Pagan and Christian creeds Part 8

(1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.

The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent--if you once allow for the overwhelming sway of fear--perfectly reasonable views of human conduct, adopted instinctively by mankind since the earliest times. If in a moment of danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your brother tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you 'sinned' against him; and naturally you expiated the sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind made to the one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice were the very foundation of social life and human morality, and must have sprung up as soon as ever, in the course of evolution, man became CAPABLE of differentiating himself from his fellows and regarding his own conduct as that of a 'separate self.' It was in the very conception of a separate self that 'sin' and disunity first began; and it was by 'sacrifice' that unity and harmony were restored, appeas.e.m.e.nt and atonement effected.

But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated more than once, man felt himself intimately related not only to his brother tribesman, but to the animals and to general Nature. It was not so much that he THOUGHT thus as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously that he was a part of all this outer world. And so he adopted for his totems or presiding spirits every possible animal, as we have seen, and all sorts of nature-phenomena, such as rain and fire and water and clouds, and sun, moon and stars--which WE consider quite senseless and inanimate. Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he felt the same compunction as I have described him feeling towards his brother tribesmen. He could sin against them too. He could sin against his totem-animal by eating it; he could sin against his 'brother the ox' by consuming its strength in the labor of the plough; he could sin against the corn by cutting it down and grinding it into flour, or against the precious and beautiful pine-tree by laying his axe to its roots and converting it into mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he could sin against elemental nature. This might be more difficult to be certain of, but when the signs of elemental displeasure were not to be mistaken--when the rain withheld itself for months, or the storms and lightning dealt death and destruction, when the crops failed or evil plagues afflicted mankind--then there could be little uncertainty that he had sinned; and Fear, which had haunted him like a demon from the first day when he became conscious of his separation from his fellows and from Nature, stood over him and urged to dreadful propitiations.

In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious thing.

We have seen that to atone for the cutting-down of the corn a human victim would often be slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of this, for wherever the blood and remains of the victim were strewn the corn always sprang up more plentifully. The tribe or human group made reparation thus to the corn; the corn-spirit signified approval. The 'sin' was expiated and harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was voluntarily offered by a tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot or otherwise; sometimes the victim was a slave, or a captive enemy; sometimes even an animal. All that did not so much matter. The main thing was that the formal expiation had been carried out, and the wrath of the spirits averted.

It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the bear felt it necessary to kill and cat a bear occasionally; but they could not do this without a sense of guilt, and some fear of vengeance from the great Bear-spirit. So they ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which the tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community with their totem and with each other. And since they could not make any reparation directly to the slain animal itself AFTER its death, they made their reparation BEFORE, bringing all sorts of presents and food to it for a long anterior period, and paying every kind of worship and respect to it. The same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia, in some of the cities of Greece as I have already mentioned, the actual bull sacrificed was the handsomest and most carefully nurtured that could be obtained; it was crowned with flowers and led in procession with every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I have already pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead of a bull or a goat or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated, it was a custom (which can be traced very widely over the world) to feed and indulge and honor the victim to the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony, arraying him often as a king and placing a crown upon his head, by way of acknowledgment of the n.o.ble and necessary work he was doing for the general good.

What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging especially to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and beloved a tree--the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of Attis!

when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis was placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the glorious youth--who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk of Winter--was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree? (1) At some earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his body bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the maidens to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and male enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice (as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their virile organs--symbols of fertility in return for the promised and expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For the ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and lamentation, but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a festival of resurrection, when it was discovered--just as in the case of Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had flown. How strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life made in order to bring salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.

(1) See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dic.u.n.t, per annos singulos arbor pinea caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis formaraque componitur, et c.u.m intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta noctibus piangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur."

Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call G.o.ds, it is important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though it dealt in 'spirits'--the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea of G.o.ds. It had not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and governing the world in solemn conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus or the recesses of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and Sacrifice, or of Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call it--was evolved perfectly naturally out of the human mind when brought face to face with Life and Nature) at some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was essentially the result of man's deep, original and instinctive sense of solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied and to some degree broken up by the growth and conscious insistence of the self-regarding impulses. It was the consciousness of disharmony and disunity, causing men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the need of reconciliation. It was a realization of union made clear by its very loss. It a.s.sumed of course, in a subconscious way as I have already indicated, that the external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds similar to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident that the particular theories current in this or that place about the nature of the world--the theories, as we should say, of science or theology--did not alter the general outlines of the creed; they only colored its details and gave its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental att.i.tudes, for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern and pious Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross are really almost exactly the same. I mention this because in tracing the origins or the evolution of religions it is important to distinguish clearly what is essential and universal from that which is merely local and temporary.

Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons just made; but surely it is much more inspiriting and encouraging to think that whatever progress HAS been made in the religious outlook of the world has come about through the gradual mental growth and consent of the peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous event of a rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which indeed might never be repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious to suggest that it SHOULD be repeated.

The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to have disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and to have symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are shocked sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals, yet we must allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early people felt the solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we must allow too that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifice, and with a result perhaps which could not have been compa.s.sed in any other way.

For after all we see now that sacrifice is of the very essence of social life. "It is expedient that ONE man should die for the people"; and not only that one man should actually die, but (what is far more important) that each man should be ready and WILLING to die in that cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable thing. It SHOULD pervade modern life more than it does. All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in Nature or Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If Christianity has any real essence, that essence is perhaps expressed in some such ritual or practice of Sacrifice, and we see that the dim beginnings of this idea date from the far-back customs of savages coming down from a time anterior to all recorded history.

VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH

We have suggested in the last chapter how the conceptions of Sin and Sacrifice coming down to us from an extremely remote past, and embodied among the various peoples of the world sometimes in crude and bloodthirsty rites, sometimes in symbols and rituals of a gentler and more gracious character, descended at last into Christianity and became a part of its creed and of the creed of the modern world. On the whole perhaps we may trace a slow amelioration in this process and may flatter ourselves that the Christian centuries exhibit a more philosophical understanding of what Sin is, and a more humane conception of what Sacrifice SHOULD be, than the centuries preceding. But I fear that any very decided statement or sweeping generalization to that effect would be--to say the least--rash. Perhaps there IS a very slow amelioration; but the briefest glance at the history of the Christian churches--the horrible rancours and revenges of the clergy and the sects against each other in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., the heresy-hunting crusades at Beziers and other places and the ma.s.sacres of the Albigenses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the witch-findings and burnings of the sixteenth and seventeenth, the hideous science-urged and bishop-blessed warfare of the twentieth--horrors fully as great as any we can charge to the account of the Aztecs or the Babylonians--must give us pause. Nor must we forget that if there is by chance a substantial amelioration in our modern outlook with regard to these matters the same had begun already before the advent of Christianity and can by no means be ascribed to any miraculous influence of that religion. Abraham was prompted to slay a ram as a subst.i.tute for his son, long before the Christians were thought of; the rather savage Artemis of the old Greek rites was (according to Pausanias) (1) honored by the yearly sacrifice of a perfect boy and girl, but later it was deemed sufficient to draw a knife across their throats as a symbol, with the result of spilling only a few drops of their blood, or to flog the boys (with the same result) upon her altar. Among the Khonds in old days many victims (meriahs) were sacrificed to the G.o.ds, "but in time the man was replaced by a horse, the horse by a bull, the bull by a ram, the ram by a kid, the kid by fowls, and the fowls by many flowers." (2) At one time, according to the Yajur-Veda, there was a festival at which one hundred and twenty-five victims, men and women, boys and girls, were sacrificed; "but reform supervened, and now the victims were bound as before to the stake, but afterwards amid litanies to the immolated (G.o.d) Narayana, the sacrificing priest brandished a knife and--severed the bonds of the captives." (3) At the Athenian festival of the Thargelia, to which I referred in the last chapter, it appears that the victims, in later times, instead of being slain, were tossed from a height into the sea, and after being rescued were then simply banished; while at Leucatas a similar festival the fall of the victim was graciously broken by tying feathers and even living birds to his body. (4)

(1) vii. 19, and iii. 8, 16.

(2) Primitive Folk, by Elie Reclus (Contemp. Science Series), p.

330.

(3) Ibid.

