Chapter 12

Let me give examples. For a long time the Tribe is all in all; the individual is completely subject to the 'Spirit of the Hive'; he does not even THINK of contravening it. Then the day comes when self-interest, as apart from the Tribe, becomes sufficiently strong to drive him against some tribal custom. He breaks the tabu; he eats the forbidden apple; he sins against the tribe, and is cast out. Suddenly he finds himself an exile, lonely, condemned and deserted. A horrible sense of distress seizes him--something of which he had no experience before. He tries to think about it all, to understand the situation, but is dazed and cannot arrive at any conclusion. His one NECESSITY is Reconciliation, Atonement. He finds he cannot LIVE outside of and alienated from his tribe. He makes a Sacrifice, an offering to his fellows, as a seal of sincerity--an offering of his own bodily suffering or precious blood, or the blood of some food-animal, or some valuable gift or other--if only he may be allowed to return. The offering is accepted. The ritual is performed; and he is received back. I have already spoken of this perfectly natural evolution of the twin-ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, so I need not enlarge upon the subject. But two things we may note here: (1) that the ritual, being so concrete (and often severe), graves itself on the minds of those concerned, and expresses the feelings of the tribe, with an intensity and sharpness of outline which no words could rival, and (2) that such rituals may have, and probably did, come into use even while language itself was in an infantile condition and incapable of dealing with the psychological situation except by symbols. They, the rituals, were the first effort of the primitive mind to get beyond, subconscious feeling and emerge into a world of forms and definite thought.

Let us carry the particular instance, given above, a stage farther, even to the confines of abstract Thought and Philosophy. I have spoken of "The Spirit of the Hive" as if the term were applicable to the Human as well as to the Bee tribe. The individual bee obviously has never THOUGHT about that 'Spirit,' nor mentally understood what Maeterlinck means by it; and yet in terms of actual experience it is an intense reality to the bee (ordaining for instance on some fateful day the slaughter of all the drones), controlling bee-movements and bee-morality generally. The individual tribesman similarly steeped in the age-long human life of his fellows has never thought of the Tribe as an ordaining being or Spirit, separate from himself--TILL that day when he is exiled and outcast from it. THEN he sees himself and the tribe as two opposing beings, himself of course an Intelligence or Spirit in his own limited degree, the Tribe as a much greater Intelligence or Spirit, standing against and over him. From that day the conception of a god arises on him. It may be only a totem-god--a divine Grizzly-Bear or what not--but still a god or supernatural Presence, embodied in the life of the tribe. This is what Sin has taught him. (1) This is what Fear, founded on self-consciousness, has revealed to him. The revelation may be true, or it may be fallacious (I do not prejudge it); but there it is--the beginning of that long series of human evolutions which we call Religion.

(1) It is to be noted, in that charming idyll of the Eden garden, that it is only AFTER eating of the forbidden fruit that Adam and Eve perceive the Lord God walking in the garden, and converse with him (Genesis iii. 8).

(For when the human mind has reached that stage of consciousness in which each man realizes his own 'self' as a rational and consistent being, "looking before and after," then, as I have said already, the mind projects on the background of Nature similarly rational Presences which we may call 'Gods'; and at that stage 'Religion' begins. Before that, when the mind is quite unformed and dream-like, and consists chiefly of broken and scattered rays, and when distinct self-consciousness is hardly yet developed, then the presences imagined in Nature are merely flickering and intermittent phantoms, and their propitiation and placation comes more properly under, the head of 'Magic.')

So much for the genesis of the religious ideas of Sin and Sacrifice, and the rites connected with these ideas--their genesis through the in-break of self-consciousness upon the corporate SUB-consciousness of the life of the Community. But an exactly similar process may be observed in the case of the other religious ideas.

