      in the art&mdash;now becoming very important&mdash;of systematically doing
+      nothing! And yet it is difficult to see the outcome of it all. The clock
+      of what is called Progress is not easily turned backward. We should not
+      very readily agree nowadays to the abolition of telegrams or to a
+      regulation compelling express trains to stop at every station! We can’t
+      ALL go to Nursing Homes, or afford to enjoy a winter’s rest-cure in Egypt.
+      And, if not, is the speeding-up process to go on indefinitely, incapable
+      of being checked, and destined ultimately to land civilization in the
+      mad-house?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, I say, a serious and an urgent problem. And it is, I think, forcing
+      a certain answer on us&mdash;which I will now endeavor to explain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we cannot turn back and reverse this fatal onrush of modern life (and
+      it is evident that we cannot do so in any very brief time&mdash;though of
+      course ultimately we might succeed) then I think there are clearly only
+      two alternatives left&mdash;either to go forward to general dislocation
+      and madness, or&mdash;to learn to rest even in the very midst of the hurry
+      and the scurry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To explain what I mean, let me use an illustration. The typhoons and
+      cyclones of the China Seas are some of the most formidable storms that
+      ships can encounter. Their paths in the past have been strewn with wrecks
+      and disaster. But now with increased knowledge much of their danger has
+      been averted. It is known that they are CIRCULAR in character, and that
+      though the wind on their outskirts often reaches a speed of 100 miles an
+      hour, in the centre of the storm there is a space of complete calm&mdash;not
+      a calm of the SEA certainly, but a complete absence of wind. The skilled
+      navigator, if he cannot escape the storm, steers right into the heart of
+      it, and rests there. Even in the midst of the clatter he finds a place of
+      quiet where he can trim his sails and adjust his future course. He knows
+      too from his position in what direction at every point around him the wind
+      is moving and where it will strike him when at last his ship emerges from
+      the charmed circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it not possible, we may ask, that in the very midst of the cyclone of
+      daily life we may find a similar resting-place? If we can, our case is by
+      no means hopeless. If we cannot, then indeed there is danger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking back in History we seem to see that in old times people took life
+      much more leisurely than they do now. The elder generations gave more
+      scope in their customs and their religions for contentment and peace of
+      mind. We associate a certain quietism and passivity with the thought of
+      the Eastern peoples. But as civilization traveled Westward external
+      activity and the pace of life increased&mdash;less and less time was left
+      for meditation and repose&mdash;till with the rise of Western Europe and
+      America, the dominant note of life seems to have simply become one of
+      feverish and ceaseless activity&mdash;of activity merely for the sake of
+      activity, without any clear idea of its own purpose or object.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such a prospect does not at first seem very hopeful; but on second
+      thoughts we see that we are not forced to draw any very pessimistic
+      conclusion from it. The direction of human evolution need not remain
+      always the same. The movement, in fact, of civilization from East to West
+      has now clearly completed itself. The globe has been circled, and we
+      cannot go any FARTHER to the West without coming round to the East again.
+      It is a commonplace to say that our psychology, our philosophy and our
+      religious sense are already taking on an Eastern color; nor is it
+      difficult to imagine that with the end of the present dispensation a new
+      era may perfectly naturally arrive in which the St. Vitus’ dance of
+      money-making and ambition will cease to be the chief end of existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the history of nations as in the history of individuals there are
+      periods when the formative ideals of life (through some hidden influence)
+      change; and the mode of life and evolution in consequence changes also. I
+      remember when I was a boy wishing&mdash;like many other boys&mdash;to go
+      to sea. I wanted to join the Navy. It was not, I am sure, that I was so
+      very anxious to defend my country. No, there was a much simpler and more
+      prosaic motive than that. The ships of those days with their complex
+      rigging suggested a perfect paradise of CLIMBING, and I know that it was
+      the thought of THAT which influenced me. To be able to climb indefinitely
+      among those ropes and spars! How delightful! Of course I knew perfectly
+      well that I should not always have free access to the rigging; but then&mdash;some
+      day, no doubt, I should be an Admiral, and who then could prevent me? I
+      remember seeing myself in my mind’s eye, with cocked hat on my head and
+      spy-glass under my arm, roaming at my own sweet will up aloft, regardless
+      of the remonstrances which might reach me from below! Such was my childish
+      ideal. But a time came&mdash;needless to say&mdash;when I conceived a
+      different idea of the object of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is said that John Tyndall, whose lectures on Science were so much
+      sought after in their time, being on one occasion in New York was accosted
+      after his discourse by a very successful American business man, who urged
+      him to devote his scientific knowledge and ability to commercial pursuits,
+      promising that if he did so, he, Tyndall, would easily make “a big pile.”
+      Tyndall very calmly replied, “Well, I myself thought of that once, but I
+      soon abandoned the idea, having come to the conclusion that I had NO TIME
+      TO WASTE IN MAKING MONEY.” The man of dollars nearly sank into the ground.
+      Such a conception of life had never entered his head before. But to
+      Tyndall no doubt it was obvious that if he chained himself to the
+      commercial ideal all the joy and glory of his days would be gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sometimes hear of the awful doom of some of the Russian convicts in the
+      quarries and mines of Siberia, who are (or were) chained permanently to
+      their wheelbarrows. It is difficult to imagine a more dreadful fate: the
+      despair, the disgust, the deadly loathing of the accursed thing from which
+      there is no escape day or night&mdash;which is the companion not only of
+      the prisoner’s work but of his hours of rest&mdash;with which he has to
+      sleep, to feed, to take his recreation if he has any, and to fulfil all
+      the offices of nature. Could anything be more crushing? And yet, and
+      yet... is it not true that we, most of us, in our various ways are chained
+      to our wheelbarrows&mdash;is it not too often true that to these beggarly
+      things we have for the most part chained OURSELVES?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let me be understood. Of course we all have (or ought to have) our work to
+      do. We have our living to get, our families to support, our trade, our
+      art, our profession to pursue. In that sense no doubt we are tied; but I
+      take it that these things are like the wheelbarrow which a man uses while
+      he is at work. It may irk him at times, but he sticks to it with a good
+      heart, and with a certain joy because it is the instrument of a noble
+      purpose. That is all right. But to be chained to it, not to be able to
+      leave it when the work of the day is done&mdash;that is indeed an ignoble
+      slavery. I would say, then, take care that even with these things, these
+      necessary arts of life, you preserve your independence, that even if to
+      some degree they may confine your body they do not enslave your mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For it is the freedom of the mind which counts. We are all no doubt caught
+      in the toils of the earth-life. One man is largely dominated by sensual
+      indulgence, another by ambition, another by the pursuit of money. Well,
+      these things are all right in themselves. Without the pleasures of the
+      senses we should be dull mokes indeed; without ambition much of the zest
+      and enterprise of life would be gone; gold, in the present order of
+      affairs, is a very useful servant. These things are right enough&mdash;but
+      to be CHAINED to them, to be unable to think of anything else&mdash;what a
+      fate! The subject reminds one of a not uncommon spectacle. It is a
+      glorious day; the sun is bright, small white clouds float in the
+      transparent blue&mdash;a day when you linger perforce on the road to enjoy
+      the scene. But suddenly here comes a man painfully running all hot and
+      dusty and mopping his head, and with no eye, clearly, for anything around
+      him. What is the matter? He is absorbed by one idea. He is running to
+      catch a train! And one cannot help wondering what EXCEEDINGLY important
+      business it must be for which all this glory and beauty is sacrificed, and
+      passed by as if it did not exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Further we must remember that in our foolishness we very commonly chain
+      ourselves, not only to things like sense-pleasures and ambitions which are
+      on the edge, so to speak, of being vices; but also to other things which
+      are accounted virtues, and which as far as I can see are just as bad, if
+      we once become enslaved to them. I have known people who were so
+      exceedingly ‘spiritual’ and ‘good’ that one really felt quite depressed in
+      their company; I have known others whose sense of duty, dear things, was
+      so strong that they seemed quite unable to REST, or even to allow their
+      friends to rest; and I have wondered whether, after all, worriting about
+      one’s duty might not be as bad&mdash;as deteriorating to oneself, as
+      distressing to one’s friends&mdash;as sinning a good solid sin. No, in
+      this respect virtues MAY be no better than vices; and to be chained to a
+      wheelbarrow made of alabaster is no way preferable to being chained to one
+      of wood. To sacrifice the immortal freedom of the mind in order to become
+      a prey to self-regarding cares and anxieties, self-estimating virtues and
+      vices, self-chaining duties and indulgences, is a mistake. And I warn you,
+      it is quite useless. For the destiny of Freedom is ultimately upon every
+      one, and if refusing it for a time you heap your life persistently upon
+      one object&mdash;however blameless in itself that object may be&mdash;Beware!
+      For one day&mdash;and when you least expect it&mdash;the gods will send a
+      thunderbolt upon you. One day the thing for which you have toiled and
+      spent laborious days and sleepless nights will lie broken before you&mdash;your
+      reputation will be ruined, your ambition will be dashed, your savings of
+      years will be lost&mdash;and for the moment you will be inclined to think
+      that your life has been in vain. But presently you will wake up and find
+      that something quite different has happened. You will find that the
+      thunderbolt which you thought was your ruin has been your salvation&mdash;that
+      it has broken the chain which bound you to your wheelbarrow, and that you
+      are free! &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think you will now see what I mean by Rest. Rest is the loosing of the
+      chains which bind us to the whirligig of the world, it is the passing into
+      the centre of the Cyclone; it is the Stilling of Thought. For (with regard
+      to this last) it is Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind, which binds
+      us to outer things. The outer things themselves are all right. It is only
+      through our thoughts that they make slaves of us. Obtain power over your
+      thoughts and you are free. You can then use the outer things or dismiss
+      them at your pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is nothing new of course in all this. It has been known for ages;
+      and is part of the ancient philosophy of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the Katha Upanishad you will find these words (Max Muller’s
+      translation): “As rainwater that has fallen on a mountain ridge runs down
+      on all sides, thus does he who sees a difference between qualities run
+      after them on all sides.” This is the figure of the man who does NOT rest.
+      And it is a powerful likeness. The thunder shower descends on the mountain
+      top; torrents of water pour down the crags in every direction. Imagine the
+      state of mind of a man&mdash;however thirsty he may be&mdash;who endeavors
+      to pursue and intercept all these streams!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then the Upanishad goes on: “As pure water poured into pure water
+      remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who knows.”
+      What a perfect image of rest! Imagine a cistern before you with
+      transparent glass sides and filled with pure water. And then imagine some
+      one comes with a phial, also of pure water, and pours the contents gently
+      into the cistern. What will happen? Almost nothing. The pure water will
+      glide into the pure water&mdash;“remaining the same.” There will be no
+      dislocation, no discoloration (as might happen if MUDDY water were poured
+      in); there will be only perfect harmony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I imagine here that the meaning is something like this. The cistern is the
+      great Reservoir of the Universe which contains the pure and perfect Spirit
+      of all life. Each one of us, and every mortal creature, represents a drop
+      from that reservoir&mdash;a drop indeed which is also pure and perfect
+      (though the phial in which it is contained may not always be so). When we,
+      each of us, descend into the world and meet the great Ocean of Life which
+      dwells there behind all mortal forms, it is like the little phial being
+      poured into the great reservoir. If the tiny canful which is our selves is
+      pure and unsoiled, then when it meets the world it will blend with the
+      Spirit which informs the world perfectly harmoniously, without distress or
+      dislocation. It will pass through and be at one with it. How can one
+      describe such a state of affairs? You will have the key to every person
+      that you meet, because indeed you are conscious that the real essence of
+      that person is the same as your own. You will have the solution of every
+      event which happens. For every event is (and is felt to be) the touch of
+      the great Spirit on yours. Can any description of Rest be more perfect
+      than that? Pure water poured into pure water.... There is no need to
+      hurry, for everything will come in its good time. There is no need to
+      leave your place, for all you desire is close at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is another verse (from the Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad) embodying
+      the same idea: “And he who beholds all beings in the Self, and the Self in
+      all beings, he never turns away from It. When, to a man who understands,
+      the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble, can there be to
+      him&mdash;having once beheld that Unity?”&mdash;What trouble, what sorrow,
+      indeed, when the universe has become transparent with the presences of all
+      we love, held firm in the One enfolding Presence?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it will be said: “Our minds are NOT pure and transparent. More often
+      they are muddy and soiled&mdash;soiled, if not in their real essence, yet
+      by reason of the mortal phial in which they are contained.” And that alas!
+      is true. If you pour a phial of muddy water into that reservoir which we
+      described&mdash;what will you see? You will see a queer and ugly cloud
+      formed. And to how many of us, in our dealings with the world, does life
+      take on just such a form&mdash;of a queer and ugly cloud?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now not so very long after those Upanishads were written there lived in
+      China that great Teacher, Lao-tze; and he too had considered these things.
+      And he wrote&mdash;in the Tao-Teh-King&mdash;“Who is there who can make
+      muddy water clear?” The question sounds like a conundrum. For a moment one
+      hesitates to answer it. Lao-tze, however, has an answer ready. He says:
+      “But if you LEAVE IT ALONE it will become clear of itself.” That muddy
+      water of the mind, muddied by all the foolish little thoughts which like a
+      sediment infest it&mdash;but if you leave it alone it will become clear of
+      itself. Sometimes walking along the common road after a shower you have
+      seen pools of water lying here and there, dirty and unsightly with the mud
+      stirred up by the hoofs of men and animals. And then returning some hours
+      afterwards along the same road&mdash;in the evening and after the
+      cessation of traffic&mdash;you have looked again, and lo! each pool has
+      cleared itself to a perfect calm, and has become a lovely mirror
+      reflecting the trees and the clouds and the sunset and the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So this mirror of the mind. Leave it alone. Let the ugly sediment of
+      tiresome thoughts and anxieties, and of fussing over one’s
+      self-importances and duties, settle down&mdash;and presently you will look
+      on it, and see something there which you never knew or imagined before&mdash;something
+      more beautiful than you ever yet beheld&mdash;a reflection of the real and
+      eternal world such is only given to the mind that rests.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in
+      that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so
+      still;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And let them become clear, so clear&mdash;so limpid, so mirror-like;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful
+      beauty,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the antelope shall descend to drink, and the lion to quench his
+      thirst,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his own likeness in
+      you. (1)
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) Towards Democracy, p. 373.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, there is this priceless thing within us, but hoofing along the roads
+      in the mud we fail to find it; there is this region of calm, but the
+      cyclone of the world raging around guards us from entering it. Perhaps it
+      is best so&mdash;best that the access to it should not be made too easy.
+      One day, some time ago, in the course of conversation with Rabindranath
+      Tagore in London, I asked him what impressed him most in visiting the
+      great city. He said, “The restless incessant movement of everybody.” I
+      said, “Yes, they seem as if they were all rushing about looking for
+      something.” He replied, “It is because each person does not know of the
+      great treasure he has within himself.” &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How then are we to reach this treasure and make it our own? How are we to
+      attain to this Stilling of the Mind, which is the secret of all power and
+      possession? The thing is difficult, no doubt; yet as I tried to show at
+      the outset of this discourse, we Moderns MUST reach it; we have got to
+      attain to it&mdash;for the penalty of failure is and must be widespread
+      Madness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The power to still the mind&mdash;to be ABLE, mark you, when you want, to
+      enter into the region of Rest, and to dismiss or command your Thoughts&mdash;is
+      a condition of Health; it is a condition of all Power and Energy. For all
+      health, whether of mind or body, resides in one’s relation to the central
+      Life within. If one cannot get into touch with THAT, then the life-forces
+      cannot flow down into the organism. Most, perhaps all, disease arises from
+      the disturbance of this connection. All mere hurry, all mere running after
+      external things (as of the man after the water-streams on the
+      mountain-top), inevitably breaks it. Let a pond be allowed calmly under
+      the influence of frost to crystallize, and most beautiful flowers and
+      spears of ice will be formed, but keep stirring the water all the time
+      with a stick or a pole and nothing will result but an ugly brash of
+      half-frozen stuff. The condition of the exercise of power and energy is
+      that it should proceed from a center of Rest within one. So convinced am I
+      of this, that whenever I find myself hurrying over my work, I pause and
+      say, “Now you are not producing anything good!” and I generally find that
+      that is true. It is curious, but I think very noticeable, that the places
+      where people hurry most&mdash;as for instance the City of London or Wall
+      Street, New York&mdash;are just the places where the work being done is of
+      LEAST importance (being mostly money-gambling); whereas if you go and look
+      at a ploughman ploughing&mdash;doing perhaps the most important of human
+      work&mdash;you find all his movements most deliberate and leisurely, as if
+      indeed he had infinite time at command; the truth being that in dealing
+      (like a ploughman) with the earth and the horses and the weather and the
+      things of Nature generally you can no more hurry than Nature herself
+      hurries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Following this line of thought it might seem that one would arrive at a
+      hopeless paradox. If it be true that the less one hurries the better the
+      work resulting, then it might seem that by sitting still and merely
+      twirling one’s thumbs one would arrive at the very greatest activity and
+      efficiency! And indeed (if understood aright) there is a truth even in
+      this, which&mdash;like the other points I have mentioned&mdash;has been
+      known and taught long ages ago. Says that humorous old sage, Lao-tze, whom
+      I have already quoted: “By non-action there is nothing that cannot be
+      done.” At first this sounds like mere foolery or worse; but afterwards
+      thinking on it one sees there is a meaning hidden. There is a secret by
+      which Nature and the powers of the universal life will do all for you. The
+      Bhagavat Gita also says, “He who discovers inaction in action and action
+      in inaction is wise among mortals.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is worth while dwelling for a moment on these texts. We are all&mdash;as
+      I said earlier on&mdash;involved in work belonging to our place and
+      station; we are tied to some degree in the bonds of action. But that fact
+      need not imprison our inner minds. While acting even with keenness and
+      energy along the external and necessary path before us, it is perfectly
+      possible to hold the mind free and untied&mdash;so that the RESULT of our
+      action (which of course is not ours to command) shall remain indifferent
+      and incapable of unduly affecting us. Similarly, when it is our part to
+      remain externally INACTIVE, we may discover that underneath this apparent
+      inaction we may be taking part in the currents of a deeper life which are
+      moving on to a definite end, to an end or object which in a sense is ours
+      and in a sense is NOT ours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lighthouse beam flies over land and sea with incredible velocity, and
+      you think the light itself must be in swiftest movement; but when you
+      climb up thither you find the lamp absolutely stationary. It is only the
+      reflection that is moving. The rider on horseback may gallop to and fro
+      wherever he will, but it is hard to say that HE is acting. The horse
+      guided by the slightest indication of the man’s will performs an the
+      action that is needed. If we can get into right touch with the immense,
+      the incalculable powers of Nature, is there anything which we may not be
+      able to do? If a man worship the Self only as his true state,” says the
+      Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, “his work cannot fail, for whatever he desires,
+      that he obtains from the Self.” What a wonderful saying, and how
+      infallibly true! For obviously if you succeed in identifying your true
+      being with the great Self of the universe, then whatever you desire the
+      great Self will also desire, and therefore every power of Nature will be
+      at your service and will conspire to fulfil your need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are marvelous things here “well wrapped up”&mdash;difficult to
+      describe, yet not impossible to experience. And they all depend upon that
+      power of stilling Thought, that ability to pass unharmed and undismayed
+      through the grinning legions of the lower mind into the very heart of
+      Paradise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The question inevitably arises, How can this power be obtained? And there
+      is only one answer&mdash;the same answer which has to be given for the
+      attainment of ANY power or faculty. There is no royal road. The only way
+      is (however imperfectly) to DO the thing in question, to practice it. If
+      you would learn to play cricket, the only way is to play cricket; if you
+      would be able to speak a language, the only way is to speak it. If you
+      would learn to swim, the only way is to practice swimming. Or would you
+      wish to be like the man who when his companions were bathing and bidding
+      him come and join them, said: “Yes, I am longing to join you, but I am not
+      going to be such a fool as to go into the water TILL I KNOW HOW TO SWIM!”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is nothing but practice. If you want to obtain that priceless power
+      of commanding Thought&mdash;of using it or dismissing it (for the two
+      things go together) at will&mdash;there is no way but practice. And the
+      practice consists in two exercises: (a) that of concentration&mdash;in
+      holding the thought steadily for a time on one subject, or point of a
+      subject; and (b) that of effacement&mdash;in effacing any given thought
+      from the mind, and determining NOT to entertain it for such and such a
+      time. Both these exercises are difficult. Failure in practicing them is
+      certain&mdash;and may even extend over years. But the power equally
+      certainly grows WITH practice. And ultimately there may come a time when
+      the learner is not only able to efface from his mind any given thought
+      (however importunate), but may even succeed in effacing, during short
+      periods, ALL thought of any kind. When this stage is reached, the veil of
+      illusion which surrounds all mortal things is pierced, and the entrance to
+      the Paradise of Rest (and of universal power and knowledge) is found.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of indirect or auxiliary methods of reaching this great conclusion, there
+      are more than one. I think of life in the open air, if not absolutely
+      necessary, at least most important. The gods&mdash;though sometimes out of
+      compassion they visit the interiors of houses&mdash;are not fond of such
+      places and the evil effluvium they find there, and avoid them as much as
+      they can. It is not merely a question of breathing oxygen instead of
+      carbonic acid. There is a presence and an influence in Nature and the Open
+      which expands the mind and causes brigand cares and worries to drop off&mdash;whereas
+      in confined places foolish and futile thoughts of all kinds swarm like
+      microbes and cloud and conceal the soul. Experto Crede. It is only
+      necessary to try this experiment in order to prove its truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another thing which corresponds in some degree to living physically in the
+      open air, is the living mentally and emotionally in the atmosphere of
+      love. A large charity of mind, which refuses absolutely to shut itself in
+      little secluded places of prejudice, bigotry and contempt for others, and
+      which attains to a great and universal sympathy, helps, most obviously, to
+      open the way to that region of calm and freedom of which we have spoken,
+      while conversely all petty enmity, meanness and spite, conspire to
+      imprison the soul and make its deliverance more difficult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary to labor these points. As we said, the way to attain
+      is to sincerely TRY to attain, to consistently PRACTICE attainment.
+      Whoever does this will find that the way will open out by degrees, as of
+      one emerging from a vast and gloomy forest, till out of darkness the path
+      becomes clear. For whomsoever really TRIES there is no failure; for every
+      effort in that region is success, and every onward push, however small,
+      and however little result it may show, is really a move forward, and one
+      step nearer the light.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h3>II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF</h3>
+
+    <p>
+      The true nature of the Self is a matter by no means easy to compass. We
+      have all probably at some time or other attempted to fathom the deeps of
+      personality, and been baffled. Some people say they can quite distinctly
+      remember a moment in early childhood, about the age of THREE (though the
+      exact period is of course only approximate) when self-consciousness&mdash;the
+      awareness of being a little separate Self&mdash;first dawned in the mind.
+      It was generally at some moment of childish tension&mdash;alone perhaps in
+      a garden, or lost from the mother’s protecting hand&mdash;that this
+      happened; and it was the beginning of a whole range of new experience.
+      Before some such period there is in childhood strictly speaking no
+      distinct self-consciousness. As Tennyson says (In Memoriam xliv):
+    </p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+The baby new to earth and sky,<br/>
+    What time his tender palm is prest<br/>
+    Against the circle of the breast,<br/>
+Hath never thought that “This is I.”
+</p>
+
+<p class="noindent">
+      It has consciousness truly, but no distinctive self-consciousness. It is
+      this absence or deficiency which explains many things which at first sight
+      seem obscure in the psychology of children and of animals. The baby (it
+      has often been noticed) experiences little or no sense of FEAR. It does
+      not know enough to be afraid; it has never formed any image of itself, as
+      of a thing which might be injured. It may shrink from actual pain or
+      discomfort, but it does not LOOK FORWARD&mdash;which is of the essence of
+      fear&mdash;to pain in the future. Fear and self-consciousness are closely
+      interlinked. Similarly with animals, we often wonder how a horse or a cow
+      can endure to stand out in a field all night, exposed to cold and rain, in
+      the lethargic patient way that they exhibit. It is not that they do not
+      FEEL the discomfort, but it is that they do not envisage THEMSELVES as
+      enduring this pain and suffering for all those coming hours; and as we
+      know with ourselves that nine-tenths of our miseries really consist in
+      looking forward to future miseries, so we understand that the absence or
+      at any rate slight prevalence of self-consciousness in animals enables
+      them to endure forms of distress which would drive us mad.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In time then the babe arrives at self-consciousness; and, as one might
+      expect, the growing boy or girl often becomes intensely aware of Self. His
+      or her self-consciousness is crude, no doubt, but it has very little
+      misgiving. If the question of the nature of the Self is propounded to the
+      boy as a problem he has no difficulty in solving it. He says “I know well
+      enough who I am: I am the boy with red hair what gave Jimmy Brown such a
+      jolly good licking last Monday week.” He knows well enough&mdash;or thinks
+      he knows&mdash;who he is. And at a later age, though his definition may
+      change and he may describe himself chiefly as a good cricketer or
+      successful in certain examinations, his method is practically the same. He
+      fixes his mind on a certain bundle of qualities and capacities which he is
+      supposed to possess, and calls that bundle Himself. And in a more
+      elaborate way we most of us, I imagine, do the same.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently, however, with more careful thought, we begin to see
+      difficulties in this view. I see that directly I think of myself as a
+      certain bundle of qualities&mdash;and for that matter it is of no account
+      whether the qualities are good or bad, or in what sort of charming
+      confusion they are mixed&mdash;I see at once that I am merely looking at a
+      bundle of qualities: and that the real “I,” the Self, is not that bundle,
+      but is the being INSPECTING the same&mdash;something beyond and behind, as
+      it were. So I now concentrate my thoughts upon that inner Something, in
+      order to find out what it really is. I imagine perhaps an inner being, of
+      ‘astral’ or ethereal nature, and possessing a new range of much finer and
+      more subtle qualities than the body&mdash;a being inhabiting the body and
+      perceiving through its senses, but quite capable of surviving the tenement
+      in which it dwells and I think of that as the Self. But no sooner have I
+      taken this step than I perceive that I am committing the same mistake as
+      before. I am only contemplating a new image or picture, and “I” still
+      remain beyond and behind that which I contemplate. No sooner do I turn my
+      attention on the subjective being than it becomes OBJECTIVE, and the real
+      subject retires into the background. And so on indefinitely. I am baffled;
+      and unable to say positively what the Self is.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile there are people who look upon the foregoing speculations about
+      an interior Self as merely unpractical. Being perhaps of a more
+      materialistic type of mind they fix their attention on the body. Frankly
+      they try to define the Self by the body and all that is connected
+      therewith&mdash;that is by the mental as well as corporeal qualities which
+      exhibit themselves in that connection; and they say, “At any rate the Self&mdash;whatever
+      it may be&mdash;is in some way limited by the body; each person studies
+      the interest of his body and of the feelings, emotions and mentality
+      directly associated with it, and you cannot get beyond that; it isn’t in
+      human nature to do so. The Self is limited by this corporeal phenomenon
+      and doubtless it perishes when the body perishes.” But here again the
+      conclusion, though specious at first, soon appears to be quite inadequate.
+      For though it is possibly true that a man, if left alone in a Robinson
+      Crusoe life on a desert island, might ultimately subside into a mere
+      gratification of his corporeal needs and of those mental needs which were
+      directly concerned with the body, yet we know that such a case would by no
+      means be representative. On the contrary we know that vast numbers of
+      people spend their lives in considering other people, and often so far as
+      to sacrifice their own bodily and mental comfort and well-being. The
+      mother spends her life thinking almost day and night about her babe and
+      the other children&mdash;spending all her thoughts and efforts on them.
+      You may call her selfish if you will, but her selfishness clearly extends
+      beyond her personal body and mind, and extends to the personalities of her
+      children around her; her “body”&mdash;if you insist on your definition&mdash;must
+      be held to include the bodies of all her children. And again, the husband
+      who is toiling for the support of the family, he is thinking and working
+      and toiling and suffering for a ‘self’ which includes his wife and
+      children. Do you mean that the whole family is his “body”? Or a man
+      belongs to some society, to a church or to a social league of some kind,
+      and his activities are largely ruled by the interests of this larger
+      group. Or he sacrifices his life&mdash;as many have been doing of late&mdash;with
+      extraordinary bravery and heroism for the sake of the nation to which he
+      belongs. Must we say then that the whole nation is really a part of the
+      man’s body? Or again, he gives his life and goes to the stake for his
+      religion. Whether his religion is right or wrong does not matter, the
+      point is that there is that in him which can carry him far beyond his
+      local self and the ordinary instincts of his physical organism, to
+      dedicate his life and powers to a something of far wider circumference and
+      scope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus in the FIRST of these two examples of a search for the nature of the
+      Self we are led INWARDS from point to point, into interior and ever
+      subtler regions of our being, and still in the end are baffled; while in
+      the SECOND we are carried outwards into an ever wider and wider
+      circumference in our quest of the Ego, and still feel that we have failed
+      to reach its ultimate nature. We are driven in fact by these two arguments
+      to the conclusion that that which we are seeking is indeed something very
+      vast&mdash;something far extending around, yet also buried deep in the
+      hidden recesses of our minds. How far, how deep, we do not know. We can
+      only say that as far as the indications point the true self is profounder
+      and more far-reaching than anything we have yet fathomed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the ordinary commonplace life we shrink to ordinary commonplace selves,
+      but it is one of the blessings of great experiences, even though they are
+      tragic or painful, that they throw us out into that enormously greater
+      self to which we belong. Sometimes, in moments of inspiration, of intense
+      enthusiasm, of revelation, such as a man feels in the midst of a battle,
+      in moments of love and dedication to another person, and in moments of
+      religious ecstasy, an immense world is opened up to the astonished gaze of
+      the inner man, who sees disclosed a self stretched far beyond anything he
+      had ever imagined. We have all had experiences more or less of that kind.
+      I have known quite a few people, and most of you have known some, who at
+      some time, even if only once in their lives, have experienced such an
+      extraordinary lifting of the veil, an opening out of the back of their
+      minds as it were, and have had such a vision of the world, that they have
+      never afterwards forgotten it. They have seen into the heart of creation,
+      and have perceived their union with the rest of mankind. They have had
+      glimpses of a strange immortality belonging to them, a glimpse of their
+      belonging to a far greater being than they have ever imagined. Just once&mdash;and
+      a man has never forgotten it, and even if it has not recurred it has
+      colored all the rest of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, this subject has been thought about&mdash;since the beginning of the
+      world, I was going to say&mdash;but it has been thought about since the
+      beginnings of history. Some three thousand years ago certain groups of&mdash;I
+      hardly like to call them philosophers&mdash;but, let us say, people who
+      were meditating and thinking upon these problems, were in the habit of
+      locating themselves in the forests of Northern India; and schools arose
+      there. In the case of each school some teacher went into the woods and
+      collected groups of disciples around him, who lived there in his company
+      and listened to his words. Such schools were formed in very considerable
+      numbers, and the doctrines of these teachers were gathered together,
+      generally by their disciples, in notes, which notes were brought together
+      into little pamphlets or tracts, forming the books which are called the
+      ‘Upanishads’ of the Indian sages. They contain some extraordinary words of
+      wisdom, some of which I want to bring before you. The conclusions arrived
+      at were not so much what we should call philosophy in the modern sense.
+      They were not so much the result of the analysis of the mind and the
+      following out of concatenations of strict argument; but they were flashes
+      of intuition and experience, and all through the ‘Upanishads’ you find
+      these extraordinary flashes embedded in the midst of a great deal of what
+      we should call a rather rubbishy kind of argument, and a good deal of
+      merely conventional Brahmanical talk of those days. But the people who
+      wrote and spoke thus had an intuition into the heart of things which I
+      make bold to say very few people in modern life have. These ‘Upanisihads,’
+      however various their subject, practically agree on one point&mdash;in the
+      definition of the “self.” They agree in saying: that the self of each man
+      is continuous with and in a sense identical with the Self of the universe.
+      Now that seems an extraordinary conclusion, and one which almost staggers
+      the modern mind to conceive of. But that is the conclusion, that is the
+      thread which runs all through the ‘Upanishads’&mdash;the identity of the
+      self of each individual with the self of every other individual throughout
+      mankind, and even with the selves of the animals and other creatures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those who have read the Khandogya Upanishad remember how in that treatise
+      the father instructs his son Svetakeitu on this very subject&mdash;pointing
+      him out in succession the objects of Nature and on each occasion exhorting
+      him to realize his identity with the very essence of the object&mdash;“Tat
+      twam asi, THAT thou art.” He calls Svetaketu’s attention to a tree. What
+      is the ESSENCE of the tree? When they have rejected the external
+      characteristics&mdash;the leaves, the branches, etc.&mdash;and agreed that
+      the SAP is the essence, then the father says, “TAT TWAM ASI&mdash;THAT
+      thou art.” He gives his son a crystal of salt, and asks him what is the
+      essence of that. The son is puzzled. Clearly neither the form nor the
+      transparent quality are essential. The father says, “Put the crystal in
+      water.” Then when it is melted he says, “Where is the crystal?” The son
+      replies, “I do not know.” “Dip your finger in the bowl,” says the father,
+      “and taste.” Then Svetaketu dips here and there, and everywhere there is a
+      salt flavor. They agree that THAT is the essence of salt; and the father
+      says again, “TAt twam asi.” I am of course neither defending nor
+      criticizing the scientific attitude here adopted. I am only pointing out
+      that this psychological identification of the observer with the object
+      observed runs through the Upanishads, and is I think worthy of the deepest
+      consideration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the ‘Bhagavat Gita,’ which is a later book, the author speaks of “him
+      whose soul is purified, whose self is the Self of all creatures.” A phrase
+      like that challenges opposition. It is so bold, so sweeping, and so
+      immense, that we hesitate to give our adhesion to what it implies. But
+      what does it mean&mdash;“whose soul is purified”? I believe that it means
+      this, that with most of us our souls are anything but clean or purified,
+      they are by no means transparent, so that all the time we are continually
+      deceiving ourselves and making clouds between us and others. We are all
+      the time grasping things from other people, and, if not in words, are
+      mentally boasting ourselves against others, trying to think of our own
+      superiority to the rest of the people around us. Sometimes we try to run
+      our neighbors down a little, just to show that they are not quite equal to
+      our level. We try to snatch from others some things which belong to them,
+      or take credit to ourselves for things to which we are not fairly
+      entitled. But all the time we are acting so it is perfectly obvious that
+      we are weaving veils between ourselves and others. You cannot have
+      dealings with another person in a purely truthful way, and be continually
+      trying to cheat that person out of money, or out of his good name and
+      reputation. If you are doing that, however much in the background you may
+      be doing it, you are not looking the person fairly in the face&mdash;there
+      is a cloud between you all the time. So long as your soul is not purified
+      from all these really absurd and ridiculous little desires and
+      superiorities and self-satisfactions, which make up so much of our lives,
+      just so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see the truth. But
+      when it happens to a person, as it does happen in times of great and deep
+      and bitter experience; when it happens that all these trumpery little
+      objects of life are swept away; then occasionally, with astonishment, the
+      soul sees that. It is also the soul of the others around. Even if it does
+      not become aware of an absolute identity, it perceives that there is a
+      deep relationship and communion between itself and others, and it comes to
+      understand how it may really be true that to him whose soul is purified
+      the self is literally the Self of all creatures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ordinary men and those who go on more intellectual and less intuitional
+      lines will say that these ideas are really contrary to human nature and to
+      nature generally. Yet I think that those people who say this in the name
+      of Science are extremely unscientific, because a very superficial glance
+      at nature reveals that the very same thing is taking place throughout
+      nature. Consider the madrepores, corallines, or sponges. You find, for
+      instance, that constantly the little self of the coralline or sponge is
+      functioning at the end of a stem and casting forth its tentacles into the
+      water to gain food and to breathe the air out of the water. That little
+      animalcule there, which is living in that way, imagines no doubt that it
+      is working all for itself, and yet it is united down the stem at whose
+      extremity it stands, with the life of the whole madrepore or sponge to
+      which it belongs. There is the common life of the whole and the individual
+      life of each, and while the little creature at the end of the stem is
+      thinking (if it is conscious at all) that its whole energies are absorbed
+      in its own maintenance, it really is feeding the common life through the
+      stem to which it belongs, and in its turn it is being fed by that common
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You have only to look at an ordinary tree to see the same thing going on.
+      Each little leaf on a tree may very naturally have sufficient
+      consciousness to believe that it is an entirely separate being maintaining
+      itself in the sunlight and the air, withering away and dying when the
+      winter comes on&mdash;and there is an end of it. It probably does not
+      realize that all the time it is being supported by the sap which flows
+      from the trunk of the tree, and that in its turn it is feeding the tree,
+      too&mdash;that its self is the self of the whole tree. If the leaf could
+      really understand itself, it would see that its self was deeply,
+      intimately connected, practically one with the life of the whole tree.
+      Therefore, I say that this Indian view is not unscientific. On the
+      contrary, I am sure that it is thoroughly scientific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us take another passage, out of the ‘Svetasvatara Upanishad,’ which,
+      speaking of the self says: “He is the one God, hidden in all creatures,
+      all pervading, the self within all, watching over all works, shadowing all
+      creatures, the witness, the perceiver, the only one free from qualities.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now we can return to the point where we left the argument at the
+      beginning of this discourse. We said, you remember, that the Self is
+      certainly no mere bundle of qualities&mdash;that the very nature of the
+      mind forbids us thinking that. For however fine and subtle any quality or
+      group of qualities may be, we are irresistibly compelled by the nature of
+      the mind itself to look for the Self, not in any quality or qualities, but
+      in the being that PERCEIVES those qualities. The passage I have just
+      quoted says that being is “The one God, hidden in all creatures, all
+      pervading, the self within all... the witness, the perceiver, the only one
+      free from qualities.” And the more you think about it the clearer I think
+      you will see that this passage is correct&mdash;that there can be only ONE
+      witness, ONE perceiver, and that is the one God hidden in all creatures,
+      “Sarva Sakshi,” the Universal Witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Have you ever had that curious feeling, not uncommon, especially in
+      moments of vivid experience and emotion, that there was at the back of
+      your mind a witness, watching everything that was going on, yet too deep
+      for your ordinary thought to grasp? Has it not occurred to you&mdash;in a
+      moment say of great danger when the mind was agitated to the last degree
+      by fears and anxieties&mdash;suddenly to become perfectly calm and
+      collected, to realize that NOTHING can harm you, that you are identified
+      with some great and universal being lifted far over this mortal world and
+      unaffected by its storms? Is it not obvious that the real Self MUST be
+      something of this nature, a being perceiving all, but itself remaining
+      unperceived? For indeed if it were perceived it would fall under the head
+      of some definable quality, and so becoming the object of thought would
+      cease to be the subject, would cease to be the Self.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The witness is and must be “free from qualities.” For since it is capable
+      of perceiving ALL qualities it must obviously not be itself imprisoned or
+      tied in any quality&mdash;it must either be entirely without quality, or
+      if it have the potentiality of quality in it, it must have the
+      potentiality of EVERY quality; but in either case it cannot be in bondage
+      to any quality, and in either case it would appear that there can be only
+      ONE such ultimate Witness in the universe. For if there were two or more
+      such Witnesses, then we should be compelled to suppose them distinguished
+      from one another by something, and that something could only be a
+      difference of qualities, which would be contrary to our conclusion that
+      such a Witness cannot be in bondage to any quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is then I take it&mdash;as the text in question says&mdash;only one
+      Witness, one Self, throughout the universe. It is hidden in all living
+      things, men and animals and plants; it pervades all creation. In every
+      thing that has consciousness it is the Self; it watches over all
+      operations, it overshadows all creatures, it moves in the depths of our
+      hearts, the perceiver, the only being that is cognizant of all and yet
+      free from all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once you really appropriate this truth, and assimilate it in the depths of
+      your mind, a vast change (you can easily imagine) will take place within
+      you. The whole world will be transformed, and every thought and act of
+      which you are capable will take on a different color and complexion.
+      Indeed the revolution will be so vast that it would be quite impossible
+      for me within the limits of this discourse to describe it. I will,
+      however, occupy the rest of my time in dealing with some points and
+      conclusions, and some mental changes which will flow perfectly naturally
+      from this axiomatic change taking place at the very root of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Free from qualities.” We generally pride ourselves a little on our
+      qualities. Some of us think a great deal of our good qualities, and some
+      of us are rather ashamed of our bad ones! I would say: “Do not trouble
+      very much about all that. What good qualities you have&mdash;well you may
+      be quite sure they do not really amount to much; and what bad qualities,
+      you may be sure they are not very important! Do not make too much fuss
+      about either. Do you see? The thing is that you, you yourself, are not ANY
+      of your qualities&mdash;you are the being that perceives them. The thing
+      to see to is that they should not confuse you, bamboozle you, and hide you
+      from the knowledge of yourself&mdash;that they should not be erected into
+      a screen, to hide you from others, or the others from you. If you cease
+      from running after qualities, then after a little time your soul will
+      become purified, and you will KNOW that your self is the Self of all
+      creatures; and when you can feel that you will know that the other things
+      do not much matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes people are so awfully good that their very goodness hides them
+      from other people. They really cannot be on a level with others, and they
+      feel that the others are far below them. Consequently their ‘selves’ are
+      blinded or hidden by their ‘goodness.’ It is a sad end to come to! And
+      sometimes it happens that very ‘bad’ people&mdash;just because they are so
+      bad&mdash;do not erect any screens or veils between themselves and others.
+      Indeed they are only too glad if others will recognize them, or if they
+      may be allowed to recognize others. And so, after all, they come nearer
+      the truth than the very good people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The Self is free from qualities.” That thing which is so deep, which
+      belongs to all, it either&mdash;as I have already said&mdash;has ALL
+      qualities, or it has none. You, to whom I am speaking now, your qualities,
+      good and bad, are all mine. I am perfectly willing to accept them. They
+      are all right enough and in place&mdash;if one can only find the places
+      for them. But I know that in most cases they have got so confused and
+      mixed up that they cause great conflict and pain in the souls that harbor
+      them. If you attain to knowing yourself to be other than and separate from
+      the qualities, then you will pass below and beyond them all. You will be
+      able to accept ALL your qualities and harmonize them, and your soul will
+      be at peace. You will be free from the domination of qualities then
+      because you will know that among all the multitudes of them there are none
+      of any importance!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you should happen some day to reach that state of mind in connection
+      with which this revelation comes, then you will find the experience a most
+      extraordinary one. You will become conscious that there is no barrier in
+      your path; that the way is open in all directions; that all men and women
+      belong to you, are part of you. You will feel that there is a great open
+      immense world around, which you had never suspected before, which belongs
+      to you, and the riches of which are all yours, waiting for you. It may, of
+      course, take centuries and thousands of years to realize this thoroughly,
+      but there it is. You are just at the threshold, peeping in at the door.
+      What did Shakespeare say? “To thine own self be true, and it must follow
+      as the night the day, thou can’st not then be false to any man.” What a
+      profound bit of philosophy in three lines! I doubt if anywhere the basis
+      of all human life has been expressed more perfectly and tersely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the Upanishads (the Maitrayana-Brahmana) says: “The happiness
+      belonging to a mind, which through deep inwardness (1) (or understanding)
+      has been washed clean and has entered into the Self, is a thing beyond the
+      power of words to describe: it can only be perceived by an inner faculty.”
+      Observe the conviction, the intensity with which this joy, this happiness
+      is described, which comes to those whose minds have been washed clean
+      (from all the silly trumpery sediment of self-thought) and have become
+      transparent, so that the great universal Being residing there in the
+      depths can be perceived. What sorrow indeed, what, grief, can come to such
+      an one who has seen this vision? It is truly a thing beyond the power of
+      words to describe: it can only be PERCEIVED&mdash;and that by an inner
+      faculty. The external apparatus of thought is of no use. Argument is of no
+      use. But experience and direct perception are possible; and probably all
+      the experiences of life and of mankind through the ages are gradually
+      deepening our powers of perception to that point where the vision will at
+      last rise upon the inward eye.
+    </p>
+<p class="footnote">
+ (1) The word in the Max Muller translation is “meditation.” But
+that is, I think, a somewhat misleading word. It suggests to most people
+the turning inward of the THINKING faculty to grope and delve in the
+interior of the mind. This is just what should NOT be done. Meditation
+in the proper sense should mean the inward deepening of FEELING and
+consciousness till the region of the universal self is reached; but
+THOUGHT should not interfere there. That should be turned on outward
+things to mould them into expression of the inner consciousness.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      Another text, from the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (which I have already
+      quoted in the paper on “Rest”), says: “If a man worship the Self only as
+      his true state, his work cannot fail, for whatever he desires, that he
+      obtains from the Self.” Is that not magnificent? If you truly realize your
+      identity and union with the great Self who inspires and informs the world,
+      then obviously whatever you desire the great Self win desire, and the
+      whole world will conspire to bring it to you. “He maketh the winds his
+      angels, and the flaming fires his ministers.” (I need not say that I am
+      not asking you to try and identify yourself with the great Self universal
+      IN ORDER to get riches, “opulence,” and other things of that kind which
+      you desire; because in that quest you will probably not succeed. The Great
+      Self is not such a fool as to be taken in in that way. It may be true&mdash;and
+      it is true&mdash;that if ye seek FIRST the Kingdom of Heaven all these
+      things shall be added unto you; but you must seek it first, not second.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here is a passage from Towards Democracy: “As space spreads everywhere,
+      and all things move and change within it, but it moves not nor changes,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “So I am the space within the soul, of which the space without is but the
+      similitude and mental image;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Comest thou to inhabit me, thou hast the entrance to all life&mdash;death
+      shall no longer divide thee from whom thou lovest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I am the Sun that shines upon all creatures from within&mdash;gazest thou
+      upon me, thou shalt be filled with joy eternal.”
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, this great sun is there, always shining, but most of the time it is
+      hidden from us by the clouds of which I have spoken, and we fail to see
+      it. We complain of being out in the cold; and in the cold, for the time
+      being, no doubt we are; but our return to the warmth and the light has now
+      become possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus at last the Ego, the mortal immortal self&mdash;disclosed at first in
+      darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe&mdash;FINDS ITS TRUE
+      IDENTITY. For a long period it is baffled in trying to understand what it
+      is. It goes through a vast experience. It is tormented by the sense of
+      separation and alienation&mdash;alienation from other people, and
+      persecution by all the great powers and forces of the universe; and it is
+      pursued by a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable. The
+      hour of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds at
+      last ITS OWN TRUE BEING.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty
+      tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works by
+      a “law of cussedness”&mdash;so that, whichever way we want to go, that way
+      seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without making
+      any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from
+      ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, which at present looks
+      so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing immediately we
+      have passed it&mdash;once we have found the open secret of identity&mdash;then
+      the way is indeed open in every direction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The world in which we live&mdash;the world into which we are tumbled as
+      children at the first onset of self-consciousness&mdash;denies this great
+      fact of unity. It is a world in which the principle of separation rules.
+      Instead of a common life and union with each other, the contrary principle
+      (especially in the later civilizations) has been the one recognized&mdash;and
+      to such an extent that always there prevails the obsession of separation,
+      and the conviction that each person is an isolated unit. The whole of our
+      modern society has been founded on this delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You
+      go into the markets, and every man’s hand is against the others&mdash;that
+      is the ruling principle. You go into the Law Courts where justice is, or
+      should be, administered, and you find that the principle which denies
+      unity is the one that prevails. The criminal (whose actions have really
+      been determined by the society around him) is cast out, disacknowledged,
+      and condemned to further isolation in a prison cell. ‘Property’ again is
+      the principle which rules and determines our modern civilization&mdash;namely
+      that which is proper to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as
+      AGAINST the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the shape of the
+      sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually (and that is its only
+      real meaning) the separation from others, and the non-acknowledgment of
+      unity. And so it has come about that during all this civilization-period
+      the sense of sin has ruled and ranged to such an extraordinary degree.
+      Society has been built on a false base, not true to fact or life&mdash;and
+      has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its falseness. Meanwhile at the
+      heart of it all&mdash;and within all the frantic external strife and
+      warfare&mdash;there is all the time this real great life brooding. The
+      kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is still within.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The word Democracy indicates something of the kind&mdash;the rule of the
+      Demos, that is of the common life. The coming of that will transform, not
+      only our Markets and our Law Courts and our sense of Property, and other
+      institutions, into something really great and glorious instead of the
+      dismal masses of rubbish which they at present are; but it will transform
+      our sense of Morality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our Morality at present consists in the idea of self-goodness&mdash;one of
+      the most pernicious and disgusting ideas which has ever infested the human
+      brain. If any one should follow and assimilate what I have just said about
+      the true nature of the Self he will realize that it will never again be
+      possible for him to congratulate himself on his own goodness or morality
+      or superiority; for the moment he does so he will separate himself from
+      the universal life, and proclaim the sin of his own separation. I agree
+      that this conclusion is for some people a most sad and disheartening one&mdash;but
+      it cannot be helped! A man may truly be ‘good’ and ‘moral’ in some real
+      sense; but only on the condition that he is not aware of it. He can only
+      BE good when not thinking about the matter; to be conscious of one’s own
+      goodness is already to have fallen!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We began by thinking of the self as just a little local self; then we
+      extended it to the family, the cause, the nation&mdash;ever to a larger
+      and vaster being. At last there comes a time when we recognize&mdash;or
+      see that we SHALL have to recognize&mdash;an inner Equality between
+      ourselves and all others; not of course an external equality&mdash;for
+      that would be absurd and impossible&mdash;but an inner and profound and
+      universal Equality. And so we come again to the mystic root-conception of
+      Democracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now it will be said: “But after all this talk you have not defined the
+      Self, or given us any intellectual outline of what you mean by the word.”
+      No&mdash;and I do not intend to. If I could, by any sort of copybook
+      definition, describe and show the boundaries of myself, I should obviously
+      lose all interest in the subject. Nothing more dull could be imagined. I
+      may be able to define and describe fairly exhaustively this inkpot on the
+      table; but for you or for me to give the limits and boundaries of
+      ourselves is, I am glad to say, impossible. That does not, however, mean
+      that we cannot FEEL and be CONSCIOUS of ourselves, and of our relations to
+      other selves, and to the great Whole. On the contrary I think it is clear
+      that the more vividly we feel our organic unity with the whole, the less
+      shall we be able to separate off the local self and enclose it within any
+      definition. I take it that we can and do become ever more vividly
+      conscious of our true Self, but that the mental statement of it always
+      does and probably always will lie beyond us. All life and all our action
+      and experience consist in the gradual manifestation of that which is
+      within us&mdash;of our inner being. In that sense&mdash;and reading its
+      handwriting on the outer world&mdash;we come to know the soul’s true
+      nature more and more intimately; we enter into the mind of that great
+      artist who beholds himself in his own creation.
+    </p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN &amp; CHRISTIAN CREEDS ***</div>
+<div style='text-align:left'>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Updated editions will replace the previous one&#8212;the old editions will
+be renamed.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
+law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
+so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
+States without permission and without paying copyright
+royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
+of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG&#8482;
+concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
+and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
+the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
+of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for
+copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very
+easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation
+of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project
+Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away--you may
+do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected
+by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark
+license, especially commercial redistribution.
+</div>
+
+<div style='margin:0.83em 0; font-size:1.1em; text-align:center'>START: FULL LICENSE<br />
+<span style='font-size:smaller'>THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE<br />
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK</span>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+To protect the Project Gutenberg&#8482; mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &#8220;Project
+Gutenberg&#8221;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; License available with this file or online at
+www.gutenberg.org/license.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
+destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works in your
+possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
+by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person
+or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.B. &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; is a registered trademark. It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
+paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works if you follow the terms of this
+agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&#8220;the
+Foundation&#8221; or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
+of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works. Nearly all the individual
+works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
+States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
+United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
+claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
+displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
+all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
+that you will support the Project Gutenberg&#8482; mission of promoting
+free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; name associated with the work. You can easily
+comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
+same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License when
+you share it without charge with others.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
+in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
+check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
+agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
+distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
+other Project Gutenberg&#8482; work. The Foundation makes no
+representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
+country other than the United States.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
+immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License must appear
+prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg&#8482; work (any work
+on which the phrase &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; appears, or with which the
+phrase &#8220;Project Gutenberg&#8221; is associated) is accessed, displayed,
+performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
+</div>
+
+<blockquote>
+  <div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+    other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+    whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+    of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+    at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+    are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws
+    of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
+  </div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work is
+derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
+contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
+copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
+the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
+redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase &#8220;Project
+Gutenberg&#8221; associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
+either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
+obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
+additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
+will be linked to the Project Gutenberg&#8482; License for all works
+posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
+beginning of this work.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg&#8482;.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; License.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
+any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
+to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg&#8482; work in a format
+other than &#8220;Plain Vanilla ASCII&#8221; or other format used in the official
+version posted on the official Project Gutenberg&#8482; website
+(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
+to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
+of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original &#8220;Plain
+Vanilla ASCII&#8221; or other form. Any alternate format must include the
+full Project Gutenberg&#8482; License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg&#8482; works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+provided that:
+</div>
+
+<div style='margin-left:0.7em;'>
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+        the use of Project Gutenberg&#8482; works calculated using the method
+        you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
+        to the owner of the Project Gutenberg&#8482; trademark, but he has
+        agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
+        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
+        within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
+        legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
+        payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
+        Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
+        Section 4, &#8220;Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
+        Literary Archive Foundation.&#8221;
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+        you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+        does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+        License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
+        copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
+        all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+        works.
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
+        any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+        electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
+        receipt of the work.
+    </div>
+
+    <div style='text-indent:-0.7em'>
+        &#8226; You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+        distribution of Project Gutenberg&#8482; works.
+    </div>
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work or group of works on different terms than
+are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
+from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of
+the Project Gutenberg&#8482; trademark. Contact the Foundation as set
+forth in Section 3 below.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
+contain &#8220;Defects,&#8221; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
+or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
+other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
+cannot be read by your equipment.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &#8220;Right
+of Replacement or Refund&#8221; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
+with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
+with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
+lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
+or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
+opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
+the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
+without further opportunities to fix the problem.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you &#8216;AS-IS&#8217;, WITH NO
+OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
+damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
+violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
+agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
+limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
+unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
+remaining provisions.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works in
+accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
+production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
+including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
+the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
+or any Project Gutenberg&#8482; work, (b) alteration, modification, or
+additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg&#8482; work, and (c) any
+Defect you cause.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg&#8482;
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
+computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
+exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
+from people in all walks of life.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg&#8482;&#8217;s
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg&#8482; collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg&#8482; and future
+generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
+Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service. The Foundation&#8217;s EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
+U.S. federal laws and your state&#8217;s laws.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Foundation&#8217;s business office is located at 809 North 1500 West,
+Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up
+to date contact information can be found at the Foundation&#8217;s website
+and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; depends upon and cannot survive without widespread
+public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
+DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state
+visit <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/donate/">www.gutenberg.org/donate</a>.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
+donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; font-size:1.1em; margin:1em 0; font-weight:bold'>
+Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg&#8482; electronic works
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
+Gutenberg&#8482; concept of a library of electronic works that could be
+freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
+distributed Project Gutenberg&#8482; eBooks with only a loose network of
+volunteer support.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Project Gutenberg&#8482; eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
+the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
+necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
+edition.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+Most people start at our website which has the main PG search
+facility: <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>.
+</div>
+
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This website includes information about Project Gutenberg&#8482;,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+</div>
+
+</div>
+
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/1561-h/images/cover.jpg b/1561-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24d384b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/1561-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b46bf21
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1561 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1561)
diff --git a/old/1561.txt b/old/1561.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c97dbdc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1561.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10068 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pagan & Christian Creeds, by Edward Carpenter
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Pagan & Christian Creeds
+       Their Origin and Meaning
+
+Author: Edward Carpenter
+
+Posting Date: August 26, 2008 [EBook #1561]
+Release Date: December, 1998
+[Last updated: July 28, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller
+
+
+
+
+
+PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+
+By Edward Carpenter
+
+
+
+
+"The different religions being lame attempts to represent under various
+guises this one root-fact of the central universal life, men have at
+all times clung to the religious creeds and rituals and ceremonials as
+symbolising in some rude way the redemption and fulfilment of their own
+most intimate natures--and this whether consciously understanding
+the interpretations, or whether (as most often) only doing so in an
+unconscious or quite subconscious way."
+
+The Drama of Love and Death, p. 96.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I.    INTRODUCTORY
+     II.   SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+     III.  THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+     IV.   TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+     V.    FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+     VI.   MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+     VII.  RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+     VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+     IX.   MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+     X.    THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+     XI.   RITUAL DANCING
+     XII.  THE SEX-TABOO
+     XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+     XV.   THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+     XV.   THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+     XVI.  THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+     XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+     APPENDIX ON THE TEACHINGS OF THE UPANISHADS:
+     I.    REST
+     II.   THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+
+
+
+PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+
+
+
+
+I. INTRODUCTORY
+
+The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as the great
+multitude of books upon it, published in late years, tends to show.
+Indeed the great difficulty to-day in dealing with the subject, lies in
+the very mass of the material to hand--and that not only on account of
+the labor involved in sorting the material, but because the abundance
+itself of facts opens up temptation to a student in this department of
+Anthropology (as happens also in other branches of general Science) to
+rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts,
+statistics, and so forth, there are available in any investigation, the
+easier it is to pick out a considerable number which will fit a given
+theory. The other facts being neglected or ignored, the views put
+forward enjoy for a time a great vogue. Then inevitably, and at a later
+time, new or neglected facts alter the outlook, and a new perspective is
+established.
+
+There is also in these matters of Science (though many scientific men
+would doubtless deny this) a great deal of "Fashion". Such has been
+notoriously the case in Political Economy, Medicine, Geology, and even
+in such definite studies as Physics and Chemistry. In a comparatively
+recent science, like that with which we are now concerned, one would
+naturally expect variations. A hundred and fifty years ago, and since
+the time of Rousseau, the "Noble Savage" was extremely popular; and he
+lingers still in the story books of our children. Then the reaction from
+this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been the popular cue
+(largely, it must be said, among "armchair" travelers and explorers)
+to represent the religious rites and customs of primitive folk as a
+senseless mass of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of
+decent feeling and intelligence. Again, when the study of religious
+origins first began in modern times to be seriously taken up--say in the
+earlier part of last century--there was a great boom in Sungods. Every
+divinity in the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun--unless indeed
+(if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was
+a sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the
+same. C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795), F. Nork
+in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard Taylor in England (The
+Devil's Pulpit, (1) 1830), were among the first in modern times to put
+forward this view. A little later the PHALLIC explanation of everything
+came into fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs and
+powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art and Mythology,
+1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868)
+popularized this idea in England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again
+there was a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism--the theory
+that the gods and goddesses had actually once been men and women,
+historical characters round whom a halo of romance and remoteness
+had gathered. Later still, a school has arisen which thinks little of
+sungods, and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits, to gnomes
+and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the processes of Magic by
+which these (so it was supposed) could be enlisted in man's service if
+friendly, or exorcised if hostile.
+
+
+ (1) This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and
+containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the right
+lines. But it raised a storm of opposition--the more so because its
+author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the ministry, of course, and
+was sent to prison twice.
+
+
+It is easy to see of course that there is some truth in ALL these
+explanations; but naturally each school for the time being makes the
+most of its own contention. Mr. J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and
+Christianity and Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field,
+(1) relies chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though he does
+not altogether deny the others; Dr. Frazer, on the other hand--whose
+great work, The Golden Bough, is a monumental collection of primitive
+customs, and will be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students--is
+apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun and the
+stars, but concentrates his attention on the collection of innumerable
+details (2) of rites, chiefly magical, connected with food and
+vegetation. Still later writers, like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and
+E. A. Crowley, being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive
+peoples, like the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have
+confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and Witchcraft.
+
+ (1) If only he did not waste so much time, and so needlessly, in
+slaughtering opponents!
+
+ (2) To such a degree, indeed, that sometimes the connecting clue
+of the argument seems to be lost.
+
+
+Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations has kept itself
+severely apart--as of course representing a unique and divine revelation
+little concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and moreover (in
+this country at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public
+of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few people, even
+nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just the same root as
+Paganism, and that it shares by far the most part of its doctrines and
+rites with the latter. Till quite lately it was thought (in Britain)
+that only secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in
+sungods; and while it was true that learned professors might point to a
+belief in Magic as one of the first sources of Religion, it was easy in
+reply to say that this obviously had nothing to do with Christianity!
+The Secularists, too, rather spoilt their case by assuming, in their
+wrath against the Church, that all priests since the beginning of
+the world have been frauds and charlatans, and that all the rites of
+religion were merely devil's devices invented by them for the purpose of
+preying upon the superstitions of the ignorant, to their own enrichment.
+They (the Secularists) overleaped themselves by grossly exaggerating a
+thing that no doubt is partially true.
+
+Thus the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex, and yields
+many aspects for consideration. It is only, I think, by keeping a broad
+course and admitting contributions to the truth from various sides, that
+valuable results can be obtained. It is absurd to suppose that in this
+or any other science neat systems can be found which will cover all the
+facts. Nature and History do not deal in such things, or supply them for
+a sop to Man's vanity.
+
+It is clear that there have been three main lines, so far, along which
+human speculation and study have run. One connecting religious rites and
+observations with the movements of the Sun and the planets in the sky,
+and leading to the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods
+dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance; the second
+connecting religion with the changes of the season, on the Earth and
+with such practical things as the growth of vegetation and food, and
+leading to or mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical
+methods of influencing such spirits; and the third connecting religion
+with man's own body and the tremendous force of sex residing in
+it--emblem of undying life and all fertility and power. It is clear
+also--and all investigation confirms it--that the second-mentioned phase
+of religion arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned--that is, that
+men naturally thought about the very practical questions of food and
+vegetation, and the magical or other methods of encouraging the same,
+before they worried themselves about the heavenly bodies and the laws of
+THEIR movements, or about the sinister or favorable influences the stars
+might exert. And again it is extremely probable that the third-mentioned
+aspect--that which connected religion with the procreative desires and
+phenomena of human physiology--really came FIRST. These desires and
+physiological phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive mind
+long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky had been at all
+definitely observed or considered. Thus we find it probable that, in
+order to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of
+religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given
+in which they have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the
+Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of
+earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief
+in definite God-figures residing in heaven.
+
+At the base of the whole process by which divinities and demons were
+created, and rites for their propitiation and placation established, lay
+Fear--fear stimulating the imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in
+orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
+stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness.
+Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human
+mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature
+was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure
+or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were correspondingly no
+figures or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that self. So
+it was that the imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness,
+and from that imaginative power was unrolled the whole panorama of the
+gods and rites and creeds of Religion down the centuries.
+
+The immense force and domination of Fear in the first self-conscious
+stages of the human mind is a thing which can hardly be exaggerated, and
+which is even difficult for some of us moderns to realize. But naturally
+as soon as Man began to think about himself--a frail phantom and waif in
+the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature and mode of operation he
+was entirely ignorant--he was BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon
+him on all sides. Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the
+chief obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native races
+is sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the recognized word
+for a state of mind ("obsession of death") which will often cause a
+savage to perish from a mere scratch hardly to be called a wound.
+The natural defence against this state of mind was the creation of an
+enormous number of taboos--such as we find among all races and on every
+conceivable subject--and these taboos constituted practically a
+great body of warnings which regulated the lives and thoughts of the
+community, and ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some
+degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent Customs and Laws.
+Such taboos naturally in the beginning tended to include the avoidance
+not only of acts which might reasonably be considered dangerous, like
+touching a corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful in
+their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-in-law, or
+passing a lightning-struck tree; and (what is especially to be noticed)
+they tended to include acts which offered any special PLEASURE or
+temptation--like sex or marriage or the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos
+surrounded these things too, and the psychological connection is easy to
+divine: but I shall deal with this general subject later.
+
+It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations made life
+anything but easy to early peoples; but, preposterous and unreasonable
+as some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of
+compelling the growth of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy
+motive, but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely animal
+passions, and introduced order and restraint among them. Simultaneously
+it became itself, through the gradual increase of knowledge and
+observation, transmuted and etherealized into something more like wonder
+and awe and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
+Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings (in the
+Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a gradual
+development--from crass superstition, senseless and accidental, to
+rudimentary observation, and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
+and personification of nature-powers in more or less human form,
+as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of the tribe; and to
+placation of these powers by rites like Sacrifice and the Eucharist,
+which in their turn became the foundation of Morality. Graphic
+representations made for the encouragement of fertility--as on the
+walls of Bushmen's rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of
+Altamira--became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of plants
+or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal medicine-men for
+purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied some of the material of
+Science; and humanity emerged by faltering and hesitating steps on the
+borderland of those finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed
+to be characteristic of Civilization.
+
+The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies has in
+its main outlines been the same all over the world, as the reader will
+presently see--and this whether in connection with the numerous creeds
+of Paganism or the supposedly unique case of Christianity; and now the
+continuity and close intermixture of these great streams can no longer
+be denied--nor IS it indeed denied by those who have really studied the
+subject. It is seen that religious evolution through the ages has been
+practically One thing--that there has been in fact a World-religion,
+though with various phases and branches.
+
+And so in the present day a new problem arises, namely how to account
+for the appearance of this great Phenomenon, with its orderly phases
+of evolution, and its own spontaneous (1) growths in all corners of the
+globe--this phenomenon which has had such a strange sway over the hearts
+of men, which has attracted them with so weird a charm, which has drawn
+out their devotion, love and tenderness, which has consoled them in
+sorrow and affliction, and yet which has stained their history with such
+horrible sacrifices and persecutions and cruelties. What has been the
+instigating cause of it?
+
+ (1) For the question of spontaneity see chap. x and elsewhere.
+
+
+The answer which I propose to this question, and which is developed to
+some extent in the following chapters, is a psychological one. It is
+that the phenomenon proceeds from, and is a necessary accompaniment of,
+the growth of human Consciousness itself--its growth, namely, through
+the three great stages of its unfoldment. These stages are (1) that of
+the simple or animal consciousness, (2) that of SELF-consciousness, and
+(3) that of a third stage of consciousness which has not as yet been
+effectively named, but whose indications and precursive signs we here
+and there perceive in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of the
+early religions, and in the poetry and art and literature generally of
+the later civilizations. Though I do not expect or wish to catch Nature
+and History in the careful net of a phrase, yet I think that in the
+sequence from the above-mentioned first stage to the second, and then
+again in the sequence from the second to the third, there will be found
+a helpful explanation of the rites and aspirations of human religion. It
+is this idea, illustrated by details of ceremonial and so forth, which
+forms the main thesis of the present book. In this sequence of growth,
+Christianity enters as an episode, but no more than an episode. It does
+not amount to a disruption or dislocation of evolution. If it did, or
+if it stood as an unique or unclassifiable phenomenon (as some of its
+votaries contend), this would seem to be a misfortune--as it would
+obviously rob us of at any rate one promise of progress in the future.
+And the promise of something better than Paganism and better than
+Christianity is very precious. It is surely time that it should be
+fulfilled.
+
+The tracing, therefore, of the part that human self-consciousness has
+played, psychologically, in the evolution of religion, runs like a
+thread through the following chapters, and seeks illustration in a
+variety of details. The idea has been repeated under different aspects;
+sometimes, possibly, it has been repeated too often; but different
+aspects in such a case do help, as in a stereoscope, to give solidity to
+the thing seen. Though the worship of Sun-gods and divine figures in
+the sky came comparatively late in religious evolution, 1 have put this
+subject early in the book (chapters ii and iii), partly because (as I
+have already explained) it was the phase first studied in modern times,
+and therefore is the one most familiar to present-day readers, and
+partly because its astronomical data give great definiteness and
+"proveability" to it, in rebuttal to the common accusation that the
+whole study of religious origins is too vague and uncertain to have much
+value. Going backwards in Time, the two next chapters (iv and v) deal
+with Totem-sacraments and Magic, perhaps the earliest forms of religion.
+And these four lead on (in chapters vi to xi) to the consideration of
+rites and creeds common to Paganism and Christianity. XII and xiii deal
+especially with the evolution of Christianity itself; xiv and xv explain
+the inner Meaning of the whole process from the beginning; and xvi and
+xvii look to the Future.
+
+The appendix on the doctrines of the Upanishads may, I hope, serve to
+give an idea, intimate even though inadequate, of the third Stage--that
+which follows on the stage of self-consciousness; and to portray the
+mental attitudes which are characteristic of that stage. Here in this
+third stage, it would seem, one comes upon the real FACTS of the inner
+life--in contradistinction to the fancies and figments of the second
+stage; and so one reaches the final point of conjunction between Science
+and Religion.
+
+
+
+
+II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+
+To the ordinary public--notwithstanding the immense amount of work which
+has of late been done on this subject--the connection between Paganism
+and Christianity still seems rather remote. Indeed the common notion
+is that Christianity was really a miraculous interposition into and
+dislocation of the old order of the world; and that the pagan gods (as
+in Milton's Hymn on the Nativity) fled away in dismay before the sign of
+the Cross, and at the sound of the name of Jesus. Doubtless this was a
+view much encouraged by the early Church itself--if only to enhance its
+own authority and importance; yet, as is well known to every student, it
+is quite misleading and contrary to fact. The main Christian doctrines
+and festivals, besides a great mass of affiliated legend and ceremonial,
+are really quite directly derived from, and related to, preceding
+Nature worships; and it has only been by a good deal of deliberate
+mystification and falsification that this derivation has been kept out
+of sight.
+
+In these Nature-worships there may be discerned three fairly independent
+streams of religious or quasi-religious enthusiasm: (1) that connected
+with the phenomena of the heavens, the movements of the Sun, planets and
+stars, and the awe and wonderment they excited; (2) that connected with
+the seasons and the very important matter of the growth of vegetation
+and food on the Earth; and (3) that connected with the mysteries of Sex
+and reproduction. It is obvious that these three streams would mingle
+and interfuse with each other a good deal; but as far as they were
+separable the first would tend to create Solar heroes and Sun-myths;
+the second Vegetation-gods and personifications of Nature and the
+earth-life; while the third would throw its glamour over the other two
+and contribute to the projection of deities or demons worshipped with
+all sorts of sexual and phallic rites. All three systems of course have
+their special rites and times and ceremonies; but, as, I say, the rites
+and ceremonies of one system would rarely be found pure and unmixed with
+those belonging to the two others. The whole subject is a very large
+one; but for reasons given in the Introduction I shall in this and
+the following chapter--while not ignoring phases (2) and (3)--lay most
+stress on phase (1) of the question before us.
+
+At the time of the life or recorded appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, and
+for some centuries before, the Mediterranean and neighboring world had
+been the scene of a vast number of pagan creeds and rituals. There were
+Temples without end dedicated to gods like Apollo or Dionysus among the
+Greeks, Hercules among the Romans, Mithra among the Persians, Adonis and
+Attis in Syria and Phrygia, Osiris and Isis and Horus in Egypt, Baal
+and Astarte among the Babylonians and Carthaginians, and so forth.
+Societies, large or small, united believers and the devout in the
+service or ceremonials connected with their respective deities, and
+in the creeds which they confessed concerning these deities. And an
+extraordinarily interesting fact, for us, is that notwithstanding great
+geographical distances and racial differences between the adherents
+of these various cults, as well as differences in the details of their
+services, the general outlines of their creeds and ceremonials were--if
+not identical--so markedly similar as we find them.
+
+I cannot of course go at length into these different cults, but I may
+say roughly that of all or nearly all the deities above-mentioned it was
+said and believed that:
+
+
+(1) They were born on or very near our Christmas Day.
+
+(2) They were born of a Virgin-Mother.
+
+(3) And in a Cave or Underground Chamber.
+
+(4) They led a life of toil for Mankind.
+
+(5) And were called by the names of Light-bringer, Healer, Mediator,
+Savior, Deliverer.
+
+(6) They were however vanquished by the Powers of Darkness.
+
+(7) And descended into Hell or the Underworld.
+
+(8) They rose again from the dead, and became the pioneers of mankind to
+the Heavenly world.
+
+(9) They founded Communions of Saints, and Churches into which disciples
+were received by Baptism.
+
+(10) And they were commemorated by Eucharistic meals.
+
+
+Let me give a few brief examples.
+
+Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. (1) He was born of
+a Virgin. (2) He traveled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator
+of men. He slew the Bull (symbol of the gross Earth which the sunlight
+fructifies). His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring
+equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples
+(the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose
+again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings.
+He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and
+sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers.
+This legend is apparently partly astronomical and partly vegetational;
+and the same may be said of the following about Osiris.
+
+ (1) The birthfeast of Mithra was held in Rome on the 8th day
+before the Kalends of January, being also the day of the Circassian
+games, which were sacred to the Sun. (See F. Nork, Der Mystagog,
+Leipzig.)
+
+ (2) This at any rate was reported by his later disciples (see
+Robertson's Pagan Christs, p. 338).
+
+
+Osiris was born (Plutarch tells us) on the 361st day of the year,
+say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great
+traveler. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and "tamed them by
+music and gentleness, not by force of arms"; (1) he was the discoverer
+of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness,
+and slain and dismembered. "This happened," says Plutarch, "on the 17th
+of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion" (the sign of
+the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed
+in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in
+the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult
+of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin was brought out before the
+worshipers and saluted with glad cries of "Osiris is risen." (1) "His
+sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in
+a great mystery-play at Abydos." (2)
+
+ (1) See Plutarch on Isis and Osiris.
+
+ (2) Ancient Art and Ritual, by Jane E. Harrison, chap. i.
+
+
+The two following legends have more distinctly the character of
+Vegetation myths.
+
+Adonis or Tammuz, the Syrian god of vegetation, was a very beautiful
+youth, born of a Virgin (Nature), and so beautiful that Venus and
+Proserpine (the goddesses of the Upper and Underworlds) both fell in
+love with him. To reconcile their claims it was agreed that he should
+spend half the year (summer) in the upper world, and the winter half
+with Proserpine below. He was killed by a boar (Typhon) in the autumn.
+And every year the maidens "wept for Adonis" (see Ezekiel viii. 14). In
+the spring a festival of his resurrection was held--the women set out
+to seek him, and having found the supposed corpse placed it (a wooden
+image) in a coffin or hollow tree, and performed wild rites and
+lamentations, followed by even wilder rejoicings over his supposed
+resurrection. At Aphaca in the North of Syria, and halfway between
+Byblus and Baalbec, there was a famous grove and temple of Astarte,
+near which was a wild romantic gorge full of trees, the birthplace of
+a certain river Adonis--the water rushing from a Cavern, under lofty
+cliffs. Here (it was said) every year the youth Adonis was again wounded
+to death, and the river ran red with his blood, (1) while the scarlet
+anemone bloomed among the cedars and walnuts.
+
+ (1) A discoloration caused by red earth washed by rain from the
+mountains, and which has been observed by modern travelers. For the
+whole story of Adonis and of Attis see Frazer's Golden Bough, part iv.
+
+
+The story of Attis is very similar. He was a fair young shepherd or
+herdsman of Phrygia, beloved by Cybele (or Demeter), the Mother of the
+gods. He was born of a Virgin--Nana--who conceived by putting a ripe
+almond or pomegranate in her bosom. He died, either killed by a boar,
+the symbol of winter, like Adonis, or self-castrated (like his own
+priests); and he bled to death at the foot of a pine tree (the pine
+and pine-cone being symbols of fertility). The sacrifice of his blood
+renewed the fertility of the earth, and in the ritual celebration of
+his death and resurrection his image was fastened to the trunk of a
+pine-tree (compare the Crucifixion). But I shall return to this legend
+presently. The worship of Attis became very widespread and much honored,
+and was ultimately incorporated with the established religion at Rome
+somewhere about the commencement of our Era.
+
+The following two legends (dealing with Hercules and with Krishna) have
+rather more of the character of the solar, and less of the vegetational
+myth about them. Both heroes were regarded as great benefactors of
+humanity; but the former more on the material plane, and the latter on
+the spiritual.
+
+Hercules or Heracles was, like other Sun-gods and benefactors of
+mankind, a great Traveler. He was known in many lands, and everywhere
+he was invoked as Saviour. He was miraculously conceived from a divine
+Father; even in the cradle he strangled two serpents sent to destroy
+him. His many labors for the good of the world were ultimately
+epitomized into twelve, symbolized by the signs of the Zodiac. He slew
+the Nemxan Lion and the Hydra (offspring of Typhon) and the Boar. He
+overcame the Cretan Bull, and cleaned out the Stables of Augeas; he
+conquered Death and, descending into Hades, brought Cerberus thence and
+ascended into Heaven. On all sides he was followed by the gratitude and
+the prayers of mortals.
+
+As to Krishna, the Indian god, the points of agreement with the general
+divine career indicated above are too salient to be overlooked, and too
+numerous to be fully recorded. He also was born of a Virgin (Devaki)
+and in a Cave, (1) and his birth announced by a Star. It was sought to
+destroy him, and for that purpose a massacre of infants was ordered.
+Everywhere he performed miracles, raising the dead, healing lepers, and
+the deaf and the blind, and championing the poor and oppressed. He had
+a beloved disciple, Arjuna, (cf. John) before whom he was transfigured.
+(2) His death is differently related--as being shot by an arrow, or
+crucified on a tree. He descended into hell; and rose again from the
+dead, ascending into heaven in the sight of many people. He will return
+at the last day to be the judge of the quick and the dead.
+
+ (1) Cox's Myths of the Aryan Nations, p. 107.
+
+ (2) Bhagavat Gita, ch. xi.
+
+
+Such are some of the legends concerning the pagan and pre-Christian
+deities--only briefly sketched now, in order that we may get something
+like a true perspective of the whole subject; but to most of them, and
+more in detail, I shall return as the argument proceeds.
+
+What we chiefly notice so far are two points; on the one hand the
+general similarity of these stories with that of Jesus Christ; on the
+other their analogy with the yearly phenomena of Nature as illustrated
+by the course of the Sun in heaven and the changes of Vegetation on the
+earth.
+
+
+(1) The similarity of these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with
+Christian traditions was indeed so great that it excited the attention
+and the undisguised wrath of the early Christian fathers. They felt no
+doubt about the similarity, but not knowing how to explain it fell
+back upon the innocent theory that the Devil--in order to confound the
+Christians--had, CENTURIES BEFORE, caused the pagans to adopt certain
+beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil, but also
+very innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr for instance
+describes (1) the institution of the Lord's Supper as narrated in the
+Gospels, and then goes on to say: "Which the wicked devils have IMITATED
+in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For,
+that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in
+the mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know or can
+learn." Tertullian also says (2) that "the devil by the mysteries of
+his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries."...
+"He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes them believe that
+this purifies them from their crimes."... "Mithra sets his mark on the
+forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers
+an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the crown and the
+sword; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage; he even has his
+virgins and ascetics." (3) Cortez, too, it will be remembered complained
+that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things
+which God had taught to Christendom.
+
+ (1) I Apol. c. 66.
+
+ (2) De Praescriptione Hereticorum, c. 40; De Bapt. c. 3; De
+Corona, c. 15.
+
+ (3) For reference to both these examples see J. M. Robertson's
+Pagan Christs, pp. 321, 322.
+
+
+Justin Martyr again, in the Dialogue with Trypho says that the Birth in
+the Stable was the prototype (!) of the birth of Mithra in the Cave of
+Zoroastrianism; and boasts that Christ was born when the Sun takes its
+birth in the Augean Stable, (1) coming as a second Hercules to cleanse
+a foul world; and St. Augustine says "we hold this (Christmas) day holy,
+not like the pagans because of the birth of the Sun, but because of the
+birth of him who made it." There are plenty of other instances in the
+Early Fathers of their indignant ascription of these similarities to the
+work of devils; but we need not dwell over them. There is no need for
+US to be indignant. On the contrary we can now see that these
+animadversions of the Christian writers are the evidence of how and to
+what extent in the spread of Christianity over the world it had become
+fused with the Pagan cults previously existing.
+
+ (1) The Zodiacal sign of Capricornus, iii.
+
+
+It was not till the year A.D. 530 or so--five centuries after the
+supposed birth of Christ--that a Scythian Monk, Dionysius Exiguus, an
+abbot and astronomer of Rome, was commissioned to fix the day and the
+year of that birth. A nice problem, considering the historical science
+of the period! For year he assigned the date which we now adopt, (2) and
+for day and month he adopted the 25th December--a date which had been
+in popular use since about 350 B.C., and the very date, within a day or
+two, of the supposed birth of the previous Sungods. (3) From that
+fact alone we may fairly conclude that by the year 530 or earlier the
+existing Nature-worships had become largely fused into Christianity. In
+fact the dates of the main pagan religious festivals had by that time
+become so popular that Christianity was OBLIGED to accommodate itself to
+them. (1)
+
+ (1) As, for instance, the festival of John the Baptist in June
+took the place of the pagan midsummer festival of water and bathing;
+the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that of Diana in the
+same month; and the festival of All Souls early in November, that of the
+world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and their ghosts at the same season.
+
+ (2) See Encycl. Brit. art. "Chronology."
+
+ (3) "There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
+as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of the rainy
+season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds could have been at
+night in the fields of Bethlehem" (!). Encycl. Brit. art. "Christmas
+Day." According to Hastings's Encyclopaedia, art. "Christmas," "Usener
+says that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th
+January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to
+the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity
+taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D." It was not till 534
+A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as
+dies non.
+
+
+This brings us to the second point mentioned a few pages back--the
+analogy between the Christian festivals and the yearly phenomena of
+Nature in the Sun and the Vegetation.
+
+Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have seen, was reported
+to have been born on the 25th December (which in the Julian Calendar was
+reckoned as the day of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the
+Sun); Plutarch says (Isis and Osiris, c. 12) that Osiris was born on
+the 361st day of the year, when a Voice rang out proclaiming the Lord of
+All. Horus, he says, was born on the 362nd day. Apollo on the same.
+
+Why was all this? Why did the Druids at Yule Tide light roaring fires?
+Why was the cock supposed to crow all Christmas Eve ("The bird of
+dawning singeth all night long")? Why was Apollo born with only one hair
+(the young Sun with only one feeble ray)? Why did Samson (name derived
+from Shemesh, the sun) lose all his strength when he lost his hair? Why
+were so many of these gods--Mithra, Apollo, Krishna, Jesus, and others,
+born in caves or underground chambers? (1) Why, at the Easter Eve
+festival of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is a light brought from the
+grave and communicated to the candles of thousands who wait outside, and
+who rush forth rejoicing to carry the new glory over the world? (2) Why
+indeed? except that older than all history and all written records has
+been the fear and wonderment of the children of men over the failure of
+the Sun's strength in Autumn--the decay of their God; and the anxiety
+lest by any means he should not revive or reappear?
+
+
+ (1) This same legend of gods (or idols) being born in caves has,
+curiously enough, been reported from Mexico, Guatemala, the Antilles,
+and other places in Central America. See C. F. P. von Martius,
+Etknographie Amerika, etc. (Leipzig, 1867), vol. i, p. 758.
+
+ (2) Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and
+communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human
+victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the
+beginning of another--the constellation of the Pleiades being in the
+Zenith (Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 4).
+
+
+Think for a moment of a time far back when there were absolutely NO
+Almanacs or Calendars, either nicely printed or otherwise, when all that
+timid mortals could see was that their great source of Light and Warmth
+was daily failing, daily sinking lower in the sky. As everyone now knows
+there are about three weeks at the fag end of the year when the days are
+at their shortest and there is very little change. What was happening?
+Evidently the god had fallen upon evil times. Typhon, the prince of
+darkness, had betrayed him; Delilah, the queen of Night, had shorn his
+hair; the dreadful Boar had wounded him; Hercules was struggling
+with Death itself; he had fallen under the influence of those malign
+constellations--the Serpent and the Scorpion. Would the god grow weaker
+and weaker, and finally succumb, or would he conquer after all? We can
+imagine the anxiety with which those early men and women watched for the
+first indication of a lengthening day; and the universal joy when the
+Priest (the representative of primitive science) having made some
+simple observations, announced from the Temple steps that the day WAS
+lengthening--that the Sun was really born again to a new and glorious
+career. (1)
+
+ (1) It was such things as these which doubtless gave the
+Priesthood its power.
+
+
+Let us look at the elementary science of those days a little closer.
+How without Almanacs or Calendars could the day, or probable day, of the
+Sun's rebirth be fixed? Go out next Christmas Evening, and at midnight
+you will see the brightest of the fixed stars, Sirius, blazing in the
+southern sky--not however due south from you, but somewhat to the
+left of the Meridian line. Some three thousand years ago (owing to the
+Precession of the Equinoxes) that star at the winter solstice did
+not stand at midnight where you now see it, but almost exactly ON
+the meridian line. The coming of Sirius therefore to the meridian at
+midnight became the sign and assurance of the Sun having reached the
+very lowest point of his course, and therefore of having arrived at the
+moment of his re-birth. Where then was the Sun at that moment? Obviously
+in the underworld beneath our feet. Whatever views the ancients may have
+had about the shape of the earth, it was evident to the mass of people
+that the Sungod, after illuminating the world during the day, plunged
+down in the West, and remained there during the hours of darkness in
+some cavern under the earth. Here he rested and after bathing in the
+great ocean renewed his garments before reappearing in the East next
+morning.
+
+But in this long night of his greatest winter weakness, when all the
+world was hoping and praying for the renewal of his strength, it is
+evident that the new birth would come--if it came at all--at midnight.
+This then was the sacred hour when in the underworld (the Stable or the
+Cave or whatever it might be called) the child was born who was destined
+to be the Savior of men. At that moment Sirius stood on the southern
+meridian (and in more southern lands than ours this would be more nearly
+overhead); and that star--there is little doubt--is the Star in the East
+mentioned in the Gospels.
+
+To the right, as the supposed observer looks at Sirius on the midnight
+of Christmas Eve, stands the magnificent Orion, the mighty hunter. There
+are three stars in his belt which, as is well known, lie in a straight
+line pointing to Sirius. They are not so bright as Sirius, but they are
+sufficiently bright to attract attention. A long tradition gives them
+the name of the Three Kings. Dupuis (1) says: "Orion a trois belles
+etoiles vers le milieu, qui sont de seconde grandeur et posees en ligne
+droite, l'une pres de l'autre, le peuple les appelle les trois rois.
+On donne aux trois rois Magis les noms de Magalat, Galgalat, Saraim;
+et Athos, Satos, Paratoras. Les Catholiques les appellent Gaspard,
+Melchior, et Balthasar." The last-mentioned group of names comes in
+the Catholic Calendar in connection with the feast of the Epiphany (6th
+January); and the name "Trois Rois" is commonly to-day given to these
+stars by the French and Swiss peasants.
+
+ (1) Charles F. Dupuis (Origine de Tous les Cultes, Paris, 1822)
+was one of the earliest modern writers on these subjects.
+
+
+Immediately after Midnight then, on the 25th December, the Beloved Son
+(or Sun-god) is born. If we go back in thought to the period, some three
+thousand years ago, when at that moment of the heavenly birth Sirius,
+coming from the East, did actually stand on the Meridian, we shall come
+into touch with another curious astronomical coincidence. For at the
+same moment we shall see the Zodiacal constellation of the Virgin in
+the act of rising, and becoming visible in the East divided through the
+middle by the line of the horizon.
+
+The constellation Virgo is a Y-shaped group, of which [gr a], the star
+at the foot, is the well-known Spica, a star of the first magnitude. The
+other principal stars, [gr g] at the centre, and [gr b] and [gr e] at
+the extremities, are of the second magnitude. The whole resembles more a
+cup than the human figure; but when we remember the symbolic meaning
+of the cup, that seems to be an obvious explanation of the name Virgo,
+which the constellation has borne since the earliest times. (The three
+stars [gr b], [gr g] and [gr a], lie very nearly on the Ecliptic, that
+is, the Sun's path--a fact to which we shall return presently.)
+
+At the moment then when Sirius, the star from the East, by coming to the
+Meridian at midnight signalled the Sun's new birth, the Virgin was seen
+just rising on the Eastern sky--the horizon line passing through
+her centre. And many people think that this astronomical fact is the
+explanation of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth. I do not
+think that it is the sole explanation--for indeed in all or nearly all
+these cases the acceptance of a myth seems to depend not upon a single
+argument but upon the convergence of a number of meanings and reasons in
+the same symbol. But certainly the fact mentioned above is curious, and
+its importance is accentuated by the following considerations.
+
+In the Temple of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside of the dome,
+there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern
+hemisphere of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation
+is represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in
+her hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and
+explicatory figure--a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms,
+and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna and Child, except
+that she is sitting and the child is on her knee. This seems to show
+that--whatever other nations may have done in associating Virgo with
+Demeter, Ceres, Diana (2) etc.--the Egyptians made no doubt of the
+constellation's connection with Isis and Horus. But it is well known as
+a matter of history that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the
+early Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form of the
+worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior, and so passed into
+the European ceremonial. We have therefore the Virgin Mary connected by
+linear succession and descent with that remote Zodiacal cluster in the
+sky! Also it may be mentioned that on the Arabian and Persian globes of
+Abenezra and Abuazar a Virgin and Child are figured in connection with
+the same constellation. (3)
+
+ (1) Carefully described and mapped by Dupuis, see op. cit.
+
+ (2) For the harvest-festival of Diana, the Virgin, and her
+parallelism with the Virgin Mary, see The Golden Bough, vol. i, 14 and
+ii, 121.
+
+ (3) See F. Nork, Der Mystagog (Leipzig, 1838).
+
+
+A curious confirmation of the same astronomical connection is afforded
+by the Roman Catholic Calendar. For if this be consulted it will be
+found that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin is placed on the
+15th August, while the festival of the Birth of the Virgin is dated the
+8th September. I have already pointed out that the stars, [gr a], [gr
+b] and [gr g] of Virgo are almost exactly on the Ecliptic, or Sun's path
+through the sky; and a brief reference to the Zodiacal signs and the
+star-maps will show that the Sun each year enters the sign of Virgo
+about the first-mentioned date, and leaves it about the second date. At
+the present day the Zodiacal signs (owing to precession) have shifted
+some distance from the constellations of the same name. But at the time
+when the Zodiac was constituted and these names were given, the first
+date obviously would signalize the actual disappearance of the cluster
+Virgo in the Sun's rays--i. e. the Assumption of the Virgin into the
+glory of the God--while the second date would signalize the reappearance
+of the constellation or the Birth of the Virgin. The Church of Notre
+Dame at Paris is supposed to be on the original site of a Temple of
+Isis; and it is said (but I have not been able to verify this myself)
+that one of the side entrances--that, namely, on the left in entering
+from the North (cloister) side--is figured with the signs of the Zodiac
+EXCEPT that the sign Virgo is replaced by the figure of the Madonna and
+Child.
+
+So strange is the scripture of the sky! Innumerable legends and customs
+connect the rebirth of the Sun with a Virgin parturition. Dr. J. G.
+Frazer in his Part IV of The Golden Bough (1) says: "If we may trust the
+evidence of an obscure scholiast the Greeks (in the worship of Mithras
+at Rome) used to celebrate the birth of the luminary by a midnight
+service, coming out of the inner shrines and crying, 'The Virgin has
+brought forth! The light is waxing!' ([gr 'H parhenos tetoken, auzei
+pws].)" In Elie Reclus' little book Primitive Folk (2) it is said of the
+Esquimaux that "On the longest night of the year two angakout (priests),
+of whom one is disguised as a WOMAN, go from hut to hut extinguishing
+all the lights, rekindling them from a vestal flame, and crying out,
+'From the new sun cometh a new light!'"
+
+ (1) Book II, ch. vi.
+
+ (2) In the Contemporary Science Series, I. 92.
+
+
+All this above-written on the Solar or Astronomical origins of the myths
+does not of course imply that the Vegetational origins must be denied
+or ignored. These latter were doubtless the earliest, but there is no
+reason--as said in the Introduction (ch. i)--why the two elements should
+not to some extent have run side by side, or been fused with each other.
+In fact it is quite clear that they must have done so; and to separate
+them out too rigidly, or treat them as antagonistic, is a mistake. The
+Cave or Underworld in which the New Year is born is not only the place
+of the Sun's winter retirement, but also the hidden chamber beneath the
+Earth to which the dying Vegetation goes, and from which it re-arises
+in Spring. The amours of Adonis with Venus and Proserpine, the lovely
+goddesses of the upper and under worlds, or of Attis with Cybele, the
+blooming Earth-mother, are obvious vegetation-symbols; but they do not
+exclude the interpretation that Adonis (Adonai) may also figure as a
+Sun-god. The Zodiacal constellations of Aries and Taurus (to which I
+shall return presently) rule in heaven just when the Lamb and the Bull
+are in evidence on the earth; and the yearly sacrifice of those two
+animals and of the growing Corn for the good of mankind runs
+parallel with the drama of the sky, as it affects not only the said
+constellations but also Virgo (the Earth-mother who bears the sheaf of
+corn in her hand).
+
+I shall therefore continue (in the next chapter) to point out these
+astronomical references--which are full of significance and poetry; but
+with a recommendation at the same time to the reader not to forget the
+poetry and significance of the terrestrial interpretations.
+
+Between Christmas Day and Easter there are several minor festivals or
+holy days--such as the 28th December (the Massacre of the Innocents),
+the 6th January (the Epiphany), the 2nd February (Candlemas (1) Day),
+the period of Lent (German Lenz, the Spring), the Annunciation of the
+Blessed Virgin, and so forth--which have been commonly celebrated in
+the pagan cults before Christianity, and in which elements of Star and
+Nature worship can be traced; but to dwell on all these would take too
+long; so let us pass at once to the period of Easter itself.
+
+ (1) This festival of the Purification of the Virgin corresponds
+with the old Roman festival of Juno Februata (i. e. purified) which was
+held in the last month (February) of the Roman year, and which included
+a candle procession of Ceres, searching for Proserpine. (F. Nork, Der
+Mystagog.)
+
+
+
+
+III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+
+The Vernal Equinox has all over the ancient world, and from the earliest
+times, been a period of rejoicing and of festivals in honor of the
+Sungod. It is needless to labor a point which is so well known. Everyone
+understands and appreciates the joy of finding that the long darkness is
+giving way, that the Sun is growing in strength, and that the days are
+winning a victory over the nights. The birds and flowers reappear, and
+the promise of Spring is in the air. But it may be worth while to give
+an elementary explanation of the ASTRONOMICAL meaning of this period,
+because this is not always understood, and yet it is very important in
+its bearing on the rites and creeds of the early religions. The priests
+who were, as I have said, the early students and inquirers, had worked
+out this astronomical side, and in that way were able to fix dates and
+to frame for the benefit of the populace myths and legends, which were
+in a certain sense explanations of the order of Nature, and a kind of
+"popular science."
+
+The Equator, as everyone knows, is an imaginary line or circle girdling
+the Earth half-way between the North and South poles. If you imagine a
+transparent Earth with a light at its very centre, and also imagine the
+SHADOW of this equatorial line to be thrown on the vast concave of
+the Sky, this shadow would in astronomical parlance coincide with the
+Equator of the Sky--forming an imaginary circle half-way between the
+North and South celestial poles.
+
+The Equator, then, may be pictured as cutting across the sky either by
+day or by night, and always at the same elevation--that is, as seen from
+any one place. But the Ecliptic (the other important great circle of the
+heavens) can only be thought of as a line traversing the constellations
+as they are seen at NIGHT. It is in fact the Sun's path among the fixed
+stars. For (really owing to the Earth's motion in its orbit) the Sun
+appears to move round the heavens once a year--travelling, always to the
+left, from constellation to constellation. The exact path of the sun is
+called the Ecliptic; and the band of sky on either side of the Ecliptic
+which may be supposed to include the said constellations is called the
+Zodiac. How then--it will of course be asked--seeing that the Sun and
+the Stars can never be seen together--were the Priests ABLE to map out
+the path of the former among the latter? Into that question we need not
+go. Sufficient to say that they succeeded; and their success--even with
+the very primitive instruments they had--shows that their astronomical
+knowledge and acuteness of reasoning were of no mean order.
+
+To return to our Vernal Equinox. Let us suppose that the Equator and
+Ecliptic of the sky, at the Spring season, are represented by two lines
+Eq. and Ecl. crossing each other at the point P. The Sun, represented
+by the small circle, is moving slowly and in its annual course along the
+Ecliptic to the left. When it reaches the point P (the dotted circle)
+it stands on the Equator of the sky, and then for a day or two, being
+neither North nor South, it shines on the two terrestrial hemispheres
+alike, and day and night are equal. BEFORE that time, when the sun
+is low down in the heavens, night has the advantage, and the days are
+short; AFTERWARDS, when the Sun has travelled more to the left, the days
+triumph over the nights. It will be seen then that this point P where
+the Sun's path crosses the Equator is a very critical point. It is the
+astronomical location of the triumph of the Sungod and of the arrival of
+Spring.
+
+How was this location defined? Among what stars was the Sun moving at
+that critical moment? (For of course it was understood, or supposed,
+that the Sun was deeply influenced by the constellation through which it
+was, or appeared to be, moving.) It seems then that at the period when
+these questions were occupying men's minds--say about three thousand
+years ago--the point where the Ecliptic crossed the Equator was, as a
+matter of fact, in the region of the constellation Aries or the he-Lamb.
+The triumph of the Sungod was therefore, and quite naturally, ascribed
+to the influence of Aries. THE LAMB BECAME THE SYMBOL OF THE RISEN
+SAVIOR, AND OF HIS PASSAGE FROM THE UNDERWORLD INTO THE HEIGHT OF
+HEAVEN. At first such an explanation sounds hazardous; but a thousand
+texts and references confirm it; and it is only by the accumulation of
+evidence in these cases that the student becomes convinced of a theory's
+correctness. It must also be remembered (what I have mentioned before)
+that these myths and legends were commonly adopted not only for
+one strict reason but because they represented in a general way the
+convergence of various symbols and inferences.
+
+Let me enumerate a few points with regard to the Vernal Equinox. In the
+Bible the festival is called the Passover, and its supposed institution
+by Moses is related in Exodus, ch. xii. In every house a he-lamb was to
+be slain, and its blood to be sprinkled on the doorposts of the house.
+Then the Lord would pass over and not smite that house. The Hebrew word
+is pasach, to pass. (1) The lamb slain was called the Paschal Lamb. But
+what was that lamb? Evidently not an earthly lamb--(though certainly
+the earthly lambs on the hillsides WERE just then ready to be killed and
+eaten)--but the heavenly Lamb, which was slain or sacrificed when the
+Lord "passed over" the equator and obliterated the constellation Aries.
+This was the Lamb of God which was slain each year, and "Slain since the
+foundation of the world." This period of the Passover (about the 25th
+March) was to be (2) the beginning of a new year. The sacrifice of
+the Lamb, and its blood, were to be the promise of redemption. The
+door-frames of the houses--symbols of the entrance into a new life--were
+to be sprinkled with blood. (3) Later, the imagery of the saving power
+of the blood of the Lamb became more popular, more highly colored. (See
+St. Paul's epistles, and the early Fathers.) And we have the expression
+"washed in the blood of the Lamb" adopted into the Christian Church.
+
+ (1) It is said that pasach sometimes means not so much to pass
+over, as to hover over and so protect. Possibly both meanings enter in
+here. See Isaiah xxxi. 5.
+
+ (2) See Exodus xii. i.
+
+ (3) It is even said (see The Golden Bough, vol. iii, 185) that
+the doorways of houses and temples in Peru were at the Spring festival
+daubed with blood of the first-born children--commuted afterwards to the
+blood of the sacred animal, the Llama. And as to Mexico, Sahagun, the
+great Spanish missionary, tells us that it was a custom of the people
+there to "smear the outside of their houses and doors with blood drawn
+from their own ears and ankles, in order to propitiate the god of
+Harvest" (Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 235).
+
+
+In order fully to understand this extraordinary expression and its
+origin we must turn for a moment to the worship both of Mithra, the
+Persian Sungod, and of Attis the Syrian god, as throwing great light
+on the Christian cult and ceremonies. It must be remembered that in the
+early centuries of our era the Mithra-cult was spread over the whole
+Western world. It has left many monuments of itself here in Britain.
+At Rome the worship was extremely popular, and it may almost be said
+to have been a matter of chance whether Mithraism should overwhelm
+Christianity, or whether the younger religion by adopting many of the
+rites of the older one should establish itself (as it did) in the face
+of the latter.
+
+Now we have already mentioned that in the Mithra cult the slaying of a
+Bull by the Sungod occupies the same sort of place as the slaving of the
+Lamb in the Christian cult. It took place at the Vernal Equinox and the
+blood of the Bull acquired in men's minds a magic virtue. Mithraism was
+a greatly older religion than Christianity; but its genesis was similar.
+In fact, owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes, the crossing-place of
+the Ecliptic and Equator was different at the time of the establishment
+of Mithra-worship from what it was in the Christian period; and the
+Sun instead of standing in the He-lamb, or Aries, at the Vernal Equinox
+stood, about two thousand years earlier (as indicated by the dotted line
+in the diagram), in this very constellation of the Bull. (1) The bull
+therefore became the symbol of the triumphant God, and the sacrifice
+of the bull a holy mystery. (Nor must we overlook here the agricultural
+appropriateness of the bull as the emblem of Spring-plowings and of
+service to man.)
+
+ (1) With regard to this point, see an article in the Nineteenth
+Century for September 1900, by E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich
+Observatory on "The Oldest Picture Book" (the Zodiac). Mr. Maunder
+calculates that the Vernal Equinox was in the centre of the Sign of
+the Bull 5,000 years ago. (It would therefore be in the centre of Aries
+2,845 years ago--allowing 2,155 years for the time occupied in passing
+from one Sign to another.) At the earlier period the Summer solstice was
+in the centre of Leo, the Autumnal equinox in the centre of Scorpio, and
+the Winter solstice in the centre of Aquarius--corresponding roughly,
+Mr. Maunder points out, to the positions of the four "Royal Stars,"
+Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.
+
+
+The sacrifice of the Bull became the image of redemption. In a certain
+well-known Mithra-sculpture or group, the Sungod is represented as
+plunging his dagger into a bull, while a scorpion, a serpent, and other
+animals are sucking the latter's blood. From one point of view this may
+be taken as symbolic of the Sun fertilizing the gross Earth by plunging
+his rays into it and so drawing forth its blood for the sustenance of
+all creatures; while from another more astronomical aspect it symbolizes
+the conquest of the Sun over winter in the moment of "passing over" the
+sign of the Bull, and the depletion of the generative power of the Bull
+by the Scorpion--which of course is the autumnal sign of the Zodiac
+and herald of winter. One such Mithraic group was found at Ostia, where
+there was a large subterranean Temple "to the invincible god Mithras."
+
+In the worship of Attis there were (as I have already indicated) many
+points of resemblance to the Christian cult. On the 22nd March (the
+Vernal Equinox) a pinetree was cut in the woods and brought into the
+Temple of Cybele. It was treated almost as a divinity, was decked
+with violets, and the effigy of a young man tied to the stem (cf. the
+Crucifixion). The 24th was called the "Day of Blood"; the High Priest
+first drew blood from his own arms; and then the others gashed and
+slashed themselves, and spattered the altar and the sacred tree with
+blood; while novices made themselves eunuchs "for the kingdom of
+heaven's sake." The effigy was afterwards laid in a tomb. But when
+night fell, says Dr. Frazer, (1) sorrow was turned to joy. A light was
+brought, and the tomb was found to be empty. The next day, the 25th, was
+the festival of the Resurrection; and ended in carnival and license
+(the Hilaria). Further, says Dr. Frazer, these mysteries "seem to have
+included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood."
+
+ (1) See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Part IV of The Golden Bough, by
+J. G. Frazer, p. 229.
+
+
+"In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with
+fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a
+wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead
+glittering with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there
+stabbed to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood
+poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout
+eagerness by the worshiper on every part of his person and garments,
+till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head
+to foot, to receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows--as
+one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins
+in the blood of the bull." (1) And Frazer continuing says: "That the
+bath of blood derived from slaughter of the bull (tauro-bolium)
+was believed to regenerate the devotee for eternity is proved by an
+inscription found at Rome, which records that a certain Sextilius
+Agesilaus Aedesius, who dedicated an altar to Attis and the mother of
+the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio criobolio que in aeternum renatus."
+(2) "In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia," says Mr. J. M.
+Robertson, (3) "which grew very popular in the Roman world, we have the
+literal and original meaning of the phrase 'washed in the blood of the
+lamb' (4); the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal life
+were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a
+sacrificial bull or ram." (5) For the POPULARITY of the rite we may
+quote Franz Cumont, who says:--"Cette douche sacree (taurobolium) pareit
+avoir ete administree en Cappadoce dans un grand nombre de sanctuaires,
+et en particulier dans ceux de Ma la grande divinite indigene, et dans
+ceux: de Anahita."
+
+ (1) See vol. i, pp. 334 ff.
+
+ (2) Adonis, Attis and Osiris, p. 229. References to Prudentius,
+and to Firmicus Maternus, De errore 28. 8.
+
+ (3) That is, "By the slaughter of the bull and the slaughter of
+the ram born again into eternity."
+
+ (4) Pagan Christs, p. 315.
+
+ (5) Mysteres de Mithra, Bruxelles, 1902, p. 153.
+
+
+Whether Mr. Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests (as he
+appears to do) so materialistic a view of the potency of the actual
+blood is, I should say, doubtful. I do not myself see that there is
+any reason for supposing that the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded
+baptism by blood very differently from the way in which the Christian
+Church has generally regarded baptism by water--namely, as a SYMBOL of
+some inner regeneration. There may certainly have been a little more
+of the MAGICAL view and a little less of the symbolic, in the older
+religions; but the difference was probably on the whole more one of
+degree than of essential disparity. But however that may be, we cannot
+but be struck by the extraordinary analogy between the tombstone
+inscriptions of that period "born again into eternity by the blood of
+the Bull or the Ram," and the corresponding texts in our graveyards
+to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs
+aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives a great number of
+texts and epitaphs of the same character as that above-quoted, and they
+are well worth studying by those interested in the subject. Cumont, it
+may be noted (vol. i, p. 305), thinks that the story of Mithra and the
+slaying of the Bull must have originated among some pastoral people to
+whom the bull was the source of all life. The Bull in heaven--the symbol
+of the triumphant Sungod--and the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good
+of humanity were one and the same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF
+OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And Mithra was the hero who first won this
+conception of divinity for mankind--though of course it is in essence
+quite similar to the conception put forward by the Christian Church.
+
+As illustrating the belief that the Baptism by Blood was accompanied by
+a real regeneration of the devotee, Frazer quotes an ancient writer
+(1) who says that for some time after the ceremony the fiction of a new
+birth was kept up by dieting the devotee on MILK, like a new-born
+babe. And it is interesting in that connection to find that even in the
+present day a diet of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for six or eight
+weeks is by many doctors recommended as the only means of getting rid
+of deep-seated illnesses and enabling a patient's organism to make a
+completely new start in life.
+
+ (1) Sallustius philosophus. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, note,
+p. 229.
+
+
+"At Rome," he further says (p. 230), "the new birth and the remission
+of sins by the shedding of bull's blood appear to have been carried
+out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian Goddess (Cybele) on
+the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great basilica of St.
+Peter's now stands; for many inscriptions relating to the rites were
+found when the church was being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From
+the Vatican as a centre," he continues, "this barbarous system of
+superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman empire.
+Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial sanctuaries
+modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican."
+
+It would appear then that at Rome in the quiet early days of the
+Christian Church, the rites and ceremonials of Mithra and Cybele,
+probably much intermingled and blended, were exceedingly popular. Both
+religions had been recognized by the Roman State, and the Christians,
+persecuted and despised as they were, found it hard to make any headway
+against them--the more so perhaps because the Christian doctrines
+appeared in many respects to be merely faint replicas and copies of the
+older creeds. Robertson maintains (1) that a he-lamb was sacrificed in
+the Mithraic mysteries, and he quotes Porphyry as saying (2) that
+"a place near the equinoctial circle was assigned to Mithra as an
+appropriate seat; and on this account he bears the sword of the Ram
+(Aries) which is a sign of Mars (Ares)." Similarly among the early
+Christians, it is said, a ram or lamb was sacrificed in the Paschal
+mystery.
+
+ (1) Pagan Christs, p. 336.
+
+ (2) De Antro, xxiv.
+
+
+Many people think that the association of the Lamb-god with the Cross
+arose from the fact that the constellation Aries at that time WAS on the
+heavenly cross (the crossways of the Ecliptic and Equator-see diagram,
+ch. iii), and in the very place through which the Sungod had to pass
+just before his final triumph. And it is curious to find that Justin
+Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho (1) (a Jew) alludes to an old Jewish
+practice of roasting a Lamb on spits arranged in the form of a Cross.
+"The lamb," he says, meaning apparently the Paschal lamb, "is roasted
+and dressed up in the form of a cross. For one spit is transfixed right
+through the lower parts up to the head, and one across the back, to
+which are attached the legs (forelegs) of the lamb."
+
+ (1) Ch. xl.
+
+
+To-day in Morocco at the festival of Eid-el-Kebir, corresponding to the
+Christian Easter, the Mohammedans sacrifice a young ram and hurry it
+still bleeding to the precincts of the Mosque, while at the same time
+every household slays a lamb, as in the Biblical institution, for its
+family feast.
+
+But it will perhaps be said, "You are going too fast and proving too
+much. In the anxiety to show that the Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the
+Lamb were honored by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of
+the Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the Bull and
+the baptism in bull's blood were the salient features of the Persian and
+Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries earlier. How can you reconcile
+the existence side by side of divinities belonging to such different
+periods, or ascribe them both to an astronomical origin?" The answer
+is simple enough. As I have explained before, the Precession of the
+Equinoxes caused the Sun, at its moment of triumph over the powers of
+darkness, to stand at one period in the constellation of the Bull, and
+at a period some two thousand years later in the constellation of the
+Ram. It was perfectly natural therefore that a change in the sacred
+symbols should, in the course of time, take place; yet perfectly natural
+also that these symbols, having once been consecrated and adopted,
+should continue to be honored and clung to long after the time of their
+astronomical appropriateness had passed, and so to be found side by side
+in later centuries. The devotee of Mithra or Attis on the Vatican
+Hill at Rome in the year 200 A.D. probably had as little notion or
+comprehension of the real origin of the sacred Bull or Ram which he
+adored, as the Christian in St. Peter's to-day has of the origin of the
+Lamb-god whose vicegerent on earth is the Pope.
+
+It is indeed easy to imagine that the change from the worship of the
+Bull to the worship of the Lamb which undoubtedly took place among
+various peoples as time went on, was only a ritual change initiated
+by the priests in order to put on record and harmonize with the
+astronomical alteration. Anyhow it is curious that while Mithra in the
+early times was specially associated with the bull, his association with
+the lamb belonged more to the Roman period. Somewhat the same happened
+in the case of Attis. In the Bible we read of the indignation of
+Moses at the setting up by the Israelites of a Golden Calf, AFTER
+the sacrifice of the ram-lamb had been instituted--as if indeed the
+rebellious people were returning to the earlier cult of Apis which they
+ought to have left behind them in Egypt. In Egypt itself, too, we find
+the worship of Apis, as time went on, yielding place to that of the
+Ram-headed god Amun, or Jupiter Ammon. (1) So that both from the Bible
+and from Egyptian history we may conclude that the worship of the Lamb
+or Ram succeeded to the worship of the Bull.
+
+ (1) Tacitus (Hist. v. 4) speaks of ram-sacrifice by the Jews in
+honor of Jupiter Ammon. See also Herodotus (ii. 42) on the same in
+Egypt.
+
+
+Finally it has been pointed out, and there may be some real connection
+in the coincidence, that in the quite early years of Christianity the
+FISH came in as an accepted symbol of Jesus Christ. Considering that
+after the domination of Taurus and Aries, the Fish (Pisces) comes next
+in succession as the Zodiacal sign for the Vernal Equinox, and is now
+the constellation in which the Sun stands at that period, it seems
+not impossible that the astronomical change has been the cause of the
+adoption of this new symbol.
+
+Anyhow, and allowing for possible errors or exaggerations, it becomes
+clear that the travels of the Sun through the belt of constellations
+which forms the Zodiac must have had, from earliest times, a profound
+influence on the generation of religious myths and legends. To say that
+it was the only influence would certainly be a mistake. Other causes
+undoubtedly contributed. But it was a main and important influence. The
+origins of the Zodiac are obscure; we do not know with any certainty the
+reasons why the various names were given to its component sections, nor
+can we measure the exact antiquity of these names; but--pre-supposing
+the names of the signs as once given--it is not difficult to imagine the
+growth of legends connected with the Sun's course among them.
+
+Of all the ancient divinities perhaps Hercules is the one whose role
+as a Sungod is most generally admitted. The helper of gods and men, a
+mighty Traveller, and invoked everywhere as the Saviour, his labors
+for the good of the world became ultimately defined and systematized
+as twelve and corresponding in number to the signs of the Zodiac. It
+is true that this systematization only took place at a late period,
+probably in Alexandria; also that the identification of some of the
+Labors with the actual signs as we have them at present is not always
+clear. But considering the wide prevalence of the Hercules myth over
+the ancient world and the very various astronomical systems it must have
+been connected with in its origin, this lack of exact correspondence is
+hardly to be wondered at.
+
+The Labors of Hercules which chiefly interest us are: (1) The capture
+of the Bull, (2) the slaughter of the Lion, (3) the destruction of the
+Hydra, (4) of the Boar, (5) the cleansing of the stables of Augeas, (6)
+the descent into Hades and the taming of Cerberus. The first of these
+is in line with the Mithraic conquest of the Bull; the Lion is of course
+one of the most prominent constellations of the Zodiac, and its conquest
+is obviously the work of a Saviour of mankind; while the last four
+labors connect themselves very naturally with the Solar conflict in
+winter against the powers of darkness. The Boar (4) we have seen already
+as the image of Typhon, the prince of darkness; the Hydra (3) was said
+to be the offspring of Typhon; the descent into Hades (6)--generally
+associated with Hercules' struggle with and victory over Death--links on
+to the descent of the Sun into the underworld, and its long and doubtful
+strife with the forces of winter; and the cleansing of the stables
+of Augeas (5) has the same signification. It appears in fact that the
+stables of Augeas was another name for the sign of Capricorn through
+which the Sun passes at the Winter solstice (1)--the stable of course
+being an underground chamber--and the myth was that there, in this
+lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil
+influences of the sky were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them
+away (December was the height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse
+the year towards its rebirth.
+
+ (1) See diagram of Zodiac.
+
+
+It should not be forgotten too that even as a child in the cradle
+Hercules slew two serpents sent for his destruction--the serpent and the
+scorpion as autumnal constellations figuring always as enemies of the
+Sungod--to which may be compared the power given to his disciples by
+Jesus (1) "to tread on serpents and scorpions." Hercules also as a
+Sungod compares curiously with Samson (mentioned above, ii), but we
+need not dwell on all the elaborate analogies that have been traced (2)
+between these two heroes.
+
+ (1) Luke x. 19.
+
+ (2) See Doane's Bible Myths, ch. viii, (New York, 1882.)
+
+
+The Jesus-story, it will now be seen, has a great number of
+correspondences with the stories of former Sungods and with the actual
+career of the Sun through the heavens--so many indeed that they cannot
+well be attributed to mere coincidence or even to the blasphemous wiles
+of the Devil! Let us enumerate some of these. There are (1) the birth
+from a Virgin mother; (2) the birth in a stable (cave or underground
+chamber); and (3) on the 25th December (just after the winter solstice).