(4) Muller's Dorians Book II, ch. ii, par. 10.

With the lapse of time and the general progress of mankind, we may, I think, perceive some such slow ameliorations in the matter of the brutality and superst.i.tion of the old religions. How far any later ameliorations were due to the direct influence of Christianity might be a difficult question; but what I think we can clearly see--and what especially interests us here--is that in respect to its main religious ideas, and the matter underlying them (exclusive of the MANNER of their treatment, which necessarily has varied among different peoples) Christianity is of one piece with the earlier pagan creeds and is for the most part a re-statement and renewed expression of world-wide doctrines whose first genesis is lost in the haze of the past, beyond all recorded history.

I have ill.u.s.trated this view with regard to the doctrine of Sin and Sacrifice. Let us take two or three other ill.u.s.trations. Let us take the doctrine of Re-birth or Regeneration. The first few verses of St. John's Gospel are occupied with the subject of salvation through rebirth or regeneration. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of G.o.d."... "Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of G.o.d." Our Baptismal Service begins by saying that "forasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin; and that our Saviour Christ saith, None can enter into the kingdom of G.o.d except he be regenerate and born anew of water and the Holy Ghost"; therefore it is desirable that this child should be baptized, "received into Christ's Holy Church, and be made a lively member of the same." That, is to say, there is one birth, after the flesh, but a second birth is necessary, a birth after the Spirit and into the Church of Christ. Our Confirmation Service is simply a service repeating and confirming these views, at an age (fourteen to sixteen or so) when the boy or girl is capable of understanding what is being done.

But our Baptismal and Confirmation ceremonies combined are clearly the exact correspondence and parallel of the old pagan ceremonies of Initiation, which are or have been observed in almost every primitive tribe over the world. "The rite of the second birth," says Jane Harrison, (1) "is widespread, universal, over half the savage world.

With the savage to be twice-born is the rule. By his first birth he comes into the world; by his second he is born into his tribe. At his first birth he belongs to his mother and the women-folk; at his second he becomes a full-fledged man and pa.s.ses into the society of the warriors of his tribe."... "These rites are very various, but they all point to one moral, that the former things are pa.s.sed away and that the new-born man has entered upon a new life. Simplest of all, and most instructive, is the rite practised by the Kikuyu tribe of British East Africa, who require that every boy, just before circ.u.mcision, must be born again. The mother stands up with the boy crouching at her feet; she pretends to go through all the labour pains, and the boy on being reborn cries like a babe and is washed." (2)

(1) Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 104.

(2) See also Themis, p. 21.

Let us pause for a moment. An Initiate is of course one who "enters in." He enters into the Tribe; he enters into the revelation of certain Mysteries; he becomes an a.s.sociate of a certain Totem, a certain G.o.d; a member of a new Society, or Church--a church of Mithra, or Dionysus or Christ. To do any of these things he must be born again; he must die to the old life; he must pa.s.s through ceremonials which symbolize the change. One of these ceremonials is washing. As the new-born babe is washed, so must the new-born initiate be washed; and as by primitive man (and not without reason) BLOOD was considered the most vital and regenerative of fluids, the very elixir of life, so in earliest times it was common to wash the initiate with blood. If the initiate had to be born anew, it would seem reasonable to suppose that he must first die.

So, not unfrequently, he was wounded, or scourged, and baptized with his own blood, or, in cases, one of the candidates was really killed and his blood used as a subst.i.tute for the blood of the others. No doubt HUMAN sacrifice attended the earliest initiations. But later it was sufficient to be half-drowned in the blood of a Bull as in the Mithra cult, (1) or 'washed in the blood of the Lamb' as in the Christian phraseology.

Finally, with a growing sense of decency and aesthetic perception among the various peoples, washing with pure water came in the initiation-ceremonies to take the place of blood; and our baptismal service has reduced the ceremony to a mere sprinkling with water. (2)

(1) See ch. iii.

(2) For the virtue supposed to reside in blood see Westermarck's Moral Ideas, Ch. 46.

