Part 8

With these earlier worships, too, the later religions have mingled in inextricable but not meaningless entanglement. The Passover, the greatest feast of the Jews, borrowed from the Egyptians, handed down to become the supreme festival of Christianity, and finally blending in the North of Europe with the worship of the Norse goddess Eastre, is as is well known closely connected with the celebration of the Spring equinox and of the passing over of the sun from south to north of the equator—i. e., from his winter depression to his summer dominion. The Sun, at the moment of passing the equinoctial point, stood 3,000 years ago in the Zodiacal constellation of the Ram or he-lamb. The Lamb, therefore, became the symbol of the young triumphant god. The Israelites (Exodus xii. 14) were to smear their doorways (symbol of the passage from darkness to light) with the blood of the Lamb, in remembrance of the conflict of their god with the powers of darkness (the Egyptians). At an earlier date—owing to the precession of the equinoxes—the sun at the spring passage stood in the constellation of the Bull; so, in the older worships of Egypt and of Persia and of India, it was the Bull that was sacred and the symbol of the god. Moses is said to have abolished the worship of the Calf and to have consecrated the Lamb at the passover—and this appears to be a rude record of the fact that the astronomical changes were accompanied or followed by priestly changes of ceremonial. Certainly it is curious that in later Egyptian times the bull-headed god was deposed in favor of the ram-headed god Ammon; and that Christianity adopted the Lamb for the symbol of its Savior. Similarly, the Virgin Mary with the holy Child in her arms can be traced by linear descent from the early Christian Church at Alexandria up through the later Egyptian times to Isis with the infant Horus, and thence to the constellation Virgo shining in the sky. In the representation of the Zodiac in the Temple of Denderah (in Egypt) the figure of Virgo is annotated by a smaller figure of Isis with Horus in her arms; and the Roman church fixed the celebration of Mary’s assumption into glory at the very date (15th August) of the said constellation’s disappearance from sight in the blaze of the solar rays, and her birth on the date (8th Sept.) of the same constellation’s reappearance.[24]

The history of Israel reveals a long series of avowedly sexual and solar worships carried on alongside with that of Jehovah—worships of Baal, Ashtaroth, Nehushtan, the Host of Heaven, etc.—and if we are to credit the sacred record, Moses himself introduced the notoriously sexual Tree and Serpent worship (Numbers xxi. 9, and 2 Kings xviii. 4); while Solomon, not without dramatic propriety, borrowed from the Phoenicians the two phallic pillars surmounted by pomegranate wreaths, called Jachin and Boaz, and placed them in front of his temple (1 Kings vii. 21). The Cross itself (identical as a symbol with the phallus of the Greeks and the lingam of the East), the Fleur de Lys, which has the same signification, and the Crux Ansata, borrowed by the early Christians from Egypt and indicating the union of male and female, are woven and worked into the priestly vestments and altar-cloths of Christianity, just as the astronomical symbols are woven and worked into its Calendar, and both sets of symbols, astronomical and sexual, into the very construction of our Churches and Cathedrals. Jesus himself—so entangled is the worship of this greatest man with the earlier cults—is purported[25] to have been born like the other sun-gods, Bacchus, Apollo, Osiris, on the 25th day of December, the day of the sun’s re-birth (i. e., the first day which obviously lengthens after the 21st of December—the day of the doubting apostle Thomas!) and to have died upon an instrument which, as already hinted, was ages before and all over the world held in reverence as a sexual symbol.

I have only touched the fringe of this great subject. The more it is examined into the more remarkable is the mass of corroborative matter belonging to it. The conclusion towards which one seems to be impelled is that these two great primitive ideas, sexual and astronomical, are likely to remain the poles of human emotion in the future, even as they have been in the past.

Some cynic has said that the two great ruling forces of mankind are Obscenity and Superstition. Put in a less paradoxical form, as that the two ruling forces are Sex and the belief in the Unseen, the saying may perhaps be accepted. To call the two Love and Faith (as Dr. Bucke does in his excellent book on “Man’s Moral Nature”) is perhaps to run the risk of becoming too abstract and spiritual.

Roughly speaking we may say that the worship of Sex and Life characterized the Pagan races of Europe and Asia Minor anterior to Christianity, while the worship of Death and the Unseen has characterized Christianity. It remains for the modern nations to accept both Life and Death, both the Greek and the Hebrew elements, and all that these general terms denote, in a spirit of the fullest friendliness and sanity and fearlessness.

