Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning
Edward Carpenter
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PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
By EDWARD CARPENTER
"The different religions being lame attempts to represent under
various guises this one root-fact of the central universal life,
men have at all times clung to the religious creeds and rituals
and ceremonials as symbolising in some rude way the redemption
and fulfilment of their own most intimate natures--and this
whether consciously understanding the interpretations, or whether
(as most often) only doing so in an unconscious or quite
subconscious way."
The Drama of Love and Death, p. 96.
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
IX. MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
XI. RITUAL DANCING
XII. THE SEX-TABOO
XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
XV. THE MEANING OF IT ALL
XV. THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
XVI. THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
XVII. CONCLUSION
APPENDIX ON THE TEACHINGS OF THE UPANISHADS:
I. REST
II. THE NATURE OF THE SELF
PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING
I. INTRODUCTORY
The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as
the great multitude of books upon it, published in late
years, tends to show. Indeed the great difficulty to-day
in dealing with the subject, lies in the very mass of the
material to hand--and that not only on account of the
labor involved in sorting the material, but because the
abundance itself of facts opens up temptation to a student
in this department of Anthropology (as happens also in
other branches of general Science) to rush in too hastily
with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts,
statistics, and so forth, there are available in any
investigation, the easier it is to pick out a considerable number
which will fit a given theory. The other facts being neglected
or ignored, the views put forward enjoy for a
time a great vogue. Then inevitably, and at a later time,
new or neglected facts alter the outlook, and a new perspective
is established.
There is also in these matters of Science (though many
scientific men would doubtless deny this) a great deal of
"Fashion". Such has been notoriously the case in Political
Economy, Medicine, Geology, and even in such definite
studies as Physics and Chemistry. In a comparatively recent
science, like that with which we are now concerned, one
would naturally expect variations. A hundred and fifty
years ago, and since the time of Rousseau, the "Noble
Savage" was extremely popular; and he lingers still in
the story books of our children. Then the reaction from
this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been
the popular cue (largely, it must be said, among "armchair"
travelers and explorers) to represent the religious
rites and customs of primitive folk as a senseless mass
of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of
decent feeling and intelligence. Again, when the study of
religious origins first began in modern times to be seriously
taken up--say in the earlier part of last century--
there was a great boom in Sungods. Every divinity in
the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun--unless
indeed (if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod,
of course; Hercules was a sungod; Samson was a sungod;
Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the same.
C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795),
F. Nork in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard
Taylor in England (The Devil's Pulpit,[1] 1830), were among
the first in modern times to put forward this view. A little
later the PHALLIC explanation of everything came into
fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs
and powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art
and Mythology, 1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient
Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868) popularized this idea in
England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again there was
a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism
--the theory that the gods and goddesses had actually once
been men and women, historical characters round whom
a halo of romance and remoteness had gathered. Later
still, a school has arisen which thinks little of sungods,
and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits,
to gnomes and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the
processes of Magic by which these (so it was supposed)
could be enlisted in man's service if friendly, or exorcised
if hostile.
[1] This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and
containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the
right lines. But it raised a storm of opposition--the more so
because its author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the
ministry, of course, and was sent to prison twice.
It is easy to see of course that there is some truth in
ALL these explanations; but naturally each school for
the time being makes the most of its own contention. Mr.
J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and Christianity and
Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field,[1]
relies chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though
he does not altogether deny the others; Dr. Frazer, on
the other hand--whose great work, The Golden Bough, is
a monumental collection of primitive customs, and will
be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students--is
apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun
and the stars, but concentrates his attention on the
collection of innumerable details[2] of rites, chiefly magical,
connected with food and vegetation. Still later writers, like
S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and E. A. Crowley, being mainly
occupied with customs of very primitive peoples, like
the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have
confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and
Witchcraft.
[1] If only he did not waste so much time, and so needlessly, in
slaughtering opponents!
[2] To such a degree, indeed, that sometimes the connecting clue
of the argument seems to be lost.
Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations
has kept itself severely apart--as of course representing a
unique and divine revelation little concerned or interested
in such heathenisms; and moreover (in this country
at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public
of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few
people, even nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just
the same root as Paganism, and that it shares by far the
most part of its doctrines and rites with the latter. Till
quite lately it was thought (in Britain) that only secularists
and unfashionable people took any interest in sungods; and
while it was true that learned professors might point to a
belief in Magic as one of the first sources of Religion, it
was easy in reply to say that this obviously had nothing to
do with Christianity! The Secularists, too, rather spoilt
their case by assuming, in their wrath against the Church,
that all priests since the beginning of the world have been
frauds and charlatans, and that all the rites of religion
were merely devil's devices invented by them for the
purpose of preying upon the superstitions of the ignorant,
to their own enrichment. They (the Secularists)
overleaped themselves by grossly exaggerating a thing that
no doubt is partially true.
Thus the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex,
and yields many aspects for consideration. It
is only, I think, by keeping a broad course and admitting
contributions to the truth from various sides, that valuable
results can be obtained. It is absurd to suppose
that in this or any other science neat systems can be found
which will cover all the facts. Nature and History do not
deal in such things, or supply them for a sop to Man's
vanity.
It is clear that there have been three main lines, so far,
along which human speculation and study have run. One
connecting religious rites and observations with the movements
of the Sun and the planets in the sky, and leading to
the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods
dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance;
the second connecting religion with the changes
of the season, on the Earth and with such practical things
as the growth of vegetation and food, and leading to or
mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical
methods of influencing such spirits; and the third connecting
religion with man's own body and the tremendous force
of sex residing in it--emblem of undying life and all
fertility and power. It is clear also--and all investigation
confirms it--that the second-mentioned phase of religion
arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned--that is,
that men naturally thought about the very practical questions
of food and vegetation, and the magical or other
methods of encouraging the same, before they worried themselves
about the heavenly bodies and the laws of THEIR
movements, or about the sinister or favorable influences the
stars might exert. And again it is extremely probable that
the third-mentioned aspect--that which connected religion
with the procreative desires and phenomena of human
physiology--really came FIRST. These desires and physiological
phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive
mind long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky
had been at all definitely observed or considered. Thus we
find it probable that, in order to understand the sequence of
the actual and historical phases of religious worship, we must
approximately reverse the order above-given in which they
have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the
Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation
of earth-divinities and spirits came second, and
only last came the belief in definite God-figures residing
in heaven.
At the base of the whole process by which divinities and
demons were created, and rites for their propitiation and
placation established, lay Fear--fear stimulating the
imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in orbe deos
fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution
of self-consciousness. Before that time, in the period of
SIMPLE consciousness, when the human mind resembled
that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature was
more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There
being no figure or image of SELF in the animal mind, there
were correspondingly no figures or images of beings who
might threaten or destroy that self. So it was that the
imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness, and
from that imaginative power was unrolled the whole panorama
of the gods and rites and creeds of Religion down the
centuries.
The immense force and domination of Fear in the first
self-conscious stages of the human mind is a thing which
can hardly be exaggerated, and which is even difficult for
some of us moderns to realize. But naturally as soon
as Man began to think about himself--a frail phantom and
waif in the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature
and mode of operation he was entirely ignorant--he was
BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon him on all sides.
Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the chief
obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native
races is sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the
recognized word for a state of mind ("obsession of
death") which will often cause a savage to perish from a
mere scratch hardly to be called a wound. The natural
defence against this state of mind was the creation of an
enormous number of taboos--such as we find among
all races and on every conceivable subject--and these taboos
constituted practically a great body of warnings which
regulated the lives and thoughts of the community, and
ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some
degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent
Customs and Laws. Such taboos naturally in the beginning
tended to include the avoidance not only of acts which
might reasonably be considered dangerous, like touching a
corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful
in their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-
in-law, or passing a lightning-struck tree; and (what is
especially to be noticed) they tended to include acts which
offered any special PLEASURE or temptation--like sex or
marriage or the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos surrounded
these things too, and the psychological connection is easy
to divine: but I shall deal with this general subject later.
It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations
made life anything but easy to early peoples; but,
preposterous and unreasonable as some of the taboos were,
they undoubtedly had the effect of compelling the growth
of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy motive,
but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely
animal passions, and introduced order and restraint among
them. Simultaneously it became itself, through the gradual
increase of knowledge and observation, transmuted and
etherealized into something more like wonder and awe
and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings
(in the Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a
gradual development--from crass superstition,
senseless and accidental, to rudimentary observation,
and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
and personification of nature-powers in more or less human
form, as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of
the tribe; and to placation of these powers by rites like
Sacrifice and the Eucharist, which in their turn became
the foundation of Morality. Graphic representations made
for the encouragement of fertility--as on the walls of Bushmen's
rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of Altamira--
became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of
plants or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal
medicine-men for purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied
some of the material of Science; and humanity emerged
by faltering and hesitating steps on the borderland of those
finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed to be
characteristic of Civilization.