To continue the quotation from Miss Harrison: "More often the new birth is stimulated, or imagined, as a death and a resurrection, either of the boys themselves or of some one else in their presence. Thus at initiation among some tribes of South-east Australia, when the boys are a.s.sembled an old man dressed in stringy bark-fibre lies down in a grave. He is covered up lightly with sticks and earth, and the grave is smoothed over. The buried man holds in his hand a small bush which seems to be growing from the ground, and other bushes are stuck in the ground round about. The novices are then brought to the edge of the grave and a song is sung. Gradually, as the song goes on, the bush held by the buried man begins to quiver. It moves more and more, and bit by bit the man himself starts up from the grave."

Strange in our own Baptismal Service and just before the actual christening we read these words, "Then shall the Priest say: O merciful G.o.d, grant that old Adam in this child may be so BURIED that the new man may be raised up in him: grant that all carnal affections may die in him, and that all things belonging to the Spirit may live and grow in him!" Can we doubt that the Australian medicine-man, standing at the graveside of the re-arisen old black-fellow, pointed the same moral to the young initiates as the priest does to-day to those a.s.sembled before him in church--for indeed we know that among savage tribes initiations have always been before all things the occasions of moral and social teaching? Can we doubt that he said, in substance if not in actual words: "As this man has arisen from the grave, so you must also arise from your old childish life of amus.e.m.e.nt and self-gratification and, ENTER INTO the life of the tribe, the life of the Spirit of the tribe."

"In totemistic societies," to quote Miss Harrison again, "and in the animal secret societies that seem to grow out of them, the novice is born again as THE SACRED ANIMAL. Thus among the Carrier Indians (1) when a man wants to become a Lulem or 'Bear,' however cold the season he tears off his clothes, puts on a bear-skin and dashes into the woods, where he will stay for three or four days. Every night his fellow-villagers will go out in search parties to find him. They cry out Yi! Kelulem (come on, Bear), and he answers with angry growls. Usually they fail to find him, but he comes back at last himself. He is met, and conducted to the ceremonial lodge, and there in company with the rest of the Bears dances solemnly his first appearance. Disappearance and reappearance is as common a rite in initiation as stimulated killing and resurrection, and has the same object. Both are rites of transition, of pa.s.sing from one to another." In the Christian ceremonies the boy or girl puts away childish things and puts on the new man, but instead of putting on a bear-skin he puts on Christ. There is not so much difference as may appear on the surface. To be identified with your Totem is to be identified with the sacred being who watches over your tribe, who has given his life for your tribe; it is to be born again, to be washed not only with water but with the Holy Spirit of all your fellows. To be baptized into Christ ought to mean to be regenerated in the Holy Spirit of all humanity; and no doubt in cases it does mean this, but too often unfortunately it has only amounted to a pretence of religious sanction given to the meanest and bitterest quarrels of the Churches and the States.

(1) Golden Bough, Section 2, III, p. 438.

This idea of a New Birth at initiation explains the prevalent pagan custom of subjecting the initiates to serious ordeals, often painful and even dangerous. If one is to be born again, obviously one must be ready to face death; the one thing cannot be without the other. One must be able to endure pain, like the Red Indian braves; to go long periods fasting and without food or drink, like the choupan among the Western Inoits--who, wanders for whole nights over the ice-fields under the moon, scantily clothed and braving the intense cold; to overcome the very fear of death and danger, like the Australian novices who, at first terrified by the sound of the bull-roarer and threats of fire and the knife, learn finally to cast their fears away. (1) By so doing one puts off the old childish things, and qualifies oneself by firmness and courage to become a worthy member of the society into which one is called. (2) The rules of social life are taught--the duty to one's tribe, and to oneself, truth-speaking, defence of women and children, the care of cattle, the meaning of s.e.x and marriage, and even the mysteries of such religious ideas and rudimentary science as the tribe possesses. And by so doing one really enters into a new life. Things of the spiritual world begin to dawn. Julius Firmicus, in describing the mysteries of the resurrection of Osiris, (3) says that when the worshipers had satiated themselves with lamentations over the death of the G.o.d then the priest would go round anointing them with oil and whispering, "Be of good cheer, O Neophytes of the new-arisen G.o.d, for to us too from our pains shall come salvation." (4)

(1) According to accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western Australia, in their initiations, the lads were frightened by a large fire being lighted near them, and hearing the awful sound of the bull-roarers, while they were told that Dhuramoolan was about to burn them; the legend being that Dhuramoolan, a powerful being, whose voice sounded like thunder, would take the boys into the bush and instruct them in all the laws, traditions and customs of the community. So he pretended that he always killed the boys, cut them up, and burnt them to ashes, after which he moulded the ashes into human shape, and restored them to life as new beings. (See R. H. Matthews, "The Wiradthuri tribes," Journal Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxv, 1896, pp. 297 sq.)