A curious part of all the old religions, Pagan or Christian—and this connects itself with the above—is Asceticism: that occasional instinct of voluntary and determined despite to the body and its senses. Even in the wildest races, rejoicing before all things in the consciousness of Life, we find festivals of fierce endurance and torments willingly undergone with a kind of savage glee;[26] and during the Christian centuries—monks, mystics, and world-spiting puritans—this instinct was sometimes exalted into the very first place of honor. I suppose it will have to be recognized—whatever absurd aberrations the tendency may have been liable to—that it is a basic thing in human nature, and as ineradicable in its way as the other equally necessary instinct towards Pleasure. To put it in another way, perhaps the ordinary Hedonism makes a mistake in failing to recognize the joy of Ascendancy, and (if it is not a “bull” to say so) the pleasure which lies in the denial of pleasure. In order to enjoy life one must be a master of life—for to be a slave to its inconsistencies can only mean torment: and in order to enjoy the senses one must be master of them. To dominate the actual world you must, like Archimedes, base your fulcrum somewhere beyond.

In such moods a man delights to feel his supremacy, not only over the beasts of the field, but over his own bodily and mental powers: no ordinary pleasure so great, but its rejection serves to throw out into relief this greater; no task so stern, but endurance is sterner; no pain so fierce but it wakes the soul to secret laughter. If there is something narrow in the creed of the ascetic on its negative side—that of denial—one cannot but feel that on its positive side, the establishment of authority and kingship, it has a real and vital meaning.

In another mood, however (equally undeniable and important), man acknowledges his delight in life, and gives the rein to his desires to chariot him to the extremest bounds of his kingdom. The kiss of the senses is beautiful beyond all and every abstraction; the touch of the sunlight, the glory of form and color, the magic of sweet sound, the joy of human embraces, the passion of sex—all so much the more perfect because they are as it were something divine made actual and realizable. In such a mood asceticism in any form seems the grossest impiety and folly, and the pursuit of the Unseen a mere abandonment of the world for its shadow.

Are not these two moods both necessary—the great rhythmical heart-beat, the systole and diastole, of the human soul? The one, a going forth and gathering of materials from all sources, the other an organizing of them under the most perfect light, or rather (it may be said) a consumption of them to feed the most perfect flame; the one centrifugal, the other centripetal; the one individual, the other universal; and so forth—each required for the purposes of the other, and making the other possible?

Do we not want a truly experiential view of what may be called Religion—derived from the largest actual acquaintance with, and acceptance of, all the facts both of mundane and extra-mundane consciousness—neither (like some secularists) denying the one, nor (like some religionists) minimizing or contemning the other? And is it not possible that in the early Star and Sex worships we have evidence of the attempt of the human mind to establish some such sane polarity?

NOTE ON THE PRIMITIVE GROUP-MARRIAGE

One of the early forms of union among human beings appears to have been that of the Group-marriage, which was an alliance between a group of men and a group of women. It had various forms, but rested in general on the fact that the women in primitive societies did not, on marriage, leave their parental habitation but remained there and were visited by the men—by one man first, who would come with presents of game, etc., from the chase, and would afterwards bring his “brothers” or friends. Thus in general a group of “brothers” would come into relation with a group of “sisters.” In such a state of society, however, it is obvious that parentage would be very uncertain, and the terms brother and sister would not always have the stricter meanings which we give them. Such a group-marriage was the “Punalua” or “friend” marriage of Morgan’s North American Indians; which is also supposed by Marx and Engels to have prevailed at an early time throughout Polynesia. See Lewis Morgan’s “Ancient Society” and Friedrich Engels’ “Ursprung der Familie.”

In later times the group-marriage became restricted in various directions, according to the genius of various races—marriage of cousins, for instance, being severely prohibited among some barbaric tribes, while among others all relatives (in the maternal line) were barred. Thus ultimately, in some quarters, sprang up a Pair-marriage; which however was only loosely defined; which had much of the old group-marriage lingering round it; and in which the children still belonged to the woman, and descent was traced in the maternal line only.

Under these conditions of society the woman was comparatively well off. Remaining as she did in her own gens or clan and among her own relations, and the husband being as it were a visitor from the outside, she was by no means subject to him; in fact, in order to gain access, he had to make himself agreeable not only to her but to her own family! She had the disposal of the children; there was no danger of their being sequestrated to her husband; and whatever little property she had she could leave to them; to her was all the honor of ancestry. The husband on the other hand, even if he knew which his own children were, could see little of them, and could not leave his possessions to them without alienating those possessions from his clan—which the clan-customs would not permit. Thus in marriage he practically had to take the second place.