+There is (4) the Star in the East (Sirius) and (5) the arrival of the
+Magi (the "Three Kings"); there is (6) the threatened Massacre of the
+Innocents, and the consequent flight into a distant country (told also
+of Krishna and other Sungods). There are the Church festivals of (7)
+Candlemas (2nd February), with processions of candles to symbolize the
+growing light; of (8) Lent, or the arrival of Spring; of (9) Easter Day
+(normally on the 25th March) to celebrate the crossing of the Equator
+by the Sun; and (10) simultaneously the outburst of lights at the Holy
+Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There is (11) the Crucifixion and death of the
+Lamb-God, on Good Friday, three days before Easter; there are (12) the
+nailing to a tree, (13) the empty grave, (14) the glad Resurrection (as
+in the cases of Osiris, Attis and others); there are (15) the twelve
+disciples (the Zodiacal signs); and (16) the betrayal by one of the
+twelve. Then later there is (17) Midsummer Day, the 24th June, dedicated
+to the Nativity of John the Baptist, and corresponding to Christmas
+Day; there are the festivals of (18) the Assumption of the Virgin
+(15th August) and of (19) the Nativity of the Virgin (8th September),
+corresponding to the movement of the god through Virgo; there is the
+conflict of Christ and his disciples with the autumnal asterisms, (20)
+the Serpent and the Scorpion; and finally there is the curious fact that
+the Church (21) dedicates the very day of the winter solstice (when any
+one may very naturally doubt the rebirth of the Sun) to St. Thomas, who
+doubted the truth of the Resurrection!
+
+These are some of, and by no means all, the coincidences in question.
+But they are sufficient, I think, to prove--even allowing for possible
+margins of error--the truth of our general contention. To go into the
+parallelism of the careers of Krishna, the Indian Sungod, and
+Jesus would take too long; because indeed the correspondence is so
+extraordinarily close and elaborate. (1) I propose, however, at the
+close of this chapter, to dwell now for a moment on the Christian
+festival of the Eucharist, partly on account of its connection with the
+derivation from the astronomical rites and Nature-celebrations already
+alluded to, and partly on account of the light which the festival
+generally, whether Christian or Pagan, throws on the origins of
+Religious Magic--a subject I shall have to deal with in the next
+chapter.
+
+ (1) See Robertson's Christianity and Mythology, Part II, pp.
+129-302; also Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xxviii, p. 278.
+
+
+I have already (Ch. II) mentioned the Eucharistic rite held in
+commemoration of Mithra, and the indignant ascription of this by Justin
+Martyr to the wiles of the Devil. Justin Martyr clearly had no doubt
+about the resemblance of the Mithraic to the Christian ceremony. A
+Sacramental meal, as mentioned a few pages back, seems to have been held
+by the worshipers of Attis (1) in commemoration of their god; and
+the 'mysteries' of the Pagan cults generally appear to have included
+rites--sometimes half-savage, sometimes more aesthetic--in which a
+dismembered animal was eaten, or bread and wine (the spirits of the Corn
+and the Vine) were consumed, as representing the body of the god whom
+his devotees desired to honor. But the best example of this practice is
+afforded by the rites of Dionysus, to which I will devote a few lines.
+Dionysus, like other Sun or Nature deities, was born of a Virgin (Semele
+or Demeter) untainted by any earthly husband; and born on the 25th.
+December. He was nurtured in a Cave, and even at that early age was
+identified with the Ram or Lamb, into whose form he was for the time
+being changed. At times also he was worshiped in the form of a Bull.
+(2) He travelled far and wide; and brought the great gift of wine to
+mankind. (3) He was called Liberator, and Saviour. His grave "was shown
+at Delphi in the inmost shrine of the temple of Apollo. Secret offerings
+were brought thither, while the women who were celebrating the feast
+woke up the new-born god.... Festivals of this kind in celebration of
+the extinction and resurrection of the deity were held (by women and
+girls only) amid the mountains at night, every third year, about the
+time of the shortest day. The rites, intended to express the excess of
+grief and joy at the death and reappearance of the god, were wild even
+to savagery, and the women who performed them were hence known by
+the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads, and Thyiades. They wandered
+through woods and mountains, their flying locks crowned with ivy or
+snakes, brandishing wands and torches, to the hollow sounds of the drum,
+or the shrill notes of the flute, with wild dances and insane cries and
+jubilation."
+
+ (1) See Frazer's Golden Bough, Part IV, p. 229.
+
+ (2) The Golden Bough, Part II, Book II, p. 164.
+
+ (3) "I am the TRUE Vine," says the Jesus of the fourth gospel,
+perhaps with an implicit and hostile reference to the cult of
+Dionysus--in which Robertson suggests (Christianity and Mythology, p.
+357) there was a ritual miracle of turning water into wine.
+
+
+Oxen, goats, even fawns and roes from the forest were killed, torn to
+pieces, and eaten raw. This in imitation of the treatment of Dionysus by
+the Titans, (1)--who it was supposed had torn the god in pieces when a
+child.
+
+ (1) See art. Dionysus. Dictionary of Classical Antiquities,
+Nettleship and Sandys 3rd edn., London, 1898).
+
+
+Dupuis, one of the earliest writers (at the beginning of last century)
+on this subject, says, describing the mystic rites of Dionysus (1):
+"The sacred doors of the Temple in which the initiation took place were
+opened only once a year, and no stranger might ever enter. Night lent to
+these august mysteries a veil which was forbidden to be drawn aside--for
+whoever it might be. (2) It was the sole occasion for the representation
+of the passion of Bacchus (Dionysus) dead, descended into hell, and
+rearisen--in imitation of the representation of the sufferings of Osiris
+which, according to Herodotus, were commemorated at Sais in Egypt. It
+was in that place that the partition took place of the body of the god,
+(3) which was then eaten--the ceremony, in fact, of which our Eucharist
+is only a reflection; whereas in the mysteries of Bacchus actual raw
+flesh was distributed, which each of those present had to consume in
+commemoration of the death of Bacchus dismembered by the Titans, and
+whose passion, in Chios and Tenedos, was renewed each year by the
+sacrifice of a man who represented the god. (4) Possibly it is this last
+fact which made people believe that the Christians (whose hoc est corpus
+meum and sharing of an Eucharistic meal were no more than a shadow of a
+more ancient rite) did really sacrifice a child and devour its limbs."
+
+ (1) See Charles F. Dupuis, "Traite des Mysteres," ch. i.
+
+ (2) Pausan, Corinth, ch. 37.
+
+ (3) Clem, Prot. Eur. Bacch.
+
+ (4) See Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lii, Section 56.
+
+
+That Eucharistic rites were very very ancient is plain from the
+Totem-sacraments of savages; and to this subject we shall now turn.
+
+
+
+
+IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+
+Much has been written on the origin of the Totem-system--the system,
+that is, of naming a tribe or a portion of a tribe (say a CLAN)
+after some ANIMAL--or sometimes--also after some plant or tree or
+Nature-element, like fire or rain or thunder; but at best the subject is
+a difficult one for us moderns to understand. A careful study has been
+made of it by Salamon Reinach in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, (1)
+where he formulates his conclusions in twelve statements or definitions;
+but even so--though his suggestions are helpful--he throws very little
+light on the real origin of the system. (2)
+
+ (1) See English translation of certain chapters (published by
+David Nutt in 1912) entitled Cults, Myths and Religions, pp. 1-25. The
+French original is in three large volumes.
+
+ (2) The same may be said of the formulated statement of the
+subject in Morris Jastrow's Handbooks of the History of Religion, vol.
+iv.
+
+There are three main difficulties. The first is to understand why
+primitive Man should name his Tribe after an animal or object of nature
+at all; the second, to understand on what principle he selected the
+particular name (a lion, a crocodile, a lady bird, a certain tree); the
+third, why he should make of the said totem a divinity, and pay honor
+and worship to it. It may be worth while to pause for a moment over
+these.
+
+(1) The fact that the Tribe was one of the early things for which Man
+found it necessary to have a name is interesting, because it shows
+how early the solidarity and psychological actuality of the tribe
+was recognized; and as to the selection of a name from some animal or
+concrete object of Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason
+that there was nothing else for the savage to choose from. Plainly to
+call his tribe "The Wayfarers" or "The Pioneers" or the "Pacifists" or
+the "Invincibles," or by any of the thousand and one names which modern
+associations adopt, would have been impossible, since such abstract
+terms had little or no existence in his mind. And again to name it after
+an animal was the most obvious thing to do, simply because the animals
+were by far the most important features or accompaniments of his own
+life. As I am dealing in this book largely with certain psychological
+conditions of human evolution, it has to be pointed out that to
+primitive man the animal was the nearest and most closely related of all
+objects. Being of the same order of consciousness as himself, the animal
+appealed to him very closely as his mate and equal. He made with regard
+to it little or no distinction from himself. We see this very clearly in
+the case of children, who of course represent the savage mind, and who
+regard animals simply as their mates and equals, and come quickly into
+rapport with them, not differentiating themselves from them.
+
+(2) As to the particular animal or other object selected in order to
+give a name to the Tribe, this would no doubt be largely accidental. Any
+unusual incident might superstitiously precipitate a name. We can hardly
+imagine the Tribe scratching its congregated head in the deliberate
+effort to think out a suitable emblem for itself. That is not the way in
+which nicknames are invented in a school or anywhere else to-day. At the
+same time the heraldic appeal of a certain object of nature, animate or
+inanimate, would be deeply and widely felt. The strength of the lion,
+the fleetness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the flight of a
+bird, the awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily mesmerize a whole
+tribe. Reinach points out, with great justice, that many tribes placed
+themselves under the protection of animals which were supposed (rightly
+or wrongly) to act as guides and augurs, foretelling the future.
+"Diodorus," he says, "distinctly states that the hawk, in Egypt, was
+venerated because it foretold the future." (Birds generally act as
+ and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow and the owl premonish their fellow
+clansmen of events to come. At one time the Samoan warriors went so far
+as to rear owls for their prophetic qualities in war. (The jackal,
+or 'pathfinder'--whose tracks sometimes lead to the remains of a
+food-animal slain by a lion, and many birds and insects, have a value of
+this kind.) "The use of animal totems for purposes of augury is, in all
+likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must soon have realized that the
+senses of animals were acuter than their own; nor is it surprising that
+they should have expected their totems--that is to say, their natural
+allies--to forewarn them both of unsuspected dangers and of those
+provisions of nature, WELLS especially, which animals seem to scent
+by instinct." (1) And again, beyond all this, I have little doubt that
+there are subconscious affinities which unite certain tribes to certain
+animals or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace, though
+they are very real--the same affinities that we recognize as existing
+between individual PERSONS and certain objects of nature. W. H.
+Hudson--himself in many respects having this deep and primitive relation
+to nature--speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical volume (2)
+of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon him as a boy, not
+only by a snake, but by certain trees, and especially by a particular
+flowering-plant "not more than a foot in height, with downy soft
+pale green leaves, and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like
+valerian." ... "One of my sacred flowers," he calls it, and insists on
+the "inexplicable attraction" which it had for him. In various ways of
+this kind one can perceive how particular totems came to be selected by
+particular peoples.
+
+
+ (1) See Reinach, Eng. trans., op. cit., pp. 20, 21.
+
+ (2) Far away and Long ago (1918) chs. xvi and xvii.
+
+
+(3) As to the tendency to divinize these totems, this arises no doubt
+partly out of question (2). The animal or other object admired on
+account of its strength or swiftness, or adopted as guardian of the
+tribe because of its keen sight or prophetic quality, or infinitely
+prized on account of its food-value, or felt for any other reason to
+have a peculiar relation and affinity to the tribe, is by that fact SET
+APART. It becomes taboo. It must not be killed--except under necessity
+and by sanction of the whole tribe--nor injured; and all dealings with
+it must be fenced round with regulations. It is out of this taboo or
+system of taboos that, according to Reinach, religion arose. "I propose
+(he says) to define religion as: A SUM OF SCRUPLES (TABOOS) WHICH IMPEDE
+THE FREE EXERCISE OF OUR FACULTIES." (1) Obviously this definition is
+gravely deficient, simply because it is purely negative, and leaves
+out of account the positive aspect of the subject. In Man, the positive
+content of religion is the instinctive sense--whether conscious or
+subconscious--of an inner unity and continuity with the world around.
+This is the stuff out of which religion is made. The scruples or taboos
+which "impede the freedom" of this relation are the negative forces
+which give outline and form to the relation. These are the things which
+generate the RITES AND CEREMONIALS of religion; and as far as Reinach
+means by religion MERELY rites and ceremonies he is correct; but clearly
+he only covers half the subject. The tendency to divinize the totem is
+at least as much dependent on the positive sense of unity with it, as on
+the negative scruples which limit the relation in each particular case.
+But I shall return to this subject presently, and more than once, with
+the view of clarifying it. Just now it will be best to illustrate the
+nature of Totems generally, and in some detail.
+
+
+ (1) See Orpheus by S. Reinach, p. 3.
+
+
+As would be gathered from what I have just said, there is found among
+all the more primitive peoples, and in all parts of the world, an
+immense variety of totem-names. The Dinkas, for instance, are a rather
+intelligent well-grown people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Nile
+in the vicinity of the great swamps. According to Dr. Seligman their
+clans have for totems the lion, the elephant, the crocodile, the
+hippopotamus, the fox, and the hyena, as well as certain birds which
+infest and damage the corn, some plants and trees, and such things as
+rain, fire, etc. "Each clan speaks of its totem as its ancestor, and
+refrains (as a rule) from injuring or eating it." (1) The members of the
+Crocodile clan call themselves "brothers of the crocodile." The tribes
+of Bechuana-land have a very similar list of totem-names--the buffalo,
+the fish, the porcupine, the wild vine, etc. They too have a Crocodile
+clan, but they call the crocodile their FATHER! The tribes of Australia
+much the same again, with the differences suitable to their country; and
+the Red Indians of North America the same. Garcilasso, della Vega,
+the Spanish historian, son of an Inca princess by one of the Spanish
+conquerors of Peru and author of the well-known book Commentarias
+Reales, says in that book (i, 57), speaking of the pre-Inca period, "An
+Indian (of Peru) was not considered honorable unless he was descended
+from a fountain, river or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild
+animal, as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur
+(condor), or some other bird of prey." (2) According to Lewis Morgan,
+the North American Indians of various tribes had for totems the wolf,
+bear, beaver, turtle, deer, snipe, heron, hawk, crane, loon, turkey,
+muskrat; pike, catfish, carp; buffalo, elk, reindeer, eagle, hare,
+rabbit, snake; reed-grass, sand, rock, and tobacco-plant.
+
+ (1) See The Golden Bough, vol. iv, p. 31.
+
+ (2) See Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 104, also Myth, Ritual
+and Religion, vol. i, pp. 71, 76, etc.
+
+
+So we might go on rather indefinitely. I need hardly say that in more
+modern and civilized life, relics of the totem system are still to be
+found in the forms of the heraldic creatures adopted for their crests by
+different families, and in the bears, lions, eagles, the sun, moon and
+stars and so forth, which still adorn the flags and are flaunted as the
+insignia of the various nations. The names may not have been ORIGINALLY
+adopted from any definite belief in blood-relationship with the animal
+or other object in question; but when, as Robertson says (Pagan Christs,
+p. 104), a "savage learned that he was 'a Bear' and that his father
+and grandfather and forefathers were so before him, it was really
+impossible, after ages in which totem-names thus passed current, that he
+should fail to assume that his folk were DESCENDED from a bear."
+
+As a rule, as may be imagined, the savage tribesman will on no account
+EAT his tribal totem-animal. Such would naturally be deemed a kind of
+sacrilege. Also it must be remarked that some totems are hardly suitable
+for eating. Yet it is important to observe that occasionally, and
+guarding the ceremony with great precautions, it has been an almost
+universal custom for the tribal elders to call a feast at which
+an animal (either the totem or some other) IS killed and commonly
+eaten--and this in order that the tribesmen may absorb some virtue
+belonging to it, and may confirm their identity with the tribe and with
+each other. The eating of the bear or other animal, the sprinkling with
+its blood, and the general ritual in which the participants shared its
+flesh, or dressed and disguised themselves in its skin, or otherwise
+identified themselves with it, was to them a symbol of their community
+of life with each other, and a means of their renewal and salvation in
+the holy emblem. And this custom, as the reader will perceive, became
+the origin of the Eucharists and Holy Communions of the later religions.
+
+Professor Robertson-Smith's celebrated Camel affords an instance of
+this. (1) It appears that St. Nilus (fifth century) has left a detailed
+account of the occasional sacrifice in his time of a spotless white
+camel among the Arabs of the Sinai region, which closely resembles a
+totemic communion-feast. The uncooked blood and flesh of the animal had
+to be entirely consumed by the faithful before daybreak. "The slaughter
+of the victim, the sacramental drinking of the blood, and devouring in
+wild haste of the pieces of still quivering flesh, recall the details
+of the Dionysiac and other festivals." (2) Robertson-Smith himself
+says:--"The plain meaning is that the victim was devoured before its
+life had left the still warm blood and flesh... and that thus in the
+most literal way, all those who shared in the ceremony absorbed part of
+the victim's life into themselves. One sees how much more forcibly
+than any ordinary meal such a rite expresses the establishment or
+confirmation of a bond of common life between the worshipers, and also,
+since the blood is shed upon the altar itself, between the worshipers
+and their god. In this sacrifice, then, the significant factors are two:
+the conveyance of the living blood to the godhead, and the absorption of
+the living flesh and blood into the flesh and blood of the worshippers.
+Each of these is effected in the simplest and most direct manner, so
+that the meaning of the ritual is perfectly transparent."
+
+ (1) See his Religion of the Semites, p. 320.
+
+ (2) They also recall the rites of the Passover--though in this
+latter the blood was no longer drunk, nor the flesh eaten raw.
+
+
+It seems strange, of course, that men should eat their totems; and
+it must not by any means be supposed that this practice is (or was)
+universal; but it undoubtedly obtains in some cases. As Miss Harrison
+says (Themis, p. 123); "you do not as a rule eat your relations," and as
+a rule the eating of a totem is tabu and forbidden, but (Miss Harrison
+continues) "at certain times and under certain restrictions a man not
+only may, but MUST, eat of his totem, though only sparingly, as of a
+thing sacrosanct." The ceremonial carried out in a communal way by the
+tribe not only identifies the tribe with the totem (animal), but is
+held, according to early magical ideas, and when the animal is desired
+for food, to favor its manipulation. The human tribe partakes of the
+mana or life-force of the animal, and is strengthened; the animal tribe
+is sympathetically renewed by the ceremonial and multiplies exceedingly.
+The slaughter of the sacred animal and (often) the simultaneous
+outpouring of human blood seals the compact and confirms the magic. This
+is well illustrated by a ceremony of the 'Emu' tribe referred to by Dr.
+Frazer:--
+
+"In order to multiply Emus which are an important article of food, the
+men of the Emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed as follows: They clear
+a small spot of level ground, and opening veins in their arms they let
+the blood stream out until the surface of the ground for a space of
+about three square yards is soaked with it. When the blood has dried
+and caked, it forms a hard and fairly impermeable surface, on which they
+paint the sacred design of the emu totem, especially the parts of the
+bird which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round
+this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers wearing long
+head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic
+the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all
+directions." (1)
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough i, 85--with reference to Spencer and
+Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 179, 189.
+
+
+Thus blood sacrifice comes in; and--(whether this has ever actually
+happened in the case of the Central Australians I know not)--we can
+easily imagine a member of the Emu tribe, and disguised as an actual
+emu, having been ceremonially slaughtered as a firstfruits and promise
+of the expected and prayed-for emu-crop; just as the same certainly
+HAS happened in the case of men wearing beast-masks of Bulls or Rams
+or Bears being sacrificed in propitiation of Bull-gods, Ram-gods or
+Bear-gods or simply in pursuance of some kind of magic to favor the
+multiplication of these food-animals.
+
+"In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly enough the
+relation of man to food-animals. You need or at least desire flesh food,
+yet you shrink from slaughtering 'your brother the ox'; you desire his
+mana, yet you respect his tabu, for in you and him alike runs the common
+life-blood. On your own individual responsibility you would never kill
+him; but for the common weal, on great occasions, and in a fashion
+conducted with scrupulous care, it is expedient that he die for his
+people, and that they feast upon his flesh." (1)
+
+ (1) Themis, p. 140.
+
+
+In her little book Ancient Art and Ritual (1) Jane Harrison describes
+the dedication of a holy Bull, as conducted in Greece at Elis, and at
+Magnesia and other cities. "There at the annual fair year by year the
+stewards of the city bought a Bull 'the finest that could be got,' and
+at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seed-time (? April)
+ Bull was led in procession at the head of which went the chief priest
+and priestess of the city. With them went a herald and sacrificer,
+and two bands of youths and maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing
+unlucky might come near him. The herald pronounced aloud a prayer for
+'the safety of the city and the land, and the citizens, and the women
+and children, for peace and wealth, and for the bringing forth of grain
+and all other fruits, and of cattle.' All this longing for fertility,
+for food and children, focuses round the holy Bull, whose holiness is
+his strength and fruitfulness." The Bull is sacrificed. The flesh is
+divided in solemn feast among those who take part in the procession.
+"The holy flesh is not offered to a god, it is eaten--to every man his
+portion--by each and every citizen, that he may get his share of the
+strength of the Bull, of the luck of the State." But at Athens the
+Bouphonia, as it was called, was followed by a curious ceremony. "The
+hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal
+was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were ploughing.
+The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all important. We
+are accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the giving up, the
+renouncing of something. But SACRIFICE does not mean 'death' at all. It
+means MAKING HOLY, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man just
+special strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was just that
+special life and strength which all the year long they had put into him,
+and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood. They could not
+eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him. So he must
+die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him,
+not to 'sacrifice' him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him,
+live BY him and through him, by his grace."
+
+ (1) Home University Library, p. 87.
+
+
+We have already had to deal with instances of the ceremonial eating of
+the sacred he-Lamb or Ram, immolated in the Spring season of the year,
+and partaken of in a kind of communal feast--not without reference (at
+any rate in later times) to a supposed Lamb-god. Among the Ainos in the
+North of Japan, as also among the Gilyaks in Eastern Siberia, the Bear
+is the great food-animal, and is worshipped as the supreme giver of
+health and strength. There also a similar ritual of sacrifice occurs. A
+perfect Bear is caught and caged. He is fed up and even pampered to the
+day of his death. "Fish, brandy and other delicacies are offered to him.
+Some of the people prostrate themselves before him; his coming into
+a house brings a blessing, and if he sniffs at the food that brings a
+blessing too." Then he is led out and slain. A great feast takes place,
+the flesh is divided, cupfuls of the blood are drunk by the men;
+the tribe is united and strengthened, and the Bear-god blesses the
+ceremony--the ideal Bear that has given its life for the people. (1)
+
+
+ (1) See Art and Ritual, pp. 92-98; The Golden Bough, ii, 375
+seq.; Themis, pp. 140, 141; etc.
+
+
+That the eating of the flesh of an animal or a man conveys to you some
+of the qualities, the life-force, the mana, of that animal or man, is an
+idea which one often meets with among primitive folk. Hence the common
+tendency to eat enemy warriors slain in battle against your tribe. By
+doing so you absorb some of their valor and strength. Even the enemy
+scalps which an Apache Indian might hang from his belt were something
+magical to add to the Apache's power. As Gilbert Murray says, (1) "you
+devoured the holy animal to get its mana, its swiftness, its strength,
+its great endurance, just as the savage now will eat his enemy's brain
+or heart or hands to get some particular quality residing there."
+Even--as he explains on the earlier page--mere CONTACT was often
+considered sufficient--"we have holy pillars whose holiness consists
+in the fact that they have been touched by the blood of a bull." And in
+this connection we may note that nearly all the Christian Churches have
+a great belief in the virtue imparted by the mere 'laying on of hands.'
+
+ (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 36.
+
+
+In quite a different connection--we read (1) that among the Spartans a
+warrior-boy would often beg for the love of the elder warrior whom he
+admired (i. e. the contact with his body) in order to obtain in that
+way a portion of the latter's courage and prowess. That through the
+mediation of the lips one's spirit may be united to the spirit of
+another person is an idea not unfamiliar to the modern mind; while the
+exchange of blood, clothes, locks of hair, etc., by lovers is a custom
+known all over the world. (2)
+
+ (1) Aelian VII, iii, 12: [gr autoi goun (oi paides) deontai twn
+erastwn] [gr eispnein autois]. See also E. Bethe on "Die Dorische
+Knabenliebe" in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. 26, iii, 461.
+
+ (2) See Crawley's Mystic Rose, pp. 238, 242.
+
+
+To suppose that by eating another you absorb his or her soul is somewhat
+naive certainly. Perhaps it IS more native, more primitive. Yet there
+may be SOME truth even in that idea. Certainly the food that one eats
+has a psychological effect, and the flesh-eaters among the human race
+have a different temperament as a rule from the fruit and vegetable
+eaters, while among the animals (though other causes may come in
+here) the Carnivora are decidedly more cruel and less gentle than the
+Herbivora.
+
+To return to the rites of Dionysus, Gilbert Murray, speaking of
+Orphism--a great wave of religious reform which swept over Greece and
+South Italy in the sixth century B.C.--says: (1) "A curious relic of
+primitive superstition and cruelty remained firmly imbedded in Orphism,
+a doctrine irrational and unintelligible, and for that very reason
+wrapped in the deepest and most sacred mystery: a belief in the
+SACRIFICE OF DIONYSUS HIMSELF, AND THE PURIFICATION OF MAN BY HIS
+BLOOD. It seems possible that the savage Thracians, in the fury of their
+worship on the mountains, when they were possessed by the god and became
+'wild beasts,' actually tore with their teeth and hands any hares,
+goats, fawns or the like that they came across.... The Orphic
+congregations of later times, in their most holy gatherings, solemnly
+partook of the blood of a bull, which was by a mystery the blood of
+Dionysus-Zagreus himself, the Bull of God, slain in sacrifice for the
+purification of man." (2)
+
+ (1) See Notes to his translation of the Bacch[ae] of Euripides.
+
+ (2) For a description of this orgy see Theocritus, Idyll xxvi;
+also for explanations of it, Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii,
+pp, 241-260, on Dionysus. The Encyclop[ae]dia Brit., article "Orpheus,"
+says:--"Orpheus, in the manner of his death, was considered to personate
+the god Dionysus, and was thus representative of the god torn to pieces
+every year--a ceremony enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with
+a human victim, and afterwards with a bull, to represent the bull-formed
+god. A distinct feature of this ritual was [gr wmofagia] (eating the
+flesh of the victim raw), whereby the communicants imagined that they
+consumed and assimilated the god represented by the victim, and thus
+became filled with the divine ecstasy." Compare also the Hindu doctrine
+of Praj[pati, the dismembered Lord of Creation.
+
+
+Such instances of early communal feasts, which fulfilled the double part
+of confirming on the one hand the solidarity of the tribe, and on the
+other of bringing the tribe, by the shedding of the blood of a divine
+Victim into close relationship with the very source of its life,
+are plentiful to find. "The sacramental rite," says Professor
+Robertson-Smith, (1) "is also an atoning rite, which brings the
+community again into harmony with its alienated god--atonement being
+simply an act of communion designed to wipe out all memory of previous
+estrangement." With this subject I shall deal more specially in chapter
+vii below. Meanwhile as instances of early Eucharists we may mention the
+following cases, remembering always that as the blood is regarded as the
+Life, the drinking or partaking of, or sprinkling with, blood is always
+an acknowledgment of the common life; and that the juice of the grape
+being regarded as the blood of the Vine, wine in the later ceremonials
+quite easily and naturally takes the place of the blood in the early
+sacrifices.
+
+ (1) Religion of the Semites, p. 302.
+
+
+Thus P. Andrada La Crozius, a French missionary, and one of the first
+Christians who went to Nepaul and Thibet, says in his History of India:
+"Their Grand Lama celebrates a species of sacrifice with BREAD and WINE,
+in which, after taking a small quantity himself, he distributes the
+rest among the Lamas present at this ceremony." (1) "The old Egyptians
+celebrated the resurrection of Osiris by a sacrament, eating the sacred
+cake or wafer after it had been consecrated by the priest, and thereby
+becoming veritable flesh of his flesh." (2) As is well known, the eating
+of bread or dough sacramentally (sometimes mixed with blood or seed)
+as an emblem of community of life with the divinity, is an extremely
+ancient practice or ritual. Dr. Frazer (3) says of the Aztecs,
+that "twice a year, in May and December, an image of the great god
+Huitzilopochtli was made of dough, then broken in pieces and solemnly
+eaten by his worshipers." And Lord Kingsborough in his Mexican
+Antiquities (vol. vi, p. 220) gives a record of a "most Holy Supper"
+in which these people ate the flesh of their god. It was a cake made of
+certain seeds, "and having made it, they blessed it in their manner, and
+broke it into pieces, which the high priest put into certain very clean
+vessels, and took a thorn of maguey which resembles a very thick needle,
+with which he took up with the utmost reverence single morsels, which
+he put into the mouth of each individual in the manner of a communion."
+Acostas (4) confirms this and similar accounts. The Peruvians partook of
+a sacrament consisting of a pudding of coarsely ground maize, of which
+a portion had been smeared on the idol. The priest sprinkled it with the
+blood of the victim before distributing it to the people. Priest and
+people then all took their shares in turn, "with great care that no
+particle should be allowed to fall to the ground--this being looked upon
+as a great sin." (5)
+
+
+ (1) See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 306.
+
+ (2) From The Great Law, of religious origins: by W. Williamson
+(1899), p. 177.
+
+ (3) The Golden Bough, vol. ii, p. 79.
+
+ (4) Natural and Moral History of the Indies. London (1604).
+
+ (5) See Markham's Rites and laws of the Incas, p. 27.
+
+
+Moving from Peru to China (instead of 'from China to Peru') we find that
+"the Chinese pour wine (a very general substitute for blood) on a straw
+image of Confucius, and then all present drink of it, and taste the
+sacrificial victim, in order to participate in the grace of Confucius."
+(Here again the Corn and Wine are blended in one rite.) And of Tartary
+Father Grueber thus testifies: "This only I do affirm, that the devil so
+mimics the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian
+has ever been there, still in all essential things they agree so
+completely with the Roman Church, as even to celebrate the Host with
+bread and wine: with my own eyes I have seen it." (1) These few
+instances are sufficient to show the extraordinarily wide diffusion of
+Totem-sacraments and Eucharistic rites all over the world.
+
+ (1) For these two quotations see Jevons' Introduction to the
+History of Religion, pp. 148 and 219.
+
+
+
+
+V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+
+I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist, some way from
+the astronomical thread of Chapters II and III, and now it would appear
+that in order to understand religious origins we must wander still
+farther. The chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and
+astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period
+when there were no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest
+astronomical knowledge existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is
+best and safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things recent
+and fairly well known to things more ancient and less known. In this way
+we approach more securely to some understanding of the dim and remote
+past.
+
+It is clear that before any definite speculations on heaven-dwelling
+gods or divine beings had arisen in the human mind--or any clear
+theories of how the sun and moon and stars might be connected with the
+changes of the seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious
+things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned alike. One of
+these was the return of Vegetation, bringing with it the fruits or the
+promise of the fruits of the earth, for human food, and also bringing
+with it increase of animal life, for food in another form; and the other
+was the return of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food
+delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth delivering from
+the fear of danger and of cold. These were three glorious things which
+returned together and brought salvation and renewed life to man. The
+period of their return was 'Spring,' and though Spring and its benefits
+might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE of its
+return--though even so it may have been a long time in human evolution
+before man discovered that it really did always return, and (with
+certain allowances) at equal intervals of time.
+
+Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in, the return of
+the Vegetation must have enthralled man's attention, and filled him with
+hope and joy. Yet since its return was somewhat variable and uncertain
+the question, What could man do to assist that return? naturally
+became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the use of
+Magic--sympathetic magic--arose in this way. Sympathetic magic seems to
+have been generated by a belief that your own actions cause a similar
+response in things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not rest
+on any philosophy or argument, but was purely instinctive and sometimes
+of the nature of a mere corporeal reaction. Every schoolboy knows how
+in watching a comrade's high jump at the Sports he often finds himself
+lifting a knee at the moment 'to help him over'; at football matches
+quarrels sometimes arise among the spectators by reason of an
+ill-placed kick coming from a too enthusiastic on-looker, behind one;
+undergraduates running on the tow-path beside their College boat in
+the races will hurry even faster than the boat in order to increase its
+speed; there is in each case an automatic bodily response increased
+by one's own desire. A person ACTS the part which he desires to be
+successful. He thinks to transfer his energy in that way. Again, if by
+chance one witnesses a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not,
+it commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same part oneself--a
+sympathetic pain. What more natural than to suppose that the pain
+really is transferred from the one person to the other? and how easy the
+inference that by tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human
+victim in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or their
+sins atoned for?
+
+Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus,
+curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she
+prays that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is
+independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy.
+Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early
+man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct of his unity and
+continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close
+that his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world
+outside.
+
+Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival
+of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you
+must have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has
+been a MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite
+fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a
+raven's skin on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with
+red zigzags of lightning (1); but partly, no doubt, he had observed
+actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as,
+for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about
+its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on
+battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud
+clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour
+of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in
+the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate
+rain-clouds--and so quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking
+SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was on the track
+of elementary Science. And so he made "bull-roarers" to imitate the
+sound of wind and the blessed rain-bringing thunder, or clashed
+great bronze cymbals together with the same object. Bull-voices and
+thunder-drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this connection
+by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus (2); but the bull-roarer,
+in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems
+to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described
+with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44),
+where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in
+religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient
+Greece, and Africa."
+
+ (1) See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.
+
+ (2) Themis, p. 61.
+
+
+Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner
+causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than
+we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that
+the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and
+cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew
+Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as
+the manifestation of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would
+therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the
+rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known
+in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds
+or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or
+sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, (2) he would cut
+himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops
+suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the rain god was
+propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed
+abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that
+rain would also be abundant." (3) Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would
+WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for
+the same purpose.
+
+ (1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said
+to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up
+green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe
+(Australian).
+
+ (2) I Kings xviii.
+
+ (3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
+Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.
+
+
+In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which has been adopted by
+so many peoples under so many forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her
+daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation), carried
+down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and Winter.
+And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic for the
+purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the world
+again. Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and unnamable
+objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a sacrifice of
+pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains
+afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields."
+(1) Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male
+fertility; snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their own
+skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive of resurrection
+and re-vivification; pigs and sows by their exceeding fruitfulness would
+in their hour of sacrifice remind old mother Earth of what was expected
+from her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that the scattering of
+dead flesh over the ground or mixed with the seed, did bless the
+ground to a greater fertility; and so by a strange mixture of primitive
+observation with a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols
+and suggestions Nature could be appealed to and induced to answer to the
+desires and needs for her children this sort of ceremonial Magic arose.
+It was not exactly Science, and it was not exactly Religion; but it was
+a naive, and perhaps not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between
+Nature and Man.
+
+ (1) See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+
+
+For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously
+differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see that the tribal life was
+so strong that the individual seldom regarded himself as different or
+separate or opposed to the rest of the tribe; but that something of the
+same kind was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and to
+Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself, was also himself.
+His sub-conscious sense of unity was so great that it largely dominated
+his life. That brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern
+man to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals, or between
+himself and Nature, did not exist in the early man. Hence it was
+no difficulty to him to believe that he was a Bear or an Emu.
+Sub-consciously he was wiser than we are. He knew that he was a bear or
+an emu, or any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his
+mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed
+between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has
+been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very
+interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that
+the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any
+forcible subjugation of them by man, but from a natural amity with
+them which grew up in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and
+affections. Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma of Brazil)
+from far-back times took to hunting in the company of his two-legged and
+bow-and-arrow-armed friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson
+(2) declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and capable
+of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack man, but
+when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage, unresisting, with
+mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated
+in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit,
+but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant
+and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual
+relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse (3) (also the
+Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced.
+The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and
+still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisee
+Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes
+by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.
+
+
+ (1) Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
+1896.
+
+ (2) See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
+
+ (3) "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
+of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before
+it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to
+Hist. Religion, p. 119).
+
+
+And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception,
+which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their
+tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought
+them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees,
+the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their
+bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set
+in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like
+noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground,
+you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons
+it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to
+leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow
+tall." (1) Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly
+yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green
+boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an
+encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic
+Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself
+you naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do
+this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world
+the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with
+dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting
+or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the
+successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day,
+and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human
+thought.
+
+ (1) See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
+
+
+Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our
+academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and
+to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification
+with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look
+upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE
+know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things
+are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as
+to our perfect comprehension of them?
+
+And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really
+ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most
+superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D.
+Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a
+certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he
+does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree
+near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and
+graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
+throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could
+walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually
+once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around
+VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
+vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and
+still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its
+skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life
+(or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of
+heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same
+energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement
+in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or
+separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing
+and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing
+activity.
+
+ (1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.
+
+
+The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences.
+Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in
+half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little
+twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy
+and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two
+visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge
+sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the
+steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known
+that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and
+deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like
+himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.
+
+It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations
+like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
+incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
+their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
+book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like
+the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
+effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
+they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion
+with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally
+protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form
+of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and
+its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling,
+took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually
+emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific
+laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also
+are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these
+things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past
+and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
+knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to
+a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious
+product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of
+the animals--and the angels.
+
+
+To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in modern
+style on these things, I yet have no reasonable doubt that he felt (and
+FEELS, in those cases where we can still trace the workings of his
+mind) his essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more
+intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If the animals with
+all their wonderful gifts are (as we readily admit) a veritable part
+of Nature--so that they live and move and have their being more or less
+submerged in the spirit of the great world around them--then Man, when
+he first began to differentiate himself from them, must for a long
+time have remained in this SUBconscious unity, becoming only distinctly
+CONSCIOUS of it when he was already beginning to lose it. That early
+dawn of distinct consciousness corresponded to the period of belief
+in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every object was
+invested with a halo of mystery or terror or adoration. Things were
+either tabu, in which case they were dangerous, and often not to be
+touched or even looked upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace
+and influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite which released
+their influence was also holy. William Blake, that modern prophetic
+child, beheld a Tree full of angels; the Central Australian native
+believes bushes to be the abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of
+passing women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses
+saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame of fire, with
+Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put off his shoes for
+he felt that the place was holy; Osiris was at times regarded as a
+Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one
+in the acacia"--which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The
+same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil
+was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe;
+the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be
+cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is
+of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical use, (2) but so
+holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb it. The Burmese believe
+the things of nature, but especially the trees, to be the abode of
+spirits. "To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the Greek of long
+ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains
+are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of
+Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round
+about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree
+that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like
+fronds of the tamarind." (3)
+
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.
+
+ (2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.
+
+ (3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.
+
+
+There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women
+(and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very
+near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these,
+including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The
+well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to
+a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the
+Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god
+Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down
+to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant
+women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those
+who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are
+benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the
+Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to
+fertilize them. (2)
+
+ (1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.
+
+ (2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.
+
+
+One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite
+indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was
+instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day
+who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the
+world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is
+not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and
+intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction
+of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the
+first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was
+hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became more
+conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms of the gods and
+the creeds--but of that process I will speak more in detail presently.
+
+The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in
+the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which
+his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and
+assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its
+many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its
+timber, and other invaluable products--why should it not become the
+natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man's worship is ever
+drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in
+its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful
+of the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and
+Serpent is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so
+potent in the life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual
+most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds
+(or even the crops) is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent
+combined, and for all the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it
+reverence. In the Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance
+we have this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen
+Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness (as a cure for the
+fiery serpents of lust); illustrations of the same are said to be found
+in the temples of Egypt and of South India, and even in the ancient
+temples of Central America. (1) In the myth of Hercules the golden
+apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans,
+the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man
+through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And
+De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories,
+says "the legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs which
+yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which the life, the
+fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the hero have their
+beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan origin: in India,
+Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."
+
+ (1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
+Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.
+
+ (2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.
+
+
+Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting
+itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case
+of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away
+and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in
+the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a
+primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or
+semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake--the fascination
+of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its
+glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of
+Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason
+(from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who
+in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions.
+No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a
+gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies
+of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship
+of Zeus and the Olympian gods.
+
+ (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+
+
+Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people
+wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a
+Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so
+foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY
+LOOKED (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of
+all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any that thrills one
+more with a sense of wizardry than just this very thing--to observe,
+each year, this disclosure of the Ear within the Blade--first a swelling
+of the sheath, then a transparency and a whitey-green face within a
+hooded shroud, and then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself
+and spiring upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat with
+pale visage appearing out of the ground."
+
+ (1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
+approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the
+Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to
+the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect
+revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr
+stacon])."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.
+
+
+If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have
+aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world
+was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What
+wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation),
+what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
+sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior
+of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as
+an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would
+no doubt be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that where
+blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more
+generous?)--what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to
+propitiate the unseen power--even though the outline and form of the
+latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of
+the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character,
+says (1): "The primitive conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly
+out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated
+the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a
+festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman
+actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of
+the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites
+in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again
+with the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a charm to ensure the
+growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as
+such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his
+fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
+stately ritual of the temple." (2)
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.
+
+ (2) See ch. xv.
+
+
+The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of
+Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically
+poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also
+common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been
+offered at the grave of Osiris. We bear that the Indians in Ecuador used
+to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields
+when they sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same,
+allowing his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico
+girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes GRIND their
+(male) victim, like corn, between two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to
+make me bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were particularly
+given to this kind of ritual--the very TEARS of the sufferer were an
+incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain.
+(1)
+
+ (1) The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.
+
+
+And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his
+astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct
+role as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body.
+"The tremendous mana of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies
+almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual." (1) Even to us there is
+something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of this animal's
+glory of strength and fury and sexual power. No wonder the primitives
+worshiped him, or that they devised rituals which should convey his
+power and vitality by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts
+they ate his flesh and drank his blood as a magic symbol and means of
+salvation.
+
+ (1) Four Stages, p. 34.
+
+
+
+
+VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+
+It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a
+few more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic.
+Magic represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of
+Religion--i.e. the instinctive sense of Man's inner continuity with the
+world around him, TAKING SHAPE: a fanciful shape it is true, but with
+very real reaction on his practical life and feelings. (1) On the other
+side it represented the beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt
+not merely to FEEL but to UNDERSTAND the mystery of things.
+
+ (1) For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion
+see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.
+
+
+Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very puerile, very
+superficial. As E. B. Tylor says (1) of primitive folk in general, "they
+mistook an imaginary for a real connection." And he instances the case
+of the inhabitants of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope, seven
+furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of Artemis, in order to
+place the former under the protection of the latter! WE should lay down
+a telephone wire, and consider that we established a much more efficient
+connection; but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men, like
+children, rely on surface associations. Among the Dyaks of Borneo (2)
+when the men are away fighting, the WOMEN must use a sort of telepathic
+magic in order to safeguard them--that is, they must themselves rise
+early and keep awake all day (lest darkness and sleep should give
+advantage to the enemy); they must not OIL their hair (lest their
+husbands should make any SLIPS); they must eat sparingly and put aside
+rice at every meal (so that the men may not want for food). And so on.
+Similar superstitions are common. But they gradually lead to a little
+thought, and then to a little more, and so to the discovery of actual
+and provable influences. Perhaps one day the cord connecting the temple
+with Ephesus was drawn TIGHT and it was found that messages could be, by
+tapping, transmitted along it. That way lay the discovery of a fact. In
+an age which worshiped fertility, whether in mankind or animals, TWINS
+were ever counted especially blest, and were credited with a magic
+power. (The Constellation of the Twins was thought peculiarly lucky.)
+Perhaps after a time it was discovered that twins sometimes run in
+families, and in such cases really do bring fertility with them. In
+cattle it is known nowadays that there are more twins of the female sex
+than of the male sex. (3)
+
+ (1) Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106.
+
+ (2) See The Golden Bough, i, 127.
+
+ (3) See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41,
+note.
+
+
+Observations of this kind were naturally made by the ablest members of
+the tribe--who were in all probability the medicine-men and wizards--and
+brought in consequence power into their hands. The road to power in
+fact--and especially was this the case in societies which had not
+yet developed wealth and property--lay through Magic. As far as magic
+represented early superstition land religion it laid hold of the HEARTS
+of men--their hopes and fears; as far as it represented science and the
+beginnings of actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a sense of
+power, and gave form to their lives and customs. We have no reason to
+suppose that the early magicians and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked
+or bent on mere self-aggrandizement--any more than we have to think the
+same of the average country vicar or country doctor of to-day. They
+were merely men a trifle wiser or more instructed than their flocks.
+But though probably in most cases their original intentions were decent
+enough, they were not proof against the temptations which the possession
+of power always brings, and as time went on they became liable to trade
+more and more upon this power for their own advancement. In the
+matter of Religion the history of the Christian priesthood through the
+centuries shows sufficiently to what misuse such power can be put; and
+in the matter of Science it is a warning to us of the dangers attending
+the formation of a scientific priesthood, such as we see growing up
+around us to-day. In both cases--whether Science or Religion--vanity,
+personal ambition, lust of domination and a hundred other vices, unless
+corrected by a real devotion to the public good, may easily bring as
+many evils in their train as those they profess to cure.
+
+The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly but
+necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there is much evidence to
+show that in the case of many tribes at any rate, it was HE who became
+ultimate chief and leader and laid the foundations of Kingship. The
+Basileus was always a sacred personality, and often united in himself as
+head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare and leader in priestly
+rites--like Agamemnon in Homer, or Saul or David in the Bible. As a
+magician he had influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the
+blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway
+
+                         "the dark earth beareth in season
+     Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and
+     alway
+      Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in
+     abundance." (1)
+
+ (1) Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.
+
+
+As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare; and
+Schoolcraft, in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang, (1) says of the Dacotah
+Indians "the war-chief who leads the party to war is always one of
+these medicine-men." This connection, however, by which the magician is
+transformed into the king has been abundantly studied, and need not be
+further dwelt upon here.
+
+And what of the transformation of the king into a god--or of the
+Magician or Priest directly into the same? Perhaps in order to
+appreciate this, one must make a further digression.
+
+For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two main objects
+in life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle and crops, for food; and (2)
+to placate or ward off Death; and it seemed very obvious--even before
+any distinct figures of gods, or any idea of prayer, had arisen--to
+attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism, of
+Initiation (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of a Second Birth,
+which we associate with fully-formed religions, did belong also to
+the age of Magic; and they all implied a belief in some kind of
+re-incarnation--in a life going forward continually and being renewed
+in birth again and again. It is curious that we find such a belief among
+the lowest savages even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Central
+Australian tribes, says the belief is firmly rooted among them "that the
+human soul undergoes an endless series of re-incarnations--the living
+men and women of one generation being nothing but the spirits of their
+ancestors come to life again, and destined themselves to be reborn
+in the persons of their descendants. During the interval between
+two re-incarnations the souls live in their nanja spots, or local
+totem-centres, which are always natural objects such as trees or rocks.
+Each totem-clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over the
+country. There the souls of the dead men and women of the totem, but no
+others, congregate, and are born again in human form when a favorable
+opportunity presents itself." (2)
+
+ (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.
+
+ (2) The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.
+
+
+And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of
+the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also. At the great
+Spring-ritual among the primitive Greeks "the tribe and the growing
+earth were renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead
+seeds, the tribe from its dead ancestors." And the whole process
+projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who "in the first
+stage is living, then dies with each year, and thirdly rises again from
+the dead, raising the whole dead world with him. The Greeks called him
+in this stage 'The Third One' (Tritos Soter) or 'the Saviour'; and the
+renovation ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the old year,
+the old garments, and everything that is polluted by the infection of
+death." (1) Thus the multiplication of the crops and the renovation of
+the tribe, and at the same time the evasion and placation of death, were
+all assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial magic. (2)
+
+ (1) Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.
+
+ (2) It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of
+the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male
+members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja
+spots--the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the
+seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for
+their re-incarnation.
+
+
+In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--of
+the magical worship of Bulls and Bears and Rams and Cats and Emus and
+Kangaroos, of Trees and Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the
+spirit of the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of the
+ground--there is still the same idea or moving inspiration, the sense
+mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the feeling (hardly yet conscious of
+its own meaning) of intimate relationship and unity with all this outer
+world, the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed by the
+spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual, the right
+word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An aura of emotion
+surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu, of fascination, of desire.
+The world, to these people, was transparent with presences related to
+themselves; and though hunger and sex may have been the dominant and
+overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their outlook on the
+world was essentially poetic and imaginative.
+
+Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and the belief in
+spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being
+alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed
+(1)--that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of
+supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of
+earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly
+evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being--though there
+might be orders and degrees of spirits (and of gods)--every such being
+was only conceived of, and could only be conceived of, as actually a
+part of Nature, dwelling in and interlaced with some phenomenon of Earth
+and Sky, and having no separate existence.
+
+ (1) For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,
+see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.
+
+
+How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and
+separable gods and goddesses--each with his or her well-marked outline
+and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of India,
+or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To
+this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an
+ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the
+Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the
+figures of the supranatural gods arose from a process in the human mind
+similar to that which the photographer adopts when by photographing a
+number of faces on the same plate, and so superposing their images on
+one another, he produces a so-called "composite" photograph or image.
+Thus, in the photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members
+of the same family superposed upon one another may produce a composite
+image or ideal of that family type, or the portraits of a number of
+Aztecs or of a number of Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the
+Aztec or of the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each member
+of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors or Priests or
+wise and gracious Women of that tribe did inevitably combine at last
+to composite figures of gods and goddesses--on whom the enthusiasm
+and adoration of the tribe was concentrated. (1) Miss Harrison has
+ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic rituals of
+the past--being the figures on which all eyes would be concentrated; and
+whose importance would be imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to
+this process. The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified,
+recurring year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand ritual
+processions, would at last be dramatized and idealized in the great
+race-consciousness into the form of a Suffering God--a Jesus Christ or
+a Dionysus or Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of
+mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the succession of Priests
+or Medicine-Men--whose figures would recur again and again as leaders
+and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the
+composite-image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic powers.
+"Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have shown us in abundance
+the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain."
+Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man
+may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual
+representative of the glorified and composite being who exists in the
+mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be unworthy, but is
+surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real
+[gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in
+clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the
+mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The
+medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some
+connection with the great god more intimate than that of other men... he
+knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him." (2) Thus
+did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but three
+names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the god.
+
+ (1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions
+of the Race-Life."
+
+ (2) The Four Stages, p. 140.
+
+
+And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in
+chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals
+and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of
+the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people
+whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear,
+and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there
+would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of
+emotions--emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and
+so forth--an image of a divine Bear in whom they lived and moved and had
+their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or
+a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same
+way spring tip the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred
+kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its
+presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these
+objects were and had been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly
+and seasonal Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo
+(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the totem-animal
+or priest or magician-chief gradually invested him with Awe and
+Divinity.
+
+According to this theory the god--the full-grown god in human shape,
+dwelling apart and beyond the earth--did not come first, but was a late
+and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of
+the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is much
+supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early
+cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The
+Egyptian religion was full of such divinities--the jackal-headed
+Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of
+darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in
+Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide
+and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that,
+following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or
+medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the
+skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask--this
+partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of
+the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic
+virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the
+crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered, wears the aegis, or goat-skin--said
+to be the hide of the goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy;
+there are a number of legends which connected the Arcadian Artemis with
+the worship of the bear, Apollo with the wolf, and so forth. And, most
+curious as showing similarity of rites between the Old and New Worlds,
+there are found plenty of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in
+religious processions among the native tribes of both North and South
+America. In the Atlas of Spix and Martius (who travelled together in
+the Amazonian forests about 1820) there is an understanding and
+characteristic picture of the men (and some women) of the tribe of the
+Tecunas moving in procession through the woods mostly naked, except for
+wearing animal heads and masks--the masks representing Cranes of various
+kinds, Ducks, the Opossum, the Jaguar, the Parrot, etc., probably
+symbolic of their respective clans.
+
+By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed, the forms of
+the Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual figures of men and women,
+of youths and girls, who year after year took part in the ancient
+rituals. Just as the Queen of the May or Father Christmas with us are
+idealized forms derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded
+old men who took leading parts in the May or December mummings and thus
+gained their apotheosis in our literature and tradition--so doubtless
+Zeus with his thunderbolts and arrows of lightning is the idealization
+into Heaven of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares the
+god of War, the similar idealization of the leading warrior in the
+ritual war-dance preceding an attack on a neighboring tribe; and Mercury
+of the foot-running Messenger whose swiftness in those days (devoid of
+steam or electricity) was so precious a tribal possession.
+
+And here it must be remembered that this explanation of the genesis of
+the gods only applies to the SHAPES and FIGURES of the various deities.
+It does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or
+a Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has
+quite another source. Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or
+'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the
+forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a
+kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored
+mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind." But I must confess
+that to me the "poor Indian" seems on the whole to show more good sense
+than his critics, and to have aimed his rude arrows at the philosophic
+mark more successfully than a vast number of his learned and scientific
+successors. A consideration of what we have said above would show that
+early people felt their unity with Nature so deeply and intimately
+that--like the animals themselves--they did not think consciously or
+theorize about it. It was just their life to be--like the beasts of the
+field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole flux of things,
+non-differentiated so to speak. What more natural or indeed more
+logically correct than for them to assume (when they first began to
+think or differentiate themselves) that these other creatures, these
+birds, beasts and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same
+blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and having the
+same interior nature? What more reasonable (if indeed they credited
+THEMSELVES with having some kind of soul or spirit) than to credit these
+other creatures with a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the
+Guiana Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with beings."
+Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored mind--unless
+indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense of the Schools--but rather a
+very directly perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing
+that these people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution) than
+that they should pay great reverence to some ideal animal--first cousin
+or ancestor--who played an important part in their tribal existence, and
+make of this animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?
+
+And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed
+to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more
+intelligent and emotional--more specially human in fact--than that
+of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and
+ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior
+and more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness of its
+own intimate quality, and still deeply penetrated with the sense of its
+kinship to external nature, it would inevitably and perfectly logically
+credit the latter with an inner life and intelligence, more
+distinctly human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE
+'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this is a
+process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding a
+certain parenthesis in the process, due to obvious elements in our
+'Civilization' and to the temporary and fallacious domination of
+a leaden-eyed so-called 'Science.' According to this view the true
+evolution of Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded not
+by the denial by man of his unity with the world, but by his seeing and
+understanding that unity more deeply. And the more deeply he understands
+himself the more certainly he will recognize in the external world a
+Being or beings resembling himself.
+
+W. H. Hudson--whose mind is certainly not of a quality to be jeered
+at--speaks of Animism as "the projection of ourselves into nature:
+the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more
+powerful, in all visible things"; and continues, "old as I am this same
+primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
+persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost
+afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it." (1) Nor will it be quite
+forgotten that Shelley once said:--
+
+     The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
+     Is active living spirit. Every grain
+     Is sentient both in unity and part,
+     And the minutest atom comprehends
+     A world of loves and hatreds.
+
+ (1) Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.
+
+
+The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism is I say
+inevitable, and perfectly logical. But the great value of the work done
+by some of those investigators whom I have quoted has been to show that
+among quite primitive people (whose interior life and 'soul-sense' was
+only very feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature were
+correspondingly feeble. The reflections of themselves projected into
+the world beyond could not reach the stature of eternal 'gods,' but
+were rather of the quality of ephemeral phantoms and ghosts; and the
+ceremonials and creeds of that period are consequently more properly
+described as, Magic than as Religion. There have indeed been great
+controversies as to whether there has or has not been, in the course
+of religious evolution, a PRE-animistic stage. Probably of course human
+evolution in this matter must have been perfectly continuous from stages
+presenting the very feeblest or an absolutely deficient animistic sense
+to the very highest manifestations of anthropomorphism; but as there is
+a good deal of evidence to show that ANIMALS (notably dogs and horses)
+see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly to be enlarged so far as to
+include the pre-human species. Anyhow it must be remembered that the
+question is one of CONSCIOUSNESS--that is, of how far and to what degree
+consciousness of self has been developed in the animal or the primitive
+man or the civilized man, and therefore how far and to what degree the
+animal or human creature has credited the outside world with a similar
+consciousness. It is not a question of whether there IS an inner life
+and SUB-consciousness common to all these creatures of the earth and
+sky, because that, I take it, is a fact beyond question; they all emerge
+or have emerged from the same matrix, and are rooted in identity; but
+it is a question of how far they are AWARE of this, and how far by
+separation (which is the genius of evolution) each individual creature
+has become conscious of the interior nature both of itself and of the
+other creatures AND of the great whole which includes them all.
+
+Finally, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that
+Anthropomorphism, in man's conception of the gods, is itself of course
+only a stage and destined to pass away. In so far, that is, as the
+term indicates a belief in divine beings corresponding to our PRESENT
+conception of ourselves--that is as separate personalities having each
+a separate and limited character and function, and animated by
+the separatist motives of ambition, possession, power, vainglory,
+superiority, patronage, self-greed, self-satisfaction, etc.--in so far
+as anthropomorphism is the expression of that kind of belief it is of
+course destined, with the illusion from which it springs, to pass away.
+When man arrives at the final consciousness in which the idea of such a
+self, superior or inferior or in any way antagonistic to others, ceases
+to operate, then he will return to his first and primal condition, and
+will cease to need ANY special religion or gods, knowing himself and all
+his fellows to be divine and the origin and perfect fruition of all.
+
+
+
+
+VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+
+There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably beautiful book
+The Story of my Heart--a passage well known to all lovers of that
+prose-poet--in which he figures himself standing "in front of the Royal
+Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory," and
+pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery of life. "Is there any
+theory, philosophy, or creed," he says, "is there any system of culture,
+any formulated method, able to meet and satisfy each separate item of
+this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
+they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving
+heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against
+which, like seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate
+personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something
+to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome that will leave
+more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real
+now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the
+sun burns.... Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side
+with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable
+belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to
+be found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought from the
+immense forces of the universe."
+
+In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand times No! there
+is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which
+will meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the
+human whirlpool." And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How
+terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew the history
+of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of
+human endeavor HAD been found absolutely correct and universally
+applicable--so that every human being would be compelled to pass
+through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under
+its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or
+system; and yet there is something--as Jefferies prophetically felt and
+with a great longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root
+of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the
+CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us:
+it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity.
+
+The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last
+chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic
+or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and
+abstract--are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt
+those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will
+catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the
+mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and
+having no real substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they
+will say) is a history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over
+it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced
+Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra
+and Agni and Kali and Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus
+Christ and Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards onto
+a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes them all tend to
+be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they each and all inevitably pass
+away. Why waste time over them?"
+
+And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at the matter.
+These gods and creeds ARE only projections of the human mind. But all
+the same it misses, does this view, the essential fact. It misses the
+fact that there is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of
+a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not directly see it) as
+well as the existence of a solid form which intercepts that light.
+Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of
+the world-consciousness--so deep indeed that the vast majority of
+individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned
+outwards is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions
+passing across their sky; they are unaware that the latter are only
+shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting their own minds. (1) The
+vast majority of people have never observed their own minds; their own
+mental forms. They have only observed the reflections cast by these.
+Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three degrees of
+reality. There are the mere shadows--the least real and most
+evanescent; there are the actual mental outlines of humanity (and of
+the individual), much more real, but themselves also of course slowly
+changing; and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which
+lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the glorious light
+of the world-consciousness. Of this last it may be said that it never
+changes. Every thing is known to it--even the very IMPEDIMENTS to its
+shining. But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light
+that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that the things of this
+world and of humanity, though real in their degree, have chiefly a
+kind of negative value; they are opaquenesses, clouds, materialisms,
+ignorances, and the inner light falling upon them gradually reveals
+their negative character and gradually dissolves them away till they
+are lost in the extreme and eternal Splendor. I think Jefferies, when
+he asked that question with which I have begun this chapter, was in some
+sense subconsciously, if not quite consciously, aware of the answer. His
+frequent references to the burning blazing sun throughout The Story of
+the Heart seem to be an indication of his real deep-down attitude of
+mind.
+
+ (1) See, in the same connection, Plato's allegory of the Cave,
+Republic, Book vii.
+
+
+The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away truly like
+ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent in their study is wasted,
+is a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much
+more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the
+human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and
+queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held
+sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or
+continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real
+formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and
+a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity.
+Certainly it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and a
+necessary step in the great process; and certainly it was opaque and
+brutish, but it is through the opaque things of the world, and not
+through the transparent, that we become aware of the light.
+
+It may be worth while to give instances of how some early rituals and
+creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous or preposterous, were really
+the indications of important moral and social conceptions evolving in
+the heart of man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected
+with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such innumerable
+examples are now to be found in the modern books on Anthropology. If we
+assume, as I have done more than once, that the earliest state of Man
+was one in which he did not consciously separate himself from the world,
+animate and inanimate, which surrounded him, then (as I have also said)
+it was perfectly natural for him to take some animal which bulked large
+on his horizon--some food-animal for instance--and to pay respect to it
+as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor and totem-symbol;
+or, seeing the boundless blessing of the cornfields, to believe in
+some kind of spirit of the corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical
+ghost) which, reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind
+from famine. But then no sooner had he done this than he was bound to
+perceive that in cutting down the corn or in eating his totem-bear
+or kangaroo he was slaying his own best self and benefactor. In
+that instant the consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some
+undefined yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in. If,
+before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the simple purpose of
+multiplying the animal or, vegetable forms of his food, now in addition
+his magical endeavor would be turned to averting the just wrath of the
+spirits who animated these forms--just indeed, for the rudest savage
+would perceive the wrong done and the probability of its retribution.
+Clearly the wrong done could only be expiated by an equivalent sacrifice
+of some kind on the part of the man, or the tribe--that is by the
+offering to the totem-animal or to the corn-spirit of some victim whom
+these nature powers in their turn could feed upon and assimilate. In
+this way the nature-powers would be appeased, the sense of unity would
+be restored, and the first At-one-ment effected.
+
+It is hardly necessary to recite in any detail the cruel and hideous
+sacrifices which have been perpetrated in this sense all over the world,
+sometimes in appeasement of a wrong committed or supposed to have been
+committed by the tribe or some member of it, sometimes in placation or
+for the averting of death, or defeat, or plague, sometimes merely
+in fulfilment of some long-standing custom of forgotten origin--the
+flayings and floggings and burnings and crucifixions of victims without
+end, carried out in all deliberation and solemnity of established
+ritual. I have mentioned some cases connected with the sowing of the
+corn. The Bible is full of such things, from the intended sacrifice of
+Isaac by his father Abraham, to the actual crucifixion of Jesus by
+the Jews. The first-born sons were claimed by a god who called himself
+"jealous" and were only to be redeemed by a substitute. (1) Of the
+Canaanites it was said that "even their daughters they have BURNT in the
+fire to their gods"; (2) and of the King of Moab, that when he saw
+his army in danger of defeat, "he took his eldest son that should have
+reigned in his stead and offered him for a burnt-offering on the wall!"
+(3) Dr. Frazer (4) mentions the similar case of the Carthaginians
+(about B.C. 300) sacrificing two hundred children of good family as a
+propitiation to Baal and to save their beloved city from the assaults
+of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles. And even so we hear that on that
+occasion three hundred more young folk VOLUNTEERED to die for the
+fatherland.
+
+ (1) Exodus xxxiv. 20.
+
+ (2) Deut. xii. 31.
+
+ (3) 2 Kings iii. 27.
+
+ (4) The Golden Bough, vol. "The Dying God," p. 167.
+
+
+The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to their gods
+Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are described in much detail
+by Sahagun, the Spanish missionary of the sixteenth century. The victims
+were mostly prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered by
+thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol or figure of the
+god as largely plated with gold and holding his hands palm upward and in
+a downward sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The
+children, who had previously been borne in triumphal state on litters
+over the crowd and decorated with every ornamental device of feathers
+and flowers and wings, were placed one by one on the vast hands and
+ROLLED DOWN into the flames--as if the god were himself offering them.
+(1) As the procession approached the temple, the members of it wept and
+danced and sang, and here again the abundance of tears was taken for a
+good augury of rain. (2)
+
+ (1) It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the
+sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is related
+concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage (see Diodorus
+Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould's Religious Belief, vol. i, p. 375).
+
+ (2) "A los ninos que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para
+llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevabos en unas literas sobre los hombros,
+estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores: iban tanendo,
+cantando y bailando delante de ellos... Cuando Ileviban los ninos a
+matar, si llevaban y echaban muchos lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los
+llevaban porque tomaban pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas
+en aquel ano." Sahagun, Historia Nueva Espana, Bk. II, ch. i.
+
+
+Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous figures--that
+of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid with gold and precious
+stones; and beside it were "braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three
+Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and
+the savor of incense were the sacrifice."
+
+Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account of the sacrifice
+of a perfect youth at Easter-time--which date Sahagun connects with the
+Christian festival of the Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had
+been held in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the
+god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every luxury
+and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four courtesans as he
+desired) had been granted him. At the last and on the fatal day, leaving
+his companions and his worshipers behind, be slowly ascended the Temple
+staircase; stripping on each step the ornaments from his body; and
+breaking and casting away his flutes and other musical instruments;
+till, reaching the summit, he was stretched, curved on his back, and
+belly upwards, over the altar stone, while the priest with obsidian
+knife cut his breast open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet
+beating, as an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and while the heart
+still lived, his successor for the next year was chosen.
+
+In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the similar
+offering of a woman to a goddess. In both cases (he explains) of young
+man or young woman, the victims were richly adorned in the guise of the
+god or goddess to whom they were offered, and at the same time great
+largesse of food was distributed to all who needed. (Here we see the
+connection in the general mind between the gift of food (by the gods)
+and the sacrifice of precious blood (by the people).) More than once
+Sahagun mentions that the victims in these Mexican ceremonials not
+infrequently offered THEMSELVES as a voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott
+says (1) that the offering of one's life to the gods was "sometimes
+voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening a sure passage
+into Paradise."
+
+ (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+
+
+Dr. Frazer describes (1) the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea
+in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's
+robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands
+he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the
+king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped
+of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly
+astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far
+removed in space and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D.
+and the Babylonians perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know
+that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim attired as a
+king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has especially made his own, and for
+further information on it his classic work should be consulted.
+
+ (1) Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. (See also S. Reinach,
+Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.
+
+
+Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes largely from
+Sahagun, and summarizes his conclusions in the following passage:
+"The general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by
+innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for
+the male gods, of a WOMAN for each goddess. (1) The latter victims were
+regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in, each
+case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the
+god with the sacrifice (? victim), and of both with the officiating priest.
+The connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins
+of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin
+or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the
+celebrants. Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this
+was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who
+communicated." (2)
+
+ (1) Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally
+connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and
+the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae.
+It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from all guilt and avert
+the wrath of the god (the Sun). A man and a woman, as representing
+the male and female population, were led about with a garland of figs
+(fertility) round their necks, to the sound of flutes and singing. They
+were then scourged, sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore.
+(Nettleship and Sandys.)
+
+ (2) A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.
+
+
+Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know a mere
+thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human sacrifice all over the
+world. We hold up our hands in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli
+dropping children from his fingers into the flames, but we have to
+remember that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content to
+describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about the floor of
+Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did Augustine worship? The Being who
+could condemn children to such a fate was certainly no better than the
+Mexican Idol.
+
+And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some by no means
+unworthy conceptions of the greatness of his God. In the same way the
+Aztecs were in many respects a refined and artistic people, and their
+religion was not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of them
+(1) that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord "omnipresent,
+knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without whom Man is as
+nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and
+purity, under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence." How can
+we reconcile St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the religious
+belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties? Perhaps we can
+only reconcile them by remembering out of what deeps of barbarism and
+what nightmares of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and is
+even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also that the ancient
+ceremonies and rituals of Magic and Fear remained on and were cultivated
+by the multitude in each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits
+had attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that even to the
+present day in each individual the Old and the New are for a long period
+thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to believe that the practice
+of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should
+have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe
+out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at any rate to
+the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and convincing. To-day
+(1918) we are witnessing in the Great European War a carnival of human
+slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke all
+the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical ages; and when
+we ask the why and wherefore of this horrid spectacle we are told,
+apparently in all sincerity, and by both the parties engaged, of the
+noble objects and commanding moralities which inspire and compel it. We
+can hardly, in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness
+of the plea, so why should we do so in the former case? In both cases we
+perceive that underneath the surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and
+was the great urging and commanding force.
+
+ (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+
+
+The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent--if you once allow for the
+overwhelming sway of fear--perfectly reasonable views of human conduct,
+adopted instinctively by mankind since the earliest times. If in a
+moment of danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your brother
+tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you 'sinned' against him; and
+naturally you expiated the sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind
+made to the one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice were
+the very foundation of social life and human morality, and must have
+sprung up as soon as ever, in the course of evolution, man became
+CAPABLE of differentiating himself from his fellows and regarding his
+own conduct as that of a 'separate self.' It was in the very conception
+of a separate self that 'sin' and disunity first began; and it was
+by 'sacrifice' that unity and harmony were restored, appeasement and
+atonement effected.
+
+But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated more than once,
+man felt himself intimately related not only to his brother tribesman,
+but to the animals and to general Nature. It was not so much that he
+THOUGHT thus as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously
+that he was a part of all this outer world. And so he adopted for his
+totems or presiding spirits every possible animal, as we have seen,
+and all sorts of nature-phenomena, such as rain and fire and water and
+clouds, and sun, moon and stars--which WE consider quite senseless and
+inanimate. Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he felt
+the same compunction as I have described him feeling towards his brother
+tribesmen. He could sin against them too. He could sin against his
+totem-animal by eating it; he could sin against his 'brother the ox' by
+consuming its strength in the labor of the plough; he could sin against
+the corn by cutting it down and grinding it into flour, or against the
+precious and beautiful pine-tree by laying his axe to its roots and
+converting it into mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he
+could sin against elemental nature. This might be more difficult to be
+certain of, but when the signs of elemental displeasure were not to be
+mistaken--when the rain withheld itself for months, or the storms and
+lightning dealt death and destruction, when the crops failed or evil
+plagues afflicted mankind--then there could be little uncertainty that
+he had sinned; and Fear, which had haunted him like a demon from the
+first day when he became conscious of his separation from his fellows
+and from Nature, stood over him and urged to dreadful propitiations.
+
+In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious thing.
+We have seen that to atone for the cutting-down of the corn a human
+victim would often be slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of
+this, for wherever the blood and remains of the victim were strewn the
+corn always sprang up more plentifully. The tribe or human group made
+reparation thus to the corn; the corn-spirit signified approval. The
+'sin' was expiated and harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was
+voluntarily offered by a tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot
+or otherwise; sometimes the victim was a slave, or a captive enemy;
+sometimes even an animal. All that did not so much matter. The main
+thing was that the formal expiation had been carried out, and the wrath
+of the spirits averted.
+
+It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the bear felt it
+necessary to kill and eat a bear occasionally; but they could not do
+this without a sense of guilt, and some fear of vengeance from the great
+Bear-spirit. So they ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which
+the tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community with their
+totem and with each other. And since they could not make any reparation
+directly to the slain animal itself AFTER its death, they made their
+reparation BEFORE, bringing all sorts of presents and food to it for a
+long anterior period, and paying every kind of worship and respect to
+it. The same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia,
+in some of the cities of Greece as I have already mentioned, the actual
+bull sacrificed was the handsomest and most carefully nurtured that
+could be obtained; it was crowned with flowers and led in procession
+with every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I have already
+pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead of a bull or a goat
+or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated, it was a custom (which can be
+traced very widely over the world) to feed and indulge and honor the
+victim to the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony,
+arraying him often as a king and placing a crown upon his head, by way
+of acknowledgment of the noble and necessary work he was doing for the
+general good.
+
+What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging especially
+to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and
+beloved a tree--the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of Attis!
+when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow
+an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis was
+placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the
+glorious youth--who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk
+of Winter--was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree? (1) At some
+earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his body
+bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the maidens
+to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and male
+enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice
+(as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their
+virile organs--symbols of fertility in return for the promised and
+expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For
+the ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and
+lamentation, but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a
+festival of resurrection, when it was discovered--just as in the case of
+Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had
+flown. How strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to
+the story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life made in order
+to bring salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the
+victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the
+binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection
+and the empty coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in
+what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable
+and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had
+ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat
+obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.
+
+ (1) See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris
+Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea
+caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis
+sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars
+subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis
+sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis
+formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta
+noctibus piangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur."
+
+
+Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it
+the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call gods, it is
+important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though
+it dealt in 'spirits'--the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the
+Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of
+totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea of gods. It
+had not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and
+governing the world in solemn conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus
+or the recesses of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its
+inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and Sacrifice, or of
+Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call it--was evolved perfectly
+naturally out of the human mind when brought face to face with Life
+and Nature) at some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was
+essentially the result of man's deep, original and instinctive sense of
+solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied and to some degree
+broken up by the growth and conscious insistence of the self-regarding
+impulses. It was the consciousness of disharmony and disunity,
+causing men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the need of
+reconciliation. It was a realization of union made clear by its very
+loss. It assumed of course, in a subconscious way as I have already
+indicated, that the external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds
+similar to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident that the
+particular theories current in this or that place about the nature of
+the world--the theories, as we should say, of science or theology--did
+not alter the general outlines of the creed; they only colored its
+details and gave its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental
+attitudes, for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the
+Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern and pious
+Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross are really almost
+exactly the same. I mention this because in tracing the origins or the
+evolution of religions it is important to distinguish clearly what is
+essential and universal from that which is merely local and temporary.
+Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons just made;
+but surely it is much more inspiriting and encouraging to think that
+whatever progress HAS been made in the religious outlook of the world
+has come about through the gradual mental growth and consent of the
+peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous event of a
+rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which indeed might never be
+repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious to suggest
+that it SHOULD be repeated.
+
+The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the
+whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to
+have disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and
+to have symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are
+shocked sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals,
+yet we must allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early
+people felt the solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we
+must allow too that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into
+rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifice, and
+with a result perhaps which could not have been compassed in any other
+way.
+
+For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social
+life. "It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people"; and not
+only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important)
+that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when
+the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and
+implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a
+perfectly reasonable thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it
+does. All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain
+and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in Nature or
+Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If
+Christianity has any real essence, that essence is perhaps expressed
+in some such ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim
+beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs of savages coming
+down from a time anterior to all recorded history.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+
+We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions of Sin and
+Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely remote past, and
+embodied among the various peoples of the world sometimes in crude and
+bloodthirsty rites, sometimes in symbols and rituals of a gentler and
+more gracious character, descended at last into Christianity and became
+a part of its creed and of the creed of the modern world. On the whole
+perhaps we may trace a slow amelioration in this process and may flatter
+ourselves that the Christian centuries exhibit a more philosophical
+understanding of what Sin is, and a more humane conception of what
+Sacrifice SHOULD be, than the centuries preceding. But I fear that any
+very decided statement or sweeping generalization to that effect would
+be--to say the least--rash. Perhaps there IS a very slow amelioration;
+but the briefest glance at the history of the Christian churches--the
+horrible rancours and revenges of the clergy and the sects against
+each other in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting
+crusades at Beziers and other places and the massacres of the Albigenses
+in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the witch-findings and
+burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth, the hideous science-urged and
+bishop-blessed warfare of the twentieth--horrors fully as great as any
+we can charge to the account of the Aztecs or the Babylonians--must give
+us pause. Nor must we forget that if there is by chance a substantial
+amelioration in our modern outlook with regard to these matters the same
+had begun already before the advent of Christianity and can by no means
+be ascribed to any miraculous influence of that religion. Abraham was
+prompted to slay a ram as a substitute for his son, long before the
+Christians were thought of; the rather savage Artemis of the old Greek
+rites was (according to Pausanias) (1) honored by the yearly sacrifice
+of a perfect boy and girl, but later it was deemed sufficient to draw a
+knife across their throats as a symbol, with the result of spilling only
+a few drops of their blood, or to flog the boys (with the same result)
+upon her altar. Among the Khonds in old days many victims (meriahs) were
+sacrificed to the gods, "but in time the man was replaced by a horse,
+the horse by a bull, the bull by a ram, the ram by a kid, the kid by
+fowls, and the fowls by many flowers." (2) At one time, according to the
+Yajur-Veda, there was a festival at which one hundred and twenty-five
+victims, men and women, boys and girls, were sacrificed; "but reform
+supervened, and now the victims were bound as before to the stake,
+but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (god) Narayana, the
+sacrificing priest brandished a knife and--severed the bonds of the
+captives." (3) At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to which I
+referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in later
+times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the sea,
+and after being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas a
+similar festival the fall of the victim was graciously broken by tying
+feathers and even living birds to his body. (4)
+
+ (1) vii. 19, and iii. 8, 16.
+
+ (2) Primitive Folk, by Elie Reclus (Contemp. Science Series), p.
+330.
+
+ (3) Ibid.
+
+ (4) Muller's Dorians Book II, ch. ii, par. 10.
+
+
+With the lapse of time and the general progress of mankind, we may,
+I think, perceive some such slow ameliorations in the matter of the
+brutality and superstition of the old religions. How far any later
+ameliorations were due to the direct influence of Christianity might
+be a difficult question; but what I think we can clearly see--and what
+especially interests us here--is that in respect to its main religious
+ideas, and the matter underlying them (exclusive of the MANNER of
+their treatment, which necessarily has varied among different peoples)
+Christianity is of one piece with the earlier pagan creeds and is
+for the most part a re-statement and renewed expression of world-wide
+doctrines whose first genesis is lost in the haze of the past, beyond
+all recorded history.
+
+I have illustrated this view with regard to the doctrine of Sin and
+Sacrifice. Let us take two or three other illustrations. Let us take the
+doctrine of Re-birth or Regeneration. The first few verses of St. John's
+Gospel are occupied with the subject of salvation through rebirth or
+regeneration. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
+God."... "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
+into the kingdom of God." Our Baptismal Service begins by saying that
+"forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin; and that our
+Saviour Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God except he
+be regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost"; therefore it
+is desirable that this child should be baptized, "received into Christ's
+Holy Church, and be made a lively member of the same." That, is to say,
+there is one birth, after the flesh, but a second birth is necessary, a
+birth after the Spirit and into the Church of Christ. Our Confirmation
+Service is simply a service repeating and confirming these views, at
+an age (fourteen to sixteen or so) when the boy or girl is capable of
+understanding what is being done.
+
+But our Baptismal and Confirmation ceremonies combined are clearly
+the exact correspondence and parallel of the old pagan ceremonies of
+Initiation, which are or have been observed in almost every primitive
+tribe over the world. "The rite of the second birth," says Jane
+Harrison, (1) "is widespread, universal, over half the savage world.
+With the savage to be twice-born is the rule. By his first birth he
+comes into the world; by his second he is born into his tribe. At his
+first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk; at his second
+he becomes a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the
+warriors of his tribe."... "These rites are very various, but they all
+point to one moral, that the former things are passed away and that
+the new-born man has entered upon a new life. Simplest of all, and most
+instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East
+Africa, who require that every boy, just before circumcision, must be
+born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she
+pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn
+cries like a babe and is washed." (2)
+
+ (1) Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.
+
+ (2) See also Themis, p. 21.
+
+
+Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one who "enters
+in." He enters into the Tribe; he enters into the revelation of certain
+Mysteries; he becomes an associate of a certain Totem, a certain God; a
+member of a new Society, or Church--a church of Mithra, or Dionysus or
+Christ. To do any of these things he must be born again; he must die
+to the old life; he must pass through ceremonials which symbolize the
+change. One of these ceremonials is washing. As the new-born babe is
+washed, so must the new-born initiate be washed; and as by primitive
+man (and not without reason) BLOOD was considered the most vital and
+regenerative of fluids, the very elixir of life, so in earliest times
+it was common to wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be
+born anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first die.
+So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged, and baptized with his
+own blood, or, in cases, one of the candidates was really killed and his
+blood used as a substitute for the blood of the others. No doubt HUMAN
+sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later it was sufficient
+to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as in the Mithra cult, (1)
+or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' as in the Christian phraseology.
+Finally, with a growing sense of decency and aesthetic perception
+among the various peoples, washing with pure water came in the
+initiation-ceremonies to take the place of blood; and our baptismal
+service has reduced the ceremony to a mere sprinkling with water. (2)
+
+ (1) See ch. iii.
+
+ (2) For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck's
+Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.
+
+
+To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: "More often the new birth
+is stimulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of
+the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at
+initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are
+assembled an old man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies down in a
+grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is
+smoothed over. The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems
+to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground
+round about. The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and
+a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the
+buried man begins to quiver. It moves more and more, and bit by bit the
+man himself starts up from the grave."
+
+Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the actual
+christening we read these words, "Then shall the Priest say: O merciful
+God, grant that old Adam in this child may be so BURIED that the new
+man may be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may die
+in him, and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow
+in him!" Can we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the
+graveside of the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to
+the young initiates as the priest does to-day to those assembled before
+him in church--for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations
+have always been before all things the occasions of moral and social
+teaching? Can we doubt that he said, in substance if not in actual
+words: "As this man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise
+from your old childish life of amusement and self-gratification and,
+ENTER INTO the life of the tribe, the life of the Spirit of the tribe."
+"In totemistic societies," to quote Miss Harrison again, "and in the
+animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is
+born again as THE SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians (1)
+when a man wants to become a Lulem or 'Bear,' however cold the season
+he tears off his clothes, puts on a bear-skin and dashes into the
+woods, where he will stay for three or four days. Every night his
+fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him. They cry out
+Yi! Kelulem (come on, Bear), and he answers with angry growls. Usually
+they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself. He is met, and
+conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there in company with the rest
+of the Bears dances solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and
+reappearance is as common a rite in initiation as stimulated killing and
+resurrection, and has the same object. Both are rites of transition,
+of passing from one to another." In the Christian ceremonies the boy or
+girl puts away childish things and puts on the new man, but instead
+of putting on a bear-skin he puts on Christ. There is not so much
+difference as may appear on the surface. To be identified with your
+Totem is to be identified with the sacred being who watches over your
+tribe, who has given his life for your tribe; it is to be born again,
+to be washed not only with water but with the Holy Spirit of all your
+fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be regenerated
+in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no doubt in cases it does mean
+this, but too often unfortunately it has only amounted to a pretence of
+religious sanction given to the meanest and bitterest quarrels of the
+Churches and the States.
+
+ (1) Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.
+
+
+This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the prevalent pagan
+custom of subjecting the initiates to serious ordeals, often painful and
+even dangerous. If one is to be born again, obviously one must be ready
+to face death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One must be
+able to endure pain, like the Red Indian braves; to go long periods
+fasting and without food or drink, like the choupan among the Western
+Inoits--who, wanders for whole nights over the ice-fields under the
+moon, scantily clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the
+very fear of death and danger, like the Australian novices who, at first
+terrified by the sound of the bull-roarer and threats of fire and the
+knife, learn finally to cast their fears away. (1) By so doing one
+puts off the old childish things, and qualifies oneself by firmness
+and courage to become a worthy member of the society into which one
+is called. (2) The rules of social life are taught--the duty to one's
+tribe, and to oneself, truth-speaking, defence of women and children,
+the care of cattle, the meaning of sex and marriage, and even the
+mysteries of such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe
+possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new life. Things of
+the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing
+the mysteries of the resurrection of Osiris, (3) says that when the
+worshipers had satiated themselves with lamentations over the death
+of the god then the priest would go round anointing them with oil and
+whispering, "Be of good cheer, O Neophytes of the new-arisen God, for to
+us too from our pains shall come salvation." (4)
+
+ (1) According to accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western
+Australia, in their initiations, the lads were frightened by a large
+fire being lighted near them, and hearing the awful sound of the
+bull-roarers, while they were told that Dhuramoolan was about to burn
+them; the legend being that Dhuramoolan, a powerful being, whose voice
+sounded like thunder, would take the boys into the bush and instruct
+them in all the laws, traditions and customs of the community. So he
+pretended that he always killed the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to
+ashes, after which he moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored
+them to life as new beings. (See R. H. Matthews, "The Wiradthuri
+tribes," Journal Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxv, 1896, pp. 297 sq.)
+
+ (2) See Catlin's North-American Indians, vol. i, for initiations
+and ordeals among the Mandans.
+
+ (3) De Errore, c. 22.
+
+ (4) [gr Qarreite, mustai ton qeou seswsmenou,]
+[gr Estai gar hmin ek ponwn swthria.]
+
+
+It would seem that at some very early time in the history of tribal and
+priestly initiations an attempt was made to impress upon the neophytes
+the existence and over-shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly
+beings. Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long
+fastings, the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains
+or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty.
+The developments of this faculty among the black and colored
+peoples--East-Indian, Burmese, African, American-Indian, etc.--are well
+known. Miss Alice Fletcher, who lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty
+years, gives a most interesting account (1) of the general philosophy
+of that people and their rites of initiation. "The Omahas regard all
+animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common
+life, which was continuous with and similar to the will-power they were
+conscious of in themselves. This mysterious power in all things they
+called Wakonda, and through it all things were related to man and
+to each other. In the idea of the continuity of life a relation was
+maintained between the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living,
+and also between the fragment of anything and its entirety." (2) Thus an
+Omaha novice might at any time seek to obtain Wakonda by what was called
+THE RITE OF THE VISION. He would go out alone, fast, chant incantations,
+and finally fall into a trance (much resembling what in modern times has
+been called COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) in which he would perceive the inner
+relations of all things and the solidarity of the least object with the
+rest of the universe.
+
+ (1) Summarized in Themis, pp. 68-71.
+
+ (2) A. C. Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-lock, Journal
+of Anthropological Studies, xxvii (1897-8), p. 436.
+
+
+Another rite in connection with initiation, and common all over
+the pagan world--in Greece, America, Africa, Australia, New Mexico,
+etc.--was the daubing of the novice all over with clay or chalk or even
+dung, and then after a while removing the same. (1) The novice must have
+looked a sufficiently ugly and uncomfortable object in this state; but
+later, when he was thoroughly WASHED, the ceremony must have afforded a
+thrilling illustration of the idea of a new birth, and one which would
+dwell in the minds of the spectators. When the daubing was done as not
+infrequently happened with white clay or gypsum, and the ritual took
+place at night, it can easily be imagined that the figures of young men
+and boys moving about in the darkness would lend support to the idea
+that they were spirits belonging to some intermediate world--who had
+already passed through death and were now waiting for their second birth
+on earth (or into the tribe) which would be signalized by their thorough
+and ceremonial washing. It will be remembered that Herodotus (viii)
+gives a circumstantial account of how the Phocians in a battle with the
+Thessalians smeared six hundred of their bravest warriors with white
+clay so that, looking like supernatural beings, and falling upon the
+Thessalians by night, they terrified the latter and put them to instant
+flight.
+
+ (1) See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 274 sq.
+
+
+Such then--though only very scantily described--were some of the rites
+of Initiation and Second Birth celebrated in the old Pagan world. The
+subject is far too large for adequate treatment within the present
+limits; but even so we cannot but be struck by the appropriateness in
+many cases of the teaching thus given to the young, the concreteness of
+the illustrations, the effectiveness of the symbols used, the dramatic
+character of the rites, the strong enforcement of lessons on the nature
+and duties of the life into which the candidates were about to enter.
+Christianity followed on, and inherited these traditions, but one feels
+that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation, which of course
+correspond to the Pagan Initiations, it falls short of the latter. Its
+ceremonies (certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries)
+are of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to and teaching on
+the immensely important subject of Sex is omitted, the details of social
+and industrial morality are passed by, and instruction is limited to a
+few rather commonplace lessons in general morality and religion.
+
+
+It may be appropriate here, before leaving the subject of the Second
+Birth, to inquire how it has come about that this doctrine--so remote
+and metaphysical as it might appear--has been taken up and embodied in
+their creeds and rituals by quite PRIMITIVE people all over the world,
+to such a degree indeed that it has ultimately been adopted and built
+into the foundations of the latter and more intellectual religions, like
+Hinduism, Mithraism, and the Egyptian and Christian cults. I think the
+answer to this question must be found in the now-familiar fact that the
+earliest peoples felt themselves so much a part of Nature and the animal
+and vegetable world around them that (whenever they thought about these
+matters at all) they never for a moment doubted that the things which
+were happening all round them in the external world were also happening
+within themselves. They saw the Sun, overclouded and nigh to death in
+winter, come to its birth again each year; they saw the Vegetation
+shoot forth anew in spring--the revival of the spirit of the Earth; the
+endless breeding of the Animals, the strange transformations of Worms
+and Insects; the obviously new life taken on by boys and girls at
+puberty; the same at a later age when the novice was transformed into
+the medicine-man--the choupan into the angakok among the Esquimaux, the
+Dacotah youth into the wakan among the Red Indians; and they felt in
+their sub-conscious way the same everlasting forces of rebirth and
+transformation working within themselves. In some of the Greek Mysteries
+the newly admitted Initiates were fed for some time after on milk only
+"as though we were being born again." (See Sallustius, quoted by Gilbert
+Murray.) When sub-conscious knowledge began to glimmer into direct
+consciousness one of the first aspects (and no doubt one of the truest)
+under which people saw life was just thus: as a series of rebirths and
+transformations. (1) The most modern science, I need hardly say, in
+biology as well as in chemistry and the field of inorganic Nature,
+supports that view. The savage in earliest times FELT the truth of some
+things which we to-day are only beginning intellectually to perceive and
+analyze.
+
+ (1) The fervent and widespread belief in animal metamorphoses
+among early peoples is well known.
+
+
+Christianity adopted and absorbed--as it was bound to do--this
+world-wide doctrine of the second birth. Passing over its physiological
+and biological applications, it gave to it a fine spiritual
+significance--or rather it insisted especially on its spiritual
+significance, which (as we have seen) had been widely recognized before.
+Only--as I suppose must happen with all local religions--it narrowed the
+application and outlook of the doctrine down to a special case--"As
+in Adam all die, so in CHRIST shall all be made alive." The Universal
+Spirit which can give rebirth and salvation to EVERY child of man to
+whom it comes, was offered only under a very special form--that of Jesus
+Christ. (1) In this respect it was no better than the religions
+which preceded it. In some respects--that is, where it was especially
+fanatical, blinkered, and hostile to other sects--it was WORSE. But
+to those who perceive that the Great Spirit may bring new birth and
+salvation to some under the form of Osiris, equally well as to others
+under the form of Jesus, or again to some under the form of a Siberian
+totem-Bear equally as to others under the form of Osiris, these
+questionings and narrowings fall away as of no importance. We in this
+latter day can see the main thing, namely that Christianity was and is
+just one phase of a world-old religion, slowly perhaps expanding its
+scope, but whose chief attitudes and orientations have been the same
+through the centuries.
+
+ (1) The same happened with regard to another great Pagan doctrine
+(to which I have just alluded), the doctrine of transformations and
+metamorphoses; and whereas the pagans believed in these things, as the
+common and possible heritage of EVERY man, the Christians only allowed
+themselves to entertain the idea in the special and unique instance of
+the Transfiguration of Christ.
+
+
+Many other illustrations might be taken of the truth of this view, but
+I will confine myself to two or three more. There is the instance of the
+Eucharist and its exceedingly widespread celebration (under very various
+forms) among the pagans all over the world--as well as among Christians.
+I have already said enough on this subject, and need not delay over it.
+By partaking of the sacramental meal, even in its wildest and crudest
+shapes, as in the mysteries of Dionysus, one was identified with and
+united to the god; in its milder and more spiritual aspects as in the
+Mithraic, Egyptian, Hindu and Christian cults, one passed behind the
+veil of maya and this ever-changing world, and entered into the region
+of divine peace and power. (1)
+
+
+ (1) Baring Gould in his Orig. Relig. Belief, I. 401,
+says:--"Among the ancient Hindus Soma was a chief deity; he is called
+the Giver of Life and Health.... He became incarnate among men, was
+taken by them and slain, and brayed in a mortar (a god of corn and wine
+apparently). But he rose in flame to heaven to be 'the Benefactor of the
+World' and the 'Mediator between God and Man!' Through communion with
+him in his sacrifice, man (who partook of this god) has an assurance of
+immortality, for by that sacrament he obtains union with his divinity."
+
+
+Or again the doctrine of the Saviour. That also is one on which I need
+not add much to what has been said already. The number of pagan deities
+(mostly virgin-born and done to death in some way or other in their
+efforts to save mankind) is so great (1) as to be difficult to keep
+account of. The god Krishna in India, the god Indra in Nepaul and
+Thibet, spilt their blood for the salvation of men; Buddha said,
+according to Max Muller, (2) "Let all the sins that were in the world
+fall on me, that the world may be delivered"; the Chinese Tien, the Holy
+One--"one with God and existing with him from all eternity"--died to
+save the world; the Egyptian Osiris was called Saviour, so was Horus;
+so was the Persian Mithras; so was the Greek Hercules who overcame Death
+though his body was consumed in the burning garment of mortality, out
+of which he rose into heaven. So also was the Phrygian Attis called
+Saviour, and the Syrian Tammuz or Adonis likewise--both of whom, as we
+have seen, were nailed or tied to a tree, and afterwards rose again
+from their biers, or coffins. Prometheus, the greatest and earliest
+benefactor of the human race, was NAILED BY THE HANDS and feet, and with
+arms extended, to the rocks of Mount Caucasus. Bacchus or Dionysus,
+born of the virgin Semele to be the Liberator of mankind (Dionysus
+Eleutherios as he was called), was torn to pieces, not unlike Osiris.
+Even in far Mexico Quetzalcoatl, the Saviour, was born of a virgin, was
+tempted, and fasted forty days, was done to death, and his second coming
+looked for so eagerly that (as is well known) when Cortes appeared, the
+Mexicans, poor things, greeted HIM as the returning god! (3) In Peru
+and among the American Indians, North and South of the Equator, similar
+legends are, or were, to be found.
+
+ (1) See for a considerable list Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xx.
+
+ (2) Hist. Sanskrit Literature, p. 80.
+
+ (3) See Kingsborough, Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi.
+
+
+Briefly sketched as all this is, it is enough to prove quite abundantly
+that the doctrine of the Saviour is world-wide and world-old, and that
+Christianity merely appropriated the same and (as the other cults did)
+gave it a special color. Probably the wide range of this doctrine would
+have been far better and more generally known, had not the Christian
+Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the greatest
+precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of pagan claims on
+the subject. There is much to show that the early Church took this line
+with regard to pre-Christian saviours; (1) and in later times the same
+policy is remarkably illustrated by the treatment in the sixteenth
+century of the writings of Sahagun the Spanish missionary--to whose work
+I have already referred. Sahagun was a wonderfully broad-minded and fine
+man who, while he did not conceal the barbarities of the Aztec religion,
+was truthful enough to point out redeeming traits in the manners and
+customs of the people and some resemblances to Christian doctrine and
+practice. This infuriated the bigoted Catholics of the newly formed
+Mexican Church. They purloined the manuscripts of Sahagun's Historia and
+scattered and hid them about the country, and it was only after infinite
+labor and an appeal to the Spanish Court that he got them together
+again. Finally, at the age of eighty, having translated them into
+Spanish (from the original Mexican) he sent them in two big volumes home
+to Spain for safety; but there almost immediately THEY DISAPPEARED, and
+could not be found! It was only after TWO CENTURIES that they ultimately
+turned up (1790) in a Convent at Tolosa in Navarre. Lord Kingsborough
+published them in England in 1830.
+
+ (1) See Tertullian's Apologia, c. 16; Ad Nationes, c. xii.
+
+
+I have thus dwelt upon several of the main doctrines of
+Christianity--namely, those of Sin and Sacrifice, the Eucharist, the
+Saviour, the Second Birth, and Transfiguration--as showing that they are
+by no means unique in our religion, but were common to nearly all the
+religions of the ancient world. The list might be much further extended,
+but there is no need to delay over a subject which is now very generally
+understood. I will, however, devote a page or two to one instance, which
+I think is very remarkable, and full of deep suggestion.
+
+There is no doctrine in Christianity which is more reverenced by the
+adherents of that religion, or held in higher estimation, than that God
+sacrificed his only Son for the salvation of the world; also that since
+the Son was not only of like nature but of the SAME nature with the
+Father, and equal to him as being the second Person of the Divine
+Trinity, the sacrifice amounted to an immolation of Himself for the good
+of mankind. The doctrine is so mystical, so remote, and in a sense so
+absurd and impossible, that it has been a favorite mark through the
+centuries for the ridicule of the scoffers and enemies of the Church;
+and here, it might easily be thought, is a belief which--whether it be
+considered glorious or whether contemptible--is at any rate unique, and
+peculiar to that Church.
+
+And yet the extraordinary fact is that a similar belief ranges all
+through the ancient religions, and can be traced back to the earliest
+times. The word host which is used in the Catholic Mass for the bread
+and wine on the Altar, supposed to be the transubstantiated body
+and blood of Christ, is from the Latin Hostia which the dictionary
+interprets as "an animal slain in sacrifice, a sin-offering." It takes
+us far far back to the Totem stage of folk-life, when the tribe, as I
+have already explained, crowned a victim-bull or bear or other animal
+with flowers, and honoring it with every offering of food and worship,
+sacrificed the victim to the Totem spirit of the tribe, and consumed it
+in an Eucharistic feast--the medicine-man or priest who conducted the
+ritual wearing a skin of the same beast as a sign that he represented
+the Totem-divinity, taking part in the sacrifice of 'himself to
+himself.' It reminds us of the Khonds of Bengal sacrificing their
+meriahs crowned and decorated as gods and goddesses; of the Aztecs doing
+the same; of Quetzalcoatl pricking his elbows and fingers so as to draw
+blood, which he offered on his own altar; or of Odin hanging by his own
+desire upon a tree. "I know I was hanged upon a tree shaken by the winds
+for nine long nights. I was transfixed by a spear; I was moved to Odin,
+myself to myself." And so on. The instances are endless. "I am the
+oblation," says the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, (1) "I am the
+sacrifice, I the ancestral offering." "In the truly orthodox conception
+of sacrifice," says Elie Reclus, (2) "the consecrated offering, be it
+man, woman or virgin, lamb or heifer, cock or dove, represents THE DEITY
+HIMSELF.... Brahma is the 'imperishable sacrifice'; Indra, Soma, Hari
+and the other gods, became incarnate in animals to the sole end that
+they might be immolated. Perusha, the Universal Being, caused himself to
+be slain by the Immortals, and from his substance were born the birds of
+the air, wild and domestic animals, the offerings of butter and curds.
+The world, declared the Rishis, is a series of sacrifices disclosing
+other sacrifices. To stop them would be to suspend the life of Nature.
+The god Siva, to whom the Tipperahs of Bengal are supposed to have
+sacrificed as many as a thousand human victims a year, said to the
+Brahamins: 'It is I that am the actual offering; it is I that you
+butcher upon my altars.'"
+
+ (1) Ch. ix, v. 16.
+
+ (2) Primitive Folk, ch. vi.
+
+
+It was in allusion to this doctrine that R. W. Emerson, paraphrasing the
+Katha-Upanishad, wrote that immortal verse of his:--
+
+     If the red slayer thinks he slays,
+          Or the slain thinks he is slain,
+     They know not well the subtle ways
+          I take, and pass, and turn again.
+
+
+I say it is an astonishing thing to think and realize that this profound
+and mystic doctrine of the eternal sacrifice of Himself, ordained by
+the Great Spirit for the creation and salvation of the world--a doctrine
+which has attracted and fascinated many of the great thinkers and nobler
+minds of Europe, which has also inspired the religious teachings of
+the Indian sages and to a less philosophical degree the writings of the
+Christian Saints--should have been seized in its general outline and
+essence by rude and primitive people before the dawn of history, and
+embodied in their rites and ceremonials. What is the explanation of this
+fact?
+
+It is very puzzling. The whole subject is puzzling. The world-wide
+adoption of similar creeds and rituals (and, we may add, legends and
+fairy tales) among early peoples, and in far-sundered places and times
+is so remarkable that it has given the students of these subjects
+'furiously to think' (1)--yet for the most part without great success in
+the way of finding a solution. The supposition that (1) the creed, rite
+or legend in question has sprung up, so to speak, accidentally, in one
+place, and then has travelled (owing to some inherent plausibility) over
+the rest of the world, is of course one that commends itself readily at
+first; but on closer examination the practical difficulties it presents
+are certainly very great. These include the migrations of customs and
+myths in quite early ages of the earth across trackless oceans and
+continents, and between races and peoples absolutely incapable of
+understanding each other. And if to avoid these difficulties it is
+assumed that the present human race all proceeds from one original
+stock which radiating from one centre--say in South-Eastern Asia
+(2)--overspread the world, carrying its rites and customs with it, why,
+then we are compelled to face the difficulty of supposing this radiation
+to have taken place at an enormous time ago (the continents being then
+all more or less conjoined) and at a period when it is doubtful if any
+religious rites and customs at all existed; not to mention the further
+difficulty of supposing all the four or five hundred languages now
+existing to be descended from one common source. The far tradition of
+the Island of Atlantis seems to afford a possible explanation of the
+community of rites and customs between the Old and New World, and
+this without assuming in any way that Atlantis (if it existed) was the
+original and SOLE cradle of the human race. (3) Anyhow it is clear that
+these origins of human culture must be of extreme antiquity, and that
+it would not be wise to be put off the track of the investigation of a
+possible common source merely by that fact of antiquity.
+
+ (1) See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii.
+
+ (2) See Hastings, Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "Ethnology."
+
+ (3) E. J. Payne, History of the New World called America (vol. i,
+p. 93) says: "It is certain that Europe and America once formed a single
+continent," but inroads of the sea "left a vast island or peninsula
+stretching from Iceland to the Azores--which gradually disappeared."
+Also he speaks (i. 93) of the "Miocene Bridge" between Siberia and the
+New World.
+
+
+A second supposition, however, is (2) that the natural psychological
+evolution of the human mind has in the various times and climes led folk
+of the most diverse surroundings and heredity--and perhaps even sprung
+from separate anthropoid stocks--to develop their social and religious
+ideas along the same general lines--and that even to the extent of
+exhibiting at times a remarkable similarity in minute details. This is a
+theory which commends itself greatly to a deeper and more philosophical
+consideration; but it brings us up point-blank against another most
+difficult question (which we have already raised), namely, how to
+account for extremely rude and primitive peoples in the far past, and on
+the very borderland of the animal life, having been SUSCEPTIBLE to the
+germs of great religious ideas (such as we have mentioned) and having
+been instinctively--though not of course by any process of conscious
+reasoning--moved to express them in symbols and rites and ceremonials,
+and (later no doubt) in myths and legends, which satisfied their
+FEELINGS and sense of fitness--though they may not have known WHY--and
+afterwards were capable of being taken up and embodied in the great
+philosophical religions.
+
+This difficulty almost compels us to a view of human knowledge which has
+found supporters among some able thinkers--the view, namely, that a vast
+store of knowledge is already contained in the subconscious mind of man
+(and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer experience
+to bring it to the surface; and that in the second stage of human
+psychology this process of crude and piecemeal externalization is
+taking place, in preparation for the final or third stage in which the
+knowledge will be re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a
+high and harmonious plane--something like the present intuition of the
+animals as we perceive it on the animal plane. However this general
+subject is one on which I shall touch again, and I do not propose to
+dwell on it at any length now.
+
+There is a third alternative theory (3)--a combination of (1) and
+(2)--namely, that if one accepts (2) and the idea that at any given
+stage of human development there is a PREDISPOSITION to certain symbols
+and rites belonging to that stage, then it is much more easy to accept
+theory (1) as an important factor in the spread of such symbols and
+rites; for clearly, then, the smallest germ of a custom or practice,
+transported from one country or people to another at the right time,
+would be sufficient to wake the development or growth in question
+and stimulate it into activity. It will be seen, therefore, that the
+important point towards the solution of this whole puzzling question is
+the discussion, of theory (2)--and to this theory, as illustrated by the
+world-wide myth of the Golden Age, I will now turn.
+
+
+
+
+IX. MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+
+The tradition of a "Golden Age" is widespread over the world, and it is
+not necessary to go at any length into the story of the Garden of Eden
+and the other legends which in almost every country illustrate this
+tradition. Without indulging in sentiment on the subject we may hold it
+not unlikely that the tradition is justified by the remembrance, among
+the people of every race, of a pre-civilization period of comparative
+harmony and happiness when two things, which to-day we perceive to be
+the prolific causes of discord and misery, were absent or only weakly
+developed--namely, PROPERTY and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. (1)
+
+ (1) For a fuller working out of this, see Civilisation: its Cause
+and Cure, by E. Carpenter, ch. i.
+
+
+During the first century B.C. there was a great spread of Messianic
+Ideas over the Roman world, and Virgil's 4th Eclogue, commonly called
+the Messianic Eclogue, reflects very clearly this state of the public
+mind. The expected babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian
+(Augustus) the first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded it
+in Virgil's verse. Unfortunately it turned out to be a GIRL! However
+there is little doubt that Virgil did--in that very sad age of the
+world, an age of "misery and massacre," and in common with thousands
+of others--look for the coming of a great 'redeemer.' It was only a few
+years earlier--about B.C. 70--that the great revolt of the shamefully
+maltreated Roman slaves occurred, and that in revenge six thousand
+prisoners from Spartacus' army were nailed on crosses all the way from
+Rome to Capua (150 miles). But long before this Hesiod had recorded a
+past Golden Age when life had been gracious in communal fraternity and
+joyful in peace, when human beings and animals spoke the same language,
+when death had followed on sleep, without old age or disease, and after
+death men had moved as good daimones or genii over the lands. Pindar,
+three hundred years after Hesiod, had confirmed the existence of the
+Islands of the Blest, where the good led a blameless, tearless, life.
+Plato the same, (1) with further references to the fabled island of
+Atlantis; the Egyptians believed in a former golden age under the god
+R[a^] to which they looked back with regret and envy; the Persians had
+a garden of Eden similar to that of the Hebrews; the Greeks a garden
+of the Hesperides, in which dwelt the serpent whose head was ultimately
+crushed beneath the heel of Hercules; and so on. The references to a
+supposed far-back state of peace and happiness are indeed numerous.
+
+ (1) See arts. by Margaret Scholes, Socialist Review, Nov. and
+Dec. 1912.
+
+
+So much so that latterly, and partly to explain their prevalence, a
+theory has been advanced which may be worth while mentioning. It is
+called the "Theory of intra-uterine Blessedness," and, remote as it may
+at first appear, it certainly has some claim for attention. The theory
+is that in the minds of mature people there still remain certain vague
+memories of their pre-natal days in the maternal womb--memories of a
+life which, though full of growing vigor and vitality, was yet at that
+time one of absolute harmony with the surroundings, and of perfect peace
+and contentment, spent within the body of the mother--the embryo indeed
+standing in the same relation to the mother as St. Paul says WE stand to
+God, "IN whom we live and move and have our being"; and that these vague
+memories of the intra-uterine life in the individual are referred back
+by the mature mind to a past age in the life of the RACE. Though it
+would not be easy at present to positively confirm this theory, yet one
+may say that it is neither improbable nor unworthy of consideration;
+also that it bears a certain likeness to the former ones about the
+Eden-gardens, etc. The well-known parallelism of the Individual history
+with the Race-history, the "recapitulation" by the embryo of the
+development of the race, does in fact afford an additional argument for
+its favorable reception.
+
+These considerations, and what we have said so often in the foregoing
+chapters about the unity of the Animals (and Early Man) with Nature, and
+their instinctive and age-long adjustment to the conditions of the
+world around them, bring us up hard and fast against the following
+conclusions, which I think we shall find difficult to avoid.
+
+We all recognize the extraordinary grace and beauty, in their different
+ways, of the (wild) animals; and not only their beauty but the extreme
+fitness of their actions and habits to their surroundings--their subtle
+and penetrating Intelligence in fact. Only we do not generally use
+the word "Intelligence." We use another word (Instinct)--and rightly
+perhaps, because their actions are plainly not the result of definite
+self-conscious reasoning, such as we use, carried out by each
+individual; but are (as has been abundantly proved by Samuel Butler and
+others) the systematic expression of experiences gathered up and sorted
+out and handed down from generation to generation in the bosom of the
+race--an Intelligence in fact, or Insight, of larger subtler scope than
+the other, and belonging to the tribal or racial Being rather than to
+the isolated individual--a super-consciousness in fact, ramifying afar
+in space and time.
+
+But if we allow (as we must) this unity and perfection of nature, and
+this somewhat cosmic character of the mind, to exist among the Animals,
+we can hardly refuse to believe that there must have been a period when
+Man, too, hardly as yet differentiated from them, did himself
+possess these same qualities--perhaps even in greater degree than the
+animals--of grace and beauty of body, perfection of movement and action,
+instinctive perception and knowledge (of course in limited spheres); and
+a period when he possessed above all a sense of unity with his fellows
+and with surrounding Nature which became the ground of a common
+consciousness between himself and his tribe, similar to that which
+Maeterlinck, in the case of the Bees, calls the Spirit of the Hive. (1)
+It would be difficult, nay impossible, to suppose that human beings
+on their first appearance formed an entire exception in the process of
+evolution, or that they were completely lacking in the very graces and
+faculties which we so admire in the animals--only of course we see that
+(LIKE the animals) they would not be SELF-conscious in these matters,
+and what perception they had of their relations to each other or to
+the world around them would be largely inarticulate and
+SUB-conscious--though none the less real for that.
+
+ (1) See The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck; and for
+numerous similar cases among other animals, P. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: a
+factor in Evolution.
+
+
+Let us then grant this preliminary assumption--and it clearly is not
+a large or hazardous one--and what follows? It follows--since to-day
+discord is the rule, and Man has certainly lost the grace, both physical
+and mental, of the animals--that at some period a break must have
+occurred in the evolution-process, a discontinuity--similar perhaps to
+that which occurs in the life of a child at the moment when it is born
+into the world. Humanity took a new departure; but a departure which for
+the moment was signalized as a LOSS--the loss of its former harmony and
+self-adjustment. And the cause or accompaniment of this change was the
+growth of Self-consciousness. Into the general consciousness of the
+tribe (in relation to its environment) which in fact had constituted
+the mentality of the animals and of man up to this stage, there now was
+intruded another kind of consciousness, a consciousness centering round
+each little individual self and concerned almost entirely with the
+interests of the latter. Here was evidently a threat to the continuance
+of the former happy conditions. It was like the appearance of
+innumerable little ulcers in a human body--a menace which if continued
+would inevitably lead to the break-up of the body. It meant loss of
+tribal harmony and nature-adjustment. It meant instead of unity a myriad
+conflicting centres; it meant alienation from the spirit of the tribe,
+the separation of man from man, discord, recrimination, and the fatal
+unfolding of the sense of sin. The process symbolized itself in the
+legend of the Fall. Man ate of the Tree of the knowledge of good and
+evil. Sometimes people wonder why knowledge of any kind--and especially
+the knowledge of good and evil--should have brought a curse. But the
+reason is obvious. Into, the placid and harmonious life of the animal
+and human tribes fulfilling their days in obedience to the slow
+evolutions and age-long mandates of nature, Self-consciousness broke
+with its inconvenient and impossible query: "How do these arrangements
+suit ME? Are they good for me, are they evil for me? I want to know. I
+WILL KNOW!" Evidently knowledge (such knowledge as we understand by
+the word) only began, and could only begin, by queries relating to the
+little local self. There was no other way for it to begin. Knowledge and
+self-consciousness were born, as twins, together. Knowledge therefore
+meant Sin (1); for self-consciousness meant sin (and it means sin
+to-day). Sin is Separation. That is probably (though disputed) the
+etymology of the word--that which sunders. (2) The essence of sin is
+one's separation from the whole (the tribe or the god) of which one is
+a part. And knowledge--which separates subject from object, and in its
+inception is necessarily occupied with the 'good and evil' of the little
+local self, is the great engine of this separation. (Mark! I say nothing
+AGAINST this association of Self-consciousness with 'Sin' (so-called)
+and 'Knowledge' (so-called). The growth of all three together is an
+absolutely necessary part of human evolution, and to rail against it
+would be absurd. But we may as well open our eyes and see the fact
+straight instead of blinking it.) The culmination of the process and the
+fulfilment of the 'curse' we may watch to-day in the towering expansion
+of the self-conscious individualized Intellect--science as the handmaid
+of human Greed devastating the habitable world and destroying its
+unworthy civilization. And the process must go on--necessarily must
+go on--until Self-consciousness, ceasing its vain quest (vain in both
+senses) for the separate domination of life, surrenders itself back
+again into the arms of the Mother-consciousness from which it originally
+sprang--surrenders itself back, not to be merged in nonentity, but to be
+affiliated in loving dependence on and harmony with the cosmic life.
+
+ (1) Compare also other myths, like Cupid and Psyche, Lohengrin
+etc., in which a fatal curiosity leads to tragedy.
+
+ (2) German Sunde, sin, and sonder, separated; Dutch zonde, sin;
+Latin sons, guilty. Not unlikely that the German root Suhn, expiation,
+is connected; Suhn-bock, a scape-goat.
+
+
+All this I have dealt with in far more detail in Civilization: its
+Cause and Cure, and in The Art of Creation; but I have only repeated the
+outline of it as above, because some such outline is necessary for the
+proper ordering and understanding of the points which follow.
+
+We are not concerned now with the ultimate effects of the 'Fall' of Man
+or with the present-day fulfilment of the Eden-curse. What we want to
+understand is how the 'Fall' into self-consciousness led to that great
+panorama of Ritual and Religion which we have very briefly described
+and summarized in the preceding chapters of this book. We want for the
+present to fix our attention on the COMMENCEMENT of that process by
+which man lapsed away from his living community with Nature and his
+fellows into the desert of discord and toil, while the angels of the
+flaming sword closed the gates of Paradise behind him.
+
+It is evident I think that in that 'golden' stage when man was simply
+the crown and perfection of the animals--and it is hardly possible
+to refuse the belief in such a stage--he possessed in reality all the
+essentials of Religion. (1) It is not necessary to sentimentalize over
+him; he was probably raw and crude in his lusts of hunger and of sex;
+he was certainly ignorant and superstitious; he loved fighting with
+and persecuting 'enemies' (which things of course all religions
+to-day--except perhaps the Buddhist--love to do); he was dominated often
+by unreasoning Fear, and was consequently cruel. Yet he was full of that
+Faith which the animals have to such an admirable degree--unhesitating
+faith in the inner promptings of his OWN nature; he had the joy which
+comes of abounding vitality, springing up like a fountain whose outlet
+is free and unhindered; he rejoiced in an untroubled and unbroken
+sense of unity with his Tribe, and in elaborate social and friendly
+institutions within its borders; he had a marvelous sense-acuteness
+towards Nature and a gift in that direction verging towards
+"second-sight"; strengthened by a conviction--which had never become
+CONSCIOUS because it had never been QUESTIONED--of his own personal
+relation to the things outside him, the Earth, the Sky, the Vegetation,
+the Animals. Of such a Man we get glimpses in the far past--though
+indeed only glimpses, for the simple reason that all our knowledge of
+him comes through civilized channels; and wherever civilization has
+touched these early peoples it has already withered and corrupted
+them, even before it has had the sense to properly observe them. It
+is sufficient, however, just to mention peoples like some of the early
+Pacific Islanders, the Zulus and Kafirs of South Africa, the Fans of the
+Congo Region (of whom Winwood Reade (2) speaks so highly), some of the
+Malaysian and Himalayan tribes, the primitive Chinese, and even the
+evidence with regard to the neolithic peoples of Europe, (3) in order to
+show what I mean.