(2) See Catlin's North-American Indians, vol. i, for initiations and ordeals among the Mandans.

(3) De Errore, c. 22.

(4) [gr Qarreite, mustai ton qeou seswsmenou,]

[gr Estai gar hmin ek ponwn swthria.]

It would seem that at some very early time in the history of tribal and priestly initiations an attempt was made to impress upon the neophytes the existence and over-shadowing presence of spiritual and ghostly beings. Perhaps the pains endured in the various ordeals, the long fastings, the silences in the depth of the forests or on the mountains or among the ice-floes, helped to rouse the visionary faculty.

The developments of this faculty among the black and colored peoples--East-Indian, Burmese, African, American-Indian, etc.--are well known. Miss Alice Fletcher, who lived among the Omaha Indians for thirty years, gives a most interesting account (1) of the general philosophy of that people and their rites of initiation. "The Omahas regard all animate and inanimate forms, all phenomena, as pervaded by a common life, which was continuous with and similar to the will-power they were conscious of in themselves. This mysterious power in all things they called Wakonda, and through it all things were related to man and to each other. In the idea of the continuity of life a relation was maintained between the seen and the unseen, the dead and the living, and also between the fragment of anything and its entirety." (2) Thus an Omaha novice might at any time seek to obtain Wakonda by what was called THE RITE OF THE VISION. He would go out alone, fast, chant incantations, and finally fall into a trance (much resembling what in modern times has been called COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) in which he would perceive the inner relations of all things and the solidarity of the least object with the rest of the universe.

(1) Summarized in Themis, pp. 68-71.

(2) A. C. Fletcher, The Significance of the Scalp-lock, Journal of Anthropological Studies, xxvii (1897-8), p. 436.

Another rite in connection with initiation, and common all over the pagan world--in Greece, America, Africa, Australia, New Mexico, etc.--was the daubing of the novice all over with clay or chalk or even dung, and then after a while removing the same. (1) The novice must have looked a sufficiently ugly and uncomfortable object in this state; but later, when he was thoroughly WASHED, the ceremony must have afforded a thrilling ill.u.s.tration of the idea of a new birth, and one which would dwell in the minds of the spectators. When the daubing was done as not infrequently happened with white clay or gypsum, and the ritual took place at night, it can easily be imagined that the figures of young men and boys moving about in the darkness would lend support to the idea that they were spirits belonging to some intermediate world--who had already pa.s.sed through death and were now waiting for their second birth on earth (or into the tribe) which would be signalized by their thorough and ceremonial washing. It will be remembered that Herodotus (viii) gives a circ.u.mstantial account of how the Phocians in a battle with the Thessalians smeared six hundred of their bravest warriors with white clay so that, looking like supernatural beings, and falling upon the Thessalians by night, they terrified the latter and put them to instant flight.

(1) See A. Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 274 sq.

Such then--though only very scantily described--were some of the rites of Initiation and Second Birth celebrated in the old Pagan world. The subject is far too large for adequate treatment within the present limits; but even so we cannot but be struck by the appropriateness in many cases of the teaching thus given to the young, the concreteness of the ill.u.s.trations, the effectiveness of the symbols used, the dramatic character of the rites, the strong enforcement of lessons on the nature and duties of the life into which the candidates were about to enter.

Christianity followed on, and inherited these traditions, but one feels that in its ceremonies of Baptism and Confirmation, which of course correspond to the Pagan Initiations, it falls short of the latter. Its ceremonies (certainly as we have them to-day in Protestant countries) are of a very milk-and-watery character; all allusion to and teaching on the immensely important subject of s.e.x is omitted, the details of social and industrial morality are pa.s.sed by, and instruction is limited to a few rather commonplace lessons in general morality and religion.