Pagan and Christian creeds Part 12

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 ma.s.s 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 repet.i.tion 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 G.o.d, 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 ill.u.s.trates 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 acc.u.mulated 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 p.r.o.ne to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and idiotic superst.i.tions, 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 superst.i.tious 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 s.e.m.e.n-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 'n.i.g.g.e.rs' he was met at all points by practical interrogations and arguments which he was perfectly unable to answer--especially over the recorded pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 emanc.i.p.ation towards which Humanity is inevitably moving.

XII. THE s.e.x-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 s.e.x. It is certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan cults generally made a great deal of all sorts of s.e.x-rites, laid much stress upon them, and introduced them in what we consider an unblus.h.i.+ng and shameless way into the instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,' on the whole took quite the opposite line--ignored s.e.x, 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 att.i.tude; 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 a.s.semblies 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 G.o.d; 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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-s.e.xual 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-s.e.xual 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 partic.i.p.ated in the taboo makes us all the more ready and anxious to inquire into its real cause.

To go into a disquisition on the s.e.x-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 s.e.xual wors.h.i.+ps. There were erect images (phallic) and "groves" (s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 G.o.d"--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-wors.h.i.+pers 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 a.s.syria and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had pa.s.sed West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or As.h.i.+rah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-G.o.ddess 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 inst.i.tution of girls attached to the Temple service--the Nautch-girls--whose functions in past times were certainly s.e.xual, and whose dances in honor of the G.o.d 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 cla.s.ses, 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 G.o.d (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 s.e.xes in one design.

(2) MacLennan in The Fortnightly Review (Oct. 1869) quotes with approval the words of Sanchoniathon, as saying that "men first wors.h.i.+p plants, next the heavenly bodies, supposed to be animals, then 'pillars'

(emblems of the Procreator), and last, the anthropomorphic G.o.ds."

(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 s.e.x-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-G.o.ddess wors.h.i.+pped 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 s.e.xual 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 prost.i.tution" is no explanation. The term suggests, of course, that the plea of religion was used simply as an excuse and a cover for s.e.xual familiarities; but though this kind of explanation commends itself, no doubt, to the modern man--whose religion is as commercial as his s.e.x-relations.h.i.+ps 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 s.e.x-relations.h.i.+ps, it cannot be accepted as in general the RIGHT explanation. No, the real explanation is--and I will return to this presently--that s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps 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. s.e.x 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x-corruption and delusion? How was it that this contempt of the body and degradation of s.e.x-things went on far into the Middle Ages of Europe, and ultimately created an organized system of hypocrisy, and concealment and suppression of s.e.x-instincts, which, acting as cover to a vile commercial Prost.i.tution 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 s.e.x 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 s.e.xual 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, s.e.x 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 s.e.x-activities to his own private pleasure and advantage; he employed his budding intellect in scheming the derailment of pa.s.sion and desire from tribal needs and, Nature's uses to the poor details of his own gratification. If the first stage of harmonious s.e.x-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 s.e.x having been turned to self-purposes, s.e.x 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 s.e.x. s.e.x 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.xual 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 s.e.x (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 s.e.x 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 s.e.x HAD to come. When one thinks of the enormous power of this pa.s.sion, 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.