Pagan and Christian creeds Part 10

(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 l.u.s.ts of hunger and of s.e.x; he was certainly ignorant and superst.i.tious; 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 inst.i.tutions 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. x.x.xvii.

(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 ill.u.s.trations 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d arises on him. It may be only a totem-G.o.d--a divine Grizzly-Bear or what not--but still a G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 'G.o.ds'; 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 a.s.serts 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 gra.s.s.

When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically) is not that of a divinized animal, but the flesh of a human-formed G.o.d--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 G.o.d (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 a.s.sociated 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.d--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-G.o.d 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 ma.s.s-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 ma.s.s-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 const.i.tutes 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d--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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d--as we have already had occasion to see--whose wors.h.i.+p 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 superst.i.tious 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 s.e.xually 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds." 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d, 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 wors.h.i.+ped (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 G.o.d, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.