+
+ (1) See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths, etc., introduction: "The
+primitive life of humanity, in so far as it is not purely animal, is
+religious. Religion is the parent stem which has thrown off, one by one,
+art, agriculture, law, morality, politics, etc."
+
+ (2) Savage Africa, ch. xxxvii.
+
+ (3) See Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, ch. iii.
+
+
+Perhaps one of the best ideas of the gulf of difference between the
+semi-civilized and the quite primal man is given by A. R. Wallace in
+his Life (Vol. i, p. 288): "A most unexpected sensation of surprise and
+delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature
+with absolute uncontaminated savages! This was on the Uaupes river....
+They were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing
+to do with the white men or their ways; they walked with the free step
+of the independent forest-dweller... original and self-sustaining as the
+wild animals of the forests, absolutely independent of civilization...
+living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless
+generations before America was discovered. Indeed the true denizen of
+the Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be
+forgotten." Elsewhere (3) Wallace speaks of the quiet, good-natured,
+inoffensive character of these copper-colored peoples, and of their
+quickness of hand and skill, and continues: "their figures are generally
+superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
+statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human
+form."
+
+
+ (3) Travels on the Amazon (1853), ch. xvii.
+
+
+Though some of the peoples just mentioned may be said to belong to
+different grades or stages of human evolution and physically some no
+doubt were far superior to others, yet they mostly exhibit this simple
+grace of the bodily and mental organism, as well as that closeness of
+tribal solidarity of which I have spoken. The immense antiquity, of
+the clan organization, as shown by investigations into early marriage,
+points to the latter conclusion. Travellers among Bushmen, Hottentots,
+Fuegians, Esquimaux, Papuans and other peoples--peoples who have been
+pushed aside into unfavorable areas by the invasion of more warlike
+and better-equipped races, and who have suffered physically in
+consequence--confirm this. Kropotkin, speaking of the Hottentots, quotes
+the German author P. Kolben who travelled among them in 1275 or so. "He
+knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence,
+but could not praise their tribal morality highly enough. Their word is
+sacred, he wrote, they know nothing of the corruption and faithless arts
+of Europe. They live in great tranquillity and are seldom at war with
+their neighbors, and are all kindness and goodwill to one another." (1)
+Kropotkin further says: "Let me remark that when Kolben says 'they are
+certainly the most friendly, the most liberal and the most benevolent
+people to one another that ever appeared on the earth' he wrote a
+sentence which has continually appeared since in the description of
+savages. When first meeting with primitive races, the Europeans usually
+make a caricature of their life; but when an intelligent man has
+stayed among them for a longer time he generally describes them as the
+'kindest' or the 'gentlest' race on the earth. These very same words
+have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dyaks,
+the Aleuts, the Papuans, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also
+remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the
+Sioux, and several others. The very frequency of that high commendation
+already speaks volumes in itself." (2)
+
+ (1) P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 90. W. J. Solias also speaks in
+terms of the highest praise of the Bushmen--"their energy, patience,
+courage, loyalty, affection, good manners and artistic sense" (Ancient
+Hunters, 1915, p. 425).
+
+ (2) Ibid, p. 91.
+
+
+Many of the tribes, like the Aleuts, Eskimos, Dyaks, Papuans, Fuegians,
+etc., are themselves in the Neolithic stage of culture--though for the
+reason given above probably degenerated physically from the standard of
+their neolithic ancestors; and so the conclusion is forced upon one
+that there must have been an IMMENSE PERIOD, (1) prior to the first
+beginnings of 'civilization,' in which the human tribes in general led a
+peaceful and friendly life on the earth, comparatively little broken
+up by dissensions, in close contact with Nature and in that degree
+of sympathy with and understanding of the Animals which led to the
+establishment of the Totem system. Though it would be absurd to credit
+these tribes with any great degree of comfort and well-being according
+to our modern standards, yet we may well suppose that the memory of
+this long period lingered on for generations and generations and was
+ultimately idealized into the Golden Age, in contrast to the succeeding
+period of everlasting warfare, rancor and strife, which came in with the
+growth of Property with its greeds and jealousies, and the accentuation
+of Self-consciousness with all its vanities and ambitions.
+
+ (1) See for estimates of periods ch. xiv; also, for the
+peacefulness of these early peoples, Havelock Ellis on "The Origin of
+War," where he says "We do not find the WEAPONS of warfare or the WOUNDS
+of warfare among these Palaeolithic remains ... it was with civilization
+that the art of killing developed, i. e. within the last 10,000 or
+12,000 years when Neolithic men (who became our ancestors) were just
+arriving."
+
+
+I say that each tribe at this early stage of development had within it
+the ESSENTIALS of what we call Religion--namely a bedrock sense of its
+community with Nature, and of the Common life among its members--a sense
+so intimate and fundamental that it was hardly aware of itself (any more
+than the fish is aware of the sea in which it lives), but yet was really
+the matrix of tribal thought and the spring of tribal action. It
+was this sense of unity which was destined by the growth of
+SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS to come to light and evidence in the shape of all
+manner of rituals and ceremonials; and by the growth of the IMAGINATIVE
+INTELLECT to embody itself in the figures and forms of all manner of
+deities.
+
+Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark soaring in the
+eye of the sun, and singing rapt between its "heaven and home" realizes
+no doubt in actual fact all that those two words mean to us; yet
+its realization is quite subconscious. It does not define its own
+experience: it FEELS but it does not THINK. In order to come to the
+stage of THINKING it would perhaps be necessary that the lark should
+be exiled from the earth and the sky, and confined in a cage. Early Man
+FELT the great truths and realities of Life--often I believe more purely
+than we do--but he could not give form to his experience. THAT stage
+came when he began to lose touch with these realities; and it showed
+itself in rites and ceremonials. The inbreak of self-consciousness
+brought OUT the facts of his inner life into ritualistic and afterwards
+into intellectual forms.
+
+Let me give examples. For a long time the Tribe is all in all; the
+individual is completely subject to the 'Spirit of the Hive'; he
+does not even THINK of contravening it. Then the day comes when
+self-interest, as apart from the Tribe, becomes sufficiently strong to
+drive him against some tribal custom. He breaks the tabu; he eats the
+forbidden apple; he sins against the tribe, and is cast out. Suddenly he
+finds himself an exile, lonely, condemned and deserted. A horrible sense
+of distress seizes him--something of which he had no experience before.
+He tries to think about it all, to understand the situation, but
+is dazed and cannot arrive at any conclusion. His one NECESSITY is
+Reconciliation, Atonement. He finds he cannot LIVE outside of and
+alienated from his tribe. He makes a Sacrifice, an offering to his
+fellows, as a seal of sincerity--an offering of his own bodily suffering
+or precious blood, or the blood of some food-animal, or some valuable
+gift or other--if only he may be allowed to return. The offering is
+accepted. The ritual is performed; and he is received back. I have
+already spoken of this perfectly natural evolution of the twin-ideas
+of Sin and Sacrifice, so I need not enlarge upon the subject. But two
+things we may note here: (1) that the ritual, being so concrete (and
+often severe), graves itself on the minds of those concerned, and
+expresses the feelings of the tribe, with an intensity and sharpness of
+outline which no words could rival, and (2) that such rituals may have,
+and probably did, come into use even while language itself was in an
+infantile condition and incapable of dealing with the psychological
+situation except by symbols. They, the rituals, were the first effort of
+the primitive mind to get beyond, subconscious feeling and emerge into a
+world of forms and definite thought.
+
+Let us carry the particular instance, given above, a stage farther, even
+to the confines of abstract Thought and Philosophy. I have spoken of
+"The Spirit of the Hive" as if the term were applicable to the Human as
+well as to the Bee tribe. The individual bee obviously has never THOUGHT
+about that 'Spirit,' nor mentally understood what Maeterlinck means by
+it; and yet in terms of actual experience it is an intense reality to
+the bee (ordaining for instance on some fateful day the slaughter of all
+the drones), controlling bee-movements and bee-morality generally. The
+individual tribesman similarly steeped in the age-long human life of his
+fellows has never thought of the Tribe as an ordaining being or Spirit,
+separate from himself--TILL that day when he is exiled and outcast from
+it. THEN he sees himself and the tribe as two opposing beings, himself
+of course an Intelligence or Spirit in his own limited degree, the Tribe
+as a much greater Intelligence or Spirit, standing against and over him.
+From that day the conception of a god arises on him. It may be only
+a totem-god--a divine Grizzly-Bear or what not--but still a god or
+supernatural Presence, embodied in the life of the tribe. This is
+what Sin has taught him. (1) This is what Fear, founded on
+self-consciousness, has revealed to him. The revelation may be true,
+or it may be fallacious (I do not prejudge it); but there it is--the
+beginning of that long series of human evolutions which we call
+Religion.
+
+ (1) It is to be noted, in that charming idyll of the Eden garden,
+that it is only AFTER eating of the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve
+perceive the Lord God walking in the garden, and converse with him
+(Genesis iii. 8).
+
+
+ (For when the human mind has reached that stage of
+consciousness in which each man realizes his own 'self' as a rational
+and consistent being, "looking before and after," then, as I have
+said already, the mind projects on the background of Nature similarly
+rational Presences which we may call 'Gods'; and at that stage
+'Religion' begins. Before that, when the mind is quite unformed and
+dream-like, and consists chiefly of broken and scattered rays, and when
+distinct self-consciousness is hardly yet developed, then the presences
+imagined in Nature are merely flickering and intermittent phantoms, and
+their propitiation and placation comes more properly under, the head of
+'Magic.')
+
+So much for the genesis of the religious ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, and
+the rites connected with these ideas--their genesis through the in-break
+of self-consciousness upon the corporate SUB-consciousness of the life
+of the Community. But an exactly similar process may be observed in the
+case of the other religious ideas.
+
+I spoke of the doctrine of the SECOND BIRTH, and the rites connected
+with it both in Paganism and in Christianity. There is much to show that
+among quite primitive peoples there is less of shrinking from death and
+more of certainty about a continued life after death than we generally
+find among more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has been,
+quite, common among many tribes for the old and decrepit, who are
+becoming a burden to their fellows, to offer themselves for happy
+dispatch, and to take willing part in the ceremonial preparations for
+their own extinction; and this readiness is encouraged by their
+na[i:]ve and untroubled belief in a speedy transference to "happy
+hunting-grounds" beyond the grave. The truth is that when, as in such
+cases, the tribal life is very whole and unbroken--each individual
+identifying himself completely with the tribe--the idea of the
+individual's being dropped out at death, and left behind by the tribe,
+hardly arises. The individual is the tribe, has no other existence.
+The tribe goes on, living a life which is eternal, and only changes its
+hunting-grounds; and the individual, identified with the tribe, feels in
+some subconscious way the same about himself.
+
+But when one member has broken faith with the tribe, when he has sinned
+against it and become an outcast--ah! then the terrors of death and
+extinction loom large upon him. "The wages of sin is death." There comes
+a period in the evolution of tribal life when the primitive bonds are
+loosening, when the tendency towards SELF-will and SELF-determination
+(so necessary of course in the long run for the evolution of humanity)
+becomes a real danger to the tribe, and a terror to the wise men and
+elders of the community. It is seen that the children inherit this
+tendency--even from their infancy. They are no longer mere animals,
+easily herded; it seems that they are born in sin--or at least in
+ignorance and neglect of their tribal life and calling. The only cure is
+that they MUST BE BORN AGAIN. They must deliberately and of set purpose
+be adopted into the tribe, and be made to realize, even severely,
+in their own persons what is happening. They must go through the
+initiations necessary to impress this upon them. Thus a whole series of
+solemn rites spring up, different no doubt in every locality, but all
+having the same object and purpose. (And one can understand how the
+necessity of such initiations and second birth may easily have been
+itself felt in every race, at some stage of its evolution--and THAT
+quite as a spontaneous growth, and independently of any contagion of
+example caught from other races.)
+
+The same may be said about the world-wide practice of the Eucharist.
+No more effective method exists for impressing on the members of a body
+their community of life with each other, and causing them to forget
+their jangling self-interests, than to hold a feast in common. It is a
+method which has been honored in all ages as well as to-day. But when
+the flesh partaken of at the feast is that of the Totem--the guardian
+and presiding genius of the tribe--or perhaps of one of its chief
+food-animals--then clearly the feast takes on a holy and solemn
+character. It becomes a sacrament of unity--of the unity of all with the
+tribe, and with each other. Self-interests and self-consciousness are
+for the time submerged, and the common life asserts itself; but here
+again we see that a custom like this would not come into being as a
+deliberate rite UNTIL self-consciousness and the divisions consequent
+thereon had grown to be an obvious evil. The herd-animals (cows, sheep,
+and so forth) do not have Eucharists, simply because they are sensible
+enough to feed along the same pastures without quarrelling over the
+richest tufts of grass.
+
+When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically) is not that
+of a divinized animal, but the flesh of a human-formed god--as in the
+mysteries of Dionysus or Osiris or Christ--then we are led to suspect
+(and of course this theory is widely held and supported) that the rites
+date from a very far-back period when a human being, as representative
+of the tribe, was actually slain, dismembered and partly devoured;
+though as time went on, the rite gradually became glossed over and
+mitigated into a love-communion through the sharing of bread and wine.
+
+It is curious anyhow that the dismemberment or division into fragments
+of the body of a god (as in the case of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis,
+Praj[a']pati and others) should be so frequent a tenet of the
+old religions, and so commonly associated with a love-feast of
+reconciliation and resurrection. It may be fairly interpreted as a
+symbol of Nature-dismemberment in Winter and resurrection in Spring; but
+we must also not forget that it may (and indeed must) have stood as
+an allegory of TRIBAL dismemberment and reconciliation--the tribe,
+conceived of as a divinity, having thus suffered and died through the
+inbreak of sin and the self-motive, and risen again into wholeness by
+the redemption of love and sacrifice. Whatever view the rank and file of
+the tribe may have taken of the matter, I think it is incontestable that
+the more thoughtful regarded these rites as full of mystic and spiritual
+meaning. It is of the nature, as I have said before, of these early
+symbols and ceremonies that they held so many meanings in solution; and
+it is this fact which gave them a poetic or creative quality, and their
+great hold upon the public mind.
+
+I use the word "tribe" in many places here as a matter of convenience;
+not forgetting however that in some cases "clan" might be more
+appropriate, as referring to a section of a tribe; or "people" or "folk"
+as referring to unions of SEVERAL tribes. It is impossible of course to
+follow out all the gradations of organization from tribal up to national
+life; but it may be remembered that while animal totems prevail as a
+rule in the earlier stages, human-formed gods become more conspicuous in
+the later developments. All through, the practice of the Eucharist goes
+on, in varying forms adapting itself to the surrounding conditions; and
+where in the later societies a religion like Mithraism or Christianity
+includes people of very various race, the Rite loses quite naturally
+its tribal significance and becomes a celebration of allegiance to a
+particular god--of unity within a special Church, in fact. Ultimately it
+may become--as for a brief moment in the history of the early Christians
+it seemed likely to do--a celebration of allegiance to all Humanity,
+irrespective of race or creed or color of skin or of mind: though
+unfortunately that day seems still far distant and remains yet
+unrealized. It must not be overlooked, however, that the religion of the
+Persian B[a^]b, first promulgated in 1845 to 1850--and a subject I shall
+deal with presently--had as a matter of fact this all embracing and
+universal scope.
+
+To return to the Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Our conclusion seems to
+be that there really was such a period of comparative harmony in human
+life--to which later generations were justified in looking back, and
+looking back with regret. It corresponded in the psychology of human
+Evolution to stage One. The second stage was that of the Fall; and so
+one is inevitably led to the conjecture and the hope that a third stage
+will redeem the earth and its inhabitants to a condition of comparative
+blessedness.
+
+
+
+
+X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+
+From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past Golden Age,
+and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist, in the sense indicated
+in the last chapter, to that of the equally widespread belief in a
+human-divine Saviour, is a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago,
+dealing with this subject, (1) I wrote as follows:--"The true Self of
+man consists in his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows;
+and when the man abandons his true Self he abandons also his true
+relation to his fellows. The mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else
+the unit-man will drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to
+separate himself from the inner, the unit-man from the mass-Man, then
+the reign of individuality begins--a false and impossible individuality
+of course, but the only means of coming to the consciousness of the true
+individuality." And further, "Thus this divinity in each creature,
+being that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was
+conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer--healer of wounds of
+body and wounds of heart--the Man within the man, whom it was not only
+possible to know, but whom to know and be united with was the alone
+salvation. This, I take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as
+accepted at some elder time of human history, and by us seen as through
+a glass darkly."
+
+ (1) See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.
+
+
+I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our pride of
+Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses of tribal
+life--that these elder people perceived as a matter of fact and direct
+consciousness the redeeming presence (within each unit-member of the
+group) of the larger life to which he belonged. This larger life was a
+reality--"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he called it by
+the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name of a Nature-divinity, or
+by the name of some gracious human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra,
+Attis, Orpheus, or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity
+itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living incarnate Being
+by the realization of whose presence the little mortal could be lifted
+out of exile and error and death and suffering into splendor and life
+eternal.
+
+It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship of
+"Saviours" all over the world, from China to Peru, can only be
+ascribed to the natural working of some such law of human and tribal
+psychology--from earliest times and in all races the same--springing up
+quite spontaneously and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the
+mere contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil, long
+before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into the heads of all
+these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great a compliment both to the
+power and the ingenuity of his Satanic Majesty--though the ingenuity
+with which the early Church DID itself suppress all information about
+these pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited to
+Satan! And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous and universal
+consent of belief to have sprung by mere contagion from one accidental
+source would seem equally far-fetched and unlikely.
+
+But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling belief in
+human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread legend of their birth
+from Virgin-mothers. There is hardly a god--as we have already had
+occasion to see--whose worship as a benefactor of mankind attained
+popularity in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and
+America--who was not reported to have been born from a Virgin, or at
+least from a mother who owed the Child not to any earthly father, but to
+an impregnation from Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more
+astonishing because the belief in the possibility of such a thing is so
+entirely out of the line of our modern thought. So that while it
+would seem not unnatural that such a legend should have, sprung up
+spontaneously in some odd benighted corner of the world, we find it
+very difficult to understand how in that case it should have spread
+so rapidly in every direction, or--if it did not spread--how we are
+to account for its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these widely sundered
+regions.
+
+I think here, and for the understanding of this problem, we are thrown
+back upon a very early age of human evolution--the age of Magic. Before
+any settled science or philosophy or religion existed, there were
+still certain Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had
+a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact affected it
+deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder'; to hear thunder, to
+imitate it, even to mention it, are sure ways of rousing superstitious
+attention and imagination. Such another word is 'Serpent,' another
+'Tree,' and so forth. There is no one who is insensible to the
+reverberation of these and other such words and images (1); and among
+them, standing prominently out, are the two 'Mother' and 'Virgin.'
+The word Mother touches the deepest springs of human feeling. As the
+earliest word learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with
+the heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor must we forget
+that in a primitive state of society (the Matriarchate) that influence
+was probably even greater than now; for the father of the child being
+(often as not) UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more
+intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about it which has
+remained even until to-day. But if that word rooted itself deep in the
+heart of the Child, the other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for
+the full grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too, has never
+lost.
+
+ (1) Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of
+such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the square,
+the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like 3, 4, 5, etc.,
+quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.
+
+
+There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human
+worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all
+things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the
+cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of
+all the gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored far and wide as the
+gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the
+same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms
+of Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The
+Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and
+to it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. (There are
+strange accounts of a huge fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in
+the midst, and of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep
+and corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames. (1)) It was,
+in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest
+and most spontaneous of cults--the worship of the Earth-mother,
+the all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her
+never-failing ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.
+
+ (1) See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.
+
+
+But when the Saviour-legend sprang up--as indeed I think it must
+have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and people after people,
+independently--then, whether it sprang from the divinization of some
+actual man who showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows
+"sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification of the tribe
+itself as a god, in either case the question of the hero's parentage was
+bound to arise. If the 'saviour' was plainly a personification of the
+tribe, it was obviously impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal
+mother. In that case--and if the tribe was generally traced in the
+legends to some primeval Animal or Mountain or thing of Nature--it was
+probably easy to think of him (the saviour) as, born out of Nature's
+womb, descended perhaps from that pure Virgin of the World who is
+the Earth and Nature, who rules the skies at night, and stands in the
+changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped (as we have seen) in
+the great constellation Virgo. If, on the other hand, he was the
+divinization of some actual man, more or less known either personally
+or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the name of his
+mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his father,
+that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very uncertain,
+it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the midnight
+visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.
+
+There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspiring to this
+conclusion. One is the condition of affairs in a remote matriarchial
+period, when descent was reckoned always through the maternal line, and
+the fatherhood in each generation was obscure or unknown or commonly
+left out of account; and the other is the fact--so strange and difficult
+for us to realize--that among some very primitive peoples, like the
+Australian aborigines, the necessity for a woman to have intercourse
+with a male, in order to bring about conception and child-birth, was
+actually not recognized. Scientific observation had not always got as
+far as that, and the matter was still under the domain of Magic! (1)
+A Virgin-Mother was therefore a quite imaginable (not to say
+'conceivable') thing; and indeed a very beautiful and fascinating thing,
+combining in one image the potent magic of two very wonderful words.
+It does not seem impossible that considerations of this kind led to the
+adoption of the doctrine or legend of the virgin-mother and the heavenly
+father among so many races and in so many localities--even without any
+contagion of tradition among them.
+
+ (1) Probably the long period (nine months) elapsing between
+cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the subject.
+Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by childbirth. And,
+more important still, the number of virgins of a mature age in primitive
+societies was so very minute that the fact of their childlessness
+attracted no attention--whereas in OUR societies the sterility of the
+whole class is patent to everyone.
+
+
+Anyhow, and as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination of the
+legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father of the gods, visited Semele, it
+will be remembered, in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to
+the great saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated Danae
+in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who slew the Gorgons
+(the powers of darkness) and saved Andromeda (the human soul (1)).
+Devaki, the radiant Virgin of the Hindu mythology, became the wife
+of the god Vishnu and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and prototype of
+Christ. With regard to Buddha St. Jerome says (2) "It is handed down
+among the Gymnosophists, of India that Buddha, the founder of their
+system, was brought forth by a Virgin from her side." The Egyptian Isis,
+with the child Horus, on her knee, was honored centuries before the
+Christian era, and worshiped under the names of "Our Lady," "Queen of
+Heaven," "Star of the Sea," "Mother of God," and so forth. Before her,
+Neith, the Virgin of the World, whose figure bends from the sky over the
+earthly plains and the children of men, was acclaimed as mother of the
+great god Osiris. The saviour Mithra, too, was born of a Virgin, as we
+have had occasion to notice before; and on the Mithrais monuments the
+mother suckling her child is a not uncommon figure. (3)
+
+ (1) For this interpretation of the word Andromeda see The Perfect
+Way by Edward Maitland, preface to First Edition, 1881.
+
+ (2) Contra Jovian, Book I; and quoted by Rhys Davids in his
+Buddhisim.
+
+ (3) See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 332, and Dupuis' Origins of
+Religious Beliefs.
+
+
+The old Teutonic goddess Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin, but was
+impregnated by the heavenly Spirit (the Sky); and her image with a child
+in her arms was to be seen in the sacred groves of Germany. (1) The
+Scandinavian Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the embraces
+of Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the blessed Balder,
+healer and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl, the (crucified) saviour of
+the Aztecs, was the son of Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven. (2)
+Even the Chinese had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms
+(3); and the ancient Etruscans the same. (4)
+
+ (1) R. P. Knight's Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.
+
+ (2) See Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 176,
+where it is said "an ambassador was sent from heaven on an embassy to a
+Virgin of Tulan, called Chimalman... announcing that it was the will
+of the God that she should conceive a son; and having delivered her the
+message he rose and left the house; and as soon as he had left it
+she conceived a son, without connection with man, who was called
+Quetzalcoat, who they say is the god of air." Further, it is explained
+that Quetzalcoatl sacrificed himself, drawing forth his own blood with
+thorns; and that the word Quetzalcoatlotopitzin means "our well-beloved
+son."
+
+ (3) Doane, p. 327.
+
+ (4) See Inman's Pagan and Christian Symbolism, p. 27.
+
+
+Finally, we have the curiously large number of BLACK virgin mothers
+who are or have been worshiped. Not only cases like Devaki the Indian
+goddess, or Isis the Egyptian, who would naturally appear black-skinned
+or dark; but the large number of images and paintings of the same
+kind, yet extant--especially in the Italian churches--and passing for
+representations of Mary and the infant Jesus. Such are the well-known
+image in the chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in the
+churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other places. It is difficult
+not to regard these as very old Pagan or pre-Christian relics which
+lingered on into Christian times and were baptized anew--as indeed
+we know many relics and images actually were--into the service of the
+Church. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"; and there is I believe more
+than one black figure extant of this Diana, who, though of course a
+virgin, is represented with innumerable breasts (1)--not unlike some of
+the archaic statues of Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian
+times there was, it is said, on the site of the present Cathedral of
+Notre Dame, a Temple dedicated to 'our Lady' Isis; and images belonging
+to the earlier shrine would in all probability be preserved with altered
+name in the later.
+
+ (1) See illustration, p. 30, in Inman's Pagan and Christian
+Symbolism.
+
+
+All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine of the
+Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity. The subject is obscure, and
+worthy of more consideration than has yet been accorded it; and I do not
+feel able to add anything to the tentative explanations given a page or
+two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision of the Perfect Man
+hovered dimly over the mind of the human race on its first emergence
+from the purely animal stage; and that a quite natural speculation
+with regard to such a being was that he would be born from a Perfect
+Woman--who according to early ideas would necessarily be the Virgin
+Earth itself, mother of all things. Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition,
+slumbering as it would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great
+Earth after giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring
+forth a Child who should become the Saviour of the human race.
+
+There is of course the further theory, entertained by some, that
+virgin-parturition--a kind of Parthenogenesis--has as a matter of fact
+occasionally occurred among mortal women, and even still does occur. I
+should be the last to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of anything else
+in Nature), but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way of PROOF
+of any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any thoroughly
+attested and verified instance, it would, I think, be advisable to leave
+this theory out of account at present.
+
+But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right or wrong,
+and whatever explanation we adopt, there remains the FACT of the
+universality over the world of this legend--affording another instance
+of the practical solidarity and continuity of the Pagan Creeds with
+Christianity.
+
+
+
+
+XI. RITUAL DANCING
+
+It is unnecessary to labor the conclusion of the last two or three
+chapters, namely that Christianity grew out of the former Pagan Creeds
+and is in its general outlook and origins continuous and of one piece
+with them. I have not attempted to bring together ALL the evidence
+in favor of this contention, as such work would be too vast, but more
+illustrations of its truth will doubtless occur to readers, or will
+emerge as we proceed.
+
+I think we may take it as proved (1) that from the earliest ages, and
+before History, a great body of religious belief and ritual--first
+appearing among very primitive and unformed folk, whom we should call
+'savages'--has come slowly down, broadening and differentiating itself
+on the way into a great variety of forms, but embodying always certain
+main ideas which became in time the accepted doctrines of the later
+Churches--the Indian, the Egyptian, the Mithraic, the Christian, and
+so forth. What these ideas in their general outline have been we can
+perhaps best judge from our "Apostles' Creed," as it is recited every
+Sunday in our churches.
+
+"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth: And in
+Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
+born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified,
+dead and buried. He descended into Hell; the third day he rose again
+from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand
+of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick
+and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church; the
+communion of Saints; the Forgiveness of sins; the Resurrection of the
+body, and the life everlasting. Amen."
+
+Here we have the All-Father and Creator, descending from the Sky in the
+form of a spirit to impregnate the earthly Virgin-mother, who thus gives
+birth to a Saviour-hero. The latter is slain by the powers of Evil, is
+buried and descends into the lower world, but arises again as God
+into heaven and becomes the leader and judge of mankind. We have the
+confirmation of the Church (or, in earlier times, of the Tribe) by means
+of a Eucharist or Communion which binds together all the members, living
+or dead, and restores errant individuals through the Sacrifice of the
+hero and the Forgiveness of their sins; and we have the belief in a
+bodily Resurrection and continued life of the members within the fold of
+the Church (or Tribe), itself regarded as eternal.
+
+One has only, instead of the word 'Jesus,' to read Dionysus or Krishna
+or Hercules or Osiris or Attis, and instead of 'Mary' to insert Semele
+or Devaki or Alcmene or Neith or Nana, and for Pontius Pilate to use the
+name of any terrestrial tyrant who comes into the corresponding story,
+and lo! the creed fits in all particulars into the rites and worship of
+a pagan god. I need not enlarge upon a thesis which is self-evident
+from all that has gone before. I do not say, of course, that ALL
+the religious beliefs of Paganism are included and summarized in our
+Apostles' Creed, for--as I shall have occasion to note in the next
+chapter--I think some very important religious elements are there
+OMITTED; but I do think that all the beliefs which ARE summarized in the
+said creed had already been fully represented and elaborately expressed
+in the non-Christian religions and rituals of Paganism.
+
+Further (2) I think we may safely say that there is no certain proof
+that the body of beliefs just mentioned sprang from any one particular
+centre far back and radiated thence by dissemination and mental
+contagion over the rest of the world; but the evidence rather shows that
+these beliefs were, for the most part, the SPONTANEOUS outgrowths
+(in various localities) of the human mind at certain stages of its
+evolution; that they appeared, in the different races and peoples, at
+different periods according to the degree of evolution, and were largely
+independent of intercourse and contagion, though of course, in cases,
+considerably influenced by it; and that one great and all-important
+occasion and provocative of these beliefs was actually the RISE OF
+SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS--that is, the coming of the mind to a more or
+less distinct awareness of itself and of its own operation, and
+the consequent development and growth of Individualism, and of the
+Self-centred attitude in human thought and action.
+
+In the third place (3) I think we may see--and this is the special
+subject of the present chapter--that at a very early period, when
+humanity was hardly capable of systematic expression in what we call
+Philosophy or Science, it could not well rise to an ordered and literary
+expression of its beliefs, such as we find in the later religions
+and the 'Churches' (Babylonian, Jewish, East Indian, Christian, or
+what-not), and yet that it FELT these beliefs very intensely and was
+urged, almost compelled, to their utterance in some form or other. And
+so it came about that people expressed themselves in a vast mass of
+ritual and myth--customs, ceremonies, legends, stories--which on account
+of their popular and concrete form were handed down for generations, and
+some of which linger on still in the midst of our modern civilization.
+These rituals and legends were, many of them, absurd enough, rambling
+and childish in character, and preposterous in conception, yet they gave
+the expression needed; and some of them of course, as we have seen, were
+full of meaning and suggestion.
+
+A critical and commercial Civilization, such as ours, in which
+(notwithstanding much TALK about Art) the artistic sense is greatly
+lacking, or at any rate but little diffused, does not as a rule
+understand that poetic RITES, in the evolution of peoples, came
+naturally before anything like ordered poems or philosophy or
+systematized VIEWS about life and religion--such as WE love to wallow
+in! Things were FELT before they were spoken. The loading of diseases
+into disease-boats, of sins onto scape-goats, the propitiation of the
+forces of nature by victims, human or animal, sacrifices, ceremonies of
+re-birth, eucharistic feasts, sexual communions, orgiastic celebrations
+of the common life, and a host of other things--all SAID plainly enough
+what was meant, but not in WORDS. Partly no doubt it was that at some
+early time words were more difficult of command and less flexible in use
+than actions (and at all times are they not less expressive?). Partly it
+was that mankind was in the child-stage. The Child delights in ritual,
+in symbol, in expression through material objects and actions:
+
+      See, at his feet some little plan or chart,
+      Some fragment from his dream of human life,
+      Shaped by himself with newly learned art;
+          A wedding or a festival,
+          A mourning or a funeral;
+               And this hath now his heart.
+
+And primitive man in the child-stage felt a positive joy in ritual
+celebrations, and indulged in expressions which we but little
+understand; for these had then his heart.
+
+One of the most pregnant of these expressions was DANCING. Children
+dance instinctively. They dance with rage; they dance with joy, with
+sheer vitality; they dance with pain, or sometimes with savage glee at
+the suffering of others; they delight in mimic combats, or in animal
+plays and disguises. There are such things as Courting-dances, when
+the mature male and female go through a ritual together--not only in
+civilized ball-rooms and the back-parlors of inns, but in the farmyards
+where the rooster pays his addresses to the hen, or the yearling bull
+to the cow--with quite recognized formalities; there are elaborate
+ceremonials performed by the Australian bower-birds and many other
+animals. All these things--at any rate in children and animals--come
+before speech; and anyhow we may say that LOVE-RITES, even in mature
+and civilized man, hardly ADMIT of speech. Words only vulgarize love and
+blunt its edge.
+
+So Dance to the savage and the early man was not merely an amusement or
+a gymnastic exercise (as the books often try to make out), but it was
+also a serious and intimate part of life, an expression of religion and
+the relation of man to non-human Powers. Imagine a young dancer--and
+the admitted age for ritual dancing was commonly from about eighteen
+to thirty--coming forward on the dancing-ground or platform for the
+INVOCATION OF RAIN. We have unfortunately no kinematic records, but it
+is not impossible or very difficult to imagine the various gestures
+and movements which might be considered appropriate to such a rite in
+different localities or among different peoples. A modern student of
+Dalcroze Eurhythmics would find the problem easy. After a time a certain
+ritual dance (for rain) would become stereotyped and generally adopted.
+Or imagine a young Greek leading an invocation to Apollo to STAY SOME
+PLAGUE which was ravaging the country. He might as well be accompanied
+by a small body of co-dancers; but he would be the leader and chief
+representative. Or it might be a WAR-DANCE--as a more or less magical
+preparation for the raid or foray. We are familiar enough with accounts
+of war-dances among American Indians. C. O. Muller in his History and
+Antiquities of the Doric Race (1) gives the following account of the
+Pyrrhic dance among the Greeks, which was danced in full armor:--"Plato
+says that it imitated all the attitudes of defence, by avoiding a thrust
+or a cast, retreating, springing up, and crouching-as also the opposite
+movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also of every kind of
+thrust. So strong was the attachment to this dance at Sparta that, long
+after it had in the other Greek states degenerated into a Bacchanalian
+revel, it was still danced by the Spartans as a warlike exercise, and
+boys of fifteen were instructed in it." Of the Hunting-dance I have
+already given instances. (2) It always had the character of Magic about
+it, by which the game or quarry might presumably be influenced; and it
+can easily be understood that if the Hunt was not successful the blame
+might well be attributed to some neglect of the usual ritual mimes or
+movements--no laughing matter for the leader of the dance.
+
+ (1) Book IV, ch. 6, Section 7.
+
+ (2) See also Winwood Reade's Savage Africa, ch. xviii, in which
+he speaks of the "gorilla dance," before hunting gorillas, as a
+"religious festival."
+
+
+Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of Initiation--dances
+both by the initiators and the initiated. Jane E. Harrison in Themis (p.
+24) says, "Instruction among savage peoples is always imparted in more
+or less mimetic dances. At initiation you learn certain dances which
+confer on you definite social status. When a man is too old to dance,
+he hands over his dance to another and a younger, and he then among
+some tribes ceases to exist socially.... The dances taught to boys at
+initiation are frequently if not always ARMED dances. These are not
+necessarily warlike. The accoutrement of spear and shield was in part
+decorative, in part a provision for making the necessary hubbub." (Here
+Miss Harrison reproduces a photograph of an Initiation dance among the
+Akikuyu of British East Africa.) The Initiation-dances blend insensibly
+and naturally with the Mystery and Religion dances, for indeed
+initiation was for the most part an instruction in the mysteries and
+social rites of the Tribe. They were the expression of things which
+would be hard even for us, and which for rude folk would be impossible,
+to put into definite words. Hence arose the expression--whose meaning
+has been much discussed by the learned--"to dance out ([gr ezorceisqai])
+a mystery." (1) Lucian, in a much-quoted passage, (2) observes: "You
+cannot find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing ...
+and this much all men know, that most people say of the revealers of the
+mysteries that they 'dance them out.'" Andrew Lang, commenting on this
+passage, (3) continues: "Clement of Alexandria uses the same term when
+speaking of his own 'appalling revelations.' So closely connected are
+mysteries with dancing among savages that when Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the
+Bushman hunter, about some doctrines in which Qing was not initiated,
+he said: 'Only the initiated men of that dance know these things.' To
+'dance' this or that means to be acquainted with this or that
+myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d'action. So widely
+distributed is the practice that Acosta in an interesting passage
+mentions it as familiar to the people of Peru before and after the
+Spanish conquest." (And we may say that when the 'mysteries' are of a
+sexual nature it can easily be understood that to 'dance them out' is
+the only way of explaining them!)
+
+ (1) Meaning apparently either simply to represent, or, sometimes
+to DIVULGE, a mystery.
+
+ (2) [gr peri 'Orchsews], Ch. xv. 277.
+
+ (3) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 272.
+
+
+Thus we begin to appreciate the serious nature and the importance of the
+dance among primitive folk. To dub a youth "a good dancer" is to pay him
+a great compliment. Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in
+the island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which record in
+deeply graven letters the friendship and devotion to each other of
+Spartan warrior-comrades; it seems strange at first to find how often
+such an epithet of praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is
+a PERFECT DANCER ([gr aristos orcestas]). One hardly in general expects
+one warrior to praise another for his dancing! But when one realizes
+what is really meant--namely the fitness of the loved comrade to lead in
+religious and magical rituals--then indeed the compliment takes on a
+new complexion. Religious dances, in dedication to a god, have of course
+been honored in every country. Muller, in the work just cited, (1)
+describes a lively dance called the hyporchema which, accompanied by
+songs, was used in the worship of Apollo. "In this, besides the chorus
+of singers who usually danced around THE BLAZING ALTAR, several persons
+were appointed to accompany the action of the poem with an appropriate
+pantomimic display." It was probably some similar dance which is
+recorded in Exodus, ch. xxxii, when Aaron made the Israelites a golden
+Calf (image of the Egyptian Apis). There was an altar and a fire and
+burnt offerings for sacrifice, and the people dancing around. Whether in
+the Apollo ritual the dancers were naked I cannot say, but in the affair
+of the golden Calf they evidently were, for it will be remembered that
+it was just this which upset Moses' equanimity so badly--"when he SAW
+THAT THE PEOPLE WERE NAKED"--and led to the breaking of the two tables
+of stone and the slaughter of some thousands of folk. It will be
+remembered also that David on a sacrificial occasion danced naked before
+the Lord. (2)
+
+ (1) Book II, ch. viii, Section 14.
+
+ (2) 2 Sam. vi.
+
+
+It may seem strange that dances in honor of a god should be held naked;
+but there is abundant evidence that this was frequently the case, and it
+leads to an interesting speculation. Many of these rituals undoubtedly
+owed their sanctity and solemnity to their extreme antiquity. They came
+down in fact from very far back times when the average man or woman--as
+in some of the Central African tribes to-day--wore simply nothing at
+all; and like all religious ceremonies they tended to preserve their
+forms long after surrounding customs and conditions had altered.
+Consequently nakedness lingered on in sacrificial and other rites into
+periods when in ordinary life it had come to be abandoned or thought
+indecent and shameful. This comes out very clearly in both instances
+above--quoted from the Bible. For in Exodus xxxii. 25 it is said that
+"Aaron had made them (the dancers) naked UNTO THEIR SHAME among their
+enemies (READ opponents)," and in 2 Sam. vi. 20 we are told that Michal
+came out and sarcastically rebuked the "glorious king of Israel" for
+"shamelessly uncovering himself, like a vain fellow" (for which rebuke,
+I am sorry to say, David took a mean revenge on Michal). In both cases
+evidently custom had so far changed that to a considerable section of
+the population these naked exhibitions had become indecent, though as
+parts of an acknowledged ritual they were still retained and supported
+by others. The same conclusion may be derived from the commands recorded
+in Exodus xx. 26 and xxviii. 42, that the priests be not "uncovered"
+before the altar--commands which would hardly have been needed had not
+the practice been in vogue.
+
+Then there were dances (partly magical or religious) performed at rustic
+and agricultural festivals, like the Epilenios, celebrated in Greece at
+the gathering of the grapes. (1) Of such a dance we get a glimpse in the
+Bible (Judges xxi. 20) when the elders advised the children of Benjamin
+to go out and lie in wait in the vineyards, at the time of the yearly
+feast; and "when the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the
+dances, then come ye out of the vineyards and catch you every man a wife
+from the daughters of Shiloh"--a touching example apparently of early
+so-called 'marriage by capture'! Or there were dances, also partly or
+originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian character,
+like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by men and women in hideous
+masks, or the Deimalea by Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the
+Bibasis carried out by both men and women--a quite gymnastic exercise in
+which the performers took a special pride in striking their own buttocks
+with their heels! or others wilder still, which it would perhaps not be
+convenient to describe.
+
+ (1) [gr Epilhnioi umnoi]:  hymns sung over the winepress
+(Dictionary).
+
+
+We must see how important a part Dancing played in that great panorama
+of Ritual and Religion (spoken of in the last chapter) which, having
+originally been led up to by the 'Fall of Man,' has ever since the dawn
+of history gradually overspread the world with its strange procession of
+demons and deities, and its symbolic representations of human destiny.
+When it is remembered that ritual dancing was the matrix out of which
+the Drama sprang, and further that the drama in its inception (as still
+to-day in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in
+connection with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand how all
+this mass of ceremonial sacrifices, expiations, initiations, Sun and
+Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic communions and celebrations,
+mystery-plays, dramatic representations, myths and legends, etc., which
+I have touched upon in the preceding chapters--together with all the
+emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the wonderment which
+they represented--have practically sprung from the same root: a root
+deep and necessary in the psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show
+that they will all practically converge again in the end to one meaning,
+and prepare the way for one great Synthesis to come--an evolution also
+necessary and inevitable in human psychology.
+
+In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few pages back, occur
+those well-known words whose repetition now will, on account of their
+beauty, I am sure be excused:--
+
+      Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
+      The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
+          Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+               And cometh from afar;
+          Not in entire forgetfulness,
+          And not in utter nakedness,
+      But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+          From God, who is our home:
+      Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
+      Shades of the prison-house begin to close
+          Upon the growing Boy,
+      But He beholds the light and whence it flows
+          He sees it in his joy;
+      The youth who daily farther from the east
+          Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
+          And by the vision splendid
+          Is on his way attended;
+      At length the man perceives it die away
+      And fade into the light of common day.
+
+
+Wordsworth--though he had not the inestimable advantage of a
+nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian
+philosophy--does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child
+in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we
+scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that
+the Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of
+entire forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores
+of sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we
+all admit that a certain grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic
+quality, in the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these
+racial inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and that
+after birth the impact of the outer world serves rather to break up
+and disintegrate this harmony than to confirm and strengthen it. Some
+psychologists indeed nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child
+is not only 'Father of the man,' but superior to the man, (1) and that
+Boyhood and Youth and Maturity are attained to not by any addition but
+by a process of loss and subtraction. It will be seen that the last ten
+lines of the above quotation rather favor this view.
+
+ (1) "Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from
+the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in the
+course of his short life goes very much farther along the road of
+degradation and premature senility." (Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis,
+p. 24).
+
+
+But my object in making the quotation was not to insist on the truth
+of its application to the individual Child, but rather to point out
+the remarkable way in which it illustrates what I have said about the
+Childhood of the Race. In fact, if the quotation be read over again with
+this interpretation (which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that
+the 'birth' spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively
+self-conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured,
+unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the parable
+unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly. THAT birth
+certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace and intuition and
+instinctive perfection of the animals was lost. But the forgetfulness
+was not entire; the memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an
+Eden-garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance
+the first tribal men, on the edge of but not yet WITHIN the
+civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.
+
+As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-consciousness was
+also the period of the dawn of the practical and inquiring Intellect; it
+was the period of the babyhood of both; and so we perceive among these
+early people (as we also do among children) that while in the main the
+heart and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for a long period
+futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as the mind left the ancient
+bases of instinct and sub-conscious racial experience it fell into
+a hopeless bog, out of which it only slowly climbed by means of the
+painfully-gathered stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science.
+"Heaven lies about us in our infancy." Wordsworth perceived that
+wonderful world of inner experience and glory out of which the child
+emerges; and some even of us may perceive that similar world in which
+the untampered animals STILL dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man
+in the history of the race was long ago driven. But a curse went
+with the exile. As the Brain grew, the Heart withered. The inherited
+instincts and racially accumulated wisdom, on which the first men
+thrived and by means of which they achieved a kind of temporary
+Paradise, were broken up; delusions and disease and dissension set
+in. Cain turned upon his brother and slew him; and the shades of the
+prison-house began to close. The growing Boy, however, (by whom we may
+understand the early tribes of Mankind) had yet a radiance of Light and
+joy in his life; and the Youth--though travelling daily farther from the
+East--still remained Nature's priest, and by the vision splendid was on
+his way attended: but
+
+     At length the Man perceived it die away.
+     And fade into the light of common day.
+
+What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it
+so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic
+clinging to the tradition of the Eden-garden, its careless and vigorous
+boyhood, its meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless
+expiatory ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of
+salvation, and finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the
+world-slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!
+
+Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our main line of
+thought, we may point out that while early peoples were intellectually
+mere babies--with their endless yarns about heroes on horseback leaping
+over wide rivers or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles
+through the air, and their utter failure to understand the general
+concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their
+instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already said, by no
+means fools; certainly not such fools as many of the arm-chair students
+of these things delight to represent them. For just as, a few years
+ago, we modern civilizees studying outlying nations, the Chinese for
+instance, rejoiced (in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity
+and absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and failed
+entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently sensible
+people; so in the case of primitive men we have been, and even still
+are, far too prone to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and
+idiotic superstitions, and to miss the sane and balanced setting of
+their actual lives.
+
+Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance with his
+subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on "The
+Primitive Medicine Man" in which he shows that the latter is as a rule
+anything but a fool and a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he
+hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man's
+excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds and
+fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning or trephining--all of
+which operations, he admits, may be accompanied with grotesque and
+superstitious ceremonies, yet show real perception and ability. We all
+know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--what a
+considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which the modern art of
+healing owes to the ancient medicine-man, and it may be again mentioned
+that one of the most up-to-date treatments--the use of a prolonged and
+exclusive diet of MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start
+in severe cases--has really come down to us through the ages from this
+early source. (1) The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett says, is largely
+a 'faith-healer' and 'soul-doctor'; he believes in his vocation, and
+undergoes much for the sake of it: "The main point is to grasp that by
+his special initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises--not to
+speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and ecstasy, which
+he may inherit by nature and have improved by art--he HAS access to a
+wonder-working power.... And the great need of primitive folk is for
+this healer of souls." Our author further insists on the enormous play
+and influence of Fear in the savage mind--a point we have touched on
+already--and gives instances of Thanatomania, or cases where, after a
+quite slight and superficial wound, the patient becomes so depressed
+that he, quite needlessly, persists in dying! Such cases, obviously,
+can only be countered by Faith, or something (whatever it may be) which
+restores courage, hope and energy to the mind. Nor need I point out
+that the situation is exactly the same among a vast number of 'patients'
+to-day. As to the value, in his degree, of the medicine-man many modern
+observers and students quite agree with the above. (2) Also as the
+present chapter is on Ritual Dancing it may not be out of place to call
+attention to the supposed healing of sick people in Ceylon and other
+places by Devil-dancing--the enormous output of energy and noise in the
+ritual possibly having the effect of reanimating the patient (if it does
+not kill him), or of expelling the disease from his organism.
+
+ (1) Milk ("fast-milk" or vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only
+diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times
+(preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with ceremony
+from the milky and semen-like sap of certain plants, and much used in
+sacrificial offerings. (See Monier-Williams. Sanskrit Dictionary.)
+
+ (2) See Winwood Reade (Savage Africa), Salamon Reinach (Cults,
+Myths and Religions), and others.
+
+
+With regard to the practical intelligence of primitive peoples,
+derived from their close contact with life and nature, Bishop Colenso's
+experiences among the Zulus may appropriately be remembered. When
+expounding the Bible to these supposedly backward 'niggers' he was met
+at all points by practical interrogations and arguments which he was
+perfectly unable to answer--especially over the recorded passage of the
+Red Sea by the Israelites in a single night. From the statistics given
+in the Sacred Book these naughty savages proved to him absolutely
+conclusively that the numbers of fugitives were such that even supposing
+them to have marched--men, women and children--FIVE ABREAST and in close
+order, they would have formed a column 100 miles long, and this
+not including the baggage, sheep and cattle! Of course the feat was
+absolutely impossible. They could not have passed the Red Sea in a night
+or a week of nights.
+
+But the sequel is still more amusing and instructive. Colenso, in his
+innocent sincerity, took the side of the Zulus, and feeling sure the
+Church at home would be quite glad to have its views with regard to
+the accuracy of Bible statistics corrected, wrote a book embodying the
+amendments needed. Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of
+protest and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition for the
+time being from his bishopric! While at the same time an avalanche of
+books to oppose his heresy poured forth from the press. Lately I had the
+curiosity to look through the British Museum catalogue and found that
+in refutation of Colenso's Pentateuch Examined some 140 (a hundred and
+forty) volumes were at that time published! To-day, I need hardly
+say, all these arm-chair critics and their works have sunk into utter
+obscurity, but the arguments of the Zulus and their Bishop still stand
+unmoved and immovable.
+
+This is a case of searching intelligence shown by 'savages,' an
+intelligence founded on intimate knowledge of the needs of actual
+life. I think we may say that a similarly instinctive intelligence
+(sub-conscious if you like) has guided the tribes of men on the whole
+in their long passage through the Red Sea of the centuries, from those
+first days of which I speak even down to the present age, and has in
+some strange, even if fitful, way kept them along the path of that final
+emancipation towards which Humanity is inevitably moving.
+
+
+
+
+XII. THE SEX-TABOO
+
+In the course of the last few chapters I have spoken more than once
+of the solidarity and continuity of Christianity, in its essential
+doctrines, with the Pagan rites. There is, however, one notable
+exception to this statement. I refer of course to Christianity's
+treatment of Sex. It is certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan
+cults generally made a great deal of all sorts of sex-rites, laid much
+stress upon them, and introduced them in what we consider an unblushing
+and shameless way into the instincts connected with it. I say 'the
+Christian Church,' on the whole took quite the opposite line--ignored
+sex, condemned it, and did much despite to the perfectly natural
+instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,' because
+there is nothing to show that Jesus himself (if we admit his figure as
+historical) adopted any such extreme or doctrinaire attitude; and the
+quite early Christian teachers (with the chief exception of Paul) do not
+exhibit this bias to any great degree. In fact, as is well known, strong
+currents of pagan usage and belief ran through the Christian assemblies
+of the first three or four centuries. "The Christian art of this period
+remained delightfully pagan. In the catacombs we see the Saviour as a
+beardless youth, like a young Greek god; sometimes represented, like
+Hermes the guardian of the flocks, bearing a ram or lamb round his neck;
+sometimes as Orpheus tuning his lute among the wild animals." (1)
+The followers of Jesus were at times even accused--whether rightly
+or wrongly I know not--of celebrating sexual mysteries at their
+love-feasts. But as the Church through the centuries grew in power and
+scope--with its monks and their mutilations and asceticisms, and its
+celibate clergy, and its absolute refusal to recognize the sexual
+meaning of its own acclaimed symbols (like the Cross, the three fingers
+of Benediction, the Fleur de Lys and so forth)--it more and more
+consistently defined itself as anti-sexual in its outlook, and stood out
+in that way in marked contrast to the earlier Nature-religions.
+
+ (1) Angels' Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.
+
+
+It may be said of course that this anti-sexual tendency can be traced in
+other of the pre-Christian Churches, especially the later ones, like the
+Buddhist, the Egyptian, and so forth; and this is perfectly true; but it
+would seem that in many ways the Christian Church marked the culmination
+of the tendency; and the fact that other cults participated in the taboo
+makes us all the more ready and anxious to inquire into its real cause.
+
+To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-Christian
+religions would be 'a large order'--larger than I could attempt to fill;
+but the general facts in this connection are fairly patent. We know,
+of course, from the Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to
+sexual worships. There were erect images (phallic) and "groves" (sexual
+symbols) on every high hill and under every green tree; (1) and these
+same images and the rites connected with them crept into the Jewish
+Temple and were popular enough to maintain their footing there for a
+long period from King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of
+Josiah (2) and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover there were
+girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached during this period to
+the Jewish Temple as to the heathen Temples, for the rendering of sexual
+services, which were recognized in many cases as part of the ritual.
+Women were persuaded that it was an honor and a privilege to be
+fertilized by a 'holy man' (a priest or other man connected with the
+rites), and children resulting from such unions were often called
+"Children of God"--an appellation which no doubt sometimes led to a
+legend of miraculous birth! Girls who took their place as hierodouloi in
+the Temple or Temple-precincts were expected to surrender themselves
+to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the same way, probably, as
+Herodotus describes in the temple of the Babylonian Venus Mylitta, where
+every native woman, once in her life, was supposed to sit in the Temple
+and have intercourse with some stranger. (3) Indeed the Syrian and
+Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. "The Hebrews entering
+Syria," says Richard Burton (4) "found it religionized by Assyria and
+Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become
+Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician
+Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of
+Heaven and Love." The word translated "grove" as above, in our Bible,
+is in fact Asherah, which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian
+Queen of Heaven.
+
+ (1) 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.
+
+ (2) 2 Kings xxiii.
+
+ (3) See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the
+apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.
+
+ (4) The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.
+
+
+In India again, in connection with the Hindu Temples and their rites,
+we have exactly the same institution of girls attached to the Temple
+service--the Nautch-girls--whose functions in past times were certainly
+sexual, and whose dances in honor of the god are, even down to the
+present day, decidedly amatory in character. Then we have the very
+numerous lingams (conventional representations of the male organ) to
+be seen, scores and scores of them, in the arcades and cloisters of the
+Hindu Temples--to which women of all classes, especially those who
+wish to become mothers, resort, anointing them copiously with oil, and
+signalizing their respect and devotion to them in a very practical
+way. As to the lingam as representing the male organ, in some form or
+other--as upright stone or pillar or obelisk or slender round tower--it
+occurs all over the world, notably in Ireland, and forms such a
+memorial of the adoration paid by early folk to the great emblem and
+instrument of human fertility, as cannot be mistaken. The pillars set
+up by Solomon in front of his temple were obviously from their
+names--Jachin and Boaz (1)--meant to be emblems of this kind; and the
+fact that they were crowned with pomegranates--the universally accepted
+symbol of the female--confirms and clinches this interpretation. The
+obelisks before the Egyptians' temples were signs of the same character.
+The well-known T-shaped cross was in use in pagan lands long before
+Christianity, as a representation of the male member, and also at the
+same time of the 'tree' on which the god (Attis or Adonis or Krishna or
+whoever it might be) was crucified; and the same symbol combined with
+the oval (or yoni) formed THE Crux Ansata {Ankh} of the old Egyptian
+ritual--a figure which is to-day sold in Cairo as a potent charm, and
+confessedly indicates the conjunction of the two sexes in one design.
+(2) MacLennan in The Fortnightly Review (Oct. 1869) quotes with approval
+the words of Sanchoniathon, as saying that "men first worship plants,
+next the heavenly bodies, supposed to be animals, then 'pillars'
+(emblems of the Procreator), and last, the anthropomorphic gods."
+
+ (1) "He shall establish" and "In it is strength" are in the Bible
+the marginal interpretations of these two words.
+
+ (2) The connection between the production of fire by means of the
+fire-drill and the generation of life by sex-intercourse is a very
+obvious one, and lends itself to magical ideas. J. E. Hewitt in his
+Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (1894) says (vol. i, p. 8) that
+"Magha, the mother-goddess worshipped in Asia Minor, was originally the
+socket-block from which fire was generated by the fire-drill." Hence we
+have, he says, the Magi of Persia, and the Maghadas of Indian History,
+also the word "Magic."
+
+
+It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject. The facts of the
+connection of sexual rites with religious services nearly everywhere in
+the early world are, as I say, sufficiently patent to every inquirer.
+But it IS necessary to try to understand the rationale of this
+connection. To dispatch all such cases under the mere term "religious
+prostitution" is no explanation. The term suggests, of course, that the
+plea of religion was used simply as an excuse and a cover for sexual
+familiarities; but though this kind of explanation commends itself,
+no doubt, to the modern man--whose religion is as commercial as his
+sex-relationships are--and though in CASES no doubt it was a true
+explanation--yet it is obvious that among people who took religion
+seriously, as a matter of life and death and who did not need
+hypocritical excuses or covers for sex-relationships, it cannot be
+accepted as in general the RIGHT explanation. No, the real explanation
+is--and I will return to this presently--that sexual relationships are
+so deep and intimate a part of human nature that from the first it has
+been simply impossible to keep them OUT of religion--it being of
+course the object of religion to bring the whole human being into
+some intelligible relation with the physical, moral, and if you like
+supernatural order of the great world around him. Sex was felt from the
+first to be part, and a foundational part, of the great order of the
+world and of human nature; and therefore to separate it from Religion
+was unthinkable and a kind of contradiction in terms. (1)
+
+ (1) For further development of this subject see ch. xv.
+
+
+If that is true--it will be asked--how was it that that divorce DID take
+place--that the taboo did arise? How was it that the Jews, under the
+influence of Josiah and the Hebrew prophets, turned their faces away
+from sex and strenuously opposed the Syrian cults? How was it that this
+reaction extended into Christianity and became even more definite in the
+Christian Church--that monks went by thousands into the deserts of the
+Thebaid, and that the early Fathers and Christian apologists could
+not find terms foul enough to hurl at Woman as the symbol (to them) of
+nothing but sex-corruption and delusion? How was it that this contempt
+of the body and degradation of sex-things went on far into the Middle
+Ages of Europe, and ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy,
+and concealment and suppression of sex-instincts, which, acting as cover
+to a vile commercial Prostitution and as a breeding ground for horrible
+Disease, has lasted on even to the edge of the present day?
+
+This is a fair question, and one which demands an answer. There must
+have been a reason, and a deep-rooted one, for this remarkable reaction
+and volte-face which has characterized Christianity, and, perhaps to
+a lesser degree, other both earlier and later cults like those of the
+Buddhists, the Egyptians, the Aztecs, (1) and so forth.
+
+ (1) For the Aztecs, see Acosta, vol. ii, p. 324 (London, 1604).
+
+
+It may be said--and this is a fair answer on the SURFACE of the
+problem--that the main reason WAS something in the nature of a reaction.
+The excesses and corruptions of sex in Syria had evidently become pretty
+bad, and that very fact may have led to a pendulum-swing of the Jewish
+Church in the opposite direction; and again in the same way the general
+laxity of morals in the decay of the Roman empire may have confirmed the
+Church of early Christendom in its determination to keep along the
+great high road of asceticism. The Christian followed on the Jewish
+and Egyptian Churches, and in this way a great tradition of sexual
+continence and anti-pagan morality came right down the centuries even
+into modern times.
+
+This seems so far a reasonable theory; but I think we shall go farther
+and get nearer the heart of the problem if we revert to the general clue
+which I have followed already more than once--the clue of the necessary
+evolution of human Consciousnss. In the first or animal stage of
+human evolution, Sex was (as among the animals) a perfectly necessary,
+instinctive and unself-conscious activity. It was harmonious with
+itself, natural, and unproductive of evil. But when the second stage set
+in, in which man became preponderantly SELF-conscious, he inevitably
+set about deflecting sex-activities to his own private pleasure and
+advantage; he employed his budding intellect in scheming the derailment
+of passion and desire from tribal needs and, Nature's uses to the poor
+details of his own gratification. If the first stage of harmonious
+sex-instinct and activity may be held as characteristic of the Golden
+Age, the second stage must be taken to represent the Fall of man and his
+expulsion from Paradise in the Garden of Eden story. The pleasure and
+glory of Sex having been turned to self-purposes, Sex itself became the
+great Sin. A sense of guilt overspread man's thoughts on the subject.
+"He knew that he was naked," and he fled from the voice and face of the
+Lord. From that moment one of the main objects of his life (in its inner
+and newer activities) came to be the DENIAL of Sex. Sex was conceived
+of as the great Antagonist, the old Serpent lying ever in wait to betray
+him; and there arrived a moment in the history of every race, and of
+every representative religion, when the sexual rites and ceremonies of
+the older time lost their naive and quasi-innocent character and became
+afflicted with a sense of guilt and indecency. This extraordinarily
+interesting and dramatic moment in human evolution was of course that in
+which self-consciousness grew powerful enough to penetrate to the centre
+of human vitality, the sanctumof man's inner life, his sexual instinct,
+and to deal it a terrific blow--a blow from which it has never yet
+recovered, and from which indeed it will not recover, until the very
+nature of man's inner life is changed.
+
+It may be said that it was very foolish of Man to deny and to try
+to expel a perfectly natural and sensible thing, a necessary and
+indispensable part of his own nature. And that, as far as I can see, is
+perfectly true. But sometimes it is unavoidable, it would seem, to do
+foolish things--if only to convince oneself of one's own foolishness.
+On the other hand, this policy on the part of Man was certainly very
+wise--wiser than he knew--for in attempting to drive out Sex (which of
+course he could not do) he entered into a conflict which was bound
+to end in the expulsion of SOMETHING; and that something was the
+domination, within himself, of self-consciousness, the very thing which
+makes and ever has made sex detestable. Man did not succeed in driving
+the snake out of the Garden, but he drove himself out, taking the real
+old serpent of self-greed and self-gratification with him. When some day
+he returns to Paradise this latter will have died in his bosom and been
+cast away, but he will find the good Snake there as of old, full of
+healing and friendliness, among the branches of the Tree of Life.
+
+Besides it is evident from other considerations that this moment of the
+denial of sex HAD to come. When one thinks of the enormous power of this
+passion, and its age-long, hold upon the human race, one realizes that
+once liberated from the instinctive bonds of nature, and backed by a
+self-conscious and self-seeking human intelligence it was on the way to
+become a fearful curse.
+
+  A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth;
+  For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
+
+And this may have been all very well and appropriate in the
+carboniferous Epoch, but WE in the end of Time have no desire to fall
+under any such preposterous domination, or to return to the primal
+swamps from which organic nature has so slowly and painfully emerged.
+
+I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere of Sex, and
+the consequent use of the latter for private ends, which poisoned
+this great race-power at its root. For above all, Sex, as representing
+through Childbirth the life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you
+like, of Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from merely
+selfish aims, and therefore to use it only for such aims is indeed a
+desecration. And even if--as some maintain and I think rightly (1)--sex
+is not MERELY for child-birth and physical procreation, but for mutual
+vitalizing and invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism;
+and to use it egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed.
+It is to cast away and corrupt the very bond of life and fellowship. The
+ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination of religious (that is,
+of communal and public) value over sex-acts, and to a great extent made
+them into matters either of Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods,
+or of communal and pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and
+other similar festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these
+celebrations--of either kind--as insincere. They were, at any rate in
+their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social and festal;
+and from either point of view they were far better than the secrecy
+of private indulgence which characterizes our modern world in these
+matters. The thorough and shameless commercialism of Sex has alas!
+been reserved for what is called "Christian civilization," and with
+it (perhaps as a necessary consequence) Prostitution and Syphilis have
+grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation of
+social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism and niaiserie.
+Love, in fact, having in this modern world-movement been denied, and its
+natural manifestations affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has
+really languished and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a
+vast number of people--both men and women, finding themselves barred or
+derailed from the main object of existence, have turned their energies
+to 'business' or 'money-making' or 'social advancement' or something
+equally futile, as the only poor substitute and pis aller open to them.
+
+ (1) See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet
+published by the "British Society for the Study of Sex-psychology."
+
+
+Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently great mistake?
+And again we must reply: Perhaps the mistake was not so great as
+it appears to be. Perhaps this was another case of the necessity of
+learning by loss. Love had to be denied, in the form of sex, in order
+that it might thus the better learn its own true values and needs. Sex
+had to be rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-seeking,
+in order that having cast out its defilement it might return one day,
+transformed in the embrace of love. The whole process has had a deep and
+strange world-significance. It has led to an immensely long period of
+suppression--suppression of two great instincts--the physical instinct
+of sex and the emotional instinct of love. Two things which should
+naturally be conjoined have been separated; and both have suffered.
+And we know from the Freudian teachings what suppressions in the
+root-instincts necessarily mean. We know that they inevitably terminate
+in diseases and distortions of proper action, either in the body or
+in the mind, or in both; and that these evils can only be cured by the
+liberation of the said instincts again to their proper expression and
+harmonious functioning in the whole organism. No wonder then that, with
+this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense though it may have
+been) which marks the Christian dispensation, there should have
+been associated endless Sickness and Crime and sordid Poverty, the
+Crucifixion of animals in the name of Science and of human workers in
+the name of Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules writhing
+in the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the rocks are only as
+figures of a toy miniature compared with this vision of the great and
+divine Spirit of Man caught in the clutches of those dread Diseases
+which through the centuries have been eating into his very heart and
+vitals.
+
+It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the blame for all
+this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the whole great scheme,
+namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it played the part very
+thoroughly and successfully. For it must be remembered (what I have
+again and again insisted on) that in the pagan cults it was always
+the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main
+consideration; the advantage of the individual took only a very
+secondary part. But in Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms
+of apostolic days and of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and
+sisterhoods had died down--religion occupied itself more and more with
+each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of what might
+happen to the community; till, with the rise of Protestantism and
+Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has
+said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a
+corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which might come
+to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regime
+became, as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: "Am _I_ saved?
+Am _I_ doing the right thing? Am _I_ winning the favor of God and man?
+Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did _I_ make a good bargain
+in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?" The poison of a diseased
+self-consciousness entered into the whole human system.
+
+As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for all
+this--partly because, AFTER the communal periods which I have just
+mentioned, Christianity was evidently deeply influenced by the rise
+of COMMERCIALISM, to which during the last two centuries it has so
+carefully and piously adapted itself; and partly because--if our view is
+anywhere near right--this microbial injection of self-consciousness was
+just the necessary work which (in conjunction with commercialism) it HAD
+to perform. But though one does not blame Christianity one cannot blind
+oneself to its defects--the defects necessarily arising from the part it
+had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual--say of Apollo or
+Dionysus--including its rude and crude sacrifices if you like, but also
+including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to the common
+life and welfare--with the morbid self-introspection of the Christian
+and the eternally recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"--the
+comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at any rate in
+modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude,
+and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though
+Nietzsche's blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one
+almost thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with one's
+head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and
+self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was entirely occupied with
+the question of one's own salvation. There is besides a lamentable want
+of grit and substance about the Christian doctrines and ceremonials.
+Somehow under the sex-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized
+out of all human use. Study the initiation-rites of any savage
+tribe--with their strict discipline of the young braves in fortitude,
+and the overcoming of pain and fear; with their very detailed lessons in
+the arts of war and life and the duties of the grown man to his tribe;
+and with their quite practical instruction in matters of Sex; and then
+read our little Baptismal and Confirmation services, which ought to
+correspond thereto. How thin and attenuated and weak the latter
+appear! Or compare the Holy Communion, as celebrated in the sentimental
+atmosphere of a Protestant Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of
+real jollity and community of life under the acknowledged presence
+of the god; or the Roman Catholic service of the Mass, including its
+genuflexions and mock oblations and droning ritual sing-song, with the
+actual sacrifice in early days of an animal-god-victim on a blazing
+altar; and I think my meaning will be clear. We do not want, of course,
+to return to all the crudities and barbarities of the past; but also we
+do not want to become attenuated and spiritualized out of all mundane
+sense and recognition, and to live in an otherworld Paradise void of
+application to earthly affairs.
+
+The sex-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have said, an effort
+of the human soul to wrest itself free from the entanglement of physical
+lust--which lust, though normal and appropriate and in a way gracious
+among the animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness
+become diseased and morbid or monstrous in Man. The work thus done has
+probably been of the greatest value to the human race; but, just as in
+other cases it has sometimes happened that the effort to do a certain
+work has resulted in the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We
+are beginning to see now the harmful side of the repression of sex, and
+are tentatively finding our way back again to a more pagan attitude.
+And as this return-movement is taking place at a time when, from many
+obvious signs, the self-conscious, grasping, commercial conception of
+life is preparing to go on the wane, and the sense of solidarity to
+re-establish itself, there is really good hope that our return-journey
+may prove in some degree successful.
+
+Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a sparrow, but
+by putting one leg forward first, and then the other. There was this
+advantage in the Christian taboo of sex that by discouraging the
+physical and sensual side of love it did for the time being allow the
+spiritual side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated,
+there is a limit to that process. We cannot always keep one leg first in
+walking, and we do not want, in life, always to put the spiritual first,
+nor always the material and sensual. The two sides in the long run have
+to keep pace with each other.
+
+And it may be that a great number of the very curious and seemingly
+senseless taboos that we find among the primitive peoples can be partly
+explained in this way: that is, that by ruling out certain directions
+of activity they enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for
+the time being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world,
+whose ways are puzzling enough in all conscience to us, must have been
+simply bewildering in its dangers and complications. It was an amazement
+of Fear and Ignorance. Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the
+blue sky, or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating plague
+out of a bad smell--or apparently even out of nothing at all! Under
+those circumstances it was perhaps wise, wherever there was the smallest
+SUSPICION of danger or ill-luck, to create a hard and fast TABOO--just
+as we tell our children ON NO ACCOUNT to walk under a ladder (thereby
+creating a superstition in their minds), partly because it would take
+too long to explain all about the real dangers of paint-pots and other
+things, and partly because for the children themselves it seems simpler
+to have a fixed and inviolable law than to argue over every case that
+occurs. The priests and elders among early folk no doubt took the
+line of FORBIDDAL of activities, as safer and simpler, even if
+carried sometimes too far, than the opposite, of easy permission and
+encouragement. Taboos multiplied--many of them quite senseless--but
+perhaps in this perilous maze of the world, of which I have spoken,
+it really WAS simpler to cut out a large part of the labyrinth, as
+forbidden ground, thus rendering it easier for the people to find their
+way in those portions of the labyrinth which remained. If you read in
+Deuteronomy (ch. xiv) the list of birds and beasts and fishes permitted
+for food among the Israelites, or tabooed, you will find the list on
+the whole reasonable, but you will be struck by some curious exceptions
+(according to our ideas), which are probably to be explained by the
+necessity of making the rules simple enough to be comprehended by
+everybody--even if they included the forbiddal of some quite eatable
+animals.
+
+At some early period, in Babylonia or Assyria, a very stringent taboo on
+the Sabbath arose, which, taken up in turn by the Jewish and Christian
+Churches, has ruled the Western World for three thousand years or more,
+and still survives in a quite senseless form among some of our rural
+populations, who will see their corn rot in the fields rather than save
+it on a Sunday. (1) It is quite likely that this taboo in its first
+beginning was due not to any need of a weekly rest-day (a need which
+could never be felt among nomad savages, but would only occur in
+some kind of industrial and stationary civilization), but to some
+superstitious fear, connected with such things as the changes of the
+Moon, and the probable ILL-LUCK of any enterprise undertaken on the
+seventh day, or any day of Moon-change. It is probable, however, that as
+time went on and Society became more complex, the advantages of a weekly
+REST-DAY (or market-day) became more obvious and that the priests and
+legislators deliberately turned the taboo to a social use. (2) The
+learned modern Ethnologists, however, will generally have none of this
+latter idea. As a rule they delight in representing early peoples as
+totally destitute of common sense (which is supposed to be a monopoly
+of us moderns!); and if the Sabbath-arrangement has had any value or
+use they insist on ascribing this to pure accident, and not to the
+application of any sane argument or reason.
+
+ (1) For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral
+Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.
+
+ (2) For a tracing of this taboo from useless superstition to
+practical utility see Hastings's Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "The
+Sabbath."
+
+
+It is true indeed that a taboo--in order to be a proper taboo--must not
+rest in the general mind on argument or reason. It may have had good
+sense in the past or even an underlying good sense in the present, but
+its foundation must rest on something beyond. It must be an absolute
+fiat--something of the nature of a Mystery (1) or of Religion or
+Magic-and not to be disputed. This gives it its blood-curdling quality.
+The rustic does not know what would happen to him if he garnered his
+corn on Sunday, nor does the diner-out in polite society know what
+would happen if he spooned up his food with his knife--but they both are
+stricken with a sort of paralysis at the very suggestion of infringing
+these taboos.
+
+ (1) See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.
+
+
+Marriage-customs have always been a fertile field for the generation
+of taboos. It seems doubtful whether anything like absolute promiscuity
+ever prevailed among the human race, but there is much to show that wide
+choice and intercourse were common among primitive folk and that the
+tendency of later marriage custom has been on the whole to LIMIT this
+range of choice. At some early period the forbiddal of marriage between
+those who bore the same totem-name took place. Thus in Australia "no man
+of the Emu stock might marry an Emu woman; no Blacksnake might marry a
+Blacksnake woman, and so forth." (1) Among the Kamilaroi and the Arunta
+of S. Australia the tribe was divided into classes or clans, sometimes
+four, sometimes eight, and a man of one particular clan was only
+marriageable with a woman of another particular clan--say (1) with (3)
+or (2) with (4), and so on. (2) Customs with a similar tendency, but
+different in detail, seem to have prevailed among native tribes in
+Central Africa and N. America. And the regulations in all this matter
+have been so (apparently) entirely arbitrary in the various cases that
+it would almost appear as if the bar of kinship through the Totem had
+been the EXCUSE, originating perhaps in some superstition, but that the
+real and more abiding object was simply limitation. And this perhaps was
+a wise line to take. A taboo on promiscuity had to be created, and for
+this purpose any current prejudice could be made use of. (3)
+
+ (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.
+
+ (2) See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.
+
+ (3) The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See
+p. 214 of that book.
+
+
+With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different complexion. When
+we consider the enormous amount of suffering and disease, both of mind
+and body, arising from the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken,
+especially among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos--which
+possibly had their place and use in the past--can be tolerated no
+longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight of reason and science on a
+number of superstitions which still linger in the dark and musty
+places of the Churches and the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown
+conclusively not only the foundational importance of sex in the
+evolution of each human being, but also the very great VARIETY of
+spontaneous manifestations in different individuals and the vital
+necessity that these should be recognized, if society is ever to expand
+into a rational human form. It is not my object here to sketch the
+future of marriage and sex-relations generally--a subject which is now
+being dealt with very effectively from many sides; but only to insist on
+our using our good sense in the whole matter, and refusing any longer to
+be bound by senseless pre-judgments.
+
+Something of the same kind may be said with regard to Nakedness, which
+in modern Civilization has become the object of a very serious and
+indeed harmful taboo; both of speech and act. As someone has said, it
+became in the end of the nineteenth century almost a crime to mention
+by name any portion of the human body within a radius of about twenty
+inches from its centre (!) and as a matter of fact a few dress-reformers
+of that period were actually brought into court and treated as criminals
+for going about with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest
+uncovered! Public follies such as these have been responsible for much
+of the bodily and mental disease and suppression just mentioned, and
+the sooner they are sent to limbo the better. No sensible person
+would advocate promiscuous nakedness any more than promiscuous
+sex-relationship; nor is it likely that aged and deformed people would
+at any time wish to expose themselves. But surely there is enough good
+sense and appreciation of grace and fitness in the average human mind
+for it to be able to liberate the body from senseless concealment, and
+give it its due expression. The Greeks of old, having on the whole
+clean bodies, treated them with respect and distinction. The young men
+appeared quite naked in the palaestra, and even the girls of Sparta ran
+races publicly in the same condition; (1) and some day when our
+bodies (and minds too) have become clean we shall return to similar
+institutions. But that will not be just yet. As long as the defilement
+of this commercial civilization is on us we shall prefer our dirt and
+concealment. The powers that be will protest against change. Heinrich
+Scham, in his charming little pamphlet Nackende Menschen, (2) describes
+the consternation of the commercial people at such ideas:
+
+"'What will become of us,' cried the tailors, 'if you go naked?'
+
+"And all the lot of them, hat, cravat, shirt, and shoemakers joined in
+the chorus.
+
+"'AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?' cried one who had just been made a
+director."
+
+
+ (1) See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.
+
+ (2) Published at Leipzig about 1893.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+Referring back to the existence of something resembling a great
+World-religion which has come down the centuries, continually expanding
+and branching in the process, we have now to consider the genesis of
+that special brand or branch of it which we call Christianity. Each
+religion or cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast
+amount in common with the general World-religion; yet each has had its
+own special characteristics. What have been the main characteristics of
+the Christian branch, as differentiating it from the other branches?
+
+We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic attitude towards Sex
+was one of the most salient marks of the Christian Church; and that
+whereas most of the pagan cults (though occasionally favoring frightful
+austerities and cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure
+and the world of the senses, Christianity--following largely on
+Judaism--displayed a tendency towards renunciation of the world and the
+flesh, and a withdrawal into the inner and more spiritual regions of the
+mind. The same tendency may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults
+of that period. It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI, 510-40)
+chaffs the priests of Cybele at Rome for making themselves "eunuchs for
+the kingdom of heaven's sake," or the rich Roman lady for plunging in
+the wintry Tiber for a propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later
+pagans "the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul" had
+become a very serious matter. But Christianity represented perhaps the
+most powerful reaction against this; and this reaction had, as indicated
+in the last chapter, the enormously valuable result that (for the time)
+it disentangled love from sex and established Love, pure and undefiled,
+as ruler of the world. "God is Love." But, as also indicated, the
+divorce between the two elements of human nature, carried to an extreme,
+led in time to a crippling of both elements and the development of a
+certain morbidity and self-consciousness which, it cannot be denied, is
+painfully marked among some sections of Christians--especially those of
+the altruistic and 'philanthropic' type.
+
+Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very fine in
+its way but has its limits of utility, has been its insistence on
+"morality." Some modern writers indeed have gone so far--forgetting, I
+suppose, the Stoics--as to claim that Christianity's chief mark is its
+high morality, and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in the
+moral sense! This, of course, is a profound mistake. I should say that,
+in the true sense of the word, the early and tribal peoples have been
+much more 'moral' as a rule--that is, ready as individuals to pay
+respect to the needs of the community--than the later and more civilized
+societies. But the mistake arises from the different interpretations of
+the word; for whereas all the pagan religions insisted very strongly on
+the just-mentioned kind of morality, which we should call CIVIC DUTY TO
+ONE'S NEIGHBOR, the Christian made morality to consist more especially
+in a mans DUTY TO GOD. It became with them a private affair between a
+mans self and-God, rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end
+to a very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose chief
+inspiration was not the helping of one's fellow-man but the saving of
+one's own soul.
+
+There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation between
+Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but for the present we
+may recognize these two--(a) the tendency towards a renunciation of the
+world, and the consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b)
+the insistence on a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of
+duty to God rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to
+society generally. It may be interesting to trace the causes which led
+to this differentiation.
+
+Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander had had the
+effect of spreading the Greek thought and culture over most of the known
+world. A vast number of small bodies of worshipers of local deities,
+with their various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken
+up, or at least brought into contact with each other and partially
+modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more general conception of life
+and religion was already being traced. By the time of the founding of
+the first Christian Church the immense conquests of Rome had greatly
+extended and established the process. The Mediterranean had become a
+great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes of traffic crossed it in all
+directions; tourists visited its shores. The known world had become one.
+The numberless peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of
+the Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs, religions,
+philosophies, were profoundly influencing each other. (1) A great fusion
+was taking place; and it was becoming inevitable that the next great
+religious movement would have a world-wide character.
+
+ (1) For an enlargement on this theme see Glover's Conflict of
+Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity (University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis worship, for
+instance (a resurrection-cult), "was still thriving in Syria and Cyprus
+when Paul preached there," and the worship of Isis and Serapis had
+already reached then, Rome and Naples.
+
+
+It was probable that this new religion would combine many elements from
+the preceding rituals in one cult. In connection with the fine temples
+and elaborate services of Isis and Cybele and Mithra there was growing
+up a powerful priesthood; Franz Cumont (1) speaks of "the learned
+priests of the Asiatic cults" as building up, on the foundations of old
+fetichism and superstition, a complete religious philosophy--just as
+the Brahmins had built the monism of the Vedanta on the "monstrous
+idolatries of Hinduism." And it was likely that a similar process would
+evolve the new religion expected. Toutain again calls attention to the
+patronage accorded to all these cults by the Roman Emperors, as favoring
+a new combination and synthesis:--"Hadrien, Commode, Septime Severe,
+Julia Domna, Elagabal, Alexandre Severe, en particulier ont contribue
+personnellement a la popularite et au succes des cultes qui se
+celebraient en l'honneur de Serapis et d'Isis, des divinites syriennes
+et de Mithra." (2)
+
+ (1) See Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain
+(Paris, 1906), p. 253.
+
+ (2) Cultes paiens dans l'Empire Romain (2 vols., 1911), vol. ii,
+p. 263.
+
+
+It was also probable that this new Religion would show (as indicated
+in the last chapter) a reaction against mere sex-indulgence; and,
+as regards its standard of Morality generally, that, among so many
+conflicting peoples with their various civic and local customs, it could
+not well identify itself with any ONE of these but would evolve an
+inner inspiration of its own which in its best form would be love of the
+neighbor, regardless of the race, creed or customs of the neighbor, and
+whose sanction would not reside in any of the external authorities
+thus conflicting with each other, but in the sense of the soul's direct
+responsibility to God.
+
+So much for what we might expect a priori as to the influence of the
+surroundings on the general form of the new Religion. And what about the
+kind of creed or creeds which that religion would favor? Here again
+we must see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a certain
+result. Those doctrines which we have described in the preceding
+chapters--doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a Savior, the Eucharist, the
+Trinity, the Virgin-birth, and so forth--were in their various forms
+seething, so to speak, all around. It was impossible for any new
+religious synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to
+appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its own. Thus
+it is into the midst of this germinating mass that we must imagine the
+various pagan cults, like fertilizing streams, descending. To trace all
+these streams would of course be an impossible task; but it may be of
+use, as an example of the process, to take the case of some particular
+belief. Let us take the belief in the coming of a Savior-god; and this
+will be the more suitable as it is a belief which has in the past been
+commonly held to be distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now
+that it is not in any sense distinctive, but that the long tradition of
+the Savior comes down from the remotest times, and perhaps from every
+country of the world. (1) The Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the
+fifty-third chapter of Isaiah emptied themselves into the Christian
+teachings, and infected them to some degree with a Judaic tinge. The
+"Messiah" means of course the Anointed One. The Hebrew word occurs some
+40 times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint or Greek
+translation (made mainly in the third century BEFORE our era) the word
+is translated [gr cristos], or Christos, which again means Anointed.
+Thus we see that the idea or the word "The Christ" was in vogue in
+Alexandria as far back certainly as 280 B.C., or nearly three centuries
+before Jesus. And what the word "The Anointed" strictly speaking means,
+and from what the expression is probably derived, will appear later. In
+The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, (2) the Christ is
+spoken of as already existing in heaven, and about to come as judge
+of all men, and is definitely called "the Son of Man." The Book of
+Revelations is FULL of passages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of Paul;
+so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden Age that is
+to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven and Hell, and of Angels good
+and evil, and it speaks of a "garden of Righteousness" with the "Tree of
+Wisdom" in its midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first century
+B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.
+
+ (1) Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with
+prophecies of a coming Mahdi.
+
+ (2) See Edition by R. H. Charles (1893).
+
+
+But the Savior-god, as we also know, was a familiar figure in Egypt. The
+great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both in his life and death: in
+his life through the noble works he wrought for the benefit of mankind,
+and in his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness and
+his resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven. (1) The Egyptian
+doctrines descended through Alexandria into Christianity--and though
+they did not influence the latter deeply until about 300 A.D., yet they
+then succeeded in reaching the Christian Churches, giving a color to
+their teachings with regard to the Savior, and persuading them to accept
+and honor the Egyptian worship of Isis in the Christian form of the
+Virgin Mary.
+
+ (1) See ch. ii.
+
+
+Again, another great stream of influence descended from Persia in the
+form of the cult of Mithra. Mithra, as we have seen, (1) stood as a
+great Mediator between God and man. With his baptisms and eucharists,
+and his twelve disciples, and his birth in a cave, and so forth,
+he seemed to the early Fathers an invention of the devil and a most
+dangerous mockery on Christianity--and all the more so because his
+worship was becoming so exceedingly popular. The cult seems to have
+reached Rome about B.C. 70. It spread far and wide through the Empire.
+It extended to Great Britain, and numerous remains of Mithraic
+monuments and sculptures in this country--at York, Chester and other
+places--testify to its wide acceptance even here. At Rome the vogue of
+Mithraism became so great that in the third century A. D., it was quite
+doubtful (2) whether it OR Christianity would triumph; the Emperor
+Aurelian in 273 founded a cult of the Invincible Sun in connection with
+Mithraism; (3) and as St. Jerome tells us in his letters, (4) the latter
+cult had at a later time to be suppressed in Rome and Alexandria by
+PHYSICAL FORCE, so powerful was it.
+
+ (1) Ch. ii.
+
+ (2) See Cumont, op. cit., who says, p. 171:--"Jamais, pas meme a
+l'epoque des invasions mussulmanes, l'Europe ne sembla plus pres
+de devenir asiatique qu'au moment ou Diocletien reconnaissait
+officiellement en Mithra, le protecteur de l'empire reconstitue." See
+also Cumont's Mysteres de Mithra, preface. The Roman Army, in fact,
+stuck to Mithra throughout, as against Christianity; and so did the
+Roman nobility. (See S. Augustine's Confessions, Book VIII, ch. 2.)
+
+ (3) Cumont indeed says that the identification of Mithra with the
+Sun (the emblem of imperial power) formed one reason why Mithraism was
+NOT persecuted at that time.
+
+ (4) Epist. cvii, ad Laetam. See Robertson's Pagan Christs, p.
+350.
+
+
+Nor was force the only method employed. IMITATION is not only the
+sincerest flattery, but it is often the most subtle and effective way of
+defeating a rival. The priests of the rising Christian Church were, like
+the priests of ALL religions, not wanting in craft; and at this moment
+when the question of a World-religion was in the balance, it was an
+obvious policy for them to throw into their own scale as many elements
+as possible of the popular Pagan cults. Mithraism had been flourishing
+for 600 years; and it is, to say the least, CURIOUS that the Mithraic
+doctrines and legends which I have just mentioned should all have been
+adopted (quite unintentionally of course!) into Christianity; and still
+more so that some others from the same source, like the legend of the
+Shepherds at the Nativity and the doctrine of the Resurrection and
+Ascension, which are NOT mentioned at all in the original draft of the
+earliest Gospel (St. Mark), should have made their appearance, in the
+Christian writings at a later time, when Mithraism was making great
+forward strides. History shows that as a Church progresses and expands
+it generally feels compelled to enlarge and fortify its own foundations
+by inserting material which was not there at first. I shall shortly give
+another illustration of this; at present I will merely point out
+that the Christian writers, as time went on, not only introduced new
+doctrines, legends, miracles and so forth--most of which we can trace to
+antecedent pagan sources--but that they took especial pains to
+destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own
+dishonesty. We learn from Porphyry (1) that there were several elaborate
+treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra; and J. M. Robertson adds
+(Pagan Christs, p. 325): "everyone of these has been destroyed by the
+care of the Church, and it is remarkable that even the treatise of
+Firmicus is mutilated at a passage (v.) where he seems to be accusing
+Christians of following Mithraic usages." While again Professor Murray
+says, "The polemic literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant;
+the books of the Pagans have been DESTROYED." (2)
+
+ (1) De Abstinentia, ii. 56; iv. 16.
+
+ (2) Four Stages, p. 180. We have probably an instance of this
+destruction in the total disappearance of Celsus' lively attack
+on Christianity (180 A.D.), of which, however, portions have been
+fortunately preserved in Origen's rather prolix refutation of the same.
+
+
+Returning to the doctrine of the Savior, I have already in preceding
+chapters given so many instances of belief in such a deity among the
+pagans--whether he be called Krishna or Mithra or Osiris or Horus or
+Apollo or Hercules--that it is not necessary to dwell on the subject any
+further in order to persuade the reader that the doctrine was 'in the
+air' at the time of the advent of Christianity. Even Dionysus, then
+a prominent figure in the 'Mysteries,' was called Eleutherios, The
+Deliverer. But it may be of interest to trace the same doctrine among
+the PRE-CHRISTIAN sects of Gnostics. The Gnostics, says Professor
+Murray, (1) "are still commonly thought of as a body of CHRISTIAN
+heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the
+Hellenistic world BEFORE Christianity as well as after. They must have
+been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the
+days of Paul or Apollos. Their Savior, like the Jewish Messiah, was
+established in men's minds before the Savior of the Christians. 'If
+we look close,' says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with great
+clearness that the figure of the Redeemer as such did not wait for
+Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnosis, but was
+already present there under various forms.'"
+
+ (1) Four Stages, p. 143.
+
+
+This Gnostic Redeemer, continues Professor Murray, "is descended by a
+fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Soter' ('third Savior') (1) of
+early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis
+from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of
+the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name
+of Jesus or 'Christos,' 'the Anointed,' tends gradually to supersede.
+Above all, he is in some sense Man, or 'the second Man' or 'the Son of
+Man'... He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man, of
+whom all bodily men are feeble copies." (2)
+
+ (1) There seems to be some doubt about the exact meaning of this
+expression. Even Zeus himself was sometimes called 'Soter,' and at
+feasts, it is said, the THIRD goblet was always drunk in his honor.
+
+ (2) See also The Gnostic Story of Jesus Christ, by Gilbert T.
+Sadler (C. W. Daniel, 1919).
+
+
+This passage brings vividly before the mind the process of which I
+have spoken, namely, the fusion and mutual interchange of ideas on the
+subject of the Savior during the period anterior to our era. Also it
+exemplifies to us through what an abstract sphere of Gnostic religious
+speculation the doctrine had to travel before reaching its expression in
+Christianity. (1) This exalted and high philosophical conception passed
+on and came out again to some degree in the Fourth Gospel and the
+Pauline Epistles (especially I Cor. xv); but I need hardly say it
+was not maintained. The enthusiasm of the little scattered Christian
+bodies--with their communism of practice with regard to THIS world and
+their intensity of faith with regard to the next--began to wane in the
+second and third centuries A.D. As the Church (with capital initial)
+grew, so was it less and less occupied with real religious feeling, and
+more and more with its battles against persecution from outside, and its
+quarrels and dissensions concerning heresies within its own borders. And
+when at the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) it endeavored to establish an
+official creed, the strife and bitterness only increased. "There is no
+wild beast," said the Emperor Julian, "like an angry theologian." Where
+the fourth Evangelist had preached the gospel of Love, and Paul had
+announced redemption by an inner and spiritual identification with
+Christ, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive";
+and whereas some at any rate of the Pagan cults had taught a glorious
+salvation by the new birth of a divine being within each man: "Be of
+good cheer, O initiates in the mystery of the liberated god; For to
+you too out of all your labors and sorrows shall come Liberation"--the
+Nicene creed had nothing to propound except some extremely futile
+speculations about the relation to each other of the Father and the
+Son, and the relation of BOTH to the Holy Ghost, and of all THREE to the
+Virgin Mary--speculations which only served for the renewal of shameful
+strife and animosities--riots and bloodshed and murder--within the
+Church, and the mockery of the heathen without. And as far as it dealt
+with the crucifixion, death and resurrection of the Lord it did not
+differ from the score of preceding pagan creeds, except in the thorough
+materialism and lack of poetry in statement which it exhibits. After
+the Council of Nicaea, in fact, the Judaic tinge in the doctrines of the
+Church becomes more apparent, and more and more its Scheme of Salvation
+through Christ takes the character of a rather sordid and huckstering
+bargain by which Man gets the better of God by persuading the latter
+to sacrifice his own Son for the redemption of the world! With the
+exception of a few episodes like the formation during the Middle Ages of
+the noble brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Frairs and Nuns, dedicated to
+the help and healing of suffering humanity, and the appearance of a few
+real lovers of mankind (and the animals) like St. Francis--(and these
+manifestations can hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty
+consistently opposed them)--it may be said that after about the fourth
+century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm died
+away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the North and East, and
+later of Moors and Arabs from the South, familiarized the European
+peoples with the ideas of bloodshed and violence; gross and material
+conceptions of life were in the ascendant; and a romantic and aspiring
+Christianity gave place to a worldly and vulgar Churchianity.
+
+ (1) When travelling in India I found that the Gnanis or Wise Men
+there quite commonly maintained that Jesus (judging from his teaching)
+must have been initiated at some time in the esoteric doctrines of the
+Vedanta.
+
+
+I have in these two or three pages dealt only--and that very
+briefly--with the entry of the pagan doctrine of the Savior into the
+Christian field, showing its transformation there and how Christianity
+could not well escape having a doctrine of a Savior, or avoid giving a
+color of its own to that doctrine. To follow out the same course
+with other doctrines, like those which I have mentioned above, would
+obviously be an endless task--which must be left to each student or
+reader to pursue according to his opportunity and capacity. It is clear
+anyhow, that all these elements of the pagan religions--pouring down
+into the vast reservoir, or rather whirlpool, of the Roman Empire,
+and mixing among all these numerous brotherhoods, societies, collegia,
+mystery-clubs, and groups which were at that time looking out intently
+for some new revelation or inspiration--did more or less automatically
+act and react upon each other, and by the general conditions prevailing
+were modified, till they ultimately combined and took united shape
+in the movement which we call Christianity, but which only--as I have
+said--narrowly escaped being called Mithraism--so nearly related and
+closely allied were these cults with each other.
+
+
+At this point it will naturally be asked: "And where in this scheme of
+the Genesis of Christianity is the chief figure and accredited leader of
+the movement--namely Jesus Christ himself--for to all appearance in the
+account here given of the matter he is practically non-existent or a
+negligible quantity?" And the question is a very pertinent one, and very
+difficult to answer. "Where is the founder of the Religion?"--or to
+put it in another form: "Is it necessary to suppose a human and visible
+Founder at all?" A few years ago such a mere question would have been
+accounted rank blasphemy, and would only--if passed over--have been
+ignored on account of its supposed absurdity. To-day, however, owing to
+the enormous amount of work which has been done of late on the
+subject of Christian origins, the question takes on quite a different
+complexion. And from Strauss onwards a growingly influential and learned
+body of critics is inclined to regard the whole story of the Gospels as
+LEGENDARY. Arthur Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his
+celebrated book The Christ-Myth, (1) places David F. Strauss as first
+in the myth field--though he allows that Dupuis in L'origine de tous
+les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the whole idea. He then mentions
+Bruno Bauer (1877) as contending that Jesus was a pure invention
+of Mark's, and John M. Robertson as having in his Christianity and
+Mythology (1900) given the first thoroughly reasoned exposition of the
+legendary theory; also Emilio Bossi in Italy, who wrote Jesu Christo
+non e mai esistito, and similar authors in Holland, Poland, and other
+countries, including W. Benjamin Smith, the American author of The
+Pre-christian Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in
+den Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of the
+Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list! (2) "But," continues
+Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this." Finally, he
+dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely in the mists of
+tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly remark that, large and learned
+as the body of opinion here represented is, a still larger (but less
+learned) body fights desperately for the actual HISTORICITY of Jesus,
+and some even still for the old view of him as a quite unique and
+miraculous revelation of Godhood on earth.
+
+ (1) Die Christus-mythe: verbesserte und erweitezte Ausgabe, Jena,
+1910.
+
+ (2) To which we may also add Schweitzer's Quest of the historical
+Jesus (1910).
+
+
+At first, no doubt, the LEGENDARY theory seems a little TOO far-fetched.
+There is a fashion in all these things, and it MAY be that there is a
+fashion even here. But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even
+in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure
+of Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in
+the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a
+subject of controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to
+have lived some 300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in
+minutest detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost
+certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember--as
+mentioned earlier in this book (1)--that it was more than five hundred
+years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort
+was made to establish the date of that birth--and that then a purely
+mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new
+birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of
+Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for
+a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and
+the general standard of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like
+Syria, and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating
+from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous
+or imaginative;--why, then the legendary theory does not seem so
+improbable. There is no doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem
+(in A.D. 70), little groups of believers in a redeeming 'Christ' were
+formed there and in other places, just as there had certainly existed,
+in the first century B.C., groups of Gnostics, Therapeutae, Essenes and
+others whose teachings were very SIMILAR to the Christian, and there was
+now a demand from many of these groups for 'writings' and 'histories'
+which should hearten and confirm the young and growing Churches. The
+Gospels and Epistles, of which there are still extant a great abundance,
+both apocryphal and canonical, met this demand; but how far their
+records of the person of Jesus of Nazareth are reliable history, or how
+far they are merely imaginative pictures of the kind of man the Saviour
+might be expected to be, (2) is a question which, as I have already
+said, is a difficult one for skilled critics to answer, and one on which
+I certainly have no intention of giving a positive verdict. Personally I
+must say I think the 'legendary' solution quite likely, and in some ways
+more satisfactory than the opposite one--for the simple reason that
+it seems much more encouraging to suppose that the story of Jesus,
+(gracious and beautiful as it is) is a myth which gradually formed
+itself in the conscience of mankind, and thus points the way of
+humanity's future evolution, than to suppose it to be the mere record
+of an unique and miraculous interposition of Providence, which depended
+entirely on the powers above, and could hardly be expected to occur
+again.
+
+ (1) Ch. II.
+
+ (2) One of Celsus' accusations against the Christians was that
+their Gospels had been written "several times over" (see Origen, Contra
+Celsum, ii. 26, 27).
+
+
+However, the question is not what we desire, but what we can prove to be
+the actual fact. And certainly the difficulties in the way of regarding
+the Gospel story (or stories, for there is not one consistent story)
+as TRUE are enormous. If anyone will read, for instance, in the four
+Gospels, the events of the night preceding the crucifixion and reckon
+the time which they would necessarily have taken to enact--the Last
+Supper, the agony in the Garden, the betrayal by Judas, the haling
+before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, and then before Pilate in the Hall
+of judgment (though courts for the trial of malefactors do not GENERALLY
+sit in the middle of the night); then--in Luke--the interposed visit to
+Herod, and the RETURN to Pilate; Pilate's speeches and washing of hands
+before the crowd; then the scourging and the mocking and the arraying of
+Jesus in purple robe as a king; then the preparation of a Cross and the
+long and painful journey to Golgotha; and finally the Crucifixion at
+sunrise;--he will see--as has often been pointed out--that the whole
+story is physically impossible. As a record of actual events the story
+is impossible; but as a record or series of notes derived from the
+witnessing of a "mystery-play"--and such plays with VERY SIMILAR
+incidents were common enough in antiquity in connection with cults of
+a dying Savior, it very likely IS true (one can see the very dramatic
+character of the incidents: the washing of hands, the threefold denial
+by Peter, the purple robe and crown of thorns, and so forth); and as
+such it is now accepted by many well-qualified authorities. (1)
+
+ (1) Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough (vol. ix, "The Scapegoat," p.
+400) speaks of the frequency in antiquity of a Mystery-play relating
+to a God-man who gives his life and blood for the people; and he
+puts forward tentatively and by no means dogmatically the following
+note:--"Such a drama, if we are right, was the original story of Esther
+and Mordecai, or (to give their older names) Ishtar and Marduk. It was
+played in Babylonia, and from Babylonia the returning Captives brought
+it to Judaea, where it was acted, rather as an historical than a
+mythical piece, by players who, having to die in grim earnest on a
+cross or gallows, were naturally drawn from the gaol rather than the
+green-room. A chain of causes, which because we cannot follow them
+might--in the loose language of common life--be called an accident,
+determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play should
+be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had made in high
+places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to put out of the way."
+See also vol. iv, "The Dying God," in the same book.
+
+
+There are many other difficulties. The raising of Lazarus, already dead
+three days, the turning of water into wine (a miracle attributed to
+Bacchus, of old), the feeding of the five thousand, and others of the
+marvels are, to say the least, not easy of digestion. The "Sermon on the
+Mount" which, with the "Lord's Prayer" embedded in it, forms the great
+and accepted repository of 'Christian' teaching and piety, is well known
+to be a collection of sayings from pre-christian writings, including the
+Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemonehesreh
+(a book of Hebrew prayers), and others; and the fact that this
+collection was really made AFTER the time of Jesus, and could not
+have originated from him, is clear from the stress which it lays on
+"persecutions" and "false prophets"--things which were certainly not a
+source of trouble at the time Jesus is supposed to be speaking, though
+they were at a later time--as well as from the occurrence of the word
+"Gentiles," which being here used apparently in contra-distinction to
+"Christians" could not well be appropriate at a time when no recognized
+Christian bodies as yet existed.
+
+But the most remarkable point in this connection is the absolute
+silence of the Gospel of Mark on the subject of the Resurrection and
+Ascension--that is, of the ORIGINAL Gospel, for it is now allowed on
+all hands that the twelve verses Mark xvi. 9 to the end, are a later
+insertion. Considering the nature of this event, astounding indeed, if
+physically true, and unique in the history of the world, it is strange
+that this Gospel--the earliest written of the four Gospels, and nearest
+in time to the actual evidence--makes no mention of it. The next Gospel
+in point of time--that of Matthew--mentions the matter rather briefly
+and timidly, and reports the story that the body had been STOLEN from
+the sepulchre. Luke enlarges considerably and gives a whole long chapter
+to the resurrection and ascension; while the Fourth Gospel, written
+fully twenty years later still--say about A. D. 120--gives two chapters
+and a GREAT VARIETY OF DETAILS!
+
+This increase of detail, however, as one gets farther and farther from
+the actual event is just what one always finds, as I have said before,
+in legendary traditions. A very interesting example of this has lately
+come to light in the case of the traditions concerning the life and
+death of the Persian Bab. The Bab, as most of my readers will know, was
+the Founder of a great religious movement which now numbers (or numbered
+before the Great War) some millions of adherents, chiefly Mahommedans,
+Christians, Jews and Parsees. The period of his missionary activity
+was from 1845 to 1850. His Gospel was singularly like that of Jesus--a
+gospel of love to mankind--only (as might be expected from the
+difference of date) with an even wider and more deliberate inclusion of
+all classes, creeds and races, sinners and saints; and the incidents and
+entourage of his ministry were also singularly similar. He was born at
+Shiraz in 1820, and growing up a promising boy and youth, fell at the
+age Of 21 under the influence of a certain Seyyid Kazim, leader of a
+heterodox sect, and a kind of fore-runner or John the Baptist to the
+Bab. The result was a period of mental trouble (like the "temptation in
+the wilderness"), after which the youth returned to Shiraz and at the
+age of twenty-five began his own mission. His real name was Mirza Ali
+Muhammad, but he called himself thenceforth The Bab, i.e. the Gate ("I
+am the Way"); and gradually there gathered round him disciples, drawn
+by the fascination of his personality and the devotion of his character.
+But with the rapid increase of his following great jealousy and hatred
+were excited among the Mullahs, the upholders of a fanatical and
+narrow-minded Mahommedanism and quite corresponding to the Scribes and
+Pharisees of the New Testament. By them he was denounced to the
+Turkish Government. He was arrested on a charge of causing political
+disturbance, and was condemned to death. Among his disciples was one
+favorite, (1) who was absolutely devoted to his Master and refused to
+leave him at the last. So together they were suspended over the city
+wall (at Tabriz) and simultaneously shot. This was on the 8th July,
+1850.
+
+ (1) Mirza Muhammad Ali; and one should note the similarity of
+the two names.
+
+
+In November 1850--or between that date and October 1851, a book
+appeared, written by one of the B[a^]b's earliest and most enthusiastic
+disciples--a merchant of Kashan--and giving in quite simple and
+unpretending form a record of the above events. There is in it no
+account of miracles or of great pretensions to godhood and the like. It
+is just a plain history of the life and death of a beloved teacher.
+It was cordially received and circulated far and wide; and we have no
+reason for doubting its essential veracity. And even if proved now to be
+inaccurate in one or two details, this would not invalidate the moral of
+the rest of the story--which is as follows:
+
+After the death of the Bab a great persecution took place (in 1852);
+there were many Babi martyrs, and for some years the general followers
+were scattered. But in time they gathered themselves together again;
+successors to the original prophet were appointed--though not without
+dissensions--and a Babi church, chiefly at Acca or Acre in Syria, began
+to be formed. It was during this period that a great number of legends
+grew up--legends of miraculous babyhood and boyhood, legends of miracles
+performed by the mature Bab, and so forth; and when the newly-forming
+Church came to look into the matter it concluded (quite naturally!) that
+such a simple history as I have outlined above would never do for the
+foundation of its plans, now grown somewhat ambitious. So a new Gospel
+was framed, called the Tarikh-i-Jadid ("The new History" or "The new
+Way"), embodying and including a lot of legendary matter, and issued
+with the authority of "the Church." This was in 1881-2; and comparing
+this with the original record (called The point of Kaf) we get a
+luminous view of the growth of fable in those thirty brief years which
+had elapsed since the Bab's death. Meanwhile it became very necessary of
+course to withdraw from circulation as far as possible all copies of the
+original record, lest they should give the lie to the later 'Gospel';
+and this apparently was done very effectively--so effectively indeed
+that Professor Edward Browne (to whom the world owes so much on account
+of his labors in connection with Babism), after arduous search, came at
+one time to the conclusion that the original was no longer extant. Most
+fortunately, however, the well-known Comte de Gobineau had in the course
+of his studies on Eastern Religions acquired a copy of The point of Kaf;
+and this, after his death, was found among his literary treasures and
+identified (as was most fitting) by Professor Browne himself.
+
+Such in brief is the history of the early Babi Church (1)--a Church
+which has grown up and expanded greatly within the memory of many yet
+living. Much might be written about it, but the chief point at present
+is for us to note the well-verified and interesting example it gives of
+the rapid growth in Syria of a religious legend and the reasons which
+contributed to this growth--and to be warned how much more rapidly
+similar legends probably grew up in the same land in the middle of
+the First Century, A.D. The story of the Bab is also interesting to us
+because, while this mass of legend was formed around it, there is no
+possible doubt about the actual existence of a historical nucleus in the
+person of Mirza Ali Muhammad.
+
+ (1) For literature, see Edward G. Browne's Traveller's Narrative
+on the Episode of the Bab (1891), and his New History of the Bab
+translated from the Persian of the Tarikh-i-Jadid (Cambridge, 1893).
+Also Sermons and Essays by Herbert Rix (Williams and Norgate, 1907), pp.
+295-325, "The Persian Bab."
+
+
+On the whole, one is sometimes inclined to doubt whether any great
+movement ever makes itself felt in the world, without dating first from
+some powerful personality or group of personalities, ROUND which the
+idealizing and myth-making genius of mankind tends to crystallize. But
+one must not even here be too certain. Something of the Apostle Paul we
+know, and something of 'John' the Evangelist and writer of the Epistle
+I John; and that the 'Christian' doctrines dated largely from the
+preaching and teaching of these two we cannot doubt; but Paul never
+saw Jesus (except "in the Spirit"), nor does he ever mention the man
+personally, or any incident of his actual life (the "crucified Christ"
+being always an ideal figure); and 'John' who wrote the Gospel was
+certainly not the same as the disciple who "lay in Jesus' bosom"--though
+an intercalated verse, the last but one in the Gospel, asserts the
+identity. (1)
+
+ (1) It is obvious, in fact, that the WHOLE of the last chapter of
+St. John is a later insertion, and again that the two last verses of
+that chapter are later than the chapter itself!
+
+
+There may have been a historic Jesus--and if so, to get a reliable
+outline of his life would indeed be a treasure; but at present it would
+seem there is no sign of that. If the historicity of Jesus, in any
+degree, could be proved, it would give us reason for supposing--what I
+have personally always been inclined to believe--that there was also
+a historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra, Krishna,
+Hercules, Apollo and the rest. The question, in fact, narrows itself
+down to this, Have there been in the course of human evolution certain,
+so to speak, NODAL points or periods at which the psychologic currents
+ran together and condensed themselves for a new start; and has each such
+node or point of condensation been marked by the appearance of an actual
+and heroic man (or woman) who supplied a necessary impetus for the
+new departure, and gave his name to the resulting movement? OR is
+it sufficient to suppose the automatic formation of such nodes or
+starting-points without the intervention of any special hero or genius,
+and to imagine that in each case the myth-making tendency of mankind
+CREATED a legendary and inspiring figure and worshiped the same for a
+long period afterwards as a god?
+
+As I have said before, this is a question which, interesting as it is,
+is not really very important. The main thing being that the prophetic
+and creative spirit of mankind HAS from time to time evolved those
+figures as idealizations of its "heart's desire" and placed a halo
+round their heads. The long procession of them becomes a REAL piece of
+History--the history of the evolution of the human heart, and of human
+consciousness. But with the psychology of the whole subject I shall deal
+in the next chapter.
+
+
+I may here, however, dwell for a moment on two other points which belong
+properly to this chapter. I have already mentioned the great reliance
+placed by the advocates of a unique 'revelation' on the high morality
+taught in the Gospels and the New Testament generally. There is no need
+of course to challenge that morality or to depreciate it unduly; but the
+argument assumes that it is so greatly superior to anything of the kind
+that had been taught before that we are compelled to suppose something
+like a revelation to explain its appearance--whereas of course anyone
+familiar with the writings of antiquity, among the Greeks or Romans
+or Egyptians or Hindus or later Jews, knows perfectly well that the
+reported sayings of Jesus and the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly
+from these sources. I have illustrated this already from the Sermon
+on the Mount. If anyone will glance at the Testament of the Twelve
+Patriarchs--a Jewish book composed about 120 B. C.--he will see that
+it is full of moral precepts, and especially precepts of love and
+forgiveness, so ardent and so noble that it hardly suffers in any way
+when compared with the New Testament teaching, and that consequently no
+special miracle is required to explain the appearance of the latter.
+
+The twelve Patriarchs in question are the twelve sons of Jacob, and the
+book consists of their supposed deathbed scenes, in which each patriarch
+in turn recites his own (more or less imaginary) life and deeds and
+gives pious counsel to his children and successors. It is composed in a
+fine and poetic style, and is full of lofty thought, remindful in scores
+of passages of the Gospels--words and all--the coincidences being too
+striking to be accidental. It evidently had a deep influence on the
+authors of the Gospels, as well as on St. Paul. It affirms a belief
+in the coming of a Messiah, and in salvation for the Gentiles. The
+following are some quotations from it: (1) Testament of Zebulun (p.
+116): "My children, I bid you keep the commands of the Lord, and show
+mercy to your neighbours, and have compassion towards all, not towards
+men only, but also towards beasts." Dan (p. 127): "Love the Lord through
+all your life, and one another with a true heart." Joseph (p. 173): "I
+was sick, and the Lord visited me; in prison, and my God showed favor
+unto me." Benjamin (p. 209): "For as the sun is not defiled by shining
+on dung and mire, but rather drieth up both and driveth away the evil
+smell, so also the pure mind, encompassed by the defilements of earth,
+rather cleanseth them and is not itself defiled."
+
+ (1) The references being to the Edition by R. H. Charles (1907).
+
+
+I think these quotations are sufficient to prove the high standard of
+this book, which was written in the Second Century B. C., and FROM which
+the New Testament authors copiously borrowed.
+
+The other point has to do with my statement at the beginning of this
+chapter that two of the main 'characteristics' of Christianity were its
+insistence on (a) a tendency towards renunciation of the world, and a
+consequent cultivation of a purely spiritual love, and (b) on a morality
+whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to God rather than a
+public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to society generally. I
+think, however, that the last-mentioned characteristic ought to
+be viewed in relation to a third, namely, (c) the extraordinarily
+DEMOCRATIC tendency of the new Religion. (1) Celsus (A.D. 200) jeered
+at the early Christians for their extreme democracy: "It is only
+the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and
+children--whom they wish to persuade (to join their churches) or CAN
+persuade"--"wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated
+and vulgar persons," and "whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent or
+a fool, in a word, whoever is god-forsaken ([gr kakodaimwn]), him the
+Kingdom of God will receive." (2) Thus Celsus, the accomplished, clever,
+philosophic and withal humorous critic, laughed at the new religionists,
+and prophesied their speedy extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken.
+There is little doubt that just the inclusion of women and weaklings
+and outcasts did contribute LARGELY to the spread of Christianity (and
+Mithraism). It brought hope and a sense of human dignity to the despised
+and rejected of the earth. Of the immense numbers of lesser officials
+who carried on the vast organization of the Roman Empire, most perhaps,
+were taken from the ranks of the freedmen and quondam slaves, drawn from
+a great variety of races and already familiar with pagan cults of all
+kinds--Egyptian, Syrian, Chaldean, Iranian, and so forth. (3) This
+fact helped to give to Christianity--under the fine tolerance of the
+Empire--its democratic character and also its willingness to accept all.
+The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the
+notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in; and though this was
+doubtless, as time went on, a source of weakness to the Church, and a
+cause of dissension and superstition, yet it was in the inevitable
+line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis which I must now
+endeavor to explain.
+
+ (1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic
+tendency was very marked in Mithraism. "Il est certain," says Cumont,
+"qu'il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les classes inferieures de
+la societe et c'est l'a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste
+longtemps la religion des humbles." Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.
+
+ (2) See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire,
+ch. viii.
+
+ (3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+
+The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think,
+from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it
+will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repetition,
+to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the
+dawn of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands or perhaps
+a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a
+gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain
+stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena
+of religious belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in
+the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by
+step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution
+concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the
+strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all
+over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have
+been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
+
+And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those at any rate
+with which we are here concerned--are Three: the stage of Simple
+Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage
+which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal
+Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be
+analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--but at present I only
+desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that
+it is from them and from their passage one into another that there
+has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange
+panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superstitions and
+magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its
+incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and
+paintings and forms of art and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama
+indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with
+three great leading motives!
+
+
+And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of
+centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not
+radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably
+more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or
+reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the
+consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as
+separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.
+He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very
+near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal
+form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general
+world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such
+a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature.
+And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before,
+allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and
+perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now.
+It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same
+sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion.
+For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher
+animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional
+privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their
+surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There
+must have been a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at
+any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet
+'golden.'
+
+It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.
+The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates
+(including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that
+they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man
+fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.
+Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these
+beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse,
+or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
+despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them
+and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we
+could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired
+the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
+friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age
+of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.
+And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand)
+that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense
+of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties
+binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it
+is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed
+the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that
+he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of
+the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into
+consciousness.
+
+ (1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
+edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between
+man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be
+found among the lower races."
+
+
+Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution
+of a child--somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)--when the
+simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new
+element--SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that
+(in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So
+in the evolution of the human race there has been a period--also marked
+and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval
+of time--when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of
+THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance
+of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question
+arose: "How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can _I_
+do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the
+painful, and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added to life.
+The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little
+eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply
+concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with
+the larger life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life of
+the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken
+up.
+
+ (1) See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1
+and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--where the
+same age is tentatively suggested.
+
+
+I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important that the
+reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable severance, an
+inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting
+nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked
+across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually)
+became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows.
+Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property
+and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship and solidarity
+grew feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts
+were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-activity and
+self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were
+less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew
+louder and more insistent. Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered
+his brother and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the Golden Age
+closed their gates behind him. He entered upon a period of suffering--a
+period of labor and toil and sorrow such as he had never before
+known, and such as the animals certainly have never known. And in that
+distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage, he
+still remains to-day.
+
+Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work. It would be
+foolish and useless to rail against the process, or to blame any one for
+it. It had to be. Through this dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had
+to pass--if only in order at last to find the True Self which was (and
+still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed
+there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark
+the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul's return
+to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will
+arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of
+life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious
+long time about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and
+Self-conceit and Cruelty and Lust of oppression and domination, which
+marks the present period, is past--and it WILL pass--then Humanity will
+come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and
+peace which has for so long been prophesied.
