Pagan and Christian creeds Part 16

(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 a.s.sistance 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 compa.s.s 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 fellows.h.i.+p. 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 fellows.h.i.+p; 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 pa.s.sed away." For "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of G.o.d"; 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d"--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 G.o.d? 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 gra.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 l.u.s.ts, 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 surpa.s.ses 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 G.o.ddess 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 fellows.h.i.+p and mutual trust"?

XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES

Thus we come to a thing which we must not pa.s.s 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 wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ds 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 pa.s.sion-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 a.s.s.

(4) Farnell, ii, 177.

"Almost always," says Dr. Cheetham, "the suffering of a G.o.d--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 G.o.ds (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 a.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ning with its brilliant light: and I approached the presence of the G.o.ds beneath and the G.o.ds above, and stood near and wors.h.i.+pped 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 mult.i.tude. 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.lenistischen Mysterien-Religionen, by R. Reitzenstein, Leipzig, 1910.

(2) Reitzenstein, p. 12.

(3) These Tablets (so-called) are instructions to the dead as to their pa.s.sage 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 G.o.d"

([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 s.p.a.ce.

"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 members.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ds, 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 v.u.l.v.a, 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 a.s.sures 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 ma.s.sive standing stones or rough pillars which the Hebrews called ma.s.seboth, 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 s.e.xual 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 wors.h.i.+pped 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 wors.h.i.+p, took the place of the Lingam, THEY also were anointed with the chrism of fertility.