With the growth however of property and the sense of property, there came a time when the men could stand this state of affairs no longer, and insisted, violently at first, in carrying off the women and locating them in their own tents and among their own clans—a change rudely recorded probably in legends like the Rape of the Sabines, and in all the later customs of Marriage by Capture. And with this change marriage took on new forms. Women became the property of their husbands; they ceased to hold property of their own, in their children or in anything else; and descent was traced through the males only. In the Patriarchal system marriage was closely akin to slavery. Polygamy and Monogamy were the two resulting institutions.

Polyandry may perhaps be looked upon as a survival of the group-marriage in a special form adapted to warrior races; but—as Engels remarks—both Polygamy and Polyandry in any strict sense can only be regarded as exceptional institutions, since if they were general in any one country, that would imply a great preponderance of one sex over the other—unless indeed the two institutions existed side by side in the same country, which notoriously never happens. As a matter of fact in oriental countries Polygamy is confined to the rich, and is so to speak a luxury, within reach of the few only.

Thus it would appear that from the first, in oriental countries, the practices of polygamy and monogamy were intermixed. In Greece and Rome polygamy ceased to be recognized as an institution; though concubinage in one form or another remained. The Monogamic marriage became the legal institution; and the woman was handed over to the man as his chattel: was bought symbolically with his money, in the marriage ceremony; and had at first no more rights of her own than a chattel. In the later times, however, of the Roman Empire, with the institution of the dowry and the power granted to women of holding property, together with the great facilities of divorce allowed, the position of the Roman matron became much improved. And in modern European countries the monogamic institution seems to have passed or be passing through somewhat the same stages as in ancient Greece or Rome.

ON JEALOUSY.

A great disturber of the celestial order of Love is Jealousy—that brand of physical passion which carried over into the emotional regions of the mind will sometimes rage there like a burning fire. One may distinguish two kinds of jealousy, a natural and an artificial. The first arises perhaps from the real uniqueness of the relationship between two persons—at any rate as it appears to one of them—and the endeavor to stamp this uniqueness on the whole relationship, sexual and moral—especially on the sexual relationship. This kind of jealousy seems in a sense natural and normal, at any rate for a period; but when the personal relation between the two parties has been fully and confessedly established, and is no more endangered, the feeling does often I think (equally naturally) die away; and may do so quite well without damaging the intimacy and uniqueness of the alliance. This jealousy is felt with terrible keenness and intensity by lovers before the consummation of their passion, and perhaps for a year or two afterwards—though it may be protracted rather indefinitely in the case where the alliance, on one side at any rate, is not quite satisfactory.

The other kind of jealousy rests on the sense of property, and is the kind that is often felt by the average husband and wife long after honeymooning days—by the husband not because of his especial devotion to his partner, but because he is furious at the idea of her disposing as she likes with what he considers his property; and by the wife because she is terrified at the thought that her matrimonial clothes-peg, from which depend all her worldly prospects, may vanish away or become the peg for another woman’s clothes. This kind of jealousy is more especially the product of immediate social conditions, and is in that sense artificial. Though probably not quite so heart-rending as the other, it is often passionate enough, and lasts on indefinitely, like a chronic disease.

In early times, with the more communistic feeling of primitive societies, and with customs (like group-marriage) which allowed some latitude in sex-relation, jealousy though strong was not probably a very great force. But with the growth of individualism in life and in love, with the rise of the sense of property under civilization and the accentuation of every personal feeling in what may be called the cellular state of society, the passion became one of fearful and convulsive power and fury; as is borne witness to by numberless dramas and poems and romances of the historical period. In the communism and humanism of the future, as the sense of property declines, and as Love rises more and more out of mere blind confusion with the sex-act, we may fairly hope that the artificial jealousy will disappear altogether, and that the other form of the passion will subside again into a comparatively reasonable human emotion.

ON THE FAMILY

A change somewhat similar to that in the position of Jealousy has taken place in the role of the Family during the progress of society into and through the period of civilization. In the primitive human association the Family was large in extent, and in outline vague; the boundaries of kinship, in cases where the woman might have several husbands, or the husband several wives, were hard to trace; paternal feeling was little or not at all developed; and the whole institution rested on the maternal instinct of care for the young. In the middle societies of civilization, and with monogamic arrangements, the Family grew exceedingly definite in form and circumscribed in extent. The growth of property and competition, and the cellular system of society, developed a kind of warfare between the units of which society was composed. These units were families. The essential communism and fraternity of society at large was dwarfed now and contracted into the limits of the family; and this institution acquired an extraordinary importance from the fact that it alone kept alive and showed in miniature (intensified by the darkness and chaos and warfare outside) the sacred fire of human fraternity. So great was this importance in fact that the Holy Family became one of the central religious conceptions of the civilized period, and it was commonly thought that society owed its existence to the Family—instead of, as was the case, the truth being reverse, namely that the Family was the condensation of the principle which had previously existed, though diffused and unconscious, throughout society.