+
+But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want
+the reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old
+psychologic unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led
+to the whole panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round
+himself, necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed
+the sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The
+sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization
+of himself as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his
+attributing a similar consciousness of some kind to the great Life
+around him. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may
+have felt before, it became clear to him now that beings more or less
+like himself--though doubtless vaster and more powerful--moved behind
+the veil of the visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and
+Demons and Gods arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of
+this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an
+alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin.
+If before, he had experienced fear--in the kind of automatic way of
+self-preservation in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered
+self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble
+degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were
+not always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived
+or thought he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate
+persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against
+him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by
+a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in
+other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and
+magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense
+of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual
+of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by
+the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue of
+ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn
+to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of
+his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic
+meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common life and
+remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and
+rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and
+demonic violence of passions which else indeed might easily rend the
+community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early
+stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting
+this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of
+SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet
+logical order a whole series of religious institutions and beliefs,
+which phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no
+means unreal to our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the
+psychological process was necessarily of similar general character in
+every branch of the human race and all over the world, so the religious
+evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much the same complexion
+everywhere; and, though they differed in details according to climate
+and other influences, ran on such remarkably parallel lines as we have
+noted.
+
+Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event,
+the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place,
+an enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age.
+I dwell on the word "began" because I think it is probable that in its
+beginnings, and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had
+an infantile and very innocent character, quite different from its later
+and more aggressive forms--just as we see self-consciousness in a little
+child has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful
+or grasping boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though
+self-consciousness may have begun to appear in the human race at this
+very early time (and more or less contemporaneously with the invention
+of very rude tools and unformed language), there probably did elapse
+a very long period--perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the
+evils of this second stage of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller
+has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various
+branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early
+period before the separation of these branches, there are not found
+the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of
+strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among
+mankind AFTER the first formation and use of language.
+
+That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were
+APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many
+thinkers; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so
+very protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact
+determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what
+might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like
+"go-hunting-kill-bear") without reference to individual personalities
+and relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like
+"I" and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up into "parts
+of speech" and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If
+true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal
+language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals,
+preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in
+the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and
+relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in
+grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection
+and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According
+to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, or
+in any particular race or section of the human family, must have been
+equally slow and hesitating; and it would be easy to imagine, as just
+said, that there may have been a very long and 'golden' period at its
+beginning, before the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher
+forms.
+
+ (1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their
+simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we
+should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not
+differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase
+and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.
+
+ (2) See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's
+Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World called
+America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness
+is associated with the break-up of the holophrase.
+
+ (3) Themis, p. 471.
+
+
+All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are
+notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we
+take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (homo
+primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000
+or 40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of
+the Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and
+inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples, and 5,000 years
+ago for the first actual historical records that have come down to us,
+we may perhaps get something like a proportion between the different
+periods. That is to say, half a million years for the purely animal man
+in his different forms and grades of evolution. Then somewhere
+towards the end of palaeolithic or commencement of neolithic times
+Self-consciousness dimly beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow
+germination and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic
+period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago, and to-day
+(we hope), reaching the climax which precedes or foretells its abatement
+and transformation.
+
+ (2) Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93
+and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.
+
+ (3) See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.
+"Ethnology"; and Havelock Ellis, "The Origin of War," in The Philosophy
+of Conflict and other Essays.
+
+
+No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor periods greatly
+LONGER than those here mentioned; but possibly there would be some
+agreement as to the RATIO to each other of the times concerned: that
+is, the said authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man
+(1)-period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter
+aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the Second
+Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or fiftieth of the time of
+the first period; and then--if they looked forward at all to a third
+stage--would be inclined for obvious reasons to attribute to that again
+a very extended duration.
+
+ (1) I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of
+contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used it, but
+with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as one feels towards
+the animals themselves.
+
+
+However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about
+Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate
+to the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist,
+it is clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means
+of expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in
+attitudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate ritual,
+in fact. (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt,
+placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community,
+sacramental Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be
+expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often
+so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.
+'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere
+flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements
+of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or
+of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became
+a most important part of ritual.
+
+ (1) See ch. ix and xi.
+
+
+So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pass on to
+the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and
+dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round
+about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on
+indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present
+moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous
+systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive
+self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society
+at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the
+domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and
+ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in
+the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching
+a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new
+inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which
+we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary
+element of regeneration?
+
+It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry into a further
+stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through
+some such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of
+suffering, the mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die. (1)
+Self-consciousness has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new
+form. Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring this
+about. (2) And what is this new form in which consciousness has to
+rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the world during countless
+centuries have dated from that fatal attempt to make the little personal
+SELF the centre of effort and activity, and since that attempt has
+inevitably led to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind
+itself and within the body of society, there is nothing left but
+the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as its
+foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the direct SENSE
+AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout creation. The simple mind of
+Early Man and the Animals was of that character--a consciousness, so
+to speak, continuous through nature, and though running to points of
+illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet at no
+point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments. (And
+it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have
+already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct
+and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but
+clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate character of the
+First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly extended
+by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of
+mentality--the consciousness of the Third Stage.
+
+ (1) "The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an
+end," says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.
+
+ (2) One may remember in this connection the tapas of the Hindu
+yogi, or the ordeals of initiates into the pagan Mysteries generally.
+
+
+In order to understand the operation and qualities of this Third
+Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now to consider in what more
+or less rudimentary way or ways it figured in the pagan rituals and in
+Christianity. We have seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or
+the 'Grizzly' tribes of North American Indians in the neighborhood of
+Mount Shasta paying their respects and adoration to a captive bear--at
+once the food-animal, and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had
+slain a bear--and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with
+all due ceremonies observed, but privately for his own satisfaction. He
+had committed, therefore, a sin theoretically unpardonable; for had he
+not--to gratify his personal desire for food--levelled a blow at the
+guardian spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from his
+fellows by destroying its very symbol? There was only one way by which
+he could regain the fellowship of his companions. He must make amends by
+some public sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal
+for himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan) in a common
+feast, while at the same time, tensest prayers and thanks are offered to
+the animal for the gift of his body for food. The Magic formula demanded
+nothing less than this--else dread disaster would fall upon the man who
+sinned, and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred similar
+rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology--the first, in which
+the individual member simply remains within the compass of the tribal
+mind, and only acts in harmony with it; the second, in which the
+individual steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an
+action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third, in which,
+to make amends and to prove his sincerity, he submits to some sacrifice,
+and by a common feast or some such ceremony is received back again
+into the unity of the fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is
+consumed, and the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh,
+the Savior of the tribe.
+
+In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit is no longer merely
+an Animal, or animal-headed Genius, but a quite human-formed Divinity,
+still the same general outline of ideas is preserved--only with gathered
+intensity owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The
+Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just an ordinary
+Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus or Jesus. He is betrayed
+by one of his own followers, and suffers death, but rises again
+redeeming all with himself in the one fellowship; and the corn and the
+wine and the wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the
+sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper of reconciliation.
+It is always the return to unity which is the ritual of Salvation, and
+of which the symbol is the Eucharist--the second birth, the formation of
+"a new creature when old things are passed away." For "Except a man be
+born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God"; and "the first man is of
+the earth, earthly, but the second man is the Lord from heaven." Like
+a strange refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this
+belief in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a
+new birth and the beginning of a new creature: "Rejoice, ye initiates
+in the mystery of the liberated god"--rejoice in the thought of the hero
+who died as a mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!
+
+Who then was this "Christos" for whom the world was waiting three
+centuries before our era (and indeed centuries before that)? Who was
+this "thrice Savior" whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the
+meaning of that "coming of the Son of Man" whom Daniel beheld in vision
+among the clouds of heaven? or of the "perfect man" who, Paul declared,
+should deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
+liberty of the children of God? What was this salvation which time after
+time and times again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and
+which the Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious
+dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy
+is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the
+hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source
+divine"; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally
+enthusiastic? (1)
+
+ (1) See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;
+also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London,
+1897).
+
+
+Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already said, what
+the answer to these questions is? As with the first blossoming of
+self-consciousness in the human mind came the dawn of an immense cycle
+of experience--a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil
+and blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely necessary
+and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the return, the restoration has
+to come through another forward step, in the same domain. Abandoning
+the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to
+return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this
+'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation, and which
+all the expressions which I have just cited have indicated. It is
+this presence which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and
+Liberator: the daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more
+glorious, than all that has gone before that the little candle of the
+local self is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the
+return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation from the
+long exile of separation, from the painful sense of isolation and
+the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can we doubt that this new
+birth--this third stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so--has
+to come, that it is indeed not merely a pious hope or a tentative
+theory, but a FACT testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the
+past--witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic
+light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among the arid and
+unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a
+summer night?
+
+Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness an immense
+period, as we have said--perhaps 30,000 years, perhaps even more--has
+elapsed. Now, in the present day this period is reaching its
+culmination, and though it will not terminate immediately, its end is,
+so to speak, in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age behind
+us--say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years--evidence has been coming in
+(partly in the religious rites recorded, partly in oracles, poems and
+prophetic literature) of the onset of this further illumination--"the
+light which never was on sea or land"--and the cloud of witnesses,
+scattered at first, has in these later centuries become so evident and
+so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to anticipate a great
+and general new birth, as now not so very far off. (1) (We should, h
+ that many a time already in the history the Millennium has been
+prophesied, and yet not arrived punctual to date, and to take to
+ourselves the words of 'Peter,' who somewhat grievously disappointed
+at the long-delayed second coming of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of
+heaven, wrote in his second Epistle: "There shall come in the last
+days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the
+promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things
+continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." (2))
+
+ (1) For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's
+remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published
+at Philadelphia, 1901).
+
+ (2) 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.
+
+
+I say that all through the historical age behind us there has been
+evidence--even though scattered--of salvation and the return of the
+Cosmic life. Man has never been so completely submerged in the bitter
+sea of self-centredness but what he has occasionally been able to dash
+the spray from his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of
+heaven. From how far back we cannot say, but from an immense antiquity
+come the beautiful myths which indicate this.
+
+ Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly.
+     hutch;
+ Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;
+ Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues
+     a garment of the sun and stars;
+ From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe,
+     and is wedded to the prince of heaven.
+
+
+How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown close to
+the Hearth-fire of the universe--herself indeed just a little spark from
+it; despised and rejected; rejected by the world, despised by her two
+elder sisters (the body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though
+latest-born, by far the most beautiful of the three. And of the Prince
+of Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her wedding garment the
+glory and beauty of all nature and of the heavens! The parables of
+Jesus are charming in their way, but they hardly reach this height of
+inspiration.
+
+Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange that here again
+there are three sisters (the three stages of human evolution), and the
+latest-born the most beautiful of the three, and the jealousies and
+persecutions heaped on the youngest by the others, and especially by
+Aphrodite the goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of the
+unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted for mortals to
+look; and the long, long tests and sufferings and trials which Psyche
+has to undergo before Eros may really take her to his arms and translate
+her to the heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these things
+were represented in the Mysteries the world flocked to see them, and the
+poets indeed said, "Happy are they that see and seeing can understand?"
+Can we not understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the
+second century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing the
+lesson that "the greatest of human blessings is fellowship and mutual
+trust"?
+
+
+
+
+XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+
+Thus we come to a thing which we must not pass over, because it throws
+great light on the meaning and interpretation of all these rites and
+ceremonies of the great World-religion. I mean the subject of the
+Ancient Mysteries. And to this I will give a few pages.
+
+These Mysteries were probably survivals of the oldest religious rites
+of the Greek races, and in their earlier forms consisted not so much
+in worship of the gods of Heaven as of the divinities of Earth, and
+of Nature and Death. Crude, no doubt, at first, they gradually became
+(especially in their Eleusinian form) more refined and philosophical;
+the rites were gradually thrown open, on certain conditions, not only
+to men generally, but also to women, and even to slaves; and in the end
+they influenced Christianity deeply. (1)
+
+ (1) See Edwin Hatch, D.D., The Influence of Greek Ideas and
+Usages on the Christian Church (London, 1890), pp. 283-5.
+
+
+There were apparently three forms of teaching made use of in these
+rites: these were [gr legomena], things SAID; [gr deiknumena], things
+SHOWN; and [gr drwmena], things PERFORMED or ACTED. (1) I have given
+already some instances of things said-texts whispered for consolation in
+the neophyte's car, and so forth; of the THIRD group, things enacted,
+we have a fair amount of evidence. There were ritual dramas or
+passion-plays, of which an important one dealt with the descent of Kore
+or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations,
+(2) and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in Spring;
+another with the sufferings of Psyche and her rescue by Eros, as
+described by Apuleius (3)--himself an initiate in the cult of Isis.
+There is a parody by Lucian, which tells of the birth of Apollo, the
+marriage of Coronis, and the coming of Aesculapius as Savior; there was
+the dying and rising again of Dionysus (chief divinity of the Orphic
+cult); and sometimes the mystery of the birth of Dionysus as a holy
+child. (4) There was, every year at Eleusis, a solemn and lengthy
+procession or pilgrimage made, symbolic of the long pilgrimage of the
+human soul, its sufferings and deliverance.
+
+ (1) Cheetham, op. cit., pp. 49-61 sq.
+
+ (2) See Farnell, op. cit., iii. 158 sq.
+
+ (3) See The Golden Ass.
+
+ (4) Farnell, ii, 177.
+
+
+"Almost always," says Dr. Cheetham, "the suffering of a god--suffering
+followed by triumph--seems to have been the subject of the sacred
+drama." Then occasionally to the Neophytes, after taking part in the
+pilgrimage, and when their minds had been prepared by an ordeal of
+darkness and fatigue and terrors, was accorded a revelation of Paradise,
+and even a vision of Transfiguration--the form of the Hierophant
+himself, or teacher of the Mysteries, being seen half-lost in a blaze
+of light. (1) Finally, there was the eating of food and drinking
+of barley-drink from the sacred chest (2)--a kind of Communion or
+Eucharist.
+
+ (1) Ibid., 179 sq.
+
+ (2) Ibid., 186. Sacred chests, in which holy things were kept,
+figure frequently in early rites and legends--as in the case of the ark
+of the Jewish tabernacle, the ark or box carried in celebrations of the
+mysteries of Bacchus (Theocritus, Idyll xxvi), the legend of Pandora's
+box which contained the seeds of all good and evil, the ark of Noah
+which saved all living creatures from the flood, the Argo of the
+argonauts, the moonshaped boat in which Isis floating over the waters
+gathered together the severed limbs of Osiris, and so brought about his
+resurrection, and the many chests or coffins out of which the various
+gods (Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Jesus), having been laid there in death,
+rose again for the redemption of the world. They all evidently refer to
+the mystic womb of Nature and of Woman, and are symbols of salvation and
+redemption (For a full discussion of this subject, see The Great Law of
+religious origins, by W. Williamson, ch. iv.)
+
+
+Apuleius in The Golden Ass gives an interesting account of his induction
+into the mysteries of Isis: how, bidding farewell one evening to the
+general congregation outside, and clothed in a new linen garment, he was
+handed by the priest into the inner recesses of the temple itself; how
+he "approached the confines of death, and having trod on the threshold
+of Proserpine (the Underworld), returned therefrom, being borne through
+all the elements. At midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant
+light: and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath and the Gods
+above, and stood near and worshipped them." During the night things
+happened which must not be disclosed; but in the morning he came forth
+"consecrated by being dressed in twelve stoles painted with the figures
+of animals." (1) He ascended a pulpit in the midst of the Temple,
+carrying in his right hand a burning torch, while a chaplet encircled
+his head, from which palm-leaves projected like rays of light. "Thus
+arrayed like the Sun, and placed so as to resemble a statue, on a
+sudden the curtains being drawn aside, I was exposed to the gaze of the
+multitude. After this I celebrated the most joyful day of my initiation,
+as my natal day (day of the New Birth) and there was a joyous banquet
+and mirthful conversation."
+
+ (1) An allusion no doubt to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the
+pathway of the Sun, as well as to the practice of the ancient priests of
+wearing the skins of totem-animals in sign of their divinity.
+
+
+One can hardly refuse to recognize in this account the description of
+some kind of ceremony which was supposed to seal the illumination of a
+man and his new birth into divinity--the animal origin, the circling of
+all experience, the terrors of death, and the resurrection in the
+form of the Sun, the symbol of all light and life. The very word
+"illumination" carries the ideas of light and a new birth with it.
+Reitzenstein in his very interesting book on the Greek Mysteries (1)
+speaks over and over again of the illumination ([gr fwtismos]) which
+was held to attend Initiation and Salvation. The doctrine of Salvation
+indeed ([gr swthria]) was, as we have already seen, rife and widely
+current in the Second Century B. C. It represented a real experience,
+and the man who shared this experience became a [gr qeios] [gr anqrwpos]
+or divine man. (2) In the Orphic Tablets the phrase "I am a child of
+earth and the starry heaven, but my race is of heaven (alone)" occurs
+more than once. In one of the longest of them the dead man is instructed
+"after he has passed the waters (of Lethe) where the white Cypress and
+the House of Hades are" to address these very words to the guardians
+of the Lake of Memory while he asks for a drink of cold water from that
+Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail, thou
+who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou hadst never suffered
+before; thou hast become god from man!" (3) Ecstacy was the acme of the
+religious life; and, what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or
+the divine nature was open to all men--to all, that is, who should go
+through the necessary stages of preparation for it. (4)
+
+ (1) Die hellenistischen Mysterien-Religionen, by R. Reitzenstein,
+Leipzig, 1910.
+
+ (2) Reitzenstein, p. 12.
+
+ (3) These Tablets (so-called) are instructions to the dead as to
+their passage into the other world, and have been found in the tombs, in
+Italy and elsewhere, inscribed on very thin gold plates and buried with
+the departed. See Manual of Greek Antiquities by Percy Gardner and F.
+B. Jerome (1896); also Prolegomena to Greek Religion by Jane E. Harrison
+(1908).
+
+ (4) Reitzenstein, pp. 15 and 18; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity, p. 301.
+
+
+Reitzenstein contends (p. 26) that in the Mysteries, transfiguration
+([gr metamorfwsis]), salvation ([gr swthria]), and new birth ([gr
+paliggenesia]) were often conjoined. He says (p. 31), that in the
+Egyptian Osiris-cult, the Initiate acquires a nature "equal to God"
+([gr isoqeos]), the very same expression as that used of Christ Jesus in
+Philippians ii. 6; he mentions Apollonius of Tyana and Sergius Paulus
+as instances of men who by their contemporaries were considered to have
+attained this nature; and he quotes Akhnaton (Pharaoh of Egypt in 1375
+B.C.) as having said, "Thou art in my heart; none other knows Thee, save
+thy son Akhnaton; Thou hast initiated him into thy wisdom and into thy
+power." He also quotes the words of Hermes (Trismegistus)--"Come unto
+Me, even as children to their mother's bosom: Thou art I, and I am Thou;
+what is thine is mine, and what is mine is thine; for indeed I am thine
+image ([gr eidwlon])," and refers to the dialogue between Hermes and
+Tat, in which they speak of the great and mystic New Birth and Union
+with the All--with all Elements, Plants and Animals, Time and Space.
+
+"The Mysteries," says Dr. Cheetham very candidly, "influenced
+Christianity considerably and modified it in some important respects";
+and Dr. Hatch, as we have seen, not only supports this general view, but
+follows it out in detail. (1) He points out that the membership of the
+Mystery-societies was very numerous in the earliest times, A.D.; that
+their general aims were good, including a sense of true religion, decent
+life, and brotherhood; that cleanness from crime and confession were
+demanded from the neophyte; that confession was followed by baptism
+([gr kaqarsis]) and THAT by sacrifice; that the term [gr fwtismos]
+(illumination) was adopted by the Christian Church as the name for the
+new birth of baptism; that the Christian usage of placing a seal on the
+forehead came from the same source; that baptism itself after a time
+was called a mystery ([gr musihriou]); that the sacred cakes and
+barley-drink of the Mysteries became the milk and honey and bread
+and wine of the first Christian Eucharists, and that the occasional
+sacrifice of a lamb on the Christian altar ("whose mention is often
+suppressed") probably originated in the same way. Indeed, the conception
+of the communion-table AS an altar and many other points of ritual
+gradually established themselves from these sources as time went on. (2)
+It is hardly necessary to say more in proof of the extent to which
+in these ancient representations "things said" and "scenes enacted"
+forestalled the doctrines and ceremonials of Christianity.
+
+ (1) See Hatch, op. cit., pp. 290 sq.
+
+ (2) See Dionysus Areop. (end of fifth century), who describes the
+Christian rites generally in Mystery language (Hatch, 296).
+
+
+"But what of the second group above-mentioned, the "things SHOWN"? It
+is not so easy naturally to get exact information concerning these, but
+they seem to have been specially holy objects, probably things connected
+with very ancient rituals in the past--such as sacred stones, old and
+rude images of the gods, magic nature-symbols, like that half-disclosed
+ear of corn above-mentioned (Ch. V.). "In the Temple of Isis at Philae,"
+says Dr. Cheetham, "the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks
+of corn springing from it, which a priest waters from a vessel. An
+inscription says: 'This is the form of him whom we may not name, Osiris
+of the Mysteries who sprang from the returning waters' (the Nile)."
+Above all, no doubt, there were images of the phallus and the vulva, the
+great symbols of human fertility. We have seen (Ch. XII) that the lingam
+and the yoni are, even down to to-day, commonly retained and honored as
+holy objects in the S. Indian Temples, and anointed with oil (some
+of them) for a very practical reason. Sir J. G. Frazer, in his lately
+published volumes on The Folk-lore of the Old Testament, has a chapter
+(in vol. ii) on the very numerous sacred stones of various shapes and
+sizes found or spoken of in Palestine and other parts of the world.
+Though uncertain as to the meaning of these stones he mentions that they
+are "frequently, though not always, UPRIGHT." Anointing them with oil,
+he assures us, "is a widespread practice, sometimes by women who wish
+to obtain children." And he concludes the chapter by saying: "The holy
+stone at Bethel was probably one of those massive standing stones or
+rough pillars which the Hebrews called masseboth, and which, as we
+have seen, were regular adjuncts of Canaanite and early Israelitish
+sanctuaries." We have already mentioned the pillars Jachin and Boaz
+which stood before the Temple of Solomon, and which had an acknowledged
+sexual significance; and so it seems probable that a great number of
+these holy stones had a similar meaning. (1) Following this clue it
+would appear likely that the lingam thus anointed and worshipped in the
+Temples of India and elsewhere IS the original [gr cristos] (2) adored
+by the human race from the very beginning, and that at a later time,
+when the Priest and the King, as objects of worship, took the place of
+the Lingam, THEY also were anointed with the chrism of fertility.
+That the exhibition of these emblems should be part of the original
+'Mystery'-rituals was perfectly natural--especially because, as we have
+explained already (3) old customs often continued on in a quite naive
+fashion in the rituals, when they had come to be thought indecent or
+improper by a later public opinion; and (we may say) was perfectly
+in order, because there is plenty of evidence to show that in SAVAGE
+initiations, of which the Mysteries were the linear descendants, all
+these things WERE explained to the novices, and their use actually
+taught. (4) No doubt also there were some representations or dramatic
+incidents of a fairly coarse character, as deriving from these ancient
+sources. (5) It is, however, quaint to observe how the mere mention of
+such things has caused an almost hysterical commotion among the critics
+of the Mysteries--from the day of the early Christians who (in order
+to belaud their own religion) were never tired of abusing the Pagans,
+onward to the present day when modern scholars either on the one hand
+follow the early Christians in representing the Mysteries as sinks of
+iniquity or on the other (knowing this charge could not be substantiated
+except in the period of their final decadence) take the line of ignoring
+the sexual interest attaching to them as non-existent or at any rate
+unworthy of attention. The good Archdeacon Cheetham, for instance, while
+writing an interesting book on the Mysteries passes by this side of the
+subject ALMOST as if it did not exist; while the learned Dr. Farnell,
+overcome apparently by the weight of his learning, and unable to
+confront the alarming obstacle presented by these sexual rites and
+aspects, hides himself behind the rather non-committal remark (speaking
+of the Eleusinian rites) "we have no right to imagine any part of this
+solemn ceremony as coarse or obscene." (6) As Nature, however, has been
+known (quite frequently) to be coarse or obscene, and as the initiators
+of the Mysteries were probably neither 'good' nor 'learned,' but were
+simply anxious to interpret Nature as best they could, we cannot find
+fault with the latter for the way they handled the problem, nor indeed
+well see how they could have handled it better.
+
+ (1) F. Nork, Der Mystagog, mentions that the Roman Penates were
+commonly anointed with oil. J. Stuart Hay, in his Life of Elagabalus
+(1911), says that "Elagabal was worshipped under the symbol of a great
+black stone or meteorite, in the shape of a Phallus, which having fallen
+from the heavens represented a true portion of the Godhead, much after
+the style of those black stone images popularly venerated in Norway and
+other parts of Europe."
+
+ (2) J. E. Hewitt, in his Ruling Races of Pre-historic Times (p.
+64), gives a long list of pre-historic races who worshipped the lingam.
+
+ (3) See Ch. XI.
+
+ (4) See Ernest Crawley's Mystic Rose, ch. xiii, pp. 310 and 313:
+"In certain tribes of Central Africa both boys and girls after
+initiation must as soon as possible have intercourse." Initiation being
+not merely preliminary to, but often ACTUALLY marriage. The same
+among Kaffirs, Congo tribes, Senegalese, etc. Also among the Arunta of
+Australia.
+
+ (5) Professor Diederichs has said that "in much ancient ritual it
+was thought that mystic communion with the deity could be obtained
+through the semblance of sex-intercourse--as in the Attis-Cybele
+worship, and the Isis-ritual." (Farnell.) Reitzenstein says (op. cit.,
+p. 20.) that the Initiates, like some of the Christian Nuns at a later
+time, believed in union with God through receiving the seed.
+
+ (6) Farnell, op. cit., iii. 176. Messrs. Gardner and Jevons, in
+their Manual of Greek Antiquities, above-quoted, compare the Eleusinian
+Mysteries favorably with some of the others, like the Arcadian, the
+Troezenian, the Aeginaean, and the very primitive Samothracian:
+saying (p. 278) that of the last-mentioned "we know little, but safely
+conjecture that in them the ideas of sex and procreation dominated EVEN
+MORE than in those of Eleusis."
+
+
+After all it is pretty clear that the early peoples saw in Sex the great
+cohesive force which kept (we will not say Humanity but at any rate)
+the Tribe together, and sustained the race. In the stage of simple
+Consciousness this must have been one of the first things that the
+budding intellect perceived. Sex became one of the earliest divinities,
+and there is abundant evidence that its organs and processes generally
+were invested with a religious sense of awe and sanctity. It was in fact
+the symbol (or rather the actuality) of the permanent undying life
+of the race, and as such was sacred to the uses of the race. Whatever
+taboos may have, among different peoples, guarded its operations, it
+was not essentially a thing to be concealed, or ashamed of. Rather the
+contrary. For instance the early Christian writer, Hippolytus, Bishop of
+Pontus (A.D. 200), in his Refutation of all Heresies, Book V, says that
+the Samothracian Mysteries, just mentioned, celebrate Adam as the
+primal or archetypal Man eternal in the heavens; and he then continues:
+"Habitually there stand in the temple of the Samothracians two images
+of naked men having both hands stretched aloft towards heaven, and their
+pudenda turned upwards, as is also the case with the statue of Mercury
+on Mt. Cyllene. And the aforesaid images are figures of the primal man,
+and of that spiritual one that is born again, in every respect of the
+same substance with that (first) man."
+
+
+This extract from Hippolytus occurs in the long discourse in which he
+'exposes' the heresy of the so-called Naassene doctrines and mysteries.
+But the whole discourse should be read by those who wish to understand
+the Gnostic philosophy of the period contemporary with and anterior to
+the birth of Christianity. A translation of the discourse, carefully
+analyzed and annotated, is given in G. R. S. Mead's Thrice-greatest
+Hermes (1) (vol. i); and Mead himself, speaking of it, says (p. 141):
+"The claim of these Gnostics was practically that the good news of the
+Christ (the Christos) was the consummation of the inner doctrine of the
+Mystery-institutions of all the nations; the end of them all being the
+revelation of the Mystery of Man." Further, he explains that the Soul,
+in these doctrines, was regarded as synonymous with the Cause of All;
+and that its loves were twain--of Aphrodite (or Life), and of Persephone
+(or Death and the other world). Also that Attis, abandoning his sex in
+the worship of the Mother-Goddess (Dea Syria), ascends to Heaven--a new
+man, Male-female, and the origin of all things: the hidden Mystery being
+the Phallus itself, erected as Hermes in all roads and boundaries and
+temples, the Conductor and Reconductor of Souls.
+
+ (1) Reitzenstein, op. cit., quotes the discourse largely. The
+Thrice-greatest Hermes may also be consulted for a translation of
+Plutarch's Isis and Osiris.
+
+
+All this may sound strange, but one may fairly say that it represented
+in its degree, and in that first 'unfallen' stage of human thought
+and psychology, a true conception of the cosmic Life, and indeed a
+conception quite sensible and admirable, until, of course, the Second
+Stage brought corruption. No sooner was this great force of the cosmic
+life diverted from its true uses of Generation and Regeneration (1) and
+appropriated by the individual to his own private pleasure--no sooner
+was its religious character as a tribal service (2), (often rendered
+within the Temple precincts) lost sight of or degraded into a commercial
+transaction--than every kind of evil fell upon mankind. Corruptio optimi
+pessima. It must be remembered too that simultaneous with this sexual
+disruption occurred the disruption of other human relations; and
+we cease to be surprised that disease and selfish passions, greed,
+jealousy, slander, cruelty, and wholesale murder, raged--and have raged
+ever since.
+
+ (1) For the special meaning of these two terms, see The Drama of
+Love and Death, by E. Carpenter, pp. 59-61.
+
+ (2) Ernest Crawley in The Mystic Rose challenges this
+identification of Religion with tribal interests; yet his arguments
+are not very convincing. On p. 5 he admits that "there is a religious
+meaning inherent in the primitive conception and practice of ALL human
+relations"; and a large part of his ch. xii is taken up in showing that
+even such institutions as the Saturnalia were religious in confirming
+the sense of social union and leading to 'extended identity.'
+
+
+But for the human soul--whatever its fate, and whatever the dangers and
+disasters that threaten it--there is always redemption waiting. As we
+saw in the last chapter, this corruption of Sex led (quite naturally) to
+its denial and rejection; and its denial led to the differentiation from
+it of Love. Humanity gained by the enthronement And deification of Love,
+pure and undefiled, and (for the time being) exalted beyond this mortal
+world, and free from all earthly contracts. But again in the end, the
+divorce thus introduced between the physical and the spiritual led
+to the crippling of both. Love relegated, so to speak, to heaven as a
+purely philanthropical, pious and 'spiritual' affair, became exceedingly
+DULL; and sex, remaining on earth, but deserted by the redeeming
+presence, fell into mere "carnal curiosity and wretchedness of unclean
+living." Obviously for the human race there remains nothing, in the
+final event, but the reconciliation of the physical and the spiritual,
+and after many sufferings, the reunion of Eros and Psyche.
+
+
+There is still, however, much to be said about the Third State of
+Consciousness. Let us examine into it a little more closely. Clearly,
+since it is a new state, and not merely an extension of a former one,
+one cannot arrive at it by argument derived from the Second state, for
+all conscious Thought such as we habitually use simply keeps us IN the
+Second state. No animal or quite primitive man could possibly understand
+what we mean by Self-consciousness till he had experienced it. Mere
+argument would not enlighten him. And so no one in the Second state
+can quite realize the Third state till he has experienced it. Still,
+explanations may help us to perceive in what direction to look, and
+to recognize in some of our experiences an approach to the condition
+sought.
+
+Evidently it is a mental condition in some respects more similar to the
+first than to the second stage. The second stage of human psychologic
+evolution is an aberration, a divorce, a parenthesis. With its
+culmination and dismissal the mind passes back into the simple state of
+union with the Whole. (The state of Ekagrata in the Hindu philosophy:
+one-pointedness, singleness of mind.) And the consciousness of
+the Whole, and of things past and things to come and things far
+around--which consciousness had been shut out by the concentration on
+the local self--begins to return again. This is not to say, of course,
+that the excursus in the second stage has been a loss and a defect. On
+the contrary, it means that the Return is a bringing of all that
+has been gained during the period of exile (all sorts of mental and
+technical knowledge and skill, emotional developments, finesse and
+adaptability of mind) BACK into harmony with the Whole. It means
+ultimately a great gain. The Man, perfected, comes back to a vastly
+extended harmony. He enters again into a real understanding and
+confidential relationship with his physical body and with the body of
+the society in which he dwells--from both of which he has been sadly
+divorced; and he takes up again the broken thread of the Cosmic Life.
+
+Everyone has noticed the extraordinary consent sometimes observable
+among the members of an animal community--how a flock of 500 birds (e.
+g. starlings) will suddenly change its direction of flight--the light
+on the wings shifting INSTANTANEOUSLY, as if the impulse to veer came
+to all at the same identical moment; or how bees will swarm or otherwise
+act with one accord, or migrating creatures (lemmings, deer, gossamer
+spiders, winged ants) the same. Whatever explanation of these facts we
+favor--whether the possession of swifter and finer means of external
+communication than we can perceive, or whether a common and inner
+sensitivity to the genius of the Tribe (the "Spirit of the Hive") or to
+the promptings of great Nature around--in any case these facts of animal
+life appear to throw light on the possibilities of an accord and consent
+among the members of emaciated humanity, such as we dream of now, and
+seem to bid us have good hope for the future.
+
+It is here, perhaps, that the ancient worship of the Lingam comes in.
+The word itself is apparently connected with our word 'link,' and has
+originally the same meaning. (1) It is the link between the generations.
+Beginning with the worship of the physical Race-life, the course of
+psychologic evolution has been first to the worship of the Tribe (or
+of the Totem which represents the tribe); then to the worship of
+the human-formed God of the tribe--the God who dies and rises
+again eternally, as the tribe passes on eternal--though its members
+perpetually perish; then to the conception of an undying Savior, and the
+realization and distinct experience of some kind of Super-consciousness
+which does certainly reside, more or less hidden, in the deeps of the
+mind, and has been waiting through the ages for its disclosure and
+recognition. Then again to the recognition that in the sacrifices,
+the Slayer and the Slain are one--the strange and profoundly mystic
+perception that the God and the Victim are in essence the same--the
+dedication of 'Himself to Himself' (2) and simultaneously with this the
+interpretation of the Eucharist as meaning, even for the individual,
+the participation in Eternal Life--the continuing life of the Tribe,
+or ultimately of Humanity. (3) The Tribal order rises to Humanity; love
+ascends from the lingam to yogam, from physical union alone to the union
+with the Whole--which of course includes physical and all other kinds of
+union. No wonder that the good St. Paul, witnessing that extraordinary
+whirlpool of beliefs and practices, new and old, there in the first
+century A.D.--the unabashed adoration of sex side by side with the
+transcendental devotions of the Vedic sages and the Gnostics--became
+somewhat confused himself and even a little violent, scolding his
+disciples (I Cor. x. 21) for their undiscriminating acceptance, as it
+seemed to him, of things utterly alien and antagonistic. "Ye cannot
+drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers
+of the Lord's table and the table of devils."
+
+
+ (1) See Sanskrit Dictionary.
+
+ (2) See Ch. VIII.
+
+ (3) There are many indications in literature--in prophetic or
+poetic form--of this awareness and distinct conviction of an eternal
+life, reached through love and an inner sense of union with others and
+with humanity at large; indications which bear the mark of absolute
+genuineness and sincerity of feeling. See, for instance, Whitman's poem,
+"To the Garden the World" (Leaves of Grass, complete edition, p. 79).
+But an eternal life of the third order; not, thank heaven! an eternity
+of the meddling and muddling self-conscious Intellect!
+
+
+Every careful reader has noticed the confusedness of Paul's mind and
+arguments. Even taking only those Epistles (Galatians, Romans and
+Corinthians) which the critics assign to his pen, the thing is
+observable--and some learned Germans even speak of TWO Pauls. (1) But
+also the thing is quite natural. There can be little doubt that Paul of
+Tarsus, a Jew brought up in the strictest sect of the Pharisees, did at
+some time fall deeply under the influence of Greek thought, and quite
+possibly became an initiate in the Mysteries. It would be difficult
+otherwise to account for his constant use of the Mystery-language.
+Reitzenstein says (p. 59): "The hellenistic religious literature MUST
+have been read by him; he uses its terms, and is saturated with its
+thoughts (see Rom. vi. 1-14." And this conjoined with his Jewish
+experience gave him creative power. "A great deal in his sentiment and
+thought may have REMAINED Jewish, but to his Hellenism he was indebted
+for his love of freedom and his firm belief in his apostleship." He
+adopts terms (like [gr sarkikos], [gr yucikos] and [gr pneumatikos])
+(2) which were in use among the hellenistic sects of the time; and
+he writes, as in Romans vi. 4, 5, about being "buried" with Christ or
+"planted" in the likeness of his death, in words which might well have
+been used (with change of the name) by a follower of Attis or Osiris
+after witnessing the corresponding 'mysteries'; certainly the allusion
+to these ancient deities would have been understood by every religionist
+of that day. These few points are sufficient to acentuate{sic} the two
+elements in Paul, the Jewish and the Greek, and to explain (so far)
+the seeming confusion in his utterances. Further it is interesting to
+note--as showing the pagan influences in the N. T. writings--the degree
+to which the Epistle to Philemon (ascribed to Paul) is FULL--short as it
+is--of expressions like PRISONER of the Lord, FELLOW SOLDIER, CAPTIVE or
+BONDMAN, (3) which were so common at the time as to be almost a cant in
+Mithraism and the allied cults. In I Peter ii. 2 (4), we have the verse
+"As newborn babes, desire ye the sincere MILK of the word, that ye
+may grow thereby." And again we may say that no one in that day could
+mistake the reference herein contained to old initiation ceremonies and
+the new birth (as described in Chapter VIII above), for indeed milk was
+the well-known diet of the novice in the Isis mysteries, as well as On
+some savage tribes) of the Medicine-man when practising his calling.
+
+ (1) "Die Mysterien-anschauungen, die bei Paulus im Hintergrunde
+stehen, drangen sich in dem sogenarmten Deuteropaulinismus machtig vor"
+(Reitzenstein).
+
+ (2) Remindful of our Three Stages: the Animal, the
+Self-conscious, and the Cosmic.
+
+ (3) [gr desmios, stratiwths, doulos].
+
+ (4) See also I Cor. iii. 2.
+
+
+And here too Democracy comes in--strangely foreboded from the first in
+all this matter. (1) Not only does the Third Stage bring illumination,
+intuitive understanding of processes in Nature and Humanity, sympathy
+with the animals, artistic capacity, and so forth, but it necessarily
+brings a new Order of Society. A preposterous--one may almost say a
+hideous--social Age is surely drawing to its end, The debacle we are
+witnessing to-day all over Europe (including the British Islands), the
+break-up of old institutions, the generally materialistic outlook on
+life, the coming to the surface of huge masses of diseased and fatuous
+populations, the scum and dregs created by the past order, all point to
+the End of a Dispensation. Protestantism and Commercialism, in the two
+fields of religion and daily life have, as I have indicated before,
+been occupied in concentrating the mind of each man solely on his OWN
+welfare, the salvation of his OWN soul or body. These two forces have
+therefore been disruptive to the last degree; they mark the culmination
+of the Self-conscious Age--a culmination in War, Greed, Materialism, and
+the general principle of Devil-take-the-hindmost--and the clearing of
+the ground for the new order which is to come. So there is hope for the
+human race. Its evolution is not all a mere formless craze and jumble.
+There is an inner necessity by which Humanity unfolds from one degree or
+plane of consciousness to another. And if there has been a great 'Fall'
+or Lapse into conflict and disease and 'sin' and misery, occupying the
+major part of the Historical period hitherto, we see that this period
+is only brief, so to speak, in comparison with the whole curve of growth
+and expansion. We see also that, as I have said before, the belief in a
+state of salvation or deliverance has in the past ages never left
+itself quite without a witness in the creeds and rituals and poems and
+prophecies of mankind. Art, in some form or other, as an activity or
+inspiration dating not from the conscious Intellect, but from deeper
+regions of sub-conscious feeling and intuition, has continually come to
+us as a message from and an evidence of the Third stage or state, and as
+a promise of its more complete realization under other conditions.
+
+ Through the long night-time where the Nations wander
+     From Eden past to Paradise to be,
+ Art's sacred flowers, like fair stars shining yonder,
+     Alone illumine Life's obscurity.
+
+ O gracious Artists, out of your deep hearts
+     'Tis some great Sun, I doubt, by men unguessed,
+ Whose rays come struggling thus, in slender darts,
+     To shadow what Is, till Time shall manifest.
+
+
+ (1) See the germs of Democracy in the yoga teaching of the
+Hindus, and in the Upanishads, the Bhagavat Gita, and other books.
+
+
+With the Cosmic stage comes also necessarily the rehabilitation of the
+WHOLE of Society in one fellowship (the true Democracy). Not the rule or
+domination of one class or caste--as of the Intellectual, the Pious,
+the Commercial or the Military--but the fusion or at least consentaneous
+organization of ALL (as in the corresponding functions of the human
+Body). Class rule has been the mark of that second period of human
+evolution, and has inevitably given birth during that period to wars and
+self-agrandizements of classes and sections, and their consequent greeds
+and tyrannies over other classes and sections. It is not found in the
+primitive human tribes and societies, and will not be found in the final
+forms of human association. The liberated and emancipated Man passes
+unconstrained and unconstraining through all grades and planes of human
+fellowship, equal and undisturbed, and never leaving his true home
+and abiding place in the heart of all. Equally necessarily with the
+rehabilitation of Society as an entirety will follow the rehabilitation
+of the entire physical body IN each member of Society. We have spoken
+already of Nakedness: its meaning and likely extent of adoption (Ch.
+XII). The idea that the head and the hands are the only seemly and
+presentable members of the organism, and that the other members are
+unworthy and indecent, is obviously as onesided and lopsided as that
+which honors certain classes in the commonwealth and despises others.
+Why should the head brag of its ascendancy and domination, and the heart
+be smothered up and hidden? It will only be a life far more in the open
+air than that which we lead at present, which will restore the balance
+and ultimately bring us back to sanity and health.
+
+
+
+
+XVI. THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+We have dealt with the Genesis of Christianity; we now come to the
+Exodus. For that Christianity can CONTINUE to hold the field of Religion
+in the Western World is neither probable nor desirable. It is true, as
+I have remarked already, that there is a certain trouble about
+defining what we mean by "Christianity" similar to that about the word
+"Civilization." If we select out of the great mass of doctrines and
+rites favored by the various Christian Churches just those which commend
+themselves to the most modern and humane and rational human mind and
+choose to call that resulting (but rather small) body of belief and
+practice 'Christianity' we are, of course, entitled to do so, and to
+hope (as we do hope) that this residuum will survive and go forward into
+the future. But this sort of proceeding is hardly fair and certainly not
+logical. It enables Christianity to pose as an angel of light while at
+the same time keeping discreetly out of sight all its own abominations
+and deeds of darkness. The Church--which began its career by destroying,
+distorting and denying the pagan sources from which it sprang; whose
+bishops and other ecclesiastics assassinated each other in their
+theological rancour "of wild beasts," which encouraged the wicked folly
+of the Crusades--especially the Children's Crusades--and the shameful
+murders of the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and the Huguenots; which
+burned at the stake thousands and thousands of poor 'witches' and
+'heretics'; which has hardly ever spoken a generous word in favor or
+defence of the animals; which in modern times has supported vivisection
+as against the latter, Capitalism and Commercialism as against the
+poorer classes of mankind; and whose priests in the forms of its various
+sects, Greek or Catholic, Lutheran or Protestant, have in these last
+days rushed forth to urge the nations to slaughter each other with every
+diabolical device of Science, and to glorify the war-cry of Patriotism
+in defiance of the principle of universal Brotherhood--such a Church can
+hardly claim to have established the angelic character of its mission
+among mankind! And if it be said--as it often IS SAID: "Oh! but you must
+go back to the genuine article, and the Church's real origin and one
+foundation in the person and teaching of Jesus Christ," then indeed you
+come back to the point which this book, as above, enforces: namely, that
+as to the person of Jesus, there is no CERTAINTY at all that he ever
+existed; and as to the teaching credited to him, it is certain that that
+comes down from a period long anterior to 'Christianity' and is part of
+what may justly be called a very ancient World-religion. So, as in the
+case of 'Civilization,' we are compelled to see that it is useless to
+apply the word to some ideal state of affairs or doctrine (an ideal
+by no means the same in all people's minds, or in all localities and
+times), but that the only reasonable thing to do is to apply it in each
+case to a HISTORICAL PERIOD. In the case of Christianity the historical
+period has lasted nearly 2,000 years, and, as I say, we can hardly
+expect or wish that it should last much longer.
+
+The very thorough and careful investigation of religious origins which
+has been made during late years by a great number of students and
+observers undoubtedly tends to show that there has been something like
+a great World-religion coming down the centuries from the remotest times
+and gradually expanding and branching as it has come--that is to say
+that the similarity (in ESSENCE though not always in external detail)
+between the creeds and rituals of widely sundered tribes and peoples is
+so great as to justify the view--advanced in the present volume--that
+these creeds and rituals are the necessary outgrowths of human
+psychology, slowly evolving, and that consequently they have a common
+origin and in their various forms a common expression. Of this great
+World-religion, so coming down, Christianity is undoubtedly a branch,
+and an important branch. But there have been important branches before;
+and while it may be true that Christianity emphasizes some points which
+may have been overlooked or neglected in the Vedic teachings or in
+Buddhism, or in the Persian and Egyptian and Syrian cults, or in
+Mahommedanism, and so forth, it is also equally true that Christianity
+has itself overlooked or neglected valuable points in these religions.
+It has, in fact, the defects of its qualities. If the World-religion
+is like a great tree, one cannot expect or desire that all its branches
+should be directed towards the same point of the compass.
+
+Reinach, whose studies of religious origins are always interesting
+and characterized by a certain Gallic grace and nettete, though with a
+somewhat Jewish non-perception of the mystic element in life, defines
+Religion as a combination of animism and scruples. This is good in
+a way, because it gives the two aspects of the subject: the inner,
+animism, consisting of the sense of contact with more or less
+intelligent beings moving in Nature; and the outer, consisting in
+scruples or taboos. The one aspect shows the feeling which INSPIRES
+religion, the other, the checks and limitations which DEFINE it and give
+birth to ritual. But like most anthropologists he (Reinach) is a little
+TOO patronizing towards the "poor Indian with untutored mind." He is
+sorry for people so foolish as to be animistic in their outlook, and he
+is always careful to point out that the scruples and taboos were quite
+senseless in their origin, though occasionally (by accident) they turned
+out useful. Yet--as I have said before--Animism is a perfectly sensible,
+logical and NECESSARY attitude of the human mind. It is a necessary
+attribute of man's psychical nature, by which he projects into the great
+World around him the image of his own mind. When that mind is in a very
+primitive, inchoate, and fragmentary condition, the images so projected
+are those of fragmentary intelligences ('spirits,' gnomes, etc.--the age
+of magic); when the mind rises to distinct consciousness of itself the
+reflections of it are anthropomorphic 'gods'; when finally it reaches
+the universal or cosmic state it perceives the presence of a universal
+Being behind all phenomena--which Being is indeed itself--"Himself to
+Himself." If you like you may call the whole process by the name of
+Animism. It is perfectly sensible throughout. The only proviso is that
+you should also be sensible, and distinguish the different stages in the
+process.
+
+Jane Harrison makes considerable efforts to show that Religion is
+primarily a reflection of the SOCIAL Conscience (see Themis, pp.
+482-92)--that is, that the sense in Man of a "Power that makes for
+righteousness" outside (and also inside) him is derived from his feeling
+of continuity with the Tribe and his instinctive obedience to its
+behests, confirmed by ages of collective habit and experience. He
+cannot in fact sever the navel-string which connects him with his tribal
+Mother, even though he desires to do so. And no doubt this view of the
+origin of Religion is perfectly correct. But it must be pointed out that
+it does not by any means exclude the view that religion derives
+also from an Animism by which man recognizes in general Nature his
+foster-mother and feels himself in closest touch with HER. Which may
+have come first, the Social affiliation or the Nature affiliation, I
+leave to the professors to determine. The term Animism may, as far as I
+can see, be quite well applied to the social affiliation, for the latter
+is evidently only a case in which the individual projects his own degree
+of consciousness into the human group around him instead of into the
+animals or the trees, but it is a case of which the justice is so
+obvious that the modern man can intellectually seize and understand it,
+and consequently he does not tar it with the 'animistic' brush.
+
+And Miss Harrison, it must be noticed, does, in other passages of the
+same book (see Themis, pp. 68, 69), admit that Religion has its origin
+not only from unity with the Tribe but from the sense of affiliation to
+Nature--the sense of "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible
+universe, a world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of magical
+activity and the medium of mysticism. The mystical element, the oneness
+and continuousness comes out very clearly in the notion of Wakonda among
+the Sioux Indians.... The Omahas regarded all animate and inanimate
+forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous
+and similar to the will-power they were conscious of in themselves. This
+mysterious power in all things they called Wakonda, and through it
+all things were related to man, and to each other. In the idea of the
+continuity of life, a relation was maintained between the seen and
+the unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the fragment of
+anything and its entirety." Thus our general position is confirmed,
+that Religion in its origin has been INSPIRED by a deep instinctive
+conviction or actual sense of continuity with a being or beings in the
+world around, while it has derived its FORM and ritual by slow degrees
+from a vast number of taboos, generated in the first instance chiefly
+by superstitious fears, but gradually with the growth of reason and
+observation becoming simplified and rationalized into forms of use. On
+the one side there has been the positive impulse--of mere animal Desire
+and the animal urge of self-expression; on the other there has been
+the negative force of Fear based on ignorance--the latter continually
+carving, moulding and shaping the former. According to this an organized
+study and classification of taboos might yield some interesting results;
+because indeed it would throw light on the earliest forms of both
+religion and science. It would be seen that some taboos, like those
+of CONTACT (say with a menstruous woman, or a mother-in-law, or a
+lightning-struck tree) had an obvious basis of observation, justifiable
+but very crude; while others, like the taboo against harming an enemy
+who had contracted blood-friendship with one of your own tribe, or
+against giving decent burial to a murderer, were equally rough and rude
+expressions or indications of the growing moral sentiment of mankind.
+All the same there would be left, in any case, a large residuum of
+taboos which could only be judged as senseless, and the mere rubbish of
+the savage mind.
+
+So much for the first origins of the World-religion; and I think enough
+has been said in the various chapters of this book to show that the same
+general process has obtained throughout. Man, like the animals, began
+with this deep, subconscious sense of unity with surrounding Nature.
+When this became (in Man) fairly conscious, it led to Magic and
+Totemism. More conscious, and it branched, on the one hand, into figures
+of Gods and definite forms of Creeds, on the other into elaborate
+Scientific Theories--the latter based on a strong INTELLECTUAL belief in
+Unity, but fervently denying any 'anthropomorphic' or 'animistic'
+SENSE of that unity. Finally, it seems that we are now on the edge of
+a further stage when the theories and the creeds, scientific and
+religious, are on the verge of collapsing, but in such a way as to leave
+the sense and the perception of Unity--the real content of the whole
+process--not only undestroyed, but immensely heightened and illuminated.
+Meanwhile the taboos--of which there remain some still, both religious
+and scientific--have been gradually breaking up and merging themselves
+into a reasonable and humane order of life and philosophy.
+
+I have said that out of this World-religion Christianity really sprang.
+It is evident that the time has arrived when it must either acknowledge
+its source and frankly endeavor to affiliate itself to the same, or
+failing that must perish. In the first case it will probably have to
+change its name; in the second the question of its name 'will interest
+it no more.'
+
+With regard to the first of these alternatives, I might venture--though
+with indifference--to make a few suggestions. Why should we
+not have--instead of a Holy Roman Church--a Holy HUMAN Church,
+rehabilitating the ancient symbols and rituals, a Christianity (if you
+still desire to call it so) frankly and gladly acknowledging its own
+sources? This seems a reasonable and even feasible proposition. If such
+a church wished to celebrate a Mass or Communion or Eucharist it would
+have a great variety of rites and customs of that kind to select from;
+those that were not appropriate for use in our times or were connected
+with the worship of strange gods need not be rejected or condemned,
+but could still be commented on and explained as approaches to the same
+idea--the idea of dedication to the Common Life, and of reinvigoration
+in the partaking of it. If the Church wished to celebrate the
+Crucifixion or betrayal of its Founder, a hundred instances of such
+celebrations would be to hand, and still the thought that has underlain
+such celebrations since the beginning of the world could easily be
+disentangled and presented in concrete form anew. In the light of such
+teaching expressions like "I know that my Redeemer liveth" would be
+traced to their origin, and men would understand that notwithstanding
+the mass of rubbish, cant and humbug which has collected round them they
+really do mean something and represent the age-long instinct of Humanity
+feeling its way towards a more extended revelation, a new order of
+being, a third stage of consciousness and illumination. In such a Church
+or religious organization EVERY quality of human nature would have to
+be represented, every practice and custom allowed for and its place
+accorded--the magical and astronomical meanings, the rites connected
+with sun-worship, or with sex, or with the worship of animals; the
+consecration of corn and wine and other products of the ground,
+initiations, sacrifices, and so forth--all (if indeed it claimed to be
+a World-religion) would have to be represented and recognized. For they
+all have their long human origin and descent in and through the pagan
+creeds, and they all have penetrated into and become embodied to some
+degree in Christianity. Christianity therefore, as I say, must either
+now come frankly forward and, acknowledging its parentage from the great
+Order of the past, seek to rehabilitate THAT and carry mankind one step
+forward in the path of evolution--or else it must perish. There is no
+other alternative. (1)
+
+ (1) Comte in founding his philosophy of Positivism seems to have
+had in view some such Holy Human Church, but he succeeded in making it
+all so profoundly dull that it never flourished, The seed of Life was
+not in it.
+
+
+Let me give an instance of how a fragment of ancient ritual which has
+survived from the far Past and is still celebrated, but with little
+intelligence or understanding, in the Catholic Church of to-day, might
+be adopted in such a Church as I have spoken of, interpreted, and made
+eloquent of meaning to modern humanity. When I was in Ceylon nearly 30
+years ago I was fortunate enough to witness a night-festival in a Hindu
+Temple--the great festival of Taipusam, which takes place every year in
+January. Of course, it was full moon, and great was the blowing up of
+trumpets in the huge courtyard of the Temple. The moon shone down above
+from among the fronds of tall coco-palms, on a dense crowd of native
+worshipers--men and a few women--the men for the most part clad in
+little more than a loin-cloth, the women picturesque in their colored
+saris and jewelled ear and nose rings. The images of Siva and two other
+gods were carried in procession round and round the temple--three or
+four times; nautch girls danced before the images, musicians, blowing
+horns and huge shells, or piping on flageolets or beating tom-toms,
+accompanied them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with flaming
+coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each side, elated and
+excited with the sense of the present divinity, yet pleasantly free from
+any abject awe. The whole thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief
+of a Bacchanalian procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus--and
+especially so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly intimacy with
+the god. There were singing of hymns and the floating of the chief
+actors on a raft round a sacred lake. And then came the final Act. Siva,
+or his image, very weighty and borne on the shoulders of strong men, was
+carried into the first chamber or hall of the Temple and placed on an
+altar with a curtain hanging in front. The crowd followed with a rush;
+and then there was more music, recital of hymns, and reading from sacred
+books. From where we stood we could see the rite which was performed
+behind the curtain. Two five-branched candlesticks were lighted; and the
+manner of their lighting was as follows. Each branch ended in a
+little cup, and in the cups five pieces of camphor were placed, all
+approximately equal in size. After offerings had been made, of fruit,
+flowers and sandalwood, the five camphors in each candlestick were
+lighted. As the camphor flames burned out the music became more wild and
+exciting, and then at the moment of their extinction the curtains
+were drawn aside and the congregation outside suddenly beheld the god
+revealed and in a blaze of light. This burning of camphor was, like
+other things in the service, emblematic. The five lights represent
+the five senses. Just as camphor consumes itself and leaves no residue
+behind, so should the five senses, being offered to the god, consume
+themselves and disappear. When this is done, that happens in the soul
+which was now figured in the ritual--the God is revealed in the inner
+light. (1)
+
+ (1) For a more detailed account of this Temple-festival, see
+Adam's Peak to Elephanta by E. Carpenter, ch. vii.
+
+
+We are familiar with this parting or rending of the veil. We hear of it
+in the Jewish Temple, and in the Greek and Egyptian Mysteries. It had
+a mystically religious, and also obviously sexual, signification. It
+occurs here and there in the Roman Catholic ritual. In Spain, some
+ancient Catholic ceremonials are kept up with a brilliance and splendor
+hardly found elsewhere in Europe. In the Cathedral, at Seville the
+service of the Passion, carried out on Good Friday with great
+solemnity and accompanied with fine music, culminates on the Saturday
+morning--i.e. in the interval between the Crucifixion and the
+Resurrection--in a spectacle similar to that described in Ceylon. A rich
+velvet-black curtain hangs before the High Altar. At the appropriate
+moment and as the very emotional strains of voices and instruments reach
+their climax in the "Gloria in Excelsis," the curtain with a sudden
+burst of sound (thunder and the ringing of all the bells) is rent
+asunder, and the crucified Jesus is seen hanging there revealed in a
+halo of glory.
+
+There is also held at Seville Cathedral and before the High Altar every
+year, the very curious Dance of the Seises (sixes), performed now by 16
+instead of (as of old) by 12 boys, quaintly dressed. It seems to be a
+survival of some very ancient ritual, probably astronomical, in which
+the two sets of six represent the signs of the Zodiac, and is celebrated
+during the festivals of Corpus Christi, the Immaculate Conception, and
+the Carnival.
+
+Numerous instances might of course be adduced of how a Church aspiring
+to be a real Church of Humanity might adopt and re-create the rituals
+of the past in the light of a modern inspiration. Indeed the difficulty
+would be to limit the process, for EVERY ancient ritual, we can now
+see, has had a meaning and a message, and it would be a real joy to
+disentangle these and to expose the profound solidarity of humanity and
+aspiration from the very dawn of civilization down to the present day.
+Nor would it be necessary to imagine any Act of Uniformity or dead
+level of ceremonial in the matter. Different groups might concentrate on
+different phases of religious thought and practice. The only necessity
+would be that they should approach the subject with a real love of
+Humanity in their hearts and a real desire to come into touch with the
+deep inner life and mystic growing-pains of the souls of men and women
+in all ages. In this direction M. Loisy has done noble and excellent
+work; but the dead weight and selfish blinkerdom of the Catholic
+organization has hampered him to that degree that he has been unable
+to get justice done to his liberalizing designs--or, perhaps, even to
+reveal the full extent of them. And the same difficulty will remain. On
+the one hand no spiritual movement which does not take up the attitude
+of a World-religion has now in this age, any chance of success; on the
+other, all the existing Churches--whether Roman Catholic, or Greek,
+or Protestant or Secularist--whether Christian or Jewish or Persian or
+Hindu--will in all probability adopt the same blind and blinkered and
+selfish attitude as that described above, and so disqualify themselves
+for the great role of world-wide emancipation, which some religion at
+some time will certainly have to play. It is the same difficulty which
+is looming large in modern World-politics, where the local selfishness
+and vainglorious "patriotisms" of the Nations are sadly impeding and
+obstructing the development of that sense of Internationalism and
+Brotherhood which is the clearly indicated form of the future, and
+which alone can give each nation deliverance from fear, and a promise of
+growth, and the confident assurance of power.
+
+I say that Christianity must either frankly adopt this generous attitude
+and confess itself a branch of the great World-religion, anxious only to
+do honor to its source--or else it must perish and pass away. There is
+no other alternative. The hour of its Exodus has come. It may be, of
+course, that neither the Christian Church nor any branch of it, nor any
+other religious organization, will step into the gap. It may be--but I
+do not think this is likely--that the time of rites and ceremonies and
+formal creeds is PAST, and churches of any kind will be no more needed
+in the world: not likely, I say, because of the still far backwardness
+of the human masses, and their considerable dependence yet on laws and
+forms and rituals. Still, if it should prove that that age of dependence
+IS really approaching its end, that would surely be a matter for
+congratulation. It would mean that mankind was moving into a knowledge
+of the REALITY which has underlain these outer shows--that it was coming
+into the Third stage of its Consciousness. Having found this there would
+be no need for it to dwell any longer in the land of superstitions and
+formulae. It would have come to the place of which these latter are only
+the outlying indications.
+
+It may, therefore, happen--and this quite independently of the growth of
+a World-cult such as I have described, though by no means in antagonism
+to it--that a religious philosophy or Theosophy might develop and
+spread, similar to the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the
+pre-Christian sects, which would become, first among individuals and
+afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion of--or
+perhaps one should say the religious approach to the Third State. Books
+like the Upanishads of the Vedic seers, and the Bhagavat Gita, though
+garbled and obscured by priestly interferences and mystifications, do
+undoubtedly represent and give expression to the highest utterance of
+religious experience to be found anywhere in the world. They are indeed
+the manuals of human entrance into the cosmic state. But as I say,
+and as has happened in the case of other sacred books, a vast deal of
+rubbish has accreted round their essential teachings, and has to be
+cleared away. To go into a serious explication of the meaning of these
+books would be far too large an affair, and would be foreign to the
+purpose of the present volume; but I have in the Appendix below inserted
+two papers, (on "Rest" and "The Nature of the Self") containing the
+substance of lectures given on the above books. These papers or lectures
+are couched in the very simplest language, free from Sanskrit terms and
+the usual 'jargon of the Schools,' and may, I hope, even on that account
+be of use in familiarizing readers who are not specially STUDENTS with
+the ideas and mental attitudes of the cosmic state. Non-differentiation
+(Advaita (1)) is the root attitude of the mind inculcated.
+
+ (1) The word means "not-two-ness." Here we see a great subtlety
+of definition. It is not to be "one" with others that is urged, but to
+be "not two."
+
+
+We have seen that there has been an age of non-differentiation in the
+Past-non-differentiation from other members of the Tribe, from the
+Animals, from Nature and the Spirit or Spirits of nature; why
+should there not arise a similar sense of non-differentiation in the
+FUTURE--similar but more extended more intelligent? Certainly this WILL
+arrive, in its own appointed time. There will be a surpassing of the
+bounds of separation and division. There will be a surpassing of all
+Taboos. We have seen the use and function of Taboos in the early stages
+of Evolution and how progress and growth have been very much a matter
+of their gradual extinction and assimilation into the general body
+of rational thought and feeling. Unreasoning and idiotic taboos still
+linger, but they grow weaker. A new Morality will come which will shake
+itself free from them. The sense of kinship with the animals (as in the
+old rituals) (1) will be restored; the sense of kinship with all the
+races of mankind will grow and become consolidated; the sense of the
+defilement and impurity of the human body will (with the adoption of a
+generally clean and wholesome life) pass away; and the body itself will
+come to be regarded more as a collection of shrines in which the
+gods may be worshiped and less as a mere organ of trivial
+self-gratifications; (2) there will be no form of Nature, or of human
+life or of the lesser creatures, which will be barred from the approach
+of Man or from the intimate and penetrating invasion of his spirit; and
+as in certain ceremonies and after honorable toils and labors a citizen
+is sometimes received into the community of his own city, so the
+emancipated human being on the completion of his long long pilgrimage on
+Earth will be presented with the Freedom of the Universe.
+
+
+ (1) The record of the Roman Catholic Church has been sadly
+Callous and inhuman in this matter of the animals.
+
+ (2) See The Art of Creation, by E. Carpenter.
+
+
+
+
+XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+In conclusion there does not seem much to say, except to accentuate
+certain points which may still appear doubtful or capable of being
+understood.
+
+The fact that the main argument of this volume is along the lines of
+psychological evolution will no doubt commend it to some, while on the
+other hand it will discredit the book to others whose eyes, being fixed
+on purely MATERIAL causes, can see no impetus in History except through
+these. But it must be remembered that there is not the least reason
+for SEPARATING the two factors. The fact that psychologically man has
+evolved from simple consciousness to self-consciousness, and is now
+in process of evolution towards another and more extended kind of
+consciousness, does not in the least bar the simultaneous appearance and
+influence of material evolution. It is clear indeed that the two must
+largely go together, acting and reacting on each other. Whatever the
+physical conditions of the animal brain may be which connect themselves
+with simple (unreflected and unreflecting) consciousness, it is evident
+that these conditions--in animals and primitive man--lasted for an
+enormous period, before the distinct consciousness of the individual and
+separate SELF arose. This second order of consciousness seems to have
+germinated at or about the same period as the discovery of the use
+of Tools (tools of stone, copper, bronze, &c.), the adoption of
+picture-writing and the use of reflective words (like "I" and "Thou");
+and it led on to the appreciation of gold and of iron with their
+ornamental and practical values, the accumulation of Property, the
+establishment of slavery of various kinds, the subjection of Women,
+the encouragement of luxury and self-indulgence, the growth of crowded
+cities and the endless conflicts and wars so resulting. We can see
+plainly that the incoming of the self-motive exercised a direct stimulus
+on the pursuit of these material objects and adaptations; and that
+the material adaptations in their turn did largely accentuate the
+self-motive; but to insist that the real explanation of the whole
+process is only to be found along one channel--the material OR the
+psychical--is clearly quite unnecessary. Those who understand that all
+matter is conscious in some degree, and that all consciousness has a
+material form of some kind, will be the first to admit this.
+
+The same remarks apply to the Third Stage. We can see that in modern
+times the huge and unlimited powers of production by machinery, united
+with a growing tendency towards intelligent Birth-control, are
+preparing the way for an age of Communism and communal Plenty which will
+inevitably be associated (partly as cause and partly as effect) with
+a new general phase of consciousness, involving the mitigation of
+the struggle for existence, the growth of intuitional and psychical
+perception, the spread of amity and solidarity, the disappearance of
+War, and the realization (in degree) of the Cosmic life.
+
+Perhaps the greatest difficulty or stumbling-block to the general
+acceptance of the belief in a third (or 'Golden-Age') phase of human
+evolution is the obstinate and obdurate pre-judgment that the passing of
+Humanity out of the Second stage can only mean the entire ABANDONMENT
+OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS; and this people say--and quite rightly--is both
+impossible and undesirable. Throughout the preceding chapters I have
+striven, wherever feasible, to counter this misunderstanding--but I have
+little hope of success. The DETERMINATION of the world to misunderstand
+or misinterpret anything a little new or unfamiliar is a thing which
+perhaps only an author can duly appreciate. But while it is clear that
+self-consciousness originally came into being through a process of
+alienation and exile and fear which marked it with the Cain-like brand
+of loneliness and apartness, it is equally clear that to think of that
+apartness as an absolute and permanent separation is an illusion, since
+no being can really continue to live divorced from the source of its
+life. For a period in evolution the SELF took on this illusive form in
+consciousness, as of an ignis fatuus--the form of a being sundered from
+all other beings, atomic, lonely, without refuge, surrounded by dangers
+and struggling, for itself alone and for its own salvation in the midst
+of a hostile environment. Perhaps some such terrible imagination was
+necessary at first, as it were to start Humanity on its new path. But
+it had its compensation, for the sufferings and tortures, mental and
+bodily, the privations, persecutions, accusations, hatreds, the wars and
+conflicts--so endured by millions of individuals and whole races--have
+at length stamped upon the human mind a sense of individual
+responsibility which otherwise perhaps would never have emerged, and
+whose mark can now be effaced; ultimately, too, these things have
+searched our inner nature to its very depths and exposed its bed-rock
+foundation. They have convinced us that this idea of ultimate
+separation is an illusion, and that in truth we are all indefeasible and
+indestructible parts of one great Unity in which "we live and move and
+have our being." That being so, it is clear that there remains in the
+end a self-consciousness which need by no means be abandoned, which
+indeed only comes to its true fruition and understanding when
+it recognizes its affiliation with the Whole, and glories in an
+individuality which is an expression both of itself AND of the whole.
+The human child at its mother's knee probably comes first to know it
+HAS a 'self' on some fateful day when having wandered afar it goes
+lost among alien houses and streets or in the trackless fields. That
+appalling experience--the sense of danger, of fear, of loneliness--is
+never forgotten; it stamps some new sense of Being upon the childish
+mind, but that sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the
+prouder and more radiant in the hour of return to the mother's arms. The
+return, the salvation, for which humanity looks, is the return of the
+little individual self to harmony and union with the great Self of the
+universe, but by no means its extinction or abandonment--rather the
+finding of its own true nature as never before.
+
+
+There is another thing which may be said here: namely, that the
+disentanglement, as above, of three main stages of psychological
+evolution as great formative influences in the history of mankind, does
+not by any means preclude the establishment of lesser stages within the
+boundaries of these. In all probability subdivisions of all the three
+will come in time to be recognized and allowed for. To take the
+Second stage only, it MAY appear that Self-consciousness in its first
+development is characterized by an accentuation of Timidity; in its
+second development by a more deliberate pursuit of sensual Pleasure
+(lust, food, drink, &c.); in its third by the pursuit of mental
+gratifications (vanities, ambitions, enslavement of others); in its
+fourth by the pursuit of Property, as a means of attaining these
+objects; in its fifth by the access of enmities, jealousies, wars and so
+forth, consequent on all these things; and so on. I have no intention at
+present of following out this line of thought, but only wish to suggest
+its feasibility and the degree to which it may throw light on the social
+evolutions of the Past. (1)
+
+ (1) For an analysis of the nature of Self-consciousness see vol.
+iii, p. 375 sq. of the three ponderous tomes by Wilhelm
+Wundt--Grund-zuge der Physiologischen Psychologie--in which amid an
+enormous mass of verbiage occasional gleams of useful suggestion are to
+be found.
+
+
+As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that there are only two
+main factors in life, namely, Love and Ignorance. And of these we may
+also say that the two are not in the same plane: one is positive and
+substantial, the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be
+thought at first that Fear and Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are
+very positive things, but in the end we see that they are due merely to
+ABSENCE of perception, to dulness of understanding. Or we may put the
+statement in a rather less crude form, and say that there are only
+two factors in life: (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with
+Nature)--which covers Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth, and
+(2) Non-perception of the same--which covers Enmity, Fear, Hatred,
+Self-pity, Cruelty, Jealousy, Meanness and an endless similar list.
+The present world which we see around us, with its idiotic wars, its
+senseless jealousies of nations and classes, its fears and greeds
+and vanities and its futile endeavors--as of people struggling in a
+swamp--to find one's own salvation by treading others underfoot, is a
+negative phenomenon. Ignorance, non-perception, are at the root of it.
+But it is the blessed virtue of Ignorance and of non-perception that
+they inevitably-if only slowly and painfully--DESTROY THEMSELVES. All
+experience serves to dissipate them. The world, as it is, carries' the
+doom of its own transformation in its bosom; and in proportion as that
+which is negative disappears the positive element must establish itself
+more and more.
+
+So we come back to that with which we began, (1) to Fear bred by
+Ignorance. From that source has sprung the long catalogue of follies,
+cruelties and sufferings which mark the records of the human race since
+the dawn of history; and to the overcoming of this Fear we perforce
+must look for our future deliverance, and for the discovery, even in
+the midst of this world, of our true Home. The time is coming when the
+positive constructive element must dominate. It is inevitable that Man
+must ever build a state of society around him after the pattern and
+image of his own interior state. The whole futile and idiotic structure
+of commerce and industry in which we are now imprisoned springs from
+that falsehood of individualistic self-seeking which marks the second
+stage of human evolution. That stage is already tottering to its fall,
+destroyed by the very flood of egotistic passions and interests, of
+vanities, greeds, and cruelties, all warring with each other, which are
+the sure outcome and culmination of its operation. With the restoration
+of the sentiment of the Common Life, and the gradual growth of a mental
+attitude corresponding, there will emerge from the flood something like
+a solid earth--something on which it will be possible to build with good
+hope for the future. Schemes of reconstruction are well enough in their
+way, but if there is no ground of REAL HUMAN SOLIDARITY beneath, of what
+avail are they?
+
+ (1) See Introduction, Ch. I.
+
+
+An industrial system which is no real industrial order, but only (on
+the part of the employers) a devil's device for securing private profit
+under the guise of public utility, and (on the part of the employed) a
+dismal and poor-spirited renunciation--for the sake of a bare living--of
+all real interest in life and work: such a 'system' must infallibly
+pass away. It cannot in the nature of things be permanent. The first
+condition of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the
+Common Life. This sense, which instinctively underlay the whole Tribal
+order of the far past--which first came to consciousness in the
+worship of a thousand pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless
+sacrifices, initiations, redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which
+inspired the dreams of the Golden Age, and flashed out for a time in the
+Communism of the early Christians and in their adorations of the risen
+Savior--must in the end be the creative condition of a new order: it
+must provide the material of which the Golden City waits to be built.
+The long travail of the World-religion will not have been in vain, which
+assures this consummation. What the signs and conditions of any general
+advance into this new order of life and consciousness will be, we know
+not. It may be that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision
+often comes quite suddenly, and GENERALLY perhaps after a period of
+great suffering, so to society at large a similar revelation will
+arrive--like "the lightning which cometh out of the East and shineth
+even unto the West"--with unexpected swiftness. On the other hand
+it would perhaps be wise not to count too much on any such sudden
+transformation. When we look abroad (and at home) in this year of grace
+and hoped-for peace, 1919, and see the spirits of rancour and revenge,
+the fears, the selfish blindness and the ignorance, which still hold in
+their paralyzing grasp huge classes and coteries in every country in the
+world, we see that the second stage of human development is by no means
+yet at its full term, and that, as in some vast chrysalis, for the
+liberation of the creature within still more and more terrible struggles
+MAY be necessary. We can only pray that such may not be the case.
+Anyhow, if we have followed the argument of this book we can hardly
+doubt that the destruction (which is going on everywhere) of the
+outer form of the present society marks the first stage of man's final
+liberation; and that, sooner or later, and in its own good time, that
+further 'divine event' will surely be realized.
+
+
+Nor need we fear that Humanity, when it has once entered into the great
+Deliverance, will be again overpowered by evil. From Knowledge back to
+Ignorance there is no complete return. The nations that have come to
+enlightenment need entertain no dread of those others (however hostile
+they appear) who are still plunging darkly in the troubled waters
+of self-greed. The dastardly Fears which inspire all brutishness and
+cruelty of warfare--whether of White against White or it may be of White
+against Yellow or Black--may be dismissed for good and all by that blest
+race which once shall have gained the shore--since from the very nature
+of the case those who are on dry land can fear nothing and need fear
+nothing from the unfortunates who are yet tossing in the welter and
+turmoil of the waves.
+
+Dr. Frazer, in the conclusion of his great work The Golden Bough, (1)
+bids farewell to his readers with the following words: "The laws of
+Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting
+phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names
+of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion
+and science are nothing but theories (of thought); and as Science has
+supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by
+some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of
+looking at phenomena--of registering the shadows on the screen--of which
+we in this generation can form no idea." I imagine Dr. Frazer is right
+in thinking that "a way of looking at phenomena" different from the way
+of Science, may some day prevail. But I think this change will come,
+not so much by the growth of Science itself or the extension of its
+'hypotheses,' as by a growth and expansion of the human HEART and a
+change in its psychology and powers of perception. Perhaps some of the
+preceding chapters will help to show how much the outlook of humanity on
+the world has been guided through the centuries by the slow evolution of
+its inner consciousness. Gradually, out of an infinite mass of folly and
+delusion, the human soul has in this way disentangled itself, and will
+in the future disentangle itself, to emerge at length in the light of
+true FREEDOM. All the taboos, the insane terrors, the fatuous forbiddals
+of this and that (with their consequent heart-searchings and distress)
+may perhaps have been in their way necessary, in order to rivet and
+define the meaning and the understanding of that word. To-day
+these taboos and terrors still linger, many of them, in the form of
+conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience, doubts and
+desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge from all these
+things, FREE--familiar, that is, with them all, making use of all,
+allowing generously for the values of all, but hampered and bound by
+NONE. He will realize the inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of the
+ancient religions, and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far
+prophecy down the ages--finding after all the long-expected Saviour of
+the world within his own breast, and Paradise in the disclosure there of
+the everlasting peace of the soul.
+
+ (1) See "Balder," vol. ii, pp. 306, 307. ("Farewell to Nemi.")
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+THE TEACHING OF THE UPANISHADS
+
+BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF TWO LECTURES TO POPULAR AUDIENCES
+
+I. REST
+
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+
+
+I. REST
+
+To some, in the present whirlpool of life and affairs it may seem almost
+an absurdity to talk about Rest. For long enough now rest has seemed a
+thing far off and unattainable. With the posts knocking at our doors
+ten or twelve times a day, with telegrams arriving every hour, and the
+telephone bell constantly ringing; with motors rushing wildly about the
+streets, and aeroplanes whizzing overhead, with work speeded up in every
+direction, and the drive in the workshops becoming more intolerable
+every day; with the pace of the walkers and the pace of the talkers from
+hour to hour insanely increasing--what room, it may well be asked, is
+there for Rest? And now the issues of war, redoubling the urgency of all
+questions, are on us.
+
+The problem is obviously a serious one. So urgent is it that I think one
+may safely say the amount of insanity due to the pressure of daily life
+is increasing; nursing-homes have sprung up for the special purpose of
+treating such cases; and doctors are starting special courses of
+tuition in the art--now becoming very important--of systematically doing
+nothing! And yet it is difficult to see the outcome of it all. The clock
+of what is called Progress is not easily turned backward. We should
+not very readily agree nowadays to the abolition of telegrams or to a
+regulation compelling express trains to stop at every station! We can't
+ALL go to Nursing Homes, or afford to enjoy a winter's rest-cure in
+Egypt. And, if not, is the speeding-up process to go on indefinitely,
+incapable of being checked, and destined ultimately to land civilization
+in the mad-house?
+
+It is, I say, a serious and an urgent problem. And it is, I think,
+forcing a certain answer on us--which I will now endeavor to explain.
+
+If we cannot turn back and reverse this fatal onrush of modern life (and
+it is evident that we cannot do so in any very brief time--though of
+course ultimately we might succeed) then I think there are clearly only
+two alternatives left--either to go forward to general dislocation and
+madness, or--to learn to rest even in the very midst of the hurry and
+the scurry.
+
+To explain what I mean, let me use an illustration. The typhoons and
+cyclones of the China Seas are some of the most formidable storms that
+ships can encounter. Their paths in the past have been strewn with
+wrecks and disaster. But now with increased knowledge much of their
+danger has been averted. It is known that they are CIRCULAR in
+character, and that though the wind on their outskirts often reaches a
+speed of 100 miles an hour, in the centre of the storm there is a
+space of complete calm--not a calm of the SEA certainly, but a complete
+absence of wind. The skilled navigator, if he cannot escape the storm,
+steers right into the heart of it, and rests there. Even in the midst
+of the clatter he finds a place of quiet where he can trim his sails
+and adjust his future course. He knows too from his position in what
+direction at every point around him the wind is moving and where it will
+strike him when at last his ship emerges from the charmed circle.
+
+Is it not possible, we may ask, that in the very midst of the cyclone of
+daily life we may find a similar resting-place? If we can, our case is
+by no means hopeless. If we cannot, then indeed there is danger.
+
+Looking back in History we seem to see that in old times people took
+life much more leisurely than they do now. The elder generations gave
+more scope in their customs and their religions for contentment and
+peace of mind. We associate a certain quietism and passivity with the
+thought of the Eastern peoples. But as civilization traveled Westward
+external activity and the pace of life increased--less and less time was
+left for meditation and repose--till with the rise of Western Europe and
+America, the dominant note of life seems to have simply become one of
+feverish and ceaseless activity--of activity merely for the sake of
+activity, without any clear idea of its own purpose or object.
+
+Such a prospect does not at first seem very hopeful; but on second
+thoughts we see that we are not forced to draw any very pessimistic
+conclusion from it. The direction of human evolution need not remain
+always the same. The movement, in fact, of civilization from East to
+West has now clearly completed itself. The globe has been circled, and
+we cannot go any FARTHER to the West without coming round to the East
+again. It is a commonplace to say that our psychology, our philosophy
+and our religious sense are already taking on an Eastern color; nor is
+it difficult to imagine that with the end of the present dispensation a
+new era may perfectly naturally arrive in which the St. Vitus' dance of
+money-making and ambition will cease to be the chief end of existence.
+
+In the history of nations as in the history of individuals there
+are periods when the formative ideals of life (through some hidden
+influence) change; and the mode of life and evolution in consequence
+changes also. I remember when I was a boy wishing--like many other
+boys--to go to sea. I wanted to join the Navy. It was not, I am sure,
+that I was so very anxious to defend my country. No, there was a much
+simpler and more prosaic motive than that. The ships of those days with
+their complex rigging suggested a perfect paradise of CLIMBING, and I
+know that it was the thought of THAT which influenced me. To be able
+to climb indefinitely among those ropes and spars! How delightful! Of
+course I knew perfectly well that I should not always have free access
+to the rigging; but then--some day, no doubt, I should be an Admiral,
+and who then could prevent me? I remember seeing myself in my mind's
+eye, with cocked hat on my head and spy-glass under my arm, roaming at
+my own sweet will up aloft, regardless of the remonstrances which
+might reach me from below! Such was my childish ideal. But a time
+came--needless to say--when I conceived a different idea of the object
+of life.
+
+It is said that John Tyndall, whose lectures on Science were so much
+sought after in their time, being on one occasion in New York was
+accosted after his discourse by a very successful American business
+man, who urged him to devote his scientific knowledge and ability to
+commercial pursuits, promising that if he did so, he, Tyndall, would
+easily make "a big pile." Tyndall very calmly replied, "Well, I myself
+thought of that once, but I soon abandoned the idea, having come to
+the conclusion that I had NO TIME TO WASTE IN MAKING MONEY." The man of
+dollars nearly sank into the ground. Such a conception of life had never
+entered his head before. But to Tyndall no doubt it was obvious that if
+he chained himself to the commercial ideal all the joy and glory of his
+days would be gone.
+
+We sometimes hear of the awful doom of some of the Russian convicts in
+the quarries and mines of Siberia, who are (or were) chained permanently
+to their wheelbarrows. It is difficult to imagine a more dreadful fate:
+the despair, the disgust, the deadly loathing of the accursed thing from
+which there is no escape day or night--which is the companion not only
+of the prisoner's work but of his hours of rest--with which he has to
+sleep, to feed, to take his recreation if he has any, and to fulfil all
+the offices of nature. Could anything be more crushing? And yet, and
+yet... is it not true that we, most of us, in our various ways are
+chained to our wheelbarrows--is it not too often true that to these
+beggarly things we have for the most part chained OURSELVES?
+
+Let me be understood. Of course we all have (or ought to have) our work
+to do. We have our living to get, our families to support, our trade,
+our art, our profession to pursue. In that sense no doubt we are tied;
+but I take it that these things are like the wheelbarrow which a man
+uses while he is at work. It may irk him at times, but he sticks to it
+with a good heart, and with a certain joy because it is the instrument
+of a noble purpose. That is all right. But to be chained to it, not to
+be able to leave it when the work of the day is done--that is indeed
+an ignoble slavery. I would say, then, take care that even with these
+things, these necessary arts of life, you preserve your independence,
+that even if to some degree they may confine your body they do not
+enslave your mind.
+
+For it is the freedom of the mind which counts. We are all no doubt
+caught in the toils of the earth-life. One man is largely dominated
+by sensual indulgence, another by ambition, another by the pursuit
+of money. Well, these things are all right in themselves. Without the
+pleasures of the senses we should be dull mokes indeed; without ambition
+much of the zest and enterprise of life would be gone; gold, in the
+present order of affairs, is a very useful servant. These things are
+right enough--but to be CHAINED to them, to be unable to think of
+anything else--what a fate! The subject reminds one of a not uncommon
+spectacle. It is a glorious day; the sun is bright, small white clouds
+float in the transparent blue--a day when you linger perforce on the
+road to enjoy the scene. But suddenly here comes a man painfully running
+all hot and dusty and mopping his head, and with no eye, clearly, for
+anything around him. What is the matter? He is absorbed by one idea.
+He is running to catch a train! And one cannot help wondering what
+EXCEEDINGLY important business it must be for which all this glory and
+beauty is sacrificed, and passed by as if it did not exist.
+
+Further we must remember that in our foolishness we very commonly chain
+ourselves, not only to things like sense-pleasures and ambitions which
+are on the edge, so to speak, of being vices; but also to other things
+which are accounted virtues, and which as far as I can see are just as
+bad, if we once become enslaved to them. I have known people who were so
+exceedingly 'spiritual' and 'good' that one really felt quite depressed
+in their company; I have known others whose sense of duty, dear things,
+was so strong that they seemed quite unable to REST, or even to allow
+their friends to rest; and I have wondered whether, after all, worriting
+about one's duty might not be as bad--as deteriorating to oneself, as
+distressing to one's friends--as sinning a good solid sin. No, in this
+respect virtues MAY be no better than vices; and to be chained to a
+wheelbarrow made of alabaster is no way preferable to being chained to
+one of wood. To sacrifice the immortal freedom of the mind in order to
+become a prey to self-regarding cares and anxieties, self-estimating
+virtues and vices, self-chaining duties and indulgences, is a mistake.
+And I warn you, it is quite useless. For the destiny of Freedom is
+ultimately upon every one, and if refusing it for a time you heap your
+life persistently upon one object--however blameless in itself that
+object may be--Beware! For one day--and when you least expect it--the
+gods will send a thunderbolt upon you. One day the thing for which
+you have toiled and spent laborious days and sleepless nights will lie
+broken before you--your reputation will be ruined, your ambition will be
+dashed, your savings of years will be lost--and for the moment you will
+be inclined to think that your life has been in vain. But presently you
+will wake up and find that something quite different has happened. You
+will find that the thunderbolt which you thought was your ruin has been
+your salvation--that it has broken the chain which bound you to your
+wheelbarrow, and that you are free! --------
+
+I think you will now see what I mean by Rest. Rest is the loosing of the
+chains which bind us to the whirligig of the world, it is the passing
+into the centre of the Cyclone; it is the Stilling of Thought. For (with
+regard to this last) it is Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind,
+which binds us to outer things. The outer things themselves are all
+right. It is only through our thoughts that they make slaves of us.
+Obtain power over your thoughts and you are free. You can then use the
+outer things or dismiss them at your pleasure.
+
+There is nothing new of course in all this. It has been known for ages;
+and is part of the ancient philosophy of the world.
+
+In the Katha Upanishad you will find these words (Max Muller's
+translation): "As rainwater that has fallen on a mountain ridge runs
+down on all sides, thus does he who sees a difference between qualities
+run after them on all sides." This is the figure of the man who does NOT
+rest. And it is a powerful likeness. The thunder shower descends on the
+mountain top; torrents of water pour down the crags in every direction.
+Imagine the state of mind of a man--however thirsty he may be--who
+endeavors to pursue and intercept all these streams!
+
+But then the Upanishad goes on: "As pure water poured into pure water
+remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self of a thinker who
+knows." What a perfect image of rest! Imagine a cistern before you with
+transparent glass sides and filled with pure water. And then imagine
+some one comes with a phial, also of pure water, and pours the contents
+gently into the cistern. What will happen? Almost nothing. The pure
+water will glide into the pure water--"remaining the same." There will
+be no dislocation, no discoloration (as might happen if MUDDY water were
+poured in); there will be only perfect harmony.
+
+I imagine here that the meaning is something like this. The cistern is
+the great Reservoir of the Universe which contains the pure and
+perfect Spirit of all life. Each one of us, and every mortal creature,
+represents a drop from that reservoir--a drop indeed which is also pure
+and perfect (though the phial in which it is contained may not always
+be so). When we, each of us, descend into the world and meet the great
+Ocean of Life which dwells there behind all mortal forms, it is like the
+little phial being poured into the great reservoir. If the tiny canful
+which is our selves is pure and unsoiled, then when it meets the
+world it will blend with the Spirit which informs the world perfectly
+harmoniously, without distress or dislocation. It will pass through and
+be at one with it. How can one describe such a state of affairs? You
+will have the key to every person that you meet, because indeed you are
+conscious that the real essence of that person is the same as your own.
+You will have the solution of every event which happens. For every event
+is (and is felt to be) the touch of the great Spirit on yours. Can any
+description of Rest be more perfect than that? Pure water poured into
+pure water.... There is no need to hurry, for everything will come in
+its good time. There is no need to leave your place, for all you desire
+is close at hand.
+
+Here is another verse (from the Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad) embodying
+the same idea: "And he who beholds all beings in the Self, and the
+Self in all beings, he never turns away from It. When, to a man who
+understands, the Self has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble,
+can there be to him--having once beheld that Unity?"--What trouble,
+what sorrow, indeed, when the universe has become transparent with the
+presences of all we love, held firm in the One enfolding Presence?
+
+But it will be said: "Our minds are NOT pure and transparent. More often
+they are muddy and soiled--soiled, if not in their real essence, yet by
+reason of the mortal phial in which they are contained." And that alas!
+is true. If you pour a phial of muddy water into that reservoir which
+we described--what will you see? You will see a queer and ugly cloud
+formed. And to how many of us, in our dealings with the world, does life
+take on just such a form--of a queer and ugly cloud?
+
+Now not so very long after those Upanishads were written there lived
+in China that great Teacher, Lao-tze; and he too had considered these
+things. And he wrote--in the Tao-Teh-King--"Who is there who can make
+muddy water clear?" The question sounds like a conundrum. For a moment
+one hesitates to answer it. Lao-tze, however, has an answer ready. He
+says: "But if you LEAVE IT ALONE it will become clear of itself." That
+muddy water of the mind, muddied by all the foolish little thoughts
+which like a sediment infest it--but if you leave it alone it will
+become clear of itself. Sometimes walking along the common road after
+a shower you have seen pools of water lying here and there, dirty and
+unsightly with the mud stirred up by the hoofs of men and animals. And
+then returning some hours afterwards along the same road--in the evening
+and after the cessation of traffic--you have looked again, and lo!
+each pool has cleared itself to a perfect calm, and has become a lovely
+mirror reflecting the trees and the clouds and the sunset and the stars.
+
+So this mirror of the mind. Leave it alone. Let the ugly sediment
+of tiresome thoughts and anxieties, and of fussing over one's
+self-importances and duties, settle down--and presently you will look
+on it, and see something there which you never knew or imagined
+before--something more beautiful than you ever yet beheld--a reflection
+of the real and eternal world such is only given to the mind that rests.
+
+
+Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction and in
+that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in the desert.
+
+But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them still, so
+still;
+
+And let them become clear, so clear--so limpid, so mirror-like;
+
+At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in peaceful
+beauty,
+
+And the antelope shall descend to drink, and the lion to quench his
+thirst,
+
+And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his own likeness in
+you. (1)
+
+
+ (1) Towards Democracy, p. 373.
+
+
+Yes, there is this priceless thing within us, but hoofing along the
+roads in the mud we fail to find it; there is this region of calm,
+but the cyclone of the world raging around guards us from entering it.
+Perhaps it is best so--best that the access to it should not be made
+too easy. One day, some time ago, in the course of conversation with
+Rabindranath Tagore in London, I asked him what impressed him most in
+visiting the great city. He said, "The restless incessant movement of
+everybody." I said, "Yes, they seem as if they were all rushing about
+looking for something." He replied, "It is because each person does not
+know of the great treasure he has within himself." --------
+
+How then are we to reach this treasure and make it our own? How are we
+to attain to this Stilling of the Mind, which is the secret of all power
+and possession? The thing is difficult, no doubt; yet as I tried to show
+at the outset of this discourse, we Moderns MUST reach it; we have got
+to attain to it--for the penalty of failure is and must be widespread
+Madness.
+
+The power to still the mind--to be ABLE, mark you, when you want,
+to enter into the region of Rest, and to dismiss or command your
+Thoughts--is a condition of Health; it is a condition of all Power
+and Energy. For all health, whether of mind or body, resides in one's
+relation to the central Life within. If one cannot get into touch with
+THAT, then the life-forces cannot flow down into the organism. Most,
+perhaps all, disease arises from the disturbance of this connection. All
+mere hurry, all mere running after external things (as of the man after
+the water-streams on the mountain-top), inevitably breaks it. Let a pond
+be allowed calmly under the influence of frost to crystallize, and most
+beautiful flowers and spears of ice will be formed, but keep stirring
+the water all the time with a stick or a pole and nothing will result
+but an ugly brash of half-frozen stuff. The condition of the exercise of
+power and energy is that it should proceed from a center of Rest within
+one. So convinced am I of this, that whenever I find myself hurrying
+over my work, I pause and say, "Now you are not producing anything
+good!" and I generally find that that is true. It is curious, but I
+think very noticeable, that the places where people hurry most--as
+for instance the City of London or Wall Street, New York--are just the
+places where the work being done is of LEAST importance (being
+mostly money-gambling); whereas if you go and look at a ploughman
+ploughing--doing perhaps the most important of human work--you find
+all his movements most deliberate and leisurely, as if indeed he had
+infinite time at command; the truth being that in dealing (like a
+ploughman) with the earth and the horses and the weather and the things
+of Nature generally you can no more hurry than Nature herself hurries.
+
+Following this line of thought it might seem that one would arrive at a
+hopeless paradox. If it be true that the less one hurries the better
+the work resulting, then it might seem that by sitting still and merely
+twirling one's thumbs one would arrive at the very greatest activity and
+efficiency! And indeed (if understood aright) there is a truth even in
+this, which--like the other points I have mentioned--has been known and
+taught long ages ago. Says that humorous old sage, Lao-tze, whom I have
+already quoted: "By non-action there is nothing that cannot be done." At
+first this sounds like mere foolery or worse; but afterwards thinking on
+it one sees there is a meaning hidden. There is a secret by which Nature
+and the powers of the universal life will do all for you. The Bhagavat
+Gita also says, "He who discovers inaction in action and action in
+inaction is wise among mortals."
+
+It is worth while dwelling for a moment on these texts. We are all--as I
+said earlier on--involved in work belonging to our place and station; we
+are tied to some degree in the bonds of action. But that fact need not
+imprison our inner minds. While acting even with keenness and energy
+along the external and necessary path before us, it is perfectly
+possible to hold the mind free and untied--so that the RESULT of our
+action (which of course is not ours to command) shall remain indifferent
+and incapable of unduly affecting us. Similarly, when it is our part
+to remain externally INACTIVE, we may discover that underneath this
+apparent inaction we may be taking part in the currents of a deeper life
+which are moving on to a definite end, to an end or object which in a
+sense is ours and in a sense is NOT ours.
+
+The lighthouse beam flies over land and sea with incredible velocity,
+and you think the light itself must be in swiftest movement; but when
+you climb up thither you find the lamp absolutely stationary. It is only
+the reflection that is moving. The rider on horseback may gallop to and
+fro wherever he will, but it is hard to say that HE is acting. The horse
+guided by the slightest indication of the man's will performs an the
+action that is needed. If we can get into right touch with the immense,
+the incalculable powers of Nature, is there anything which we may not be
+able to do? If a man worship the Self only as his true state," says
+the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, "his work cannot fail, for whatever he
+desires, that he obtains from the Self." What a wonderful saying, and
+how infallibly true! For obviously if you succeed in identifying your
+true being with the great Self of the universe, then whatever you desire
+the great Self will also desire, and therefore every power of Nature
+will be at your service and will conspire to fulfil your need.
+
+There are marvelous things here "well wrapped up"--difficult to
+describe, yet not impossible to experience. And they all depend upon
+that power of stilling Thought, that ability to pass unharmed and
+undismayed through the grinning legions of the lower mind into the very
+heart of Paradise.
+
+The question inevitably arises, How can this power be obtained? And
+there is only one answer--the same answer which has to be given for the
+attainment of ANY power or faculty. There is no royal road. The only way
+is (however imperfectly) to DO the thing in question, to practice it. If
+you would learn to play cricket, the only way is to play cricket; if you
+would be able to speak a language, the only way is to speak it. If you
+would learn to swim, the only way is to practice swimming. Or would you
+wish to be like the man who when his companions were bathing and bidding
+him come and join them, said: "Yes, I am longing to join you, but I am
+not going to be such a fool as to go into the water TILL I KNOW HOW TO
+SWIM!"
+
+There is nothing but practice. If you want to obtain that priceless
+power of commanding Thought--of using it or dismissing it (for the
+two things go together) at will--there is no way but practice. And
+the practice consists in two exercises: (a) that of concentration--in
+holding the thought steadily for a time on one subject, or point of a
+subject; and (b) that of effacement--in effacing any given thought from
+the mind, and determining NOT to entertain it for such and such a
+time. Both these exercises are difficult. Failure in practicing them is
+certain--and may even extend over years. But the power equally certainly
+grows WITH practice. And ultimately there may come a time when the
+learner is not only able to efface from his mind any given thought
+(however importunate), but may even succeed in effacing, during short
+periods, ALL thought of any kind. When this stage is reached, the
+veil of illusion which surrounds all mortal things is pierced, and the
+entrance to the Paradise of Rest (and of universal power and knowledge)
+is found.
+
+Of indirect or auxiliary methods of reaching this great conclusion,
+there are more than one. I think of life in the open air, if not
+absolutely necessary, at least most important. The gods--though
+sometimes out of compassion they visit the interiors of houses--are not
+fond of such places and the evil effluvium they find there, and avoid
+them as much as they can. It is not merely a question of breathing
+oxygen instead of carbonic acid. There is a presence and an influence in
+Nature and the Open which expands the mind and causes brigand cares
+and worries to drop off--whereas in confined places foolish and futile
+thoughts of all kinds swarm like microbes and cloud and conceal the
+soul. Experto Crede. It is only necessary to try this experiment in
+order to prove its truth.
+
+Another thing which corresponds in some degree to living physically in
+the open air, is the living mentally and emotionally in the atmosphere
+of love. A large charity of mind, which refuses absolutely to shut
+itself in little secluded places of prejudice, bigotry and contempt for
+others, and which attains to a great and universal sympathy, helps, most
+obviously, to open the way to that region of calm and freedom of which
+we have spoken, while conversely all petty enmity, meanness and spite,
+conspire to imprison the soul and make its deliverance more difficult.
+
+It is not necessary to labor these points. As we said, the way to attain
+is to sincerely TRY to attain, to consistently PRACTICE attainment.
+Whoever does this will find that the way will open out by degrees, as
+of one emerging from a vast and gloomy forest, till out of darkness the
+path becomes clear. For whomsoever really TRIES there is no failure; for
+every effort in that region is success, and every onward push, however
+small, and however little result it may show, is really a move forward,
+and one step nearer the light.
+
+
+
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+The true nature of the Self is a matter by no means easy to compass. We
+have all probably at some time or other attempted to fathom the deeps of
+personality, and been baffled. Some people say they can quite distinctly
+remember a moment in early childhood, about the age of THREE (though the
+exact period is of course only approximate) when self-consciousness--the
+awareness of being a little separate Self--first dawned in the mind.
+It was generally at some moment of childish tension--alone perhaps in a
+garden, or lost from the mother's protecting hand--that this happened;
+and it was the beginning of a whole range of new experience. Before
+some such period there is in childhood strictly speaking no distinct
+self-consciousness. As Tennyson says (In Memoriam xliv):
+
+      The baby new to earth and sky,
+          What time his tender palm is prest
+          Against the circle of the breast,
+      Hath never thought that "This is I."
+
+It has consciousness truly, but no distinctive self-consciousness. It
+is this absence or deficiency which explains many things which at first
+sight seem obscure in the psychology of children and of animals. The
+baby (it has often been noticed) experiences little or no sense of FEAR.
+It does not know enough to be afraid; it has never formed any image of
+itself, as of a thing which might be injured. It may shrink from actual
+pain or discomfort, but it does not LOOK FORWARD--which is of the
+essence of fear--to pain in the future. Fear and self-consciousness are
+closely interlinked. Similarly with animals, we often wonder how a horse
+or a cow can endure to stand out in a field all night, exposed to cold
+and rain, in the lethargic patient way that they exhibit. It is not that
+they do not FEEL the discomfort, but it is that they do not envisage
+THEMSELVES as enduring this pain and suffering for all those coming
+hours; and as we know with ourselves that nine-tenths of our miseries
+really consist in looking forward to future miseries, so we understand
+that the absence or at any rate slight prevalence of self-consciousness
+in animals enables them to endure forms of distress which would drive us
+mad.
+
+In time then the babe arrives at self-consciousness; and, as one might
+expect, the growing boy or girl often becomes intensely aware of Self.
+His or her self-consciousness is crude, no doubt, but it has very little
+misgiving. If the question of the nature of the Self is propounded to
+the boy as a problem he has no difficulty in solving it. He says "I know
+well enough who I am: I am the boy with red hair what gave Jimmy Brown
+such a jolly good licking last Monday week." He knows well enough--or
+thinks he knows--who he is. And at a later age, though his definition
+may change and he may describe himself chiefly as a good cricketer or
+successful in certain examinations, his method is practically the same.
+He fixes his mind on a certain bundle of qualities and capacities which
+he is supposed to possess, and calls that bundle Himself. And in a more
+elaborate way we most of us, I imagine, do the same.
+
+Presently, however, with more careful thought, we begin to see
+difficulties in this view. I see that directly I think of myself as a
+certain bundle of qualities--and for that matter it is of no account
+whether the qualities are good or bad, or in what sort of charming
+confusion they are mixed--I see at once that I am merely looking at
+a bundle of qualities: and that the real "I," the Self, is not that
+bundle, but is the being INSPECTING the same--something beyond and
+behind, as it were. So I now concentrate my thoughts upon that inner
+Something, in order to find out what it really is. I imagine perhaps an
+inner being, of 'astral' or ethereal nature, and possessing a new
+range of much finer and more subtle qualities than the body--a being
+inhabiting the body and perceiving through its senses, but quite capable
+of surviving the tenement in which it dwells and I think of that as the
+Self. But no sooner have I taken this step than I perceive that I am
+committing the same mistake as before. I am only contemplating a new
+image or picture, and "I" still remain beyond and behind that which I
+contemplate. No sooner do I turn my attention on the subjective being
+than it becomes OBJECTIVE, and the real subject retires into the
+background. And so on indefinitely. I am baffled; and unable to say
+positively what the Self is.
+
+Meanwhile there are people who look upon the foregoing speculations
+about an interior Self as merely unpractical. Being perhaps of a more
+materialistic type of mind they fix their attention on the body. Frankly
+they try to define the Self by the body and all that is connected
+therewith--that is by the mental as well as corporeal qualities which
+exhibit themselves in that connection; and they say, "At any rate the
+Self--whatever it may be--is in some way limited by the body; each
+person studies the interest of his body and of the feelings, emotions
+and mentality directly associated with it, and you cannot get beyond
+that; it isn't in human nature to do so. The Self is limited by this
+corporeal phenomenon and doubtless it perishes when the body perishes."
+But here again the conclusion, though specious at first, soon appears to
+be quite inadequate. For though it is possibly true that a man, if left
+alone in a Robinson Crusoe life on a desert island, might ultimately
+subside into a mere gratification of his corporeal needs and of those
+mental needs which were directly concerned with the body, yet we know
+that such a case would by no means be representative. On the contrary we
+know that vast numbers of people spend their lives in considering other
+people, and often so far as to sacrifice their own bodily and mental
+comfort and well-being. The mother spends her life thinking almost
+day and night about her babe and the other children--spending all her
+thoughts and efforts on them. You may call her selfish if you will, but
+her selfishness clearly extends beyond her personal body and mind, and
+extends to the personalities of her children around her; her "body"--if
+you insist on your definition--must be held to include the bodies of all
+her children. And again, the husband who is toiling for the support of
+the family, he is thinking and working and toiling and suffering for a
+'self' which includes his wife and children. Do you mean that the whole
+family is his "body"? Or a man belongs to some society, to a church or
+to a social league of some kind, and his activities are largely ruled by
+the interests of this larger group. Or he sacrifices his life--as many
+have been doing of late--with extraordinary bravery and heroism for the
+sake of the nation to which he belongs. Must we say then that the whole
+nation is really a part of the man's body? Or again, he gives his life
+and goes to the stake for his religion. Whether his religion is right or
+wrong does not matter, the point is that there is that in him which can
+carry him far beyond his local self and the ordinary instincts of his
+physical organism, to dedicate his life and powers to a something of far
+wider circumference and scope.
+
+Thus in the FIRST of these two examples of a search for the nature of
+the Self we are led INWARDS from point to point, into interior and ever
+subtler regions of our being, and still in the end are baffled; while
+in the SECOND we are carried outwards into an ever wider and wider
+circumference in our quest of the Ego, and still feel that we have
+failed to reach its ultimate nature. We are driven in fact by these two
+arguments to the conclusion that that which we are seeking is indeed
+something very vast--something far extending around, yet also buried
+deep in the hidden recesses of our minds. How far, how deep, we do not
+know. We can only say that as far as the indications point the true self
+is profounder and more far-reaching than anything we have yet fathomed.
+
+In the ordinary commonplace life we shrink to ordinary commonplace
+selves, but it is one of the blessings of great experiences, even though
+they are tragic or painful, that they throw us out into that enormously
+greater self to which we belong. Sometimes, in moments of inspiration,
+of intense enthusiasm, of revelation, such as a man feels in the midst
+of a battle, in moments of love and dedication to another person, and
+in moments of religious ecstasy, an immense world is opened up to the
+astonished gaze of the inner man, who sees disclosed a self stretched
+far beyond anything he had ever imagined. We have all had experiences
+more or less of that kind. I have known quite a few people, and most of
+you have known some, who at some time, even if only once in their lives,
+have experienced such an extraordinary lifting of the veil, an opening
+out of the back of their minds as it were, and have had such a vision of
+the world, that they have never afterwards forgotten it. They have seen
+into the heart of creation, and have perceived their union with the rest
+of mankind. They have had glimpses of a strange immortality belonging to
+them, a glimpse of their belonging to a far greater being than they have
+ever imagined. Just once--and a man has never forgotten it, and even if
+it has not recurred it has colored all the rest of his life.
+
+Now, this subject has been thought about--since the beginning of the
+world, I was going to say--but it has been thought about since the
+beginnings of history. Some three thousand years ago certain groups
+of--I hardly like to call them philosophers--but, let us say, people who
+were meditating and thinking upon these problems, were in the habit of
+locating themselves in the forests of Northern India; and schools arose
+there. In the case of each school some teacher went into the woods and
+collected groups of disciples around him, who lived there in his company
+and listened to his words. Such schools were formed in very considerable
+numbers, and the doctrines of these teachers were gathered together,
+generally by their disciples, in notes, which notes were brought
+together into little pamphlets or tracts, forming the books which
+are called the 'Upanishads' of the Indian sages. They contain some
+extraordinary words of wisdom, some of which I want to bring before
+you. The conclusions arrived at were not so much what we should call
+philosophy in the modern sense. They were not so much the result of the
+analysis of the mind and the following out of concatenations of strict
+argument; but they were flashes of intuition and experience, and all
+through the 'Upanishads' you find these extraordinary flashes embedded
+in the midst of a great deal of what we should call a rather rubbishy
+kind of argument, and a good deal of merely conventional Brahmanical
+talk of those days. But the people who wrote and spoke thus had an
+intuition into the heart of things which I make bold to say very few
+people in modern life have. These 'Upanisihads,' however various their
+subject, practically agree on one point--in the definition of the
+"self." They agree in saying: that the self of each man is continuous
+with and in a sense identical with the Self of the universe. Now that
+seems an extraordinary conclusion, and one which almost staggers the
+modern mind to conceive of. But that is the conclusion, that is the
+thread which runs all through the 'Upanishads'--the identity of the self
+of each individual with the self of every other individual throughout
+mankind, and even with the selves of the animals and other creatures.
+
+Those who have read the Khandogya Upanishad remember how in that
+treatise the father instructs his son Svetakeitu on this very
+subject--pointing him out in succession the objects of Nature and
+on each occasion exhorting him to realize his identity with the
+very essence of the object--"Tat twam asi, THAT thou art." He calls
+Svetaketu's attention to a tree. What is the ESSENCE of the tree?
+When they have rejected the external characteristics--the leaves, the
+branches, etc.--and agreed that the SAP is the essence, then the father
+says, "TAT TWAM ASI--THAT thou art." He gives his son a crystal of salt,
+and asks him what is the essence of that. The son is puzzled. Clearly
+neither the form nor the transparent quality are essential. The father
+says, "Put the crystal in water." Then when it is melted he says, "Where
+is the crystal?" The son replies, "I do not know." "Dip your finger in
+the bowl," says the father, "and taste." Then Svetaketu dips here and
+there, and everywhere there is a salt flavor. They agree that THAT is
+the essence of salt; and the father says again, "TAt twam asi." I am of
+course neither defending nor criticizing the scientific attitude here
+adopted. I am only pointing out that this psychological identification
+of the observer with the object observed runs through the Upanishads,
+and is I think worthy of the deepest consideration.
+
+In the 'Bhagavat Gita,' which is a later book, the author speaks of
+"him whose soul is purified, whose self is the Self of all creatures." A
+phrase like that challenges opposition. It is so bold, so sweeping, and
+so immense, that we hesitate to give our adhesion to what it implies.
+But what does it mean--"whose soul is purified"? I believe that it means
+this, that with most of us our souls are anything but clean or
+purified, they are by no means transparent, so that all the time we are
+continually deceiving ourselves and making clouds between us and others.
+We are all the time grasping things from other people, and, if not in
+words, are mentally boasting ourselves against others, trying to think
+of our own superiority to the rest of the people around us. Sometimes we
+try to run our neighbors down a little, just to show that they are not
+quite equal to our level. We try to snatch from others some things which
+belong to them, or take credit to ourselves for things to which we are
+not fairly entitled. But all the time we are acting so it is perfectly
+obvious that we are weaving veils between ourselves and others. You
+cannot have dealings with another person in a purely truthful way, and
+be continually trying to cheat that person out of money, or out of his
+good name and reputation. If you are doing that, however much in the
+background you may be doing it, you are not looking the person fairly
+in the face--there is a cloud between you all the time. So long as your
+soul is not purified from all these really absurd and ridiculous little
+desires and superiorities and self-satisfactions, which make up so much
+of our lives, just so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see
+the truth. But when it happens to a person, as it does happen in times
+of great and deep and bitter experience; when it happens that all these
+trumpery little objects of life are swept away; then occasionally, with
+astonishment, the soul sees that. It is also the soul of the others
+around. Even if it does not become aware of an absolute identity, it
+perceives that there is a deep relationship and communion between itself
+and others, and it comes to understand how it may really be true that
+to him whose soul is purified the self is literally the Self of all
+creatures.
+
+Ordinary men and those who go on more intellectual and less intuitional
+lines will say that these ideas are really contrary to human nature and
+to nature generally. Yet I think that those people who say this in the
+name of Science are extremely unscientific, because a very superficial
+glance at nature reveals that the very same thing is taking place
+throughout nature. Consider the madrepores, corallines, or sponges. You
+find, for instance, that constantly the little self of the coralline
+or sponge is functioning at the end of a stem and casting forth its
+tentacles into the water to gain food and to breathe the air out of
+the water. That little animalcule there, which is living in that way,
+imagines no doubt that it is working all for itself, and yet it is
+united down the stem at whose extremity it stands, with the life of the
+whole madrepore or sponge to which it belongs. There is the common
+life of the whole and the individual life of each, and while the little
+creature at the end of the stem is thinking (if it is conscious at all)
+that its whole energies are absorbed in its own maintenance, it really
+is feeding the common life through the stem to which it belongs, and in
+its turn it is being fed by that common life.
+
+You have only to look at an ordinary tree to see the same thing going
+on. Each little leaf on a tree may very naturally have sufficient
+consciousness to believe that it is an entirely separate being
+maintaining itself in the sunlight and the air, withering away and dying
+when the winter comes on--and there is an end of it. It probably does
+not realize that all the time it is being supported by the sap which
+flows from the trunk of the tree, and that in its turn it is feeding
+the tree, too--that its self is the self of the whole tree. If the leaf
+could really understand itself, it would see that its self was deeply,
+intimately connected, practically one with the life of the whole tree.
+Therefore, I say that this Indian view is not unscientific. On the
+contrary, I am sure that it is thoroughly scientific.
+
+Let us take another passage, out of the 'Svetasvatara Upanishad,' which,
+speaking of the self says: "He is the one God, hidden in all creatures,
+all pervading, the self within all, watching over all works, shadowing
+all creatures, the witness, the perceiver, the only one free from
+qualities."
+
+And now we can return to the point where we left the argument at the
+beginning of this discourse. We said, you remember, that the Self is
+certainly no mere bundle of qualities--that the very nature of the mind
+forbids us thinking that. For however fine and subtle any quality or
+group of qualities may be, we are irresistibly compelled by the
+nature of the mind itself to look for the Self, not in any quality or
+qualities, but in the being that PERCEIVES those qualities. The passage
+I have just quoted says that being is "The one God, hidden in all
+creatures, all pervading, the self within all... the witness, the
+perceiver, the only one free from qualities." And the more you
+think about it the clearer I think you will see that this passage is
+correct--that there can be only ONE witness, ONE perceiver, and that
+is the one God hidden in all creatures, "Sarva Sakshi," the Universal
+Witness.
+
+Have you ever had that curious feeling, not uncommon, especially in
+moments of vivid experience and emotion, that there was at the back of
+your mind a witness, watching everything that was going on, yet too deep
+for your ordinary thought to grasp? Has it not occurred to you--in a
+moment say of great danger when the mind was agitated to the last degree
+by fears and anxieties--suddenly to become perfectly calm and collected,
+to realize that NOTHING can harm you, that you are identified with
+some great and universal being lifted far over this mortal world and
+unaffected by its storms? Is it not obvious that the real Self MUST be
+something of this nature, a being perceiving all, but itself remaining
+unperceived? For indeed if it were perceived it would fall under the
+head of some definable quality, and so becoming the object of thought
+would cease to be the subject, would cease to be the Self.
+
+The witness is and must be "free from qualities." For since it is
+capable of perceiving ALL qualities it must obviously not be itself
+imprisoned or tied in any quality--it must either be entirely without
+quality, or if it have the potentiality of quality in it, it must have
+the potentiality of EVERY quality; but in either case it cannot be in
+bondage to any quality, and in either case it would appear that there
+can be only ONE such ultimate Witness in the universe. For if there were
+two or more such Witnesses, then we should be compelled to suppose them
+distinguished from one another by something, and that something could
+only be a difference of qualities, which would be contrary to our
+conclusion that such a Witness cannot be in bondage to any quality.
+
+There is then I take it--as the text in question says--only one Witness,
+one Self, throughout the universe. It is hidden in all living things,
+men and animals and plants; it pervades all creation. In every thing
+that has consciousness it is the Self; it watches over all operations,
+it overshadows all creatures, it moves in the depths of our hearts, the
+perceiver, the only being that is cognizant of all and yet free from
+all.
+
+Once you really appropriate this truth, and assimilate it in the depths
+of your mind, a vast change (you can easily imagine) will take place
+within you. The whole world will be transformed, and every thought
+and act of which you are capable will take on a different color and
+complexion. Indeed the revolution will be so vast that it would be quite
+impossible for me within the limits of this discourse to describe it.
+I will, however, occupy the rest of my time in dealing with some points
+and conclusions, and some mental changes which will flow perfectly
+naturally from this axiomatic change taking place at the very root of
+life.