I spoke of the doctrine of the SECOND BIRTH, and the rites connected with it both in Paganism and in Christianity. There is much to show that among quite primitive peoples there is less of shrinking from death and more of certainty about a continued life after death than we generally find among more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has been, quite, common among many tribes for the old and decrepit, who are becoming a burden to their fellows, to offer themselves for happy dispatch, and to take willing part in the ceremonial preparations for their own extinction; and this readiness is encouraged by their na[i:]ve and untroubled belief in a speedy transference to "happy hunting-grounds" beyond the grave. The truth is that when, as in such cases, the tribal life is very whole and unbroken--each individual identifying himself completely with the tribe--the idea of the individual's being dropped out at death, and left behind by the tribe, hardly arises. The individual is the tribe, has no other existence. The tribe goes on, living a life which is eternal, and only changes its hunting-grounds; and the individual, identified with the tribe, feels in some subconscious way the same about himself.

But when one member has broken faith with the tribe, when he has sinned against it and become an outcast--ah! then the terrors of death and extinction loom large upon him. "The wages of sin is death." There comes a period in the evolution of tribal life when the primitive bonds are loosening, when the tendency towards SELF-will and SELF-determination (so necessary of course in the long run for the evolution of humanity) becomes a real danger to the tribe, and a terror to the wise men and elders of the community. It is seen that the children inherit this tendency--even from their infancy. They are no longer mere animals, easily herded; it seems that they are born in sin--or at least in ignorance and neglect of their tribal life and calling. The only cure is that they MUST BE BORN AGAIN. They must deliberately and of set purpose be adopted into the tribe, and be made to realize, even severely, in their own persons what is happening. They must go through the initiations necessary to impress this upon them. Thus a whole series of solemn rites spring up, different no doubt in every locality, but all having the same object and purpose. (And one can understand how the necessity of such initiations and second birth may easily have been itself felt in every race, at some stage of its evolution--and THAT quite as a spontaneous growth, and independently of any contagion of example caught from other races.)

The same may be said about the world-wide practice of the Eucharist. No more effective method exists for impressing on the members of a body their community of life with each other, and causing them to forget their jangling self-interests, than to hold a feast in common. It is a method which has been honored in all ages as well as to-day. But when the flesh partaken of at the feast is that of the Totem--the guardian and presiding genius of the tribe--or perhaps of one of its chief food-animals--then clearly the feast takes on a holy and solemn character. It becomes a sacrament of unity--of the unity of all with the tribe, and with each other. Self-interests and self-consciousness are for the time submerged, and the common life asserts itself; but here again we see that a custom like this would not come into being as a deliberate rite UNTIL self-consciousness and the divisions consequent thereon had grown to be an obvious evil. The herd-animals (cows, sheep, and so forth) do not have Eucharists, simply because they are sensible enough to feed along the same pastures without quarrelling over the richest tufts of grass.

When the flesh partaken of (either actually or symbolically) is not that of a divinized animal, but the flesh of a human-formed god--as in the mysteries of Dionysus or Osiris or Christ--then we are led to suspect (and of course this theory is widely held and supported) that the rites date from a very far-back period when a human being, as representative of the tribe, was actually slain, dismembered and partly devoured; though as time went on, the rite gradually became glossed over and mitigated into a love-communion through the sharing of bread and wine.

It is curious anyhow that the dismemberment or division into fragments of the body of a god (as in the case of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, Praj[a']pati and others) should be so frequent a tenet of the old religions, and so commonly associated with a love-feast of reconciliation and resurrection. It may be fairly interpreted as a symbol of Nature-dismemberment in Winter and resurrection in Spring; but we must also not forget that it may (and indeed must) have stood as an allegory of TRIBAL dismemberment and reconciliation--the tribe, conceived of as a divinity, having thus suffered and died through the inbreak of sin and the self-motive, and risen again into wholeness by the redemption of love and sacrifice. Whatever view the rank and file of the tribe may have taken of the matter, I think it is incontestable that the more thoughtful regarded these rites as full of mystic and spiritual meaning. It is of the nature, as I have said before, of these early symbols and ceremonies that they held so many meanings in solution; and it is this fact which gave them a poetic or creative quality, and their great hold upon the public mind.

