ArcaMax Publishing > Books > Religion > Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning > Section 10
Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning

Edward Carpenter

Section 10 of 18 - Table of Contents
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.


The old Teutonic goddess Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin,
but was impregnated by the heavenly Spirit (the
Sky); and her image with a child in her arms was to
be seen in the sacred groves of Germany.[1] The Scandinavian
Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the embraces
of Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the
blessed Balder, healer and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl,
the (crucified) saviour of the Aztecs, was the son of
Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven.[2] Even the Chinese
had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms[3];
and the ancient Etruscans the same.[4]

[1] R. P. Knight's Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.

[2] See Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 176,
where it is said "an ambassador was sent from heaven on an
embassy to a Virgin of Tulan, called Chimalman . . . announcing
that it was the will of the God that she should conceive a son;
and having delivered her the message he rose and left the house;
and as soon as he had left it she conceived a son, without
connection with man, who was called Quetzalcoat], who they say is
the god of air." Further, it is explained that Quetzalcoatl
sacrificed himself, drawing forth his own blood with thorns; and
that the word Quetzalcoatlotopitzin means "our well-beloved son."

[3] Doane, p. 327.

[4] See Inman's Pagan and Christian Symbolism, p. 27.


Finally, we have the curiously large number of BLACK
virgin mothers who are or have been worshiped. Not
only cases like Devaki the Indian goddess, or Isis the
Egyptian, who would naturally appear black-skinned or
dark; but the large number of images and paintings of
the same kind, yet extant--especially in the Italian
churches--and passing for representations of Mary and
the infant Jesus. Such are the well-known image in the
chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in
the churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other
places. It is difficult not to regard these as very old Pagan
or pre-Christian relics which lingered on into Christian
times and were baptized anew--as indeed we know many
relics and images actually were--into the service of the
Church. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"; and there is
I believe more than one black figure extant of this
Diana, who, though of course a virgin, is represented
with innumerable breasts[1]--not unlike some of the archaic
statues of Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian
times there was, it is said, on the site of the present
Cathedral of Notre Dame, a Temple dedicated to 'our Lady'
Isis; and images belonging to the earlier shrine would
in all probability be preserved with altered name in the
later.

[1] See illustration, p. 30, in Inman's Pagan and Christian
Symbolism.


All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine
of the Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity.
The subject is obscure, and worthy of more consideration
than has yet been accorded it; and I do not feel able to
add anything to the tentative explanations given a page
or two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision
of the Perfect Man hovered dimly over the mind of the
human race on its first emergence from the purely animal
stage; and that a quite natural speculation with
regard to such a being was that he would be born from a
Perfect Woman--who according to early ideas would
necessarily be the Virgin Earth itself, mother of all things.
Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition, slumbering as it
would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great Earth
after giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring
forth a Child who should become the Saviour of the
human race.

There is of course the further theory, entertained by
some, that virgin-parturition--a kind of Parthenogenesis--
has as a matter of fact occasionally occurred among mortal
women, and even still does occur. I should be the last
to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of anything else in Nature),
but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way of PROOF of
any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any
thoroughly attested and verified instance, it would, I
think, be advisable to leave this theory out of account
at present.

But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right
or wrong, and whatever explanation we adopt, there remains
the FACT of the universality over the world of this legend--
affording another instance of the practical solidarity and
continuity of the Pagan Creeds with Christianity.
Prev Next All
Printer Friendly Version | Send this page to a friend | Discuss this Book
Your email address is safe with us. View our Privacy policy.

The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan W.S. Gilbert Category: Plays Sections: 50 What's this? Table of Contents		Fiction Non Fiction Short Stories Poetry Plays Sci Fi Philosophy Biography