+
+"Free from qualities." We generally pride ourselves a little on our
+qualities. Some of us think a great deal of our good qualities, and some
+of us are rather ashamed of our bad ones! I would say: "Do not trouble
+very much about all that. What good qualities you have--well you may be
+quite sure they do not really amount to much; and what bad qualities,
+you may be sure they are not very important! Do not make too much fuss
+about either. Do you see? The thing is that you, you yourself, are not
+ANY of your qualities--you are the being that perceives them. The thing
+to see to is that they should not confuse you, bamboozle you, and hide
+you from the knowledge of yourself--that they should not be erected into
+a screen, to hide you from others, or the others from you. If you cease
+from running after qualities, then after a little time your soul will
+become purified, and you will KNOW that your self is the Self of all
+creatures; and when you can feel that you will know that the other
+things do not much matter.
+
+Sometimes people are so awfully good that their very goodness hides them
+from other people. They really cannot be on a level with others,
+and they feel that the others are far below them. Consequently their
+'selves' are blinded or hidden by their 'goodness.' It is a sad end to
+come to! And sometimes it happens that very 'bad' people--just because
+they are so bad--do not erect any screens or veils between themselves
+and others. Indeed they are only too glad if others will recognize them,
+or if they may be allowed to recognize others. And so, after all, they
+come nearer the truth than the very good people.
+
+"The Self is free from qualities." That thing which is so deep, which
+belongs to all, it either--as I have already said--has ALL qualities,
+or it has none. You, to whom I am speaking now, your qualities, good and
+bad, are all mine. I am perfectly willing to accept them. They are all
+right enough and in place--if one can only find the places for them. But
+I know that in most cases they have got so confused and mixed up that
+they cause great conflict and pain in the souls that harbor them. If
+you attain to knowing yourself to be other than and separate from the
+qualities, then you will pass below and beyond them all. You will be
+able to accept ALL your qualities and harmonize them, and your soul
+will be at peace. You will be free from the domination of qualities then
+because you will know that among all the multitudes of them there are
+none of any importance!
+
+If you should happen some day to reach that state of mind in connection
+with which this revelation comes, then you will find the experience
+a most extraordinary one. You will become conscious that there is no
+barrier in your path; that the way is open in all directions; that all
+men and women belong to you, are part of you. You will feel that there
+is a great open immense world around, which you had never suspected
+before, which belongs to you, and the riches of which are all yours,
+waiting for you. It may, of course, take centuries and thousands of
+years to realize this thoroughly, but there it is. You are just at the
+threshold, peeping in at the door. What did Shakespeare say? "To thine
+own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou can'st
+not then be false to any man." What a profound bit of philosophy in
+three lines! I doubt if anywhere the basis of all human life has been
+expressed more perfectly and tersely.
+
+One of the Upanishads (the Maitrayana-Brahmana) says: "The
+happiness belonging to a mind, which through deep inwardness (1) (or
+understanding) has been washed clean and has entered into the Self, is a
+thing beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be perceived by
+an inner faculty." Observe the conviction, the intensity with which this
+joy, this happiness is described, which comes to those whose minds have
+been washed clean (from all the silly trumpery sediment of self-thought)
+and have become transparent, so that the great universal Being residing
+there in the depths can be perceived. What sorrow indeed, what, grief,
+can come to such an one who has seen this vision? It is truly a thing
+beyond the power of words to describe: it can only be PERCEIVED--and
+that by an inner faculty. The external apparatus of thought is of no
+use. Argument is of no use. But experience and direct perception are
+possible; and probably all the experiences of life and of mankind
+through the ages are gradually deepening our powers of perception to
+that point where the vision will at last rise upon the inward eye.
+
+ (1) The word in the Max Muller translation is "meditation." But
+that is, I think, a somewhat misleading word. It suggests to most people
+the turning inward of the THINKING faculty to grope and delve in the
+interior of the mind. This is just what should NOT be done. Meditation
+in the proper sense should mean the inward deepening of FEELING and
+consciousness till the region of the universal self is reached; but
+THOUGHT should not interfere there. That should be turned on outward
+things to mould them into expression of the inner consciousness.
+
+
+Another text, from the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (which I have already
+quoted in the paper on "Rest"), says: "If a man worship the Self only as
+his true state, his work cannot fail, for whatever he desires, that he
+obtains from the Self." Is that not magnificent? If you truly realize
+your identity and union with the great Self who inspires and informs the
+world, then obviously whatever you desire the great Self win desire, and
+the whole world will conspire to bring it to you. "He maketh the winds
+his angels, and the flaming fires his ministers." (I need not say that
+I am not asking you to try and identify yourself with the great Self
+universal IN ORDER to get riches, "opulence," and other things of that
+kind which you desire; because in that quest you will probably not
+succeed. The Great Self is not such a fool as to be taken in in that
+way. It may be true--and it is true--that if ye seek FIRST the Kingdom
+of Heaven all these things shall be added unto you; but you must seek it
+first, not second.)
+
+Here is a passage from Towards Democracy: "As space spreads everywhere,
+and all things move and change within it, but it moves not nor changes,
+
+"So I am the space within the soul, of which the space without is but
+the similitude and mental image;
+
+"Comest thou to inhabit me, thou hast the entrance to all life--death
+shall no longer divide thee from whom thou lovest.
+
+"I am the Sun that shines upon all creatures from within--gazest thou
+upon me, thou shalt be filled with joy eternal."
+
+Yes, this great sun is there, always shining, but most of the time it is
+hidden from us by the clouds of which I have spoken, and we fail to see
+it. We complain of being out in the cold; and in the cold, for the time
+being, no doubt we are; but our return to the warmth and the light has
+now become possible.
+
+
+Thus at last the Ego, the mortal immortal self--disclosed at first in
+darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe--FINDS ITS TRUE
+IDENTITY. For a long period it is baffled in trying to understand what
+it is. It goes through a vast experience. It is tormented by the
+sense of separation and alienation--alienation from other people, and
+persecution by all the great powers and forces of the universe; and it
+is pursued by a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable.
+The hour of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds
+at last ITS OWN TRUE BEING.
+
+
+We are accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty
+tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works
+by a "law of cussedness"--so that, whichever way we want to go, that way
+seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without
+making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from
+ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, which at present looks
+so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing immediately we
+have passed it--once we have found the open secret of identity--then the
+way is indeed open in every direction.
+
+The world in which we live--the world into which we are tumbled as
+children at the first onset of self-consciousness--denies this great
+fact of unity. It is a world in which the principle of separation
+rules. Instead of a common life and union with each other, the contrary
+principle (especially in the later civilizations) has been the one
+recognized--and to such an extent that always there prevails the
+obsession of separation, and the conviction that each person is an
+isolated unit. The whole of our modern society has been founded on this
+delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's
+hand is against the others--that is the ruling principle. You go into
+the Law Courts where justice is, or should be, administered, and you
+find that the principle which denies unity is the one that prevails.
+The criminal (whose actions have really been determined by the society
+around him) is cast out, disacknowledged, and condemned to further
+isolation in a prison cell. 'Property' again is the principle which
+rules and determines our modern civilization--namely that which is
+proper to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as AGAINST the
+others.
+
+In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the shape of
+the sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually (and that
+is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the
+non-acknowledgment of unity. And so it has come about that during all
+this civilization-period the sense of sin has ruled and ranged to such
+an extraordinary degree. Society has been built on a false base, not
+true to fact or life--and has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its
+falseness. Meanwhile at the heart of it all--and within all the frantic
+external strife and warfare--there is all the time this real great life
+brooding. The kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is still within.
+
+The word Democracy indicates something of the kind--the rule of the
+Demos, that is of the common life. The coming of that will transform,
+not only our Markets and our Law Courts and our sense of Property, and
+other institutions, into something really great and glorious instead
+of the dismal masses of rubbish which they at present are; but it will
+transform our sense of Morality.
+
+Our Morality at present consists in the idea of self-goodness--one of
+the most pernicious and disgusting ideas which has ever infested the
+human brain. If any one should follow and assimilate what I have just
+said about the true nature of the Self he will realize that it will
+never again be possible for him to congratulate himself on his own
+goodness or morality or superiority; for the moment he does so he will
+separate himself from the universal life, and proclaim the sin of his
+own separation. I agree that this conclusion is for some people a most
+sad and disheartening one--but it cannot be helped! A man may truly be
+'good' and 'moral' in some real sense; but only on the condition that
+he is not aware of it. He can only BE good when not thinking about the
+matter; to be conscious of one's own goodness is already to have fallen!
+
+We began by thinking of the self as just a little local self; then we
+extended it to the family, the cause, the nation--ever to a larger and
+vaster being. At last there comes a time when we recognize--or see that
+we SHALL have to recognize--an inner Equality between ourselves and all
+others; not of course an external equality--for that would be absurd and
+impossible--but an inner and profound and universal Equality. And so we
+come again to the mystic root-conception of Democracy.
+
+And now it will be said: "But after all this talk you have not defined
+the Self, or given us any intellectual outline of what you mean by the
+word." No--and I do not intend to. If I could, by any sort of copybook
+definition, describe and show the boundaries of myself, I should
+obviously lose all interest in the subject. Nothing more dull could be
+imagined. I may be able to define and describe fairly exhaustively
+this inkpot on the table; but for you or for me to give the limits and
+boundaries of ourselves is, I am glad to say, impossible. That does not,
+however, mean that we cannot FEEL and be CONSCIOUS of ourselves, and of
+our relations to other selves, and to the great Whole. On the contrary
+I think it is clear that the more vividly we feel our organic unity with
+the whole, the less shall we be able to separate off the local self and
+enclose it within any definition. I take it that we can and do become
+ever more vividly conscious of our true Self, but that the mental
+statement of it always does and probably always will lie beyond us.
+All life and all our action and experience consist in the gradual
+manifestation of that which is within us--of our inner being. In that
+sense--and reading its handwriting on the outer world--we come to know
+the soul's true nature more and more intimately; we enter into the mind
+of that great artist who beholds himself in his own creation.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Pagan & Christian Creeds, by Edward Carpenter
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 1561.txt or 1561.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/1/5/6/1561/
+
+Produced by Charles Keller
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/1561.zip b/old/1561.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7c78f5f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1561.zip
diff --git a/old/pchrc10.txt b/old/pchrc10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..541164d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/pchrc10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11602 @@
+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pagan and Christian Creeds***
+by Edward Carpenter
 
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
+the copyright laws for your country before posting these files!!
+
+Please take a look at the important information in this header.
+We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
+electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*
+
+Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
+further information is included below.  We need your donations.
+Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra.
+
+
+Pagan & Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
+
+by Edward Carpenter
 
+
+December, 1998  [Etext #1561]
+
+
+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Pagan and Christian Creeds***
+*****This file should be named pchrc10.txt or pchrc10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, pchrc11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, pchrc10a.txt
+
+
+Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+We are now trying to release all our books one month in advance
+of the official release dates, for time for better editing.
+
+Please note:  neither this list nor its contents are final till
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
+up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
+in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
+a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
+look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
+new copy has at least one byte more or less.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
+to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour this year as we release thirty-two text
+files per month, or 384 more Etexts in 1998 for a total of 1500+
+If these reach just 10% of the computerized population, then the
+total should reach over 150 billion Etexts given away.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
+Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only 10% of the present number of computer users.  2001
+should have at least twice as many computer users as that, so it
+will require us reaching less than 5% of the users in 2001.
+
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+
+All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/CMU": and are
+tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.  (CMU = Carnegie-
+Mellon University).
+
+For these and other matters, please mail to:
+
+Project Gutenberg
+P. O. Box  2782
+Champaign, IL 61825
+
+When all other email fails try our Executive Director:
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+We would prefer to send you this information by email
+(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).
+
+******
+If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
+FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
+[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]
+
+ftp uiarchive.cso.uiuc.edu
+login:  anonymous
+password:  your@login
+cd etext/etext90 through /etext96
+or cd etext/articles [get suggest gut for more information]
+dir [to see files]
+get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
+GET INDEX?00.GUT
+for a list of books
+and
+GET NEW GUT for general information
+and
+MGET GUT* for newsletters.
+
+**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
+(Three Pages)
+
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here?  You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault.  So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you.  It also tells you how
+you can distribute copies of this etext if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement.  If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from.  If you received this etext on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-
+tm etexts, is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor
+Michael S. Hart through the Project Gutenberg Association at
+Carnegie-Mellon University (the "Project").  Among other
+things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext
+under the Project's "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works.  Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects".  Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this
+etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
+officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
+and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
+indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
+[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
+or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     etext or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word pro-
+     cessing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The etext may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the etext (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Project of 20% of the
+     net profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Association/Carnegie-Mellon
+     University" within the 60 days following each
+     date you prepare (or were legally required to prepare)
+     your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax return.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time,
+scanning machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty
+free copyright licenses, and every other sort of contribution
+you can think of.  Money should be paid to "Project Gutenberg
+Association / Carnegie-Mellon University".
+
+*END*THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
+
+
+
+
+
+Scanned by Charles Keller with OmniPage Professional OCR software
+
+
+
+
+
+PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+
+By EDWARD CARPENTER
+
+
+
+
+"The different religions being lame attempts to represent under
+various guises this one root-fact of the central universal life,
+men have at all times clung to the religious creeds and rituals
+and ceremonials as symbolising in some rude way the redemption
+and fulfilment of their own most intimate natures--and this
+whether consciously understanding the interpretations, or whether
+(as most often) only doing so in an unconscious or quite
+subconscious way."
+                         The Drama of Love and Death, p. 96.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+I. INTRODUCTORY
+II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+IX. MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+XI. RITUAL DANCING
+XII. THE SEX-TABOO
+XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+XV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+XVI. THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+APPENDIX ON THE TEACHINGS OF THE UPANISHADS:
+I. REST
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+
+
+
+PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
+
+I. INTRODUCTORY
+
+The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as
+the great multitude of books upon it, published in late
+years, tends to show. Indeed the great difficulty to-day
+in dealing with the subject, lies in the very mass of the
+material to hand--and that not only on account of the
+labor involved in sorting the material, but because the
+abundance itself of facts opens up temptation to a student
+in this department of Anthropology (as happens also in
+other branches of general Science) to rush in too hastily
+with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts,
+statistics, and so forth, there are available in any
+investigation, the easier it is to pick out a considerable number
+which will fit a given theory. The other facts being neglected
+or ignored, the views put forward enjoy for a
+time a great vogue. Then inevitably, and at a later time,
+new or neglected facts alter the outlook, and a new perspective
+is established.
+
+There is also in these matters of Science (though many
+scientific men would doubtless deny this) a great deal of
+"Fashion". Such has been notoriously the case in Political
+Economy, Medicine, Geology, and even in such definite
+studies as Physics and Chemistry. In a comparatively recent
+science, like that with which we are now concerned, one
+would naturally expect variations. A hundred and fifty
+years ago, and since the time of Rousseau, the "Noble
+Savage" was extremely popular; and he lingers still in
+the story books of our children. Then the reaction from
+this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been
+the popular cue (largely, it must be said, among "armchair"
+travelers and explorers) to represent the religious
+rites and customs of primitive folk as a senseless mass
+of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of
+decent feeling and intelligence. Again, when the study of
+religious origins first began in modern times to be seriously
+taken up--say in the earlier part of last century--
+there was a great boom in Sungods. Every divinity in
+the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun--unless
+indeed (if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod,
+of course; Hercules was a sungod; Samson was a sungod;
+Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the same.
+C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795),
+F. Nork in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard
+Taylor in England (The Devil's Pulpit,[1] 1830), were among
+the first in modern times to put forward this view. A little
+later the PHALLIC explanation of everything came into
+fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs
+and powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art
+and Mythology, 1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient
+Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868) popularized this idea in
+England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again there was
+a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism
+--the theory that the gods and goddesses had actually once
+been men and women, historical characters round whom
+a halo of romance and remoteness had gathered. Later
+still, a school has arisen which thinks little of sungods,
+and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits,
+to gnomes and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the
+processes of Magic by which these (so it was supposed)
+could be enlisted in man's service if friendly, or exorcised
+if hostile.
+
+[1] This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and
+containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the
+right lines. But it raised a storm of opposition--the more so
+because its author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the
+ministry, of course, and was sent to prison twice.
+
+
+It is easy to see of course that there is some truth in
+ALL these explanations; but naturally each school for
+the time being makes the most of its own contention. Mr.
+J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and Christianity and
+Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field,[1]
+relies chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though
+he does not altogether deny the others; Dr. Frazer, on
+the other hand--whose great work, The Golden Bough, is
+a monumental collection of primitive customs, and will
+be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students--is
+apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun
+and the stars, but concentrates his attention on the
+collection of innumerable details[2] of rites, chiefly magical,
+connected with food and vegetation. Still later writers, like
+S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and E. A. Crowley, being mainly
+occupied with customs of very primitive peoples, like
+the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have
+confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and
+Witchcraft.
+
+[1] If only he did not waste so much time, and so needlessly, in
+slaughtering opponents!
+
+[2] To such a degree, indeed, that sometimes the connecting clue
+of the argument seems to be lost.
+
+
+Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations
+has kept itself severely apart--as of course representing a
+unique and divine revelation little concerned or interested
+in such heathenisms; and moreover (in this country
+at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public
+of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few
+people, even nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just
+the same root as Paganism, and that it shares by far the
+most part of its doctrines and rites with the latter. Till
+quite lately it was thought (in Britain) that only secularists
+and unfashionable people took any interest in sungods; and
+while it was true that learned professors might point to a
+belief in Magic as one of the first sources of Religion, it
+was easy in reply to say that this obviously had nothing to
+do with Christianity! The Secularists, too, rather spoilt
+their case by assuming, in their wrath against the Church,
+that all priests since the beginning of the world have been
+frauds and charlatans, and that all the rites of religion
+were merely devil's devices invented by them for the
+purpose of preying upon the superstitions of the ignorant,
+to their own enrichment. They (the Secularists)
+overleaped themselves by grossly exaggerating a thing that
+no doubt is partially true.
+
+Thus the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex,
+and yields many aspects for consideration. It
+is only, I think, by keeping a broad course and admitting
+contributions to the truth from various sides, that valuable
+results can be obtained. It is absurd to suppose
+that in this or any other science neat systems can be found
+which will cover all the facts. Nature and History do not
+deal in such things, or supply them for a sop to Man's
+vanity.
+
+It is clear that there have been three main lines, so far,
+along which human speculation and study have run. One
+connecting religious rites and observations with the movements
+of the Sun and the planets in the sky, and leading to
+the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods
+dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance;
+the second connecting religion with the changes
+of the season, on the Earth and with such practical things
+as the growth of vegetation and food, and leading to or
+mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical
+methods of influencing such spirits; and the third connecting
+religion with man's own body and the tremendous force
+of sex residing in it--emblem of undying life and all
+fertility and power. It is clear also--and all investigation
+confirms it--that the second-mentioned phase of religion
+arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned--that is,
+that men naturally thought about the very practical questions
+of food and vegetation, and the magical or other
+methods of encouraging the same, before they worried themselves
+about the heavenly bodies and the laws of THEIR
+movements, or about the sinister or favorable influences the
+stars might exert. And again it is extremely probable that
+the third-mentioned aspect--that which connected religion
+with the procreative desires and phenomena of human
+physiology--really came FIRST. These desires and physiological
+phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive
+mind long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky
+had been at all definitely observed or considered. Thus we
+find it probable that, in order to understand the sequence of
+the actual and historical phases of religious worship, we must
+approximately reverse the order above-given in which they
+have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the
+Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation
+of earth-divinities and spirits came second, and
+only last came the belief in definite God-figures residing
+in heaven.
+
+At the base of the whole process by which divinities and
+demons were created, and rites for their propitiation and
+placation established, lay Fear--fear stimulating the
+imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in orbe deos
+fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
+stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution
+of self-consciousness. Before that time, in the period of
+SIMPLE consciousness, when the human mind resembled
+that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature was
+more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There
+being no figure or image of SELF in the animal mind, there
+were correspondingly no figures or images of beings who
+might threaten or destroy that self. So it was that the
+imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness, and
+from that imaginative power was unrolled the whole panorama
+of the gods and rites and creeds of Religion down the
+centuries.
+
+The immense force and domination of Fear in the first
+self-conscious stages of the human mind is a thing which
+can hardly be exaggerated, and which is even difficult for
+some of us moderns to realize. But naturally as soon
+as Man began to think about himself--a frail phantom and
+waif in the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature
+and mode of operation he was entirely ignorant--he was
+BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon him on all sides.
+Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the chief
+obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native
+races is sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the
+recognized word for a state of mind ("obsession of
+death") which will often cause a savage to perish from a
+mere scratch hardly to be called a wound. The natural
+defence against this state of mind was the creation of an
+enormous number of taboos--such as we find among
+all races and on every conceivable subject--and these taboos
+constituted practically a great body of warnings which
+regulated the lives and thoughts of the community, and
+ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some
+degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent
+Customs and Laws. Such taboos naturally in the beginning
+tended to include the avoidance not only of acts which
+might reasonably be considered dangerous, like touching a
+corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful
+in their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-
+in-law, or passing a lightning-struck tree; and (what is
+especially to be noticed) they tended to include acts which
+offered any special PLEASURE or temptation--like sex or
+marriage or the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos surrounded
+these things too, and the psychological connection is easy
+to divine: but I shall deal with this general subject later.
+
+It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations
+made life anything but easy to early peoples; but,
+preposterous and unreasonable as some of the taboos were,
+they undoubtedly had the effect of compelling the growth
+of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy motive,
+but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely
+animal passions, and introduced order and restraint among
+them. Simultaneously it became itself, through the gradual
+increase of knowledge and observation, transmuted and
+etherealized into something more like wonder and awe
+and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
+Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings
+(in the Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a
+gradual development--from crass superstition,
+senseless and accidental, to rudimentary observation,
+and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
+and personification of nature-powers in more or less human
+form, as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of
+the tribe; and to placation of these powers by rites like
+Sacrifice and the Eucharist, which in their turn became
+the foundation of Morality. Graphic representations made
+for the encouragement of fertility--as on the walls of Bushmen's
+rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of Altamira--
+became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of
+plants or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal
+medicine-men for purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied
+some of the material of Science; and humanity emerged
+by faltering and hesitating steps on the borderland of those
+finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed to be
+characteristic of Civilization.
+
+The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies
+has in its main outlines been the same all over the
+world, as the reader will presently see--and this whether
+in connection with the numerous creeds of Paganism
+or the supposedly unique case of Christianity; and now
+the continuity and close intermixture of these great
+streams can no longer be denied--nor IS it indeed denied
+by those who have really studied the subject. It is
+seen that religious evolution through the ages has been
+practically One thing--that there has been in fact a World-
+religion, though with various phases and branches.
+
+And so in the present day a new problem arises, namely
+how to account for the appearance of this great Phenomenon,
+with its orderly phases of evolution, and its own spontaneous[1]
+growths in all corners of the globe--this phenomenon
+which has had such a strange sway over the
+hearts of men, which has attracted them with so weird
+a charm, which has drawn out their devotion, love and
+tenderness, which has consoled them in sorrow and affliction,
+and yet which has stained their history with such horrible
+sacrifices and persecutions and cruelties. What has
+been the instigating cause of it?
+
+[1] For the question of spontaneity see chap. x and elsewhere.
+
+
+The answer which I propose to this question, and which
+is developed to some extent in the following chapters, is
+a psychological one. It is that the phenomenon proceeds
+from, and is a necessary accompaniment of, the growth of
+human Consciousness itself--its growth, namely, through
+the three great stages of its unfoldment. These stages
+are (1) that of the simple or animal consciousness, (2) that
+of SELF-consciousness, and (3) that of a third stage of
+consciousness which has not as yet been effectively named, but
+whose indications and precursive signs we here and there
+perceive in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of
+the early religions, and in the poetry and art and literature
+generally of the later civilizations. Though I do not
+expect or wish to catch Nature and History in the careful
+net of a phrase, yet I think that in the sequence from
+the above-mentioned first stage to the second, and then
+again in the sequence from the second to the third,
+there will be found a helpful explanation of the rites and
+aspirations of human religion. It is this idea, illustrated
+by details of ceremonial and so forth, which forms the main
+thesis of the present book. In this sequence of growth,
+Christianity enters as an episode, but no more than an episode.
+It does not amount to a disruption or dislocation of evolution.
+If it did, or if it stood as an unique or unclassifiable
+phenomenon (as some of its votaries contend), this would
+seem to be a misfortune--as it would obviously rob us of
+at any rate one promise of progress in the future. And
+the promise of something better than Paganism and better
+than Christianity is very precious. It is surely time
+that it should be fulfilled.
+
+The tracing, therefore, of the part that human self-
+consciousness has played, psychologically, in the evolution
+of religion, runs like a thread through the following chapters,
+and seeks illustration in a variety of details. The idea
+has been repeated under different aspects; sometimes,
+possibly, it has been repeated too often; but different aspects
+in such a case do help, as in a stereoscope, to give
+solidity to the thing seen. Though the worship of Sun-gods
+and divine figures in the sky came comparatively late
+in religious evolution, 1 have put this subject early in
+the book (chapters ii and iii), partly because (as I have
+already explained) it was the phase first studied in modern
+times, and therefore is the one most familiar to present-
+day readers, and partly because its astronomical data
+give great definiteness and "proveability" to it, in rebuttal
+to the common accusation that the whole study of religious
+origins is too vague and uncertain to have much value.
+Going backwards in Time, the two next chapters (iv and v)
+deal with Totem-sacraments and Magic, perhaps the earliest
+forms of religion. And these four lead on (in chapters vi
+to xi) to the consideration of rites and creeds common to
+Paganism and Christianity. XII and xiii deal especially
+with the evolution of Christianity itself; xiv and xv explain
+the inner Meaning of the whole process from the beginning;
+and xvi and xvii look to the Future.
+
+The appendix on the doctrines of the Upanishads may,
+I hope, serve to give an idea, intimate even though inadequate,
+of the third Stage--that which follows on the
+stage of self-consciousness; and to portray the mental attitudes
+which are characteristic of that stage. Here in this
+third stage, it would seem, one comes upon the real FACTS of
+the inner life--in contradistinction to the fancies and figments
+of the second stage; and so one reaches the final point
+of conjunction between Science and Religion.
+
+
+
+II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
+
+To the ordinary public--notwithstanding the immense amount
+of work which has of late been done on this subject--
+the connection between Paganism and Christianity still seems
+rather remote. Indeed the common notion is that Christianity
+was really a miraculous interposition into and
+dislocation of the old order of the world; and that the pagan
+gods (as in Milton's Hymn on the Nativity) fled away in
+dismay before the sign of the Cross, and at the sound
+of the name of Jesus. Doubtless this was a view much
+encouraged by the early Church itself--if only to enhance
+its own authority and importance; yet, as is well known
+to every student, it is quite misleading and contrary to
+fact. The main Christian doctrines and festivals, besides
+a great mass of affiliated legend and ceremonial, are really
+quite directly derived from, and related to, preceding Nature
+worships; and it has only been by a good deal of deliberate
+mystification and falsification that this derivation has been
+kept out of sight.
+
+In these Nature-worships there may be discerned three
+fairly independent streams of religious or quasi-religious
+enthusiasm: (1) that connected with the phenomena of the
+heavens, the movements of the Sun, planets and stars, and
+the awe and wonderment they excited; (2) that connected
+with the seasons and the very important matter of the
+growth of vegetation and food on the Earth; and (3)
+that connected with the mysteries of Sex and reproduction.
+It is obvious that these three streams would mingle and
+interfuse with each other a good deal; but as far as
+they were separable the first would tend to create Solar heroes
+and Sun-myths; the second Vegetation-gods and personifications
+of Nature and the earth-life; while the third
+would throw its glamour over the other two and contribute
+to the projection of deities or demons worshipped
+with all sorts of sexual and phallic rites. All three systems
+of course have their special rites and times and ceremonies;
+but, as, I say, the rites and ceremonies of one
+system would rarely be found pure and unmixed with
+those. belonging to the two others. The whole subject
+is a very large one; but for reasons given in the Introduction
+I shall in this and the following chapter--while not
+ignoring phases (2) and (3)--lay most stress on phase (1)
+of the question before us.
+
+At the time of the life or recorded appearance of Jesus
+of Nazareth, and for some centuries before, the Mediterranean
+and neighboring world had been the scene of a
+vast number of pagan creeds and rituals. There were
+Temples without end dedicated to gods like Apollo or Dionysus
+among the Greeks, Hercules among the Romans,
+Mithra among the Persians, Adonis and Attis in Syria and
+Phrygia, Osiris and Isis and Horus in Egypt, Baal and
+Astarte among the Babylonians and Carthaginians, and so
+forth. Societies, large or small, united believers and the
+devout in the service or ceremonials connected with their
+respective deities, and in the creeds which they confessed
+concerning these deities. And an extraordinarily
+interesting fact, for us, is that notwithstanding great
+geographical
+distances and racial differences between the adherents
+of these various cults, as well as differences in the
+details of their services, the general outlines of their creeds
+and ceremonials were--if not identical--so markedly similar
+as we find them.
+
+I cannot of course go at length into these different cults,
+but I may say roughly that of all or nearly all the deities
+above-mentioned it was said and believed that:
+
+(1) They were born on or very near our Christmas Day.
+
+(2) They were born of a Virgin-Mother.
+
+(3) And in a Cave or Underground Chamber.
+
+(4) They led a life of toil for Mankind.
+
+(5) And were called by the names of Light-bringer,
+Healer, Mediator, Savior, Deliverer.
+
+(6) They were however vanquished by the Powers of
+Darkness.
+
+(7) And descended into Hell or the Underworld.
+
+(8) They rose again from the dead, and became the
+pioneers of mankind to the Heavenly world.
+
+(9) They founded Communions of Saints, and Churches
+into which disciples were received by Baptism.
+
+(10) And they were commemorated by Eucharistic
+meals.
+
+Let me give a few brief examples.
+
+Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December.[1]
+He was born of a Virgin.[2] He traveled far and wide as
+a teacher and illuminator of men. He slew the Bull
+(symbol of the gross Earth which the sunlight fructifies).
+His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring
+equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions
+or disciples (the twelve months). He was buried
+in a tomb, from which however he rose again; and his
+resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings. He
+was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as
+a Lamb; and sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were
+held by his followers. This legend is apparently partly
+astronomical and partly vegetational; and the same may be said
+of the following about Osiris.
+
+[1] The birthfeast of Mithra was held in Rome on the 8th day
+before the Kalends of January, being also the day of the
+Circassian games, which were sacred to the Sun. (See F. Nork, Der
+Mystagog, Leipzig.)
+
+[2] This at any rate was reported by his later disciples (see
+Robertson's Pagan Christs, p. 338).
+
+
+Osiris was born (Plutarch tells us) on the 361st day of
+the year, say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and
+Dionysus, was a great traveler. As King of Egypt he
+taught men civil arts, and "tamed them by music and
+gentleness, not by force of arms";[1] he was the discoverer
+of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the
+power of darkness, and slain and dismembered. "This happened,"
+says Plutarch, "on the 17th of the month Athyr,
+when the sun enters into the Scorpion" (the sign of the
+Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body
+was placed in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again
+to life, and, as in the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and
+others, so in the cult of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin
+was brought out before the worshipers and saluted with
+glad cries of "Osiris is risen."[1] "His sufferings, his death
+and his resurrection were enacted year by year in a great
+mystery-play at Abydos."[2]
+
+[1] See Plutarch on Isis and Osiris.
+
+[2] Ancient Art and Ritual, by Jane E. Harrison, chap. i.
+
+
+The two following legends have more distinctly the character
+of Vegetation myths.
+
+Adonis or Tammuz, the Syrian god of vegetation, was
+a very beautiful youth, born of a Virgin (Nature), and so
+beautiful that Venus and Proserpine (the goddesses of the
+Upper and Underworlds) both fell in love with him.
+To reconcile their claims it was agreed that he should
+spend half the year (summer) in the upper world, and the
+winter half with Proserpine below. He was killed by a
+boar (Typhon) in the autumn. And every year the maidens
+"wept for Adonis" (see Ezekiel viii. 14). In the spring
+a festival of his resurrection was held--the women set out
+to seek him, and having found the supposed corpse
+placed it (a wooden image) in a coffin or hollow tree, and
+performed wild rites and lamentations, followed by even
+wilder rejoicings over his supposed resurrection. At Aphaca
+in the North of Syria, and halfway between Byblus and
+Baalbec, there was a famous grove and temple of Astarte,
+near which was a wild romantic gorge full of trees, the
+birthplace of a certain river Adonis--the water rushing from
+a Cavern, under lofty cliffs. Here (it was said) every year
+the youth Adonis was again wounded to death, and the
+river ran red with his blood,[1] while the scarlet anemone
+bloomed among the cedars and walnuts.
+
+[1] A discoloration caused by red earth washed by rain from the
+mountains, and which has been observed by modern travelers. For
+the whole story of Adonis and of Attis see Frazer's Golden Bough,
+part iv.
+
+
+The story of Attis is very similar. He was a fair young
+shepherd or herdsman of Phrygia, beloved by Cybele (or
+Demeter), the Mother of the gods. He was born of a Virgin
+--Nana--who conceived by putting a ripe almond or
+pomegranate in her bosom. He died, either killed by a
+boar, the symbol of winter, like Adonis, or self-castrated
+(like his own priests); and he bled to death at the foot of
+a pine tree (the pine and pine-cone being symbols of fertility).
+The sacrifice of his blood renewed the fertility of
+the earth, and in the ritual celebration of his death and
+resurrection his image was fastened to the trunk of a pine-
+tree (compare the Crucifixion). But I shall return to this
+legend presently. The worship of Attis became very widespread
+and much honored, and was ultimately incorporated
+with the established religion at Rome somewhere about the
+commencement of our Era.
+
+The following two legends (dealing with Hercules and
+with Krishna) have rather more of the character of the
+solar, and less of the vegetational myth about them. Both
+heroes were regarded as great benefactors of humanity; but
+the former more on the material plane, and the latter on the
+spiritual.
+
+Hercules or Heracles was, like other Sun-gods and benefactors of
+mankind, a great Traveler. He was known in
+many lands, and everywhere he was invoked as Saviour.
+He was miraculously conceived from a divine Father; even
+in the cradle he strangled two serpents sent to destroy him.
+His many labors for the good of the world were ultimately
+epitomized into twelve, symbolized by the signs of the Zodiac.
+He slew the Nemxan Lion and the Hydra (offspring
+of Typhon) and the Boar. He overcame the Cretan Bull,
+and cleaned out the Stables of Augeas; he conquered Death
+and, descending into Hades, brought Cerberus thence and
+ascended into Heaven. On all sides he was followed by the
+gratitude and the prayers of mortals.
+
+As to Krishna, the Indian god, the points of agreement
+with the general divine career indicated above are too salient
+to be overlooked, and too numerous to be fully recorded.
+He also was born of a Virgin (Devaki) and in a Cave,[1]
+and his birth announced by a Star. It was sought to destroy
+him, and for that purpose a massacre of infants was ordered.
+Everywhere he performed miracles, raising the dead, healing
+lepers, and the deaf and the blind, and championing the
+poor and oppressed. He had a beloved disciple, Arjuna, (cf.
+John) before whom he was transfigured.[2] His death is
+differently related--as being shot by an arrow, or crucified on
+a tree. He descended into hell; and rose again from the
+dead, ascending into heaven in the sight of many people.
+He will return at the last day to be the judge of the quick
+and the dead.
+
+[1] Cox's Myths of the Aryan Nations, p. 107.
+
+[2] Bhagavat Gita, ch. xi.
+
+
+Such are some of the legends concerning the pagan and
+pre-Christian deities--only briefly sketched now, in order
+that we may get something like a true perspective of the
+whole subject; but to most of them, and more in detail,
+I shall return as the argument proceeds.
+
+What we chiefly notice so far are two points; on the
+one hand the general similarity of these stories with that
+of Jesus Christ; on the other their analogy with the yearly
+phenomena of Nature as illustrated by the course of the
+Sun in heaven and the changes of Vegetation on the earth.
+
+(1) The similarity of these ancient pagan legends and
+beliefs with Christian traditions was indeed so great that
+it excited the attention and the undisguised wrath of the
+early Christian fathers. They felt no doubt about the similarity,
+but not knowing how to explain it fell back upon the
+innocent theory that the Devil--in order to confound the
+Christians--had, CENTURIES BEFORE, caused the pagans to
+adopt certain beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we
+may say, of the Devil, but also very innocent of the
+Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr for instance
+describes[1] the institution of the Lord's Supper as narrated
+in the Gospels, and then goes on to say: "Which the wicked
+devils have IMITATED in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding
+the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup
+of water are placed with certain incantations in the
+mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know
+or can learn." Tertullian also says[2] that "the devil by the
+mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part of the
+divine mysteries." . . . "He baptizes his worshippers in
+water and makes them believe that this purifies them from
+their crimes." . . . "Mithra sets his mark on the forehead
+of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread;
+he offers an image of the resurrection, and presents at once
+the crown and the sword; he limits his chief priest to a
+single marriage; he even has his virgins and ascetics."[3]
+Cortez, too, it will be remembered complained that the Devil
+had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things which
+God had taught to Christendom.
+
+[1] I Apol. c. 66.
+
+[2] De Praescriptione Hereticorum, c. 40; De Bapt. c. 3; De
+Corona, c. 15.
+
+[3] For reference to both these examples see J. M. Robertson's
+Pagan Christs, pp. 321, 322.
+
+
+Justin Martyr again, in the Dialogue with Trypho says
+that the Birth in the Stable was the prototype (!) of the
+birth of Mithra in the Cave of Zoroastrianism; and boasts
+that Christ was born when the Sun takes its birth in the
+Augean Stable,[1] coming as a second Hercules to cleanse
+a foul world; and St. Augustine says "we hold this
+(Christmas) day holy, not like the pagans because of the
+birth of the Sun, but because of the birth of him who made
+it." There are plenty of other instances in the Early Fathers
+of their indignant ascription of these similarities to the work
+of devils; but we need not dwell over them. There is no
+need for US to be indignant. On the contrary we can now
+see that these animadversions of the Christian writers are
+the evidence of how and to what extent in the spread of
+Christianity over the world it had become fused with the
+Pagan cults previously existing.
+
+[1] The Zodiacal sign of Capricornus, iii.).
+
+
+It was not till the year A.D. 530 or so--five centuries after
+the supposed birth of Christ--that a Scythian Monk, Dionysius
+Exiguus, an abbot and astronomer of Rome, was
+commissioned to fix the day and the year of that birth.
+A nice problem, considering the historical science of the
+period! For year he assigned the date which we now adopt,[2]
+and for day and month he adopted the 25th December
+--a date which had been in popular use since about
+350 B.C., and the very date, within a day or two, of the
+supposed birth of the previous Sungods.[3] From that
+fact alone we may fairly conclude that by the year 530
+or earlier the existing Nature-worships had become largely
+fused into Christianity. In fact the dates of the main
+pagan religious festivals had by that time become so
+popular that Christianity was OBLIGED to accommodate itself
+to them.[1]
+
+[1] As, for instance, the festival of John the Baptist in June
+took the place of the pagan midsummer festival of water and
+bathing; the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that
+of Diana in the same month; and the festival of All Souls early
+in November, that of the world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and
+their ghosts at the same season.
+
+[2] See Encycl. Brit. art. "Chronology."
+
+[3] "There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
+as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of
+the rainy season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds
+could have been at night in the fields of Bethlehem" (!). Encycl.
+Brit. art. "Christmas Day." According to Hastings's
+Encyclopaedia, art. "Christmas," "Usener says that the Feast of
+the Nativity was held originally on the 6th January (the
+Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced
+it to the 25th December . . . but there is no evidence of a
+Feast of the Nativity taking place at all, before the fourth
+century A.D." It was not till 534 A.D. that Christmas Day and
+Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as dies non.
+
+
+This brings us to the second point mentioned a few
+pages back--the analogy between the Christian festivals
+and the yearly phenomena of Nature in the Sun and the
+Vegetation.
+
+Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have
+seen, was reported to have been born on the 25th December
+(which in the Julian Calendar was reckoned as the day
+of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the Sun);
+Plutarch says (Isis and Osiris, c. 12) that Osiris was born
+on the 361st day of the year, when a Voice rang out proclaiming
+the Lord of All. Horus, he says, was born on the
+362nd day. Apollo on the same.
+
+Why was all this? Why did the Druids at Yule Tide
+light roaring fires? Why was the cock supposed to crow all
+Christmas Eve ("The bird of dawning singeth all night
+long")? Why was Apollo born with only one hair (the
+young Sun with only one feeble ray)? Why did Samson
+(name derived from Shemesh, the sun) lose all his strength
+when he lost his hair? Why were so many of these gods
+--Mithra, Apollo, Krishna, Jesus, and others, born in
+caves or underground chambers?[1] Why, at the Easter
+Eve festival of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is a light
+brought from the grave and communicated to the candles
+of thousands who wait outside, and who rush forth rejoicing
+to carry the new glory over the world?[2] Why indeed?
+except that older than all history and all written records
+has been the fear and wonderment of the children of men
+over the failure of the Sun's strength in Autumn--the decay
+of their God; and the anxiety lest by any means he should
+not revive or reappear?
+
+
+[1] This same legend of gods (or idols) being born in caves has,
+curiously enough, been reported from Mexico, Guatemala, the
+Antilles, and other places in Central America. See C. F. P. von
+Martius, Etknographie Amerika, etc. (Leipzig, 1867), vol. i, p.
+758.
+
+[2] Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and
+communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a
+human victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle
+and the beginning of another--the constellation of the Pleiades
+being in the Zenith (Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch.
+4).
+
+
+Think for a moment of a time far back when there were
+absolutely NO Almanacs or Calendars, either nicely printed
+or otherwise, when all that timid mortals could see was that
+their great source of Light and Warmth was daily failing,
+daily sinking lower in the sky. As everyone now knows
+there are about three weeks at the fag end of the
+year when the days are at their shortest and there is very
+little change. What was happening? Evidently the god
+had fallen upon evil times. Typhon, the prince of darkness,
+had betrayed him; Delilah, the queen of Night, had
+shorn his hair; the dreadful Boar had wounded him;
+Hercules was struggling with Death itself; he had fallen
+under the influence of those malign constellations--the
+Serpent and the Scorpion. Would the god grow weaker
+and weaker, and finally succumb, or would he conquer after
+all? We can imagine the anxiety with which those early
+men and women watched for the first indication of a lengthening
+day; and the universal joy when the Priest (the representative
+of primitive science) having made some simple
+observations, announced from the Temple steps that the
+day WAS lengthening--that the Sun was really born again
+to a new and glorious career.[1]
+
+[1] It was such things as these which doubtless gave the
+Priesthood
+its power.
+
+
+Let us look at the elementary science of those days a
+little closer. How without Almanacs or Calendars could
+the day, or probable day, of the Sun's rebirth be fixed?
+Go out next Christmas Evening, and at midnight you will
+see the brightest of the fixed stars, Sirius, blazing in the
+southern sky--not however due south from you, but somewhat
+to the left of the Meridian line. Some three thousand
+years ago (owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes) that
+star at the winter solstice did not stand at midnight where
+you now see it, but almost exactly ON the meridian line.
+The coming of Sirius therefore to the meridian at midnight
+became the sign and assurance of the Sun having reached
+the very lowest point of his course, and therefore of having
+arrived at the moment of his re-birth. Where then was
+the Sun at that moment? Obviously in the underworld
+beneath our feet. Whatever views the ancients may have
+had about the shape of the earth, it was evident to the
+mass of people that the Sungod, after illuminating the
+world during the day, plunged down in the West, and
+remained there during the hours of darkness in some cavern
+under the earth. Here he rested and after bathing in the
+great ocean renewed his garments before reappearing in the
+East next morning.
+
+But in this long night of his greatest winter weakness,
+when all the world was hoping and praying for the renewal
+of his strength, it is evident that the new birth would come
+--if it came at all--at midnight. This then was the sacred
+hour when in the underworld (the Stable or the Cave or
+whatever it might be called) the child was born who was
+destined to be the Savior of men. At that moment Sirius
+stood on the southern meridian (and in more southern lands
+than ours this would be more nearly overhead); and that
+star--there is little doubt--is the Star in the East mentioned
+in the Gospels.
+
+To the right, as the supposed observer looks at Sirius on
+the midnight of Christmas Eve, stands the magnificent
+Orion, the mighty hunter. There are three stars in his belt
+which, as is well known, lie in a straight line pointing to
+Sirius. They are not so bright as Sirius, but they are
+sufficiently bright to attract attention. A long tradition
+gives them the name of the Three Kings. Dupuis[1] says:
+"Orion a trois belles etoiles vers le milieu, qui sont de
+seconde grandeur et posees en ligne droite, l'une pres de
+l'autre, le peuple les appelle les trois rois. On donne aux
+trois rois Magis les noms de Magalat, Galgalat, Saraim;
+et Athos, Satos, Paratoras. Les Catholiques les appellent
+Gaspard, Melchior, et Balthasar." The last-mentioned
+group of names comes in the Catholic Calendar in connection
+with the feast of the Epiphany (6th January); and
+the name "Trois Rois" is commonly to-day given to these
+stars by the French and Swiss peasants.
+
+[1] Charles F. Dupuis (Origine de Tous les Cultes, Paris, 1822)
+was one of the earliest modern writers on these subjects.
+
+
+Immediately after Midnight then, on the 25th December,
+the Beloved Son (or Sun-god) is born. If we go back in
+thought to the period, some three thousand years ago, when
+at that moment of the heavenly birth Sirius, coming from
+the East, did actually stand on the Meridian, we shall
+come into touch with another curious astronomical coincidence.
+For at the same moment we shall see the Zodiacal
+constellation of the Virgin in the act of rising, and becoming
+visible in the East divided through the middle by the line
+of the horizon.
+
+The constellation Virgo is a Y-shaped group, of which <gr a>,
+the star at the foot, is the well-known Spica, a star of
+the first magnitude. The other principal stars, <gr g> at the
+centre, and <gr b> and <gr e> at the extremities, are of the
+second magnitude. The whole resembles more a cup than the human
+figure; but when we remember the symbolic meaning
+of the cup, that seems to be an obvious explanation of
+the name Virgo, which the constellation has borne since
+the earliest times. [The three stars <gr b>, <gr g> and <gr a>,
+lie very nearly on the Ecliptic, that is, the Sun's path--a fact
+to which we shall return presently.]
+
+At the moment then when Sirius, the star from the East,
+by coming to the Meridian at midnight signalled the Sun's
+new birth, the Virgin was seen just rising on the Eastern
+sky--the horizon line passing through her centre. And
+many people think that this astronomical fact is the explanation
+of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth. I
+do not think that it is the sole explanation--for indeed in
+all or nearly all these cases the acceptance of a myth seems
+to depend not upon a single argument but upon the convergence
+of a number of meanings and reasons in the same
+symbol. But certainly the fact mentioned above is curious,
+and its importance is accentuated by the following
+considerations.
+
+In the Temple of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside
+of the dome, there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation
+of the Northern hemisphere of the sky and the
+Zodiac.[1] Here Virgo the constellation is represented, as
+in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in her
+hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating
+and explicatory figure--a figure of Isis with
+the infant Horus in her arms, and quite resembling in style
+the Christian Madonna and Child, except that she is
+sitting and the child is on her knee. This seems to show
+that--whatever other nations may have done in associating
+Virgo with Demeter, Ceres, Diana[2] etc.--the Egyptians
+made no doubt of the constellation's connection with Isis
+and Horus. But it is well known as a matter of history
+that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the early
+Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form
+of the worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior,
+and so passed into the European ceremonial. We have
+therefore the Virgin Mary connected by linear succession and
+descent with that remote Zodiacal cluster in the sky! Also
+it may be mentioned that on the Arabian and Persian globes
+of Abenezra and Abuazar a Virgin and Child are figured in
+connection with the same constellation.[3]
+
+[1] Carefully described and mapped by Dupuis, see op. cit.
+
+[2] For the harvest-festival of Diana, the Virgin, and her
+parallelism
+with the Virgin Mary, see The Golden Bough, vol. i, 14 and ii,
+121.
+
+[3] See F. Nork, Der Mystagog (Leipzig, 1838).
+
+
+A curious confirmation of the same astronomical connection
+is afforded by the Roman Catholic Calendar. For if this be
+consulted it will be found that the festival of the
+Assumption of the Virgin is placed on the 15th August, while the
+festival of the Birth of the Virgin is dated the 8th September. I
+have already pointed out that the stars, <gr a>, <gr b> and <gr
+g> of Virgo are almost exactly on the Ecliptic, or
+Sun's path through the sky; and a brief reference to the
+Zodiacal signs and the star-maps will show that the Sun
+each year enters the sign of Virgo about the first-mentioned
+date, and leaves it about the second date. At the present
+day the Zodiacal signs (owing to precession) have shifted
+some distance from the constellations of the same name.
+But at the time when the Zodiac was constituted and
+these names were given, the first date obviously would
+signalize the actual disappearance of the cluster Virgo
+in the Sun's rays--i. e. the Assumption of the Virgin into
+the glory of the God--while the second date would signalize
+the reappearance of the constellation or the Birth of the
+Virgin. The Church of Notre Dame at Paris is supposed
+to be on the original site of a Temple of Isis; and it is said
+(but I have not been able to verify this myself) that one of
+the side entrances--that, namely, on the left in entering
+from the North (cloister) side--is figured with the signs of
+the Zodiac EXCEPT that the sign Virgo is replaced by the
+figure of the Madonna and Child.
+
+So strange is the scripture of the sky! Innumerable
+legends and customs connect the rebirth of the Sun with
+a Virgin parturition. Dr. J. G. Frazer in his Part IV of
+The Golden Bough[1] says: "If we may trust the evidence
+of an obscure scholiast the Greeks [in the worship of
+Mithras at Rome] used to celebrate the birth of the luminary
+by a midnight service, coming out of the inner
+shrines and crying, 'The Virgin has brought forth! The light
+is waxing!' (<gr 'H parhenos tetoken, auzei pws>.)" In
+Elie Reclus' little book Primitive Folk[2] it is said of the
+Esquimaux that "On the longest night of the year two
+angakout (priests), of whom one is disguised as a WOMAN,
+go from hut to hut extinguishing all the lights, rekindling
+them from a vestal flame, and crying out, 'From the new sun
+cometh a new light!' "
+
+[1] Book II, ch. vi.
+
+[2] In the Contemporary Science Series, I. 92.
+
+
+All this above-written on the Solar or Astronomical origins
+of the myths does not of course imply that the Vegetational
+origins must be denied or ignored. These latter
+were doubtless the earliest, but there is no reason--
+as said in the Introduction (ch. i)--why the two elements
+should not to some extent have run side by side, or been
+fused with each other. In fact it is quite clear that they
+must have done so; and to separate them out too rigidly,
+or treat them as antagonistic, is a mistake. The Cave or
+Underworld in which the New Year is born is not only
+the place of the Sun's winter retirement, but also the hidden
+chamber beneath the Earth to which the dying Vegetation
+goes, and from which it re-arises in Spring. The amours
+of Adonis with Venus and Proserpine, the lovely goddesses
+of the upper and under worlds, or of Attis with Cybele, the
+blooming Earth-mother, are obvious vegetation-symbols; but
+they do not exclude the interpretation that Adonis
+(Adonai) may also figure as a Sun-god. The Zodiacal
+constellations of Aries and Taurus (to which I shall return
+presently) rule in heaven just when the Lamb and the Bull
+are in evidence on the earth; and the yearly sacrifice of
+those two animals and of the growing Corn for the good
+of mankind runs parallel with the drama of the sky, as it
+affects not only the said constellations but also Virgo (the
+Earth-mother who bears the sheaf of corn in her hand).
+
+I shall therefore continue (in the next chapter) to point
+out these astronomical references--which are full of
+significance and poetry; but with a recommendation at the
+same time to the reader not to forget the poetry and significance
+of the terrestrial interpretations.
+
+Between Christmas Day and Easter there are several minor
+festivals or holy days--such as the 28th December (the
+Massacre of the Innocents), the 6th January (the
+Epiphany), the 2nd February (Candlemas[1] Day), the
+period of Lent (German Lenz, the Spring), the Annunciation of the
+Blessed Virgin, and so forth--which have been
+commonly celebrated in the pagan cults before Christianity,
+and in which elements of Star and Nature worship
+can be traced; but to dwell on all these would take too
+long; so let us pass at once to the period of Easter itself.
+
+[1] This festival of the Purification of the Virgin corresponds
+with the old Roman festival of Juno Februata (i. e. purified)
+which was held in the last month (February) of the Roman year,
+and which included a candle procession of Ceres, searching for
+Proserpine. (F. Nork, Der Mystagog.)
+
+
+
+III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
+
+The Vernal Equinox has all over the ancient world, and
+from the earliest times, been a period of rejoicing and of
+festivals in honor of the Sungod. It is needless to labor
+a point which is so well known. Everyone understands
+and appreciates the joy of finding that the long darkness
+is giving way, that the Sun is growing in strength, and
+that the days are winning a victory over the nights. The
+birds and flowers reappear, and the promise of Spring is
+in the air. But it may be worth while to give an elementary
+explanation of the ASTRONOMICAL meaning of this period,
+because this is not always understood, and yet it is very
+important in its bearing on the rites and creeds of the early
+religions. The priests who were, as I have said, the early
+students and inquirers, had worked out this astronomical
+side, and in that way were able to fix dates and
+to frame for the benefit of the populace myths and legends,
+which were in a certain sense explanations of the order of
+Nature, and a kind of "popular science."
+
+The Equator, as everyone knows, is an imaginary line
+or circle girdling the Earth half-way between the North
+and South poles. If you imagine a transparent Earth with
+a light at its very centre, and also imagine the SHADOW
+of this equatorial line to be thrown on the vast concave
+of the Sky, this shadow would in astronomical parlance
+coincide with the Equator of the Sky--forming an imaginary
+circle half-way between the North and South celestial poles.
+
+The Equator, then, may be pictured as cutting across the
+sky either by day or by night, and always at the same
+elevation--that is, as seen from any one place. But the
+Ecliptic (the other important great circle of the heavens)
+can only be thought of as a line traversing the constellations
+as they are seen at NIGHT. It is in fact the Sun's path
+among the fixed stars. For (really owing to the Earth's
+motion in its orbit) the Sun appears to move round
+the heavens once a year--travelling, always to the left,
+from constellation to constellation. The exact path of
+the sun is called the Ecliptic; and the band of sky on either
+side of the Ecliptic which may be supposed to include
+the said constellations is called the Zodiac. How then--
+it will of course be asked--seeing that the Sun and the Stars
+can never be seen together--were the Priests ABLE to map
+out the path of the former among the latter? Into that
+question we need not go. Sufficient to say that they succeeded;
+and their success--even with the very primitive instruments
+they had--shows that their astronomical knowledge
+and acuteness of reasoning were of no mean order.
+
+To return to our Vernal Equinox. Let us suppose that
+the Equator and Ecliptic of the sky, at the Spring season,
+are represented by two lines Eq. and Ecl. crossing each
+other at the point P. The Sun, represented by the small
+circle, is moving slowly and in its annual course along the
+Ecliptic to the left. When it reaches the point P (the
+dotted circle) it stands on the Equator of the sky, and then
+for a day or two, being neither North nor South, it
+shines on the two terrestrial hemispheres alike, and day and
+night are equal. BEFORE that time, when the sun is low
+down in the heavens, night has the advantage, and the
+days are short; AFTERWARDS, when the Sun has travelled more
+to the left, the days triumph over the nights. It will be seen
+then that this point P where the Sun's path crosses the Equator
+is a very critical point. It is the astronomical location
+of the triumph of the Sungod and of the arrival of Spring.
+
+How was this location defined? Among what stars was
+the Sun moving at that critical moment? (For of course
+it was understood, or supposed, that the Sun was deeply
+influenced by the constellation through which it was, or
+appeared to be, moving.) It seems then that at the
+period when these questions were occupying men's minds
+--say about three thousand years ago--the point where
+the Ecliptic crossed the Equator was, as a matter of
+fact, in the region of the constellation Aries or the he-
+Lamb. The triumph of the Sungod was therefore, and quite
+naturally, ascribed to the influence of Aries. THE LAMB
+BECAME THE SYMBOL OF THE RISEN SAVIOR, AND OF HIS PASSAGE
+FROM THE UNDERWORLD INTO THE HEIGHT OF HEAVEN. At first such
+an explanation sounds hazardous; but a thousand texts and
+references confirm it; and it is only by the accumulation
+of evidence in these cases that the student becomes convinced
+of a theory's correctness. It must also be remembered
+(what I have mentioned before) that these myths and legends
+were commonly adopted not only for one strict reason but
+because they represented in a general way the convergence of
+various symbols and inferences.
+
+Let me enumerate a few points with regard to the Vernal
+Equinox. In the Bible the festival is called the Passover,
+and its supposed institution by Moses is related in Exodus,
+ch. xii. In every house a he-lamb was to be slain,
+and its blood to be sprinkled on the doorposts of the
+house. Then the Lord would pass over and not smite that
+house. The Hebrew word is pasach, to pass.[1] The lamb
+slain was called the Paschal Lamb. But what was that
+lamb? Evidently not an earthly lamb--(though certainly
+the earthly lambs on the hillsides WERE just then ready
+to be killed and eaten)--but the heavenly Lamb, which
+was slain or sacrificed when the Lord "passed over" the
+equator and obliterated the constellation Aries. This was
+the Lamb of God which was slain each year, and "Slain
+since the foundation of the world." This period of the
+Passover (about the 25th March) was to be[2] the beginning
+of a new year. The sacrifice of the Lamb, and its blood,
+were to be the promise of redemption. The door-frames of the
+houses--symbols of the entrance into a new life--were
+to be sprinkled with blood.[3] Later, the imagery of the
+saving power of the blood of the Lamb became more
+popular, more highly colored. (See St. Paul's epistles, and
+the early Fathers.) And we have the expression "washed
+in the blood of the Lamb" adopted into the Christian
+Church.
+
+[1] It is said that pasach sometimes means not so much to pass
+over, as to hover over and so protect. Possibly both meanings
+enter in here. See Isaiah xxxi. 5.
+
+[2] See Exodus xii. i.
+
+[3] It is even said (see The Golden Bough, vol. iii, 185) that
+the doorways of houses and temples in Peru were at the Spring
+festival daubed with blood of the first-born children--commuted
+afterwards to the blood of the sacred animal, the Llama. And as
+to Mexico, Sahagun, the great Spanish missionary, tells us that
+it was a custom of the people there to "smear the outside of
+their houses and doors with blood drawn from their own ears and
+ankles, in order to propitiate the god of Harvest"
+(Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 235).
+
+
+In order fully to understand this extraordinary expression
+and its origin we must turn for a moment to the worship
+both of Mithra, the Persian Sungod, and of Attis the Syrian
+god, as throwing great light on the Christian cult and
+ceremonies. It must be remembered that in the early centuries
+of our era the Mithra-cult was spread over the whole Western
+world. It has left many monuments of itself here
+in Britain. At Rome the worship was extremely popular,
+and it may almost be said to have been a matter
+of chance whether Mithraism should overwhelm Christianity,
+or whether the younger religion by adopting many of the
+rites of the older one should establish itself (as it did) in
+the face of the latter.
+
+Now we have already mentioned that in the Mithra
+cult the slaying of a Bull by the Sungod occupies the same
+sort of place as the slaving of the Lamb in the Christian
+cult. It took place at the Vernal Equinox and the blood
+of the Bull acquired in men's minds a magic virtue.
+Mithraism was a greatly older religion than Christianity;
+but its genesis was similar. In fact, owing to the Precession
+of the Equinoxes, the crossing-place of the Ecliptic and
+Equator was different at the time of the establishment
+of Mithra-worship from what it was in the Christian period;
+and the Sun instead of standing in the He-lamb, or Aries,
+at the Vernal Equinox stood, about two thousand years
+earlier (as indicated by the dotted line in the diagram), in this
+very constellation of the Bull.[1] The bull
+therefore became the symbol of the triumphant God, and the
+sacrifice of the bull a holy mystery. (Nor must we
+overlook here the agricultural appropriateness of the bull as
+the emblem of Spring-plowings and of service to man.)
+
+[1] With regard to this point, see an article in the Nineteenth
+Century for September 1900, by E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich
+Observatory on "The Oldest Picture Book" (the Zodiac). Mr.
+Maunder calculates that the Vernal Equinox was in the centre of
+the Sign of the Bull 5,000 years ago. [It would therefore be in
+the centre of Aries 2,845 years ago--allowing 2,155 years for the
+time occupied in passing from one Sign to another.] At the
+earlier period the Summer solstice was in the centre of Leo, the
+Autumnal equinox in the centre of Scorpio, and the Winter
+solstice in the centre of Aquarius--corresponding
+roughly, Mr. Maunder points out, to the positions of the
+four "Royal Stars," Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.
+
+
+The sacrifice of the Bull became the image of redemption.
+In a certain well-known Mithra-sculpture or group, the Sungod
+is represented as plunging his dagger into a bull, while
+a scorpion, a serpent, and other animals are sucking the
+latter's blood. From one point of view this may be taken as
+symbolic of the Sun fertilizing the gross Earth by plunging
+his rays into it and so drawing forth its blood for the
+sustenance of all creatures; while from another more astronomical
+aspect it symbolizes the conquest of the Sun over winter
+in the moment of "passing over" the sign of the Bull, and the
+depletion of the generative power of the Bull by the Scorpion
+--which of course is the autumnal sign of the Zodiac and
+herald of winter. One such Mithraic group was found at
+Ostia, where there was a large subterranean Temple "to the
+invincible god Mithras."
+
+In the worship of Attis there were (as I have already indicated)
+many points of resemblance to the Christian
+cult. On the 22nd March (the Vernal Equinox) a pinetree
+was cut in the woods and brought into the Temple of
+Cybele. It was treated almost as a divinity, was decked
+with violets, and the effigy of a young man tied to the stem
+(cf. the Crucifixion). The 24th was called the "Day of
+Blood"; the High Priest first drew blood from his own
+arms; and then the others gashed and slashed themselves,
+and spattered the altar and the sacred tree with blood; while
+novices made themselves eunuchs "for the kingdom of
+heaven's sake." The effigy was afterwards laid in a tomb.
+But when night fell, says Dr. Frazer,[1] sorrow was turned to
+joy. A light was brought, and the tomb was found to
+be empty. The next day, the 25th, was the festival of
+the Resurrection; and ended in carnival and license (the
+Hilaria). Further, says Dr. Frazer, these mysteries "seem
+to have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of
+blood."
+
+[1] See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Part IV of The Golden Bough, by
+J. G. Frazer, p. 229.
+
+
+"In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and
+wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of
+which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull, adorned
+with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering with gold
+leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed
+to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood
+poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received
+with devout eagerness by the worshiper on every part of
+his person and garments, till he emerged from the pit,
+drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to
+receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows--as
+one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed
+away his sins in the blood of the bull."[1] And Frazer continuing
+says: "That the bath of blood derived from slaughter
+of the bull (tauro-bolium) was believed to regenerate
+the devotee for eternity is proved by an inscription
+found at Rome, which records that a certain Sextilius
+Agesilaus Aedesius, who dedicated an altar to Attis and
+the mother of the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio criobolio que
+in aeternum renatus."[2] "In the procedure of the Taurobolia
+and Criobolia," says Mr. J. M. Robertson,[3] "which
+grew very popular in the Roman world, we have the literal
+and original meaning of the phrase 'washed in the blood of
+the lamb'[4]; the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal
+life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the
+actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram."[5] For the
+POPULARITY of the rite we may quote Franz Cumont, who
+says:--"Cette douche sacree (taurobolium) pareit avoir ete
+administree en Cappadoce dans un grand nombre de sanctuaires, et
+en particulier dans ceux de Ma la grande divinite
+indigene, et dans ceux: de Anahita."
+
+[1] See vol. i, pp. 334 ff.
+
+[2] Adonis, Attis and Osiris, p. 229. References to Prudentius,
+and to Firmicus Maternus, De errore 28. 8.
+
+[3] That is, "By the slaughter of the bull and the slaughter of
+the ram born again into eternity."
+
+[4] Pagan Christs, p. 315.
+
+[5] Mysteres de Mithra, Bruxelles, 1902, p. 153.
+
+
+Whether Mr. Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests
+(as he appears to do) so materialistic a view of the
+potency of the actual blood is, I should say, doubtful. I
+do not myself see that there is any reason for supposing that
+the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded baptism by
+blood very differently from the way in which the Christian
+Church has generally regarded baptism by water--namely,
+as a SYMBOL of some inner regeneration. There may certainly
+have been a little more of the MAGICAL view and a little
+less of the symbolic, in the older religions; but the
+difference was probably on the whole more one of degree
+than of essential disparity. But however that may be,
+we cannot but be struck by the extraordinary analogy
+between the tombstone inscriptions of that period "born
+again into eternity by the blood of the Bull or the Ram,"
+and the corresponding texts in our graveyards to-day.
+F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs
+aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives
+a great number of texts and epitaphs of the same character
+as that above-quoted, and they are well worth studying
+by those interested in the subject. Cumont, it may be
+noted (vol. i, p. 305), thinks that the story of Mithra and
+the slaying of the Bull must have originated among some
+pastoral people to whom the bull was the source of all life.
+The Bull in heaven--the symbol of the triumphant Sungod--
+and the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good of humanity
+were one and the same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF
+OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And Mithra was the hero who first
+won this conception of divinity for mankind--though of
+course it is in essence quite similar to the conception put
+forward by the Christian Church.
+
+As illustrating the belief that the Baptism by Blood was
+accompanied by a real regeneration of the devotee, Frazer
+quotes an ancient writer[1] who says that for some time after
+the ceremony the fiction of a new birth was kept up
+by dieting the devotee on MILK, like a new-born babe.
+And it is interesting in that connection to find that even in
+the present day a diet of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for
+six or eight weeks is by many doctors recommended as
+the only means of getting rid of deep-seated illnesses
+and enabling a patient's organism to make a completely new
+start in life.
+
+[1] Sallustius philosophus. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, note,
+p. 229.
+
+
+"At Rome," he further says (p. 230), "the new birth and
+the remission of sins by the shedding of bull's blood appear
+to have been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the
+Phrygian Goddess (Cybele) on the Vatican Hill, at or near
+the spot where the great basilica of St. Peter's now stands;
+for many inscriptions relating to the rites were found when
+the church was being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From
+the Vatican as a centre," he continues, "this barbarous system
+of superstition seems to have spread to other parts of
+the Roman empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany
+prove that provincial sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that
+of the Vatican."
+
+It would appear then that at Rome in the quiet early
+days of the Christian Church, the rites and ceremonials
+of Mithra and Cybele, probably much intermingled and
+blended, were exceedingly popular. Both religions had been
+recognized by the Roman State, and the Christians, persecuted
+and despised as they were, found it hard to make any
+headway against them--the more so perhaps because the
+Christian doctrines appeared in many respects to be merely
+faint replicas and copies of the older creeds. Robertson
+maintains[1] that a he-lamb was sacrificed in the
+Mithraic mysteries, and he quotes Porphyry as saying[2]
+that "a place near the equinoctial circle was assigned to
+Mithra as an appropriate seat; and on this account he
+bears the sword of the Ram [Aries] which is a sign of Mars
+[Ares]." Similarly among the early Christians, it is said,
+a ram or lamb was sacrificed in the Paschal mystery.
+
+[1] Pagan Christs, p. 336.
+
+[2] De Antro, xxiv.
+
+
+Many people think that the association of the Lamb-god
+with the Cross arose from the fact that the constellation
+Aries at that time WAS on the heavenly cross (the
+crossways of the Ecliptic and Equator-see diagram, ch.
+iii), and in the very place through which the Sungod
+had to pass just before his final triumph. And it is
+curious to find that Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho[1]
+(a Jew) alludes to an old Jewish practice of roasting a Lamb on
+spits arranged in the form of a Cross. "The lamb,"
+he says, meaning apparently the Paschal lamb, "is roasted
+and dressed up in the form of a cross. For one spit is transfixed
+right through the lower parts up to the head, and one
+across the back, to which are attached the legs [forelegs] of
+the lamb."
+
+[1] Ch. xl.
+
+
+To-day in Morocco at the festival of Eid-el-Kebir, corresponding
+to the Christian Easter, the Mohammedans sacrifice
+a young ram and hurry it still bleeding to the precincts
+of the Mosque, while at the same time every household slays
+a lamb, as in the Biblical institution, for its family feast.
+
+But it will perhaps be said, "You are going too fast and
+proving too much. In the anxiety to show that the
+Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the Lamb were honored
+by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of the
+Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the
+Bull and the baptism in bull's blood were the salient
+features of the Persian and Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries
+earlier. How can you reconcile the existence side
+by side of divinities belonging to such different periods, or
+ascribe them both to an astronomical origin?" The answer
+is simple enough. As I have explained before, the Precession of
+the Equinoxes caused the Sun, at its moment
+of triumph over the powers of darkness, to stand at one period
+in the constellation of the Bull, and at a period some
+two thousand years later in the constellation of the Ram.
+It was perfectly natural therefore that a change in the
+sacred symbols should, in the course of time, take place;
+yet perfectly natural also that these symbols, having once
+been consecrated and adopted, should continue to be
+honored and clung to long after the time of their astronomical
+appropriateness had passed, and so to be found side by
+side in later centuries. The devotee of Mithra or Attis
+on the Vatican Hill at Rome in the year 200 A.D. probably
+had as little notion or comprehension of the real origin of
+the sacred Bull or Ram which he adored, as the Christian in
+St. Peter's to-day has of the origin of the Lamb-god whose
+vicegerent on earth is the Pope.
+
+It is indeed easy to imagine that the change from the
+worship of the Bull to the worship of the Lamb which
+undoubtedly took place among various peoples as time
+went on, was only a ritual change initiated by the priests
+in order to put on record and harmonize with the astronomical
+alteration. Anyhow it is curious that while Mithra
+in the early times was specially associated with the bull,
+his association with the lamb belonged more to the Roman
+period. Somewhat the same happened in the case of Attis.
+In the Bible we read of the indignation of Moses at the
+setting up by the Israelites of a Golden Calf, AFTER the
+sacrifice of the ram-lamb had been instituted--as if indeed
+the rebellious people were returning to the earlier
+cult of Apis which they ought to have left behind them in
+Egypt. In Egypt itself, too, we find the worship of
+Apis, as time went on, yielding place to that of the Ram-
+headed god Amun, or Jupiter Ammon.[1] So that both
+from the Bible and from Egyptian history we may conclude
+that the worship of the Lamb or Ram succeeded to
+the worship of the Bull.
+
+[1] Tacitus (Hist. v. 4) speaks of ram-sacrifice by the Jews in
+honor of Jupiter Ammon. See also Herodotus (ii. 42) on the same
+in Egypt.
+
+
+Finally it has been pointed out, and there may be some
+real connection in the coincidence, that in the quite early
+years of Christianity the FISH came in as an accepted symbol
+of Jesus Christ. Considering that after the domination
+of Taurus and Aries, the Fish (Pisces) comes next in succession
+as the Zodiacal sign for the Vernal Equinox, and
+is now the constellation in which the Sun stands at that
+period, it seems not impossible that the astronomical change
+has been the cause of the adoption of this new symbol.
+
+Anyhow, and allowing for possible errors or exaggerations,
+it becomes clear that the travels of the Sun through
+the belt of constellations which forms the Zodiac must
+have had, from earliest times, a profound influence on
+the generation of religious myths and legends. To say
+that it was the only influence would certainly be a mistake.
+Other causes undoubtedly contributed. But it was a main
+and important influence. The origins of the Zodiac are
+obscure; we do not know with any certainty the reasons
+why the various names were given to its component sections,
+nor can we measure the exact antiquity of these names; but
+--pre-supposing the names of the signs as once given--it
+is not difficult to imagine the growth of legends connected
+with the Sun's course among them.
+
+Of all the ancient divinities perhaps Hercules is the one
+whose role as a Sungod is most generally admitted. The
+helper of gods and men, a mighty Traveller, and invoked
+everywhere as the Saviour, his labors for the good of the
+world became ultimately defined and systematized as
+twelve and corresponding in number to the signs of the
+Zodiac. It is true that this systematization only took place
+at a late period, probably in Alexandria; also that the
+identification of some of the Labors with the actual
+signs as we have them at present is not always clear. But
+considering the wide prevalence of the Hercules myth over
+the ancient world and the very various astronomical systems
+it must have been connected with in its origin, this lack of
+exact correspondence is hardly to be wondered at.
+
+The Labors of Hercules which chiefly interest us are:
+(1) The capture of the Bull, (2) the slaughter of the Lion,
+(3) the destruction of the Hydra, (4) of the Boar, (5) the
+cleansing of the stables of Augeas, (6) the descent into
+Hades and the taming of Cerberus. The first of these is
+in line with the Mithraic conquest of the Bull; the Lion is
+of course one of the most prominent constellations of the
+Zodiac, and its conquest is obviously the work of a Saviour
+of mankind; while the last four labors connect themselves
+very naturally with the Solar conflict in winter against
+the powers of darkness. The Boar (4) we have seen
+already as the image of Typhon, the prince of darkness;
+the Hydra (3) was said to be the offspring of Typhon;
+the descent into Hades (6)--generally associated with
+Hercules' struggle with and victory over Death--links
+on to the descent of the Sun into the underworld, and its
+long and doubtful strife with the forces of winter; and
+the cleansing of the stables of Augeas (5) has the same
+signification. It appears in fact that the stables of Augeas
+was another name for the sign of Capricorn through which
+the Sun passes at the Winter solstice[1]--the stable of course
+being an underground chamber--and the myth was that
+there, in this lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic
+all the malarious and evil influences of the sky were collected,
+and the Sungod came to wash them away (December was the
+height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse the year
+towards its rebirth.
+
+[1] See diagram of Zodiac.
+
+
+It should not be forgotten too that even as a child in the
+cradle Hercules slew two serpents sent for his destruction--
+the serpent and the scorpion as autumnal constellations
+figuring always as enemies of the Sungod--to which
+may be compared the power given to his disciples by Jesus[1]
+"to tread on serpents and scorpions." Hercules also as
+a Sungod compares curiously with Samson (mentioned
+above, ii), but we need not dwell on all the
+elaborate analogies that have been traced[2] between these two
+heroes.
+
+[1] Luke x. 19.
+
+[2] See Doane's Bible Myths, ch. viii, (New York, 1882.)
+
+
+The Jesus-story, it will now be seen, has a great number
+of correspondences with the stories of former Sungods and
+with the actual career of the Sun through the heavens--so
+many indeed that they cannot well be attributed to
+mere coincidence or even to the blasphemous wiles of the
+Devil! Let us enumerate some of these. There are (1)
+the birth from a Virgin mother; (2) the birth in a stable
+(cave or underground chamber); and (3) on the 25th December
+(just after the winter solstice). There is (4) the
+Star in the East (Sirius) and (5) the arrival of the Magi
+(the "Three Kings"); there is (6) the threatened Massacre
+of the Innocents, and the consequent flight into a distant
+country (told also of Krishna and other Sungods). There
+are the Church festivals of (7) Candlemas (2nd February),
+with processions of candles to symbolize the growing
+light; of (8) Lent, or the arrival of Spring; of (9) Easter
+Day (normally on the 25th March) to celebrate the crossing
+of the Equator by the Sun; and (10) simultaneously the
+outburst of lights at the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There
+is (11) the Crucifixion and death of the Lamb-God, on Good
+Friday, three days before Easter; there are (12) the
+nailing to a tree, (13) the empty grave, (14) the glad
+Resurrection (as in the cases of Osiris, Attis and others);
+there are (15) the twelve disciples (the Zodiacal signs);
+and (16) the betrayal by one of the twelve. Then later
+there is (17) Midsummer Day, the 24th June, dedicated to
+the Nativity of John the Baptist, and corresponding
+to Christmas Day; there are the festivals of (18) the
+Assumption of the Virgin (15th August) and of (19) the
+Nativity of the Virgin (8th September), corresponding
+to the movement of the god through Virgo; there is the conflict
+of Christ and his disciples with the autumnal asterisms,
+(20) the Serpent and the Scorpion; and finally
+there is the curious fact that the Church (21) dedicates the
+very day of the winter solstice (when any one may very
+naturally doubt the rebirth of the Sun) to St. Thomas, who
+doubted the truth of the Resurrection!
+
+These are some of, and by no means all, the coincidences
+in question. But they are sufficient, I think, to prove--
+even allowing for possible margins of error--the truth
+of our general contention. To go into the parallelism
+of the careers of Krishna, the Indian Sungod, and Jesus
+would take too long; because indeed the correspondence
+is so extraordinarily close and elaborate.[1] I propose, however,
+at the close of this chapter, to dwell now for a
+moment on the Christian festival of the Eucharist, partly
+on account of its connection with the derivation from
+the astronomical rites and Nature-celebrations already
+alluded to, and partly on account of the light which the festival
+generally, whether Christian or Pagan, throws on the
+origins of Religious Magic--a subject I shall have to deal
+with in the next chapter.
+
+[1] See Robertson's Christianity and Mythology, Part II, pp.
+129-302; also Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xxviii, p. 278.
+
+
+I have already (Ch. II) mentioned the Eucharistic
+rite held in commemoration of Mithra, and the indignant
+ascription of this by Justin Martyr to the wiles of the Devil.
+Justin Martyr clearly had no doubt about the resemblance
+of the Mithraic to the Christian ceremony. A Sacramental
+meal, as mentioned a few pages back, seems
+to have been held by the worshipers of Attis[1] in
+commemoration of their god; and the 'mysteries' of the
+Pagan cults generally appear to have included rites--
+sometimes half-savage, sometimes more aesthetic--in which
+a dismembered animal was eaten, or bread and wine (the
+spirits of the Corn and the Vine) were consumed, as
+representing the body of the god whom his devotees desired
+to honor. But the best example of this practice is
+afforded by the rites of Dionysus, to which I will devote
+a few lines. Dionysus, like other Sun or Nature deities,
+was born of a Virgin (Semele or Demeter) untainted by any
+earthly husband; and born on the 25th. December. He was
+nurtured in a Cave, and even at that early age was
+identified with the Ram or Lamb, into whose form he was
+for the time being changed. At times also he was worshiped
+in the form of a Bull.[2] He travelled far and
+wide; and brought the great gift of wine to mankind.[3]
+He was called Liberator, and Saviour. His grave "was
+shown at Delphi in the inmost shrine of the temple of Apollo.
+Secret offerings were brought thither, while the women
+who were celebrating the feast woke up the new-born
+god. . . . Festivals of this kind in celebration of the
+extinction and resurrection of the deity were held (by
+women and girls only) amid the mountains at night,
+every third year, about the time of the shortest day. The
+rites, intended to express the excess of grief and joy at the
+death and reappearance of the god, were wild even
+to savagery, and the women who performed them were
+hence known by the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads,
+and Thyiades. They wandered through woods and mountains,
+their flying locks crowned with ivy or snakes, brandishing
+wands and torches, to the hollow sounds of the drum,
+or the shrill notes of the flute, with wild dances and
+insane cries and jubilation.
+
+[1] See Frazer's Golden Bough, Part IV, p. 229.
+
+[2] The Golden Bough, Part II, Book II, p. 164.
+
+[3] "I am the TRUE Vine," says the Jesus of the fourth gospel,
+perhaps with an implicit and hostile reference to the cult of
+Dionysus--in which Robertson suggests (Christianity and
+Mythology, p. 357) there was a ritual miracle of turning water
+into wine.
+
+
+Oxen, goats, even fawns and roes from the forest were killed,
+torn to pieces, and eaten raw. This in imitation of the
+treatment of Dionysus by the Titans"[1]--who it was supposed
+had torn the god in pieces when a child.
+
+[1] See art. Dionysus. Dictionary of Classical Antiquities,
+Nettleship and Sandys 3rd edn., London, 1898).
+
+
+Dupuis, one of the earliest writers (at the beginning of
+last century) on this subject, says, describing the mystic
+rites of Dionysus[1]: "The sacred doors of the Temple in which
+the initiation took place were opened only once a year, and
+no stranger might ever enter. Night lent to these august
+mysteries a veil which was forbidden to be drawn aside
+--for whoever it might be.[2] It was the sole occasion
+for the representation of the passion of Bacchus [Dionysus]
+dead, descended into hell, and rearisen--in imitation
+of the representation of the sufferings of Osiris which,
+according to Herodotus, were commemorated at Sais in
+Egypt. It was in that place that the partition took
+place of the body of the god,[3] which was then eaten--
+the ceremony, in fact, of which our Eucharist is only a
+reflection; whereas in the mysteries of Bacchus actual raw
+flesh was distributed, which each of those present had
+to consume in commemoration of the death of Bacchus
+dismembered by the Titans, and whose passion, in Chios
+and Tenedos, was renewed each year by the sacrifice of a man
+who represented the god.[4] Possibly it is this last fact which
+made people believe that the Christians (whose hoc est corpus
+meum and sharing of an Eucharistic meal were no more than
+a shadow of a more ancient rite) did really sacrifice a child
+and devour its limbs."
+
+[1] See Charles F. Dupuis, "Traite des Mysteres," ch. i.
+
+[2] Pausan, Corinth, ch. 37.
+
+[3] Clem, Prot. Eur. Bacch.
+
+[4] See Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lii, Section 56.
+
+
+That Eucharistic rites were very very ancient is plain
+from the Totem-sacraments of savages; and to this subject
+we shall now turn.
+
+
+
+IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
+
+Much has been written on the origin of the Totem-system
+--the system, that is, of naming a tribe or a portion of a
+tribe (say a CLAN) after some ANIMAL--or sometimes--also
+after some plant or tree or Nature-element, like fire or
+rain or thunder; but at best the subject is a difficult one
+for us moderns to understand. A careful study has been
+made of it by Salamon Reinach in his Cultes, Mythes et
+Religions,[1] where he formulates his conclusions in twelve
+statements or definitions; but even so--though his suggestions
+are helpful--he throws very little light on the real
+origin of the system.[2]
+
+[1] See English translation of certain chapters (published by
+David Nutt in 1912) entitled Cults, Myths and Religions, pp.
+1-25. The French original is in three large volumes.
+
+[2] The same may be said of the formulated statement of the
+subject in Morris Jastrow's Handbooks of the History of Religion,
+vol. iv.
+
+There are three main difficulties. The first is to understand
+why primitive Man should name his Tribe after an
+animal or object of nature at all; the second, to understand
+on what principle he selected the particular name (a lion, a
+crocodile, a lady bird, a certain tree); the third, why he should
+make of the said totem a divinity, and pay honor and worship
+to it. It may be worth while to pause for a moment
+over these.
+
+(1) The fact that the Tribe was one of the early things
+for which Man found it necessary to have a name is interesting,
+because it shows how early the solidarity and psychological
+actuality of the tribe was recognized; and as to the
+selection of a name from some animal or concrete object of
+Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason that there
+was nothing else for the savage to choose from. Plainly to
+call his tribe "The Wayfarers" or "The Pioneers" or the
+"Pacifists" or the "Invincibles," or by any of the thousand
+and one names which modern associations adopt,
+would have been impossible, since such abstract terms had
+little or no existence in his mind. And again to name it
+after an animal was the most obvious thing to do, simply
+because the animals were by far the most important
+features or accompaniments of his own life. As I am
+dealing in this book largely with certain psychological
+conditions of human evolution, it has to be pointed out that
+to primitive man the animal was the nearest and most closely
+related of all objects. Being of the same order of consciousness
+as himself, the animal appealed to him very
+closely as his mate and equal. He made with regard
+to it little or no distinction from himself. We see this very
+clearly in the case of children, who of course represent the
+savage mind, and who regard animals simply as their mates
+and equals, and come quickly into rapport with them, not
+differentiating themselves from them.
+
+(2) As to the particular animal or other object selected
+in order to give a name to the Tribe, this would no doubt
+be largely accidental. Any unusual incident might superstitiously
+precipitate a name. We can hardly imagine
+the Tribe scratching its congregated head in the deliberate
+effort to think out a suitable emblem for itself. That is
+not the way in which nicknames are invented in a school
+or anywhere else to-day. At the same time the heraldic
+appeal of a certain object of nature, animate or inanimate,
+would be deeply and widely felt. The strength of the lion,
+the fleetness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the
+flight of a bird, the awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily
+mesmerize a whole tribe. Reinach points out, with great
+justice, that many tribes placed themselves under the
+protection of animals which were supposed (rightly or
+wrongly) to act as guides and augurs, foretelling the future.
+"Diodorus," he says, "distinctly states that the hawk,
+in Egypt, was venerated because it foretold the future."
+[Birds generally act as weather-prophets.] "In Australia
+and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow and the owl premonish
+their fellow clansmen of events to come. At one time the
+Samoan warriors went so far as to rear owls for their
+prophetic qualities in war." [The jackal, or 'pathfinder'
+--whose tracks sometimes lead to the remains of a food-
+animal slain by a lion, and many birds and insects, have
+a value of this kind.] "The use of animal totems for
+purposes of augury is, in all likelihood, of great antiquity.
+Men must soon have realized that the senses of animals
+were acuter than their own; nor is it surprising that
+they should have expected their totems--that is to say, their
+natural allies--to forewarn them both of unsuspected
+dangers and of those provisions of nature, WELLS especially,
+which animals seem to scent by instinct."[1] And again,
+beyond all this, I have little doubt that there are subconscious
+affinities which unite certain tribes to certain animals
+or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace, though
+they are very real--the same affinities that we recognize
+as existing between individual PERSONS and certain
+objects of nature. W. H. Hudson--himself in many
+respects having this deep and primitive relation to nature--
+speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical
+volume[2] of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon
+him as a boy, not only by a snake, but by certain trees,
+and especially by a particular flowering-plant "not more
+than a foot in height, with downy soft pale green leaves,
+and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like valerian."
+. . . "One of my sacred flowers," he calls it, and insists on
+the "inexplicable attraction" which it had for him. In
+various ways of this kind one can perceive how particular
+totems came to be selected by particular peoples.
+
+[1] See Reinach, Eng. trans., op. cit., pp. 20, 21.
+
+[2] Far away and Long ago (1918) chs. xvi and xvii.
+
+
+(3) As to the tendency to divinize these totems, this arises
+no doubt partly out of question (2). The animal or
+other object admired on account of its strength or swiftness,
+or adopted as guardian of the tribe because of its keen
+sight or prophetic quality, or infinitely prized on account
+of its food-value, or felt for any other reason to have
+a peculiar relation and affinity to the tribe, is by that
+fact SET APART. It becomes taboo. It must not be
+killed--except under necessity and by sanction of the whole
+tribe--nor injured; and all dealings with it must be
+fenced round with regulations. It is out of this taboo
+or system of taboos that, according to Reinach, religion
+arose. "I propose (he says) to define religion as: A
+SUM OF SCRUPLES (TABOOS) WHICH IMPEDE THE FREE EXERCISE OF
+OUR FACULTIES."[1] Obviously this definition is gravely
+deficient, simply because it is purely negative, and leaves
+out of account the positive aspect of the subject. In
+Man, the positive content of religion is the instinctive
+sense--whether conscious or subconscious--of an inner unity
+and continuity with the world around. This is the stuff
+out of which religion is made. The scruples or taboos
+which "impede the freedom" of this relation are the
+negative forces which give outline and form to the relation.
+These are the things which generate the RITES AND CEREMONIALS
+of religion; and as far as Reinach means by religion MERELY
+rites and ceremonies he is correct; but clearly he only covers
+half the subject. The tendency to divinize the totem
+is at least as much dependent on the positive sense
+of unity with it, as on the negative scruples which limit
+the relation in each particular case. But I shall return to
+this subject presently, and more than once, with the view of
+clarifying it. Just now it will be best to illustrate the nature
+of Totems generally, and in some detail.
+
+[1] See Orpheus by S. Reinach, p. 3.
+
+
+As would be gathered from what I have just said, there
+is found among all the more primitive peoples, and in all
+parts of the world, an immense variety of totem-names.
+The Dinkas, for instance, are a rather intelligent well-grown
+people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Nile in the
+vicinity of the great swamps. According to Dr. Seligman
+their clans have for totems the lion, the elephant,
+the crocodile, the hippopotamus, the fox, and the hyena,
+as well as certain birds which infest and damage the
+corn, some plants and trees, and such things as rain,
+fire, etc. "Each clan speaks of its totem as its ancestor,
+and refrains [as a rule] from injuring or eating it."[1] The
+members of the Crocodile clan call themselves "brothers of
+the crocodile." The tribes of Bechuana-land have a very
+similar list of totem-names--the buffalo, the fish, the
+porcupine, the wild vine, etc. They too have a Crocodile
+clan, but they call the crocodile their FATHER! The
+tribes of Australia much the same again, with the differences
+suitable to their country; and the Red Indians of
+North America the same. Garcilasso, della Vega, the
+Spanish historian, son of an Inca princess by one of the
+Spanish conquerors of Peru and author of the well-known
+book Commentarias Reales, says in that book (i, 57), speaking
+of the pre-Inca period, "An Indian (of Peru) was not
+considered honorable unless he was descended from a fountain,
+river or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild
+animal, as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call
+cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey."[2] According
+to Lewis Morgan, the North American Indians of various
+tribes had for totems the wolf, bear, beaver, turtle, deer,
+snipe, heron, hawk, crane, loon, turkey, muskrat; pike, catfish,
+carp; buffalo, elk, reindeer, eagle, hare, rabbit, snake;
+reed-grass, sand, rock, and tobacco-plant.
+
+[1] See The Golden Bough, vol. iv, p. 31.
+
+[2] See Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 104, also Myth, Ritual
+and Religion, vol. i, pp. 71, 76, etc.
+
+
+So we might go on rather indefinitely. I need hardly
+say that in more modern and civilized life, relics of the totem
+system are still to be found in the forms of the heraldic
+creatures adopted for their crests by different families,
+and in the bears, lions, eagles, the sun, moon and stars
+and so forth, which still adorn the flags and are flaunted
+as the insignia of the various nations. The names may
+not have been ORIGINALLY adopted from any definite belief
+in blood-relationship with the animal or other object
+in question; but when, as Robertson says (Pagan Christs,
+p. 104), a "savage learned that he was 'a Bear' and that
+his father and grandfather and forefathers were so before
+him, it was really impossible, after ages in which totem-
+names thus passed current, that he should fail to assume that
+his folk were DESCENDED from a bear."
+
+As a rule, as may be imagined, the savage tribesman
+will on no account EAT his tribal totem-animal. Such
+would naturally be deemed a kind of sacrilege. Also it
+must be remarked that some totems are hardly suitable for
+eating. Yet it is important to observe that occasionally,
+and guarding the ceremony with great precautions, it
+has been an almost universal custom for the tribal elders
+to call a feast at which an animal (either the totem or
+some other) IS killed and commonly eaten--and this in order
+that the tribesmen may absorb some virtue belonging to
+it, and may confirm their identity with the tribe and with
+each other. The eating of the bear or other animal, the
+sprinkling with its blood, and the general ritual in which
+the participants shared its flesh, or dressed and disguised
+themselves in its skin, or otherwise identified themselves
+with it, was to them a symbol of their community of life with
+each other, and a means of their renewal and
+salvation in the holy emblem. And this custom, as the reader
+will perceive, became the origin of the Eucharists and Holy
+Communions of the later religions.
+
+Professor Robertson-Smith's celebrated Camel affords an
+instance of this.[1] It appears that St. Nilus (fifth century)
+has left a detailed account of the occasional sacrifice in
+his time of a spotless white camel among the Arabs of the
+Sinai region, which closely resembles a totemic communion-
+feast. The uncooked blood and flesh of the animal had to
+be entirely consumed by the faithful before daybreak. "The
+slaughter of the victim, the sacramental drinking of the
+blood, and devouring in wild haste of the pieces of still
+quivering flesh, recall the details of the Dionysiac and
+other festivals."[2] Robertson-Smith himself says:--"The
+plain meaning is that the victim was devoured before
+its life had left the still warm blood and flesh . . . and
+that thus in the most literal way, all those who shared in
+the ceremony absorbed part of the victim's life into
+themselves. One sees how much more forcibly than
+any ordinary meal such a rite expresses the establishment
+or confirmation of a bond of common life between the
+worshipers, and also, since the blood is shed upon the
+altar itself, between the worshipers and their god. In this
+sacrifice, then, the significant factors are two: the
+conveyance of the living blood to the godhead, and the
+absorption of the living flesh and blood into the flesh and
+blood of the worshippers. Each of these is effected in the
+simplest and most direct manner, so that the meaning of the
+ritual is perfectly transparent."
+
+[1] See his Religion of the Semites, p. 320.
+
+[2] They also recall the rites of the Passover--though in this
+latter the blood was no longer drunk, nor the flesh eaten raw.
+
+
+It seems strange, of course, that men should eat their
+totems; and it must not by any means be supposed that
+this practice is (or was) universal; but it undoubtedly
+obtains in some cases. As Miss Harrison says (Themis,
+p. 123); "you do not as a rule eat your relations," and as a
+rule the eating of a totem is tabu and forbidden, but
+(Miss Harrison continues) "at certain times and under certain
+restrictions a man not only may, but MUST, eat of
+his totem, though only sparingly, as of a thing sacrosanct."
+The ceremonial carried out in a communal way by the tribe
+not only identifies the tribe with the totem (animal), but
+is held, according to early magical ideas, and when the
+animal is desired for food, to favor its manipulation.
+The human tribe partakes of the mana or life-force of the
+animal, and is strengthened; the animal tribe is sympathetically
+renewed by the ceremonial and multiplies exceedingly.
+The slaughter of the sacred animal and (often) the
+simultaneous outpouring of human blood seals the compact
+and confirms the magic. This is well illustrated
+by a ceremony of the 'Emu' tribe referred to by Dr.
+Frazer:--
+
+"In order to multiply Emus which are an important article
+of food, the men of the Emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed
+as follows: They clear a small spot of level
+ground, and opening veins in their arms they let the blood
+stream out until the surface of the ground for a space of about
+three square yards is soaked with it. When the blood
+has dried and caked, it forms a hard and fairly impermeable
+surface, on which they paint the sacred design
+of the emu totem, especially the parts of the bird which
+they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round
+this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers
+wearing long head-dresses to represent the long neck and
+small head of the emu, mimic the appearance of the bird
+as it stands aimlessly peering about in all directions."[1]
+
+[1] The Golden Bough i, 85--with reference to Spencer and
+Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 179, 189.
+
+
+Thus blood sacrifice comes in; and--(whether this has
+ever actually happened in the case of the Central Australians
+I know not)--we can easily imagine a member of the Emu
+tribe, and disguised as an actual emu, having been ceremonially
+slaughtered as a firstfruits and promise of the expected
+and prayed-for emu-crop; just as the same certainly
+HAS happened in the case of men wearing beast-masks of Bulls or
+Rams or Bears being sacrificed in propitiation
+of Bull-gods, Ram-gods or Bear-gods or simply in pursuance
+of some kind of magic to favor the multiplication of
+these food-animals.
+
+"In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly
+enough the relation of man to food-animals. You need or
+at least desire flesh food, yet you shrink from slaughtering
+'your brother the ox'; you desire his mana, yet you respect
+his tabu, for in you and him alike runs the common
+life-blood. On your own individual responsibility you
+would never kill him; but for the common weal, on great
+occasions, and in a fashion conducted with scrupulous care, it
+is expedient that he die for his people, and that they feast
+upon his flesh."[1]
+
+[1] Themis, p. 140.
+
+
+In her little book Ancient Art and Ritual[1] Jane Harrison
+describes the dedication of a holy Bull, as conducted in
+Greece at Elis, and at Magnesia and other cities. "There
+at the annual fair year by year the stewards of the city
+bought a Bull 'the finest that could be got,' and at the
+new moon of the month at the beginning of seed-time
+[? April] they dedicated it for the city's welfare. . . . The
+Bull was led in procession at the head of which went the
+chief priest and priestess of the city. With them went a
+herald and sacrificer, and two bands of youths and
+maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing unlucky
+might come near him. The herald pronounced aloud a
+prayer for 'the safety of the city and the land, and the
+citizens, and the women and children, for peace and wealth,
+and for the bringing forth of grain and all other fruits,
+and of cattle.' All this longing for fertility, for food and
+children, focuses round the holy Bull, whose holiness is
+his strength and fruitfulness." The Bull is sacrificed.
+The flesh is divided in solemn feast among those who take
+part in the procession. "The holy flesh is not offered to
+a god, it is eaten--to every man his portion--by each and
+every citizen, that he may get his share of the strength of
+the Bull, of the luck of the State." But at Athens the Bouphonia,
+as it was called, was followed by a curious ceremony.
+"The hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and
+next the stuffed animal was set on its feet and yoked to
+a plough as though it were ploughing. The Death is
+followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all important.
+We are accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the
+giving up, the renouncing of something. But SACRIFICE
+does not mean 'death' at all. It means MAKING HOLY,
+sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man just special
+strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was
+just that special life and strength which all the year long
+they had put into him, and nourished and fostered. That
+life was in his blood. They could not eat that flesh nor
+drink that blood unless they killed him. So he must
+die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed
+him, not to 'sacrifice' him in our sense, but to have him,
+keep him, eat him, live BY him and through him, by his
+grace."
+
+[1] Home University Library, p. 87.
+
+
+We have already had to deal with instances of the
+ceremonial eating of the sacred he-Lamb or Ram, immolated
+in the Spring season of the year, and partaken of in a kind
+of communal feast--not without reference (at any rate in
+later times) to a supposed Lamb-god. Among the Ainos
+in the North of Japan, as also among the Gilyaks in
+Eastern Siberia, the Bear is the great food-animal, and
+is worshipped as the supreme giver of health and strength.
+There also a similar ritual of sacrifice occurs. A perfect
+Bear is caught and caged. He is fed up and even
+pampered to the day of his death. "Fish, brandy and
+other delicacies are offered to him. Some of the people
+prostrate themselves before him; his coming into a house
+brings a blessing, and if he sniffs at the food that brings a
+blessing too." Then he is led out and slain. A great feast
+takes place, the flesh is divided, cupfuls of the blood are
+drunk by the men; the tribe is united and strengthened, and
+the Bear-god blesses the ceremony--the ideal Bear that has
+given its life for the people.[1]
+
+
+[1] See Art and Ritual, pp. 92-98; The Golden Bough, ii, 375
+seq.; Themis, pp. 140, 141; etc.
+
+
+That the eating of the flesh of an animal or a man conveys
+to you some of the qualities, the life-force, the
+mana, of that animal or man, is an idea which one often
+meets with among primitive folk. Hence the common
+tendency to eat enemy warriors slain in battle against
+your tribe. By doing so you absorb some of their valor
+and strength. Even the enemy scalps which an Apache
+Indian might hang from his belt were something magical
+to add to the Apache's power. As Gilbert Murray says,[1]
+"you devoured the holy animal to get its mana, its swiftness,
+its strength, its great endurance, just as the savage now
+will eat his enemy's brain or heart or hands to get
+some particular quality residing there." Even--as he explains
+on the earlier page--mere CONTACT was often considered
+sufficient--"we have holy pillars whose holiness consists
+in the fact that they have been touched by the
+blood of a bull." And in this connection we may note
+that nearly all the Christian Churches have a great belief
+in the virtue imparted by the mere 'laying on of hands.'
+
+[1] Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 36.
+
+
+In quite a different connection--we read[1] that among the
+Spartans a warrior-boy would often beg for the love of the
+elder warrior whom he admired (i. e. the contact with
+his body) in order to obtain in that way a portion of the
+latter's courage and prowess. That through the mediation
+of the lips one's spirit may be united to the spirit of another
+person is an idea not unfamiliar to the modern mind; while
+the exchange of blood, clothes, locks of hair, etc., by lovers
+is a custom known all over the world.[2]
+
+[1] Aelian VII, iii, 12: <gr autoi goun (oi paides) deontai twn
+erastwn> <gr eispnein autois>. See also E. Bethe on "Die Dorische
+Knabenliebe" in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. 26, iii, 461.
+
+[2] See Crawley's Mystic Rose, pp. 238, 242.
+
+
+To suppose that by eating another you absorb his or her
+soul is somewhat naive certainly. Perhaps it IS more native,
+more primitive. Yet there may be SOME truth even
+in that idea. Certainly the food that one eats has a
+psychological effect, and the flesh-eaters among the human
+race have a different temperament as a rule from
+the fruit and vegetable eaters, while among the animals
+(though other causes may come in here) the Carnivora
+are decidedly more cruel and less gentle than the Herbivora.
+
+To return to the rites of Dionysus, Gilbert Murray, speaking
+of Orphism--a great wave of religious reform which
+swept over Greece and South Italy in the sixth century
+B.C.--says:[1] "A curious relic of primitive superstition
+and cruelty remained firmly imbedded in Orphism,
+a doctrine irrational and unintelligible, and for that very
+reason wrapped in the deepest and most sacred mystery: a belief
+in the SACRIFICE OF DIONYSUS HIMSELF, AND THE PURIFICATION OF MAN
+BY HIS BLOOD. It seems possible that the savage
+Thracians, in the fury of their worship on the mountains,
+when they were possessed by the god and became
+'wild beasts,' actually tore with their teeth and hands
+any hares, goats, fawns or the like that they came
+across. . . . The Orphic congregations of later times, in
+their most holy gatherings, solemnly partook of the blood
+of a bull, which was by a mystery the blood of Dionysus-
+Zagreus himself, the Bull of God, slain in sacrifice for the
+purification of man."[2]
+
+[1] See Notes to his translation of the Bacch<ae> of Euripides.
+
+[2] For a description of this orgy see Theocritus, Idyll xxvi;
+also for explanations of it, Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion,
+vol. ii, pp, 241-260, on Dionysus. The Encyclop<ae>dia Brit.,
+article "Orpheus," says:--"Orpheus, in the manner of his death,
+was considered to personate the god Dionysus, and was thus
+representative of the god torn to pieces every year--a ceremony
+enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with a human victim,
+and afterwards with a bull, to represent the bull-formed god. A
+distinct feature of this ritual was <gr wmofagia> (eating the
+flesh of the victim raw), whereby the communicants imagined that
+they consumed and assimilated the god represented by the victim,
+and thus became filled with the divine ecstasy." Compare also the
+Hindu doctrine of Praj<pati, the dismembered Lord of Creation.
+
+
+Such instances of early communal feasts, which fulfilled
+the double part of confirming on the one hand the solidarity
+of the tribe, and on the other of bringing the tribe, by
+the shedding of the blood of a divine Victim into close
+relationship with the very source of its life, are plentiful
+to find. "The sacramental rite," says Professor Robertson-
+Smith,[1] "is also an atoning rite, which brings the community
+again into harmony with its alienated god--atonement
+being simply an act of communion designed to
+wipe out all memory of previous estrangement." With
+this subject I shall deal more specially in chapter vii below.
+Meanwhile as instances of early Eucharists we may mention
+the following cases, remembering always that as the blood
+is regarded as the Life, the drinking or partaking of, or
+sprinkling with, blood is always an acknowledgment of the
+common life; and that the juice of the grape being regarded
+as the blood of the Vine, wine in the later ceremonials quite
+easily and naturally takes the place of the blood in the early
+sacrifices.
+
+[1] Religion of the Semites, p. 302.
+
+
+Thus P. Andrada La Crozius, a French missionary,
+and one of the first Christians who went to Nepaul and
+Thibet, says in his History of India: "Their Grand Lama
+celebrates a species of sacrifice with BREAD and WINE, in which,
+after taking a small quantity himself, he distributes
+the rest among the Lamas present at this ceremony."[1]
+"The old Egyptians celebrated the resurrection of Osiris by
+a sacrament, eating the sacred cake or wafer after it
+had been consecrated by the priest, and thereby becoming
+veritable flesh of his flesh."[2] As is well known, the eating
+of bread or dough sacramentally (sometimes mixed with
+blood or seed) as an emblem of community of life with the
+divinity, is an extremely ancient practice or ritual. Dr.
+Frazer[3] says of the Aztecs, that "twice a year, in May
+and December, an image of the great god Huitzilopochtli
+was made of dough, then broken in pieces and solemnly
+eaten by his worshipers." And Lord Kingsborough in his
+Mexican Antiquities (vol. vi, p. 220) gives a record of a
+"most Holy Supper" in which these people ate the flesh of
+their god. It was a cake made of certain seeds, "and having
+made it, they blessed it in their manner, and broke it into
+pieces, which the high priest put into certain very clean
+vessels, and took a thorn of maguey which resembles a
+very thick needle, with which he took up with the
+utmost reverence single morsels, which he put into the
+mouth of each individual in the manner of a communion."
+Acostas[4] confirms this and similar accounts. The
+Peruvians partook of a sacrament consisting of a pudding
+of coarsely ground maize, of which a portion had been
+smeared on the idol. The priest sprinkled it with the
+blood of the victim before distributing it to the people."
+Priest and people then all took their shares in turn,
+"with great care that no particle should be allowed to
+fall to the ground--this being looked upon as a great
+sin."[5]
+
+
+[1] See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 306.
+
+[2] From The Great Law, of religious origins: by W. Williamson
+(1899), p. 177.
+
+[3] The Golden Bough, vol. ii, p. 79.
+
+[4] Natural and Moral History of the Indies. London (1604).
+
+[5] See Markham's Rites and laws of the Incas, p. 27.
+
+
+Moving from Peru to China (instead of 'from China
+to Peru') we find that "the Chinese pour wine (a very
+general substitute for blood) on a straw image of Confucius,
+and then all present drink of it, and taste the sacrificial
+victim, in order to participate in the grace of Confucius."
+[Here again the Corn and Wine are blended in one rite.]
+And of Tartary Father Grueber thus testifies: "This only
+I do affirm, that the devil so mimics the Catholic Church
+there, that although no European or Christian has ever been
+there, still in all essential things they agree so completely
+with the Roman Church, as even to celebrate the
+Host with bread and wine: with my own eyes I have seen
+it."[1] These few instances are sufficient to show the
+extraordinarily wide diffusion of Totem-sacraments and
+Eucharistic rites all over the world.
+
+[1] For these two quotations see Jevons' Introduction to the
+History of Religion, pp. 148 and 219.
+
+
+
+V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
+
+I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist,
+some way from the astronomical thread of Chapters II and
+III, and now it would appear that in order to understand
+religious origins we must wander still farther. The chapters
+mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and
+astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an
+earlier period when there were no definite forms of gods,
+and when none but the vaguest astronomical knowledge
+existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is best and
+safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things
+recent and fairly well known to things more ancient and less
+known. In this way we approach more securely to some
+understanding of the dim and remote past.
+
+It is clear that before any definite speculations on
+heaven-dwelling gods or divine beings had arisen in the human
+mind--or any clear theories of how the sun and moon
+and stars might be connected with the changes of the
+seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious
+things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned
+alike. One of these was the return of Vegetation, bringing
+with it the fruits or the promise of the fruits of the earth,
+for human food, and also bringing with it increase of animal
+life, for food in another form; and the other was the return
+of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food
+delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth
+delivering from the fear of danger and of cold. These were
+three glorious things which returned together and brought
+salvation and renewed life to man. The period of their
+return was 'Spring,' and though Spring and its benefits
+might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE
+of its return--though even so it may have been a long time
+in human evolution before man discovered that it really did
+always return, and (with certain allowances) at equal intervals
+of time.
+
+Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in,
+the return of the Vegetation must have enthralled man's
+attention, and filled him with hope and joy. Yet since
+its return was somewhat variable and uncertain the question,
+What could man do to assist that return? naturally
+became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the
+use of Magic--sympathetic magic--arose in this way.
+Sympathetic magic seems to have been generated by a
+belief that your own actions cause a similar response in
+things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not
+rest on any philosophy or argument, but was purely
+instinctive and sometimes of the nature of a mere corporeal
+reaction. Every schoolboy knows how in watching a
+comrade's high jump at the Sports he often finds himself
+lifting a knee at the moment 'to help him over'; at football
+matches quarrels sometimes arise among the spectators
+by reason of an ill-placed kick coming from a too enthusiastic
+on-looker, behind one; undergraduates running on the
+tow-path beside their College boat in the races will hurry
+even faster than the boat in order to increase its speed;
+there is in each case an automatic bodily response
+increased by one's own desire. A person ACTS the part
+which he desires to be successful. He thinks to transfer
+his energy in that way. Again, if by chance one witnesses
+a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not, it
+commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same
+part oneself--a sympathetic pain. What more natural than
+to suppose that the pain really is transferred from the one
+person to the other? and how easy the inference that by
+tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human victim
+in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or
+their sins atoned for?
+
+Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of
+Theocritus, curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she
+melts his waxen image she prays that HE TOO MAY MELT.
+All this is of the nature of Magic, and is independent of and
+generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy. Yet
+it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in
+early man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct
+of his unity and continuity with the rest of creation, and
+of a common life so close that his lightest actions may cause
+a far-reaching reaction in the world outside.
+
+Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist
+the arrival of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you
+want the Vegetation to appear you must have rain; and the
+rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has been a MOST
+important personage. Generally he based his rites on
+quite fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among
+the Mandans wore a raven's skin on his head (bird of
+the storm) or painted his shield with red zigzags of
+lightning[1]; but partly, no doubt, he had observed actual
+facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to
+him--as, for instance that when rain is impending loud noises
+will bring about its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns
+have had occasion to notice on battlefields. He
+had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud
+clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased
+downpour of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which
+I have often verified in the vicinity of Sheffield) that the
+copious smoke of fires will generate rain-clouds--and so
+quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking
+SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was
+on the track of elementary Science. And so he made "bull-
+roarers" to imitate the sound of wind and the blessed
+rain-bringing thunder, or clashed great bronze cymbals
+together with the same object. Bull-voices and thunder-
+drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this
+connection by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus[2];
+but the bull-roarer, in the form of a rhombus of wood
+whirled at the end of a string, seems to be known, or
+to have been known, all over the world. It is described
+with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and
+Myth (pp. 29-44), where he says "it is found always as a
+sacred instrument employed in religious mysteries, in New
+Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient Greece, and
+Africa."
+
+[1] See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.
+
+[2] Themis, p. 61.
+
+
+Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but
+of the inner causes of rain he knew next to nothing;
+he was more ignorant even than we are! His main
+idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that the
+sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder
+and cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder
+(in Hebrew Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was
+everywhere regarded as the manifestation of a spirit.[1]
+To make sounds like thunder would therefore naturally
+call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the rain-maker,
+might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles
+(known in ever so many parts of the world) in which he
+rattled dried seeds or small pebbles with a most beguiling
+and rain-like insistence; or sometimes, like the priests of
+Baal in the Bible,[2] he would cut himself with knives
+till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops suggestive
+of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the raingod
+was propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children
+wept and shed abundant tears, they who carried
+them rejoiced, being convinced that rain would also be
+abundant."[3] Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would WHISTLE
+for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets
+for the same purpose.
+
+[1] See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said
+to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass
+grow up green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel
+of the Tribe (Australian).
+
+[2] I Kings xviii.
+
+[3] Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
+Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.
+
+
+In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which
+has been adopted by so many peoples under so many
+forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her daughter
+Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation),
+carried down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness
+and Winter. And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial
+and ritual of magic for the purpose of restoring
+the lost one and bringing her back to the world again.
+Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and
+unnamable objects made of paste, to ensure fertility;
+there was a sacrifice of pigs, who were thrown into a deep
+cleft of the earth, and their remains afterwards collected
+and scattered as a charm over the fields."[1] Fir-cones
+and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male fertility;
+snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their
+own skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive
+of resurrection and re-vivification; pigs and sows by
+their exceeding fruitfulness would in their hour of sacrifice
+remind old mother Earth of what was expected from
+her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that
+the scattering of dead flesh over the ground or mixed
+with the seed, did bless the ground to a greater fertility;
+and so by a strange mixture of primitive observation with
+a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols and
+suggestions Nature could be appealed to and induced to
+answer to the desires and needs for her children this sort
+of ceremonial Magic arose. It was not exactly Science, and
+it was not exactly Religion; but it was a naive, and perhaps
+not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between Nature
+and Man.
+
+[1] See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+
+
+For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously
+differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see
+that the tribal life was so strong that the individual seldom
+regarded himself as different or separate or opposed to the
+rest of the tribe; but that something of the same kind
+was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and
+to Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself,
+was also himself. His sub-conscious sense of unity
+was so great that it largely dominated his life. That
+brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern
+man to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals,
+or between himself and Nature, did not exist in the early
+man. Hence it was no difficulty to him to believe that
+he was a Bear or an Emu. Sub-consciously he was wiser
+than we are. He knew that he was a bear or an emu, or
+any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his
+mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common
+consent existed between primitive man and many
+of his companion animals such as has been lost or much
+attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very
+interesting paper La Grande Famille[1] gives support to the
+idea that the so-called domestication of animals did not
+originally arise from any forcible subjugation of them by
+man, but from a natural amity with them which grew up
+in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and affections.
+Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma
+of Brazil) from far-back times took to hunting in the
+company of his two-legged and bow-and-arrow-armed
+friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson[2]
+declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and
+capable of killing the largest game, will never even to-day
+attack man, but when maltreated by the latter submits to
+the outrage, unresisting, with mournful cries and every
+sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated in a sense,
+has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit, but
+may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian
+peasant and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud
+companionship. The mutual relations of Women and the
+Cow, or of Man and the Horse[3] (also the Elephant) reach
+so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced. The
+Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves
+and still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good
+fortune. Elisee Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on
+the Nile calls to certain snakes by name and shares with them
+the milk of his cows.
+
+
+[1] Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
+1896.
+
+[2] See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.
+
+[3] "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
+of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries,
+before it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B.
+Jevons, Introd. to Hist. Religion, p. 119).
+
+
+And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious
+perception, which made primitive men feel their
+unity with other members of their tribe, and their obvious
+kinship with the animals around them, brought them also so
+close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees, the
+vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their
+bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had
+not yet set in. To cause rain or thunder you had to
+make rain- or thunder-like noises; to encourage Vegetation
+and the crops to leap out of the ground, you had
+to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian
+Saxons it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer)
+for a man who has some hemp to leap high in the
+field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow tall."[1]
+Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have
+hardly yet died out--even in this most civilized England.
+The bower of green boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping
+and the twirling, were all an encouragement to the arrival
+of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic Magic. When
+you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself you
+naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically
+do this for the energizing of the crops? In every
+country of the world the vernal season and the resurrection
+of the Sun has been greeted with dances and
+the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting
+or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances
+suggesting the successful hunt or battle. It was no more
+than our children do to-day, and it all was, and is, part of a
+natural-magic tendency in human thought.
+
+[1] See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.
+
+
+Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us
+with our academical and somewhat school-boardy minds
+to enter into all this, and to understand the sense of
+(unconscious or sub-conscious) identification with the world
+around which characterized the primitive man--or to look upon
+Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of
+Corn. WE know so well from our botany and natural history
+books what these things are. Why should our minds
+dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as to our perfect
+comprehension of them?
+
+And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any
+one of us really ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think
+that I have--except most superficially. That very penetrating
+observer and naturalist, Henry D. Thoreau, tells
+us that he would often make an appointment to visit
+a certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when
+he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also
+a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree near which he sometimes
+sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and graceful,
+yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
+throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature
+could walk, if it only would"; and mentions that
+in a dream-trance he actually once saw his "favorite trees
+step out and promenade up, down and around VERY CURIOUSLY."[1]
+Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
+vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat
+isolated, and still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly
+I was aware of its skyward-reaching arms and up-turned
+finger-tips, as if some vivid life (or electricity) was streaming
+through them far into the spaces of heaven, and of its roots
+plunged in the earth and drawing the same energies
+from below. The day was quite still and there was no
+movement in the branches, but in that moment the tree
+was no longer a separate or separable organism, but a vast
+being ramifying far into space, sharing and uniting the
+life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing activity.