The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies
has in its main outlines been the same all over the
world, as the reader will presently see--and this whether
in connection with the numerous creeds of Paganism
or the supposedly unique case of Christianity; and now
the continuity and close intermixture of these great
streams can no longer be denied--nor IS it indeed denied
by those who have really studied the subject. It is
seen that religious evolution through the ages has been
practically One thing--that there has been in fact a World-
religion, though with various phases and branches.
And so in the present day a new problem arises, namely
how to account for the appearance of this great Phenomenon,
with its orderly phases of evolution, and its own spontaneous[1]
growths in all corners of the globe--this phenomenon
which has had such a strange sway over the
hearts of men, which has attracted them with so weird
a charm, which has drawn out their devotion, love and
tenderness, which has consoled them in sorrow and affliction,
and yet which has stained their history with such horrible
sacrifices and persecutions and cruelties. What has
been the instigating cause of it?
[1] For the question of spontaneity see chap. x and elsewhere.
The answer which I propose to this question, and which
is developed to some extent in the following chapters, is
a psychological one. It is that the phenomenon proceeds
from, and is a necessary accompaniment of, the growth of
human Consciousness itself--its growth, namely, through
the three great stages of its unfoldment. These stages
are (1) that of the simple or animal consciousness, (2) that
of SELF-consciousness, and (3) that of a third stage of
consciousness which has not as yet been effectively named, but
whose indications and precursive signs we here and there
perceive in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of
the early religions, and in the poetry and art and literature
generally of the later civilizations. Though I do not
expect or wish to catch Nature and History in the careful
net of a phrase, yet I think that in the sequence from
the above-mentioned first stage to the second, and then
again in the sequence from the second to the third,
there will be found a helpful explanation of the rites and
aspirations of human religion. It is this idea, illustrated
by details of ceremonial and so forth, which forms the main
thesis of the present book. In this sequence of growth,
Christianity enters as an episode, but no more than an episode.
It does not amount to a disruption or dislocation of evolution.
If it did, or if it stood as an unique or unclassifiable
phenomenon (as some of its votaries contend), this would
seem to be a misfortune--as it would obviously rob us of
at any rate one promise of progress in the future. And
the promise of something better than Paganism and better
than Christianity is very precious. It is surely time
that it should be fulfilled.
The tracing, therefore, of the part that human self-
consciousness has played, psychologically, in the evolution
of religion, runs like a thread through the following chapters,
and seeks illustration in a variety of details. The idea
has been repeated under different aspects; sometimes,
possibly, it has been repeated too often; but different aspects
in such a case do help, as in a stereoscope, to give
solidity to the thing seen. Though the worship of Sun-gods
and divine figures in the sky came comparatively late
in religious evolution, 1 have put this subject early in
the book (chapters ii and iii), partly because (as I have
already explained) it was the phase first studied in modern
times, and therefore is the one most familiar to present-
day readers, and partly because its astronomical data
give great definiteness and "proveability" to it, in rebuttal
to the common accusation that the whole study of religious
origins is too vague and uncertain to have much value.
Going backwards in Time, the two next chapters (iv and v)
deal with Totem-sacraments and Magic, perhaps the earliest
forms of religion. And these four lead on (in chapters vi
to xi) to the consideration of rites and creeds common to
Paganism and Christianity. XII and xiii deal especially
with the evolution of Christianity itself; xiv and xv explain
the inner Meaning of the whole process from the beginning;
and xvi and xvii look to the Future.
The appendix on the doctrines of the Upanishads may,
I hope, serve to give an idea, intimate even though inadequate,
of the third Stage--that which follows on the
stage of self-consciousness; and to portray the mental attitudes
which are characteristic of that stage. Here in this
third stage, it would seem, one comes upon the real FACTS of
the inner life--in contradistinction to the fancies and figments
of the second stage; and so one reaches the final point
of conjunction between Science and Religion.
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