The third and future stage is of course easy to see—that is, the expansion again of the conception of the family consciously into the fraternity and communism of all society. It is obvious that as this takes place the family will once more lose its definition of outline and merge more and more again with the larger social groups in which it is embedded—but not into the old barbaric society in which the conception of human fellowship lay diffused and only dimly auroral, but into the newer society in which it shall be clear and all-illuminating as the sun.

Thus the Family institution in its present form, and as far as that form may be said to be artificial, will doubtless pass away. Nevertheless there remains of course, and must remain, its natural or physiological basis—namely the actual physical relation of the parents to each other and to the child. One perhaps of the most valuable results of the Monogamic family institution under civilization has been the development of the paternal feeling for the child, which in primitive society was so weak. To-day the love of man and wife for each other is riveted, as it never was in ancient days, by the tender beauty of the child-face, in which each parent sees with strange emotion his own features blended with the features of his loved one—the actual realization of that union which the lovers so desired, and which yet so often seemed to them after all not consummated. The little prolongation of oneself, carrying in its eyes the star-look of another’s love, and descending a stranger into the world to face a destiny all its own, touches the most personal and mortal-close feelings (as well as perhaps the most impersonal) of the heart. And while to-day this sight often reconciles husband and wife to the legal chains which perforce hold them together, in a Free Society, we may hope, it will more often be the sign and seal of a love which neither requires nor allows any kind of mechanical bond.

ON PREVENTIVE CHECKS TO POPULATION.

This is no doubt a complex and difficult subject. Nature from far back time has provided in the most determined and obstinate way for the perpetuation of organic life, and has endowed animals, and even plants, with a strong sexual instinct. By natural selection this instinct tends, it would seem, to be accentuated; and in the higher animals and man it sometimes attains a pitch almost of ferocity. In civilized man this effect is further increased by the intensity of consciousness, which reflects desire on itself, as well as by collateral conditions of life and luxury.

In the animal and plant world generally, and up to the realm of Man, Nature appears to be perfectly lavish in the matter, and careless of the waste of seed and of life that may ensue, provided her object of race-propagation is attained; and naturally when the time arrives that Man, objecting to this waste, faces up to the problem, he finds it no easy one to solve.

And not only Man (the male) objects to lower Nature’s method of producing superfluous individuals only to kill them off again in the struggle for existence; but Woman objects to being a mere machine for perpetual reproduction.

There are only two ways commonly proposed of meeting the difficulty: either (1) the adoption of some kind of artificial preventatives to conception, or (2) the exercise of very considerable continence and self-control in the face of the powerful instinct of procreation. Of course, also, the two methods may be used in conjunction with each other.

(1) It must be acknowledged that artificial checks to population are for the most part very unsatisfactory: their uncertainty, their desperate matter-of-factness, so fatal to real feeling, the probability that they are in one way or another dangerous or harmful, and then their one-sideness, since here—as so often in matters of sex—the man’s satisfaction is largely at the cost of the woman: all these things are against them. One method however—that which consists in selecting, for sexual congress, a certain part of the woman’s monthly cycle, can hardly be called artificial, and is altogether the least open to the objections cited. Its success truly is not absolutely certain, but is perhaps sufficiently nearly so for the general purpose of regulating the family; and if the method involves some self-control, it does not at any rate make an impracticable demand in that direction.

(2) To adopt the method of self-control alone without regard to (1) would practically mean, in those instances where children were thought undesirable, an entire abstinence from actual intercourse, and would in most cases be making too great a demand on human nature, as well as, in some, running a possible risk of prejudice to health. No doubt the danger of prejudice to health has been greatly exaggerated; for as a rule a strong effort towards voluntary continence is one of the best safeguards of health; but it does not follow from this that complete abstinence is generally either practicable or desirable. It may, however, be said that it is in the direction of self-control rather than in the direction of unlimited “checks” that we should look for the future; and that if some effort were made towards a wise choice of the periods of congress, the general object in view would be attained without putting an inordinate strain upon the average human nature, and without necessitating recourse to doubtful and artificial devices. The effort itself, too, would lead to that Transmutation of sex-force into the higher emotional elements, of which we have spoken already, and which is such an important factor in Evolution.