I use the word "tribe" in many places here as a matter of convenience; not forgetting however that in some cases "clan" might be more appropriate, as referring to a section of a tribe; or "people" or "folk" as referring to unions of SEVERAL tribes. It is impossible of course to follow out all the gradations of organization from tribal up to national life; but it may be remembered that while animal totems prevail as a rule in the earlier stages, human-formed gods become more conspicuous in the later developments. All through, the practice of the Eucharist goes on, in varying forms adapting itself to the surrounding conditions; and where in the later societies a religion like Mithraism or Christianity includes people of very various race, the Rite loses quite naturally its tribal significance and becomes a celebration of allegiance to a particular god--of unity within a special Church, in fact. Ultimately it may become--as for a brief moment in the history of the early Christians it seemed likely to do--a celebration of allegiance to all Humanity, irrespective of race or creed or color of skin or of mind: though unfortunately that day seems still far distant and remains yet unrealized. It must not be overlooked, however, that the religion of the Persian B[a^]b, first promulgated in 1845 to 1850--and a subject I shall deal with presently--had as a matter of fact this all embracing and universal scope.

To return to the Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Our conclusion seems to be that there really was such a period of comparative harmony in human life--to which later generations were justified in looking back, and looking back with regret. It corresponded in the psychology of human Evolution to stage One. The second stage was that of the Fall; and so one is inevitably led to the conjecture and the hope that a third stage will redeem the earth and its inhabitants to a condition of comparative blessedness.

X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER

From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past Golden Age, and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist, in the sense indicated in the last chapter, to that of the equally widespread belief in a human-divine Saviour, is a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago, dealing with this subject, (1) I wrote as follows:--"The true Self of man consists in his organic relation with the whole body of his fellows; and when the man abandons his true Self he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to separate himself from the inner, the unit-man from the mass-Man, then the reign of individuality begins--a false and impossible individuality of course, but the only means of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality." And further, "Thus this divinity in each creature, being that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer--healer of wounds of body and wounds of heart--the Man within the man, whom it was not only possible to know, but whom to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This, I take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as accepted at some elder time of human history, and by us seen as through a glass darkly."

(1) See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.

I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our pride of Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses of tribal life--that these elder people perceived as a matter of fact and direct consciousness the redeeming presence (within each unit-member of the group) of the larger life to which he belonged. This larger life was a reality--"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he called it by the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name of a Nature-divinity, or by the name of some gracious human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra, Attis, Orpheus, or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living incarnate Being by the realization of whose presence the little mortal could be lifted out of exile and error and death and suffering into splendor and life eternal.

It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship of "Saviours" all over the world, from China to Peru, can only be ascribed to the natural working of some such law of human and tribal psychology--from earliest times and in all races the same--springing up quite spontaneously and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the mere contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil, long before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into the heads of all these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great a compliment both to the power and the ingenuity of his Satanic Majesty--though the ingenuity with which the early Church DID itself suppress all information about these pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited to Satan! And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous and universal consent of belief to have sprung by mere contagion from one accidental source would seem equally far-fetched and unlikely.

But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling belief in human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread legend of their birth from Virgin-mothers. There is hardly a god--as we have already had occasion to see--whose worship as a benefactor of mankind attained popularity in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and America--who was not reported to have been born from a Virgin, or at least from a mother who owed the Child not to any earthly father, but to an impregnation from Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more astonishing because the belief in the possibility of such a thing is so entirely out of the line of our modern thought. So that while it would seem not unnatural that such a legend should have, sprung up spontaneously in some odd benighted corner of the world, we find it very difficult to understand how in that case it should have spread so rapidly in every direction, or--if it did not spread--how we are to account for its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these widely sundered regions.