+
+[1] Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.
+
+
+The reader of this will probably have had some similar
+experiences. Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy
+poplar swaying in half a gale in June--the wind
+and the sun streaming over every little twig and leaf,
+the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy
+and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses
+of its two visitants; or he will have heard the deep
+glad murmur of some huge sycamore with ripening seed clusters
+when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain
+brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known that
+these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately
+and deeply-related to him in their love and hunger
+longing, and, like himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.
+
+It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious
+speculations like these, belonging more properly to the
+twentieth century; yet it is incontrovertible, I think, that
+in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with their swift
+subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
+book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns
+are blind. Like the animals they arrived at their perceptions
+without (individual) brain effort; they knew things
+without thinking. When they did THINK of course they
+went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray.
+Religion with them had as yet taken no definite shape;
+science was equally protoplasmic; and all they had was
+a queer jumble of the two in the form of Magic. When
+at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook
+and its observations, and Religion, from being a vague
+subconscious feeling, took clear shape in the form of gods
+and creeds, then mankind gradually emerged into the stage
+of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific laws
+and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and
+so also are the gods and the creeds of our own and
+other religions; but these things, with their set and
+angular outlines, have served in the past and will serve
+in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
+knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead
+us on to a renewed power of perception which again
+will not be the laborious product of thought but a
+direct and instantaneous intuition like that of the animals
+--and the angels.
+
+
+To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not
+speculate in modern style on these things, I yet have no
+reasonable doubt that he felt (and FEELS, in those cases
+where we can still trace the workings of his mind) his
+essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more
+intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If
+the animals with all their wonderful gifts are (as we
+readily admit) a veritable part of Nature--so that they
+live and move and have their being more or less submerged
+in the spirit of the great world around them--then
+Man, when he first began to differentiate himself from them,
+must for a long time have remained in this SUBconscious
+unity, becoming only distinctly CONSCIOUS of it when he was
+already beginning to lose it. That early dawn of distinct
+consciousness corresponded to the period of belief
+in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every
+object was invested with a halo of mystery or terror or
+adoration. Things were either tabu, in which case they
+were dangerous, and often not to be touched or even looked
+upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace and
+influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite
+which released their influence was also holy. William Blake,
+that modern prophetic child, beheld a Tree full of angels;
+the Central Australian native believes bushes to be the
+abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of passing
+women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses
+saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame
+of fire, with Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put
+off his shoes for he felt that the place was holy; Osiris
+was at times regarded as a Tree-spirit[1]; and in inscriptions
+is referred to as "the solitary one in the acacia"--
+which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The
+same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse
+mythology Ygdrasil was the great branching World-Ash,
+abode of the soul of the universe; the Peepul or Bo-tree in
+India is very sacred and must on no account be cut
+down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches.
+It is of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical
+use,[2] but so holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb
+it. The Burmese believe the things of nature, but especially
+the trees, to be the abode of spirits. "To the Burman of
+to-day, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature
+is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are
+full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all
+kinds of Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and
+female, now living round about us. Some of them live
+in the trees, especially in the huge figtree that shades half-
+an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like fronds of
+the tamarind."[3]
+
+
+[1] The Golden Bough, iv, 339.
+
+[2] Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.
+
+[3] The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.
+
+
+There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of
+MARRIAGE of women (and men) to Trees; which suggest
+that trees were regarded as very near akin to human
+beings! The Golden Bough[1] mentions many of these, including
+the idea that some trees are male and others female.
+The well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone
+being presented by a priest to a Palm-tree is supposed
+by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the Pine cone
+being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony
+of the god Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still
+celebrated in India down to the present day; and certain trees
+are clasped and hugged by pregnant women--the idea no
+doubt being that they bestow fertility on those who embrace
+them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which
+are benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked
+into the Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual
+intercourse to fertilize them.[2]
+
+[1] Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.
+
+[2] Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.
+
+
+One might go on multiplying examples in this direction
+quite indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all
+indicate--what was instinctively felt by early man, and is
+perfectly obvious to all to-day who are not blinded by
+"civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the world outside
+us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is
+not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct
+with feeling and intelligence resembling our own. It is
+this perception, this conviction of our essential unity with
+the whole of creation, which lay from the first at the base
+of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was hardly a
+conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became
+more conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms
+of the gods and the creeds--but of that process I will speak
+more in detail presently.
+
+The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the
+Man. It grew in the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It
+had a magical virtue, which his tentative science could
+only explain by chance analogies and assimilations. Attractive
+and beloved and worshipped by reason of its
+many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding
+fruits, its timber, and other invaluable products--why should
+it not become the natural emblem of the female, to
+whom through sex man's worship is ever drawn? If
+the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male
+organ in its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is
+equally remindful of the female. What more clear than
+that the conjunction of Tree and Serpent is the fulfilment
+in nature of that sex-mystery which is so potent in
+the life of man and the animals? and that the magic
+ritual most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe
+or the herds (or even the crops) is to set up an image of
+the Tree and the Serpent combined, and for all the tribe-folk in
+common to worship and pay it reverence. In the
+Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance we have
+this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the
+brazen Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness
+(as a cure for the fiery serpents of lust); illustrations
+of the same are said to be found in the temples of Egypt
+and of South India, and even in the ancient temples of Central
+America.[1] In the myth of Hercules the golden apples
+of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The
+Etruscans, the Persians and the Babylonians had also
+legends of the Fall of man through a serpent tempting him
+to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And De Gubernatis,[2]
+pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories, says "the
+legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs
+which yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which
+the life, the fortune, the glory, the strength and the
+riches of the hero have their beginning, are numerous
+among every people of Aryan origin: in India, Persia, Russia,
+Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."
+
+[1] See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
+Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.
+
+[2] Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.
+
+
+Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human
+mind asserting itself. To some of us indeed this tendency
+is even greater in the case of the Snake than in that of the
+Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago, speaks
+of "that sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which
+appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive
+state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous
+or semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of
+the Snake--the fascination of its mysteriously gliding movement,
+of its vivid energy, its glittering eye, its intensity
+of life, combined with its fatal dart of Death--is a
+thing felt even more by women than by men--and for
+a reason (from what we have already said) not far to seek.
+It was the Woman who in the story of the Fall was the first to
+listen to its suggestions. No wonder that, as Professor Murray
+says,[1] the Greeks worshiped a gigantic snake (Meilichios)
+the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies of appeasement,
+and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the
+worship of Zeus and the Olympian gods.
+
+[1] Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.
+
+
+Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people
+wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used
+to worship a Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any
+human beings could have been so foolish. But probably
+the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY LOOKED
+(with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat.[1]
+Of all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any
+that thrills one more with a sense of wizardry than just this
+very thing--to observe, each year, this disclosure of the Ear
+within the Blade--first a swelling of the sheath, then a
+transparency and a whitey-green face within a hooded shroud, and
+then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself and spiring
+upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat
+with pale visage appearing out of the ground."
+
+[1] Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
+approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks
+of the Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and
+showing to the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous
+mystery of perfect revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK
+(<gr teqerismenon> <gr stacon>)."--Cults of the Greek States,
+vol. iii, p. 182.
+
+
+If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must
+it not have aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose
+outlook on the world was so much more direct than ours
+--more 'animistic' if you like! What wonderment, what gratitude,
+what deliverance from fear (of starvation), what certainty
+that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
+sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen
+again as a savior of men, what readiness to make some
+human sacrifice in return, both as an acknowledgment
+of the debt, and as a gift of something which would no doubt
+be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that
+where blood had been spilt on the ground the future
+crop was so much more generous?)--what readiness to
+adopt some magic ritual likely to propitiate the unseen
+power--even though the outline and form of the latter
+were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer,
+speaking of the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many
+corn-gods of the above character, says[1]: "The primitive
+conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly out in
+the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated
+the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have
+been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at
+the time when the husbandman actually committed the seed
+to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god,
+moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites
+in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to
+life again with the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a
+charm to ensure the growth of the corn by sympathetic
+magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was practised
+in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields long
+before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in
+the stately ritual of the temple."[2]
+
+[1] The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.
+
+[2] See ch. xv.
+
+
+The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the
+clay image of Osiris sprouting all over with the young green
+blade was pathetically poetic; but, as has been suggested,
+bloodthirsty ceremonies were also common enough. Human
+sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been offered
+at the grave of Osiris. We bear that the Indians in
+Ecuador used to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out
+human blood on their fields when they sowed them; the
+Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same, allowing
+his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that
+in Mexico girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans
+would sometimes GRIND their (male) victim, like corn, between
+two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to make me
+bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were
+particularly given to this kind of ritual--the very TEARS
+of the sufferer were an incitement to more cruelties, for
+tears of course were magic for Rain.[1]
+
+[1] The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.
+
+
+And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times,
+both in his astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-
+Sun, and in his more direct role as plougher of the fields, and
+provider of food from his own body. "The tremendous mana
+of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies almost
+half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual."[1] Even to us there
+is something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of
+this animal's glory of strength and fury and sexual power.
+No wonder the primitives worshiped him, or that they
+devised rituals which should convey his power and vitality
+by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts
+they ate his flesh and drank his blood as a magic symbol and
+means of salvation.
+
+[1] Four Stages, p. 34.
+
+
+
+VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
+
+It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter,
+to say a, few more words about the nature and origin of
+the belief in Magic. Magic represented on one side, and
+clearly enough, the beginnings of Religion--i.e. the instinctive
+sense of Man's inner continuity with the world
+around him, TAKING SHAPE: a fanciful shape it is true, but
+with very real reaction on his practical life and feelings.[1]
+On the other side it represented the beginnings of Science.
+It was his first attempt not merely to FEEL but to UNDERSTAND the
+mystery of things.
+
+[1] For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion
+see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.
+
+
+Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very
+puerile, very superficial. As E. B. Tylor says[1] of primitive
+folk in general, "they mistook an imaginary for a
+real connection." And he instances the case of the inhabitants
+of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope,
+seven furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of
+Artemis, in order to place the former under the protection
+of the latter! WE should lay down a telephone wire, and
+consider that we established a much more efficient connection;
+but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men,
+like children, rely on surface associations. Among the
+Dyaks of Borneo[2] when the men are away fighting,
+the WOMEN must use a sort of telepathic magic in order to
+safeguard them--that is, they must themselves rise early
+and keep awake all day (lest darkness and sleep should
+give advantage to the enemy); they must not OIL their
+hair (lest their husbands should make any SLIPS); they must
+eat sparingly and put aside rice at every meal (so that
+the men may not want for food). And so on. Similar
+superstitions are common. But they gradually lead to
+a little thought, and then to a little more, and so to
+the discovery of actual and provable influences. Perhaps
+one day the cord connecting the temple with Ephesus
+was drawn TIGHT and it was found that messages could
+be, by tapping, transmitted along it. That way lay the
+discovery of a fact. In an age which worshiped fertility,
+whether in mankind or animals, TWINS were ever
+counted especially blest, and were credited with a magic
+power. (The Constellation of the Twins was thought
+peculiarly lucky.) Perhaps after a time it was discovered
+that twins sometimes run in families, and in such cases really
+do bring fertility with them. In cattle it is known nowadays
+that there are more twins of the female sex than of the
+male sex.[3]
+
+[1] Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106.
+
+[2] See The Golden Bough, i, 127.
+
+[3] See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41,
+note.
+
+
+Observations of this kind were naturally made by the
+ablest members of the tribe--who were in all probability
+the medicine-men and wizards--and brought in consequence
+power into their hands. The road to power in fact--and
+especially was this the case in societies which had not
+yet developed wealth and property--lay through Magic.
+As far as magic represented early superstition land religion
+it laid hold of the HEARTS of men--their hopes and
+fears; as far as it represented science and the beginnings
+of actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a
+sense of power, and gave form to their lives and customs.
+We have no reason to suppose that the early magicians
+and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked or bent on mere
+self-aggrandizement--any more than we have to think
+the same of the average country vicar or country doctor of
+to-day. They were merely men a trifle wiser or more
+instructed than their flocks. But though probably in most
+cases their original intentions were decent enough, they
+were not proof against the temptations which the possession
+of power always brings, and as time went on they
+became liable to trade more and more upon this power
+for their own advancement. In the matter of Religion
+the history of the Christian priesthood through the centuries
+shows sufficiently to what misuse such power can
+be put; and in the matter of Science it is a warning
+to us of the dangers attending the formation of a scientific
+priesthood, such as we see growing up around us to-day.
+In both cases--whether Science or Religion--vanity, personal
+ambition, lust of domination and a hundred other
+vices, unless corrected by a real devotion to the public good,
+may easily bring as many evils in their train as those they
+profess to cure.
+
+The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly
+but necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there
+is much evidence to show that in the case of many tribes
+at any rate, it was HE who became ultimate chief and
+leader and laid the foundations of Kingship. The Basileus
+was always a sacred personality, and often united in himself
+as head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare
+and leader in priestly rites--like Agamemnon in Homer,
+or Saul or David in the Bible. As a magician he had
+influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the
+blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway
+                    "the dark earth beareth in season
+Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and
+alway
+ Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in
+abundance."[1]
+
+[1] Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.
+
+
+As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare;
+and Schoolcraft, in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang,[1] says
+of the Dacotah Indians "the war-chief who leads the party
+to war is always one of these medicine-men." This connection,
+however, by which the magician is transformed into the
+king has been abundantly studied, and need not be further
+dwelt upon here.
+
+And what of the transformation of the king into a god--
+or of the Magician or Priest directly into the same?
+Perhaps in order to appreciate this, one must make a
+further digression.
+
+For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two
+main objects in life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle
+and crops, for food; and (2) to placate or ward off Death;
+and it seemed very obvious--even before any distinct
+figures of gods, or any idea of prayer, had arisen--to
+attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism,
+of Initiation (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of
+a Second Birth, which we associate with fully-formed religions,
+did belong also to the age of Magic; and they all
+implied a belief in some kind of re-incarnation--in a
+life going forward continually and being renewed in birth
+again and again. It is curious that we find such a belief
+among the lowest savages even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking
+of the Central Australian tribes, says the belief is firmly
+rooted among them "that the human soul undergoes an
+endless series of re-incarnations--the living men and
+women of one generation being nothing but the spirits of their
+ancestors come to life again, and destined themselves to
+be reborn in the persons of their descendants. During
+the interval between two re-incarnations the souls live
+in their nanja spots, or local totem-centres, which are
+always natural objects such as trees or rocks. Each totem-
+clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over
+the country. There the souls of the dead men and
+women of the totem, but no others, congregate, and are born
+again in human form when a favorable opportunity presents
+itself."[2]
+
+[1] Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.
+
+[2] The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.
+
+
+And what the early people believed of the human spirit,
+they believed of the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation
+spirits also. At the great Spring-ritual among the primitive
+Greeks "the tribe and the growing earth were renovated
+together: the earth arises afresh from her dead seeds,
+the tribe from its dead ancestors." And the whole
+process projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who
+"in the first stage is living, then dies with each year, and
+thirdly rises again from the dead, raising the whole dead
+world with him. The Greeks called him in this stage 'The
+Third One' [Tritos Soter] or 'the Saviour'; and the renovation
+ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the
+old year, the old garments, and everything that is polluted
+by the infection of death."[1] Thus the multiplication
+of the crops and the renovation of the tribe, and
+at the same time the evasion and placation of death,
+were all assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial
+magic.[2]
+
+[1] Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.
+
+[2] It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of
+the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or
+male members of those who died were deposited in the
+above-mentioned nanja spots--the idea evidently being that like
+the seeds of the corn the seeds of the human crop must be
+carefully and ceremonially preserved for their re-incarnation.
+
+
+In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--
+of the magical worship of Bulls and Bears and
+Rams and Cats and Emus and Kangaroos, of Trees and
+Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the spirit of
+the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of
+the ground--there is still the same idea or moving inspiration,
+the sense mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the
+feeling (hardly yet conscious of its own meaning) of
+intimate relationship and unity with all this outer world,
+the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed
+by the spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual,
+the right word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An
+aura of emotion surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu,
+of fascination, of desire. The world, to these people,
+was transparent with presences related to themselves;
+and though hunger and sex may have been the dominant
+and overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their
+outlook on the world was essentially poetic and imaginative.
+
+Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and
+the belief in spirits, though there was an intense sense of
+every thing being alive, the gods, in the more modern
+sense of the world, hardly existed[1]--that is, there was no
+very clear vision, to these people, of supra-mundane beings,
+sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of earth, as
+it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was
+slowly evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time
+being--though there might be orders and degrees of spirits
+(and of gods)--every such being was only conceived of,
+and could only be conceived of, as actually a part of
+Nature, dwelling in and interlaced with some phenomenon
+of Earth and Sky, and having no separate existence.
+
+[1] For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,
+see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.
+
+
+How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in
+separate and separable gods and goddesses--each with his
+or her well-marked outline and character and function, like
+the divinities of Greece, or of India, or of the Egyptian
+or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To this question
+Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an
+ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations
+(in the Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined
+to adopt. It is that the figures of the supranatural gods arose
+from a process in the human mind similar
+to that which the photographer adopts when by
+photographing a number of faces on the same plate, and
+so superposing their images on one another, he produces a
+so-called "composite" photograph or image. Thus, in the
+photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members of
+the same family superposed upon one another may produce
+a composite image or ideal of that family type,
+or the portraits of a number of Aztecs or of a number of
+Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the Aztec or of
+the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each
+member of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors
+or Priests or wise and gracious Women of that
+tribe did inevitably combine at last to composite figures
+of gods and goddesses--on whom the enthusiasm and
+adoration of the tribe was concentrated.[1] Miss Harrison
+has ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic
+rituals of the past--being the figures on which all eyes
+would be concentrated; and whose importance would be
+imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to this process.
+The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified, recurring
+year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand
+ritual processions, would at last be dramatized and
+idealized in the great race-consciousness into the form
+of a Suffering God--a Jesus Christ or a Dionysus or
+Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of
+mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the
+succession of Priests or Medicine-Men--whose figures
+would recur again and again as leaders and ordainers of the
+ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the composite-
+image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic
+powers. "Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have
+shown us in abundance the early Greek medicine-chiefs
+making thunder and lightning and rain." Here is the
+germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man
+may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual
+representative of the glorified and composite being
+who exists in the mind of the tribe (just as a present-day
+King may be unworthy, but is surrounded all the same by
+the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real <gr qeos>,
+tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in
+clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain.
+If the mountain is once climbed the god will
+move to the upper sky. The medicine-chief meanwhile
+stays on earth, still influential. He has some connection
+with the great god more intimate than that of other
+men . . . he knows the rules for approaching him and making
+prayers to him."[2] Thus did the Medicine-man, or Priest,
+or Magician (for these are but three names for
+one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the
+god.
+
+[1] See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions
+of the Race-Life."
+
+[2] The Four Stages, p. 140.
+
+
+And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may
+trace (as in chapter iv above) the divinization or deification
+of four-footed animals and birds and snakes and
+trees and the like, from the personification of the collective
+emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For
+people whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose
+totem was a bear, and who believed themselves descended
+from an ursine ancestor, there would grow up in the
+tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of emotions--
+emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude
+and so forth--an image of a divine Bear in whom
+they lived and moved and had their being. For another
+tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or a Lamb
+or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same
+way spring tip the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or
+a sacred kangaroo. Another group again might come to
+worship a Serpent as its presiding genius, or a particular
+kind of Tree, simply because these objects were and had
+been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly and seasonal
+Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo
+(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the
+totem-animal or priest or magician-chief gradually invested
+him with Awe and Divinity.
+
+According to this theory the god--the full-grown god in
+human shape, dwelling apart and beyond the earth--did
+not come first, but was a late and more finished product
+of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of the preceding
+animal-worships and totem-systems. And this
+theory is much supported and corroborated by the fact that
+in a vast number of early cults the gods are represented by
+human figures with animal heads. The Egyptian religion
+was full of such divinities--the jackal-headed Anubis,
+the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or
+Muth, queen of darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos
+and the Minotaur in Crete; in Greece, Athena with an owl's
+head, or Herakles masked in the hide and jaws of
+a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that,
+following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest
+or medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic
+ritual should don the skin and head of that animal, and
+wear the same as a kind of mask--this partly in order to
+appear to the people as the true representative of the totem,
+and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the
+magic virtues and mana of the beast, which he could
+then duly impart to the crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered,
+wears the aegis, or goat-skin--said to be the hide
+of the goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy; there
+are a number of legends which connected the Arcadian
+Artemis with the worship of the bear, Apollo with the wolf,
+and so forth. And, most curious as showing similarity
+of rites between the Old and New Worlds, there are
+found plenty of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in
+religious processions among the native tribes of both
+North and South America. In the Atlas of Spix and
+Martius (who travelled together in the Amazonian forests
+about 1820) there is an understanding and characteristic
+picture of the men (and some women) of the tribe of the
+Tecunas moving in procession through the woods mostly
+naked, except for wearing animal heads and masks--
+the masks representing Cranes of various kinds, Ducks, the
+Opossum, the Jaguar, the Parrot, etc., probably symbolic of
+their respective clans.
+
+By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed,
+the forms of the Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual
+figures of men and women, of youths and girls, who year
+after year took part in the ancient rituals. Just as the Queen
+of the May or Father Christmas with us are idealized forms
+derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded
+old men who took leading parts in the May or December
+mummings and thus gained their apotheosis in our
+literature and tradition--so doubtless Zeus with his thunderbolts
+and arrows of lightning is the idealization into Heaven
+of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares
+the god of War, the similar idealization of the leading warrior
+in the ritual war-dance preceding an attack on a neighboring
+tribe; and Mercury of the foot-running Messenger
+whose swiftness in those days (devoid of steam or electricity)
+was so precious a tribal possession.
+
+And here it must be remembered that this explanation of
+the genesis of the gods only applies to the SHAPES and FIGURES
+of the various deities. It does not apply to the genesis
+of the widespread belief in spirits or a Great Spirit
+generally; that, as I think will become clear, has quite another
+source. Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or
+'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his
+contemplation of the forces of Nature or his imaginations
+of religion and the gods. With a kind of superior pity they
+speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored mind sees
+God in clouds and hears him in the wind." But I must confess
+that to me the "poor Indian" seems on the whole
+to show more good sense than his critics, and to have aimed
+his rude arrows at the philosophic mark more successfully
+than a vast number of his learned and scientific
+successors. A consideration of what we have said above
+would show that early people felt their unity with Nature
+so deeply and intimately that--like the animals themselves--
+they did not think consciously or theorize about it.
+It was just their life to be--like the beasts of
+the field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole
+flux of things, non-differentiated so to speak. What more
+natural or indeed more logically correct than for them to
+assume (when they first began to think or differentiate
+themselves) that these other creatures, these birds, beasts
+and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same
+blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and
+having the same interior nature? What more reasonable
+(if indeed they credited THEMSELVES with having some kind
+of soul or spirit) than to credit these other creatures with
+a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the Guiana
+Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with
+beings." Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored
+mind--unless indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense
+of the Schools--but rather a very directly perceptive
+mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing that these
+people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution)
+than that they should pay great reverence to some ideal
+animal--first cousin or ancestor--who played an important
+part in their tribal existence, and make of this
+animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?
+
+And, further still, what more natural than that when the
+tribe passed to some degree beyond the animal stage and
+began to realize a life more intelligent and emotional--more
+specially human in fact--than that of the beasts of
+the field, that it should then in its rituals and ceremonies
+throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior
+and more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness
+of its own intimate quality, and still deeply
+penetrated with the sense of its kinship to external nature,
+it would inevitably and perfectly logically credit the
+latter with an inner life and intelligence, more distinctly
+human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE
+'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this
+is a process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding
+a certain parenthesis in the process, due to obvious
+elements in our 'Civilization' and to the temporary
+and fallacious domination of a leaden-eyed so-called
+'Science.' According to this view the true evolution of
+Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded
+not by the denial by man of his unity with the world,
+but by his seeing and understanding that unity more deeply.
+And the more deeply he understands himself the more certainly
+he will recognize in the external world a Being or
+beings resembling himself.
+
+W. H. Hudson--whose mind is certainly not of a quality
+to be jeered at--speaks of Animism as "the projection
+of ourselves into nature: the sense and apprehension of an
+intelligence like our own, but more powerful, in all visible
+things"; and continues, "old as I am this same primitive
+faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood,
+still persists, and in those early years was so powerful
+that I am almost afraid to say how deeply I was moved
+by it."[1] Nor will it be quite forgotten that Shelley
+once said:--
+
+ The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
+ Is active living spirit. Every grain
+ Is sentient both in unity and part,
+ And the minutest atom comprehends
+ A world of loves and hatreds.
+
+[1] Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.
+
+
+The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism
+is I say inevitable, and perfectly logical. But the great
+value of the work done by some of those investigators whom
+I have quoted has been to show that among quite primitive
+people (whose interior life and 'soul-sense' was only
+very feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature
+were correspondingly feeble. The reflections of themselves
+projected into the world beyond could not reach the stature of
+eternal 'gods,' but were rather of the quality of ephemeral
+phantoms and ghosts; and the ceremonials and creeds
+of that period are consequently more properly described
+as, Magic than as Religion. There have indeed
+been great controversies as to whether there has or has
+not been, in the course of religious evolution, a PRE-
+animistic stage. Probably of course human evolution in
+this matter must have been perfectly continuous from
+stages presenting the very feeblest or an absolutely deficient
+animistic sense to the very highest manifestations
+of anthropomorphism; but as there is a good deal of
+evidence to show that ANIMALS (notably dogs and horses)
+see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly to be enlarged so
+far as to include the pre-human species. Anyhow it must
+be remembered that the question is one of CONSCIOUSNESS--
+that is, of how far and to what degree consciousness of self
+has been developed in the animal or the primitive man
+or the civilized man, and therefore how far and to what
+degree the animal or human creature has credited the outside
+world with a similar consciousness. It is not a question
+of whether there IS an inner life and SUB-consciousness common
+to all these creatures of the earth and sky, because
+that, I take it, is a fact beyond question; they all emerge
+or have emerged from the same matrix, and are rooted in
+identity; but it is a question of how far they are AWARE of
+this, and how far by separation (which is the genius of
+evolution) each individual creature has become conscious
+of the interior nature both of itself and of the other
+creatures AND of the great whole which includes them all.
+
+Finally, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that
+Anthropomorphism, in man's conception of the gods, is
+itself of course only a stage and destined to pass away.
+In so far, that is, as the term indicates a belief in divine
+beings corresponding to our PRESENT conception of ourselves
+--that is as separate personalities having each a separate
+and limited character and function, and animated by
+the separatist motives of ambition, possession, power,
+vainglory, superiority, patronage, self-greed, self-satisfaction,
+etc.--in so far as anthropomorphism is the expression
+of that kind of belief it is of course destined,
+with the illusion from which it springs, to pass away. When
+man arrives at the final consciousness in which the idea of
+such a self, superior or inferior or in any way antagonistic
+to others, ceases to operate, then he will return to
+his first and primal condition, and will cease to need ANY
+special religion or gods, knowing himself and all his fellows
+to be divine and the origin and perfect fruition of all.
+
+
+
+VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
+
+There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably
+beautiful book The Story of my Heart--a passage well known
+to all lovers of that prose-poet--in which he figures
+himself standing "in front of the Royal Exchange
+where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory,"
+and pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery
+of life. "Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed," he says,
+"is there any system of culture, any formulated method, able
+to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool
+of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
+they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere
+illusion of the craving heart--something real, as real as
+the solid walls of fact against which, like seaweed, they
+are dashed; something to give each separate personality
+sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something
+to shape this million-handed labor to an end and
+outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers
+to those who must succeed? Something real now, and
+not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and
+the sun burns. . . . Full well aware that all has failed, yet,
+side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there
+lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning
+like the sun, that there is yet something to be
+found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought
+from the immense forces of the universe."
+
+In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand
+times No! there is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or
+formulated method which will meet or ever satisfy the
+demand of each separate item of the human whirlpool."
+And happy are we to know there is no such thing!
+How terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew
+the history of religion and philosophy and the political
+and social paths of human endeavor HAD been found
+absolutely correct and universally applicable--so that every
+human being would be compelled to pass through its
+machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under
+its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no
+theory or creed or system; and yet there is something--
+as Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great
+longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root of
+all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It
+is the CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep
+down within us: it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in
+Omnipresence and Eternity.
+
+The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the
+last chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic
+or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly
+brutish or serenely ideal and abstract--are essentially
+projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are
+anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will
+catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and
+phantoms of the mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on
+the background of Nature, and having no real substance or
+solid value. The history of Religion (they will say) is a
+history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over
+it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these
+cat-faced Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte
+and Baal and Indra and Agni and Kali and Demeter
+and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus Christ and
+Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards
+onto a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes
+them all tend to be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they
+each and all inevitably pass away. Why waste time over
+them?"
+
+And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at
+the matter. These gods and creeds ARE only projections
+of the human mind. But all the same it misses, does this
+view, the essential fact. It misses the fact that there
+is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of
+a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not
+directly see it) as well as the existence of a solid form which
+intercepts that light. Deep, deep in the human mind there is
+that burning blazing light of the world-consciousness--
+so deep indeed that the vast majority of individuals are
+hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned outwards is
+held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions
+passing across their sky; they are unaware that the
+latter are only shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting
+their own minds.[1] The vast majority of people have
+never observed their own minds; their own mental forms.
+They have only observed the reflections cast by these.
+Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three
+degrees of reality. There are the mere shadows--the
+least real and most evanescent; there are the actual
+mental outlines of humanity (and of the individual), much
+more real, but themselves also of course slowly changing;
+and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which
+lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the
+glorious light of the world-consciousness. Of this last it
+may be said that it never changes. Every thing is
+known to it--even the very IMPEDIMENTS to its shining.
+But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light
+that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that
+the things of this world and of humanity, though real in
+their degree, have chiefly a kind of negative value; they
+are opaquenesses, clouds, materialisms, ignorances, and the
+inner light falling upon them gradually reveals their negative
+character and gradually dissolves them away till they
+are lost in the extreme and eternal Splendor. I think
+Jefferies, when he asked that question with which I have
+begun this chapter, was in some sense subconsciously,
+if not quite consciously, aware of the answer. His frequent
+references to the burning blazing sun throughout
+The Story of the Heart seem to be an indication of his real
+deep-down attitude of mind.
+
+[1] See, in the same connection, Plato's allegory of the Cave,
+Republic,Book vii.
+
+
+The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away
+truly like ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent
+in their study is wasted, is a mistake, for they have
+value as being indications of things much more real than
+themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human
+mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque
+and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel,
+and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over
+the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world
+is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at
+the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite
+stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly
+it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and
+a necessary step in the great process; and certainly it
+was opaque and brutish, but it is through the opaque
+things of the world, and not through the transparent,
+that we become aware of the light.
+
+It may be worth while to give instances of how some early
+rituals and creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous
+or preposterous, were really the indications of important
+moral and social conceptions evolving in the heart of
+man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected
+with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such
+innumerable examples are now to be found in the modern
+books on Anthropology. If we assume, as I have done
+more than once, that the earliest state of Man was one
+in which he did not consciously separate himself from
+the world, animate and inanimate, which surrounded him,
+then (as I have also said) it was perfectly natural for
+him to take some animal which bulked large on his horizon--
+some food-animal for instance--and to pay respect to
+it as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor
+and totem-symbol; or, seeing the boundless blessing of
+the cornfields, to believe in some kind of spirit of the
+corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical ghost) which,
+reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind
+from famine. But then no sooner had he done this than
+he was bound to perceive that in cutting down the
+corn or in eating his totem-bear or kangaroo he was slaying
+his own best self and benefactor. In that instant the
+consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some undefined
+yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in.
+If, before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the
+simple purpose of multiplying the animal or, vegetable
+forms of his food, now in addition his magical endeavor
+would be turned to averting the just wrath of the spirits
+who animated these forms--just indeed, for the rudest savage
+would perceive the wrong done and the probability of
+its retribution. Clearly the wrong done could only be expiated
+by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind on the part of
+the man, or the tribe--that is by the offering to the totem-
+animal or to the corn-spirit of some victim whom these
+nature powers in their turn could feed upon and assimilate.
+In this way the nature-powers would be appeased,
+the sense of unity would be restored, and the first At-one-ment
+effected.
+
+It is hardly necessary to recite in any detail the cruel and
+hideous sacrifices which have been perpetrated in this
+sense all over the world, sometimes in appeasement of
+a wrong committed or supposed to have been committed by the tribe
+or some member of it, sometimes in placation
+or for the averting of death, or defeat, or plague,
+sometimes merely in fulfilment of some long-standing
+custom of forgotten origin--the flayings and floggings and
+burnings and crucifixions of victims without end, carried
+out in all deliberation and solemnity of established ritual.
+I have mentioned some cases connected with the sowing
+of the corn. The Bible is full of such things, from
+the intended sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham,
+to the actual crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews. The first-
+born sons were claimed by a god who called himself
+"jealous" and were only to be redeemed by a substitute.[1]
+Of the Canaanites it was said that "even their daughters
+they have BURNT in the fire to their gods";[2] and of the
+King of Moab, that when he saw his army in danger of
+defeat, "he took his eldest son that should have reigned
+in his stead and offered him for a burnt-offering on the
+wall!"[3] Dr. Frazer[4] mentions the similar case of the
+Carthaginians (about B.C. 300) sacrificing two hundred children
+of good family as a propitiation to Baal and to
+save their beloved city from the assaults of the Sicilian
+tyrant Agathocles. And even so we hear that on that
+occasion three hundred more young folk VOLUNTEERED to
+die for the fatherland.
+
+[1] Exodus xxxiv. 20.
+
+[2] Deut. xii. 31.
+
+[3] 2 Kings iii. 27.
+
+[4] The Golden Bough, vol. "The Dying God," p. 167.
+
+
+The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to
+their gods Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are
+described in much detail by Sahagun, the Spanish missionary
+of the sixteenth century. The victims were mostly
+prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered
+by thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol
+or figure of the god as largely plated with gold and
+holding his hands palm upward and in a downward
+sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The
+children, who had previously been borne in triumphal state
+on litters over the crowd and decorated with every ornamental
+device of feathers and flowers and wings, were
+placed one by one on the vast hands and ROLLED DOWN into
+the flames--as if the god were himself offering them.[1] As
+the procession approached the temple, the members of
+it wept and danced and sang, and here again the abundance
+of tears was taken for a good augury of rain.[2]
+
+[1] It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the
+sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is
+related concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage
+(see Diodorus Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould's Religious
+Belief, vol. i, p. 375).
+
+[2] "A los ninos que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para
+llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevabos en unas literas sobre los
+hombros, estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores:
+iban tanendo, cantando y bailando delante de ellos . . . Cuando
+Ileviban los ninos a matar, si llevaban y echaban muchos
+lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los llevaban porque tomaban
+pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas en aquel ano."
+Sahagun, Historia Nueva Espana, Bk. II, ch. i.
+
+
+Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous
+figures--that of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid
+with gold and precious stones; and beside it were "braziers,
+wherein burned the hearts of three Indians, torn
+from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and
+the savor of incense were the sacrifice."
+
+Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account
+of the sacrifice of a perfect youth at Easter-time--which
+date Sabagun connects with the Christian festival of the
+Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had been held
+in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the
+god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every
+luxury and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four
+courtesans as he desired) had been granted him. At the last
+and on the fatal day, leaving his companions and his worshipers
+behind, be slowly ascended the Temple staircase; stripping
+on each step the ornaments from his body; and breaking
+and casting away his flutes and other musical
+instruments; till, reaching the summit, he was stretched,
+curved on his back, and belly upwards, over the altar
+stone, while the priest with obsidian knife cut his breast
+open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet beating,
+as an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and
+while the heart still lived, his successor for the next year
+was chosen.
+
+In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the
+similar offering of a woman to a goddess. In both cases
+(he explains) of young man or young woman, the victims
+were richly adorned in the guise of the god or
+goddess to whom they were offered, and at the same time
+great largesse of food was distributed to all who needed.
+[Here we see the connection in the general mind between
+the gift of food (by the gods) and the sacrifice of precious
+blood (by the people).] More than once Sahagun mentions
+that the victims in these Mexican ceremonials not infrequently
+offered THEMSELVES as a voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott
+says[1] that the offering of one's life to the gods was
+"sometimes voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening
+a sure passage into Paradise."
+
+[1] Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+
+
+Dr. Frazer describes[1] the far-back Babylonian festival
+of the Sacaea in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was
+dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne,
+allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink
+and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the king's concubines."
+But at the end of the five days he was stripped
+of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It
+is certainly astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing
+among peoples so far removed in space and time
+as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D. and the Babylonians
+perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know
+that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim
+attired as a king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has especially
+made his own, and for further information on it his classic
+work should be consulted.
+
+[1] Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. See also S. Reinach,
+Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.
+
+
+Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes
+largely from Sahagun, and summarizes his conclusions in
+the following passage: "The general theory of worship was
+the adoration of a deity, first by innumerable human
+sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for the male
+gods, of a WOMAN for each goddess.[1] The latter victims
+were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the
+divinities in, each case; for no system of worship carried
+farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice
+[? victim], and of both with the officiating priest. The
+connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the
+newly-flayed skins of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt
+and Assyria, the fawn-skin or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-
+skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an
+image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided
+into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those
+who communicated."[2]
+
+[1] Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally
+connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed
+and the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and
+the Horae. It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from
+all guilt and avert the wrath of the god [the Sun]. A man and a
+woman, as representing the male and female population, were led
+about with a garland of figs [fertility] round their necks, to
+the sound of flutes and singing. They were then scourged,
+sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore. (Nettleship
+and Sandys.)
+
+[2] A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.
+
+
+Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know
+a mere thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human
+sacrifice all over the world. We hold up our hands
+in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli dropping children
+from his fingers into the flames, but we have to remember
+that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content
+to describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about
+the floor of Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did
+Augustine worship? The Being who could condemn children
+to such a fate was certainly no better than the Mexican Idol.
+
+And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some
+by no means unworthy conceptions of the greatness of
+his God. In the same way the Aztecs were in many
+respects a refined and artistic people, and their religion was
+not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of
+them[1] that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord
+"omnipresent, knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without
+whom Man is as nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God,
+of perfect perfection and purity, under whose wings we
+find repose and a sure defence." How can we reconcile
+St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the
+religious belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties?
+Perhaps we can only reconcile them by remembering
+out of what deeps of barbarism and what nightmares
+of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and
+is even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also
+that the ancient ceremonies and rituals of Magic and
+Fear remained on and were cultivated by the multitude in
+each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits had
+attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that
+even to the present day in each individual the Old and the
+New are for a long period thus intricately intertangled. It
+is hard to believe that the practice of human and animal
+sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should have been
+cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe
+out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at
+any rate to the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding
+and convincing. To-day [1918] we are witnessing
+in the Great European War a carnival of human slaughter
+which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke
+all the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical
+ages; and when we ask the why and wherefore of this
+horrid spectacle we are told, apparently in all sincerity, and
+by both the parties engaged, of the noble objects and commanding
+moralities which inspire and compel it. We can hardly,
+in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness
+of the plea, so why should we do so in the former
+case? In both cases we perceive that underneath the
+surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and was the
+great urging and commanding force.
+
+[1] Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.
+
+
+The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent--if you
+once allow for the overwhelming sway of fear--perfectly
+reasonable views of human conduct, adopted instinctively
+by mankind since the earliest times. If in a moment of
+danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your
+brother tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you
+'sinned' against him; and naturally you expiated the
+sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind made to the
+one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice
+were the very foundation of social life and human morality,
+and must have sprung up as soon as ever, in the course
+of evolution, man became CAPABLE of differentiating himself
+from his fellows and regarding his own conduct as that of
+a 'separate self.' It was in the very conception of a
+separate self that 'sin' and disunity first began; and it
+was by 'sacrifice' that unity and harmony were restored,
+appeasement and atonement effected.
+
+But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated
+more than once, man felt himself intimately related not
+only to his brother tribesman, but to the animals and to
+general Nature. It was not so much that he THOUGHT thus
+as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously
+that he was a part of all this outer world. And so he
+adopted for his totems or presiding spirits every possible
+animal, as we have seen, and all sorts of nature-phenomena,
+such as rain and fire and water and clouds, and sun, moon and
+stars--which WE consider quite senseless and inanimate.
+Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he
+felt the same compunction as I have described him feeling
+towards his brother tribesmen. He could sin against
+them too. He could sin against his totem-animal by
+eating it; he could sin against his 'brother the ox' by consuming
+its strength in the labor of the plough; he could
+sin against the corn by cutting it down and grinding
+it into flour, or against the precious and beautiful pine-
+tree by laying his axe to its roots and converting it into
+mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he
+could sin against elemental nature. This might be more
+difficult to be certain of, but when the signs of elemental
+displeasure were not to be mistaken--when the rain withheld
+itself for months, or the storms and lightning dealt death
+and destruction, when the crops failed or evil plagues afflicted
+mankind--then there could be little uncertainty that he had
+sinned; and Fear, which had haunted him like a demon from
+the first day when he became conscious of his separation
+from his fellows and from Nature, stood over him and urged
+to dreadful propitiations.
+
+In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious
+thing. We have seen that to atone for the cutting-down
+of the corn a human victim would often be
+slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of this, for
+wherever the blood and remains of the victim were
+strewn the corn always sprang up more plentifully. The
+tribe or human group made reparation thus to the corn; the
+corn-spirit signified approval. The 'sin' was expiated and
+harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was voluntarily
+offered by a tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot
+or otherwise; sometimes the victim was a slave, or a
+captive enemy; sometimes even an animal. All that
+did not so much matter. The main thing was that the
+formal expiation had been carried out, and the wrath
+of the spirits averted.
+
+It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the
+bear felt it necessary to kill and cat a bear occasionally;
+but they could not do this without a sense of guilt, and some
+fear of vengeance from the great Bear-spirit. So they
+ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which the
+tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community
+with their totem and with each other. And since they could
+not make any reparation directly to the slain animal itself
+AFTER its death, they made their reparation BEFORE, bringing
+all sorts of presents and food to it for a long anterior period,
+and paying every kind of worship and respect to it. The
+same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia,
+in some of the cities of Greece as I have already
+mentioned, the actual bull sacrificed was the handsomest
+and most carefully nurtured that could be obtained; it
+was crowned with flowers and led in procession with
+every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I
+have already pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead
+of a bull or a goat or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated,
+it was a custom (which can be traced very widely over the
+world) to feed and indulge and honor the victim to
+the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony,
+arraying him often as a king and placing a crown
+upon his head, by way of acknowledgment of the noble
+and necessary work he was doing for the general
+good.
+
+What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging
+especially to the North of Syria, and lands where
+the pine is so beneficent and beloved a tree--the mourning
+ceremony of the death and burial of Attis! when a
+pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow
+an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the
+young Attis was placed. Could any symbolism express more
+tenderly the idea that the glorious youth--who represented
+Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk of Winter--
+was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree?[1] At
+some earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed
+and his body bound within the pine; but now it was
+deemed sufficient for the maidens to sing their wild songs
+of lamentation; and for the priests and male enthusiasts
+to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice
+(as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering
+of their virile organs--symbols of fertility in return
+for the promised and expected renewal of Nature and
+the crops in the coming Spring. For the ceremony, as
+we have already seen, did not end with death and lamentation,
+but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or
+two to a festival of resurrection, when it was discovered--
+just as in the case of Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin
+was empty, and the immortal life had flown. How strange
+the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the
+story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life
+made in order to bring salvation to men and expiation of
+sins, the crowning of the victim, and arraying in royal
+attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to
+a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty
+coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in what
+numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same
+parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated,
+and how it had ultimately come down to bring
+its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian
+city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.
+
+[1] See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris
+Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea
+caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In
+Isiacis sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci
+media pars subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum
+idolum Osiridis sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in
+effigiem virginis formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem
+fuerit illata, quadraginta noctibus pIangitur, quadragesima vero
+nocte comburitur."
+
+
+Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form
+bears with it the consciousness of the presence of beings
+whom we may call gods, it is important to remember that in many
+or most of its earlier forms, though it dealt in 'spirits'--the
+spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the Spring,
+or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits
+of totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea
+of gods. It had not risen to the conception of eternal
+deities sitting apart and governing the world in solemn
+conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus or the recesses
+of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its
+inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and
+Sacrifice, or of Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call
+it--was evolved perfectly naturally out of the human mind
+when brought face to face with Life and Nature) at
+some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was essentially
+the result of man's deep, original and instinctive
+sense of solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied
+and to some degree broken up by the growth and conscious
+insistence of the self-regarding impulses. It was
+the consciousness of disharmony and disunity, causing
+men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the
+need of reconciliation. It was a realization of union
+made clear by its very loss. It assumed of course,
+in a subconscious way as I have already indicated, that the
+external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds similar
+to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident
+that the particular theories current in this or that place about
+the nature of the world--the theories, as we should say,
+of science or theology--did not alter the general outlines
+of the creed; they only colored its details and gave
+its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental attitudes,
+for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the
+Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern
+and pious Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross
+are really almost exactly the same. I mention this because
+in tracing the origins or the evolution of religions it is
+important to distinguish clearly what is essential and
+universal from that which is merely local and temporary.
+Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons
+just made; but surely it is much more inspiriting and
+encouraging to think that whatever progress HAS been
+made in the religious outlook of the world has come about
+through the gradual mental growth and consent of the peoples,
+rather than through some unique and miraculous event
+of a rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which
+indeed might never be repeated, and concerning which
+it would perhaps be impious to suggest that it SHOULD
+be repeated.
+
+The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from
+the life of the whole), and of restoration or redemption
+through Sacrifice, seems to have disclosed itself in the human
+race in very far-back times, and to have symbolized itself
+in some most ancient rituals; and if we are shocked
+sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those
+rituals, yet we must allow that these barbarities show
+how intensely the early people felt the solemnity and
+importance of the whole matter; and we must allow too
+that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into
+rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of
+Sacrifice, and with a result perhaps which could not have
+been compassed in any other way.
+
+For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very
+essence of social life. "It is expedient that ONE man
+should die for the people"; and not only that one man
+should actually die, but (what is far more important) that
+each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that
+cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken
+in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived
+in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable
+thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it does.
+All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain
+and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in
+Nature or Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness
+to suffer on our part. If Christianity has any real
+essence, that essence is perhaps expressed in some such
+ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim
+beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs
+of savages coming down from a time anterior to all recorded
+history.
+
+
+
+VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
+
+We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions
+of Sin and Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely
+remote past, and embodied among the various peoples
+of the world sometimes in crude and bloodthirsty rites,
+sometimes in symbols and rituals of a gentler and more
+gracious character, descended at last into Christianity and
+became a part of its creed and of the creed of the
+modern world. On the whole perhaps we may trace a
+slow amelioration in this process and may flatter ourselves
+that the Christian centuries exhibit a more philosophical
+understanding of what Sin is, and a more humane conception
+of what Sacrifice SHOULD be, than the centuries
+preceding. But I fear tht any very decided statement
+or sweeping generalization to that effect would be--to
+say the least--rash. Perhaps there IS a very slow amelioration;
+but the briefest glance at the history of the Christian
+churches--the horrible rancours and revenges of the
+clergy and the sects against each other in the fourth
+and fifth centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting crusades at
+Beziers and other places and the massacres of the Albigenses
+in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the witch-findings
+and burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth, the hideous
+science-urged and bishop-blessed warfare of the twentieth
+--horrors fully as great as any we can charge to the account
+of the Aztecs or the Babylonians--must give us pause.
+Nor must we forget that if there is by chance a substantial
+amelioration in our modern outlook with regard to these
+matters the same had begun already before the advent
+of Christianity and can by no means be ascribed to any
+miraculous influence of that religion. Abraham was
+prompted to slay a ram as a substitute for his son, long
+before the Christians were thought of; the rather savage
+Artemis of the old Greek rites was (according to Pausanias)[1]
+honored by the yearly sacrifice of a perfect boy and girl,
+but later it was deemed sufficient to draw a knife across their
+throats as a symbol, with the result of spilling only a
+few drops of their blood, or to flog the boys (with the
+same result) upon her altar. Among the Khonds in old
+days many victims (meriahs) were sacrificed to the gods,
+"but in time the man was replaced by a horse, the horse by
+a bull, the bull by a ram, the ram by a kid, the kid
+by fowls, and the fowls by many flowers."[2] At one time,
+according to the Yajur-Veda, there was a festival at which
+one hundred and twenty-five victims, men and women,
+boys and girls, were sacrificed; "but reform supervened,
+and now the victims were bound as before to the stake,
+but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (god)
+Narayana, the sacrificing priest brandished a knife and
+--severed the bonds of the captives."[3] At the Athenian festival
+of the Thargelia, to which I referred in the last chapter,
+it appears that the victims, in later times, instead of being
+slain, were tossed from a height into the sea, and after
+being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas
+a similar festival the fall of the victim was
+graciously broken by tying feathers and even living birds to
+his body.[4]
+
+[1] vii. 19, and iii. 8, 16.
+
+[2] Primitive Folk, by Elie Reclus (Contemp. Science Series), p.
+330.
+
+[3] Ibid.
+
+[4] Muller's Dorians Book II, ch. ii, par. 10.
+
+
+With the lapse of time and the general progress of mankind, we
+may, I think, perceive some such slow ameliorations
+in the matter of the brutality and superstition of the old
+religions. How far any later ameliorations were due to
+the direct influence of Christianity might be a difficult
+question; but what I think we can clearly see--and what
+especially interests us here--is that in respect to its main
+religious ideas, and the matter underlying them (exclusive
+of the MANNER of their treatment, which necessarily has varied
+among different peoples) Christianity is of one piece
+with the earlier pagan creeds and is for the most part a
+re-statement and renewed expression of world-wide doctrines
+whose first genesis is lost in the haze of the past, beyond all
+recorded history.
+
+I have illustrated this view with regard to the doctrine of
+Sin and Sacrifice. Let us take two or three other
+illustrations. Let us take the doctrine of Re-birth or
+Regeneration. The first few verses of St. John's Gospel are
+occupied with the subject of salvation through rebirth or
+regeneration. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
+kingdom of God." . . . "Except a man be born of water
+and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."
+Our Baptismal Service begins by saying that "forasmuch as all
+men are conceived and born in sin; and that our Saviour Christ
+saith, None can enter into the kingdom of God except he be
+regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost"; therefore
+it is desirable that this child should be baptized, "received
+into Christ's Holy Church, and be made a lively member of the
+same." That, is to say, there is one birth, after the
+flesh, but a second birth is necessary, a birth after the
+Spirit and into the Church of Christ. Our Confirmation
+Service is simply a service repeating and confirming
+these views, at an age (fourteen to sixteen or so) when the
+boy or girl is capable of understanding what is being done.
+
+But our Baptismal and Confirmation ceremonies combined
+are clearly the exact correspondence and parallel
+of the old pagan ceremonies of Initiation, which are or
+have been observed in almost every primitive tribe over
+the world. "The rite of the second birth," says Jane
+Harrison,[1] "is widespread, universal, over half the savage
+world. With the savage to be twice-born is the rule. By
+his first birth he comes into the world; by his second he
+is born into his tribe. At his first birth he belongs to his
+mother and the women-folk; at his second he becomes
+a full-fledged man and passes into the society of the
+warriors of his tribe." . . . "These rites are very various,
+but they all point to one moral, that the former things are
+passed away and that the new-born man has entered upon
+a new life. Simplest of all, and most instructive, is the
+rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East Africa,
+who require that every boy, just before circumcision,
+must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy
+crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the
+labour pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe
+and is washed."[2]
+
+[1] Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.
+
+[2] See also Themis, p. 21.
+
+
+Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one
+who "enters in." He enters into the Tribe; he enters into
+the revelation of certain Mysteries; he becomes an associate
+of a certain Totem, a certain God; a member
+of a new Society, or Church--a church of Mithra, or Dionysus
+or Christ. To do any of these things he must be
+born again; be must die to the old life; he must pass
+through ceremonials which symbolize the change. One
+of these ceremonials is washing. As the new-born babe
+is washed, so must the new-born initiate be washed; and
+as by primitive man (and not without reason) BLOOD was
+considered the most vital and regenerative of fluids, the
+very elixir of life, so in earliest times it was common to
+wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be born
+anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first
+die. So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged,
+and baptized with his own blood, or, in cases, one of
+the candidates was really killed and his blood used
+as a substitute for the blood of the others. No doubt
+HUMAN sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later
+it was sufficient to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as
+in the Mithra cult,[1] or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb'
+as in the Christian phraseology. Finally, with a growing
+sense of decency and aesthetic perception among the
+various peoples, washing with pure water came in the
+initiation-ceremonies to take the place of blood; and our
+baptismal service has reduced the ceremony to a mere
+sprinkling with water.[2]
+
+[1] See ch. iii.
+
+[2] For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck's
+Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.
+
+
+To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: "More
+often the new birth is stimulated, or imagined, as a death
+and a resurrection, either of the boys themselves or of
+some one else in their presence. Thus at initiation among
+some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are
+assembled an old man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies
+down in a grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and
+earth, and the grave is smoothed over. The buried man
+holds in his hand a small bush which seems to be growing
+from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the
+ground round about. The novices are then brought to the
+edge of the grave and a song is sung. Gradually, as the
+song goes on, the bush held by the buried man begins
+to quiver. It moves more and more, and bit by bit the man
+himself starts up from the grave."
+
+Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the
+actual christening we read these words, "Then shall the
+Priest say: O merciful God, grant that old Adam in
+this child may be so BURIED that the new man may
+be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may
+die in him, and that all things belonging to the Spirit may
+live and grow in him!" Can we doubt that the Australian
+medicine-man, standing at the graveside of the re-arisen old
+black-fellow, pointed the same moral to the young initiates
+as the priest does to-day to those assembled before
+him in church--for indeed we know that among
+savage tribes initiations have always been before all things
+the occasions of moral and social teaching? Can we doubt
+that he said, in substance if not in actual words: "As
+this man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise
+from your old childish life of amusement and self-gratification
+and, ENTER INTO the life of the tribe, the life of the
+Spirit of the tribe." "In totemistic societies," to quote
+Miss Harrison again, "and in the animal secret societies that
+seem to grow out of them, the novice is born again
+aS THE SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians[1]
+when a man wants to become a Lulem or 'Bear,' however cold
+the season he tears off his clothes, puts on a bear-skin
+and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or
+four days. Every night his fellow-villagers will go
+out in search parties to find him. They cry out Yi!
+Kelulem (come on, Bear), and he answers with angry growls.
+Usually they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself.
+He is met, and conducted to the ceremonial lodge,
+and there in company with the rest of the Bears dances
+solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and reappearance
+is as common a rite in initiation as stimulated
+killing and resurrection, and has the same object. Both
+are rites of transition, of passing from one to another." In
+the Christian ceremonies the boy or girl puts away
+childish things and puts on the new man, but instead of
+putting on a bear-skin he puts on Christ. There is not so
+much difference as may appear on the surface. To be identified
+with your Totem is to be identified with the
+sacred being who watches over your tribe, who has given
+his life for your tribe; it is to be born again, to be washed
+not only with water but with the Holy Spirit of all your
+fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be
+regenerated in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no
+doubt in cases it does mean this, but too often unfortunately
+it has only amounted to a pretence of religious sanction given
+to the meanest and bitterest quarrels of the Churches and
+the States.
+
+[1] Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.
+
+
+This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the
+prevalent pagan custom of subjecting the initiates to serious
+ordeals, often painful and even dangerous. If one
+is to be born again, obviously one must be ready to face
+death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One
+must be able to endure pain, like the Red Indian braves;
+to go long periods fasting and without food or drink,
+like the choupan among the Western Inoits--who, wanders
+for whole nights over the ice-fields under the moon, scantily
+clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the
+very fear of death and danger, like the Australian novices
+who, at first terrified by the sound of the bull-
+roarer and threats of fire and the knife, learn finally
+to cast their fears away.[1] By so doing one puts off
+the old childish things, and qualifies oneself by firmness
+and courage to become a worthy member of the society
+into which one is called.[2] The rules of social life are taught
+--the duty to one's tribe, and to oneself, truth-
+speaking, defence of women and children, the care of cattle,
+the meaning of sex and marriage, and even the mysteries of
+such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe
+possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new
+life. Things of the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius
+Firmicus, in describing the mysteries of the resurrection of
+Osiris,[3] says that when the worshipers had satiated themselves
+with lamentations over the death of the god then
+the priest would go round anointing them with oil and
+whispering, "Be of good cheer, O Neophytes of the new-
+arisen God, for to us too from our pains shall come
+salvation."[4]
+
+[1] According to accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western
+Australia, in their initiations, the lads were frightened by a
+large fire being lighted near them, and hearing the awful sound
+of the bull-roarers, while they were told that Dhuramoolan was
+about to burn them; the legend being that Dhuramoolan, a powerful
+being, whose voice sounded like thunder, would take the boys into
+the bush and instruct them in all the laws, traditions and
+customs of the community. So he pretended that he always killed
+the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to ashes, after which he
+moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored them to life as
+new beings. (See R. H. Matthews, "The Wiradthuri tribes," Journal
+Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxv, 1896, pp. 297 sq.)
+
+[2] See Catlin's North-American Indians, vol. i, for initiations
+and ordeals among the Mandans.
+
+[3] De Errore, c. 22.
+
+[4] <gr Qarreite, mustai ton qeou seswsmenou,>
+<gr Estai gar hmin ek ponwn swthria.>
+
+
+It would seem that at some very early time in the history
+of tribal and priestly initiations an attempt was made to
+impress upon the neophytes the existence and over-
+shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly beings. Perhaps
+the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long fastings,
+the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains
+or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty.
+The developments of this faculty among the black and
+colored peoples--East-Indian, Burmese, African, American-
+Indian, etc.--are well known. Miss Alice Fletcher, who
+lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty years, gives
+a most interesting account[1] of the general philosophy of
+that people and their rites of initiation. "The Omahas
+regard all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena,
+as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous with
+and similar to the will-power they were conscious of in
+themselves. This mysterious power in all things they
+called Wakonda, and through it all things were related
+to man and to each other. In the idea of the continuity
+of life a relation was maintained between the seen and
+the unseen, the dead and the living, and also between
+the fragment of anything and its entirety."[2] Thus an
+Omaha novice might at any time seek to obtain Wakonda
+by what was called THE RITE OF THE VISION. He would go out
+alone, fast, chant incantations, and finally fall into a
+trance (much resembling what in modern times has been called
+COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) in which he would perceive the inner
+relations of all things and the solidarity of the least object
+with the rest of the universe.
+
+[1] Summarized in Themis, pp. 68-71.
+
+[2] A. C. Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-lock, Journal
+of Anthropological Studies, xxvii (1897-8), p. 436.
+
+
+Another rite in connection with initiation, and common all
+over the pagan world--in Greece, America, Africa, Australia,
+New Mexico, etc.--was the daubing of the novice all
+over with clay or chalk or even dung, and then after a
+while removing the same.[1] The novice must have looked
+a sufficiently ugly and uncomfortable object in this state;
+but later, when he was thoroughly WASHED, the ceremony
+must have afforded a thrilling illustration of the idea of
+a new birth, and one which would dwell in the minds of
+the spectators. When the daubing was done as not infrequently
+happened with white clay or gypsum, and the
+ritual took place at night, it can easily be imagined
+that the figures of young men and boys moving about in
+the darkness would lend support to the idea that they
+were spirits belonging to some intermediate world--who
+had already passed through death and were now waiting
+for their second birth on earth (or into the tribe) which
+would be signalized by their thorough and ceremonial
+washing. It will be remembered that Herodotus (viii)
+gives a circumstantial account of how the Phocians in
+a battle with the Thessalians smeared six hundred of their
+bravest warriors with white clay so that, looking like
+supernatural beings, and falling upon the Thessalians by
+night, they terrified the latter and put them to instant
+flight.
+
+[1] See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 274 sq.
+
+
+Such then--though only very scantily described--were some
+of the rites of Initiation and Second Birth celebrated in the
+old Pagan world. The subject is far too large for adequate
+treatment within the present limits; but even so
+we cannot but be struck by the appropriateness in many
+cases of the teaching thus given to the young, the concreteness
+of the illustrations, the effectiveness of the symbols
+used, the dramatic character of the rites, the strong
+enforcement of lessons on the nature and duties of the
+life into which the candidates were about to enter. Christianity
+followed on, and inherited these traditions, but
+one feels that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation,
+which of course correspond to the Pagan Initiations,
+it falls short of the latter. Its ceremonies
+(certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries)
+are of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to
+and teaching on the immensely important subject of Sex
+is omitted, the details of social and industrial morality are
+passed by, and instruction is limited to a few rather commonplace
+lessons in general morality and religion.
+
+
+It may be appropriate here, before leaving the subject of
+the Second Birth, to inquire how it has come about that
+this doctrine--so remote and metaphysical as it might
+appear--has been taken up and embodied in their creeds
+and rituals by quite PRIMITIVE people all over the world,
+to such a degree indeed that it has ultimately been adopted
+and built into the foundations of the latter and more
+intellectual religions, like Hinduism, Mithraism, and the
+Egyptian and Christian cults. I think the answer to
+this question must be found in the now-familiar fact that
+the earliest peoples felt themselves so much a part of
+Nature and the animal and vegetable world around them
+that (whenever they thought about these matters at all)
+they never for a moment doubted that the things which
+were happening all round them in the external world were
+also happening within themselves. They saw the Sun,
+overclouded and nigh to death in winter, come to its birth
+again each year; they saw the Vegetation shoot forth
+anew in spring--the revival of the spirit of the Earth;
+the endless breeding of the Animals, the strange
+transformations of Worms and Insects; the obviously new life
+taken on by boys and girls at puberty; the same at a later
+age when the novice was transformed into the medicine-
+man--the choupan into the angakok among the Esquimaux,
+the Dacotah youth into the wakan among the Red
+Indians; and they felt in their sub-conscious way the
+same everlasting forces of rebirth and transformation working
+within themselves. In some of the Greek Mysteries
+the newly admitted Initiates were fed for some time
+after on milk only "as though we were being born
+again." (See Sallustius, quoted by Gilbert Murray.) When
+sub-conscious knowledge began to glimmer into direct
+consciousness one of the first aspects (and no doubt one of
+the truest) under which people saw life was just thus: as
+a series of rebirths and transformations.[1] The most modern
+science, I need hardly say, in biology as well as
+in chemistry and the field of inorganic Nature, supports
+that view. The savage in earliest times FELT the truth of
+some things which we to-day are only beginning intellectually
+to perceive and analyze.
+
+[1] The fervent and widespread belief in animal metamorphoses
+among early peoples is well known.
+
+
+Christianity adopted and absorbed--as it was bound
+to do--this world-wide doctrine of the second birth. Passing
+over its physiological and biological applications, it
+gave to it a fine spiritual significance--or rather it insisted
+especially on its spiritual significance, which (as we have
+seen) had been widely recognized before. Only--as I
+suppose must happen with all local religions--it narrowed
+the application and outlook of the doctrine down to a special
+case--"As in Adam all die, so in CHRIST shall all be
+made alive." The Universal Spirit which can give rebirth
+and salvation to EVERY child of man to whom it
+comes, was offered only under a very special form--that of
+Jesus Christ.[1] In this respect it was no better than the
+religions which preceded it. In some respects--that is,
+where it was especially fanatical, blinkered, and hostile to
+other sects--it was WORSE. But to those who perceive
+that the Great Spirit may bring new birth and salvation
+to some under the form of Osiris, equally well as to others
+under the form of Jesus, or again to some under the form
+of a Siberian totem-Bear equally as to others under the
+form of Osiris, these questionings and narrowings fall
+away as of no importance. We in this latter day can see
+the main thing, namely that Christianity was and is just
+one phase of a world-old religion, slowly perhaps expanding
+its scope, but whose chief attitudes and orientations have been
+the same through the centuries.
+
+[1] The same happened with regard to another great Pagan doctrine
+(to which I have just alluded), the doctrine of transformations
+and metamorphoses; and whereas the pagans believed in these
+things, as the common and possible heritage of EVERY man, the
+Christians only allowed themselves to entertain the idea in the
+special and unique instance of the Transfiguration of Christ.
+
+
+Many other illustrations might be taken of the truth of
+this view, but I will confine myself to two or three more.
+There is the instance of the Eucharist and its exceedingly
+widespread celebration (under very various forms) among
+the pagans all over the world--as well as among Christians.
+I have already said enough on this subject, and need not
+delay over it. By partaking of the sacramental meal, even
+in its wildest and crudest shapes, as in the mysteries
+of Dionysus, one was identified with and united to the
+god; in its milder and more spiritual aspects as in the Mithraic,
+Egyptian, Hindu and Christian cults, one passed behind
+the veil of maya and this ever-changing world, and entered
+into the region of divine peace and power.[1]
+
+
+[1] Baring Gould in his Orig. Relig. Belief, I. 401,
+says:--"Among the ancient Hindus Soma was a chief deity; he is
+called the Giver of Life and Health. . . . He became incarnate
+among men, was taken by them and slain, and brayed in a mortar [a
+god of corn and wine apparently]. But he rose in flame to heaven
+to be 'the Benefactor of the World' and the 'Mediator between God
+and Man!' Through communion with him in his sacrifice, man (who
+partook of this god) has an assurance of immortality, for by that
+sacrament he obtains union with his divinity."
+
+
+Or again the doctrine of the Saviour. That also is one
+on which I need not add much to what has been said already.
+The number of pagan deities (mostly virgin-born and
+done to death in some way or other in their efforts to
+save mankind) is so great[1] as to be difficult to keep
+account of. The god Krishna in India, the god Indra
+in Nepaul and Thibet, spilt their blood for the salvation
+of men; Buddha said, according to Max Muller,[2] "Let all
+the sins that were in the world fall on me, that the world
+may be delivered"; the Chinese Tien , the Holy One--"one
+with God and existing with him from all eternity"--died
+to save the world; the Egyptian Osiris was called Saviour,
+so was Horus; so was the Persian Mithras; so was
+the Greek Hercules who overcame Death though his body
+was consumed in the burning garment of mortality, out of
+which he rose into heaven. So also was the Phrygian
+Attis called Saviour, and the Syrian Tammuz or Adonis
+likewise--both of whom, as we have seen, were nailed
+or tied to a tree, and afterwards rose again from their
+biers, or coffins. Prometheus, the greatest and earliest
+benefactor of the human race, was NAILED BY THE HANDS and
+feet, and with arms extended, to the rocks of Mount
+Caucasus. Bacchus or Dionysus, born of the virgin Semele
+to be the Liberator of mankind (Dionysus Eleutherios
+as he was called), was torn to pieces, not unlike Osiris. Even
+in far Mexico Quetzalcoatl, the Saviour, was born of a virgin,
+was tempted, and fasted forty days, was done to death, and
+his second coming looked for so eagerly that (as is well known)
+when Cortes appeared, the Mexicans, poor things, greeted
+HIM as the returning god![3] In Peru and among the American
+Indians, North and South of the Equator, similar legends
+are, or were, to be found.
+
+[1] See for a considerable list Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xx.
+
+[2] Hist. Sanskrit Literature, p. 80.
+
+[3] See Kingsborough, Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi.
+
+
+Briefly sketched as all this is, it is enough to prove quite
+abundantly that the doctrine of the Saviour is world-wide
+and world-old, and that Christianity merely appropriated
+the same and (as the other cults did) gave it a special
+color. Probably the wide range of this doctrine would
+have been far better and more generally known, had not the
+Christian Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts
+and taken the greatest precautions to extinguish and
+snuff out all evidence of pagan claims on the subject.
+There is much to show that the early Church took this
+line with regard to pre-Christian saviours;[1] and in later times
+the same policy is remarkably illustrated by the treatment
+in the sixteenth century of the writings of Sahagun
+the Spanish missionary--to whose work I have already referred.
+Sahagun was a wonderfully broad-minded and
+fine man who, while he did not conceal the barbarities
+of the Aztec religion, was truthful enough to point out
+redeeming traits in the manners and customs of the
+people and some resemblances to Christian doctrine and
+practice. This infuriated the bigoted Catholics of the
+newly formed Mexican Church. They purloined the manuscripts
+of Sahagun's Historia and scattered and hid them
+about the country, and it was only after infinite labor
+and an appeal to the Spanish Court that he got them
+together again. Finally, at the age of eighty, having translated
+them into Spanish (from the original Mexican) he
+sent them in two big volumes home to Spain for safety;
+but there almost immediately THEY DISAPPEARED, and could
+not be found! It was only after TWO CENTURIES that they
+ultimately turned up (1790) in a Convent at Tolosa in
+Navarre. Lord Kingsborough published them in England
+in 1830.
+
+[1] See Tertullian's Apologia, c. 16; Ad Nationes, c. xii.
+
+
+I have thus dwelt upon several of the main doctrines of
+Christianity--namely, those of Sin and Sacrifice, the Eucharist,
+the Saviour, the Second Birth, and Transfiguration--as
+showing that they are by no means unique in
+our religion, but were common to nearly all the religions
+of the ancient world. The list might be much further extended,
+but there is no need to delay over a subject which is
+now very generally understood. I will, however, devote a
+page or two to one instance, which I think is very remarkable,
+and full of deep suggestion.
+
+There is no doctrine in Christianity which is more
+reverenced by the adherents of that religion, or held in higher
+estimation, than that God sacrificed his only Son for the
+salvation of the world; also that since the Son was not
+only of like nature but of the SAME nature with the
+Father, and equal to him as being the second Person of
+the Divine Trinity, the sacrifice amounted to an immolation
+of Himself for the good of mankind. The doctrine
+is so mystical, so remote, and in a sense so absurd
+and impossible, that it has been a favorite mark through
+the centuries for the ridicule of the scoffers and enemies
+of the Church; and here, it might easily be thought, is a
+belief which--whether it be considered glorious or whether
+contemptible--is at any rate unique, and peculiar to that
+Church.
+
+And yet the extraordinary fact is that a similar belief
+ranges all through the ancient religions, and can be traced
+back to the earliest times. The word host which is used
+in the Catholic Mass for the bread and wine on the Altar,
+supposed to be the transubstantiated body and blood of
+Christ, is from the Latin Hostia which the dictionary
+interprets as "an animal slain in sacrifice, a sin-offering." It
+takes us far far back to the Totem stage of folk-life,
+when the tribe, as I have already explained, crowned a
+victim-bull or bear or other animal with flowers, and
+honoring it with every offering of food and worship,
+sacrificed the victim to the Totem spirit of the tribe, and
+consumed it in an Eucharistic feast--the medicine-man
+or priest who conducted the ritual wearing a skin of the
+same beast as a sign that he represented the Totem-
+divinity, taking part in the sacrifice of 'himself to himself.'
+It reminds us of the Khonds of Bengal sacrificing their
+meriahs crowned and decorated as gods and goddesses;
+of the Aztecs doing the same; of Quetzalcoatl pricking
+his elbows and fingers so as to draw blood, which he offered
+on his own altar; or of Odin hanging by his own desire upon
+a tree. "I know I was hanged upon a tree shaken by
+the winds for nine long nights. I was transfixed by
+a spear; I was moved to Odin, myself to myself." And
+so on. The instances are endless. "I am the oblation,"
+says the Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita,[1] "I am the
+sacrifice, I the ancestral offering." "In the truly orthodox
+conception of sacrifice," says Elie Reclus,[2] "the consecrated
+offering, be it man, woman or virgin, lamb or
+heifer, cock or dove, represents tHE DEITY HIMSELF. . . .
+Brahma is the 'imperishable sacrifice'; Indra, Soma, Hari and
+the other gods, became incarnate in animals to the
+sole end that they might be immolated. Perusha, the
+Universal Being, caused himself to be slain by the Immortals,
+and from his substance were born the birds of the
+air, wild and domestic animals, the offerings of butter
+and curds. The world, declared the Rishis, is a series
+of sacrifices disclosing other sacrifices. To stop them
+would be to suspend the life of Nature. The god Siva, to
+whom the Tipperahs of Bengal are supposed to have sacrificed
+as many as a thousand human victims a year, said to the
+Brahamins: 'It is I that am the actual offering; it is I that
+you butcher upon my altars.' "
+
+[1] Ch. ix, v. 16.
+
+[2] Primitive Folk, ch. vi.
+
+
+It was in allusion to this doctrine that R. W. Emerson,
+paraphrasing the Katha-Upanishad, wrote that immortal verse
+of his:-
+
+     If the red slayer thinks he slays,
+          Or the slain thinks he is slain,
+     They know not well the subtle ways
+          I take, and pass, and turn again.
+
+
+I say it is an astonishing thing to think and realize that
+this profound and mystic doctrine of the eternal sacrifice
+of Himself, ordained by the Great Spirit for the creation
+and salvation of the world--a doctrine which has attracted
+and fascinated many of the great thinkers and nobler minds
+of Europe, which has also inspired the religious teachings
+of the Indian sages and to a less philosophical degree the
+writings of the Christian Saints--should have been seized
+in its general outline and essence by rude and primitive
+people before the dawn of history, and embodied in their
+rites and ceremonials. What is the explanation of this fact?
+
+It is very puzzling. The whole subject is puzzling. The
+world-wide adoption of similar creeds and rituals (and,
+we may add, legends and fairy tales) among early peoples,
+and in far-sundered places and times is so remarkable
+that it has given the students of these subjects
+'furiously to think'[1]--yet for the most part without great
+success in the way of finding a solution. The supposition
+that (1) the creed, rite or legend in question has
+sprung up, so to speak, accidentally, in one place, and
+then has travelled (owing to some inherent plausibility)
+over the rest of the world, is of course one that commends
+itself readily at first; but on closer examination the
+practical difficulties it presents are certainly very great.
+These include the migrations of customs and myths in quite
+early ages of the earth across trackless oceans and continents,
+and between races and peoples absolutely incapable
+of understanding each other. And if to avoid
+these difficulties it is assumed that the present human
+race all proceeds from one original stock which radiating
+from one centre--say in South-Eastern Asia[2]--overspread the
+world, carrying its rites and customs with it, why, then we
+are compelled to face the difficulty of supposing this radiation
+to have taken place at an enormous time ago (the continents
+being then all more or less conjoined) and at a period
+when it is doubtful if any religious rites and customs
+at all existed; not to mention the further difficulty of
+supposing all the four or five hundred languages now existing
+to be descended from one common source. The far
+tradition of the Island of Atlantis seems to afford a possible
+explanation of the community of rites and customs between
+the Old and New World, and this without assuming
+in any way that Atlantis (if it existed) was the
+original and SOLE cradle of the human race.[3] Anyhow it
+is clear that these origins of human culture must be of
+extreme antiquity, and that it would not be wise to be
+put off the track of the investigation of a possible common
+source merely by that fact of antiquity.
+
+[1] See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii.
+
+[2] See Hastings, Encycl. Religion and Ethics, art. "Ethnology."
+
+[3] E. J. Payne, History of the New World called America (vol. i,
+p. 93) says: "It is certain that Europe and America once formed a
+single continent," but inroads of the sea "left a vast island or
+peninsula stretching from Iceland to the Azores--which gradually
+disappeared." Also he speaks (i. 93) of the "Miocene Bridge"
+between Siberia and the New World.
+
+
+A second supposition, however, is (2) that the natural
+psychological evolution of the human mind has in the various
+times and climes led folk of the most diverse surroundings
+and heredity--and perhaps even sprung from separate
+anthropoid stocks--to develop their social and religious
+ideas along the same general lines--and that even to the
+extent of exhibiting at times a remarkable similarity in
+minute details. This is a theory which commends itself
+greatly to a deeper and more philosophical consideration;
+but it brings us up point-blank against another
+most difficult question (which we have already raised),
+namely, how to account for extremely rude and primitive
+peoples in the far past, and on the very borderland
+of the animal life, having been SUSCEPTIBLE to the germs
+of great religious ideas (such as we have mentioned) and
+having been instinctively--though not of course by any process
+of conscious reasoning--moved to express them in
+symbols and rites and ceremonials, and (later no doubt)
+in myths and legends, which satisfied their FEELINGS and
+sense of fitness--though they may not have known WHY--
+and afterwards were capable of being taken up and embodied
+in the great philosophical religions.
+
+This difficulty almost compels us to a view of human
+knowledge which has found supporters among some able
+thinkers--the view, namely, that a vast store of knowledge
+is already contained in the subconscious mind of man
+(and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer
+experience to bring it to the surface; and that in the second
+stage of human psychology this process of crude and
+piecemeal externalization is taking place, in preparation for
+the final or third stage in which the knowledge will be
+re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a high and
+harmonious plane--something like the present intuition of
+the animals as we perceive it on the animal plane. However
+this general subject is one on which I shall touch
+again, and I do not propose to dwell on it at any length now.
+
+There is a third alternative theory (3)--a combination
+of (1) and (2)--namely, that if one accepts (2) and the
+idea that at any given stage of human development there
+is a PREDISPOSITION to certain symbols and rites belonging to
+that stage, then it is much more easy to accept theory (1)
+as an important factor in the spread of such symbols
+and rites; for clearly, then, the smallest germ of a custom
+or practice, transported from one country or people
+to another at the right time, would be sufficient to wake
+the development or growth in question and stimulate it into
+activity. It will be seen, therefore, that the important point
+towards the solution of this whole puzzling question is the
+discussion, of theory (2)--and to this theory, as illustrated
+by the world-wide myth of the Golden Age, I will now turn.
+
+
+
+IX. MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
+
+The tradition of a "Golden Age" is widespread over the
+world, and it is not necessary to go at any length into the
+story of the Garden of Eden and the other legends which in
+almost every country illustrate this tradition. Without
+indulging in sentiment on the subject we may hold it not unlikely
+that the tradition is justified by the remembrance,
+among the people of every race, of a pre-civilization period
+of comparative harmony and happiness when two things,
+which to-day we perceive to be the prolific causes of discord
+and misery, were absent or only weakly developed--namely,
+PROPERTY and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.[1]
+
+[1] For a fuller working out of this, see Civilisation: its Cause
+and Cure, by E. Carpenter, ch. i.
+
+
+During the first century B.C. there was a great spread
+of Messianic Ideas over the Roman world, and Virgil's
+4th Eclogue, commonly called the Messianic Eclogue,
+reflects very clearly this state of the public mind. The expected
+babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian (Augustus)
+the first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded
+it in Virgil's verse. Unfortunately it turned out to
+be a GIRL! However there is little doubt that Virgil did--
+in that very sad age of the world, an age of "misery
+and massacre," and in common with thousands of others
+--look for the coming of a great 'redeemer.' It was only
+a few years earlier--about B.C. 70--that the great revolt
+of the shamefully maltreated Roman slaves occurred,
+and that in revenge six thousand prisoners from Spartacus'
+army were nailed on crosses all the way from Rome to
+Capua (150 miles). But long before this Hesiod had
+recorded a past Golden Age when life had been gracious
+in communal fraternity and joyful in peace, when human
+beings and animals spoke the same language, when death
+had followed on sleep, without old age or disease, and
+after death men had moved as good daimones or genii over
+the lands. Pindar, three hundred years after Hesiod, had
+confirmed the existence of the Islands of the Blest, where
+the good led a blameless, tearless, life. Plato the same,[1]
+with further references to the fabled island of Atlantis;
+the Egyptians believed in a former golden age under
+the god R<a^> to which they looked back with regret and
+envy; the Persians had a garden of Eden similar to
+that of the Hebrews; the Greeks a garden of the Hesperides,
+in which dwelt the serpent whose head was ultimately
+crushed beneath the heel of Hercules; and so on.
+The references to a supposed far-back state of peace and
+happiness are indeed numerous.
+
+[1] See arts. by Margaret Scholes, Socialist Review, Nov. and
+Dec. 1912.
+
+
+So much so that latterly, and partly to explain their prevalence,
+a theory has been advanced which may be
+worth while mentioning. It is called the "Theory of
+intra-uterine Blessedness," and, remote as it may at first
+appear, it certainly has some claim for attention. The
+theory is that in the minds of mature people there still remain
+certain vague memories of their pre-natal days in
+the maternal womb--memories of a life which, though full
+of growing vigor and vitality, was yet at that time
+one of absolute harmony with the surroundings, and of
+perfect peace and contentment, spent within the body of
+the mother--the embryo indeed standing in the same 
+relation to the mother as St. Paul says WE stand to God,
+"IN whom we live and move and have our being"; and that
+these vague memories of the intra-uterine life in the individual
+are referred back by the mature mind to a past
+age in the life of the RACE. Though it would not be easy
+at present to positively confirm this theory, yet one may say
+that it is neither improbable nor unworthy of consideration;
+also that it bears a certain likeness to the former
+ones about the Eden-gardens, etc. The well-known parallelism
+of the Individual history with the Race-history,
+the "recapitulation" by the embryo of the development of
+the race, does in fact afford an additional argument for its
+favorable reception.
+
+These considerations, and what we have said so often in
+the foregoing chapters about the unity of the Animals
+(and Early Man) with Nature, and their instinctive and age-long
+adjustment to the conditions of the world around them,
+bring us up hard and fast against the following conclusions,
+which I think we shall find difficult to avoid.
+
+We all recognize the extraordinary grace and beauty,
+in their different ways, of the (wild) animals; and not
+only their beauty but the extreme fitness of their actions
+and habits to their surroundings--their subtle and penetrating
+Intelligence in fact. Only we do not generally use
+the word "Intelligence." We use another word (Instinct)
+--and rightly perhaps, because their actions are plainly not
+the result of definite self-conscious reasoning, such as we use,
+carried out by each individual; but are (as has been abundantly
+proved by Samuel Butler and others) the systematic
+expression of experiences gathered up and sorted
+out and handed down from generation to generation in
+the bosom of the race--an Intelligence in fact, or Insight,
+of larger subtler scope than the other, and belonging
+to the tribal or racial Being rather than to
+the isolated individual--a super-consciousness in fact,
+ramifying afar in space and time.
+
+But if we allow (as we must) this unity and perfection
+of nature, and this somewhat cosmic character of the
+mind, to exist among the Animals, we can hardly refuse
+to believe that there must have been a period when Man,
+too, hardly as yet differentiated from them, did himself possess
+these same qualities--perhaps even in greater degree than
+the animals--of grace and beauty of body, perfection
+of movement and action, instinctive perception and knowledge
+(of course in limited spheres); and a period when
+he possessed above all a sense of unity with his fellows
+and with surrounding Nature which became the ground
+of a common consciousness between himself and his tribe,
+similar to that which Maeterlinck, in the case of the
+Bees, calls the Spirit of the Hive.[1] It would be difficult,
+nay impossible, to suppose that human beings on their
+first appearance formed an entire exception in the process
+of evolution, or that they were completely lacking
+in the very graces and faculties which we so admire
+in the animals--only of course we see that (LIKE the animals)
+they would not be SELF-conscious in these matters, and what
+perception they had of their relations to each other or to
+the world around them would be largely inarticulate and
+SUB-conscious--though none the less real for that.
+
+[1] See The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck; and for
+numerous similar cases among other animals, P. Kropotkin's Mutual
+Aid: a factor in Evolution.
+
+
+Let us then grant this preliminary assumption--and it
+clearly is not a large or hazardous one--and what follows?
+It follows--since to-day discord is the rule, and
+Man has certainly lost the grace, both physical and mental,
+of the animals--that at some period a break must
+have occurred in the evolution-process, a discontinuity--
+similar perhaps to that which occurs in the life of a
+child at the moment when it is born into the world. Humanity
+took a new departure; but a departure which for the
+moment was signalized as a LOSS--the loss of its former
+harmony and self-adjustment. And the cause or accompaniment
+of this change was the growth of Self-consciousness.
+Into the general consciousness of the tribe (in relation
+to its environment) which in fact had constituted the mentality
+of the animals and of man up to this stage, there
+now was intruded another kind of consciousness, a
+consciousness centering round each little individual self
+and concerned almost entirely with the interests of
+the latter. Here was evidently a threat to the continuance
+of the former happy conditions. It was like the appearance
+of innumerable little ulcers in a human body--a
+menace which if continued would inevitably lead to the
+break-up of the body. It meant loss of tribal harmony and
+nature-adjustment. It meant instead of unity a myriad
+conflicting centres; it meant alienation from the spirit
+of the tribe, the separation of man from man, discord,
+recrimination, and the fatal unfolding of the sense of sin.
+The process symbolized itself in the legend of the Fall. Man
+ate of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
+Sometimes people wonder why knowledge of any kind
+--and especially the knowledge of good and evil--should
+have brought a curse. But the reason is obvious. Into,
+the placid and harmonious life of the animal and human
+tribes fulfilling their days in obedience to the slow evolutions
+and age-long mandates of nature, Self-consciousness
+broke with its inconvenient and impossible query:
+"How do these arrangements suit ME? Are they good
+for me, are they evil for me? I want to know. I
+WILL KNOW!" Evidently knowledge (such knowledge as we
+understand by the word) only began, and could only
+begin, by queries relating to the little local self. There
+was no other way for it to begin. Knowledge and self-
+consciousness were born, as twins, together. Knowledge
+therefore meant Sin[1]; for self-consciousness meant sin
+(and it means sin to-day). Sin is Separation. That is
+probably (though disputed) the etymology of the word--
+that which sunders.[2] The essence of sin is one's separation
+from the whole (the tribe or the god) of which one is a
+part. And knowledge--which separates subject from object,
+and in its inception is necessarily occupied with the
+'good and evil' of the little local self, is the great engine
+of this separation. [Mark! I say nothing AGAINST this association
+of Self-consciousness with 'Sin' (so-called) and
+'Knowledge' (so-called). The growth of all three together
+is an absolutely necessary part of human evolution,
+and to rail against it would be absurd. But we
+may as well open our eyes and see the fact straight instead of
+blinking it.] The culmination of the process and the
+fulfilment of the 'curse' we may watch to-day in the
+towering expansion of the self-conscious individualized
+Intellect--science as the handmaid of human Greed devastating
+the habitable world and destroying its unworthy
+civilization. And the process must go on--necessarily
+must go on--until Self-consciousness, ceasing its vain
+quest (vain in both senses) for the separate domination
+of life, surrenders itself back again into the arms
+of the Mother-consciousness from which it originally sprang
+--surrenders itself back, not to be merged in nonentity, but
+to be affiliated in loving dependence on and harmony with the
+cosmic life.
+
+[1] Compare also other myths, like Cupid and Psyche, Lohengrin
+etc., in which a fatal curiosity leads to tragedy.
+
+[2] German Sunde, sin, and sonder, separated; Dutch zonde, sin;
+Latin sons, guilty. Not unlikely that the German root Suhn,
+expiation, is connected; Suhn-bock, a scape-goat.
+
+
+All this I have dealt with in far more detail in Civilization:
+its Cause and Cure, and in The Art of Creation; but I have
+only repeated the outline of it as above, because some such
+outline is necessary for the proper ordering and understanding
+of the points which follow.
+
+We are not concerned now with the ultimate effects of
+the 'Fall' of Man or with the present-day fulfilment of
+the Eden-curse. What we want to understand is how the
+'Fall' into self-consciousness led to that great panorama
+of Ritual and Religion which we have very briefly described
+and summarized in the preceding chapters of
+this book. We want for the present to fix our attention
+on the COMMENCEMENT of that process by which man lapsed
+away from his living community with Nature and his
+fellows into the desert of discord and toil, while the angels
+of the flaming sword closed the gates of Paradise behind him.
+
+It is evident I think that in that 'golden' stage when man
+was simply the crown and perfection of the animals--
+and it is hardly possible to refuse the belief in such a
+stage--he possessed in reality all the essentials of Religion.[1]
+It is not necessary to sentimentalize over him; he was
+probably raw and crude in his lusts of hunger and of sex;
+he was certainly ignorant and superstitious; he loved
+fighting with and persecuting 'enemies' (which things of
+course all religions to-day--except perhaps the Buddhist
+--love to do); he was dominated often by unreasoning Fear,
+and was consequently cruel. Yet he was full of that
+Faith which the animals have to such an admirable degree
+--unhesitating faith in the inner promptings of his OWN
+nature; he had the joy which comes of abounding vitality,
+springing up like a fountain whose outlet is free and
+unhindered; he rejoiced in an untroubled and unbroken
+sense of unity with his Tribe, and in elaborate social and
+friendly institutions within its borders; he had a marvelous
+sense-acuteness towards Nature and a gift in that direction
+verging towards "second-sight"; strengthened by a
+conviction--which had never become CONSCIOUS because
+it had never been QUESTIONED-- of his own personal relation
+to the things outside him, the Earth, the Sky, the Vegetation,
+the Animals. Of such a Man we get glimpses in
+the far past--though indeed only glimpses, for the simple
+reason that all our knowledge of him comes through civilized
+channels; and wherever civilization has touched these
+early peoples it has already withered and corrupted them,
+even before it has had the sense to properly observe them.
+It is sufficient, however, just to mention peoples like some
+of the early Pacific Islanders, the Zulus and Kafirs of
+South Africa, the Fans of the Congo Region (of whom
+Winwood Reade[2] speaks so highly), some of the Malaysian
+and Himalayan tribes, the primitive Chinese, and even the
+evidence with regard to the neolithic peoples of Europe,[3]
+in order to show what I mean.
+
+[1] See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths, etc., introduction: "The
+primitive life of humanity, in so far as it is not purely animal,
+is religious. Religion is the parent stem which has thrown off,
+one by one, art, agriculture, law, morality, politics, etc."
+
+[2] Savage Africa, ch. xxxvii.
+
+[3] See Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, ch. iii.
+
+
+Perhaps one of the best ideas of the gulf of difference
+between the semi-civilized and the quite primal man is given
+by A. R. Wallace in his Life (Vol. i, p. 288): "A most
+unexpected sensation of surprise and delight was my first
+meeting and living with man in a state of nature with
+absolute uncontaminated savages! This was on the
+Uaupes river. . . . They were all going about their own work
+or pleasure, which had nothing to do with the white men
+or their ways; they walked with the free step of the
+independent forest-dweller . . . original and self-sustaining
+as the wild animals of the forests, absolutely independent
+of civilization . . . living their own lives in their
+own way, as they had done for countless generations
+before America was discovered. Indeed the true denizen
+of the Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and
+not to be forgotten." Elsewhere[3] Wallace speaks of the
+quiet, good-natured, inoffensive character of these
+copper-colored peoples, and of their quickness of hand and
+skill, and continues: "their figures are generally superb;
+and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the
+finest statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of
+the human form."
+
+
+[3] Travels on the Amazon (1853), ch. xvii.
+
+
+Though some of the peoples just mentioned may be said
+to belong to different grades or stages of human evolution
+and physically some no doubt were far superior
+to others, yet they mostly exhibit this simple grace of
+the bodily and mental organism, as well as that closeness of
+tribal solidarity of which I have spoken. The immense
+antiquity, of the clan organization, as shown by investigations
+into early marriage, points to the latter conclusion.
+Travellers among Bushmen, Hottentots, Fuegians, Esquimaux,
+Papuans and other peoples--peoples who have been
+pushed aside into unfavorable areas by the invasion of more
+warlike and better-equipped races, and who have suffered
+physically in consequence--confirm this. Kropotkin, speaking
+of the Hottentots, quotes the German author P. Kolben
+who travelled among them in 1275 or so. "He
+knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects
+in silence, but could not praise their tribal morality
+highly enough. Their word is sacred, he wrote, they know
+nothing of the corruption and faithless arts of Europe. They
+live in great tranquillity and are seldom at war with their
+neighbors, and are all kindness and goodwill to one 
+another."[1] Kropotkin further says: "Let me remark that
+when Kolben says 'they are certainly the most friendly,
+the most liberal and the most benevolent people to one
+another that ever appeared on the earth' he wrote a sentence
+which has continually appeared since in the description
+of savages. When first meeting with primitive races,
+the Europeans usually make a caricature of their
+life; but when an intelligent man has stayed among them
+for a longer time he generally describes them as the
+'kindest' or the 'gentlest' race on the earth. These
+very same words have been applied to the Ostyaks, the
+Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dyaks, the Aleuts, the
+Papuans, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also
+remember having read them applied to the Tunguses,
+the Tchuktchis, the Sioux, and several others. The very
+frequency of that high commendation already speaks volumes
+in itself."[2]
+
+[1] P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 90. W. J. Solias also speaks in
+terms of the highest praise of the Bushmen--"their energy,
+patience, courage, loyalty, affection, good manners and artistic
+sense" (Ancient Hunters, 1915, p. 425).
+
+[2] Ibid, p. 91.
+
+
+Many of the tribes, like the Aleuts, Eskimos, Dyaks,
+Papuans, Fuegians, etc., are themselves in the Neolithic
+stage of culture--though for the reason given above probably
+degenerated physically from the standard of their
+neolithic ancestors; and so the conclusion is forced upon
+one that there must have been an IMMENSE PERIOD,[1] prior
+to the first beginnings of 'civilization,' in which the
+human tribes in general led a peaceful and friendly life
+on the earth, comparatively little broken up by dissensions,
+in close contact with Nature and in that degree of
+sympathy with and understanding of the Animals which led to
+the establishment of the Totem system. Though it would
+be absurd to credit these tribes with any great degree
+of comfort and well-being according to our modern
+standards, yet we may well suppose that the memory of
+this long period lingered on for generations and generations
+and was ultimately idealized into the Golden Age,
+in contrast to the succeeding period of everlasting warfare,
+rancor and strife, which came in with the growth of Property
+with its greeds and jealousies, and the accentuation of
+Self-consciousness with all its vanities and
+ambitions.
+
+[1] See for estimates of periods ch. xiv; also, for the
+peacefulness of these early peoples, Havelock Ellis on "The
+Origin of War," where he says "We do not find the WEAPONS of
+warfare or the WOUNDS of warfare among these Palaeolithic remains
+. . . it was with civilization that the art of killing developed,
+i. e. within the last 10,000 or 12,000 years when Neolithic men
+(who became our ancestors) were just arriving."
+
+
+I say that each tribe at this early stage of development
+had within it the ESSENTIALS of what we call Religion--
+namely a bedrock sense of its community with Nature, and of
+the Common life among its members--a sense so intimate
+and fundamental that it was hardly aware of itself (any
+more than the fish is aware of the sea in which it lives),
+but yet was really the matrix of tribal thought and the
+spring of tribal action. It was this sense of unity which
+was destined by the growth of SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS to come to light
+and evidence in the shape of all manner of rituals and
+ceremonials; and by the growth of the IMAGINATIVE INTELLECT to
+embody itself in the figures and forms of all manner of deities.
+
+Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark
+soaring in the eye of the sun, and singing rapt between
+its "heaven and home" realizes no doubt in actual fact
+all that those two words mean to us; yet its realization
+is quite subconscious. It does not define its own experience:
+it FEELS but it does not THINK. In order to come to
+the stage of THINKING it would perhaps be necessary that
+the lark should be exiled from the earth and the sky, and
+confined in a cage. Early Man FELT the great truths and
+realities of Life--often I believe more purely than we do
+--but he could not give form to his experience. THAT
+stage came when he began to lose touch with these realities;
+and it showed itself in rites and ceremonials. The inbreak
+of self-consciousness brought OUT the facts of his inner
+life into ritualistic and afterwards into intellectual forms.
+
+Let me give examples. For a long time the Tribe is
+all in all; the individual is completely subject to the
+'Spirit of the Hive'; he does not even THINK of contravening
+it. Then the day comes when self-interest, as
+apart from the Tribe, becomes sufficiently strong to drive
+him against some tribal custom. He breaks the tabu;
+he eats the forbidden apple; he sins against the tribe,
+and is cast out. Suddenly he finds himself an exile,
+lonely, condemned and deserted. A horrible sense of distress
+seizes him--something of which he had no experience
+before. He tries to think about it all, to understand the
+situation, but is dazed and cannot arrive at any conclusion.
+His one NECESSITY is Reconciliation, Atonement. He finds he
+cannot LIVE outside of and alienated from his tribe. He
+makes a Sacrifice, an offering to his fellows, as a seal of
+sincerity--an offering of his own bodily suffering or precious
+blood, or the blood of some food-animal, or some valuable
+gift or other--if only he may be allowed to return. The
+offering is accepted. The ritual is performed; and he
+is received back. I have already spoken of this perfectly
+natural evolution of the twin-ideas of Sin and Sacrifice,
+so I need not enlarge upon the subject. But two things
+we may note here: (1) that the ritual, being so concrete
+(and often severe), graves itself on the minds of those
+concerned, and expresses the feelings of the tribe, with
+an intensity and sharpness of outline which no words
+could rival, and (2) that such rituals may have, and probably
+did, come into use even while language itself was in an infantile
+condition and incapable of dealing with the psychological
+situation except by symbols. They, the rituals,
+were the first effort of the primitive mind to get beyond,
+subconscious feeling and emerge into a world of forms
+and definite thought.
+
+Let us carry the particular instance, given above, a
+stage farther, even to the confines of abstract Thought
+and Philosophy. I have spoken of "The Spirit of the
+Hive" as if the term were applicable to the Human as
+well as to the Bee tribe. The individual bee obviously
+has never THOUGHT about that 'Spirit,' nor mentally understood
+what Maeterlinck means by it; and yet in terms
+of actual experience it is an intense reality to the bee
+(ordaining for instance on some fateful day the slaughter
+of all the drones), controlling bee-movements and bee-
+morality generally. The individual tribesman similarly
+steeped in the age-long human life of his fellows has never
+thought of the Tribe as an ordaining being or Spirit, separate
+from himself--TILL that day when he is exiled and outcast
+from it. THEN he sees himself and the tribe as two opposing
+beings, himself of course an Intelligence or Spirit in his own
+limited degree, the Tribe as a much greater Intelligence
+or Spirit, standing against and over him. From that day
+the conception of a god arises on him. It may be only
+a totem-god--a divine Grizzly-Bear or what not--but still
+a god or supernatural Presence, embodied in the life of
+the tribe. This is what Sin has taught him.[1] This is
+what Fear, founded on self-consciousness, has revealed to
+him. The revelation may be true, or it may be fallacious (I
+do not prejudge it); but there it is--the beginning of that
+long series of human evolutions which we call Religion.
+
+[1] It is to be noted, in that charming idyll of the Eden garden,
+that it is only AFTER eating of the forbidden fruit that Adam and
+Eve perceive the Lord God walking in the garden, and converse
+with him (Genesis iii. 8).
+
+
+[For when the human mind has reached that stage of
+consciousness in which each man realizes his own 'self' as
+a rational and consistent being, "looking before and
+after," then, as I have said already, the mind projects
+on the background of Nature similarly rational Presences
+which we may call 'Gods'; and at that stage 'Religion'
+begins. Before that, when the mind is quite unformed
+and dream-like, and consists chiefly of broken and scattered
+rays, and when distinct self-consciousness is hardly
+yet developed, then the presences imagined in Nature are
+merely flickering and intermittent phantoms, and their
+propitiation and placation comes more properly under, the
+head of 'Magic.']
+
+So much for the genesis of the religious ideas of Sin
+and Sacrifice, and the rites connected with these ideas--
+their genesis through the in-break of self-consciousness
+upon the corporate SUB-consciousness of the life of the
+Community. But an exactly similar process may be observed
+in the case of the other religious ideas.
+
+I spoke of the doctrine of the SECOND BIRTH, and the rites
+connected with it both in Paganism and in Christianity.
+There is much to show that among quite primitive peoples
+there is less of shrinking from death and more of certainty
+about a continued life after death than we generally find
+among more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has
+been, quite, common among many tribes for the old and
+decrepit, who are becoming a burden to their fellows,
+to offer themselves for happy dispatch, and to take willing
+part in the ceremonial preparations for their own extinction;
+and this readiness is encouraged by their na<i:>ve and
+untroubled belief in a speedy transference to "happy
+hunting-grounds" beyond the grave. The truth is that
+when, as in such cases, the tribal life is very whole and
+unbroken--each individual identifying himself completely with
+the tribe--the idea of the individual's being dropped out
+at death, and left behind by the tribe, hardly arises. The
+individual is the tribe, has no other existence. The
+tribe goes on, living a life which is eternal, and only
+changes its hunting-grounds; and the individual, identified
+with the tribe, feels in some subconscious way the same about
+himself.
+
+But when one member has broken faith with the tribe,
+when he has sinned against it and become an outcast--
+ah! then the terrors of death and extinction loom large
+upon him. "The wages of sin is death." There comes
+a period in the evolution of tribal life when the primitive
+bonds are loosening, when the tendency towards SELF-will and
+SELF-determination (so necessary of course in the long
+run for the evolution of humanity) becomes a real danger
+to the tribe, and a terror to the wise men and elders of the
+community. It is seen that the children inherit this
+tendency--even from their infancy. They are no longer
+mere animals, easily herded; it seems that they are born
+in sin--or at least in ignorance and neglect of their tribal
+life and calling. The only cure is that they MUST BE BORN
+AGAIN. They must deliberately and of set purpose be adopted
+into the tribe, and be made to realize, even severely,
+in their own persons what is happening. They must go
+through the initiations necessary to impress this upon them.
+Thus a whole series of solemn rites spring up, different
+no doubt in every locality, but all having the same object
+and purpose. [And one can understand how the
+necessity of such initiations and second birth may easily
+have been itself felt in every race, at some stage of
+its evolution--and THAT quite as a spontaneous growth, and
+independently of any contagion of example caught from
+other races.]
+
+The same may be said about the world-wide practice of
+the Eucharist. No more effective method exists for
+impressing on the members of a body their community
+of life with each other, and causing them to forget their
+jangling self-interests, than to hold a feast in common.
+It is a method which has been honored in all ages as
+well as to-day. But when the flesh partaken of at the feast
+is that of the Totem--the guardian and presiding genius of
+the tribe--or perhaps of one of its chief food-animals--
+then clearly the feast takes on a holy and solemn character.
+It becomes a sacrament of unity--of the unity of all with
+the tribe, and with each other. Self-interests and self-
+consciousness are for the time submerged, and the common
+life asserts itself; but here again we see that a
+custom like this would not come into being as a deliberate
+rite UNTIL self-consciousness and the divisions consequent
+thereon had grown to be an obvious evil. The herd-
+animals (cows, sheep, and so forth) do not have Eucharists,
+simply because they are sensible enough to feed along the
+same pastures without quarrelling over the richest tufts
+of grass.
+
+When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically)
+is not that of a divinized animal, but the flesh
+of a human-formed god--as in the mysteries of Dionysus
+or Osiris or Christ--then we are led to suspect (and of course
+this theory is widely held and supported) that the rites
+date from a very far-back period when a human
+being, as representative of the tribe, was actually slain,
+dismembered and partly devoured; though as time went
+on, the rite gradually became glossed over and mitigated
+into a love-communion through the sharing of bread and wine.
+
+It is curious anyhow that the dismemberment or division
+into fragments of the body of a god (as in the case of Dionysus,
+Osiris, Attis, Praj<a'>pati and others) should be so
+frequent a tenet of the old religions, and so commonly associated
+with a love-feast of reconciliation and resurrection.
+It may be fairly interpreted as a symbol of Nature-dismemberment
+in Winter and resurrection in Spring; but we must
+also not forget that it may (and indeed must) have stood
+as an allegory of TRIBAL dismemberment and reconciliation--
+the tribe, conceived of as a divinity, having thus suffered
+and died through the inbreak of sin and the self-motive, and
+risen again into wholeness by the redemption of
+love and sacrifice. Whatever view the rank and file of the
+tribe may have taken of the matter, I think it is incontestable
+that the more thoughtful regarded these rites as full of
+mystic and spiritual meaning. It is of the nature, as
+I have said before, of these early symbols and ceremonies
+that they held so many meanings in solution; and it is
+this fact which gave them a poetic or creative quality,
+and their great hold upon the public mind.
+
+I use the word "tribe" in many places here as a matter
+of convenience; not forgetting however that in some
+cases "clan" might be more appropriate, as referring to a
+section of a tribe; or "people" or "folk" as referring
+to unions of SEVERAL tribes. It is impossible of course to
+follow out all the gradations of organization from tribal up
+to national life; but it may be remembered that while
+animal totems prevail as a rule in the earlier stages, human-
+formed gods become more conspicuous in the later developments.
+All through, the practice of the Eucharist goes
+on, in varying forms adapting itself to the surrounding
+conditions; and where in the later societies a religion
+like Mithraism or Christianity includes people of very
+various race, the Rite loses quite naturally its tribal
+significance and becomes a celebration of allegiance to a
+particular god--of unity within a special Church, in fact.
+Ultimately it may become--as for a brief moment in the history of
+the early Christians it seemed likely to do--a celebration of
+allegiance to all Humanity, irrespective of race or creed
+or color of skin or of mind: though unfortunately that day
+seems still far distant and remains yet unrealized. It
+must not be overlooked, however, that the religion of
+the Persian B<a^>b, first promulgated in 1845 to 1850--and
+a subject I shall deal with presently--had as a matter of
+fact this all embracing and universal scope.
+
+To return to the Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Our
+conclusion seems to be that there really was such a period
+of comparative harmony in human life--to which later
+generations were justified in looking back, and looking back
+with regret. It corresponded in the psychology of human
+Evolution to stage One. The second stage was
+that of the Fall; and so one is inevitably led to the
+conjecture and the hope that a third stage will redeem the
+earth and its inhabitants to a condition of comparative
+blessedness.
+
+
+
+X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
+
+From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past
+Golden Age, and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist,
+in the sense indicated in the last chapter, to that of the
+equally widespread belief in a human-divine Saviour, is
+a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago, dealing
+with this subject,[1] I wrote as follows:--"The true Self
+of man consists in his organic relation with the whole body
+of his fellows; and when the man abandons his true Self
+he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The
+mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man
+will drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to
+separate himself from the inner, the unit-man from the
+mass-Man, then the reign of individuality begins--a false
+and impossible individuality of course, but the only means
+of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality."
+And further, "Thus this divinity in each creature, being
+that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere together,
+was conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer--healer
+of wounds of body and wounds of heart--the Man within
+the man, whom it was not only possible to know, but whom
+to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This,
+I take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as
+accepted at some elder time of human history, and by
+us seen as through a glass darkly."
+
+[1] See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.
+
+
+I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our
+pride of Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses
+of tribal life--that these elder people perceived as a matter
+of fact and direct consciousness the redeeming presence
+(within each unit-member of the group) of the larger life
+to which he belonged. This larger life was a reality--
+"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he
+called it by the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name
+of a Nature-divinity, or by the name of some gracious
+human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra, Attis, Orpheus,
+or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity
+itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living
+incarnate Being by the realization of whose presence the little
+mortal could be lifted out of exile and error and death and
+suffering into splendor and life eternal.
+
+It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship
+of "Saviours" all over the world, from China to Peru,
+can only be ascribed to the natural working of some such
+law of human and tribal psychology--from earliest times
+and in all races the same--springing up quite spontaneously
+and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the mere
+contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil,
+long before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into
+the heads of all these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great
+a compliment both to the power and the ingenuity of his
+Satanic Majesty--though the ingenuity with which the
+early Church DID itself suppress all information about these
+pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited
+to Satan! And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous
+and universal consent of belief to have sprung
+by mere contagion from one accidental source would seem
+equally far-fetched and unlikely.
+
+But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling
+belief in human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread
+legend of their birth from Virgin-mothers. There is hardly
+a god--as we have already had occasion to see--whose
+worship as a benefactor of mankind attained popularity
+in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and
+America--who was not reported to have been born from a
+Virgin, or at least from a mother who owed the Child
+not to any earthly father, but to an impregnation from
+Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more
+astonishing because the belief in the possibility of such
+a thing is so entirely out of the line of our modern thought.
+So that while it would seem not unnatural that such a legend
+should have, sprung up spontaneously in some odd benighted
+corner of the world, we find it very difficult to
+understand how in that case it should have spread so rapidly
+in every direction, or--if it did not spread--how we are
+to account for its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these
+widely sundered regions.
+
+I think here, and for the understanding of this problem,
+we are thrown back upon a very early age of human
+evolution--the age of Magic. Before any settled science
+or philosophy or religion existed, there were still certain
+Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had
+a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact
+affected it deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder';
+to hear thunder, to imitate it, even to mention it, are sure
+ways of rousing superstitious attention and imagination.
+Such another word is 'Serpent,' another 'Tree,' and so
+forth. There is no one who is insensible to the reverberation
+of these and other such words and images[1]; and
+among them, standing prominently out, are the two
+'Mother' and 'Virgin.' The word Mother touches the deepest
+springs of human feeling. As the earliest word
+learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with the
+heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor
+must we forget that in a primitive state of society (the
+Matriarchate) that influence was probably even greater
+than now; for the father of the child being (often as not)
+UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more
+intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about
+it which has remained even until to-day. But if that
+word rooted itself deep in the heart of the Child, the
+other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for the full
+grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too,
+has never lost.
+
+[1] Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of
+such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the
+square, the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like
+3, 4, 5, etc., quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.
+
+
+There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects
+of human worship was the Earth itself, conceived of
+as the fertile Mother of all things. Gaia or Ge (the earth)
+had temples and altars in almost all the cities of Greece.
+Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of
+all the gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored
+far and wide as the gracious patroness of the crops and
+vegetation. Ceres, of course, the same. Maia in the Indian
+mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms of Nature
+and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so
+forth. The Earth, in these ancient cults , was the mystic
+source of all life, and to it, as a propitiation, life of all
+kinds was sacrificed. [There are strange accounts of a huge
+fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in the midst, and
+of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep and
+corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames.[1]]
+It was, in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been
+the earliest and most spontaneous of cults--the worship
+of the Earth-mother, the all-producing eternal source of
+life, and on account of her never-failing ever-renewed
+fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.
+
+[1] See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.
+
+
+But when the Saviour-legend sprang up--as indeed I
+think it must have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and
+people after people, independently--then, whether it
+sprang from the divinization of some actual man who
+showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows
+"sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification
+of the tribe itself as a god, in either case the question of the
+hero's parentage was bound to arise. If the 'saviour'
+was plainly a personification of the tribe, it was obviously
+impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal mother. In
+that case--and if the tribe was generally traced in the
+legends to some primeval Animal or Mountain or thing
+of Nature--it was probably easy to think of him (the
+saviour) as, born out of Nature's womb, descended perhaps
+from that pure Virgin of the World who is the
+Earth and Nature, who rules the skies at night, and stands
+in the changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped
+(as we have seen) in the great constellation Virgo. If, on
+the other hand, he was the divinization of some actual
+man, more or less known either personally or by tradition to
+his fellows, then in all probability the name of his mortal
+mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his
+father, that side of parentage being, as we have said,
+generally very uncertain, it would be easy to suppose some
+heavenly Annunciation, the midnight visit of a God, and what
+is usually termed a Virgin-birth.
+
+There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspiring
+to this conclusion. One is the condition of affairs
+in a remote matriarchial period, when descent was reckoned
+always through the maternal line, and the fatherhood
+in each generation was obscure or unknown or
+commonly left out of account; and the other is the
+fact--so strange and difficult for us to realize--that among
+some very primitive peoples, like the Australian aborigines,
+the necessity for a woman to have intercourse with a
+male, in order to bring about conception and child-birth,
+was actually not recognized. Scientific observation had not
+always got as far as that, and the matter was still under
+the domain of Magic![1] A Virgin-Mother was therefore a
+quite imaginable (not to say 'conceivable') thing; and indeed
+a very beautiful and fascinating thing, combining
+in one image the potent magic of two very wonderful
+words. It does not seem impossible that considerations
+of this kind led to the adoption of the doctrine or legend
+of the virgin-mother and the heavenly father among so many
+races and in so many localities--even without any contagion
+of tradition among them.
+
+[1] Probably the long period (nine months) elapsing between
+cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the
+subject. Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by
+childbirth. And, more important still, the number of virgins of a
+mature age in primitive societies was so very minute that the
+fact of their childlessness attracted no attention--whereas in
+OUR societies the sterility of the whole class is patent to
+everyone.
+
+
+Anyhow, and as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination
+of the legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father
+of the gods, visited Semele, it will be remembered, in the
+form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great
+saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated
+Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who
+slew the Gorgons (the powers of darkness) and saved
+Andromeda (the human soul[1]). Devaki, the radiant Virgin
+of the Hindu mythology, became the wife of the
+god Vishnu and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and prototype
+of Christ. With regard to Buddha St. Jerome
+says[2] "It is handed down among the Gymnosophists, of India
+that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth
+by a Virgin from her side." The Egyptian Isis, with
+the child Horus, on her knee, was honored centuries
+before the Christian era, and worshiped under the names
+of "Our Lady," "Queen of Heaven," "Star of the Sea,"
+"Mother of God," and so forth. Before her, Neith, the
+Virgin of the World, whose figure bends from the sky over
+the earthly plains and the children of men, was acclaimed
+as mother of the great god Osiris. The saviour Mithra,
+too, was born of a Virgin, as we have had occasion to
+notice before; and on the Mithrais monuments the mother
+suckling her child is a not uncommon figure.[3]
+
+[1] For this interpretation of the word Andromeda see The Perfect
+Way by Edward Maitland, preface to First Edition, 1881.
+
+[2] Contra Jovian, Book I; and quoted by Rhys Davids in his
+Buddhisim.
+
+[3] See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 332, and Dupuis' Origins of
+Religious Beliefs.
+
+
+The old Teutonic goddess Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin,
+but was impregnated by the heavenly Spirit (the
+Sky); and her image with a child in her arms was to
+be seen in the sacred groves of Germany.[1] The Scandinavian
+Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the embraces
+of Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the
+blessed Balder, healer and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl,
+the (crucified) saviour of the Aztecs, was the son of
+Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven.[2] Even the Chinese
+had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms[3];
+and the ancient Etruscans the same.[4]
+
+[1] R. P. Knight's Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.
+
+[2] See Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 176,
+where it is said "an ambassador was sent from heaven on an
+embassy to a Virgin of Tulan, called Chimalman . . . announcing
+that it was the will of the God that she should conceive a son;
+and having delivered her the message he rose and left the house;
+and as soon as he had left it she conceived a son, without
+connection with man, who was called Quetzalcoat], who they say is
+the god of air." Further, it is explained that Quetzalcoatl
+sacrificed himself, drawing forth his own blood with thorns; and
+that the word Quetzalcoatlotopitzin means "our well-beloved son."
+
+[3] Doane, p. 327.
+
+[4] See Inman's Pagan and Christian Symbolism, p. 27.
+
+
+Finally, we have the curiously large number of BLACK
+virgin mothers who are or have been worshiped. Not
+only cases like Devaki the Indian goddess, or Isis the
+Egyptian, who would naturally appear black-skinned or
+dark; but the large number of images and paintings of
+the same kind, yet extant--especially in the Italian
+churches--and passing for representations of Mary and
+the infant Jesus. Such are the well-known image in the
+chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in
+the churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other
+places. It is difficult not to regard these as very old Pagan
+or pre-Christian relics which lingered on into Christian
+times and were baptized anew--as indeed we know many
+relics and images actually were--into the service of the
+Church. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"; and there is
+I believe more than one black figure extant of this
+Diana, who, though of course a virgin, is represented
+with innumerable breasts[1]--not unlike some of the archaic
+statues of Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian
+times there was, it is said, on the site of the present
+Cathedral of Notre Dame, a Temple dedicated to 'our Lady'
+Isis; and images belonging to the earlier shrine would
+in all probability be preserved with altered name in the
+later.
