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Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning
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.