I think here, and for the understanding of this problem, we are thrown back upon a very early age of human evolution--the age of Magic. Before any settled science or philosophy or religion existed, there were still certain Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact affected it deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder'; to hear thunder, to imitate it, even to mention it, are sure ways of rousing superstitious attention and imagination. Such another word is 'Serpent,' another 'Tree,' and so forth. There is no one who is insensible to the reverberation of these and other such words and images (1); and among them, standing prominently out, are the two 'Mother' and 'Virgin.' The word Mother touches the deepest springs of human feeling. As the earliest word learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with the heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor must we forget that in a primitive state of society (the Matriarchate) that influence was probably even greater than now; for the father of the child being (often as not) UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about it which has remained even until to-day. But if that word rooted itself deep in the heart of the Child, the other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for the full grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too, has never lost.

(1) Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the square, the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like 3, 4, 5, etc., quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.

There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of all the gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored far and wide as the gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms of Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and to it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. (There are strange accounts of a huge fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in the midst, and of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep and corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames. (1)) It was, in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest and most spontaneous of cults--the worship of the Earth-mother, the all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her never-failing ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.

(1) See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.

But when the Saviour-legend sprang up--as indeed I think it must have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and people after people, independently--then, whether it sprang from the divinization of some actual man who showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows "sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification of the tribe itself as a god, in either case the question of the hero's parentage was bound to arise. If the 'saviour' was plainly a personification of the tribe, it was obviously impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal mother. In that case--and if the tribe was generally traced in the legends to some primeval Animal or Mountain or thing of Nature--it was probably easy to think of him (the saviour) as, born out of Nature's womb, descended perhaps from that pure Virgin of the World who is the Earth and Nature, who rules the skies at night, and stands in the changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped (as we have seen) in the great constellation Virgo. If, on the other hand, he was the divinization of some actual man, more or less known either personally or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the name of his mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his father, that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very uncertain, it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the midnight visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.

There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspiring to this conclusion. One is the condition of affairs in a remote matriarchial period, when descent was reckoned always through the maternal line, and the fatherhood in each generation was obscure or unknown or commonly left out of account; and the other is the fact--so strange and difficult for us to realize--that among some very primitive peoples, like the Australian aborigines, the necessity for a woman to have intercourse with a male, in order to bring about conception and child-birth, was actually not recognized. Scientific observation had not always got as far as that, and the matter was still under the domain of Magic! (1) A Virgin-Mother was therefore a quite imaginable (not to say 'conceivable') thing; and indeed a very beautiful and fascinating thing, combining in one image the potent magic of two very wonderful words. It does not seem impossible that considerations of this kind led to the adoption of the doctrine or legend of the virgin-mother and the heavenly father among so many races and in so many localities--even without any contagion of tradition among them.

(1) Probably the long period (nine months) elapsing between cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the subject. Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by childbirth. And, more important still, the number of virgins of a mature age in primitive societies was so very minute that the fact of their childlessness attracted no attention--whereas in OUR societies the sterility of the whole class is patent to everyone.

Anyhow, and as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination of the legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father of the gods, visited Semele, it will be remembered, in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who slew the Gorgons (the powers of darkness) and saved Andromeda (the human soul (1)). Devaki, the radiant Virgin of the Hindu mythology, became the wife of the god Vishnu and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and prototype of Christ. With regard to Buddha St. Jerome says (2) "It is handed down among the Gymnosophists, of India that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth by a Virgin from her side." The Egyptian Isis, with the child Horus, on her knee, was honored centuries before the Christian era, and worshiped under the names of "Our Lady," "Queen of Heaven," "Star of the Sea," "Mother of God," and so forth. Before her, Neith, the Virgin of the World, whose figure bends from the sky over the earthly plains and the children of men, was acclaimed as mother of the great god Osiris. The saviour Mithra, too, was born of a Virgin, as we have had occasion to notice before; and on the Mithrais monuments the mother suckling her child is a not uncommon figure. (3)

(1) For this interpretation of the word Andromeda see The Perfect Way by Edward Maitland, preface to First Edition, 1881.

(2) Contra Jovian, Book I; and quoted by Rhys Davids in his Buddhisim.

(3) See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 332, and Dupuis' Origins of Religious Beliefs.