+
+[1] See illustration, p. 30, in Inman's Pagan and Christian
+Symbolism.
+
+
+All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine
+of the Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity.
+The subject is obscure, and worthy of more consideration
+than has yet been accorded it; and I do not feel able to
+add anything to the tentative explanations given a page
+or two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision
+of the Perfect Man hovered dimly over the mind of the
+human race on its first emergence from the purely animal
+stage; and that a quite natural speculation with
+regard to such a being was that he would be born from a
+Perfect Woman--who according to early ideas would
+necessarily be the Virgin Earth itself, mother of all things.
+Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition, slumbering as it
+would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great Earth
+after giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring
+forth a Child who should become the Saviour of the
+human race.
+
+There is of course the further theory, entertained by
+some, that virgin-parturition--a kind of Parthenogenesis--
+has as a matter of fact occasionally occurred among mortal
+women, and even still does occur. I should be the last
+to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of anything else in Nature),
+but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way of PROOF of
+any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any
+thoroughly attested and verified instance, it would, I
+think, be advisable to leave this theory out of account
+at present.
+
+But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right
+or wrong, and whatever explanation we adopt, there remains
+the FACT of the universality over the world of this legend--
+affording another instance of the practical solidarity and
+continuity of the Pagan Creeds with Christianity.
+
+
+
+XI. RITUAL DANCING
+
+It is unnecessary to labor the conclusion of the last two
+or three chapters, namely that Christianity grew out of the
+former Pagan Creeds and is in its general outlook and
+origins continuous and of one piece with them. I have
+not attempted to bring together ALL the evidence in favor
+of this contention, as such work would be too vast, but more
+illustrations of its truth will doubtless occur to readers, or
+will emerge as we proceed.
+
+I think we may take it as proved (1) that from the earliest
+ages, and before History, a great body of religious belief
+and ritual--first appearing among very primitive and
+unformed folk, whom we should call 'savages'--has come
+slowly down, broadening and differentiating itself on the
+way into a great variety of forms, but embodying always
+certain main ideas which became in time the accepted
+doctrines of the later Churches--the Indian, the
+Egyptian, the Mithraic, the Christian, and so forth. What
+these ideas in their general outline have been we can
+perhaps best judge from our "Apostles' Creed," as it is
+recited every Sunday in our churches.
+
+"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven
+and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who
+was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
+Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead
+and buried. He descended into Hell; the third day he rose
+again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and
+sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from
+thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I
+believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church;
+the communion of Saints; the Forgiveness of sins; the
+Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen."
+
+Here we have the All-Father and Creator, descending from
+the Sky in the form of a spirit to impregnate the earthly
+Virgin-mother, who thus gives birth to a Saviour-hero.
+The latter is slain by the powers of Evil, is buried and
+descends into the lower world, but arises again as God
+into heaven and becomes the leader and judge of mankind.
+We have the confirmation of the Church (or,
+in earlier times, of the Tribe) by means of a Eucharist
+or Communion which binds together all the members,
+living or dead, and restores errant individuals through
+the Sacrifice of the hero and the Forgiveness of their sins;
+and we have the belief in a bodily Resurrection and continued
+life of the members within the fold of the Church
+(or Tribe), itself regarded as eternal.
+
+One has only, instead of the word 'Jesus,' to read Dionysus
+or Krishna or Hercules or Osiris or Attis, and instead
+of 'Mary' to insert Semele or Devaki or Alcmene
+or Neith or Nana, and for Pontius Pilate to use the name
+of any terrestrial tyrant who comes into the corresponding
+story, and lo! the creed fits in all particulars into the
+rites and worship of a pagan god. I need not enlarge
+upon a thesis which is self-evident from all that has gone
+before. I do not say, of course, that ALL the religious
+beliefs of Paganism are included and summarized in our
+Apostles' Creed, for--as I shall have occasion to note in the
+next chapter--I think some very important religious elements
+are there OMITTED; but I do think that all the beliefs which
+ARE summarized in the said creed had already been fully
+represented and elaborately expressed in the non-Christian
+religions and rituals of Paganism.
+
+Further (2) I think we may safely say that there is no
+certain proof that the body of beliefs just mentioned sprang
+from any one particular centre far back and radiated thence
+by dissemination and mental contagion over the rest of the
+world; but the evidence rather shows that these beliefs
+were, for the most part, the SPONTANEOUS outgrowths (in
+various localities) of the human mind at certain stages of
+its evolution; that they appeared, in the different races
+and peoples, at different periods according to the degree
+of evolution, and were largely independent of intercourse
+and contagion, though of course, in cases, considerably
+influenced by it; and that one great and all-important
+occasion and provocative of these beliefs was actually
+the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS--that is, the coming of the
+mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its
+own operation, and the consequent development and growth
+of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude in human
+thought and action.
+
+In the third place (3) I think we may see--and this is the
+special subject of the present chapter--that at a very early
+period, when humanity was hardly capable of systematic
+expression in what we call Philosophy or Science,
+it could not well rise to an ordered and literary expression
+of its beliefs, such as we find in the later religions and
+the 'Churches' (Babylonian, Jewish, East Indian, Christian,
+or what-not), and yet that it FELT these beliefs very intensely
+and was urged, almost compelled, to their utterance in
+some form or other. And so it came about that people
+expressed themselves in a vast mass of ritual and myth--
+customs, ceremonies, legends, stories--which on account
+of their popular and concrete form were handed down
+for generations, and some of which linger on still in the
+midst of our modern civilization. These rituals and legends
+were, many of them, absurd enough, rambling and childish
+in character, and preposterous in conception, yet they gave
+the expression needed; and some of them of course, as we
+have seen, were full of meaning and suggestion.
+
+A critical and commercial Civilization, such as ours,
+in which (notwithstanding much TALK about Art) the artistic
+sense is greatly lacking, or at any rate but little diffused,
+does not as a rule understand that poetic RITES,
+in the evolution of peoples, came naturally before anything
+like ordered poems or philosophy or systematized VIEWS
+about life and religion--such as WE love to wallow in!
+Things were FELT before they were spoken. The loading
+of diseases into disease-boats, of sins onto scape-goats, the
+propitiation of the forces of nature by victims, human or
+animal, sacrifices, ceremonies of re-birth, eucharistic feasts,
+sexual communions, orgiastic celebrations of the common
+life, and a host of other things--all SAID plainly enough what
+was meant, but not in WORDS. Partly no doubt it was
+that at some early time words were more difficult of
+command and less flexible in use than actions (and at
+all times are they not less expressive?). Partly it was
+that mankind was in the child-stage. The Child delights
+in ritual, in symbol, in expression through material objects
+and actions:
+
+ See, at his feet some little plan or chart,
+ Some fragment from his dream of human life,
+ Shaped by himself with newly learned art;
+     A wedding or a festival,
+     A mourning or a funeral;
+          And this hath now his heart.
+
+And primitive man in the child-stage felt a positive joy in
+ritual celebrations, and indulged in expressions which we but
+little understand; for these had then his heart.
+
+One of the most pregnant of these expressions was DANCING.
+Children dance instinctively. They dance with rage;
+they dance with joy, with sheer vitality; they dance
+with pain, or sometimes with savage glee at the suffering
+of others; they delight in mimic combats, or in
+animal plays and disguises. There are such things as
+Courting-dances, when the mature male and female go
+through a ritual together--not only in civilized ball-rooms
+and the back-parlors of inns, but in the farmyards where
+the rooster pays his addresses to the hen, or the yearling
+bull to the cow--with quite recognized formalities; there
+are elaborate ceremonials performed by the Australian
+bower-birds and many other animals. All these things--
+at any rate in children and animals--come before speech;
+and anyhow we may say that LOVE-RITES, even in mature
+and civilized man, hardly ADMIT of speech. Words only
+vulgarize love and blunt its edge.
+
+So Dance to the savage and the early man was not merely
+an amusement or a gymnastic exercise (as the books
+often try to make out), but it was also a serious
+and intimate part of life, an expression of religion
+and the relation of man to non-human Powers. Imagine
+a young dancer--and the admitted age for ritual dancing
+was commonly from about eighteen to thirty--coming
+forward on the dancing-ground or platform for the
+INVOCATION OF RAIN. We have unfortunately no kinematic
+records, but it is not impossible or very difficult to imagine
+the various gestures and movements which might be considered
+appropriate to such a rite in different localities
+or among different peoples. A modern student of Dalcroze
+Eurhythmics would find the problem easy. After a time
+a certain ritual dance (for rain) would become stereotyped
+and generally adopted. Or imagine a young Greek leading an
+invocation to Apollo to STAY SOME PLAGUE which was
+ravaging the country. He might as well be accompanied
+by a small body of co-dancers; but he would be the leader
+and chief representative. Or it might be a WAR-DANCE--
+as a more or less magical preparation for the raid or foray.
+We are familiar enough with accounts of war-dances among
+American Indians. C. O. Muller in his History and Antiquities
+of the Doric Race[1] gives the following account of
+the Pyrrhic dance among the Greeks, which was danced in
+full armor:--"Plato says that it imitated all the
+attitudes of defence, by avoiding a thrust or a cast, retreating,
+springing up, and crouching-as also the opposite
+movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also
+of every kind of thrust. So strong was the attachment
+to this dance at Sparta that, long after it had in the other
+Greek states degenerated into a Bacchanalian revel, it was
+still danced by the Spartans as a warlike exercise, and
+boys of fifteen were instructed in it." Of the Hunting-
+dance I have already given instances.[2] It always had
+the character of Magic about it, by which the game or
+quarry might presumably be influenced; and it can easily
+be understood that if the Hunt was not successful the blame
+might well be attributed to some neglect of the usual
+ritual mimes or movements--no laughing matter for the
+leader of the dance.
+
+[1] Book IV, ch. 6, Section 7.
+
+[2] See also Winwood Reade's Savage Africa, ch. xviii, in which
+he speaks of the "gorilla dance," before hunting gorillas, as a
+"religious festival."
+
+
+Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of
+Initiation--dances both by the initiators and the initiated. Jane
+E. Harrison in Themis (p. 24) says, "Instruction among
+savage peoples is always imparted in more or less mimetic
+dances. At initiation you learn certain dances
+which confer on you definite social status. When a man
+is too old to dance, he hands over his dance to another
+and a younger, and he then among some tribes ceases
+to exist socially. . . . The dances taught to boys at
+initiation are frequently if not always ARMED dances. These
+are not necessarily warlike. The accoutrement of spear
+and shield was in part decorative, in part a provision for
+making the necessary hubbub." (Here Miss Harrison
+reproduces a photograph of an Initiation dance among
+the Akikuyu of British East Africa.) The Initiation-
+dances blend insensibly and naturally with the Mystery
+and Religion dances, for indeed initiation was for the most
+part an instruction in the mysteries and social rites of
+the Tribe. They were the expression of things which
+would be hard even for us, and which for rude folk would
+be impossible, to put into definite words. Hence arose
+the expression--whose meaning has been much discussed
+by the learned--"to dance out (<gr ezorceisqai>) a mystery."[1]
+Lucian, in a much-quoted passage,[2] observes: "You cannot
+find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing
+. . . and this much all men know, that most people say of
+the revealers of the mysteries that they 'dance them
+out.' " Andrew Lang, commenting on this passage,[3]
+continues: "Clement of Alexandria uses the same term when
+speaking of his own 'appalling revelations.' So closely
+connected are mysteries with dancing among savages that
+when Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about
+some doctrines in which Qing was not initiated, he said:
+'Only the initiated men of that dance know these things.'
+To 'dance' this or that means to be acquainted with this
+or that myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d'action.
+So widely distributed is the practice that Acosta in an
+interesting passage mentions it as familiar to the people
+of Peru before and after the Spanish conquest." [And
+we may say that when the 'mysteries' are of a sexual nature
+it can easily be understood that to 'dance them out'
+is the only way of explaining them!]
+
+[1] Meaning apparently either simply to represent, or, sometimes
+to DIVULGE, a mystery.
+
+[2] <gr peri 'Orchsews>, Ch. xv. 277.
+
+[3] Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 272.
+
+
+Thus we begin to appreciate the serious nature and the
+importance of the dance among primitive folk. To dub
+a youth "a good dancer" is to pay him a great compliment.
+Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in the
+island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which
+record in deeply graven letters the friendship and devotion
+to each other of Spartan warrior-comrades; it seems
+strange at first to find how often such an epithet of
+praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is a PERFECT
+DANCER (<gr aristos orcestas>). One hardly in general expects
+one warrior to praise another for his dancing! But when
+one realizes what is really meant--namely the fitness of
+the loved comrade to lead in religious and magical rituals
+--then indeed the compliment takes on a new complexion.
+Religious dances, in dedication to a god, have of course been
+honored in every country. Muller, in the work just
+cited,[1] describes a lively dance called the hyporchema
+which, accompanied by songs, was used in the worship
+of Apollo. "In this, besides the chorus of singers who
+usually danced around THE BLAZING ALTAR, several persons
+were appointed to accompany the action of the poem
+with an appropriate pantomimic display." It was probably
+some similar dance which is recorded in Exodus,
+ch. xxxii, when Aaron made the Israelites a golden Calf
+(image of the Egyptian Apis). There was an altar and a
+fire and burnt offerings for sacrifice, and the people dancing
+around. Whether in the Apollo ritual the dancers were
+naked I cannot say, but in the affair of the golden Calf
+they evidently were, for it will be remembered that it
+was just this which upset Moses' equanimity so badly--
+"when he SAW THAT THE PEOPLE WERE NAKED"--and led to the
+breaking of the two tables of stone and the slaughter of
+some thousands of folk. It will be remembered also that David on
+a sacrificial occasion danced naked before the Lord.[2]
+
+[1] Book II, ch. viii, Section 14.
+
+[2] 2 Sam. vi.
+
+
+It may seem strange that dances in honor of a god should
+be held naked; but there is abundant evidence that this
+was frequently the case, and it leads to an interesting
+speculation. Many of these rituals undoubtedly owed their
+sanctity and solemnity to their extreme antiquity. They
+came down in fact from very far back times when
+the average man or woman--as in some of the Central
+African tribes to-day--wore simply nothing at all; and
+like all religious ceremonies they tended to preserve their
+forms long after surrounding customs and conditions had
+altered. Consequently nakedness lingered on in sacrificial
+and other rites into periods when in ordinary life it
+had come to be abandoned or thought indecent and shameful.
+This comes out very clearly in both instances above--
+quoted from the Bible. For in Exodus xxxii. 25 it is said
+that "Aaron had made them (the dancers) naked UNTO THEIR
+SHAME among their enemies (READ opponents)," and in 2
+Sam. vi. 20 we are told that Michal came out and sarcastically
+rebuked the "glorious king of Israel" for "shamelessly
+uncovering himself, like a vain fellow" (for which
+rebuke, I am sorry to say, David took a mean revenge
+on Michal). In both cases evidently custom had so
+far changed that to a considerable section of the population
+these naked exhibitions had become indecent, though
+as parts of an acknowledged ritual they were still retained
+and supported by others. The same conclusion may be derived
+from the commands recorded in Exodus xx. 26 and
+xxviii. 42, that the priests be not "uncovered" before the
+altar--commands which would hardly have been needed had
+not the practice been in vogue.
+
+Then there were dances (partly magical or religious) performed
+at rustic and agricultural festivals, like the Epilenios,
+celebrated in Greece at the gathering of the grapes.[1]
+Of such a dance we get a glimpse in the Bible (Judges xxi.
+20) when the elders advised the children of Benjamin to go
+out and lie in wait in the vineyards, at the time of the
+yearly feast; and "when the daughters of Shiloh come out
+to dance in the dances, then come ye out of the vineyards
+and catch you every man a wife from the daughters of
+Shiloh"--a touching example apparently of early so-called
+'marriage by capture'! Or there were dances, also partly
+or originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian
+character, like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by
+men and women in hideous masks, or the Deimalea by
+Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the Bibasis
+carried out by both men and women--a quite gymnastic
+exercise in which the performers took a special pride in striking
+their own buttocks with their heels! or others wilder
+still, which it would perhaps not be convenient to
+describe.
+
+[1] <gr Epilhnioi umnoi>:  hymns sung over the winepress
+(Dictionary).
+
+
+We must see how important a part Dancing played in
+that great panorama of Ritual and Religion (spoken of in
+the last chapter) which, having originally been led up to
+by the 'Fall of Man,' has ever since the dawn of history
+gradually overspread the world with its strange procession
+of demons and deities, and its symbolic representations
+of human destiny. When it is remembered that ritual
+dancing was the matrix out of which the Drama sprang,
+and further that the drama in its inception (as still to-day
+in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in
+connection with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand
+how all this mass of ceremonial sacrifices, expiations,
+initiations, Sun and Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic
+communions and celebrations, mystery-plays, dramatic
+representations, myths and legends, etc., which I have touched
+upon in the preceding chapters--together with all the
+emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the
+wonderment which they represented--have practically sprung
+from the same root: a root deep and necessary in the
+psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show that they
+will all practically converge again in the end to one
+meaning, and prepare the way for one great Synthesis to
+come--an evolution also necessary and inevitable in human
+psychology.
+
+In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few
+pages back, occur those well-known words whose repetition
+now will, on account of their beauty, I am sure be excused:--
+
+ Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
+ The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
+     Hath had elsewhere its setting,
+          And cometh from afar;
+     Not in entire forgetfulness,
+     And not in utter nakedness,
+ But trailing clouds of glory do we come
+     From God, who is our home:
+ Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
+ Shades of the prison-house begin to close
+     Upon the growing Boy,
+ But He beholds the light and whence it flows
+     He sees it in his joy;
+ The youth who daily farther from the east
+     Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
+     And by the vision splendid
+     Is on his way attended;
+ At length the man perceives it die away
+ And fade into the light of common day.
+
+
+Wordsworth--though he had not the inestimable advantage
+of a nineteenth-century education and the inheritance
+of the Darwinian philosophy--does nevertheless put
+the matter of the Genius of the Child in a way which
+(with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we scientific
+moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now
+that the Child does not come into the world with a mental
+tabula rasa of entire forgetfulness but on the contrary
+as the possessor of vast stores of sub-conscious memory, derived
+from its ancestral inheritances; we all admit that a certain
+grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic quality, in
+the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these racial
+inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and
+that after birth the impact of the outer world serves
+rather to break up and disintegrate this harmony than
+to confirm and strengthen it. Some psychologists indeed
+nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child is not
+only 'Father of the man,' but superior to the man,[1] and
+that Boyhood and Youth and Maturity are attained to not
+by any addition but by a process of loss and subtraction.
+It will be seen that the last ten lines of the above quotation
+rather favor this view.
+
+[1] Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from
+the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in
+the course of his short life goes very much farther along the
+road of degradation and premature senility." (Man and Woman, by
+Havelock Ellis, p. 24).
+
+
+But my object in making the quotation was not to insist
+on the truth of its application to the individual Child, but
+rather to point out the remarkable way in which it illustrates
+what I have said about the Childhood of the Race. In fact,
+if the quotation be read over again with this interpretation
+(which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that the 'birth'
+spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively self-
+conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured,
+unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the
+parable unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly.
+THAT birth certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace
+and intuition and instinctive perfection of the animals
+was lost. But the forgetfulness was not entire; the
+memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an Eden-
+garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance
+the first tribal men, on the edge of but not yet WITHIN the
+civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.
+
+As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-
+consciousness was also the period of the dawn of the practical
+and inquiring Intellect; it was the period of the babyhood
+of both; and so we perceive among these early people (as
+we also do among children) that while in the main the heart
+and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for
+a long period futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as
+the mind left the ancient bases of instinct and sub-conscious
+racial experience it fell into a hopeless bog, out of which
+it only slowly climbed by means of the painfully-gathered
+stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science. "Heaven
+lies about us in our infancy." Wordsworth perceived
+that wonderful world of inner experience and glory out of
+which the child emerges; and some even of us may perceive
+that similar world in which the untampered animals STILL
+dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man in the history
+of the race was long ago driven. But a curse went with
+the exile. As the Brain grew, the Heart withered. The
+inherited instincts and racially accumulated wisdom, on
+which the first men thrived and by means of which they
+achieved a kind of temporary Paradise, were broken up;
+delusions and disease and dissension set in. Cain turned
+upon his brother and slew him; and the shades of the prison-
+house began to close. The growing Boy, however, (by
+whom we may understand the early tribes of Mankind)
+had yet a radiance of Light and joy in his life; and the
+Youth--though travelling daily farther from the East--still
+remained Nature's priest, and by the vision splendid was on
+his way attended: but
+
+     At length the Man perceived it die away.
+     And fade into the light of common day.
+
+What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to
+take it so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race,
+its early and pathetic clinging to the tradition of the Eden-
+garden, its careless and vigorous boyhood, its meditative
+youth, with consciousness of sin and endless expiatory
+ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of salvation, and
+finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the world-
+slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!
+
+Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our
+main line of thought, we may point out that while early
+peoples were intellectually mere babies--with their endless
+yarns about heroes on horseback leaping over wide rivers
+or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles through the
+air, and their utter failure to understand the general
+concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their
+instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already
+said, by no means fools; certainly not such fools as many
+of the arm-chair students of these things delight to represent
+them. For just as, a few years ago, we modern civilizees
+studying outlying nations, the Chinese for instance, rejoiced
+(in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity and
+absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and
+failed entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently
+sensible people; so in the case of primitive men we
+have been, and even still are, far too prone to catalogue
+their cruelties and obscenities and idiotic superstitions,
+and to miss the sane and balanced setting of their actual lives.
+
+Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance
+with his subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918
+an article on "The Primitive Medicine Man" in which he
+shows that the latter is as a rule anything but a fool and
+a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he hocuspocuses
+his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-
+man's excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth,
+or of wounds and fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning
+or trephining--all of which operations, he admits, may
+be accompanied with grotesque and superstitious ceremonies,
+yet show real perception and ability. We all
+know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--
+what a considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which
+the modern art of healing owes to the ancient medicine-man,
+and it may be again mentioned that one of the most up-to-
+date treatments--the use of a prolonged and exclusive diet of
+MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start in severe
+cases--has really come down to us through the ages from
+this early source.[1] The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett
+says, is largely a 'faith-healer' and 'soul-doctor'; he believes
+in his vocation, and undergoes much for the sake of
+it: "The main point is to grasp that by his special
+initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises--not
+to speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and
+ecstasy, which he may inherit by nature and have improved
+by art--he HAS access to a wonder-working power. . . .
+And the great need of primitive folk is for this healer of
+souls." Our author further insists on the enormous play
+and influence of Fear in the savage mind--a point we have
+touched on already--and gives instances of Thanatomania,
+or cases where, after a quite slight and superficial wound,
+the patient becomes so depressed that he, quite needlessly,
+persists in dying! Such cases, obviously, can only be countered
+by Faith, or something (whatever it may be) which
+restores courage, hope and energy to the mind. Nor need
+I point out that the situation is exactly the same among
+a vast number of 'patients' to-day. As to the value, in
+his degree, of the medicine-man many modern observers and
+students quite agree with the above.[2] Also as the present
+chapter is on Ritual Dancing it may not be out of place
+to call attention to the supposed healing of sick people in
+Ceylon and other places by Devil-dancing--the enormous
+output of energy and noise in the ritual possibly having the
+effect of reanimating the patient (if it does not kill
+him), or of expelling the disease from his organism.
+
+[1] Milk ("fast-milk" or vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only
+diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times
+(preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with
+ceremony from the milky and semen-like sap of certain plants, and
+much used in sacrificial offerings. (See Monier-Williams.
+Sanskrit Dictionary.)
+
+[2] See Winwood Reade (Savage Africa), Salamon Reinach (Cults,
+Myths and Religions), and others.
+
+
+With regard to the practical intelligence of primitive
+peoples, derived from their close contact with life and
+nature, Bishop Colenso's experiences among the Zulus may
+appropriately be remembered. When expounding the Bible
+to these supposedly backward 'niggers' he was met at all
+points by practical interrogations and arguments which he
+was perfectly unable to answer--especially over the recorded
+passage of the Red Sea by the Israelites in a single night.
+From the statistics given in the Sacred Book these naughty
+savages proved to him absolutely conclusively that the numbers
+of fugitives were such that even supposing them
+to have marched--men, women and children--FIVE ABREAST
+and in close order, they would have formed a column 100
+miles long, and this not including the baggage, sheep
+and cattle! Of course the feat was absolutely impossible.
+They could not have passed the Red Sea in a night or a
+week of nights.
+
+But the sequel is still more amusing and instructive.
+Colenso, in his innocent sincerity, took the side of the Zulus,
+and feeling sure the Church at home would be quite glad to
+have its views with regard to the accuracy of Bible statistics
+corrected, wrote a book embodying the amendments needed.
+Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of protest
+and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition
+for the time being from his bishopric! While at the same
+time an avalanche of books to oppose his heresy poured
+forth from the press. Lately I had the curiosity to look
+through the British Museum catalogue and found that
+in refutation of Colenso's Pentateuch Examined some 140
+(a hundred and forty) volumes were at that time published!
+To-day, I need hardly say, all these arm-chair critics and
+their works have sunk into utter obscurity, but the arguments
+of the Zulus and their Bishop still stand unmoved and immovable.
+
+This is a case of searching intelligence shown by 'savages,'
+an intelligence founded on intimate knowledge of the needs
+of actual life. I think we may say that a, similarly instinctive
+intelligence (sub-conscious if you like) has guided the tribes
+of men on the whole in their long passage through the Red
+Sea of the centuries, from those first days of which I
+speak even down to the present age, and has in some strange,
+even if fitful, way kept them along the path of that final
+emancipation towards which Humanity is inevitably moving.
+
+
+
+XII. THE SEX-TABOO
+
+In the course of the last few chapters I have spoken more
+than once of the solidarity and continuity of Christianity,
+in its essential doctrines, with the Pagan rites. There is,
+however, one notable exception to this statement. I refer
+of course to Christianity's treatment of Sex. It is
+certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan cults generally
+made a great deal of all sorts of sex-rites, laid
+much stress upon them, and introduced them in what
+we consider an unblushing and shameless way into the
+instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,'
+on the whole took quite the opposite line--ignored sex,
+condemned it, and did much despite to the perfectly natural
+instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,'
+because there is nothing to show that Jesus himself (if we
+admit his figure as historical) adopted any such extreme
+or doctrinaire attitude; and the quite early Christian teachers
+(with the chief exception of Paul) do not exhibit this bias
+to any great degree. In fact, as is well known, strong
+currents of pagan usage and belief ran through the Christian
+assemblies of the first three or four centuries. "The Christian
+art of this period remained delightfully pagan. In the
+catacombs we see the Saviour as a beardless youth, like a
+young Greek god; sometimes represented, like Hermes the
+guardian of the flocks, bearing a ram or lamb round
+his neck; sometimes as Orpheus tuning his lute among
+the wild animals."[1] The followers of Jesus were at times
+even accused--whether rightly or wrongly I know not--
+of celebrating sexual mysteries at their love-feasts. But
+as the Church through the centuries grew in power and scope
+--with its monks and their mutilations and asceticisms, and
+its celibate clergy, and its absolute refusal to recognize the
+sexual meaning of its own acclaimed symbols (like the
+Cross, the three fingers of Benediction, the Fleur de Lys
+and so forth)--it more and more consistently defined itself
+as anti-sexual in its outlook, and stood out in that way in
+marked contrast to the earlier Nature-religions.
+
+[1] Angels' Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.
+
+
+It may be said of course that this anti-sexual tendency
+can be traced in other of the pre-Christian Churches, especially
+the later ones, like the Buddhist, the Egyptian,
+and so forth; and this is perfectly true; but it would seem
+that in many ways the Christian Church marked the culmination
+of the tendency; and the fact that other cults participated
+in the taboo makes us all the more ready and anxious
+to inquire into its real cause.
+
+To go into a disquisition on the Sex-rites of the various pre-
+Christian religions would be 'a large order'--larger than
+I could attempt to fill; but the general facts in this connection
+are fairly patent. We know, of course, from the
+Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to sexual
+worships. There were erect images (phallic) and "groves"
+(sexual symbols) on every high hill and under every green
+tree;[1] and these same images and the rites connected
+with them crept into the Jewish Temple and were popular
+enough to maintain their footing there for a long period from
+King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of
+Josiah[2] and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover
+there were girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached
+during this period to the Jewish Temple as to the heathen
+Temples, for the rendering of sexual services, which were
+recognized in many cases as part of the ritual. Women
+were persuaded that it was an honor and a privilege to be
+fertilized by a 'holy man' (a priest or other man connected
+with the rites), and children resulting from such
+unions were often called "Children of God"--an appellation
+which no doubt sometimes led to a legend of miraculous
+birth! Girls who took their place as hierodouloi in the
+Temple or Temple-precincts were expected to surrender
+themselves to men-worshipers in the Temple, much in the
+same way, probably, as Herodotus describes in the temple
+of the Babylonian Venus Mylitta, where every native
+woman, once in her life, was supposed to sit in the
+Temple and have intercourse with some stranger.[3] Indeed
+the Syrian and Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia.
+"The Hebrews entering Syria," says Richard Burton[4]
+"found it religionized. by Assyria and Babylonia, when the
+Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth,
+Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician
+Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-
+goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love." The word
+translated "grove" as above, in our Bible, is in fact Asherah,
+which connects it pretty clearly with the Babylonian Queen
+of Heaven.
+
+[1] 1 Kings xiv. 22-24.
+
+[2] 2 Kings xxiii.
+
+[3] See Herodotus i. 199; also a reference to this custom in the
+apocryphal Baruch, vi. 42, 43.
+
+[4] The Thousand Nights and a Night (1886 edn.), vol. x, p. 229.
+
+
+In India again, in connection with the Hindu Temples and
+their rites, we have exactly the same institution of girls
+attached to the Temple service--the Nautch-girls--whose
+functions in past times were certainly sexual, and whose
+dances in honor of the god are, even down to the
+present day, decidedly amatory in character. Then we
+have the very numerous lingams (conventional representations
+of the male organ) to be seen, scores and scores of
+them, in the arcades and cloisters of the Hindu Temples--
+to which women of all classes, especially those who wish to
+become mothers, resort, anointing them copiously with
+oil, and signalizing their respect and devotion to them in
+a very practical way. As to the lingam as representing
+the male organ, in some form or other--as upright stone
+or pillar or obelisk or slender round tower--it occurs all
+over the, world, notably in Ireland, and forms such a memorial
+of the adoration paid by early folk to the great emblem
+and instrument of human fertility, as cannot be mistaken.
+The pillars set up by Solomon in front of his temple were
+obviously from their names--Jachin and Boaz[1]--meant to
+be emblems of this kind; and the fact that they were
+crowned with pomegranates--the universally accepted symbol
+of the female--confirms and clinches this interpretation.
+The obelisks before the Egyptians' temples were
+signs of the same character. The well-known T-shaped
+cross was in use in pagan lands long before Christianity, as
+a representation of the male member, and also at the same
+time of the 'tree' on which the god (Attis or Adonis or Krishna
+or whoever it might be) was crucified; and the same
+symbol combined with the oval (or yoni) formed THE
+Crux Ansata {Ankh} of the old Egyptian ritual--a figure which
+is to-day sold in Cairo as a potent charm, and confessedly
+indicates the conjunction of the two sexes in one
+design.[2] MacLennan in The Fortnightly Review (Oct. 1869)
+quotes with approval the words of Sanchoniathon, as saying
+that "men first worship plants, next the heavenly bodies,
+supposed to be animals, then 'pillars' (emblems of the
+Procreator), and last, the anthropomorphic gods."
+
+[1] "He shall establish" and "In it is strength" are in the Bible
+the marginal interpretations of these two words.
+
+[2] The connection between the production of fire by means of the
+fire-drill and the generation of life by sex-intercourse is a
+very obvious one, and lends itself to magical ideas. J. E. Hewitt
+in his Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (1894) says (vol. i, p.
+8) that "Magha, the mother-goddess worshipped in Asia Minor, was
+originally the socket-block from which fire was generated by the
+fire-drill." Hence we have, he says, the Magi of Persia, and the
+Maghadas of Indian History, also the word 'Magic."
+
+
+It is not necessary to enlarge on this subject. The
+facts of the connection of sexual rites with religious services
+nearly everywhere in the early world are, as I say, sufficiently
+patent to every inquirer. But it IS necessary to try
+to understand the rationale of this connection. To dispatch
+all such cases under the mere term "religious prostitution"
+is no explanation. The term suggests, of
+course, that the plea of religion was used simply as an
+excuse and a cover for sexual familiarities; but though
+this kind of explanation commends itself, no doubt, to
+the modern man--whose religion is as commercial as his
+sex-relationships are--and though in CASES no doubt it
+was a true explanation--yet it is obvious that among people
+who took religion seriously, as a matter of life and death
+and who did not need hypocritical excuses or covers for
+sex-relationships, it cannot be accepted as in general the
+RIGHT explanation. No, the real explanation is--and I
+will return to this presently--that sexual relationships are
+so deep and intimate a part of human nature that from
+the first it has been simply impossible to keep them OUT
+of religion--it being of course the object of religion to bring
+the whole human being into some intelligible relation with
+the physical, moral, and if you like supernatural order of
+the great world around him. Sex was felt from the first
+to be part, and a foundational part, of the great order of the
+world and of human nature; and therefore to separate
+it from Religion was unthinkable and a kind of contradiction
+in terms.[1]
+
+[1] For further development of this subject see ch. xv.
+
+
+If that is true--it will be asked--how was it that that
+divorce DID take place--that the taboo did arise? How was
+it that the Jews, under the influence of Josiah and the
+Hebrew prophets, turned their faces away from sex and
+strenuously opposed the Syrian cults? How was it that
+this reaction extended into Christianity and became even
+more definite in the Christian Church--that monks went
+by thousands into the deserts of the Thebaid, and that
+the early Fathers and Christian apologists could not find
+terms foul enough to hurl at Woman as the symbol (to them)
+of nothing but sex-corruption and delusion? How was it
+that this contempt of the body and degradation of sex-
+things went on far into the Middle Ages of Europe, and
+ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy, and
+concealment and suppression of sex-instincts, which, acting
+as cover to a vile commercial Prostitution and as a
+breeding ground for horrible Disease, has lasted on even
+to the edge of the present day?
+
+This is a fair question, and one which demands an answer.
+There must have been a reason, and a deep-rooted one, for
+this remarkable reaction and volte-face which has characterized
+Christianity, and, perhaps to a lesser degree, other
+both earlier and later cults like those of the Buddhists, the
+Egyptians, the Aztecs,[1] and so forth.
+
+[1] For the Aztecs, see Acosta, vol. ii, p. 324 (London, 1604).
+
+
+It may be said--and this is a fair answer on the SURFACE
+of the problem--that the main reason WAS something in
+the nature of a reaction. The excesses and corruptions of
+sex in Syria had evidently become pretty bad, and that very
+fact may have led to a pendulum-swing of the Jewish
+Church in the opposite direction; and again in the same way
+the general laxity of morals in the decay of the Roman empire
+may have confirmed the Church of early Christendom in its
+determination to keep along the great high road of asceticism.
+The Christian followed on the Jewish and Egyptian Churches,
+and in this way a great tradition of sexual continence and
+anti-pagan morality came right down the centuries even into
+modern times.
+
+This seems so far a reasonable theory; but I think we
+shall go farther and get nearer the heart of the problem if
+we revert to the general clue which I have followed already
+more than once--the clue of the necessary evolution of human
+Consciousnss. In the first or animal stage of human
+evolution, Sex was (as among the animals) a perfectly
+necessary, instinctive and unself-conscious activity. It
+was harmonious with itself, natural, and unproductive of
+evil. But when the second stage set in, in which man
+became preponderantly SELF-conscious, he inevitably set
+about deflecting sex-activities to his own private pleasure
+and advantage; he employed his budding intellect in
+scheming the derailment of passion and desire from tribal
+needs and, Nature's uses to the poor details of his own
+gratification. If the first stage of harmonious sex-instinct
+and activity may be held as characteristic of the Golden
+Age, the second stage must be taken to represent the Fall
+of man and his expulsion from Paradise in the Garden of
+Eden story. The pleasure and glory of Sex having been
+turned to self-purposes, Sex itself became the great Sin. A
+sense of guilt overspread man's thoughts on the subject. "He
+knew that he was naked," and he fled from the voice
+and face of the Lord. From that moment one of
+the main objects of his life (in its inner and newer activities)
+came to be the DENIAL of Sex. Sex was conceived of as the
+great Antagonist, the old Serpent lying ever in wait to
+betray him; and there arrived a moment in the history
+of every race, and of every representative religion, when
+the sexual rites and ceremonies of the older time lost their
+naive and quasi-innocent character and became afflicted with
+a sense of guilt and indecency. This extraordinarily
+interesting and dramatic moment in human evolution was
+of course that in which self-consciousness grew powerful
+enough to penetrate to the centre of human vitality, the
+sanctumof man's inner life, his sexual instinct, and to deal
+it a terrific blow--a blow from which it has never yet
+recovered, and from which indeed it will not recover, until
+the very nature of man's inner life is changed.
+
+It may be said that it was very foolish of Man to
+deny and to try to expel a perfectly natural and sensible
+thing, a necessary and indispensable part of his own nature.
+And that, as far as I can see, is perfectly true. But sometimes
+it is unavoidable, it would seem, to do foolish things--
+if only to convince oneself of one's own foolishness. On
+the other hand, this policy on the part of Man was certainly
+very wise--wiser than he knew--for in attempting to drive
+out Sex (which of course he could not do) he entered into
+a conflict which was bound to end in the expulsion of
+SOMETHING; and that something was the domination, within
+himself, of self-consciousness, the very thing which makes and
+ever has made sex detestable. Man did not succeed in
+driving the snake out of the Garden, but he drove himself
+out, taking the real old serpent of self-greed and self-
+gratification with him. When some day he returns to
+Paradise this latter will have died in his bosom and
+been cast away, but he will find the good Snake there as
+of old, full of healing and friendliness, among the branches
+of the Tree of Life.
+
+Besides it is evident from other considerations that
+this moment of the denial of sex HAD to come. When
+one thinks of the enormous power of this passion, and its
+age-long, hold upon the human race, one realizes that once
+liberated from the instinctive bonds of nature, and backed
+by a self-conscious and self-seeking human intelligence it was
+on the way to become a fearful curse.
+
+  A monstrous Eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth;
+  For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran.
+
+And this may have been all very well and appropriate in
+the carboniferous Epoch, but WE in the end of Time have
+no desire to fall under any such preposterous domination,
+or to return to the primal swamps from which organic nature
+has so slowly and painfully emerged.
+
+I say it was the entry of self-consciousness into the sphere
+of Sex, and the consequent use of the latter for private
+ends, which poisoned this great race-power at its root.
+For above all, Sex, as representing through Childbirth the
+life of the Race (or of the Tribe, or, if you like,
+of Humanity at large) should be sacred and guarded from
+merely selfish aims, and therefore to use it only for such
+aims is indeed a desecration. And even if--as some maintain
+and I think rightly[1]--sex is not MERELY for child-birth
+and physical procreation, but for mutual vitalizing and
+invigoration, it still subserves union and not egotism; and to
+use it egotistically is to commit the sin of Separation indeed.
+It is to cast away and corrupt the very bond of life and
+fellowship. The ancient peoples at any rate threw an illumination
+of religious (that is, of communal and public) value over
+sex-acts, and to a great extent made them into matters either of
+Temple-ritual and the worship of the gods, or of communal and
+pandemic celebration, as in the Saturnalia and other similar
+festivals. We have certainly no right to regard these
+celebrations--of either kind--as insincere. They were, at any
+rate in their inception, genuinely religious or genuinely social
+and festal; and from either point of view they were far better
+than the secrecy of private indulgence which characterizes our
+modern world in these matters. The thorough and shameless
+commercialism of Sex has alas! been reserved for what is
+called "Christian civilization," and with it (perhaps as
+a necessary consequence) Prostitution and Syphilis have
+grown into appalling evils, accompanied by a gigantic degradation
+of social standards, and upgrowth of petty Philistinism
+and niaiserie. Love, in fact, having in this modern
+world-movement been denied, and its natural manifestations
+affected with a sense of guilt and of sin, has really languished
+and ceased to play its natural part in life; and a vast number
+of people--both men and women, finding themselves
+barred or derailed from the main object of existence,
+have turned their energies to 'business' or 'money-making'
+or 'social advancement' or something equally futile,
+as the only poor substitute and pis aller open to them.
+
+[1] See Havelock Ellis, The Objects of Marriage, a pamphlet
+published by the "British Society for the Study of
+Sex-psychology."
+
+
+Why (again we ask) did Christianity make this apparently
+great mistake? And again we must reply: Perhaps the
+mistake was not so great as it appears to be. Perhaps
+this was another case of the necessity of learning by loss.
+Love had to be denied, in the form of sex, in order that it
+might thus the better learn its own true values and needs. Sex
+had to be rejected, or defiled with the sense of guilt and self-
+seeking, in order that having cast out its defilement it might
+return one day, transformed in the embrace of love.
+The whole process has had a deep and strange world-
+significance. It has led to an immensely long period of
+suppression--suppression of two great instincts--the physical
+instinct of sex and the emotional instinct of love. Two
+things which should naturally be conjoined have been
+separated; and both have suffered. And we know from
+the Freudian teachings what suppressions in the root-instincts
+necessarily mean. We know that they inevitably
+terminate in diseases and distortions of proper action,
+either in the body or in the mind, or in both; and that
+these evils can only be cured by the liberation of the said
+instincts again to their proper expression and harmonious
+functioning in the whole organism. No wonder then that,
+with this agelong suppression (necessary in a sense though
+it may have been) which marks the Christian dispensation,
+there should have been associated endless Sickness and Crime
+and sordid Poverty, the Crucifixion of animals in the
+name of Science and of human workers in the name of
+Wealth, and wars and horrors innumerable! Hercules
+writhing in the Nessus-shirt or Prometheus nailed to the
+rocks are only as figures of a toy miniature compared with
+this vision of the great and divine Spirit of Man caught in the
+clutches of those dread Diseases which through the centuries
+have been eating into his very heart and vitals.
+
+It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the
+blame for all this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the
+whole great scheme, namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it
+played the part very thoroughly and successfully. For it must be
+remembered (what I have again and again insisted on) that in the
+pagan cults it was always the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE,
+the people that was the main consideration; the advantage of the
+individual took only a very secondary part. But in
+Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms of apostolic days and
+of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and sisterhoods had
+died down--religion occupied itself more and more with
+each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of
+what might happen to the community; till, with the rise
+of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached
+such an extreme that, as some one has said, each
+man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a
+corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which
+might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality
+too, under the commercial regime became, as was natural,
+perfectly selfish. It was always: "Am _I_ saved? Am
+_I_ doing the right thing? Am _I_ winning the favor of God
+and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed?
+Did _I_ make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified
+for me?" The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered
+into the whole human system.
+
+As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for
+all this--partly because, AFTER the communal periods which
+I have just mentioned, Christianity was evidently deeply
+influenced by the rise of COMMERCIALISM, to which during
+the last two centuries it has so carefully and piously
+adapted itself; and partly because--if our view is anywhere
+near right--this microbial injection of self-consciousness
+was just the necessary work which (in conjunction with
+commercialism) it HAD to perform. But though one does
+not blame Christianity one cannot blind oneself to its defects
+--the defects necessarily arising from the part it had to
+play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual--say
+of Apollo or Dionysus--including its rude and crude sacrifices
+if you like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity
+and dedication to the common life and welfare--with the
+morbid self-introspection of the Christian and the eternally
+recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"--the
+comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at
+any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness
+about the Christian attitude, and also a painful self-
+consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though Nietzsche's
+blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one almost
+thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with
+one's head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always
+of altruism and self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was
+entirely occupied with the question of one's own salvation.
+There is besides a lamentable want of grit and substance
+about the Christian doctrines and ceremonials. Somehow
+under the sex-taboo they became spiritualized and etherealized
+out of all human use. Study the initiation-rites of any
+savage tribe--with their strict discipline of the young
+braves in fortitude, and the overcoming of pain and fear;
+with their very detailed lessons in the arts of war and life
+and the duties of the grown man to his tribe; and with
+their quite practical instruction in matters of Sex; and then
+read our little Baptismal and Confirmation services, which
+ought to correspond thereto. How thin and attenuated and
+weak the latter appear! Or compare the Holy Communion,
+as celebrated in the sentimental atmosphere of
+a Protestant Church, with an ancient Eucharistic feast of
+real jollity and community of life under the acknowledged
+presence of the god; or the Roman Catholic service of the
+Mass, including its genuflexions and mock oblations and
+droning ritual sing-song, with the actual sacrifice in early
+days of an animal-god-victim on a blazing altar; and I think
+my meaning will be clear. We do not want, of course,
+to return to all the crudities and barbarities of the past; but
+also we do not want to become attenuated and spiritualized
+out of all mundane sense and recognition, and to live in an
+otherworld Paradise void of application to earthly
+affairs.
+
+The sex-taboo in Christianity was apparently, as I have
+said, an effort of the human soul to wrest itself free from
+the entanglement of physical lust--which lust, though normal
+and appropriate and in a way gracious among the
+animals, had through the domination of self-consciousness
+become diseased and morbid or monstrous in Man. The
+work thus done has probably been of the greatest value
+to the human race; but, just as in other cases it has sometimes
+happened that the effort to do a certain work has resulted
+in the end in an unbalanced exaggeration so here. We
+are beginning to see now the harmful side of the repression
+of sex, and are tentatively finding our way back again to a
+more pagan attitude. And as this return-movement is
+taking place at a time when, from many obvious signs, the
+self-conscious, grasping, commercial conception of life is
+preparing to go on the wane, and the sense of solidarity to
+re-establish itself, there is really good hope that our
+return-journey may prove in some degree successful.
+
+Man progresses generally, not both legs at once like a
+sparrow, but by putting one leg forward first, and then
+the other. There was this advantage in the Christian
+taboo of sex that by discouraging the physical and sensual
+side of love it did for the time being allow the spiritual
+side to come forward. But, as I have just now indicated,
+there is a limit to that process. We cannot always keep
+one leg first in walking, and we do not want, in life, always
+to put the spiritual first, nor always the material and sensual.
+The two sides in the long run have to keep pace with each other.
+
+And it may be that a great number of the very curious
+and seemingly senseless taboos that we find among the primitive
+peoples can be partly explained in this way: that is,
+that by ruling out certain directions of activity they
+enabled people to concentrate more effectually, for the time
+being, on other directions. To primitive folk the great world,
+whose ways are puzzling enough in all conscience to us,
+must have been simply bewildering in its dangers and
+complications. It was an amazement of Fear and Ignorance.
+Thunderbolts might come at any moment out of the blue sky,
+or a demon out of an old tree trunk, or a devastating
+plague out of a bad smell--or apparently even out of nothing
+at all! Under those circumstances it was perhaps wise,
+wherever there was the smallest SUSPICION of danger or
+ill-luck, to create a hard and fast TABOO--just as we tell
+our children ON NO ACCOUNT to walk under a ladder (thereby
+creating a superstition in their minds), partly because it
+would take too long to explain all about the real dangers
+of paint-pots and other things, and partly because for the
+children themselves it seems simpler to have a fixed and
+inviolable law than to argue over every case that occurs.
+The priests and elders among early folk no doubt took the
+line of FORBIDDAL of activities, as safer and simpler, even if
+carried sometimes too far, than the opposite, of easy
+permission and encouragement. Taboos multiplied--many of
+them quite senseless--but perhaps in this perilous maze
+of the world, of which I have spoken, it really WAS simpler
+to cut out a large part of the labyrinth, as forbidden ground,
+thus rendering it easier for the people to find their way in
+those portions of the labyrinth which remained. If
+you read in Deuteronomy (ch. xiv) the list of birds and
+beasts and fishes permitted for food among the Israelites,
+or tabooed, you will find the list on the whole reasonable,
+but you will be struck by some curious exceptions (according
+to our ideas), which are probably to be explained by the
+necessity of making the rules simple enough to be comprehended
+by everybody--even if they included the forbiddal of some quite
+eatable animals.
+
+At some early period, in Babylonia or Assyria, a very
+stringent taboo on the Sabbath arose, which, taken up in turn
+by the Jewish and Christian Churches, has ruled the
+Western World for three thousand years or more, and still
+survives in a quite senseless form among some of our rural
+populations, who will see their corn rot in the fields rather
+than save it on a Sunday.[1] It is quite likely that this taboo
+in its first beginning was due not to any need of a weekly
+rest-day (a need which could never be felt among nomad
+savages, but would only occur in some kind of industrial
+and stationary civilization), but to some superstitious fear,
+connected with such things as the changes of the Moon,
+and the probable ILL-LUCK of any enterprise undertaken on
+the seventh day, or any day of Moon-change. It is probable,
+however, that as time went on and Society became more
+complex, the advantages of a weekly REST-DAY (or market-
+day) became more obvious and that the priests and legislators
+deliberately turned the taboo to a social use.[2] The
+learned modern Ethnologists, however, will generally have
+none of this latter idea. As a rule they delight in representing
+early peoples as totally destitute of common sense
+(which is supposed to be a monopoly of us moderns!);
+and if the Sabbath-arrangement has had any value or use
+they insist on ascribing this to pure accident, and not to
+the application of any sane argument or reason.
+
+[1] For other absurd Sunday taboos see Westermarck on The Moral
+Ideas, vol. ii, p. 289.
+
+[2] For a tracing of this taboo from useless superstition to
+practical utility see Hastings's Encycl. Religion and Ethics,
+art. "The Sabbath."
+
+
+It is true indeed that a taboo--in order to be a proper
+taboo--must not rest in the general mind on argument or
+reason. It may have had good sense in the past or even
+an underlying good sense in the present, but its foundation
+must rest on something beyond. It must be an absolute
+fiat--something of the nature of a Mystery[1] or of Religion
+or Magic-and not to be disputed. This gives it its blood-
+curdling quality. The rustic does not know what would
+happen to him if he garnered his corn on Sunday, nor does
+the diner-out in polite society know what would happen if
+he spooned up his food with his knife--but they both
+are stricken with a sort of paralysis at the very suggestion of
+infringing these taboos.
+
+[1] See Westermarck, Ibid., ii. 586.
+
+
+Marriage-customs have always been a fertile field for the
+generation of taboos. It seems doubtful whether anything
+like absolute promiscuity ever prevailed among the human
+race, but there is much to show that wide choice and
+intercourse were common among primitive folk and that
+the tendency of later marriage custom has been on the whole
+to LIMIT this range of choice. At some early period the
+forbiddal of marriage between those who bore the
+same totem-name took place. Thus in Australia "no man of
+the Emu stock might marry an Emu woman; no Blacksnake
+might marry a Blacksnake woman, and so forth."[1] Among
+the Kamilaroi and the Arunta of S. Australia the tribe was
+divided into classes or clans, sometimes four, sometimes
+eight, and a man of one particular clan was only marriageable
+with a woman of another particular clan--say (1)
+with (3) or (2) with (4), and so on.[2] Customs with a similar
+tendency, but different in detail, seem to have prevailed
+among native tribes in Central Africa and N. America.
+And the regulations in all this matter have been so (apparently)
+entirely arbitrary in the various cases that it would
+almost appear as if the bar of kinship through the Totem
+had been the EXCUSE, originating perhaps in some superstition,
+but that the real and more abiding object was simply limitation.
+And this perhaps was a wise line to take. A taboo
+on promiscuity had to be created, and for this purpose any
+current prejudice could be made use of.[3]
+
+[1] Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66.
+
+[2] See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia.
+
+[3] The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See
+p. 214 of that book.
+
+
+With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different
+complexion. When we consider the enormous amount of
+suffering and disease, both of mind and body, arising from
+the sex-suppression of which I have just spoken, especially
+among women, we see that mere unreasoning taboos--which
+possibly had their place and use in the past--can be
+tolerated no longer. We are bound to turn the searchlight
+of reason and science on a number of superstitions which
+still linger in the dark and musty places of the Churches and
+the Law courts. Modern inquiry has shown conclusively
+not only the foundational importance of sex in the evolution
+of each human being, but also the very great
+VARIETY of spontaneous manifestations in different individuals
+and the vital necessity that these should be recognized,
+if society is ever to expand into a rational human
+form. It is not my object here to sketch the future
+of marriage and sex-relations generally--a subject
+which is now being dealt with very effectively from many
+sides; but only to insist on our using our good sense in the
+whole matter, and refusing any longer to be bound by senseless
+pre-judgments.
+
+Something of the same kind may be said with regard to
+Nakedness, which in modern Civilization has become the
+object of a very serious and indeed harmful taboo; both
+of speech and act. As someone has said, it became in the
+end of the nineteenth century almost a crime to mention
+by name any portion of the human body within a radius
+of about twenty inches from its centre (!) and as a matter
+of fact a few dress-reformers of that period were actually
+brought into court and treated as criminals for going about
+with legs bare up to the knees, and shoulders and chest
+uncovered! Public follies such as these have been responsible
+for much of the bodily and mental disease and
+suppression just mentioned, and the sooner they are sent to
+limbo the better. No sensible person would advocate
+promiscuous nakedness any more than promiscuous sex-
+relationship; nor is it likely that aged and deformed
+people would at any time wish to expose themselves. But
+surely there is enough good sense and appreciation of grace
+and fitness in the average human mind for it to be able to
+liberate the body from senseless concealment, and give it
+its due expression. The Greeks of old, having on the
+whole clean bodies, treated them with respect and distinction.
+The young men appeared quite naked in the palaestra,
+and even the girls of Sparta ran races publicly in
+the same condition;[1] and some day when our bodies (and
+minds too) have become clean we shall return to similar
+institutions. But that will not be just yet. As long as
+the defilement of this commercial civilization is on us we
+shall prefer our dirt and concealment. The powers that
+be will protest against change. Heinrich Scham, in his
+charming little pamphlet Nackende Menschen,[2] describes the
+consternation of the commercial people at such ideas:
+
+" 'What will become of us,' cried the tailors, 'if you go
+naked?'
+
+"And all the lot of them, hat, cravat, shirt, and shoemakers
+joined in the chorus.
+
+" 'AND WHERE SHALL I CARRY MY MONEY?' cried one who had
+just been made a director."
+
+
+[1] See Theocritus, Idyll xviii.
+
+[2] Published at Leipzig about 1893.
+
+
+
+XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+Referring back to the existence of something resembling
+a great World-religion which has come down the centuries,
+continually expanding and branching in the process, we have
+now to consider the genesis of that special brand or
+branch of it which we call Christianity. Each religion or
+cult, pagan or Christian, has had, as we have seen, a vast
+amount in common with the general World-religion; yet each
+has had its own special characteristics. What have been the
+main characteristics of the Christian branch, as differentiating
+it from the other branches?
+
+We saw in the last chapter that a certain ascetic attitude
+towards Sex was one of the most salient marks of the Christian
+Church; and that whereas most of the pagan cults
+(though occasionally favoring frightful austerities and
+cruel sacrifices) did on the whole rejoice in pleasure and
+the world of the senses, Christianity--following largely on
+Judaism--displayed a tendency towards renunciation of
+the world and the flesh, and a withdrawal into the inner and
+more spiritual regions of the mind. The same tendency
+may be traced in the Egyptian and Phrygian cults of that
+period. It will be remembered how Juvenal (Sat. VI,
+510-40) chaffs the priests of Cybele at Rome for making
+themselves "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake,"
+or the rich Roman lady for plunging in the wintry Tiber
+for a propitiation to Isis. No doubt among the later pagans
+"the long intolerable tyranny of the senses over the soul"
+had become a very serious matter. But Christianity represented
+perhaps the most powerful reaction against this;
+and this reaction had, as indicated in the last chapter, the
+enormously valuable result that (for the time) it disentangled
+love from sex and established Love, pure and undefiled, as
+ruler of the world. "God is Love." But, as also indicated,
+the divorce between the two elements of human nature,
+carried to an extreme, led in time to a crippling of both
+elements and the development of a certain morbidity and
+self-consciousness which, it cannot be denied, is painfully
+marked among some sections of Christians--especially those
+of the altruistic and 'philanthropic' type.
+
+Another characteristic of Christianity which is also very
+fine in its way but has its limits of utility, has been its
+insistence on "morality." Some modern writers indeed have
+gone so far--forgetting, I suppose, the Stoics--as to
+claim that Christianity's chief mark is its high morality,
+and that the pagans generally were quite wanting in
+the moral sense! This, of course, is a profound
+mistake. I should say that, in the true sense of the
+word, the early and tribal peoples have been much more
+'moral' as a rule--that is, ready as individuals to pay
+respect to the needs of the community--than the later and
+more civilized societies. But the mistake arises from the
+different interpretations of the word; for whereas all
+the pagan religions insisted very strongly on the just-
+mentioned kind of morality, which we should call CIVIC DUTY
+TO ONE'S NEIGHBOR, the Christian made morality to consist
+more especially in a mans DUTY TO GOD. It became
+with them a private affair between a mans self and-God,
+rather than a public affair; and thus led in the end to a
+very obnoxious and quite pharisaic kind of morality, whose
+chief inspiration was not the helping of one's fellow-man
+but the saving of one's own soul.
+
+There may perhaps be other salient points of differentiation
+between Christianity and the preceding pagan religions; but
+for the present we may recognize these two--(a) the tendency
+towards a renunciation of the world, and the consequent
+cultivation of a purely spiritual love and (b) the insistence on
+a morality whose inspiration was a private sense of duty
+to God rather than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor
+and to society generally. It may be interesting to trace the
+causes which led to this differentiation.
+
+Three centuries before our era the conquests of Alexander
+had had the effect of spreading the Greek thought and
+culture over most of the known world. A vast number
+of small bodies of worshipers of local deities, with their
+various rituals and religious customs, had thus been broken up,
+or at least brought into contact with each other and
+partially modified and hellenized. The orbit of a more
+general conception of life and religion was already being traced.
+By the time of the founding of the first Christian Church
+the immense conquests of Rome had greatly extended
+and established the process. The Mediterranean had
+become a great Roman lake. Merchant ships and routes
+of traffic crossed it in all directions; tourists visited its
+shores. The known world had become one. The numberless
+peoples, tribes, nations, societies within the girdle of the
+Empire, with their various languages, creeds, customs,
+religions, philosophies, were profoundly influencing each
+other.[1] A great fusion was taking place; and it was becoming
+inevitable that the next great religious movement would have
+a world-wide character.
+
+[1] For an enlargement on this theme see Glover's Conflict of
+Religions in the early Roman Empire; also S. J. Case, Evolution
+of Early Christianity(University of Chicago, 1914). The Adonis
+worship, for instance (a resurrection-cult), "was still thriving
+in Syria and Cyprus when Paul preached there," and the worship of
+Isis and Serapis had already reached then, Rome and Naples.
+
+
+It was probable that this new religion would combine many
+elements from the preceding rituals in one cult. In
+connection with the fine temples and elaborate services of
+Isis and Cybele and Mithra there was growing up a powerful
+priesthood; Franz Cumont[1] speaks of "the learned priests
+of the Asiatic cults" as building up, on the foundations
+of old fetichism and superstition, a complete religious
+philosophy--just as the Brahmins had built the monism
+of the Vedanta on the "monstrous idolatries of Hinduism."
+And it was likely that a similar process would evolve the
+new religion expected. Toutain again calls attention to
+the patronage accorded to all these cults by the Roman
+Emperors, as favoring a new combination and synthesis:
+--"Hadrien, Commode, Septime Severe, Julia Domna,
+Elagabal, Alexandre Severe, en particulier ont contribue
+personnellement a la popularite et au succes des cultes
+qui se celebraient en l'honneur de Serapis et d'Isis, des
+divinites syriennes et de Mithra."[2]
+
+[1] See Cumont, Religions Orientales dans le Paganisme Romain
+(Paris, 1906), p. 253.
+
+[2] Cultes paiens dans l'Empire Romain (2 vols., 1911), vol. ii,
+p. 263.
+
+
+It was also probable that this new Religion would show
+(as indicated in the last chapter) a reaction against mere
+sex-indulgence; and, as regards its standard of Morality
+generally, that, among so many conflicting peoples with
+their various civic and local customs, it could not well
+identify itself with any ONE of these but would evolve an
+inner inspiration of its own which in its best form would
+be love of the neighbor, regardless of the race, creed or
+customs of the neighbor, and whose sanction would not
+reside in any of the external authorities thus conflicting
+with each other, but in the sense of the soul's direct
+responsibility to God.
+
+So much for what we might expect a priori as to the
+influence of the surroundings on the general form of the
+new Religion. And what about the kind of creed or creeds
+which that religion would favor? Here again we must
+see that the influence of the surroundings compelled a
+certain result. Those doctrines which we have described
+in the preceding chapters--doctrines of Sin and Sacrifice, a
+Savior, the Eucharist, the Trinity, the Virgin-birth,
+and so forth--were in their various forms seething, so to
+speak, all around. It was impossible for any new religious
+synthesis to escape them; all it could do would be to
+appropriate them, and to give them perhaps a color of its
+own. Thus it is into the midst of this germinating mass
+that we must imagine the various pagan cults, like fertilizing
+streams, descending. To trace all these streams would
+of course be an impossible task; but it may be of use, as
+an example of the process, to take the case of some particular
+belief. Let us take the belief in the coming of a
+Savior-god; and this will be the more suitable as it is a
+belief which has in the past been commonly held to be
+distinctive of Christianity. Of course we know now that
+it is not in any sense distinctive, but that the long tradition
+of the Savior comes down from the remotest times, and
+perhaps from every country of the world.[1] The Messianic
+prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah
+emptied themselves into the Christian teachings, and infected
+them to some degree with a Judaic tinge. The
+"Messiah" means of course the Anointed One. The
+Hebrew word occurs some 40 times in the Old Testament;
+and each time in the Septuagint or Greek translation
+(made mainly in the third century BEFORE our era) the word
+is translated <gr cristos>, or Christos, which again means
+Anointed. Thus we see that the idea or the word "The
+Christ" was in vogue in Alexandria as far back certainly
+as 280 B.C., or nearly three centuries before Jesus. And what
+the word "The Anointed" strictly speaking means, and from
+what the expression is probably derived, will appear later.
+In The Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170,[2]
+the Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven,
+and about to come as judge of all men, and is definitely
+called "the Son of Man." The Book of Revelations is
+FULL of passages from Enoch; so are the Epistles of Paul;
+so too the Gospels. The Book of Enoch believes in a Golden
+Age that is to come; it has Dantesque visions of Heaven
+and Hell, and of Angels good and evil, and it speaks of a
+"garden of Righteousness" with the "Tree of Wisdom" in its
+midst. Everywhere, says Prof. Drews, in the first century
+B.C., there was the longing for a coming Savior.
+
+[1] Even to-day, the Arabian lands are always vibrating with
+prophecies of a coming Mahdi.
+
+[2] See Edition by R. H. Charles (1893).
+
+
+But the Savior-god, as we also know, was a familiar figure
+in Egypt. The great Osiris was the Savior of the world, both
+in his life and death: in his life through the noble
+works he wrought for the benefit of mankind, and in
+his death through his betrayal by the powers of darkness
+and his resurrection from the tomb and ascent into heaven.[1]
+The Egyptian doctrines descended through Alexandria
+into Christianity--and though they did not influence the
+latter deeply until about 300 A.D., yet they then succeeded
+in reaching the Christian Churches, giving a color to their
+teachings with regard to the Savior, and persuading them to
+accept and honor the Egyptian worship of Isis in the Christian
+form of the Virgin Mary.
+
+[1] See ch. ii.
+
+
+Again, another great stream of influence descended from
+Persia in the form of the cult of Mithra. Mithra, as we
+have seen,[1] stood as a great Mediator between God and man.
+With his baptisms and eucharists, and his twelve disciples,
+and his birth in a cave, and so forth, he seemed to the
+early Fathers an invention of the devil and a most dangerous
+mockery on Christianity--and all the more so because his
+worship was becoming so exceedingly popular. The cult
+seems to have reached Rome about B.C. 70. It spread
+far and wide through the Empire. It extended to Great
+Britain, and numerous remains of Mithraic monuments
+and sculptures in this country--at York, Chester and other
+places--testify to its wide acceptance even here. At
+Rome the vogue of Mithraism became so great that in
+the third century A. D., it was quite doubtful[2] whether it
+OR Christianity would triumph; the Emperor Aurelian in 273
+founded a cult of the Invincible Sun in connection
+with Mithraism;[3] and as St. Jerome tells us in his letters,[4]
+the latter cult had at a later time to be suppressed in Rome
+and Alexandria by PHYSICAL FORCE, so powerful was it.
+
+[1] Ch. ii.
+
+[2] See Cumont, op. cit., who says, p. 171:--"Jamais, pas meme a
+1'epoque des invasions mussulmanes, l'Europe ne sembla plus pres
+de devenir asiatique qu'au moment ou Diocletien reconnaissait
+officiellement en Mithra, le protecteur de l'empire reconstitue."
+See also Cumont's Mysteres de Mithra, preface. The Roman Army, in
+fact, stuck to Mithra throughout, as against Christianity; and so
+did the Roman nobility. (See S. Augustine's Confessions, Book
+VIII, ch. 2.)
+
+[3] Cumont indeed says that the identification of Mithra with the
+Sun (the emblem of imperial power) formed one reason why
+Mithraism was NOT persecuted at that time.
+
+[4] Epist. cvii, ad Laetam. See Robertson's Pagan Christs, p.
+350.
+
+
+Nor was force the only method employed. IMITATION is
+not only the sincerest flattery, but it is often the most
+subtle and effective way of defeating a rival. The priests
+of the rising Christian Church were, like the priests of ALL
+religions, not wanting in craft; and at this moment
+when the question of a World-religion was in the balance, it
+was an obvious policy for them to throw into their own scale
+as many elements as possible of the popular Pagan cults.
+Mithraism had been flourishing for 600 years; and it is, to
+say the least, CURIOUS that the Mithraic doctrines and legends
+which I have just mentioned should all have been
+adopted (quite unintentionally of course!) into Christianity;
+and still more so that some others from the same source,
+like the legend of the Shepherds at the Nativity and the
+doctrine of the Resurrection and Ascension, which are
+NOT mentioned at all in the original draft of the earliest
+Gospel (St. Mark), should have made their appearance, in
+the Christian writings at a later time, when Mithraism
+was making great forward strides. History shows that
+as a Church progresses and expands it generally feels
+compelled to enlarge and fortify its own foundations by inserting
+material which was not there at first. I shall shortly
+give another illustration of this; at present I will
+merely point out that the Christian writers, as time
+went on, not only introduced new doctrines, legends,
+miracles and so forth--most of which we can trace to
+antecedent pagan sources--but that they took especial pains
+to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence
+of their own dishonesty. We learn from Porphyry[1] that
+there were several elaborate treatises setting forth the
+religion of Mithra; and J. M. Robertson adds (Pagan
+Christs, p. 325): "everyone of these has been destroyed by
+the care of the Church, and it is remarkable that even the
+treatise of Firmicus is mutilated at a passage (v.) where
+he seems to be accusing Christians of following Mithraic
+usages." While again Professor Murray says, "The polemic
+literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant; the
+books of the Pagans have been DESTROYED."[2]
+
+[1] De Abstinentia, ii. 56; iv. 16.
+
+[2] Four Stages, p. 180. We have probably an instance of this
+destruction in the total disappearance of Celsus' lively attack
+on Christianity (180 A.D.), of which, however, portions have been
+fortunately preserved in Origen's rather prolix refutation of the
+same.
+
+
+Returning to the doctrine of the Savior, I have already
+in preceding chapters given so many instances of belief
+in such a deity among the pagans--whether he be called
+Krishna or Mithra or Osiris or Horus or Apollo or Hercules
+--that it is not necessary to dwell on the subject any further
+in order to persuade the reader that the doctrine was 'in the
+air' at the time of the advent of Christianity. Even
+Dionysus, then a prominent figure in the 'Mysteries,'
+was called Eleutherios, The Deliverer. But it may be of
+interest to trace the same doctrine among the PRE-CHRISTIAN
+sects of Gnostics. The Gnostics, says Professor Murray,[1]
+"are still commonly thought of as a body of CHRISTIAN
+heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over
+the Hellenistic world BEFORE Christianity as well as after.
+They must have been established in Antioch and probably
+in Tarsus well before the days of Paul or Apollos. Their
+Savior, like the Jewish Messiah, was established in men's
+minds before the Savior of the Christians. 'If we look
+close,' says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with
+great clearness that the figure of the Redeemer as such did
+not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion
+of Gnosis, but was already present there under various
+forms.' "
+
+[1] Four Stages, p. 143.
+
+
+This Gnostic Redeemer, continues Professor Murray, "is
+descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos
+Soter' ('third Savior')[1] of early Greece, contaminated
+with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis from Asia Minor,
+Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of the
+Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which
+the name of Jesus or 'Christos,' 'the Anointed,' tends
+gradually to supersede. Above all, he is in some
+sense Man, or 'the second Man' or 'the Son of Man' . . .
+He is the real, the ultimate, the perfect and eternal Man,
+of whom all bodily men are feeble copies."[2]
+
+[1] There seems to be some doubt about the exact meaning of this
+expression. Even Zeus himself was sometimes called 'Soter,' and
+at feasts, it is said, the THIRD goblet was always drunk in his
+honor.
+
+[2] See also The Gnostic Story of Jesus Christ, by Gilbert T.
+Sadler (C. W. Daniel, 1919).
+
+
+This passage brings vividly before the mind the process of
+which I have spoken, namely, the fusion and mutual
+interchange of ideas on the subject of the Savior during the
+period anterior to our era. Also it exemplifies to us
+through what an abstract sphere of Gnostic religious speculation
+the doctrine had to travel before reaching its expression
+in Christianity.[1] This exalted and high philosophical
+conception passed on and came out again to some degree
+in the Fourth Gospel and the Pauline Epistles (especially
+I Cor. xv); but I need hardly say it was not maintained.
+The enthusiasm of the little scattered Christian bodies--
+with their communism of practice with regard to THIS
+world and their intensity of faith with regard to the next
+--began to wane in the second and third centuries A.D. As
+the Church (with capital initial) grew, so was it less
+and less occupied with real religious feeling, and more and
+more with its battles against persecution from outside, and
+its quarrels and dissensions concerning heresies within
+its own borders. And when at the Council of Nicaea (325
+A.D) it endeavored to establish an official creed, the
+strife and bitterness only increased. "There is no wild
+beast," said the Emperor Julian, "like an angry theologian."
+Where the fourth Evangelist had preached the gospel of
+Love, and Paul had announced redemption by an inner
+and spiritual identification with Christ, "As in Adam all die,
+so in Christ shall all be made alive"; and whereas some
+at any rate of the Pagan cults had taught a glorious salvation
+by the new birth of a divine being within each man:
+"Be of good cheer, O initiates in the mystery of the liberated
+god; For to you too out of all your labors and sorrows shall
+come Liberation"--the Nicene creed had nothing to propound
+except some extremely futile speculations about the
+relation to each other of the Father and the Son, and
+the relation of BOTH to the Holy Ghost, and of all THREE to
+the Virgin Mary--speculations which only served for the renewal
+of shameful strife and animosities--riots and bloodshed
+and murder--within the Church, and the mockery of
+the heathen without. And as far as it dealt with the crucifixion,
+death and resurrection of the Lord it did not differ
+from the score of preceding pagan creeds, except in the
+thorough materialism and lack of poetry in statement
+which it exhibits. After the Council of Nicaea, in fact, the
+Judaic tinge in the doctrines of the Church becomes
+more apparent, and more and more its Scheme of Salvation
+through Christ takes the character of a rather sordid and
+huckstering bargain by which Man gets the better of God
+by persuading the latter to sacrifice his own Son for the
+redemption of the world! With the exception of a few episodes
+like the formation during the Middle Ages of the noble
+brotherhoods and sisterhoods of Frairs and Nuns, dedicated
+to the help and healing of suffering humanity,
+and the appearance of a few real lovers of mankind (and the
+animals) like St. Francis--(and these manifestations can
+hardly be claimed by the Church, which pretty consistently
+opposed them)--it may be said that after about the fourth
+century the real spirit and light of early Christian enthusiasm
+died away. The incursions of barbarian tribes from the
+North and East, and later of Moors and Arabs from the South,
+familiarized the European peoples with the ideas of bloodshed
+and violence; gross and material conceptions of life
+were in the ascendant; and a romantic and aspiring Christianity
+gave place to a worldly and vulgar Churchianity.
+
+[1] When travelling in India I found that the Gnanis or Wise Men
+there quite commonly maintained that Jesus (judging from his
+teaching) must have been initiated at some time in the esoteric
+doctrines of the Vedanta.
+
+
+I have in these two or three pages dealt only--and that
+very briefly--with the entry of the pagan doctrine of the
+Savior into the Christian field, showing its transformation
+there and how Christianity could not well escape having
+a doctrine of a Savior, or avoid giving a color of its own
+to that doctrine. To follow out the same course with
+other doctrines, like those which I have mentioned above,
+would obviously be an endless task--which must be left to
+each student or reader to pursue according to his opportunity
+and capacity. It is clear anyhow, that all these
+elements of the pagan religions--pouring down into the vast
+reservoir, or rather whirlpool, of the Roman Empire, and
+mixing among all these numerous brotherhoods, societies,
+collegia, mystery-clubs, and groups which were at that time
+looking out intently for some new revelation or inspiration--
+did more or less automatically act and react upon
+each other, and by the general conditions prevailing were
+modified, till they ultimately combined and took united
+shape in the movement which we call Christianity, but which
+only--as I have said--narrowly escaped being called
+Mithraism--so nearly related and closely allied were these
+cults with each other.
+
+
+At this point it will naturally be asked: "And where in
+this scheme of the Genesis of Christianity is the chief
+figure and accredited leader of the movement--namely
+Jesus Christ himself--for to all appearance in the account
+here given of the matter he is practically non-existent or
+a negligible quantity?" And the question is a very pertinent
+one, and very difficult to answer. "Where is the
+founder of the Religion?"--or to put it in another form:
+"Is it necessary to suppose a human and visible Founder
+at all?" A few years ago such a mere question would
+have been accounted rank blasphemy, and would only--
+if passed over--have been ignored on account of its
+supposed absurdity. To-day, however, owing to the enormous
+amount of work which has been done of late on the
+subject of Christian origins, the question takes on quite
+a different complexion. And from Strauss onwards a
+growingly influential and learned body of critics is inclined
+to regard the whole story of the Gospels as LEGENDARY. Arthur
+Drews, for instance, a professor at Karlsruhe, in his celebrated
+book The Christ-Myth,[1] places David F. Strauss as
+first in the myth field--though he allows that Dupuis in
+L'origine de tous les cultes (1795) had given the clue to the
+whole idea. He then mentions Bruno Bauer (1877) as
+contending that Jesus was a pure invention of Mark's,
+and John M. Robertson as having in his Christianity and
+Mythology (1900) given the first thoroughly reasoned exposition
+of the legendary theory; also Emilio Bossi in Italy, who
+wrote Jesu Christo non e mai esistito, and similar authors
+in Holland, Poland, and other countries, including W. Benjamin
+Smith, the American author of The Pre-christian
+Jesus (1906), and P. Jensen in Das Gilgamesch Epos in den
+Welt-literatur (1906), who makes the Jesus-story a variant of
+the Babylonian epic, 2000 B.C. A pretty strong list![2] "But,"
+continues Drews, "ordinary historians still ignore all this."
+Finally, he dismisses Jesus as "a figure swimming obscurely
+in the mists of tradition." Nevertheless I need hardly
+remark that, large and learned as the body of opinion
+here represented is, a still larger (but less learned) body
+fights desperately for the actual HISTORICITY of Jesus, and some
+even still for the old view of him as a quite unique and
+miraculous revelation of Godhood on earth.
+
+[1] Die Christus-mythe: verbesserte und erweitezte Ausgabe, Jena,
+1910.
+
+[2] To which we may also add Schweitzer's Quest of the historical
+Jesus (1910).
+
+
+At first, no doubt, the LEGENDARY theory seems a little TOO
+far-fetched. There is a fashion in all these things, and
+it MAY be that there is a fashion even here. But when
+you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even in these days of
+exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure of
+Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost
+in the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his
+works has become a subject of controversy; when you find
+that William Tell, supposed to have lived some 300
+years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in minutest
+detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost
+certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when
+you remember--as mentioned earlier in this book[1]--that
+it was more than five hundred years after the supposed
+birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish
+the date of that birth--and that then a purely mythical date
+was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new
+birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed
+birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods;
+when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state
+of historical criticism must have been, and the general standard
+of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like Syria,
+and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating
+from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently
+marvelous or imaginative;--why, then the legendary
+theory does not seem so improbable. There is
+no doubt that after the destruction of Jerusalem (in A.D.
+70), little groups of believers in a redeeming 'Christ' were
+formed there and in other places, just as there had certainly
+existed, in the first century B.C., groups of Gnostics,
+Therapeutae, Essenes and others whose teachings were very
+SIMILAR to the Christian, and there was now a demand from
+many of these groups for 'writings' and 'histories' which
+should hearten and confirm the young and growing Churches.
+The Gospels and Epistles, of which there are still extant a
+great abundance, both apocryphal and canonical, met this
+demand; but how far their records of the person of Jesus
+of Nazareth are reliable history, or how far they are merely
+imaginative pictures of the kind of man the Saviour might
+be expected to be,[2] is a question which, as I have already
+said, is a difficult one for skilled critics to answer, and one
+on which I certainly have no intention of giving a positive
+verdict. Personally I must say I think the 'legendary'
+solution quite likely, and in some ways more satisfactory
+than the opposite one--for the simple reason that it seems
+much more encouraging to suppose that the story of Jesus,
+(gracious and beautiful as it is) is a myth which gradually
+formed itself in the conscience of mankind, and thus points
+the way of humanity's future evolution, than to suppose
+it to be the mere record of an unique and miraculous
+interposition of Providence, which depended entirely on the
+powers above, and could hardly be expected to occur again.
+
+[1] Ch. II.
+
+[2] One of Celsus' accusations against the Christians was that
+their Gospels had been written "several times over" (see Origen,
+Contra Celsum, ii. 26, 27).
+
+
+However, the question is not what we desire, but what
+we can prove to be the actual fact. And certainly the
+difficulties in the way of regarding the Gospel story (or
+stories, for there is not one consistent story) as TRUE are
+enormous. If anyone will read, for instance, in the four Gospels,
+the events of the night preceding the crucifixion and reckon the
+time which they would necessarily have taken to enact--
+the Last Supper, the agony in the Garden, the betrayal by
+Judas, the haling before Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, and
+then before Pilate in the Hall of judgment (though
+courts for the trial of malefactors do not GENERALLY sit in
+the middle of the night); then--in Luke--the interposed visit
+to Herod, and the RETURN to Pilate; Pilate's speeches and
+washing of hands before the crowd; then the scourging
+and the mocking and the arraying of Jesus in purple robe
+as a king; then the preparation of a Cross and the long and
+painful journey to Golgotha; and finally the Crucifixion
+at sunrise;--he will see--as has often been pointed out--
+that the whole story is physically impossible. As a record
+of actual events the story is impossible; but as a record
+or series of notes derived from the witnessing of a "mystery-
+play"--and such plays with VERY SIMILAR incidents were common
+enough in antiquity in connection with cults of a dying
+Savior, it very likely IS true (one can see the very dramatic
+character of the incidents: the washing of hands, the
+threefold denial by Peter, the purple robe and crown
+of thorns, and so forth); and as such it is now accepted
+by many well-qualified authorities.[1]
+
+[1] Dr. Frazer in The Golden Bough (vol. ix, "The Scapegoat," p.
+400) speaks of the frequency in antiquity of a Mystery-play
+relating to a God-man who gives his life and blood for the
+people; and he puts forward tentatively and by no means
+dogmatically the following note:--"Such a drama, if we are right,
+was the original story of Esther and Mordecai, or (to give their
+older names) Ishtar and Marduk. It was played in Babylonia, and
+from Babylonia the returning Captives brought it to Judaea, where
+it was acted, rather as an historical than a mythical piece, by
+players who, having to die in grim earnest on a cross or gallows,
+were naturally drawn from the gaol rather than the green-room. A
+chain of causes, which because we cannot follow them might--in
+the loose language of common life--be called an accident,
+determined that the part of the dying god in this annual play
+should be thrust upon Jesus of Nazareth, whom the enemies he had
+made in high places by his outspoken strictures were resolved to
+put out of the way." See also vol. iv, "The Dying God," in the
+same book.
+
+
+There are many other difficulties. The raising of Lazarus,
+already dead three days, the turning of water into wine
+(a miracle attributed to Bacchus, of old), the feeding of
+the five thousand, and others of the marvels are, to say
+the least, not easy of digestion. The "Sermon on the
+Mount" which, with the "Lord's Prayer" embedded in
+it, forms the great and accepted repository of 'Christian'
+teaching and piety, is well known to be a collection of sayings
+from pre-christian writings, including the Psalms, Isaiah,
+Ecclesiasticus, the Secrets of Enoch, the Shemonehesreh (a
+book of Hebrew prayers), and others; and the fact that this
+collection was really made AFTER the time of Jesus, and could
+not have originated from him, is clear from the stress which
+it lays on "persecutions" and "false prophets"--things which
+were certainly not a source of trouble at the time
+Jesus is supposed to be speaking, though they were at a
+later time--as well as from the occurrence of the word
+"Gentiles," which being here used apparently in contra-
+distinction to "Christians" could not well be appropriate
+at a time when no recognized Christian bodies as yet existed.
+
+But the most remarkable point in this connection is the
+absolute silence of the Gospel of Mark on the subject of
+the Resurrection and Ascension--that is, of the ORIGINAL
+Gospel, for it is now allowed on all hands that the twelve
+verses Mark xvi. 9 to the end, are a later insertion. Considering
+the nature of this event, astounding indeed, if
+physically true, and unique in the history of the world,
+it is strange that this Gospel--the earliest written of the
+four Gospels, and nearest in time to the actual evidence--
+makes no mention of it. The next Gospel in point of time
+--that of Matthew--mentions the matter rather briefly
+and timidly, and reports the story that the body had been
+STOLEN from the sepulchre. Luke enlarges considerably and
+gives a whole long chapter to the resurrection and ascension;
+while the Fourth Gospel, written fully twenty years later
+still--say about A. D. 120--gives two chapters and a GREAT
+VARIETY OF DETAILS!
+
+This increase of detail, however, as one gets farther
+and farther from the actual event is just what one always
+finds, as I have said before, in legendary traditions. A
+very interesting example of this has lately come to light in
+the case of the traditions concerning the life and
+death of the Persian Bab. The Bab, as most of my readers
+will know, was the Founder of a great religious movement
+which now numbers (or numbered before the Great War)
+some millions of adherents, chiefly Mahommedans, Christians,
+Jews and Parsees. The period of his missionary
+activity was from 1845 to 1850. His Gospel was singularly
+like that of Jesus--a gospel of love to mankind--only (as
+might be expected from the difference of date) with an
+even wider and more deliberate inclusion of all classes,
+creeds and races, sinners and saints; and the incidents
+and entourage of his ministry were also singularly similar.
+He was born at Shiraz in 1820, and growing up a promising
+boy and youth, fell at the age Of 21 under the influence
+of a certain Seyyid Kazim, leader of a heterodox sect, and
+a kind of fore-runner or John the Baptist to the Bab. The
+result was a period of mental trouble (like the "temptation
+in the wilderness"), after which the youth returned
+to Shiraz and at the age of twenty-five began his own mission.
+His real name was Mirza Ali Muhammad, but he called
+himself thenceforth The Bab, i.e. the Gate ("I am the Way");
+and gradually there gathered round him disciples, drawn
+by the fascination of his personality and the devotion
+of his character. But with the rapid increase of his
+following great jealousy and hatred were excited among the
+Mullahs, the upholders of a fanatical and narrow-
+minded Mahommedanism and quite corresponding to the
+Scribes and Pharisees of the New Testament. By them
+he was denounced to the Turkish Government. He was
+arrested on a charge of causing political disturbance, and
+was condemned to death. Among his disciples was one
+favorite,[1] who was absolutely devoted to his Master and
+refused to leave him at the last. So together they were
+suspended over the city wall (at Tabriz) and simultaneously
+shot. This was on the 8th July, 1850.
+
+[1] Mirza Muhammad Ali; and one should note the similarity of
+the two names.
+
+
+In November 1850--or between that date and October 1851,
+a book appeared, written by one of the B<a^>b's earliest
+and most enthusiastic disciples--a merchant of Kashan--
+and giving in quite simple and unpretending form a record
+of the above events. There is in it no account of miracles
+or of great pretensions to godhood and the like. It is just
+a plain history of the life and death of a beloved teacher. It
+was cordially received and circulated far and wide; and
+we have no reason for doubting its essential veracity. And
+even if proved now to be inaccurate in one or two details, this
+would not invalidate the moral of the rest of the story--which
+is as follows:
+
+After the death of the Bab a great persecution took place
+(in 1852); there were many Babi martyrs, and for some
+years the general followers were scattered. But in time
+they gathered themselves together again; successors to the
+original prophet were appointed--though not without
+dissensions--and a Babi church, chiefly at Acca or Acre
+in Syria, began to be formed. It was during this period
+that a great number of legends grew up--legends of miraculous
+babyhood and boyhood, legends of miracles performed
+by the mature Bab, and so forth; and when the newly-
+forming Church came to look into the matter it concluded
+(quite naturally!) that such a simple history as I have outlined
+above would never do for the foundation of its plans,
+now grown somewhat ambitious. So a new Gospel
+was framed, called the Tarikh-i-Jadid ("The new History"
+or "The new Way"), embodying and including a lot of legendary
+matter, and issued with the authority of "the
+Church." This was in 1881-2; and comparing this with
+the original record (called The point of Kaf) we get
+a luminous view of the growth of fable in those thirty brief
+years which had elapsed since the Bab's death. Meanwhile
+it became very necessary of course to withdraw from circulation
+as far as possible all copies of the original record,
+lest they should give the lie to the later 'Gospel'; and
+this apparently was done very effectively--so effectively
+indeed that Professor Edward Browne (to whom the world
+owes so much on account of his labors in connection with
+Babism), after arduous search, came at one time to the
+conclusion that the original was no longer extant. Most
+fortunately, however, the well-known Comte de Gobineau
+had in the course of his studies on Eastern Religions acquired
+a copy of The point of Kaf; and this, after his death, was
+found among his literary treasures and identified (as was most
+fitting) by Professor Browne himself.
+
+Such in brief is the history of the early Babi Church[1]
+--a Church which has grown up and expanded greatly
+within the memory of many yet living. Much might be written
+about it, but the chief point at present is for us
+to note the well-verified and interesting example it gives
+of the rapid growth in Syria of a religious legend and the
+reasons which contributed to this growth--and to be warned
+how much more rapidly similar legends probably grew up
+in the same land in the middle of the First Century, A.D.
+The story of the Bab is also interesting to us because, while
+this mass of legend was formed around it, there is no possible
+doubt about the actual existence of a historical nucleus in the
+person of Mirza Ali Muhammad.
+
+[1] For literature, see Edward G. Browne's Traveller's Narrative
+on the Episode of the Bab (1891), and his New History of the Bab
+translated from the Persian of the Tarikh-i-Jadid (Cambridge,
+1893). Also Sermons and Essays by Herbert Rix (Williams and
+Norgate, 1907), pp. 295-325, "The Persian Bab."
+
+
+On the whole, one is sometimes inclined to doubt whether
+any great movement ever makes itself felt in the world, without
+dating first from some powerful personality or
+group of personalities, ROUND which the idealizing and myth-
+making genius of mankind tends to crystallize. But one
+must not even here be too certain. Something of the
+Apostle Paul we know, and something of 'John' the
+Evangelist and writer of the Epistle I John; and that the
+'Christian' doctrines dated largely from the preaching and
+teaching of these two we cannot doubt; but Paul
+never saw Jesus (except "in the Spirit"), nor does he ever
+mention the man personally, or any incident of his actual
+life (the "crucified Christ" being always an ideal figure);
+and 'John' who wrote the Gospel was certainly not the same
+as the disciple who "lay in Jesus' bosom"--though
+an intercalated verse, the last but one in the Gospel, asserts
+the identity.[1]
+
+[1] It is obvious, in fact, that the WHOLE of the last chapter of
+St. John is a later insertion, and again that the two last verses
+of that chapter are later than the chapter itself!
+
+
+There may have been a historic Jesus--and if so, to get
+a reliable outline of his life would indeed be a treasure;
+but at present it would seem there is no sign of that. If
+the historicity of Jesus, in any degree, could be proved,
+it would give us reason for supposing--what I have personally
+always been inclined to believe--that there was also a
+historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra,
+Krishna, Hercules, Apollo and the rest. The question,
+in fact, narrows itself down to this, Have there been in
+the course of human evolution certain, so to speak, NODAL
+points or periods at which the psychologic currents ran
+together and condensed themselves for a new start; and
+has each such node or point of condensation been marked
+by the appearance of an actual and heroic man (or woman)
+who supplied a necessary impetus for the new departure,
+and gave his name to the resulting movement? OR is it sufficient
+to suppose the automatic formation of such nodes or
+starting-points without the intervention of any special
+hero or genius, and to imagine that in each case the myth-
+making tendency of mankind CREATED a legendary and
+inspiring figure and worshiped the same for a long period
+afterwards as a god?
+
+As I have said before, this is a question which, interesting
+as it is, is not really very important. The main thing being
+that the prophetic and creative spirit of mankind HAS from
+time to time evolved those figures as idealizations of its
+"heart's desire" and placed a halo round their heads.
+The long procession of them becomes a REAL piece of History
+--the history of the evolution of the human heart, and of
+human consciousness. But with the psychology of the whole
+subject I shall deal in the next chapter.
+
+
+I may here, however, dwell for a moment on two other
+points which belong properly to this chapter. I have
+already mentioned the great reliance placed by the advocates
+of a unique 'revelation' on the high morality taught in the
+Gospels and the New Testament generally. There is no
+need of course to challenge that morality or to depreciate it
+unduly; but the argument assumes that it is so greatly superior
+to anything of the kind that had been taught before
+that we are compelled to suppose something like
+a revelation to explain its appearance--whereas of course
+anyone familiar with the writings of antiquity, among the
+Greeks or Romans or Egyptians or Hindus or later Jews,
+knows perfectly well that the reported sayings of Jesus and
+the Apostles may be paralleled abundantly from these sources.
+I have illustrated this already from the Sermon on
+the Mount. If anyone will glance at the Testament of
+the Twelve Patriarchs--a Jewish book composed about
+120 B. C.--he will see that it is full of moral precepts, and
+especially precepts of love and forgiveness, so ardent and
+so noble that it hardly suffers in any way when compared
+with the New Testament teaching, and that consequently no
+special miracle is required to explain the appearance of the
+latter.
+
+The twelve Patriarchs in question are the twelve sons of
+Jacob, and the book consists of their supposed deathbed
+scenes, in which each patriarch in turn recites his own
+(more or less imaginary) life and deeds and gives pious
+counsel to his children and successors. It is composed in
+a fine and poetic style, and is full of lofty thought, remindful
+in scores of passages of the Gospels--words and all--
+the coincidences being too striking to be accidental. It
+evidently had a deep influence on the authors of the Gospels,
+as well as on St. Paul. It affirms a belief in the coming of
+a Messiah, and in salvation for the Gentiles. The following
+are some quotations from it:[1] Testament of Zebulun
+(p. 116): "My children, I bid you keep the commands of
+the Lord, and show mercy to your neighbours, and have
+compassion towards all, not towards men only, but also
+towards beasts." Dan (p. 127): "Love the Lord through all
+your life, and one another with a true heart." Joseph
+(p. 173): "I was sick, and the Lord visited me; in prison,
+and my God showed favor unto me." Benjamin (p. 209):
+"For as the sun is not defiled by shining on dung and mire,
+but rather drieth up both and driveth away the evil
+smell, so also the pure mind, encompassed by the defilements
+of earth, rather cleanseth them and is not itself defiled."
+
+[1] The references being to the Edition by R. H. Charles (1907).
+
+
+I think these quotations are sufficient to prove the high
+standard of this book, which was written in the Second Century
+B. C., and FROM which the New Testament authors copiously
+borrowed.
+
+The other point has to do with my statement at the beginning
+of this chapter that two of the main 'characteristics'
+of Christianity were its insistence on (a) a tendency
+towards renunciation of the world, and a consequent cultivation
+of a purely spiritual love, and (b) on a morality
+whose inspiration was a private sense of duty to God rather
+than a public sense of duty to one's neighbor and to society
+generally. I think, however, that the last-mentioned
+characteristic ought to be viewed in relation to a third, namely,
+(c) the extraordinarily DEMOCRATIC tendency of the new
+Religion.[1] Celsus (A.D. 200) jeered at the early Christians
+for their extreme democracy: "It is only the
+simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk
+and children--whom they wish to persuade [to join their
+churches] or CAN persuade"--"wool-dressers and cobblers
+and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons," and
+"whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent or a fool, in
+a word, whoever is god-forsaken (<gr kakodaimwn>), him the
+Kingdom of God will receive."[2] Thus Celsus, the accomplished,
+clever, philosophic and withal humorous critic,
+laughed at the new religionists, and prophesied their speedy
+extinction. Nevertheless he was mistaken. There is little
+doubt that just the inclusion of women and weaklings
+and outcasts did contribute LARGELY to the spread of Christianity
+(and Mithraism). It brought hope and a sense of
+human dignity to the despised and rejected of the earth.
+Of the immense numbers of lesser officials who carried on
+the vast organization of the Roman Empire, most perhaps,
+were taken from the ranks of the freedmen and quondam
+slaves, drawn from a great variety of races and already
+familiar with pagan cults of all kinds--Egyptian, Syrian,
+Chaldean, Iranian, and so forth.[3] This fact helped to give
+to Christianity--under the fine tolerance of the Empire--
+its democratic character and also its willingness to accept
+all. The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been
+almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture,
+flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on,
+a source of weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension
+and superstition, yet it was in the inevitable line of human
+evolution, and had a psychological basis which I must now
+endeavor to explain.
+
+[1] It is important to note, however, that this same democratic
+tendency was very marked in Mithraism. "Il est certain," says
+Cumont, "qu'il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les classes
+inferieures de la societe et c'est l'a un fait considerable; le
+mithracisme est reste longtemps la religion des humbles."
+Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.
+
+[2] See Glover's Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire,
+ch. viii.
+
+[3] See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.
+
+
+
+XIV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL
+
+The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I
+think, from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing
+clear. But it will be well perhaps in this chapter,
+at the risk of some repetition, to bring the whole argument
+together. And the argument is that since the dawn
+of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands
+or perhaps a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic
+evolution, a gradual development or refinement of
+Consciousness, which at a certain stage has spontaneously
+given birth in the human race to the phenomena of religious
+belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in
+the race at large or in any branch of it) always following,
+step by step, a certain order depending on the degrees
+of psychologic evolution concerned; and that it is this
+general fact which accounts for the strange similarities of
+belief and ritual which have been observed all over the world
+and in places far remote from each other, and which have been
+briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
+
+And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those
+at any rate with which we are here concerned--are Three:
+the stage of Simple Consciousness, the stage of Self-
+consciousness, and a third Stage which for want of a
+better word we may term the stage of Universal Consciousness.
+Of course these three stages may at some future
+time be analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--
+but at present I only desire to draw attention to them in
+the rough, so to speak, to show that it is from them and
+from their passage one into another that there has flowed
+by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange
+panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superstitions
+and magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally,
+and later its incantations and prophecies, and services
+of speech and verse, and paintings and forms of art
+and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama indeed,
+or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony
+with three great leading motives!
+
+
+And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For
+hundreds of centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed
+a degree of consciousness not radically different from that
+of the higher Animals, though probably more quick and
+varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted
+or reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions.
+But the consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from
+his impressions, as separate from his surroundings, had
+not yet arisen or taken hold on him. He was an instinctive
+part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very near to
+the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a
+germinal form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak,
+in the general world consciousness. It is on this account
+that the animals have such a marvellously acute perception
+and instinct, being embedded in Nature. And primitive
+Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before,
+allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort
+of grace and perfection of form and movement as we admire
+in the (wild) animals now. It would be quite unreasonable
+to suppose that he, the crown in the same sense of creation,
+was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion. For
+a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher
+animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing
+for occasional privations and sufferings and conflicts) well
+adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the
+earth and with each other. There must have been
+a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at any
+rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the
+epithet 'golden.'
+
+It was during this period apparently that the system of
+Totems arose. The tribes felt their relationship to their
+winged and fourfooted mates (including also other objects
+of nature) so deeply and intensely that they adopted the
+latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man fairly
+worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after
+them. Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose
+conceptions of these beautiful creatures are mostly derived
+from a broken-down cab-horse, or a melancholy
+milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
+despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen
+or loved them and have only wondered with our true commercial
+instinct what profit we could extract from them.
+But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals;
+they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
+friendship,[1] and accorded them a kind of divinity. This
+was the age of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of
+solidarity with Nature. And the point of it all is (with regard
+to the subject we have in hand) that this was also
+the age from which by a natural evolution the sense of
+Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense
+of ties binding his inner self to the powers of the universe
+around him, then it is evident I think that primitive man
+as I have described him possessed the REALITY of this sense
+--though so far buried and subconscious that he was hardly
+aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of
+the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into
+consciousness.
+
+[1] See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
+edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction
+between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is
+hardly to be found among the lower races."
+
+
+Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment
+in the evolution of a child--somewhere perhaps about the
+age of three[1]--when the simple almost animal-like consciousness
+of the babe is troubled by a new element--SELF-consciousness. The
+change is so marked, so definite, that
+(in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take
+place. So in the evolution of the human race there has
+been a period--also marked and definite, though extending
+intermittent over a vast interval of time--when on men in
+general there dawned the consciousness of THEMSELVES,
+of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance
+of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION.
+The question arose: "How do these sensations and experiences
+affect ME? What can _I_ do to modify them, to
+encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the painful,
+and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added
+to life. The mind revolved round a new centre. It began
+to spin like a little eddy round its own axis. It studied
+ITSELF first and became deeply concerned about its own
+pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with the larger
+life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life
+of the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity,
+were broken up.
+
+[1] See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1
+and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--
+where the same age is tentatively suggested.
+
+
+I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important
+that the reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable
+severance, an inevitable period of strife. The
+magic mirror of the soul, reflecting nature as heretofore
+in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked across.
+The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually)
+became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife
+with his fellows. Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of
+domination, the desire for property and possessions, set in.
+The influences of fellowship and solidarity grew feebler.
+He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts
+were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-
+activity and self-regarding calculation took their place.
+Love and mutual help were less compelling in proportion as
+the demands of self-interest grew louder and more insistent.
+Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered his brother
+and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the
+Golden Age closed their gates behind him. He entered
+upon a period of suffering--a period of labor and toil and
+sorrow such as he had never before known, and such
+as the animals certainly have never known. And in that
+distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage,
+he still remains to-day.
+
+Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work.
+It would be foolish and useless to rail against the process,
+or to blame any one for it. It had to be. Through this
+dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had to pass--if only in
+order at last to find the True Self which was (and still
+remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever.
+Indeed there are signs that the recent Great War and the
+following Events mark the lowest point of descent and the
+beginning of the human soul's return to sanity and ascent
+towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will
+arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely
+beauty of life which the animals realized long ago, though
+he seems a precious long time about it; and when all this
+nightmare of Greed and Vanity and Self-conceit and Cruelty
+and Lust of oppression and domination, which marks the
+present period, is past--and it WILL pass--then Humanity
+will come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of
+redemption and peace which has for so long been prophesied.
+
+But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what
+I want the reader to see is that it was just this breaking
+up of the old psychologic unity and continuity of man with
+his surroundings which led to the whole panorama of the
+rituals and creeds. Man, centering round himself, necessarily
+became an exile from the great Whole. He committed the
+sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was
+swift. The sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came
+on him. The realization of himself as a separate conscious
+being necessarily led to his attributing a similar consciousness
+of some kind to the great Life around him. Action
+and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may have
+felt before, it became clear to him now that beings
+more or less like himself--though doubtless vaster and
+more powerful--moved behind the veil of the visible world.
+From that moment the belief in Magic and Demons and
+Gods arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of
+this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived
+himself an alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken
+with the sense of Sin. If before, he had experienced
+fear--in the kind of automatic way of self-preservation
+in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered self-
+regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or
+treble degree. And if, before, he had been aware that
+fortune and chance were not always friendly and propitious
+to his designs, he now perceived or thought he perceived
+in every adverse happening the deliberate persecution of the
+powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against
+him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them.
+Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose
+the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether
+purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational
+and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of
+offence against these powers; there arose a complex
+ritual of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and
+suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too
+a whole catalogue of ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation,
+by which the novice should learn to keep within the good
+grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of his Tribe
+and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic
+meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common
+life and remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies
+of Marriage and rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to
+curb the terrific and demonic violence of passions which
+else indeed might easily rend the community asunder.
+And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early stage
+of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting
+this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival
+of SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in
+spontaneous yet logical order a whole series of religious
+institutions and beliefs, which phantasmal and unreal
+as they may appear to us, were by no means unreal to our
+ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the psychological
+process was necessarily of similar general character in every
+branch of the human race and all over the world, so the
+religious evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much
+the same complexion everywhere; and, though they differed
+in details according to climate and other influences, ran
+on such remarkably parallel lines as we have noted.
+
+Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat
+that this event, the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took
+place, or BEGAN to take place, an enormous time ago, perhaps
+in the beginning of the Neolithic Age. I dwell on the word
+"began" because I think it is probable that in its beginnings,
+and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness
+had an infantile and very innocent character, quite different
+from its later and more aggressive forms--just as we see
+self-consciousness in a little child has a charm and a grace
+which it loses later in a boastful or grasping boyhood and
+manhood. So we may understand that though self-consciousness may
+have begun to appear in the human race
+at this very early time (and more or less contemporaneously
+with the invention of very rude tools and unformed
+language), there probably did elapse a very long period--
+perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the evils
+of this second stage of human evolution came to a head.
+Max Muller has pointed out that among the words which
+are common to the various branches of Aryan language, and
+which therefore belong to the very early period before
+the separation of these branches, there are not found the words
+denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments
+of strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance
+of peaceful habit among mankind AFTER the first formation
+and use of language.
+
+That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness
+were APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable
+theory, and one favored by many thinkers;[1] but the
+slow beginnings of both must have been so very protracted
+that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact
+determination. Late researches seem to show that language
+began in what might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood
+and feeling (holophrases like "go-hunting-kill-bear") without
+reference to individual personalities and relationships;
+and that it was only at a later stage that words like "I"
+and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up
+into "parts of speech" and took on a definite grammatical
+structure.[2] If true, these facts point clearly to a long
+foreground of rude communal language, something like
+though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding
+or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in
+the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of
+personal actions and relations. "They show that the
+plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by
+multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection and gradual
+EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.' "[3] According
+to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human
+family, or in any particular race or section of the human
+family, must have been equally slow and hesitating; and it
+would be easy to imagine, as just said, that there may have
+been a very long and 'golden' period at its beginning, before
+the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher
+forms.
+
+[1] Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their
+simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we
+should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does
+not differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the
+holophrase and the much later growth of formed and grammatical
+speech.
+
+[2] See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's
+Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World
+called America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of
+self-consciousness is associated with the break-up of the
+holophrase.
+
+[3] Themis, p. 471.
+
+
+All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of
+early man are notoriously most divergent and most difficult
+to be sure of; but if we take 500,000 years ago for
+the first appearance of veritable Man (homo primigenius),[2]
+and (following Professor W. J. Sollas)[3] 30,000 or 40,000 years
+ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of the
+Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings
+and inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian
+peoples, and 5,000 years ago for the first actual historical
+records that have come down to us, we may
+perhaps get something like a proportion between the different
+periods. That is to say, half a million years for
+the purely animal man in his different forms and grades of
+evolution. Then somewhere towards the end of palaeolithic
+or commencement of neolithic times Self-consciousness dimly
+beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow germination
+and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic
+period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago,
+and to-day (we hope), reaching the climax which precedes
+or foretells its abatement and transformation.
+
+[2] Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93
+and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.
+
+[3] See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.
+"Ethnology"; and Havelock Ellis, "The Origin of War," in The
+Philosophy of Conflict and other Essays.
+
+
+No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor
+periods greatly LONGER than those here mentioned; but
+possibly there would be some agreement as to the RATIO
+to each other of the times concerned: that is, the said
+authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man[1]-
+period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter
+aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the
+Second Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or
+fiftieth of the time of the first period; and then--if
+they looked forward at all to a third stage--would be inclined
+for obvious reasons to attribute to that again a very extended
+duration.
+
+[1] I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of
+contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used
+it, but with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as
+one feels towards the animals themselves.
+
+
+However, all this is very speculative. To return to the
+difficulty about Language and the consideration of those early
+times when words adequate to the expression of religious
+or magical ideas simply did not exist, it is clear
+that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means of
+expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures,
+in attitudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate
+ritual, in fact.[1] Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving,
+confession of Guilt, placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice,
+Celebration of Community, sacramental Atonement, and
+a score of others could at that time be expressed by appropriate
+rites--and as a matter of fact are often so expressed
+even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.
+'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did
+not mean a mere flinging about of the limbs in recreation,
+but any expressive movements of the body which might be
+used to convey the feelings of the dancer or of the audience
+whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became
+a most important part of ritual.
+
+[1] See ch. ix and xi.
+
+
+So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us
+now pass on to the Third Stage. It is evident that the
+process of disruption and dissolution--disruption both of
+the human mind, and of society round about it, due to the
+action of the Second Stage--could not go on indefinitely.
+There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present
+moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their
+nervous systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive
+self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and
+restlessness. Society at large is perishing both in industry
+and in warfare through the domination in its organism of
+the self-motives of greed and vanity and ambition. This
+cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in
+the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are
+approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element
+must enter in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals)
+and the society of which we form a part, must make a fresh
+start. What is that new and necessary element of regeneration?
+
+It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry
+into a further stage of consciousness which must supersede
+the present one. Through some such crisis as we have spoken
+of, through the extreme of suffering, the mind of
+Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die.[1] Self-consciousness
+has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new form.
+Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring
+this about.[2] And what is this new form in which consciousness
+has to rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the
+world during countless centuries have dated from that
+fatal attempt to make the little personal SELF the centre of
+effort and activity, and since that attempt has inevitably led
+to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind itself
+and within the body of society, there is nothing left but
+the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as
+its foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the
+direct SENSE AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout
+creation. The simple mind of Early Man and the Animals
+was of that character--a consciousness, so to speak, continuous
+through nature, and though running to points of
+illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet
+at no point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate
+compartments. (And it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive
+mind which enables us, as I have already explained, to
+understand the mysterious workings of instinct and intuition.)
+To some such unity-consciousness we have to return;
+but clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate
+character of the First Stage, for it has been enriched,
+deepened, and greatly extended by the experience of the
+Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of mentality--the
+consciousness of the Third Stage.
+
+[1] "The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an
+end," says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.
+
+[2] One may remember in this connection the tapas of the Hindu
+yogi, or the ordeals of initiates into the pagan Mysteries
+generally.
+
+
+In order to understand the operation and qualities of this
+Third Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now
+to consider in what more or less rudimentary way or ways
+it figured in the pagan rituals and in Christianity. We have
+seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or
+the 'Grizzly' tribes of North American Indians in the
+neighborhood of Mount Shasta paying their respects and
+adoration to a captive bear--at once the food-animal,
+and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had slain a
+bear--and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with
+all due ceremonies observed, but privately for his own
+satisfaction. He had committed, therefore, a sin theoretically
+unpardonable; for had he not--to gratify his
+personal desire for food--levelled a blow at the guardian
+spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from
+his fellows by destroying its very symbol? There was
+only one way by which he could regain the fellowship of
+his companions. He must make amends by some public
+sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal
+for himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan)
+in a common feast, while at the same time, tensest prayers
+and thanks are offered to the animal for the gift of his body
+for food. The Magic formula demanded nothing less than
+this--else dread disaster would fall upon the man who sinned,
+and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred
+similar rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology--
+the first, in which the individual member simply remains
+within the compass of the tribal mind, and only acts in
+harmony with it; the second, in which the individual
+steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an
+action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third,
+in which, to make amends and to prove his sincerity, he
+submits to some sacrifice, and by a common feast or some
+such ceremony is received back again into the unity of the
+fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is consumed,
+and the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh,
+the Savior of the tribe.
+
+In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit
+is no longer merely an Animal, or animal-headed Genius,
+but a quite human-formed Divinity, still the same general
+outline of ideas is preserved--only with gathered intensity
+owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The
+Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just
+an ordinary Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus
+or Jesus. He is betrayed by one of his own followers, and
+suffers death, but rises again redeeming all with himself
+in the one fellowship; and the corn and the wine and the
+wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the
+sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper
+of reconciliation. It is always the return to unity which
+is the ritual of Salvation, and of which the symbol is the
+Eucharist--the second birth, the formation of "a new creature
+when old things are passed away." For "Except a
+man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God";
+and "the first man is of the earth, earthly, but the second
+man is the Lord from heaven." Like a strange refrain,
+and from centuries before our era, comes down this belief
+in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation
+is a new birth and the beginning of a new creature:
+"Rejoice, ye initiates in the mystery of the liberated god"
+--rejoice in the thought of the hero who died as a mortal
+in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!
+
+Who then was this "Christos" for whom the world
+was waiting three centuries before our era (and indeed
+centuries before that)? Who was this "thrice Savior"
+whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the
+meaning of that "coming of the Son of Man" whom Daniel
+beheld in vision among the clouds of heaven? or of the
+"perfect man" who, Paul declared, should deliver us from
+the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of
+the children of God? What was this salvation which
+time after time and times again the pagan deities promised
+to their devotees, and which the Eleusinian and other
+Mysteries represented in their religious dramas with such
+convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy
+is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes
+beneath the hollow earth: that man knows the true end of
+life and its source divine"; and concerning which Sophocles
+and Aeschylus were equally enthusiastic?[1]
+
+[1] See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;
+also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D.
+(London, 1897).
+
+
+Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already
+said, what the answer to these questions is? As with
+the first blossoming of self-consciousness in the human
+mind came the dawn of an immense cycle of experience--
+a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil and
+blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely
+necessary and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the
+return, the restoration has to come through another forward
+step, in the same domain. Abandoning the quest and the
+glorification of the separate isolated self we have to return
+to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed
+of this 'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation,
+and which all the expressions which I have just cited have
+indicated. It is this presence which all down the ages
+has been hailed as Savior and Liberator: the daybreak of a
+consciousness so much vaster, so much more glorious, than
+all that has gone before that the little candle of the local self
+is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the
+return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation
+from the long exile of separation, from the painful sense
+of isolation and the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can
+we doubt that this new birth--this third stage of consciousness,
+if we like to call it so--has to come, that it is indeed
+not merely a pious hope or a tentative theory, but a FACT
+testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the past--
+witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic
+light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among
+the arid and unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms
+in the dry grass of a summer night?
+
+Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness
+an immense period, as we have said--perhaps 30,000 years,
+perhaps even more--has elapsed. Now, in the present
+day this period is reaching its culmination, and though
+it will not terminate immediately, its end is, so to speak,
+in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age behind
+us--say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years--evidence has been
+coming in (partly in the religious rites recorded, partly
+in oracles, poems and prophetic literature) of the onset
+of this further illumination--"the light which never was
+on sea or land"--and the cloud of witnesses, scattered
+at first, has in these later centuries become so evident and
+so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to anticipate
+a great and general new birth, as now not so very far off.[1]
+[We should, however, do well to remember, in this connection,
+that many a time already in the history the Millennium
+has been prophesied, and yet not arrived punctual to date,
+and to take to ourselves the words of 'Peter,' who somewhat
+grievously disappointed at the long-delayed second coming
+of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of heaven, wrote in his second
+Epistle: "There shall come in the last days scoffers,
+walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise
+of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all
+things continue as they were from the beginning of the
+creation."[2]]
+
+[1] For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's
+remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first
+published at Philadelphia, 1901).
+
+[2] 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.
+
+
+I say that all through the historical age behind us there
+has been evidence--even though scattered-- of salvation
+and the return of the Cosmic life. Man has never been so
+completely submerged in the bitter sea of self-centredness but
+what he has occasionally been able to dash the spray from
+his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of
+heaven. From how far back we cannot say, but from an
+immense antiquity come the beautiful myths which indicate
+this.
+
+ Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly.
+     hutch;
+ Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;
+ Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues
+     a garment of the sun and stars;
+ From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe,
+     and is wedded to the prince of heaven.
+
+
+How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown
+close to the Hearth-fire of the universe--herself
+indeed just a little spark from it; despised and rejected;
+rejected by the world, despised by her two elder sisters (the
+body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though latest-born,
+by far the most beautiful of the three. And of
+the Prince of Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her
+wedding garment the glory and beauty of all nature and of
+the heavens! The parables of Jesus are charming in their
+way, but they hardly reach this height of inspiration.
+
+Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange
+that here again there are three sisters (the three stages of
+human evolution), and the latest-born the most beautiful
+of the three, and the jealousies and persecutions heaped on
+the youngest by the others, and especially by Aphrodite the
+goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of
+the unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted
+for mortals to look; and the long, long tests and sufferings
+and trials which Psyche has to undergo before Eros
+may really take her to his arms and translate her to the
+heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these
+things were represented in the Mysteries the world flocked
+to see them, and the poets indeed said, "Happy are
+they that see and seeing can understand?" Can we not
+understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the
+second century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing
+the lesson that "the greatest of human blessings
+is fellowship and mutual trust"?
+
+
+
+XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
+
+Thus we come to a thing which we must not pass over,
+because it throws great light on the meaning and interpretation
+of all these rites and ceremonies of the great World-religion. I
+mean the subject of the Ancient Mysteries. And to this I will
+give a few pages.
+
+These Mysteries were probably survivals of the oldest religious
+rites of the Greek races, and in their earlier forms
+consisted not so much in worship of the gods of Heaven
+as of the divinities of Earth, and of Nature and Death. Crude,
+no doubt, at first, they gradually became (especially in their
+Eleusinian form) more refined and philosophical; the rites
+were gradually thrown open, on certain conditions, not
+only to men generally, but also to women, and even to slaves;
+and in the end they influenced Christianity deeply.[1]
+
+[1] See Edwin Hatch, D.D., The Influence of Greek Ideas and
+Usages on the Christian Church (London, 1890), pp. 283-5.
+
+
+There were apparently three forms of teaching made
+use of in these rites: these were <gr legomena>, things SAID;
+<gr deiknumena>, things SHOWN; and <gr drwmena>, things PERFORMED
+or ACTED.[1] I have given already some instances
+of things said-texts whispered for consolation in the
+neophyte's car, and so forth; of the THIRD group, things
+enacted, we have a fair amount of evidence. There were
+ritual dramas or passion-plays, of which an important
+one dealt with the descent of Kore or Proserpine into the
+underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations,[2] and her
+redemption and restoration to the upper world in Spring;
+another with the sufferings of Psyche and her rescue by Eros,
+as described by Apuleius[3]--himself an initiate in the cult
+of Isis. There is a parody by Lucian, which tells
+of the birth of Apollo, the marriage of Coronis, and the
+coming of Aesculapius as Savior; there was the dying
+and rising again of Dionysus (chief divinity of the Orphic
+cult); and sometimes the mystery of the birth of Dionysus
+as a holy child.[4] There was, every year at Eleusis, a
+solemn and lengthy procession or pilgrimage made, symbolic
+of the long pilgrimage of the human soul, its sufferings and
+deliverance.
+
+[1] Cheetham, op. cit., pp. 49-61 sq.
+
+[2] See Farnell, op. cit., iii. 158 sq.
+
+[3] See The Golden Ass.
+
+[4] Farnell, ii, 177.
+
+
+"Almost always," says Dr. Cheetham, "the suffering of a
+god--suffering followed by triumph--seems to have been
+the subject of the sacred drama." Then occasionally to
+the Neophytes, after taking part in the pilgrimage, and
+when their minds had been prepared by an ordeal of
+darkness and fatigue and terrors, was accorded a revelation
+of Paradise, and even a vision of Transfiguration--the form
+of the Hierophant himself, or teacher of the Mysteries,
+being seen half-lost in a blaze of light.[1] Finally, there
+was the eating of food and drinking of barley-drink from
+the sacred chest[2]--a kind of Communion or Eucharist.
+
+[1] Ibid., 179 sq.
+
+[2] Ibid., 186. Sacred chests, in which holy things were kept,
+figure frequently in early rites and legends--as in the case of
+the ark of the Jewish tabernacle, the ark or box carried in
+celebrations of the mysteries of Bacchus (Theocritus, Idyll
+xxvi), the legend of Pandora's box which contained the seeds of
+all good and evil, the ark of Noah which saved all living
+creatures from the flood, the Argo of the argonauts, the
+moonshaped boat in which Isis floating over the waters gathered
+together the severed limbs of Osiris, and so brought about his
+resurrection, and the many chests or coffins out of which the
+various gods (Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Jesus), having been
+laid there in death, rose again for the redemption of the world.
+They all evidently refer to the mystic womb of Nature and of
+Woman, and are symbols of salvation and redemption (For a full
+discussion of this subject, see The Great Law of religious
+origins, by W. Williamson, ch. iv.)
+
+
+Apuleius in The Golden Ass gives an interesting account
+of his induction into the mysteries of Isis: how, bidding
+farewell one evening to the general congregation outside, and
+clothed in a new linen garment, he was handed by
+the priest into the inner recesses of the temple itself; how
+he "approached the confines of death, and having trod on
+the threshold of Proserpine (the Underworld), returned
+therefrom, being borne through all the elements. At
+midnight I saw the sun shining with its brilliant light:
+and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath and
+the Gods above, and stood near and worshipped them."
+During the night things happened which must not be
+disclosed; but in the morning he came forth "consecrated
+by being dressed in twelve stoles painted with the figures of
+animals."[1] He ascended a pulpit in the midst of the Temple,
+carrying in his right hand a burning torch, while a
+chaplet encircled his head, from which palm-leaves projected
+like rays of light. "Thus arrayed like the Sun, and
+placed so as to resemble a statue, on a sudden the curtains
+being drawn aside, I was exposed to the gaze of the multitude.
+After this I celebrated the most joyful day of my
+initiation, as my natal day [day of the New Birth]
+and there was a joyous banquet and mirthful conversation."
+
+[1] An allusion no doubt to the twelve signs of the Zodiac, the
+pathway of the Sun, as well as to the practice of the ancient
+priests of wearing the skins of totem-animals in sign of their
+divinity.
+
+
+One can hardly refuse to recognize in this account the
+description of some kind of ceremony which was supposed
+to seal the illumination of a man and his new birth into
+divinity--the animal origin, the circling of all experience,
+the terrors of death, and the resurrection in the form of
+the Sun, the symbol of all light and life. The very word
+"illumination" carries the ideas of light and a new birth with
+it. Reitzenstein in his very interesting book on the Greek
+Mysteries[1] speaks over and over again of the illumination
+(<gr fwtismos>) which was held to attend Initiation and
+Salvation. The doctrine of Salvation indeed (<gr swthria>)
+was, as we have already seen, rife and widely current in
+the Second Century B. C. It represented a real experience,
+and the man who shared this experience became a <gr qeios>
+<gr anqrwpos> or divine man.[2] In the Orphic Tablets the
+phrase "I am a child of earth and the starry heaven, but
+my race is of heaven (alone)" occurs more than once.
+In one of the longest of them the dead man is instructed
+"after he has passed the waters (of Lethe) where the white
+Cypress and the House of Hades are" to address these very
+words to the guardians of the Lake of Memory while
+he asks for a drink of cold water from that Lake. In
+another the dead person himself is thus addressed: "Hail,
+thou who hast endured the Suffering, such as indeed thou
+hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from
+man!"[3] Ecstacy was the acme of the religious life; and,
+what is especially interesting to us, Salvation or the divine
+nature was open to all men--to all, that is, who should go
+through the necessary stages of preparation for it.[4]
+
+[1] Die hellenistischen Mysterien-Religionen, by R. Reitzenstein,
+Leipzig, 1910.
+
+[2] Reitzenstein, p. 12.
+
+[3] These Tablets (so-called) are instructions to the dead as to
+their passage into the other world, and have been found in the
+tombs, in Italy and elsewhere, inscribed on very thin gold plates
+and buried with the departed. See Manual of Greek Antiquities by
+Percy Gardner and F. B. Jerome (1896); also Prolegomena to Greek
+Religion by Jane E. Harrison (1908).
+
+[4] Reitzenstein, pp. 15 and 18; also S. J. Case, Evolution of
+Early Christianity, p. 301.
+
+
+Reitzenstein contends (p. 26) that in the Mysteries,
+transfiguration (<gr metamorfwsis>), salvation (<gr swthria>),
+and new birth (<gr paliggenesia>) were often conjoined. He says
+(p. 31), that in the Egyptian Osiris-cult, the Initiate acquires
+a nature "equal to God" (<gr isoqeos>), the very same expression
+as that used of Christ Jesus in Philippians ii. 6;
+he mentions Apollonius of Tyana and Sergius Paulus as
+instances of men who by their contemporaries were considered
+to have attained this nature; and he quotes Akhnaton
+(Pharaoh of Egypt in 1375 B.C.) as having said,
+"Thou art in my heart; none other knows Thee, save thy
+son Akhnaton; Thou hast initiated him into thy wisdom
+and into thy power." He also quotes the words of Hermes
+(Trismegistus)--"Come unto Me, even as children to their
+mother's bosom: Thou art I, and I am Thou; what is thine
+is mine, and what is mine is thine; for indeed I am
+thine image (<gr eidwlon>)," and refers to the dialogue between
+Hermes and Tat, in which they speak of the great and mystic
+New Birth and Union with the All--with all Elements, Plants
+and Animals, Time and Space.
+
+"The Mysteries," says Dr. Cheetham very candidly,
+"influenced Christianity considerably and modified it in some
+important respects"; and Dr. Hatch, as we have seen,
+not only supports this general view, but follows it
+out in detail.[1] He points out that the membership of the
+Mystery-societies was very numerous in the earliest times,
+A.D.; that their general aims were good, including a sense of
+true religion, decent life, and brotherhood; that cleanness
+from crime and confession were demanded from the neophyte; that
+confession was followed by baptism (<gr kaqarsis>) and
+THAT by sacrifice; that the term <gr fwtismos>
+(illumination) was adopted by the Christian Church as
+the name for the new birth of baptism; that the Christian
+usage of placing a seal on the forehead came from the same
+source; that baptism itself after a time was called a mystery
+(<gr musihriou>); that the sacred cakes and barley-drink of
+the Mysteries became the milk and honey and bread and
+wine of the first Christian Eucharists, and that the occasional
+sacrifice of a lamb on the Christian altar ("whose mention
+is often suppressed") probably originated in the same way.
+Indeed, the conception of the communion-table AS an altar
+and many other points of ritual gradually established themselves
+from these sources as time went on.[2] It is hardly
+necessary to say more in proof of the extent to which in
+these ancient representations "things said" and "scenes
+enacted" forestalled the doctrines and ceremonials of
+Christianity.
+
+[1] See Hatch, op. cit., pp. 290 sq.
+
+[2] See Dionysus Areop. (end of fifth century), who describes the
+Christian rites generally in Mystery language (Hatch, 296).
+
+
+"But what of the second group above-mentioned, the
+"things SHOWN"? It is not so easy naturally to get exact
+information concerning these, but they seem to have been
+specially holy objects, probably things connected with
+very ancient rituals in the past--such as sacred stones,
+old and rude images of the gods, magic nature-symbols, like
+that half-disclosed ear of corn above-mentioned (Ch. V.). "In the
+Temple of Isis at Philae," says Dr. Cheetham,
+"the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks
+of corn springing from it, which a priest waters from
+a vessel. An inscription says: 'This is the form of him
+whom we may not name, Osiris of the Mysteries who sprang
+from the returning waters' [the Nile]." Above all, no doubt,
+there were images of the phallus and the vulva, the great
+symbols of human fertility. We have seen (Ch. XII) that
+the lingam and the yoni are, even down to to-day, commonly
+retained and honored as holy objects in the S. Indian
+Temples, and anointed with oil (some of them) for
+a very practical reason. Sir J. G. Frazer, in his lately
+published volumes on The Folk-lore of the Old Testament,
+has a chapter (in vol. ii) on the very numerous sacred stones
+of various shapes and sizes found or spoken of in Palestine
+and other parts of the world. Though uncertain as to the
+meaning of these stones he mentions that they are "frequently,
+though not always, UPRIGHT." Anointing them with
+oil, he assures us, "is a widespread practice, sometimes by
+women who wish to obtain children." And he concludes
+the chapter by saying: "The holy stone at Bethel was probably
+one of those massive standing stones or rough pillars
+which the Hebrews called masseboth, and which,
+as we have seen, were regular adjuncts of Canaanite and
+early Israelitish sanctuaries." We have already mentioned
+the pillars Jachin and Boaz which stood before the Temple
+of Solomon, and which had an acknowledged sexual significance;
+and so it seems probable that a great number of
+these holy stones had a similar meaning.[1] Following this
+clue it would appear likely that the lingam thus anointed
+and worshipped in the Temples of India and elsewhere IS the
+original <gr cristos>[2] adored by the human race from the very
+beginning, and that at a later time, when the Priest
+and the King, as objects of worship, took the place
+of the Lingam, THEY also were anointed with the chrism of
+fertility. That the exhibition of these emblems should be
+part of the original 'Mystery'-rituals was perfectly
+natural--especially because, as we have explained already[3]
+old customs often continued on in a quite naive fashion
+in the rituals, when they had come to be thought indecent
+or improper by a later public opinion; and (we may say)
+was perfectly in order, because there is plenty of evidence to
+show that in SAVAGE initiations, of which the Mysteries were
+the linear descendants, all these things WERE explained to
+the novices, and their use actually taught.[4] No doubt also
+there were some representations or dramatic incidents of
+a fairly coarse character, as deriving from these ancient
+sources.[5] It is, however, quaint to observe how the mere
+mention of such things has caused an almost hysterical
+commotion among the critics of the Mysteries--from the
+day of the early Christians who (in order to belaud their
+own religion) were never tired of abusing the Pagans, onward
+to the present day when modern scholars either on
+the one hand follow the early Christians in representing
+the Mysteries as sinks of iniquity or on the other (knowing
+this charge could not be substantiated except in the period
+of their final decadence) take the line of ignoring the sexual
+interest attaching to them as non-existent or at any rate
+unworthy of attention. The good Archdeacon Cheetham,
+for instance, while writing an interesting book on the Mysteries
+passes by this side of the subject ALMOST as if it did
+not exist; while the learned Dr. Farnell, overcome apparently
+by the weight of his learning, and unable to confront
+the alarming obstacle presented by these sexual rites and
+aspects, hides himself behind the rather non-committal
+remark (speaking of the Eleusinian rites) "we have no
+right to imagine any part of this solemn ceremony as coarse
+or obscene."[6] As Nature, however, has been known (quite
+frequently) to be coarse or obscene, and as the initiators
+of the Mysteries were probably neither 'good' nor 'learned,'
+but were simply anxious to interpret Nature as best they
+could, we cannot find fault with the latter for the way
+they handled the problem, nor indeed well see how they could
+have handled it better.
+
+[1] F. Nork, Der Mystagog, mentions that the Roman Penates were
+commonly anointed with oil. J. Stuart Hay, in his Life of
+Elagabalus (1911), says that "Elagabal was worshipped under the
+symbol of a great black stone or meteorite, in the shape of a
+Phallus, which having fallen from the heavens represented a true
+portion of the Godhead, much after the style of those black stone
+images popularly venerated in Norway and other parts of Europe."
+
+[2] J. E. Hewitt, in his Ruling Races of Pre-historic Times (p.
+64), gives a long list of pre-historic races who worshipped the
+lingam.
+
+[3] See Ch. XI.
+
+[4] See Ernest Crawley's Mystic Rose, ch. xiii, pp. 310 and 313:
+"In certain tribes of Central Africa both boys and girls after
+initiation must as soon as possible have intercourse." Initiation
+being not merely preliminary to, but often ACTUALLY marriage. The
+same among Kaffirs, Congo tribes, Senegalese, etc. Also among the
+Arunta of Australia.
+
+[5] Professor Diederichs has said that "in much ancient ritual it
+was thought that mystic communion with the deity could be
+obtained through the semblance of sex-intercourse--as in the
+Attis-Cybele worship, and the Isis-ritual." (Farnell.)
+Reitzenstein says (op. cit., p. 20.) that the Initiates, like
+some of the Christian Nuns at a later time, believed
+in union with God through receiving the seed.
+
+[6] Farnell, op. cit., iii. 176. Messrs. Gardner and Jevons, in
+their Manual of Greek Antiquities, above-quoted, compare the
+Eleusinian Mysteries favorably with some of the others, like the
+Arcadian, the Troezenian, the Aeginaean, and the very primitive
+Samothracian: saying (p. 278) that of the last-mentioned "we know
+little, but safely conjecture that in them the ideas of sex and
+procreation dominated EVEN MORE than in those of Eleusis."
+
+
+After all it is pretty clear that the early peoples saw
+in Sex the great cohesive force which kept (we will not say
+Humanity but at any rate) the Tribe together, and sustained
+the race. In the stage of simple Consciousness this
+must have been one of the first things that the budding intellect
+perceived. Sex became one of the earliest divinities,
+and there is abundant evidence that its organs and processes
+generally were invested with a religious sense of awe and
+sanctity. It was in fact the symbol (or rather the actuality)
+of the permanent undying life of the race, and as such was
+sacred to the uses of the race. Whatever taboos may have,
+among different peoples, guarded its operations, it was not
+essentially a thing to be concealed, or ashamed of. Rather
+the contrary. For instance the early Christian writer,
+Hippolytus, Bishop of Pontus (A.D. 200), in his Refutation
+of all Heresies, Book V, says that the Samothracian Mysteries,
+just mentioned, celebrate Adam as the primal or archetypal
+Man eternal in the heavens; and he then continues:
+"Habitually there stand in the temple of the
+Samothracians two images of naked men having both hands
+stretched aloft towards heaven, and their pudenda turned
+upwards, as is also the case with the statue of Mercury
+on Mt. Cyllene. And the aforesaid images are figures of
+the primal man, and of that spiritual one that is born again,
+in every respect of the same substance with that [first]
+man."
+
+
+This extract from Hippolytus occurs in the long discourse
+in which he 'exposes' the heresy of the so-called Naassene
+doctrines and mysteries. But the whole discourse should be
+read by those who wish to understand the Gnostic philosophy
+of the period contemporary with and anterior to the
+birth of Christianity. A translation of the discourse, carefully
+analyzed and annotated, is given in G. R. S. Mead's
+Thrice-greatest Hermes[1] (vol. i); and Mead himself, speaking
+of it, says (p. 141): "The claim of these Gnostics was
+practically that the good news of the Christ [the Christos]
+was the consummation of the inner doctrine of the Mystery-
+institutions of all the nations; the end of them all being
+the revelation of the Mystery of Man." Further, he explains
+that the Soul, in these doctrines, was regarded as synonymous
+with the Cause of All; and that its loves were twain--of
+Aphrodite (or Life), and of Persephone (or Death and the
+other world). Also that Attis, abandoning his sex in the
+worship of the Mother-Goddess (Dea Syria), ascends to
+Heaven--a new man, Male-female, and the origin of all
+things: the hidden Mystery being the Phallus itself,
+erected as Hermes in all roads and boundaries and temples,
+the Conductor and Reconductor of Souls.
+
+[1] Reitzenstein, op. cit., quotes the discourse largely. The
+Thrice-greatest Hermes may also be consulted for a translation of
+Plutarch's Isis and Osiris.
+
+
+All this may sound strange, but one may fairly say that
+it represented in its degree, and in that first 'unfallen' stage
+of human thought and psychology, a true conception of the
+cosmic Life, and indeed a conception quite sensible and
+admirable, until, of course, the Second Stage brought
+corruption. No sooner was this great force of the cosmic
+life diverted from its true uses of Generation and
+Regeneration[1] and appropriated by the individual to his own
+private pleasure--no sooner was its religious character as a
+tribal service[2], (often rendered within the Temple precincts)
+lost sight of or degraded into a commercial transaction--than
+every kind of evil fell upon mankind. Corruptio optimi
+pessima. It must be remembered too that simultaneous
+with this sexual disruption occurred the disruption of
+other human relations; and we cease to be surprised that
+disease and selfish passions, greed, jealousy, slander, cruelty,
+and wholesale murder, raged--and have raged ever since.
+
+[1] For the special meaning of these two terms, see The Drama of
+Love and Death, by E. Carpenter, pp. 59-61.
+
+[2] Ernest Crawley in The Mystic Rose challenges this
+identification of Religion with tribal interests; yet his
+arguments are not very convincing. On p. 5 he admits that "there
+is a religious meaning inherent in the primitive conception and
+practice of ALL human relations"; and a large part of his ch. xii
+is taken up in showing that even such institutions as the
+Saturnalia were religious in confirming the sense of social union
+and leading to 'extended identity.'
+
+
+But for the human soul--whatever its fate, and whatever
+the dangers and disasters that threaten it--there is always
+redemption waiting. As we saw in the last chapter, this
+corruption of Sex led (quite naturally) to its denial and
+rejection; and its denial led to the differentiation from it of
+Love. Humanity gained by the enthronement And deification
+of Love, pure and undefiled, and (for the time
+being) exalted beyond this mortal world, and free from all
+earthly contracts. But again in the end, the divorce thus
+introduced between the physical and the spiritual led to
+the crippling of both. Love relegated, so to speak, to
+heaven as a purely philanthropical, pious and 'spiritual'
+affair, became exceedingly DULL; and sex, remaining on
+earth, but deserted by the redeeming presence, fell into mere
+"carnal curiosity and wretchedness of unclean living."
+Obviously for the human race there remains nothing, in
+the final event, but the reconciliation of the physical
+and the spiritual, and after many sufferings, the reunion of
+Eros and Psyche.
+
+
+There is still, however, much to be said about the Third
+State of Consciousness. Let us examine into it a little
+more closely. Clearly, since it is a new state, and not
+merely an extension of a former one, one cannot arrive at it
+by argument derived from the Second state, for all conscious
+Thought such as we habitually use simply keeps
+us IN the Second state. No animal or quite primitive man
+could possibly understand what we mean by Self-consciousness
+till he had experienced it. Mere argument would not
+enlighten him. And so no one in the Second state can quite
+realize the Third state till he has experienced it. Still,
+explanations may help us to perceive in what direction to look,
+and to recognize in some of our experiences an approach to
+the condition sought.
+
+Evidently it is a mental condition in some respects more
+similar to the first than to the second stage. The second
+stage of human psychologic evolution is an aberration,
+a divorce, a parenthesis. With its culmination and dismissal
+the mind passes back into the simple state of union
+with the Whole. (The state of Ekagrata in the Hindu philosophy:
+one-pointedness, singleness of mind.) And the consciousness
+of the Whole, and of things past and things to
+come and things far around--which consciousness had
+been shut out by the concentration on the local self--begins
+to return again. This is not to say, of course, that the
+excursus in the second stage has been a loss and a defect.
+On the contrary, it means that the Return is a bringing of
+all that has been gained during the period of exile (all sorts
+of mental and technical knowledge and skill, emotional
+developments, finesse and adaptability of mind) BACK into harmony
+with the Whole. It means ultimately a great gain.
+The Man, perfected, comes back to a vastly extended
+harmony. He enters again into a real understanding and
+confidential relationship with his physical body and with
+the body of the society in which he dwells--from both
+of which he has been sadly divorced; and he takes up
+again the broken thread of the Cosmic Life.
+
+Everyone has noticed the extraordinary consent sometimes
+observable among the members of an animal community--
+how a flock of 500 birds (e. g. starlings) will suddenly change
+its direction of flight--the light on the wings shifting
+INSTANTANEOUSLY, as if the impulse to veer came to all at the
+same identical moment; or how bees will swarm or otherwise
+act with one accord, or migrating creatures (lemmings,
+deer, gossamer spiders, winged ants) the same. Whatever
+explanation of these facts we favor--whether the possession
+of swifter and finer means of external communication than
+we can perceive, or whether a common and inner sensitivity
+to the genius of the Tribe (the "Spirit of the Hive") or
+to the promptings of great Nature around--in any case these
+facts of animal life appear to throw light on the possibilities
+of an accord and consent among the members of emaciated
+humanity, such as we dream of now, and seem to bid us have
+good hope for the future.
+
+It is here, perhaps, that the ancient worship of the Lingam
+comes in. The word itself is apparently connected with
+our word 'link,' and has originally the same meaning.[1]
+It is the link between the generations. Beginning with the
+worship of the physical Race-life, the course of psychologic
+evolution has been first to the worship of the Tribe
+(or of the Totem which represents the tribe); then to the
+worship of the human-formed God of the tribe--the God
+who dies and rises again eternally, as the tribe passes on
+eternal--though its members perpetually perish; then to
+the conception of an undying Savior, and the realization
+and distinct experience of some kind of Super-consciousness
+which does certainly reside, more or less hidden, in the
+deeps of the mind, and has been waiting through the
+ages for its disclosure and recognition. Then again to the
+recognition that in the sacrifices, the Slayer and the Slain
+are one--the strange and profoundly mystic perception
+that the God and the Victim are in essence the same--the
+dedication of 'Himself to Himself'[2] and simultaneously
+with this the interpretation of the Eucharist as meaning,
+even for the individual, the participation in Eternal Life--
+the continuing life of the Tribe, or ultimately of Humanity.[3]
+The Tribal order rises to Humanity; love ascends from the
+lingam to yogam, from physical union alone to the union
+with the Whole--which of course includes physical and all
+other kinds of union. No wonder that the good St. Paul,
+witnessing that extraordinary whirlpool of beliefs and practices,
+new and old, there in the first century A.D.--the unabashed
+adoration of sex side by side with the transcendental
+devotions of the Vedic sages and the Gnostics--became
+somewhat confused himself and even a little violent, scolding
+his disciples (I Cor. x. 21) for their undiscriminating
+acceptance, as it seemed to him, of things utterly alien and
+antagonistic. "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and
+the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table
+and the table of devils."
+
+
+[1] See Sanskrit Dictionary.
+
+[2] See Ch. VIII.
+
+[3] There are many indications in literature--in prophetic or
+poetic form--of this awareness and distinct conviction of an
+eternal life, reached through love and an inner sense of union
+with others and with humanity at large; indications which bear
+the mark of absolute genuineness and sincerity of feeling. See,
+for instance, Whitman's poem, "To the Garden the World" (Leaves
+of Grass, complete edition, p. 79). But an eternal life of the
+third order; not, thank heaven! an eternity of the meddling and
+muddling self-conscious Intellect!
+
+
+Every careful reader has noticed the confusedness of
+Paul's mind and arguments. Even taking only those
+Epistles (Galatians, Romans and Corinthians) which the
+critics assign to his pen, the thing is observable--and some
+learned Germans even speak of TWO Pauls.[1] But also the
+thing is quite natural. There can be little doubt that
+Paul of Tarsus, a Jew brought up in the strictest sect of
+the Pharisees, did at some time fall deeply under the influence
+of Greek thought, and quite possibly became an initiate
+in the Mysteries. It would be difficult otherwise to account
+for his constant use of the Mystery-language. Reitzenstein
+says (p. 59): "The hellenistic religious literature MUST have
+been read by him; he uses its terms, and is saturated with
+its thoughts (see Rom. vi. 1-14." And this conjoined with
+his Jewish experience gave him creative power. "A great deal
+in his sentiment and thought may have REMAINED Jewish, but to his
+Hellenism he was indebted for his love of freedom and his firm
+belief in his apostleship." He adopts  terms (like <gr sarkikos>,
+<gr yucikos> and <gr pneumatikos>)[2] which were in use among the
+hellenistic sects of the time; and he writes, as in Romans vi. 4,
+5, about being "buried" with Christ or "planted" in the likeness
+of his death, in words which might well have been used (with
+change of the name) by a follower of Attis or Osiris after
+witnessing the corresponding 'mysteries'; certainly the allusion
+to these ancient deities would have been understood by every
+religionist of that day. These few points are sufficient
+to acentuate{sic} the two elements in Paul, the Jewish and the
+Greek, and to explain (so far) the seeming confusion
+in his utterances. Further it is interesting to note--as
+showing the pagan influences in the N. T. writings--the
+degree to which the Epistle to Philemon (ascribed to Paul)
+is FULL--short as it is--of expressions like PRISONER of the
+Lord, FELLOW SOLDIER, CAPTIVE or BONDMAN,[3] which were so
+common at the time as to be almost a cant in Mithraism and
+the allied cults. In I Peter ii. 2[4], we have the verse "As
+newborn babes, desire ye the sincere MILK of the word, that
+ye may grow thereby." And again we may say that
+no one in that day could mistake the reference herein
+contained to old initiation ceremonies and the new birth (as
+described in Chapter VIII above), for indeed milk was
+the well-known diet of the novice in the Isis mysteries, as
+well as On some savage tribes) of the Medicine-man when
+practising his calling.
+
+[1] "Die Mysterien-anschauungen, die bei Paulus im Hintergrunde
+stehen, drangen sich in dem sogenarmten Deuteropaulinismus
+machtig vor" (Reitzenstein).
+
+[2] Remindful of our Three Stages: the Animal, the
+Self-conscious, and the Cosmic.
+
+[3] <gr desmios, stratiwths, doulos>.
+
+[4] See also I Cor. iii. 2.
+
+
+And here too Democracy comes in--strangely foreboded
+from the first in all this matter.[1] Not only does
+the Third Stage bring illumination, intuitive understanding
+of processes in Nature and Humanity, sympathy with the
+animals, artistic capacity, and so forth, but it necessarily
+brings a new Order of Society. A preposterous--one may
+almost say a hideous--social Age is surely drawing to its end,
+The debacle we are witnessing to-day all over Europe (including
+the, British Islands), the break-up of old institutions,
+the generally materialistic outlook on life, the coming to the
+surface of huge masses of diseased and fatuous populations,
+the scum and dregs created by the past order, all point to
+the End of a Dispensation. Protestantism and Commercialism,
+in the two fields of religion and daily life
+have, as I have indicated before, been occupied in concentrating
+the mind of each man solely on his OWN welfare,
+the salvation of his OWN soul or body. These two forces
+have therefore been disruptive to the last degree; they mark
+the culmination of the Self-conscious Age--a culmination in
+War, Greed, Materialism, and the general principle of Devil-
+take-the-hindmost--and the clearing of the ground for the
+new order which is to come. So there is hope for
+the human race. Its evolution is not all a mere formless
+craze and jumble. There is an inner necessity by which
+Humanity unfolds from one degree or plane of consciousness
+to another. And if there has been a great 'Fall' or Lapse
+into conflict and disease and 'sin' and misery, occupying
+the major part of the Historical period hitherto, we see that
+this period is only brief, so to speak, in comparison
+with the whole curve of growth and expansion. We see also
+that, as I have said before, the belief in a state of salvation
+or deliverance has in the past ages never left itself quite
+without a witness in the creeds and rituals and poems
+and prophecies of mankind. Art, in some form or other,
+as an activity or inspiration dating not from the conscious
+Intellect, but from deeper regions of sub-conscious feeling
+and intuition, has continually come to us as a message from
+and an evidence of the Third stage or state, and as a promise
+of its more complete realization under other conditions.
+
+ Through the long night-time where the Nations wander
+     From Eden past to Paradise to be,
+ Art's sacred flowers, like fair stars shining yonder,
+     Alone illumine Life's obscurity.
+
+ O gracious Artists, out of your deep hearts
+     'Tis some great Sun, I doubt, by men unguessed,
+ Whose rays come struggling thus, in slender darts,
+     To shadow what Is, till Time shall manifest.
+
+
+[1] See the germs of Democracy in the yoga teaching of the
+Hindus, and in the Upanishads, the Bhagavat Gita, and other
+books.
+
+
+With the Cosmic stage comes also necessarily the rehabilitation
+of the WHOLE of Society in one fellowship (the
+true Democracy). Not the rule or domination of one
+class or caste--as of the Intellectual, the Pious, the Commercial
+or the Military--but the fusion or at least consentaneous
+organization of ALL (as in the corresponding functions
+of the human Body). Class rule has been the mark of that
+second period of human evolution, and has inevitably
+given birth during that period to wars and self-agrandizements
+of classes and sections, and their consequent greeds
+and tyrannies over other classes and sections. It is not
+found in the primitive human tribes and societies, and
+will not be found in the final forms of human association.
+The liberated and emancipated Man passes unconstrained and
+unconstraining through all grades and planes of human fellowship,
+equal and undisturbed, and never leaving his true
+home and abiding place in the heart of all. Equally
+necessarily with the rehabilitation of Society as an entirety
+will follow the rehabilitation of the entire physical body IN
+each member of Society. We have spoken already of Nakedness:
+its meaning and likely extent of adoption (Ch. XII). The idea
+that the head and the hands are the only seemly and presentable
+members of the organism, and that the other members are unworthy
+and indecent, is obviously as onesided and lopsided as
+that which honors certain classes in the commonwealth
+and despises others. Why should the head brag of its
+ascendancy and domination, and the heart be smothered
+up and hidden? It will only be a life far more in the
+open air than that which we lead at present, which will restore
+the balance and ultimately bring us back to sanity and health.
+
+
+
+XVI. THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
+
+We have dealt with the Genesis of Christianity; we now
+come to the Exodus. For that Christianity can CONTINUE
+to hold the field of Religion in the Western World is neither
+probable nor desirable. It is true, as I have remarked already,
+that there is a certain trouble about defining what we mean
+by "Christianity" similar to that about the word "Civilization."
+If we select out of the great mass of doctrines and
+rites favored by the various Christian Churches just those
+which commend themselves to the most modern and humane
+and rational human mind and choose to call that resulting
+(but rather small) body of belief and practice 'Christianity'
+we are, of course, entitled to do so, and to hope (as we do
+hope) that this residuum will survive and go forward into
+the future. But this sort of proceeding is hardly fair and
+certainly not logical. It enables Christianity to pose as
+an angel of light while at the same time keeping discreetly
+out of sight all its own abominations and deeds of darkness.
+The Church--which began its career by destroying, distorting
+and denying the pagan sources from which it sprang;
+whose bishops and other ecclesiastics assassinated each
+other in their theological rancour "of wild beasts," which
+encouraged the wicked folly of the Crusades--especially
+the Children's Crusades--and the shameful murders of
+the Manicheans, the Albigenses, and the Huguenots; which
+burned at the stake thousands and thousands of poor
+'witches' and 'heretics'; which has hardly ever spoken a
+generous word in favor or defence of the animals; which
+in modern times has supported vivisection as against the
+latter, Capitalism and Commercialism as against the poorer
+classes of mankind; and whose priests in the forms of its
+various sects, Greek or Catholic, Lutheran or Protestant,
+have in these last days rushed forth to urge the nations to
+slaughter each other with every diabolical device of Science,
+and to glorify the war-cry of Patriotism in defiance of the
+principle of universal Brotherhood--such a Church can hardly
+claim to have established the angelic character of its
+mission among mankind! And if it be said--as it often
+IS SAID: "Oh! but you must go back to the genuine article,
+and the Church's real origin and one foundation in the
+person and teaching of Jesus Christ," then indeed you
+come back to the point which this book, as above, enforces:
+namely, that as to the person of Jesus, there is
+no CERTAINTY at all that he ever existed; and as to the teaching
+credited to him, it is certain that that comes down from a
+period long anterior to 'Christianity' and is part of what
+may justly be called a very ancient World-religion. So, as
+in the case of 'Civilization,' we are compelled to see that
+it is useless to apply the word to some ideal state of affairs
+or doctrine (an ideal by no means the same in all people's
+minds, or in all localities and times), but that the only
+reasonable thing to do is to apply it in each case to a
+HISTORICAL PERIOD. In the case of Christianity the historical
+period has lasted nearly 2,000 years, and, as I say, we can
+hardly expect or wish that it should last much longer.
+
+The very thorough and careful investigation of religious
+origins which has been made during late years by a great
+number of students and observers undoubtedly tends to show
+that there has been something like a great World-religion
+coming down the centuries from the remotest times and
+gradually expanding and branching as it has come--that
+is to say that the similarity (in ESSENCE though not always
+in external detail) between the creeds and rituals of widely
+sundered tribes and peoples is so great as to justify the view
+--advanced in the present volume--that these creeds and
+rituals are the necessary outgrowths of human psychology,
+slowly evolving, and that consequently they have a common
+origin and in their various forms a common expression. Of
+this great World-religion, so coming down, Christianity
+is undoubtedly a branch, and an important branch. But
+there have been important branches before; and while
+it may be true that Christianity emphasizes some points
+which may have been overlooked or neglected in the Vedic
+teachings or in Buddhism, or in the Persian and Egyptian
+and Syrian cults, or in Mahommedanism, and so forth, it is also
+equally true that Christianity has itself overlooked or neglected
+valuable points in these religions. It has, in fact, the defects
+of its qualities. If the World-religion is like a great tree, one
+cannot expect or desire that all its branches should be directed
+towards the same point of the compass.
+
+Reinach, whose studies of religious origins are always
+interesting and characterized by a certain Gallic grace
+and nettete, though with a somewhat Jewish non-perception
+of the mystic element in life, defines Religion as a combination
+of animism and scruples. This is good in a way, because
+it gives the two aspects of the subject: the inner,
+animism, consisting of the sense of contact with more or
+less intelligent beings moving in Nature; and the outer,
+consisting in scruples or taboos. The one aspect shows
+the feeling which INSPIRES religion, the other, the checks and
+limitations which DEFINE it and give birth to ritual. But
+like most anthropologists he (Reinach) is a little TOO
+patronizing towards the "poor Indian with untutored
+mind." He is sorry for people so foolish as to be animistic
+in their outlook, and he is always careful to point out that
+the scruples and taboos were quite senseless in their origin,
+though occasionally (by accident) they turned out useful.
+Yet--as I have said before--Animism is a perfectly sensible,
+logical and NECESSARY attitude of the human mind. It is
+a necessary attribute of man's psychical nature, by which
+he projects into the great World around him the image
+of his own mind. When that mind is in a very primitive,
+inchoate, and fragmentary condition, the images so projected
+are those of fragmentary intelligences ('spirits,'
+gnomes, etc.--the age of magic); when the mind rises
+to distinct consciousness of itself the reflections of it are
+anthropomorphic 'gods'; when finally it reaches the
+universal or cosmic state it perceives the presence of
+a universal Being behind all phenomena--which Being is
+indeed itself--"Himself to Himself." If you like you
+may call the whole process by the name of Animism. It
+is perfectly sensible throughout. The only proviso is
+that you should also be sensible, and distinguish the different
+stages in the process.
+
+Jane Harrison makes considerable efforts to show that Religion
+is primarily a reflection of the SOCIAL Conscience (see
+Themis, pp. 482-92)--that is, that the sense in Man
+of a "Power that makes for righteousness" outside (and
+also inside) him is derived from his feeling of continuity
+with the Tribe and his instinctive obedience to its
+behests, confirmed by ages of collective habit and experience.
+He cannot in fact sever the navel-string which connects
+him with his tribal Mother, even though he
+desires to do so. And no doubt this view of the origin
+of Religion is perfectly correct. But it must be pointed
+out that it does not by any means exclude the view that
+religion derives also from an Animism by which man recognizes
+in general Nature his foster-mother and feels himself
+in closest touch with HER. Which may have come first, the
+Social affiliation or the Nature affiliation, I leave to
+the professors to determine. The term Animism may,
+as far as I can see, be quite well applied to the social
+affiliation, for the latter is evidently only a case in which
+the individual projects his own degree of consciousness
+into the human group around him instead of into the
+animals or the trees, but it is a case of which the justice
+is so obvious that the modern man can intellectually seize
+and understand it, and consequently he does not tar it with
+the 'animistic' brush.
+
+And Miss Harrison, it must be noticed, does, in other passages
+of the same book (see Themis, pp. 68, 69), admit
+that Religion has its origin not only from unity with the
+Tribe but from the sense of affiliation to Nature--the
+sense of "a world of unseen power lying behind the visible
+universe, a world which is the sphere, as will be seen, of
+magical activity and the medium of mysticism. The
+mystical element, the oneness and continuousness comes
+out very clearly in the notion of Wakonda among the Sioux
+Indians. . . . The Omahas regarded all animate and inanimate
+forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common
+life, which was continuous and similar to the will-power
+they were conscious of in themselves. This mysterious
+power in all things they called Wakonda, and through
+it all things were related to man, and to each other. In the
+idea of the continuity of life, a relation was maintained between
+the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living, and
+also between the fragment of anything and its entirety." Thus
+our general position is confirmed, that Religion in
+its origin has been INSPIRED by a deep instinctive conviction
+or actual sense of continuity with a being or beings in the
+world around, while it has derived its FORM and ritual by
+slow degrees from a vast number of taboos, generated in
+the first instance chiefly by superstitious fears, but gradually
+with the growth of reason and observation becoming
+simplified and rationalized into forms of use. On the one
+side there has been the positive impulse--of mere animal
+Desire and the animal urge of self-expression; on the
+other there has been the negative force of Fear based
+on ignorance--the latter continually carving, moulding and
+shaping the former. According to this an organized study and
+classification of taboos might yield some interesting results;
+because indeed it would throw light on the earliest forms of
+both religion and science. It would be seen that some taboos,
+like those of CONTACT (say with a menstruous woman,
+or a mother-in-law, or a lightning-struck tree) had an obvious
+basis of observation, justifiable but very crude; while
+others, like the taboo against harming an enemy who
+had contracted blood-friendship with one of your own
+tribe, or against giving decent burial to a murderer, were
+equally rough and rude expressions or indications of the growing
+moral sentiment of mankind. All the same there would
+be left, in any case, a large residuum of taboos which could
+only be judged as senseless, and the mere rubbish of the
+savage mind.
+
+So much for the first origins of the World-religion;
+and I think enough has been said in the various chapters
+of this book to show that the same general process has obtained
+throughout. Man, like the animals, began with
+this deep, subconscious sense of unity with surrounding
+Nature. When this became (in Man) fairly conscious, it led
+to Magic and Totemism. More conscious, and it branched,
+on the one hand, into figures of Gods and definite forms
+of Creeds, on the other into elaborate Scientific Theories--
+the latter based on a strong INTELLECTUAL belief in Unity, but
+fervently denying any 'anthropomorphic' or 'animistic'
+SENSE of that unity. Finally, it seems that we are
+now on the edge of a further stage when the theories
+and the creeds, scientific and religious, are on the verge of
+collapsing, but in such a way as to leave the sense and the
+perception of Unity--the real content of the whole
+process--not only undestroyed, but immensely heightened
+and illuminated. Meanwhile the taboos--of which there
+remain some still, both religious and scientific--
+have been gradually breaking up and merging themselves into a
+reasonable and humane order of life and philosophy.
+
+I have said that out of this World-religion Christianity
+really sprang. It is evident that the time has arrived when
+it must either acknowledge its source and frankly endeavor
+to affiliate itself to the same, or failing that must
+perish. In the first case it will probably have to change its
+name; in the second the question of its name 'will interest
+it no more.'
+
+With regard to the first of these alternatives, I might venture--
+though with indifference--to make a few suggestions.
+Why should we not have--instead of a Holy
+Roman Church--a Holy HUMAN Church, rehabilitating the
+ancient symbols and rituals, a Christianity (if you still
+desire to call it so) frankly and gladly acknowledging
+its own sources? This seems a reasonable and even feasible
+proposition. If such a church wished to celebrate a Mass
+or Communion or Eucharist it would have a great variety
+of rites and customs of that kind to select from; those that
+were not appropriate for use in our times or were connected
+with the worship of strange gods need not be rejected or
+condemned, but could still be commented on and explained
+as approaches to the same idea--the idea of dedication
+to the Common Life, and of reinvigoration in the partaking
+of it. If the Church wished to celebrate the Crucifixion
+or betrayal of its Founder, a hundred instances of such
+celebrations would be to hand, and still the thought that
+has underlain such celebrations since the beginning of the
+world could easily be disentangled and presented in concrete
+form anew. In the light of such teaching expressions
+like "I know that my Redeemer liveth" would be traced
+to their origin, and men would understand that notwithstanding
+the mass of rubbish, cant and humbug which has
+collected round them they really do mean something and
+represent the age-long instinct of Humanity feeling its way
+towards a more extended revelation, a new order of being,
+a third stage of consciousness and illumination. In such a
+Church or religious organization EVERY quality of human nature
+would have to be represented, every practice and
+custom allowed for and its place accorded--the magical
+and astronomical meanings, the rites connected with sun-worship,
+or with sex, or with the worship of animals; the
+consecration of corn and wine and other products of the
+ground, initiations, sacrifices, and so forth--all (if indeed it
+claimed to be a World-religion) would have to be represented
+and recognized. For they all have their long human origin
+and descent in and through the pagan creeds, and they all
+have penetrated into and become embodied to some degree
+in Christianity. Christianity therefore, as I say, must either
+now come frankly forward and, acknowledging its parentage from
+the great Order of the past, seek to rehabilitate THAT and carry
+mankind one step forward in the path of evolution--or else it
+must perish. There is no other alternative.[1]
+
+[1] Comte in founding his philosophy of Positivism seems to have
+had in view some such Holy Human Church, but he succeeded in
+making it all so profoundly dull that it never flourished, The
+seed of Life was not in it.
+
+
+Let me give an instance of how a fragment of ancient
+ritual which has survived from the far Past and is still
+celebrated, but with little intelligence or understanding, in
+the Catholic Church of to-day, might be adopted in such
+a Church as I have spoken of, interpreted, and made eloquent
+of meaning to modern humanity. When I was in Ceylon
+nearly 30 years ago I was fortunate enough to witness a
+night-festival in a Hindu Temple--the great festival of
+Taipusam, which takes place every year in January. Of
+course, it was full moon, and great was the blowing up of
+trumpets in the huge courtyard of the Temple. The
+moon shone down above from among the fronds of tall coco-palms,
+on a dense crowd of native worshipers--men and
+a few women--the men for the most part clad in little
+more than a loin-cloth, the women picturesque in their colored
+saris and jewelled ear and nose rings. The images of
+Siva and two other gods were carried in procession round
+and round the temple--three or four times; nautch girls
+danced before the images, musicians, blowing horns and huge
+shells, or piping on flageolets or beating tom-toms, accompanied
+them. The crowd carrying torches or high crates with
+flaming coco-nuts, walked or rather danced along on each
+side, elated and excited with the sense of the present
+divinity, yet pleasantly free from any abject awe. The whole
+thing indeed reminded one of some bas-relief of a Bacchanalian
+procession carved on a Greek sarcophagus--and
+especially so in its hilarity and suggestion of friendly
+intimacy with the god. There were singing of hymns and
+the floating of the chief actors on a raft round a sacred
+lake. And then came the final Act. Siva, or his image, very
+weighty and borne on the shoulders of strong men, was carried
+into the first chamber or hall of the Temple and
+placed on an altar with a curtain hanging in front. The
+crowd followed with a rush; and then there was more music,
+recital of hymns, and reading from sacred books.
+From where we stood we could see the rite which was performed
+behind the curtain. Two five-branched candlesticks
+were lighted; and the manner of their lighting was
+as follows. Each branch ended in a little cup, and in the
+cups five pieces of camphor were placed, all approximately
+equal in size. After offerings had been made, of fruit,
+flowers and sandalwood, the five camphors in each candlestick
+were lighted. As the camphor flames burned out the music
+became more wild and exciting, and then at the moment of
+their extinction the curtains were drawn aside and the
+congregation outside suddenly beheld the god revealed
+and in a blaze of light. This burning of camphor was,
+like other things in the service, emblematic. The five
+lights represent the five senses. Just as camphor consumes
+itself and leaves no residue behind, so should the five senses,
+being offered to the god, consume themselves and disappear.
+When this is done, that happens in the soul which was now
+figured in the ritual--the God is revealed in the
+inner light.[1]
+
+[1] For a more detailed account of this Temple-festival, see
+Adam's Peak to Elephanta by E. Carpenter, ch. vii.
+
+
+We are familiar with this parting or rending of the veil.
+We hear of it in the Jewish Temple, and in the Greek and
+Egyptian Mysteries. It had a mystically religious, and also
+obviously sexual, signification. It occurs here and there in
+the Roman Catholic ritual. In Spain, some ancient
+Catholic ceremonials are kept up with a brilliance and
+splendor hardly found elsewhere in Europe. In the
+Cathedral, at Seville the service of the Passion, carried
+out on Good Friday with great solemnity and accompanied
+with fine music, culminates on the Saturday morning--i.e.
+in the interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection--
+in a spectacle similar to that described in Ceylon.
+A rich velvet-black curtain hangs before the High Altar. At
+the appropriate moment and as the very emotional strains
+of voices and instruments reach their climax in the "Gloria
+in Excelsis," the curtain with a sudden burst of sound
+(thunder and the ringing of all the bells) is rent asunder,
+and the crucified Jesus is seen hanging there revealed in a
+halo of glory.
+
+There is also held at Seville Cathedral and before the
+High Altar every year, the very curious Dance of the Seises
+(sixes), performed now by 16 instead of (as of old) by 12
+boys, quaintly dressed. It seems to be a survival of
+some very ancient ritual, probably astronomical, in which
+the two sets of six represent the signs of the Zodiac, and
+is celebrated during the festivals of Corpus Christi, the
+Immaculate Conception, and the Carnival.
+
+Numerous instances might of course be adduced of how
+a Church aspiring to be a real Church of Humanity might
+adopt and re-create the rituals of the past in the light of
+a modern inspiration. Indeed the difficulty would be to
+limit the process, for EVERY ancient ritual, we can now
+see, has had a meaning and a message, and it would be a
+real joy to disentangle these and to expose the profound
+solidarity of humanity and aspiration from the very dawn
+of civilization down to the present day. Nor would
+it be necessary to imagine any Act of Uniformity or dead
+level of ceremonial in the matter. Different groups might
+concentrate on different phases of religious thought and
+practice. The only necessity would be that they should
+approach the subject with a real love of Humanity in
+their hearts and a real desire to come into touch with the deep
+inner life and mystic growing-pains of the souls of men and
+women in all ages. In this direction M. Loisy has done
+noble and excellent work; but the dead weight and selfish
+blinkerdom of the Catholic organization has hampered him
+to that degree that he has been unable to get justice done
+to his liberalizing designs--or, perhaps, even to reveal
+the full extent of them. And the same difficulty will
+remain. On the one hand no spiritual movement which
+does not take up the attitude of a World-religion has now
+in this age, any chance of success; on the other, all the
+existing Churches--whether Roman Catholic, or Greek, or
+Protestant or Secularist--whether Christian or Jewish or
+Persian or Hindu--will in all probability adopt the same
+blind and blinkered and selfish attitude as that described
+above, and so disqualify themselves for the great role of
+world-wide emancipation, which some religion at some time
+will certainly have to play. It is the same difficulty which
+is looming large in modern World-politics, where the local
+selfishness and vainglorious "patriotisms" of the Nations are
+sadly impeding and obstructing the development of that
+sense of Internationalism and Brotherhood which is the
+clearly indicated form of the future, and which alone can
+give each nation deliverance from fear, and a promise of
+growth, and the confident assurance of power.
+
+I say that Christianity must either frankly adopt this generous
+attitude and confess itself a branch of the great
+World-religion, anxious only to do honor to its source--
+or else it must perish and pass away. There is no other
+alternative. The hour of its Exodus has come. It may be,
+of course, that neither the Christian Church nor any
+branch of it, nor any other religious organization, will
+step into the gap. It may be--but I do not think this is
+likely--that the time of rites and ceremonies and formal
+creeds is PAST, and churches of any kind will be no more
+needed in the world: not likely, I say, because of the still far
+backwardness of the human masses, and their considerable
+dependence yet on laws and forms and rituals. Still, if it
+should prove that that age of dependence IS really approaching
+its end, that would surely be a matter for congratulation.
+It would mean that mankind was moving into a knowledge
+of the REALITY which has underlain these outer shows--that
+it was coming into the Third stage of its Consciousness.
+Having found this there would be no need for it to dwell
+any longer in the land of superstitions and formulae. It
+would have come to the place of which these latter are only
+the outlying indications.
+
+It may, therefore, happen--and this quite independently
+of the growth of a World-cult such as I have described, though
+by no means in antagonism to it--that a religious philosophy
+or Theosophy might develop and spread, similar to
+the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the pre-Christian
+sects, which would become, first among individuals and
+afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion
+of--or perhaps one should say the religious approach to the
+Third State. Books like the Upanishads of the Vedic
+seers, and the Bhagavat Gita, though garbled and obscured
+by priestly interferences and mystifications, do undoubtedly
+represent and give expression to the highest
+utterance of religious experience to be found anywhere
+in the world. They are indeed the manuals of human
+entrance into the cosmic state. But as I say, and as has
+happened in the case of other sacred books, a vast deal of
+rubbish has accreted round their essential teachings,
+and has to be cleared away. To go into a serious explication
+of the meaning of these books would be far too large an
+affair, and would be foreign to the purpose of the present
+volume; but I have in the Appendix below inserted two papers,
+(on "Rest" and "The Nature of the Self") containing the
+substance of lectures given on the above books. These papers
+or lectures are couched in the very simplest language,
+free from Sanskrit terms and the usual 'jargon of the
+Schools,' and may, I hope, even on that account be of
+use in familiarizing readers who are not specially
+STUDENTS with the ideas and mental attitudes of the cosmic
+state. Non-differentiation (Advaita[1]) is the root attitude of
+the mind inculcated.
+
+[1] The word means "not-two-ness." Here we see a great subtlety
+of definition. It is not to be "one" with others that is urged,
+but to be "not two."
+
+
+We have seen that there has been an age of non-differentiation
+in the Past-non-differentiation from other members
+of the Tribe, from the Animals, from Nature and the Spirit
+or Spirits of nature; why should there not arise a similar
+sense of non-differentiation in the FUTURE--similar but more
+extended more intelligent? Certainly this WILL arrive, in
+its own appointed time. There will be a surpassing of the
+bounds of separation and division. There will be a surpassing
+of all Taboos. We have seen the use and function of Taboos
+in the early stages of Evolution and how progress and growth
+have been very much a matter of their gradual extinction
+and assimilation into the general body of rational thought
+and feeling. Unreasoning and idiotic taboos still linger, but
+they grow weaker. A new Morality will come which will
+shake itself free from them. The sense of kinship with the
+animals (as in the old rituals)[1] will be restored; the sense
+of kinship with all the races of mankind will grow and
+become consolidated; the sense of the defilement and impurity
+of the human body will (with the adoption of a
+generally clean and wholesome life) pass away; and the body
+itself will come to be regarded more as a collection of shrines
+in which the gods may be worshiped and less as a mere
+organ of trivial self-gratifications;[2] there will be no form
+of Nature, or of human life or of the lesser creatures, which
+will be barred from the approach of Man or from the
+intimate and penetrating invasion of his spirit; and as in
+certain ceremonies and after honorable toils and labors a
+citizen is sometimes received into the community of his own
+city, so the emancipated human being on the completion of
+his long long pilgrimage on Earth will be presented with
+the Freedom of the Universe.
+
+
+[1] The record of the Roman Catholic Church has been sadly
+Callous and inhuman in this matter of the animals.
+
+[2] See The Art of Creation, by E. Carpenter.
+
+
+
+XVII. CONCLUSION
+
+In conclusion there does not seem much to say, except to
+accentuate certain points which may still appear doubtful
+or capable of being understood.
+
+The fact that the main argument of this volume is along
+the lines of psychological evolution will no doubt commend
+it to some, while on the other hand it will discredit
+the book to others whose eyes, being fixed on purely MATERIAL
+causes, can see no impetus in History except through these.
+But it must be remembered that there is not the least reason
+for SEPARATING the two factors. The fact that psychologically
+man has evolved from simple consciousness to
+self-consciousness, and is now in process of evolution
+towards another and more extended kind of consciousness,
+does not in the least bar the simultaneous appearance
+and influence of material evolution. It is clear indeed
+that the two must largely go together, acting and reacting
+on each other. Whatever the physical conditions of the animal
+brain may be which connect themselves with simple (unreflected
+and unreflecting) consciousness, it is evident that
+these conditions--in animals and primitive man--lasted
+for an enormous period, before the distinct consciousness
+of the individual and separate SELF arose. This second
+order of consciousness seems to have germinated at
+or about the same period as the discovery of the use
+of Tools (tools of stone, copper, bronze, &c.), the adoption
+of picture-writing and the use of reflective words (like "I"
+and "Thou"); and it led on to the appreciation of gold and
+of iron with their ornamental and practical values, the
+accumulation of Property, the establishment of slavery
+of various kinds, the subjection of Women, the encouragement
+of luxury and self-indulgence, the growth of crowded
+cities and the endless conflicts and wars so resulting. We
+can see plainly that the incoming of the self-motive exercised
+a direct stimulus on the pursuit of these material objects
+and adaptations; and that the material adaptations in their
+turn did largely accentuate the self-motive; but to insist
+that the real explanation of the whole process is only to
+be found along one channel--the material OR the psychical
+--is clearly quite unnecessary. Those who understand
+that all matter is conscious in some degree, and that all
+consciousness has a material form of some kind, will be the
+first to admit this.
+
+The same remarks apply to the Third Stage. We can see
+that in modern times the huge and unlimited powers of
+production by machinery, united with a growing tendency
+towards intelligent Birth-control, are preparing the way
+for an age of Communism and communal Plenty which
+will inevitably be associated (partly as cause and partly as
+effect) with a new general phase of consciousness, involving
+the mitigation of the struggle for existence, the growth
+of intuitional and psychical perception, the spread of amity
+and solidarity, the disappearance of War, and the realization
+(in degree) of the Cosmic life.
+
+Perhaps the greatest difficulty or stumbling-block to
+the general acceptance of the belief in a third (or 'Golden-
+Age') phase of human evolution is the obstinate and obdurate
+pre-judgment that the passing of Humanity out of the Second
+stage can only mean the entire ABANDONMENT OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS;
+and this people say--and quite rightly --is both impossible and
+undesirable. Throughout the preceding chapters I have striven,
+wherever feasible, to counter this misunderstanding--but I have
+little hope of success. The DETERMINATION of the world to
+misunderstand or misinterpret anything a little new or unfamiliar
+is a thing which perhaps only an author can duly appreciate.
+But while it is clear that self-consciousness originally came
+into being through a process of alienation and exile and fear
+which marked it with the Cain-like brand of loneliness
+and apartness, it is equally clear that to think of that
+apartness as an absolute and permanent separation is an
+illusion, since no being can really continue to live divorced
+from the source of its life. For a period in evolution the
+SELF took on this illusive form in consciousness, as of an
+ignis fatuus--the form of a being sundered from all other
+beings, atomic, lonely, without refuge, surrounded by dangers
+and struggling, for itself alone and for its own salvation
+in the midst of a hostile environment. Perhaps some
+such terrible imagination was necessary at first, as it
+were to start Humanity on its new path. But it had
+its compensation, for the sufferings and tortures, mental and
+bodily, the privations, persecutions, accusations, hatreds,
+the wars and conflicts--so endured by millions of
+individuals and whole races--have at length stamped upon
+the human mind a sense of individual responsibility which
+otherwise perhaps would never have emerged, and whose
+mark can now be effaced; ultimately, too, these things
+have searched our inner nature to its very depths and exposed
+its bed-rock foundation. They have convinced us
+that this idea of ultimate separation is an illusion, and
+that in truth we are all indefeasible and indestructible
+parts of one great Unity in which "we live and move and
+have our being." That being so, it is clear that there remains
+in the end a self-consciousness which need by no means be
+abandoned, which indeed only comes to its true fruition and
+understanding when it recognizes its affiliation with the
+Whole, and glories in an individuality which is an
+expression both of itself AND of the whole. The human
+child at its mother's knee probably comes first to know it
+HAS a 'self' on some fateful day when having wandered
+afar it goes lost among alien houses and streets or in the
+trackless fields. That appalling experience--the sense of
+danger, of fear, of loneliness--is never forgotten; it stamps
+some new sense of Being upon the childish mind, but that
+sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the prouder
+and more radiant in the hour of return to the mother's arms.
+The return, the salvation, for which humanity looks, is
+the return of the little individual self to harmony and union
+with the great Self of the universe, but by no means its
+extinction or abandonment--rather the finding of its own true
+nature as never before.
+
+
+There is another thing which may be said here: namely,
+that the disentanglement, as above, of three main stages of
+psychological evolution as great formative influences in the
+history of mankind, does not by any means preclude
+the establishment of lesser stages within the boundaries
+of these. In all probability subdivisions of all the three
+will come in time to be recognized and allowed for. To take
+the Second stage only, it MAY appear that Self-consciousness
+in its first development is characterized by an accentuation
+of Timidity; in its second development by a more deliberate
+pursuit of sensual Pleasure (lust, food, drink, &c.); in its
+third by the pursuit of mental gratifications (vanities,
+ambitions, enslavement of others); in its fourth by the pursuit
+of Property, as a means of attaining these objects;
+in its fifth by the access of enmities, jealousies, wars and so
+forth, consequent on all these things; and so on. I have no
+intention at present of following out this line of thought,
+but only wish to suggest its feasibility and the degree to
+which it may throw light on the social evolutions of the Past.[1]
+
+[1] For an analysis of the nature of Self-consciousness see vol.
+iii, p. 375 sq. of the three ponderous tomes by Wilhelm
+Wundt--Grund-zuge der Physiologischen Psychologie--in which amid
+an enormous mass of verbiage occasional gleams of useful
+suggestion are to be found.
+
+
+As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that
+there are only two main factors in life, namely, Love and
+Ignorance. And of these we may also say that the two are
+not in the same plane: one is positive and substantial,
+the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be thought
+at first that Fear and Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are
+very positive things, but in the end we see that they
+are due merely to ABSENCE of perception, to dulness
+of understanding. Or we may put the statement in a rather
+less crude form, and say that there are only two factors
+in life: (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with Nature)
+--which covers Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth,
+and (2) Non-perception of the same--which covers Enmity,
+Fear, Hatred, Self-pity, Cruelty, Jealousy, Meanness and an
+endless similar list. The present world which we see
+around us, with its idiotic wars, its senseless jealousies of
+nations and classes, its fears and greeds and vanities and
+its futile endeavors--as of people struggling in a swamp--
+to find one's own salvation by treading others underfoot,
+is a negative phenomenon. Ignorance, non-perception, are
+at the root of it. But it is the blessed virtue of Ignorance
+and of non-perception that they inevitably-if only slowly
+and painfully--dESTROY THEMSELVES. All experience serves
+to dissipate them. The world, as it is, carries' the doom
+of its own transformation in its bosom; and in proportion as
+that which is negative disappears the positive element must
+establish itself more and more.
+
+So we come back to that with which we began,[1] to Fear
+bred by Ignorance. From that source has sprung the long
+catalogue of follies, cruelties and sufferings which mark
+the records of the human race since the dawn of history;
+and to the overcoming of this Fear we perforce must look
+for our future deliverance, and for the discovery, even in
+the midst of this world, of our true Home. The time is
+coming when the positive constructive element must dominate.
+It is inevitable that Man must ever build a state of
+society around him after the pattern and image of his own
+interior state. The whole futile and idiotic structure of
+commerce and industry in which we are now imprisoned
+springs from that falsehood of individualistic self-seeking
+which marks the second stage of human evolution. That
+stage is already tottering to its fall, destroyed by the very
+flood of egotistic passions and interests, of vanities, greeds,
+and cruelties, all warring with each other, which are the sure
+outcome and culmination of its operation. With the restoration
+of the sentiment of the Common Life, and the gradual
+growth of a mental attitude corresponding, there will emerge
+from the flood something like a solid earth--something on
+which it will be possible to build with good hope for
+the future. Schemes of reconstruction are well enough
+in their way, but if there is no ground of REAL HUMAN
+SOLIDARITY beneath, of what avail are they?
+
+[1] See Introduction, Ch. I.
+
+
+An industrial system which is no real industrial order, but
+only (on the part of the employers) a devil's device for
+securing private profit under the guise of public utility,
+and (on the part of the employed) a dismal and poor-spirited
+renunciation--for the sake of a bare living--of all real
+interest in life and work: such a 'system' must infallibly
+pass away. It cannot in the nature of things be permanent.
+The first condition of social happiness and prosperity must
+be the sense of the Common Life. This sense, which
+instinctively underlay the whole Tribal order of the far past--
+which first came to consciousness in the worship of a thousand
+pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless sacrifices,
+initiations, redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which
+inspired the dreams of the Golden Age, and flashed out for
+a time in the Communism of the early Christians and in
+their adorations of the risen Savior--must in the end be
+the creative condition of a new order: it must provide
+the material of which the Golden City waits to be built.
+The long travail of the World-religion will not have been
+in vain, which assures this consummation. What the signs
+and conditions of any general advance into this new order
+of life and consciousness will be, we know not. It may be
+that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision
+often comes quite suddenly, and GENERALLY perhaps after a
+period of great suffering, so to society at large a similar
+revelation will arrive--like "the lightning which cometh out
+of the East and shineth even unto the West"--with unexpected
+swiftness. On the other hand it would perhaps
+be wise not to count too much on any such sudden transformation.
+When we look abroad (and at home) in this
+year of grace and hoped-for peace, 1919, and see the spirits
+of rancour and revenge, the fears, the selfish blindness and
+the ignorance, which still hold in their paralyzing grasp huge
+classes and coteries in every country in the world, we
+see that the second stage of human development is
+by no means yet at its full term, and that, as in some vast
+chrysalis, for the liberation of the creature within still more
+and more terrible struggles MAY be necessary. We
+can only pray that such may not be the case. Anyhow, if
+we have followed the argument of this book we can hardly
+doubt that the destruction (which is going on everywhere)
+of the outer form of the present society marks the first
+stage of man's final liberation; and that, sooner or later, and
+in its own good time, that further 'divine event' will surely
+be realized.
+
+
+Nor need we fear that Humanity, when it has once entered
+into the great Deliverance, will be again overpowered
+by evil. From Knowledge back to Ignorance there
+is no complete return. The nations that have come
+to enlightenment need entertain no dread of those others
+(however hostile they appear) who are still plunging darkly
+in the troubled waters of self-greed. The dastardly Fears
+which inspire all brutishness and cruelty of warfare--whether
+of White against White or it may be of White against
+Yellow or Black--may be dismissed for good and
+all by that blest race which once shall have gained the shore
+--since from the very nature of the case those who are on
+dry land can fear nothing and need fear nothing from the
+unfortunates who are yet tossing in the welter and turmoil
+of the waves.
+
+Dr. Frazer, in the conclusion of his great work The Golden
+Bough,[1] bids farewell to his readers with the following
+words: "The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses
+devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of
+thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of
+the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic,
+religion and science are nothing but theories [of thought];
+and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may
+hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis,
+perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at
+phenomena--of registering the shadows on the screen--of
+which we in this generation can form no idea." I imagine
+Dr. Frazer is right in thinking that "a way of looking
+at phenomena" different from the way of Science, may some
+day prevail. But I think this change will come, not so
+much by the growth of Science itself or the extension
+of its 'hypotheses,' as by a growth and expansion of the
+human HEART and a change in its psychology and powers of
+perception. Perhaps some of the preceding chapters
+will help to show how much the outlook of humanity on
+the world has been guided through the centuries by the
+slow evolution of its inner consciousness. Gradually, out
+of an infinite mass of folly and delusion, the human soul
+has in this way disentangled itself, and will in the future
+disentangle itself, to emerge at length in the light of true
+FREEDOM. All the taboos, the insane terrors, the fatuous
+forbiddals of this and that (with their consequent heart-
+searchings and distress) may perhaps have been in their
+way necessary, in order to rivet and define the meaning
+and the understanding of that word. To-day these taboos
+and terrors still linger, many of them, in the form of
+conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience, doubts
+and desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge
+from all these things, FREE--familiar, that is, with them all,
+making use of all, allowing generously for the values of
+all, but hampered and bound by NONE. He will realize the
+inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of the ancient religions,
+and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far
+prophecy down the ages--finding after all the long-expected
+Saviour of the world within his own breast, and Paradise
+in the disclosure there of the everlasting peace of the soul.
+
+[1] See "Balder," vol. ii, pp. 306, 307. ("Farewell to Nemi.")
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+THE TEACHING OF THE UPANISHADS
+
+BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF TWO LECTURES TO POPULAR AUDIENCES
+
+I. REST
+
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+
+
+I. REST
+
+To some, in the present whirlpool of life and affairs it may
+seem almost an absurdity to talk about Rest. For long enough
+now rest has seemed a thing far off and unattainable. With
+the posts knocking at our doors ten or twelve times a day, with
+telegrams arriving every hour, and the telephone bell constantly
+ringing; with motors rushing wildly about the streets, and
+aeroplanes whizzing overhead, with work speeded up in every
+direction, and the drive in the workshops becoming more
+intolerable every day; with the pace of the walkers and the
+pace of the talkers from hour to hour insanely increasing--
+what room, it may well be asked, is there for Rest? And now
+the issues of war, redoubling the urgency of all questions, are
+on us.
+
+The problem is obviously a serious one. So urgent is it that
+I think one may safely say the amount of insanity due to the
+pressure of daily life is increasing; nursing-homes have sprung
+up for the special purpose of treating such cases; and doctors
+are starting special courses of tuition in the art--now becoming
+very important--of systematically doing nothing! And yet
+it is difficult to see the outcome of it all. The clock of what
+is called Progress is not easily turned backward. We should
+not very readily agree nowadays to the abolition of telegrams
+or to a regulation compelling express trains to stop at every
+station! We can't ALL go to Nursing Homes, or afford to enjoy
+a winter's rest-cure in Egypt. And, if not, is the speeding-up
+process to go on indefinitely, incapable of being checked, and
+destined ultimately to land civilization in the mad-house?
+
+It is, I say, a serious and an urgent problem. And it is, I
+think, forcing a certain answer on us--which I will now endeavor
+to explain.
+
+If we cannot turn back and reverse this fatal onrush of modern
+life (and it is evident that we cannot do so in any very brief
+time--though of course ultimately we might succeed) then I
+think there are clearly only two alternatives left--either to go
+forward to general dislocation and madness, or--to learn to
+rest even in the very midst of the hurry and the scurry.
+
+To explain what I mean, let me use an illustration. The
+typhoons and cyclones of the China Seas are some of the most
+formidable storms that ships can encounter. Their paths in
+the past have been strewn with wrecks and disaster. But
+now with increased knowledge much of their danger has been
+averted. It is known that they are CIRCULAR in character, and
+that though the wind on their outskirts often reaches a speed of
+100 miles an hour, in the centre of the storm there is a space of
+complete calm--not a calm of the SEA certainly, but a complete
+absence of wind. The skilled navigator, if he cannot escape
+the storm, steers right into the heart of it, and rests there.
+Even in the midst of the clatter he finds a place of quiet where
+he can trim his sails and adjust his future course. He knows
+too from his position in what direction at every point around
+him the wind is moving and where it will strike him when at
+last his ship emerges from the charmed circle.
+
+Is it not possible, we may ask, that in the very midst of the
+cyclone of daily life we may find a similar resting-place? If
+we can, our case is by no means hopeless. If we cannot, then
+indeed there is danger.
+
+Looking back in History we seem to see that in old times
+people took life much more leisurely than they do now. The
+elder generations gave more scope in their customs and their
+religions for contentment and peace of mind. We associate
+a certain quietism and passivity with the thought of the
+Eastern peoples. But as civilization traveled Westward external
+activity and the pace of life increased--less and less time was
+left for meditation and repose--till with the rise of Western
+Europe and America, the dominant note of life seems to have
+simply become one of feverish and ceaseless activity--of activity
+merely for the sake of activity, without any clear idea of its
+own purpose or object.
+
+Such a prospect does not at first seem very hopeful; but
+on second thoughts we see that we are not forced to draw any
+very pessimistic conclusion from it. The direction of human
+evolution need not remain always the same. The movement,
+in fact, of civilization from East to West has now clearly
+completed itself. The globe has been circled, and we cannot go
+any FARTHER to the West without coming round to the East again.
+It is a commonplace to say that our psychology, our philosophy
+and our religious sense are already taking on an Eastern color;
+nor is it difficult to imagine that with the end of the present
+dispensation a new era may perfectly naturally arrive in which
+the St. Vitus' dance of money-making and ambition will cease
+to be the chief end of existence.
+
+In the history of nations as in the history of individuals there
+are periods when the formative ideals of life (through some
+hidden influence) change; and the mode of life and evolution
+in consequence changes also. I remember when I was a boy
+wishing--like many other boys--to go to sea. I wanted to
+join the Navy. It was not, I am sure, that I was so very anxious
+to defend my country. No, there was a much simpler and more
+prosaic motive than that. The ships of those days with their
+complex rigging suggested a perfect paradise of CLIMBING, and
+I know that it was the thought of THAT which influenced me.
+To be able to climb indefinitely among those ropes and spars!
+How delightful! Of course I knew perfectly well that I should
+not always have free access to the rigging; but then--some
+day, no doubt, I should be an Admiral, and who then could
+prevent me? I remember seeing myself in my mind's eye,
+with cocked hat on my head and spy-glass under my arm,
+roaming at my own sweet will up aloft, regardless of the
+remonstrances which might reach me from below! Such was my
+childish ideal. But a time came--needless to say--when I
+conceived a different idea of the object of life.
+
+It is said that John Tyndall, whose lectures on Science were
+so much sought after in their time, being on one occasion in
+New York was accosted after his discourse by a very successful
+American business man, who urged him to devote his scientific
+knowledge and ability to commercial pursuits, promising that
+if he did so, he, Tyndall, would easily make "a big pile."
+Tyndall very calmly replied, "Well, I myself thought of that
+once, but I soon abandoned the idea, having come to the
+conclusion that I had NO TIME TO WASTE IN MAKING MONEY." The
+man of dollars nearly sank into the ground. Such a conception
+of life had never entered his head before. But to Tyndall no
+doubt it was obvious that if he chained himself to the commercial
+ideal all the joy and glory of his days would be gone.
+
+We sometimes hear of the awful doom of some of the Russian
+convicts in the quarries and mines of Siberia, who are (or were)
+chained permanently to their wheelbarrows. It is difficult to
+imagine a more dreadful fate: the despair, the disgust, the
+deadly loathing of the accursed thing from which there is no
+escape day or night--which is the companion not only of the
+prisoner's work but of his hours of rest--with which he has to
+sleep, to feed, to take his recreation if he has any, and to
+fulfil all the offices of nature. Could anything be more
+crushing? And yet, and yet . . . is it not true that we, most of
+us, in our various ways are chained to our wheelbarrows--is it
+not too often true that to these beggarly things we have for the
+most part chained OURSELVES?
+
+Let me be understood. Of course we all have (or ought to
+have) our work to do. We have our living to get, our families
+to support, our trade, our art, our profession to pursue. In
+that sense no doubt we are tied; but I take it that these things
+are like the wheelbarrow which a man uses while he is at work.
+It may irk him at times, but he sticks to it with a good heart,
+and with a certain joy because it is the instrument of a noble
+purpose. That is all right. But to be chained to it, not to
+be able to leave it when the work of the day is done--that is
+indeed an ignoble slavery. I would say, then, take care that
+even with these things, these necessary arts of life, you
+preserve your independence, that even if to some degree they may
+confine your body they do not enslave your mind.
+
+For it is the freedom of the mind which counts. We are
+all no doubt caught in the toils of the earth-life. One man is
+largely dominated by sensual indulgence, another by ambition,
+another by the pursuit of money. Well, these things are all
+right in themselves. Without the pleasures of the senses we
+should be dull mokes indeed; without ambition much of the
+zest and enterprise of life would be gone; gold, in the present
+order of affairs, is a very useful servant. These things are
+right enough--but to be CHAINED to them, to be unable to think
+of anything else--what a fate! The subject reminds one of
+a not uncommon spectacle. It is a glorious day; the sun is
+bright, small white clouds float in the transparent blue--a day
+when you linger perforce on the road to enjoy the sence. But
+suddenly here comes a man painfully running all hot and dusty
+and mopping his head, and with no eye, clearly, for anything
+around him. What is the matter? He is absorbed by one idea.
+He is running to catch a train! And one cannot help wondering
+what EXCEEDINGLY important business it must be for which all this
+glory and beauty is sacrificed, and passed by as if it did not
+exist.
+
+Further we must remember that in our foolishness we very
+commonly chain ourselves, not only to things like sense-
+pleasures and ambitions which are on the edge, so to speak,
+of being vices; but also to other things which are accounted
+virtues, and which as far as I can see are just as bad, if we
+once become enslaved to them. I have known people who were so
+exceedingly 'spiritual' and 'good' that one really felt quite
+depressed in their company; I have known others whose sense
+of duty, dear things, was so strong that they seemed quite
+unable to REST, or even to allow their friends to rest; and I
+have wondered whether, after all, worriting about one's duty
+might not be as bad--as deteriorating to oneself, as distressing
+to one's friends--as sinning a good solid sin. No, in this
+respect virtues MAY be no better than vices; and to be chained to
+a wheelbarrow made of alabaster is no way preferable to being
+chained to one of wood. To sacrifice the immortal freedom
+of the mind in order to become a prey to self-regarding cares
+and anxieties, self-estimating virtues and vices, self-chaining
+duties and indulgences, is a mistake. And I warn you, it is
+quite useless. For the destiny of Freedom is ultimately upon
+every one, and if refusing it for a time you heap your life
+persistently upon one object--however blameless in itself that
+object may be--Beware! For one day--and when you least
+expect it--the gods will send a thunderbolt upon you. One
+day the thing for which you have toiled and spent laborious
+days and sleepless nights will lie broken before you--your
+reputation will be ruined, your ambition will be dashed, your
+savings of years will be lost--and for the moment you will be
+inclined to think that your life has been in vain. But presently
+you will wake up and find that something quite different has
+happened. You will find that the thunderbolt which you
+thought was your ruin has been your salvation--that it has
+broken the chain which bound you to your wheelbarrow, and
+that you are free!
+--------
+
+I think you will now see what I mean by Rest. Rest is
+the loosing of the chains which bind us to the whirligig of the
+world, it is the passing into the centre of the Cyclone; it is
+the Stilling of Thought. For (with regard to this last) it is
+Thought, it is the Attachment of the Mind, which binds us
+to outer things. The outer things themselves are all right.
+It is only through our thoughts that they make slaves of us.
+Obtain power over your thoughts and you are free. You can
+then use the outer things or dismiss them at your pleasure.
+
+There is nothing new of course in all this. It has been known
+for ages; and is part of the ancient philosophy of the world.
+
+In the Katha Upanishad you will find these words (Max
+Muller's translation): "As rainwater that has fallen on a
+mountain ridge runs down on all sides, thus does he who sees
+a difference between qualities run after them on all sides."
+This is the figure of the man who does NOT rest. And it is a
+powerful likeness. The thunder shower descends on the mountain
+top; torrents of water pour down the crags in every
+direction. Imagine the state of mind of a man--however
+thirsty he may be--who endeavors to pursue and intercept
+all these streams!
+
+But then the Upanishad goes on: "As pure water poured
+into pure water remains the same, thus, O Gautama, is the Self
+of a thinker who knows." What a perfect image of rest!
+Imagine a cistern before you with transparent glass sides and
+filled with pure water. And then imagine some one comes
+with a phial, also of pure water, and pours the contents gently
+into the cistern. What will happen? Almost nothing. The
+pure water will glide into the pure water--"remaining the
+same." There will be no dislocation, no discoloration (as
+might happen if MUDDY water were poured in); there will be
+only perfect harmony.
+
+I imagine here that the meaning is something like this. The
+cistern is the great Reservoir of the Universe which contains
+the pure and perfect Spirit of all life. Each one of us, and
+every mortal creature, represents a drop from that reservoir--
+a drop indeed which is also pure and perfect (though the phial
+in which it is contained may not always be so). When we,
+each of us, descend into the world and meet the great Ocean
+of Life which dwells there behind all mortal forms, it is like
+the little phial being poured into the great reservoir. If the
+tiny canful which is our selves is pure and unsoiled, then when
+it meets the world it will blend with the Spirit which informs
+the world perfectly harmoniously, without distress or
+dislocation. It will pass through and be at one with it. How can
+one describe such a state of affairs? You will have the key
+to every person that you meet, because indeed you are conscious
+that the real essence of that person is the same as your
+own. You will have the solution of every event which happens.
+For every event is (and is felt to be) the touch of the great
+Spirit on yours. Can any description of Rest be more perfect
+than that? Pure water poured into pure water. . . . There
+is no need to hurry, for everything will come in its good
+time. There is no need to leave your place, for all you desire
+is close at hand.
+
+Here is another verse (from the Vagasaneyi-Samhita Upanishad)
+embodying the same idea: "And he who beholds all
+beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings, he never turns
+away from It. When, to a man who understands, the Self
+has become all things, what sorrow, what trouble, can there
+be to him--having once beheld that Unity?"--What trouble,
+what sorrow, indeed, when the universe has become transparent
+with the presences of all we love, held firm in the One
+enfolding Presence?
+
+But it will be said: "Our minds are NOT pure and transparent.
+More often they are muddy and soiled--soiled, if not
+in their real essence, yet by reason of the mortal phial in which
+they are contained." And that alas! is true. If you pour
+a phial of muddy water into that reservoir which we described
+--what will you see? You will see a queer and ugly cloud
+formed. And to how many of us, in our dealings with the world,
+does life take on just such a form--of a queer and ugly cloud?
+
+Now not so very long after those Upanishads were written
+there lived in China that great Teacher, Lao-tze; and he too
+had considered these things. And he wrote--in the Tao-Teh-
+King--"Who is there who can make muddy water clear?"
+The question sounds like a conundrum. For a moment one
+hesitates to answer it. Lao-tze, however, has an answer ready.
+He says: "But if you LEAVE IT ALONE it will become clear of
+itself." That muddy water of the mind, muddied by all the foolish
+little thoughts which like a sediment infest it--but if you leave
+it alone it will become clear of itself. Sometimes walking along
+the common road after a shower you have seen pools of water
+lying here and there, dirty and unsightly with the mud stirred
+up by the hoofs of men and animals. And then returning
+some hours afterwards along the same road--in the evening
+and after the cessation of traffic--you have looked again, and
+lo! each pool has cleared itself to a perfect calm, and has
+become a lovely mirror reflecting the trees and the clouds and
+the sunset and the stars.
+
+So this mirror of the mind. Leave it alone. Let the ugly
+sediment of tiresome thoughts and anxieties, and of fussing
+over one's self-importances and duties, settle down--and
+presently you will look on it, and see something there which you
+never knew or imagined before--something more beautiful
+than you ever yet beheld--a reflection of the real and eternal
+world such is only given to the mind that rests.
+
+
+Do not recklessly spill the waters of your mind in this direction
+and in that, lest you become like a spring lost and dissipated in
+the desert.
+
+But draw them together into a little compass, and hold them
+still, so still;
+
+And let them become clear, so clear--so limpid, so mirror-like;
+
+At last the mountains and the sky shall glass themselves in
+peaceful beauty,
+
+And the antelope shall descend to drink, and the lion to quench
+his thirst,
+
+And Love himself shall come and bend over, and catch his own
+likeness in you.[1]
+
+
+[1] Towards Democracy, p. 373.
+
+
+Yes, there is this priceless thing within us, but hoofing along
+the roads in the mud we fail to find it; there is this region of
+calm, but the cyclone of the world raging around guards us
+from entering it. Perhaps it is best so--best that the access
+to it should not be made too easy. One day, some time ago,
+in the course of conversation with Rabindranath Tagore in
+London, I asked him what impressed him most in visiting the
+great city. He said, "The restless incessant movement of
+everybody." I said, "Yes, they seem as if they were all rushing
+about looking for something." He replied, "It is because
+each person does not know of the great treasure he has within
+himself."
+
+--------
+
+How then are we to reach this treasure and make it our own?
+How are we to attain to this Stilling of the Mind, which is the
+secret of all power and possession? The thing is difficult, no
+doubt; yet as I tried to show at the outset of this discourse,
+we Moderns MUST reach it; we have got to attain to it--for
+the penalty of failure is and must be widespread Madness.
+
+The power to still the mind--to be ABLE, mark you, when
+you want, to enter into the region of Rest, and to dismiss or
+command your Thoughts--is a condition of Health; it is a
+condition of all Power and Energy. For all health, whether
+of mind or body, resides in one's relation to the central Life
+within. If one cannot get into touch with THAT, then the life-
+forces cannot flow down into the organism. Most, perhaps all,
+disease arises from the disturbance of this connection. All mere
+hurry, all mere running after external things (as of the man
+after the water-streams on the mountain-top), inevitably breaks
+it. Let a pond be allowed calmly under the influence of frost
+to crystallize, and most beautiful flowers and spears of ice will
+be formed, but keep stirring the water all the time with a
+stick or a pole and nothing will result but an ugly brash of
+half-frozen stuff. The condition of the exercise of power and
+energy is that it should proceed from a center of Rest within
+one. So convinced am I of this, that whenever I find myself
+hurrying over my work, I pause and say, "Now you are not
+producing anything good!" and I generally find that that is true.
+It is curious, but I think very noticeable, that the places where
+people hurry most--as for instance the City of London or Wall
+Street, New York--are just the places where the work being
+done is of LEAST importance (being mostly money-gambling);
+whereas if you go and look at a ploughman ploughing--doing
+perhaps the most important of human work--you find all his
+movements most deliberate and leisurely, as if indeed he had
+infinite time at command; the truth being that in dealing
+(like a ploughman) with the earth and the horses and the weather
+and the things of Nature generally you can no more hurry than
+Nature herself hurries.
+
+Following this line of thought it might seem that one would
+arrive at a hopeless paradox. If it be true that the less one
+hurries the better the work resulting, then it might seem that
+by sitting still and merely twirling one's thumbs one would
+arrive at the very greatest activity and efficiency! And indeed
+(if understood aright) there is a truth even in this, which--like
+the other points I have mentioned--has been known and taught
+long ages ago. Says that humorous old sage, Lao-tze, whom
+I have already quoted: "By non-action there is nothing that
+cannot be done." At first this sounds like mere foolery or
+worse; but afterwards thinking on it one sees there is a meaning
+hidden. There is a secret by which Nature and the powers
+of the universal life will do all for you. The Bhagavat Gita
+also says, "He who discovers inaction in action and action in
+inaction is wise among mortals."
+
+It is worth while dwelling for a moment on these texts. We
+are all--as I said earlier on--involved in work belonging to
+our place and station; we are tied to some degree in the bonds
+of action. But that fact need not imprison our inner minds.
+While acting even with keenness and energy along the external
+and necessary path before us, it is perfectly possible to hold
+the mind free and untied--so that the RESULT of our action (which
+of course is not ours to command) shall remain indifferent and
+incapable of unduly affecting us. Similarly, when it is our part
+to remain externally INACTIVE, we may discover that underneath
+this apparent inaction we may be taking part in the currents of a
+deeper life which are moving on to a definite end, to an end or
+object which in a sense is ours and in a sense is NOT ours.
+
+The lighthouse beam flies over land and sea with incredible
+velocity, and you think the light itself must be in swiftest
+movement; but when you climb up thither you find the lamp
+absolutely stationary. It is only the reflection that is moving.
+The rider on horseback may gallop to and fro wherever he will,
+but it is hard to say that HE is acting. The horse guided by
+the slightest indication of the man's will performs an the action
+that is needed. If we can get into right touch with the immense,
+the incalculable powers of Nature, is there anything which
+we may not be able to do?" If a man worship the Self only
+as his true state," says the Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, "his
+work cannot fail, for whatever he desires, that he obtains from
+the Self." What a wonderful saying, and how infallibly true!
+For obviously if you succeed in identifying your true being with
+the great Self of the universe, then whatever you desire the
+great Self will also desire, and therefore every power of Nature
+will be at your service and will conspire to fulfil your need.
+
+There are marvelous things here "well wrapped up"--
+difficult to describe, yet not impossible to experience. And
+they all depend upon that power of stilling Thought, that
+ability to pass unharmed and undismayed through the grinning
+legions of the lower mind into the very heart of Paradise.
+
+The question inevitably arises, How can this power be
+obtained? And there is only one answer--the same answer
+which has to be given for the attainment of ANY power or
+faculty. There is no royal road. The only way is (however
+imperfectly) to DO the thing in question, to practice it. If you
+would learn to play cricket, the only way is to play cricket;
+if you would be able to speak a language, the only way is to
+speak it. If you would learn to swim, the only way is to practice
+swimming. Or would you wish to be like the man who when
+his companions were bathing and bidding him come and join
+them, said: "Yes, I am longing to join you, but I am not going to
+be such a fool as to go into the water TILL I KNOW HOW TO SWIM!"
+
+There is nothing but practice. If you want to obtain that
+priceless power of commanding Thought--of using it or dismissing
+it (for the two things go together) at will--there is no
+way but practice. And the practice consists in two exercises:
+(a) that of concentration--in holding the thought steadily for
+a time on one subject, or point of a subject; and (b) that of
+effacement--in effacing any given thought from the mind, and
+determining NOT to entertain it for such and such a time. Both
+these exercises are difficult. Failure in practicing them is
+certain --and may even extend over years. But the power equally
+certainly grows WITH practice. And ultimately there may come
+a time when the learner is not only able to efface from his mind
+any given thought (however importunate), but may even
+succeed in effacing, during short periods, ALL thought of any
+kind. When this stage is reached, the veil of illusion which
+surrounds all mortal things is pierced, and the entrance to the
+Paradise of Rest (and of universal power and knowledge) is found.
+
+Of indirect or auxiliary methods of reaching this great
+conclusion, there are more than one. I think of life in the open
+air, if not absolutely necessary, at least most important. The
+gods--though sometimes out of compassion they visit the
+interiors of houses--are not fond of such places and the evil
+effluvium they find there, and avoid them as much as they can.
+It is not merely a question of breathing oxygen instead of
+carbonic acid. There is a presence and an influence in Nature
+and the Open which expands the mind and causes brigand
+cares and worries to drop off--whereas in confined places foolish
+and futile thoughts of all kinds swarm like microbes and cloud
+and conceal the soul. Experto Crede. It is only necessary to
+try this experiment in order to prove its truth.
+
+Another thing which corresponds in some degree to living
+physically in the open air, is the living mentally and
+emotionally in the atmosphere of love. A large charity of mind,
+which refuses absolutely to shut itself in little secluded places
+of prejudice, bigotry and contempt for others, and which attains
+to a great and universal sympathy, helps, most obviously, to
+open the way to that region of calm and freedom of which we
+have spoken, while conversely all petty enmity, meanness and
+spite, conspire to imprison the soul and make its deliverance
+more difficult.
+
+It is not necessary to labor these points. As we said, the
+way to attain is to sincerely TRY to attain, to consistently
+PRACTICE attainment. Whoever does this will find that the way
+will open out by degrees, as of one emerging from a vast and
+gloomy forest, till out of darkness the path becomes clear. For
+whomsoever really TRIES there is no failure; for every effort in
+that region is success, and every onward push, however small, and
+however little result it may show, is really a move forward,
+and one step nearer the light.
+
+
+
+II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
+
+The true nature of the Self is a matter by no means easy to
+compass. We have all probably at some time or other attempted
+to fathom the deeps of personality, and been baffled. Some
+people say they can quite distinctly remember a moment in
+early childhood, about the age of THREE (though the exact period
+is of course only approximate) when self-consciousness--the
+awareness of being a little separate Self--first dawned in the
+mind. It was generally at some moment of childish tension--
+alone perhaps in a garden, or lost from the mother's protecting
+hand--that this happened; and it was the beginning of a whole
+range of new experience. Before some such period there is
+in childhood strictly speaking no distinct self-consciousness.
+As Tennyson says (In Memoriam xliv):
+
+ The baby new to earth and sky,
+     What time his tender palm is prest
+     Against the circle of the breast,
+ Hath never thought that "This is I."
+
+It has consciousness truly, but no distinctive
+self-consciousness. It is this absence or deficiency which
+explains many things which at first sight seem obscure in the
+psychology of children and of animals. The baby (it has often
+been noticed) experiences little or no sense of FEAR. It does not
+know enough to be afraid; it has never formed any image of
+itself, as of a thing which might be injured. It may shrink from
+actual pain or discomfort, but it does not LOOK FORWARD--which is
+of the essence of fear--to pain in the future. Fear and
+self-consciousness are closely interlinked. Similarly with
+animals, we often wonder how a horse or a cow can endure to stand
+out in a field all night, exposed to cold and rain, in the
+lethargic patient way that they exhibit. It is not that they do
+not FEEL the discomfort, but it is that they do not envisage
+THEMSELVES as enduring this pain and suffering for all those
+coming hours; and as we know with ourselves that nine-tenths of
+our miseries really consist in looking forward to future
+miseries, so we understand that the absence or at any rate slight
+prevalence of self-consciousness in animals enables them to
+endure forms of distress which would drive us mad.
+
+In time then the babe arrives at self-consciousness; and,
+as one might expect, the growing boy or girl often becomes
+intensely aware of Self. His or her self-consciousness is crude,
+no doubt, but it has very little misgiving. If the question
+of the nature of the Self is propounded to the boy as a problem
+he has no difficulty in solving it. He says "I know well enough
+who I am: I am the boy with red hair what gave Jimmy Brown such a
+jolly good licking last Monday week." He knows well enough--or
+thinks he knows--who he is. And at a later age, though his
+definition may change and he may describe himself chiefly as a
+good cricketer or successful in certain examinations,
+his method is practically the same. He fixes his mind on a
+certain bundle of qualities and capacities which he is supposed
+to possess, and calls that bundle Himself. And in a more
+elaborate way we most of us, I imagine, do the same.
+
+Presently, however, with more careful thought, we begin to see
+difficulties in this view. I see that directly I think of myself 
+as a certain bundle of qualities--and for that matter it is
+of no account whether the qualities are good or bad, or in what
+sort of charming confusion they are mixed--I see at once that
+I am merely looking at a bundle of qualities: and that the
+real "I," the Self, is not that bundle, but is the being
+INSPECTING the same--something beyond and behind, as it were. So
+I now concentrate my thoughts upon that inner Something, in
+order to find out what it really is. I imagine perhaps an inner
+being, of 'astral' or ethereal nature, and possessing a new range
+of much finer and more subtle qualities than the body--a being
+inhabiting the body and perceiving through its senses, but
+quite capable of surviving the tenement in which it dwells and
+I think of that as the Self. But no sooner have I taken
+this step than I perceive that I am committing the same mistake
+as before. I am only contemplating a new image or picture,
+and "I" still remain beyond and behind that which I contemplate.
+No sooner do I turn my attention on the subjective
+being than it becomes OBJECTIVE, and the real subject retires
+into the background. And so on indefinitely. I am baffled;
+and unable to say positively what the Self is.
+
+Meanwhile there are people who look upon the foregoing
+speculations about an interior Self as merely unpractical. Being
+perhaps of a more materialistic type of mind they fix their
+attention on the body. Frankly they try to define the Self
+by the body and all that is connected therewith--that is by
+the mental as well as corporeal qualities which exhibit
+themselves in that connection; and they say, "At any rate the
+Self--whatever it may be--is in some way limited by the body;
+each person studies the interest of his body and of the feelings,
+emotions and mentality directly associated with it, and you
+cannot get beyond that; it isn't in human nature to do so.
+The Self is limited by this corporeal phenomenon and doubtless
+it perishes when the body perishes." But here again the
+conclusion, though specious at first, soon appears to be quite
+inadequate. For though it is possibly true that a man, if left
+alone in a Robinson Crusoe life on a desert island, might
+ultimately subside into a mere gratification of his corporeal
+needs and of those mental needs which were directly concerned
+with the body, yet we know that such a case would by no means be
+representative. On the contrary we know that vast numbers of
+people spend their lives in considering other people, and often
+so far as to sacrifice their own bodily and mental comfort and
+well-being. The mother spends her life thinking almost day
+and night about her babe and the other children--spending
+all her thoughts and efforts on them. You may call her selfish
+if you will, but her selfishness clearly extends beyond her
+personal body and mind, and extends to the personalities of her
+children around her; her "body"--if you insist on your definition
+--must be held to include the bodies of all her children.
+And again, the husband who is toiling for the support of the
+family, he is thinking and working and toiling and suffering
+for a 'self' which includes his wife and children. Do you
+mean that the whole family is his "body"? Or a man belongs
+to some society, to a church or to a social league of some kind,
+and his activities are largely ruled by the interests of this
+larger group. Or he sacrifices his life--as many have been doing
+of late--with extraordinary bravery and heroism for the sake
+of the nation to which he belongs. Must we say then that
+the whole nation is really a part of the man's body? Or again,
+he gives his life and goes to the stake for his religion. Whether
+his religion is right or wrong does not matter, the point is that
+there is that in him which can carry him far beyond his local
+self and the ordinary instincts of his physical organism, to
+dedicate his life and powers to a something of far wider
+circumference and scope.
+
+Thus in the FIRST of these two examples of a search for the
+nature of the Self we are led INWARDS from point to point, into
+interior and ever subtler regions of our being, and still in the
+end are baffled; while in the SECOND we are carried outwards
+into an ever wider and wider circumference in our quest of
+the Ego, and still feel that we have failed to reach its ultimate
+nature. We are driven in fact by these two arguments to the
+conclusion that that which we are seeking is indeed something
+very vast--something far extending around, yet also buried
+deep in the hidden recesses of our minds. How far, how deep,
+we do not know. We can only say that as far as the indications
+point the true self is profounder and more far-reaching than
+anything we have yet fathomed.
+
+In the ordinary commonplace life we shrink to ordinary
+commonplace selves, but it is one of the blessings of great
+experiences, even though they are tragic or painful, that they
+throw us out into that enormously greater self to which we
+belong. Sometimes, in moments of inspiration, of intense
+enthusiasm, of revelation, such as a man feels in the midst of
+a battle, in moments of love and dedication to another person,
+and in moments of religious ecstasy, an immense world is
+opened up to the astonished gaze of the inner man, who sees
+disclosed a self stretched far beyond anything he had ever
+imagined. We have all had experiences more or less of that
+kind. I have known quite a few people, and most of you have
+known some, who at some time, even if only once in their lives,
+have experienced such an extraordinary lifting of the veil, an
+opening out of the back of their minds as it were, and have
+had such a vision of the world, that they have never afterwards
+forgotten it. They have seen into the heart of creation, and
+have perceived their union with the rest of mankind. They
+have had glimpses of a strange immortality belonging to them,
+a glimpse of their belonging to a far greater being than they
+have ever imagined. Just once--and a man has never forgotten
+it, and even if it has not recurred it has colored all
+the rest of his life.
+
+Now, this subject has been thought about--since the beginning
+of the world, I was going to say--but it has been thought
+about since the beginnings of history. Some three thousand
+years ago certain groups of--I hardly like to call them
+philosophers --but, let us say, people who were meditating and
+thinking upon these problems, were in the habit of locating
+themselves in the forests of Northern India; and schools arose
+there. In the case of each school some teacher went into the
+woods and collected groups of disciples around him, who lived
+there in his company and listened to his words. Such schools were
+formed in very considerable numbers, and the doctrines of
+these teachers were gathered together, generally by their
+disciples, in notes, which notes were brought together into
+little pamphlets or tracts, forming the books which are called
+the 'Upanishads' of the Indian sages. They contain some
+extraordinary words of wisdom, some of which I want to bring
+before you. The conclusions arrived at were not so much what we
+should call philosophy in the modern sense. They were not so
+much the result of the analysis of the mind and the following
+out of concatenations of strict argument; but they were flashes
+of intuition and experience, and all through the 'Upanishads'
+you find these extraordinary flashes embedded in the midst
+of a great deal of what we should call a rather rubbishy kind
+of argument, and a good deal of merely conventional Brahmanical
+talk of those days. But the people who wrote and spoke thus
+had an intuition into the heart of things which I make bold to
+say very few people in modern life have. These 'Upanisihads,'
+however various their subject, practically agree on one point
+--in the definition of the "self." They agree in saying: that
+the self of each man is continuous with and in a sense identical
+with the Self of the universe. Now that seems an extraordinary
+conclusion, and one which almost staggers the modern mind
+to conceive of. But that is the conclusion, that is the thread
+which runs all through the 'Upanishads'--the identity of the
+self of each individual with the self of every other individual
+throughout mankind, and even with the selves of the animals
+and other creatures.
+
+Those who have read the Khandogya Upanishad remember
+how in that treatise the father instructs his son Svetakeitu on
+this very subject--pointing him out in succession the objects
+of Nature and on each occasion exhorting him to realize his
+identity with the very essence of the object--"Tat twam asi,
+THAT thou art." He calls Svetaketu's attention to a tree. What
+is the ESSENCE of the tree? When they have rejected the external
+characteristics--the leaves, the branches, etc.--and agreed
+that the SAP is the essence, then the father says, "TAT TWAM ASI
+--THAT thou art." He gives his son a crystal of salt, and asks
+him what is the essence of that. The son is puzzled. Clearly
+neither the form nor the transparent quality are essential. The
+father says, "Put the crystal in water." Then when it is melted
+he says, "Where is the crystal?" The son replies, "I do not
+know." "Dip your finger in the bowl," says the father, "and
+taste." Then Svetaketu dips here and there, and everywhere
+there is a salt flavor. They agree that THAT is the essence of
+salt; and the father says again, "TAt twam asi." I am of course
+neither defending nor criticizing the scientific attitude here
+adopted. I am only pointing out that this psychological
+identification of the observer with the object observed runs
+through the Upanishads, and is I think worthy of the deepest
+consideration.
+
+In the 'Bhagavat Gita,' which is a later book, the author
+speaks of "him whose soul is purified, whose self is the Self
+of all creatures." A phrase like that challenges opposition.
+It is so bold, so sweeping, and so immense, that we hesitate to
+give our adhesion to what it implies. But what does it mean
+--"whose soul is purified"? I believe that it means this, that
+with most of us our souls are anything but clean or purified,
+they are by no means transparent, so that all the time
+we are continually deceiving ourselves and making clouds
+between us and others. We are all the time grasping things
+from other people, and, if not in words, are mentally boasting
+ourselves against others, trying to think of our own superiority
+to the rest of the people around us. Sometimes we try to run
+our neighbors down a little, just to show that they are not
+quite equal to our level. We try to snatch from others some
+things which belong to them, or take credit to ourselves for
+things to which we are not fairly entitled. But all the time we
+are acting so it is perfectly obvious that we are weaving veils
+between ourselves and others. You cannot have dealings with
+another person in a purely truthful way, and be continually
+trying to cheat that person out of money, or out of his good
+name and reputation. If you are doing that, however much
+in the background you may be doing it, you are not looking
+the person fairly in the face--there is a cloud between you all
+the time. So long as your soul is not purified from all these
+really absurd and ridiculous little desires and superiorities and
+self-satisfactions, which make up so much of our lives, just
+so long as that happens you do not and you cannot see the
+truth. But when it happens to a person, as it does happen
+in times of great and deep and bitter experience; when it
+happens that all these trumpery little objects of life are swept
+away; then occasionally, with astonishment, the soul sees that.
+It is also the soul of the others around. Even if it does not
+become aware of an absolute identity, it perceives that there is
+a deep relationship and communion between itself and others, and
+it comes to understand how it may really be true that to him
+whose soul is purified the self is literally the Self of all
+creatures.
+
+Ordinary men and those who go on more intellectual and less
+intuitional lines will say that these ideas are really contrary
+to human nature and to nature generally. Yet I think that those
+people who say this in the name of Science are extremely
+unscientific, because a very superficial glance at nature reveals
+that the very same thing is taking place throughout nature.
+Consider the madrepores, corallines, or sponges. You find, for
+instance, that constantly the little self of the coralline or
+sponge is functioning at the end of a stem and casting forth its
+tentacles into the water to gain food and to breathe the air out
+of the water. That little animalcule there, which is living in
+that way, imagines no doubt that it is working all for itself,
+and yet it is united down the stem at whose extremity it stands,
+with the life of the whole madrepore or sponge to which it
+belongs. There is the common life of the whole and the individual
+life of each, and while the little creature at the end of the
+stem is thinking (if it is conscious at all) that its whole
+energies are absorbed in its own maintenance, it really is
+feeding the common life through the stem to which it belongs, and
+in its turn it is being fed by that common life.
+
+You have only to look at an ordinary tree to see the same
+thing going on. Each little leaf on a tree may very naturally
+have sufficient consciousness to believe that it is an entirely
+separate being maintaining itself in the sunlight and the air,
+withering away and dying when the winter comes on--and there is
+an end of it. It probably does not realize that all the time it
+is being supported by the sap which flows from the trunk of the
+tree, and that in its turn it is feeding the tree, too--that its
+self is the self of the whole tree. If the leaf could really
+understand itself, it would see that its self was deeply,
+intimately connected, practically one with the life of the whole
+tree. Therefore, I say that this Indian view is not unscientific.
+On the contrary, I am sure that it is thoroughly scientific.
+
+Let us take another passage, out of the 'Svetasvatara Upanishad,'
+which, speaking of the self says: "He is the one God, hidden in
+all creatures, all pervading, the self within all, watching
+over all works, shadowing all creatures, the witness, the
+perceiver, the only one free from qualities."
+
+And now we can return to the point where we left the argument
+at the beginning of this discourse. We said, you remember,
+that the Self is certainly no mere bundle of qualities--that
+the very nature of the mind forbids us thinking that. For
+however fine and subtle any quality or group of qualities may
+be, we are irresistibly compelled by the nature of the mind
+itself to look for the Self, not in any quality or qualities, but
+in the being that PERCEIVES those qualities. The passage I have
+just quoted says that being is "The one God, hidden in all
+creatures, all pervading, the self within all . . . the witness,
+the perceiver, the only one free from qualities." And the more
+you think about it the clearer I think you will see that this
+passage is correct--that there can be only ONE witness, ONE
+perceiver, and that is the one God hidden in all creatures,
+"Sarva Sakshi," the Universal Witness.
+
+Have you ever had that curious feeling, not uncommon,
+especially in moments of vivid experience and emotion, that
+there was at the back of your mind a witness, watching everything
+that was going on, yet too deep for your ordinary thought
+to grasp? Has it not occurred to you--in a moment say of
+great danger when the mind was agitated to the last degree by
+fears and anxieties--suddenly to become perfectly calm and
+collected, to realize that NOTHING can harm you, that you are
+identified with some great and universal being lifted far over
+this mortal world and unaffected by its storms? Is it not
+obvious that the real Self MUST be something of this nature,
+a being perceiving all, but itself remaining unperceived? For
+indeed if it were perceived it would fall under the head of some
+definable quality, and so becoming the object of thought would
+cease to be the subject, would cease to be the Self.
+
+The witness is and must be "free from qualities." For
+since it is capable of perceiving ALL qualities it must obviously
+not be itself imprisoned or tied in any quality--it must either
+be entirely without quality, or if it have the potentiality of
+quality in it, it must have the potentiality of EVERY quality;
+but in either case it cannot be in bondage to any
+quality, and in either case it would appear that there can
+be only ONE such ultimate Witness in the universe. For if
+there were two or more such Witnesses, then we should be
+compelled to suppose them distinguished from one another by
+something, and that something could only be a difference of
+qualities, which would be contrary to our conclusion that such
+a Witness cannot be in bondage to any quality.
+
+There is then I take it--as the text in question says--only
+one Witness, one Self, throughout the universe. It is hidden
+in all living things, men and animals and plants; it pervades
+all creation. In every thing that has consciousness it is
+the Self; it watches over all operations, it overshadows all
+creatures, it moves in the depths of our hearts, the perceiver,
+the only being that is cognizant of all and yet free from all.
+
+Once you really appropriate this truth, and assimilate it in
+the depths of your mind, a vast change (you can easily imagine)
+will take place within you. The whole world will be transformed,
+and every thought and act of which you are capable
+will take on a different color and complexion. Indeed the
+revolution will be so vast that it would be quite impossible for
+me within the limits of this discourse to describe it. I will,
+however, occupy the rest of my time in dealing with some points
+and conclusions, and some mental changes which will flow
+perfectly naturally from this axiomatic change taking place
+at the very root of life.
+
+"Free from qualities." We generally pride ourselves a
+little on our qualities. Some of us think a great deal of our
+good qualities, and some of us are rather ashamed of our bad
+ones! I would say: "Do not trouble very much about all
+that. What good qualities you have--well you may be quite
+sure they do not really amount to much; and what bad
+qualities, you may be sure they are not very important! Do
+not make too much fuss about either. Do you see? The
+thing is that you, you yourself, are not ANY of your qualities--
+you are the being that perceives them. The thing to see to is
+that they should not confuse you, bamboozle you, and hide you
+from the knowledge of yourself--that they should not be erected
+into a screen, to hide you from others, or the others from you.
+If you cease from running after qualities, then after a little
+time your soul will become purified, and you will KNOW that your
+self is the Self of all creatures; and when you can feel that you
+will know that the other things do not much matter.
+
+Sometimes people are so awfully good that their very goodness
+hides them from other people. They really cannot be
+on a level with others, and they feel that the others are far
+below them. Consequently their 'selves' are blinded or hidden
+by their 'goodness.' It is a sad end to come to! And sometimes
+it happens that very 'bad' people--just because they are so
+bad--do not erect any screens or veils between themselves
+and others. Indeed they are only too glad if others will
+recognize them, or if they may be allowed to recognize others.
+And so, after all, they come nearer the truth than the very good
+people.
+
+"The Self is free from qualities." That thing which is so
+deep, which belongs to all, it either--as I have already said--
+has ALL qualities, or it has none. You, to whom I am speaking
+now, your qualities, good and bad, are all mine. I am perfectly
+willing to accept them. They are all right enough and in
+place--if one can only find the places for them. But I know
+that in most cases they have got so confused and mixed up that
+they cause great conflict and pain in the souls that harbor
+them. If you attain to knowing yourself to be other than and
+separate from the qualities, then you will pass below and beyond
+them all. You will be able to accept ALL your qualities and
+harmonize them, and your soul will be at peace. You will be free
+from the domination of qualities then because you will know that
+among all the multitudes of them there are none of any
+importance!
+
+If you should happen some day to reach that state of mind
+in connection with which this revelation comes, then you will
+find the experience a most extraordinary one. You will become
+conscious that there is no barrier in your path; that the way
+is open in all directions; that all men and women belong to
+you, are part of you. You will feel that there is a great open
+immense world around, which you had never suspected before,
+which belongs to you, and the riches of which are all yours,
+waiting for you. It may, of course, take centuries and thousands
+of years to realize this thoroughly, but there it is. You are
+just at the threshold, peeping in at the door. What did
+Shakespeare say? "To thine own self be true, and it must follow
+as the night the day, thou can'st not then be false to any
+man." What a profound bit of philosophy in three lines!
+I doubt if anywhere the basis of all human life has been
+expressed more perfectly and tersely.
+
+One of the Upanishads (the Maitrayana-Brahmana) says:
+"The happiness belonging to a mind, which through deep
+inwardness[1] (or understanding) has been washed clean and has
+entered into the Self, is a thing beyond the power of words to
+describe: it can only be perceived by an inner faculty." Observe
+the conviction, the intensity with which this joy, this happiness
+is described, which comes to those whose minds have been washed
+clean (from all the silly trumpery sediment of self-thought) and
+have become transparent, so that the great universal
+Being residing there in the depths can be perceived.
+What sorrow indeed, what, grief, can come to such an one who
+has seen this vision? It is truly a thing beyond the power of
+words to describe: it can only be PERCEIVED--and that by an
+inner faculty. The external apparatus of thought is of no use.
+Argument is of no use. But experience and direct perception
+are possible; and probably all the experiences of life and of
+mankind through the ages are gradually deepening our powers
+of perception to that point where the vision will at last rise
+upon the inward eye.
+
+[1] The word in the Max Muller translation is "meditation." But
+that is, I think, a somewhat misleading word. It suggests to most
+people the turning inward of the THINKING faculty to grope and
+delve in the interior of the mind. This is just what should NOT
+be done. Meditation in the proper sense should mean the inward
+deepening of FEELING and consciousness till the region of the
+universal self is reached; but THOUGHT should not interfere
+there. That should be turned on outward things to mould them into
+expression of the inner consciousness.
+
+
+Another text, from the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (which
+I have already quoted in the paper on "Rest"), says: "If a
+man worship the Self only as his true state, his work cannot
+fail, for whatever he desires, that he obtains from the Self."
+Is that not magnificent? If you truly realize your identity
+and union with the great Self who inspires and informs the
+world, then obviously whatever you desire the great Self win
+desire, and the whole world will conspire to bring it to you.
+"He maketh the winds his angels, and the flaming fires his
+ministers." [I need not say that I am not asking you to try
+and identify yourself with the great Self universal IN ORDER to
+get riches, "opulence," and other things of that kind which
+you desire; because in that quest you will probably not succeed.
+The Great Self is not such a fool as to be taken in in that way.
+It may be true--and it is true--that if ye seek FIRST the Kingdom
+of Heaven all these things shall be added unto you; but
+you must seek it first, not second.]
+
+Here is a passage from Towards Democracy: "As space spreads
+everywhere, and all things move and change within it, but it
+moves not nor changes,
+
+"So I am the space within the soul, of which the space without
+is but the similitude and mental image;
+
+"Comest thou to inhabit me, thou hast the entrance to all
+life--death shall no longer divide thee from whom thou
+lovest.
+
+"I am the Sun that shines upon all creatures from within--
+gazest thou upon me, thou shalt be filled with joy eternal."
+
+Yes, this great sun is there, always shining, but most of the
+time it is hidden from us by the clouds of which I have spoken,
+and we fail to see it. We complain of being out in the cold;
+and in the cold, for the time being, no doubt we are; but our
+return to the warmth and the light has now become possible.
+
+
+Thus at last the Ego, the mortal immortal self--disclosed at
+first in darkness and fear and ignorance in the growing babe
+--FINDS ITS TRUE IDENTITY. For a long period it is baffled in
+trying to understand what it is. It goes through a vast
+experience. It is tormented by the sense of separation and
+alienation--alienation from other people, and persecution by all
+the great powers and forces of the universe; and it is pursued by
+a sense of its own doom. Its doom truly is irrevocable. The hour
+of fulfilment approaches, the veil lifts, and the soul beholds at
+last ITS OWN TRUE BEING.
+
+
+We are accustomed to think of the external world around us
+as a nasty tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain
+is that it works by a "law of cussedness"--so that, whichever
+way we want to go, that way seems always barred, and
+we only bump against blind walls without making any progress.
+But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from ourselves.
+Once we have passed a certain barrier, which at present looks
+so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing
+immediately we have passed it--once we have found the open
+secret of identity--then the way is indeed open in every
+direction.
+
+The world in which we live--the world into which we are
+tumbled as children at the first onset of self-consciousness--
+denies this great fact of unity. It is a world in which the
+principle of separation rules. Instead of a common life and
+union with each other, the contrary principle (especially in the
+later civilizations) has been the one recognized--and to such
+an extent that always there prevails the obsession of separation,
+and the conviction that each person is an isolated unit. The
+whole of our modern society has been founded on this delusive
+idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's
+hand is against the others--that is the ruling principle. You
+go into the Law Courts where justice is, or should be,
+administered, and you find that the principle which denies unity
+is the one that prevails. The criminal (whose actions have really
+been determined by the society around him) is cast out,
+disacknowledged, and condemned to further isolation in a prison
+cell. 'Property' again is the principle which rules and
+determines our modern civilization--namely that which is proper
+to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as AGAINST the
+others. 
+
+In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the
+shape of the sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually
+(and that is its only real meaning) the separation from others,
+and the non-acknowledgment of unity. And so it has come
+about that during all this civilization-period the sense of sin
+has ruled and ranged to such an extraordinary degree. Society
+has been built on a false base, not true to fact or life--and
+has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its falseness. Meanwhile
+at the heart of it all--and within all the frantic external
+strife and warfare--there is all the time this real great life
+brooding. The kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is still
+within.
+
+The word Democracy indicates something of the kind--the
+rule of the Demos, that is of the common life. The coming of
+that will transform, not only our Markets and our Law Courts
+and our sense of Property, and other institutions, into something
+really great and glorious instead of the dismal masses of
+rubbish which they at present are; but it will transform our
+sense of Morality.
+
+Our Morality at present consists in the idea of self-goodness
+--one of the most pernicious and disgusting ideas which has
+ever infested the human brain. If any one should follow and
+assimilate what I have just said about the true nature of the
+Self he will realize that it will never again be possible for him
+to congratulate himself on his own goodness or morality or
+superiority; for the moment he does so he will separate himself
+from the universal life, and proclaim the sin of his own
+separation. I agree that this conclusion is for some people a
+most sad and disheartening one--but it cannot be helped!
+A man may truly be 'good' and 'moral' in some real sense;
+but only on the condition that he is not aware of it. He can
+only BE good when not thinking about the matter; to be conscious
+of one's own goodness is already to have fallen!
+
+We began by thinking of the self as just a little local self;
+then we extended it to the family, the cause, the nation--ever
+to a larger and vaster being. At last there comes a time when
+we recognize--or see that we SHALL have to recognize--an inner
+Equality between ourselves and all others; not of course an
+external equality--for that would be absurd and impossible
+--but an inner and profound and universal Equality. And so
+we come again to the mystic root-conception of Democracy.
+
+And now it will be said: "But after all this talk you have
+not defined the Self, or given us any intellectual outline of
+what you mean by the word." No--and I do not intend to. If
+I could, by any sort of copybook definition, describe and show
+the boundaries of myself, I should obviously lose all interest
+in the subject. Nothing more dull could be imagined. I may
+be able to define and describe fairly exhaustively this inkpot
+on the table; but for you or for me to give the limits and
+boundaries of ourselves is, I am glad to say, impossible. That
+does not, however, mean that we cannot FEEL and be CONSCIOUS
+of ourselves, and of our relations to other selves, and to the
+great Whole. On the contrary I think it is clear that the more
+vividly we feel our organic unity with the whole, the less shall
+we be able to separate off the local self and enclose it within
+any definition. I take it that we can and do become ever more
+vividly conscious of our true Self, but that the mental statement
+of it always does and probably always will lie beyond us. All
+life and all our action and experience consist in the gradual
+manifestation of that which is within us--of our inner being.
+In that sense--and reading its handwriting on the outer world
+--we come to know the soul's true nature more and more
+intimately; we enter into the mind of that great artist who
+beholds himself in his own creation.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Pagan & Christian Creeds:
+Their Origin and Meaning
+
diff --git a/old/pchrc10.zip b/old/pchrc10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..091c499
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/pchrc10.zip