The tradition of a "Golden Age" is widespread over the world, and it is
not necessary to go at any length into the story of the Garden of Eden
and the other legends which in almost every country illustrate this
tradition. Without indulging in sentiment on the subject we may hold it
not unlikely that the tradition is justified by the remembrance, among
the people of every race, of a pre-civilization period of comparative
harmony and happiness when two things, which to-day we perceive to be
the prolific causes of discord and misery, were absent or only weakly
developed--namely, PROPERTY and SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. (1)
(1) For a fuller working out of this, see Civilisation: its Cause
and Cure, by E. Carpenter, ch. i.
During the first century B.C. there was a great spread of Messianic
Ideas over the Roman world, and Virgil's 4th Eclogue, commonly called
the Messianic Eclogue, reflects very clearly this state of the public
mind. The expected babe in the poem was to be the son of Octavian
(Augustus) the first Roman emperor, and a messianic halo surrounded it
in Virgil's verse. Unfortunately it turned out to be a GIRL! However
there is little doubt that Virgil did--in that very sad age of the
world, an age of "misery and massacre," and in common with thousands
of others--look for the coming of a great 'redeemer.' It was only a few
years earlier--about B.C. 70--that the great revolt of the shamefully
maltreated Roman slaves occurred, and that in revenge six thousand
prisoners from Spartacus' army were nailed on crosses all the way from
Rome to Capua (150 miles). But long before this Hesiod had recorded a
past Golden Age when life had been gracious in communal fraternity and
joyful in peace, when human beings and animals spoke the same language,
when death had followed on sleep, without old age or disease, and after
death men had moved as good daimones or genii over the lands. Pindar,
three hundred years after Hesiod, had confirmed the existence of the
Islands of the Blest, where the good led a blameless, tearless, life.
Plato the same, (1) with further references to the fabled island of
Atlantis; the Egyptians believed in a former golden age under the god
R[a^] to which they looked back with regret and envy; the Persians had
a garden of Eden similar to that of the Hebrews; the Greeks a garden
of the Hesperides, in which dwelt the serpent whose head was ultimately
crushed beneath the heel of Hercules; and so on. The references to a
supposed far-back state of peace and happiness are indeed numerous.
(1) See arts. by Margaret Scholes, Socialist Review, Nov. and
Dec. 1912.
So much so that latterly, and partly to explain their prevalence, a
theory has been advanced which may be worth while mentioning. It is
called the "Theory of intra-uterine Blessedness," and, remote as it may
at first appear, it certainly has some claim for attention. The theory
is that in the minds of mature people there still remain certain vague
memories of their pre-natal days in the maternal womb--memories of a
life which, though full of growing vigor and vitality, was yet at that
time one of absolute harmony with the surroundings, and of perfect peace
and contentment, spent within the body of the mother--the embryo indeed
standing in the same relation to the mother as St. Paul says WE stand to
God, "IN whom we live and move and have our being"; and that these vague
memories of the intra-uterine life in the individual are referred back
by the mature mind to a past age in the life of the RACE. Though it
would not be easy at present to positively confirm this theory, yet one
may say that it is neither improbable nor unworthy of consideration;
also that it bears a certain likeness to the former ones about the
Eden-gardens, etc. The well-known parallelism of the Individual history
with the Race-history, the "recapitulation" by the embryo of the
development of the race, does in fact afford an additional argument for
its favorable reception.
These considerations, and what we have said so often in the foregoing
chapters about the unity of the Animals (and Early Man) with Nature, and
their instinctive and age-long adjustment to the conditions of the
world around them, bring us up hard and fast against the following
conclusions, which I think we shall find difficult to avoid.
We all recognize the extraordinary grace and beauty, in their different
ways, of the (wild) animals; and not only their beauty but the extreme
fitness of their actions and habits to their surroundings--their subtle
and penetrating Intelligence in fact. Only we do not generally use
the word "Intelligence." We use another word (Instinct)--and rightly
perhaps, because their actions are plainly not the result of definite
self-conscious reasoning, such as we use, carried out by each
individual; but are (as has been abundantly proved by Samuel Butler and
others) the systematic expression of experiences gathered up and sorted
out and handed down from generation to generation in the bosom of the
race--an Intelligence in fact, or Insight, of larger subtler scope than
the other, and belonging to the tribal or racial Being rather than to
the isolated individual--a super-consciousness in fact, ramifying afar
in space and time.
But if we allow (as we must) this unity and perfection of nature, and
this somewhat cosmic character of the mind, to exist among the Animals,
we can hardly refuse to believe that there must have been a period when
Man, too, hardly as yet differentiated from them, did himself
possess these same qualities--perhaps even in greater degree than the
animals--of grace and beauty of body, perfection of movement and action,
instinctive perception and knowledge (of course in limited spheres); and
a period when he possessed above all a sense of unity with his fellows
and with surrounding Nature which became the ground of a common
consciousness between himself and his tribe, similar to that which
Maeterlinck, in the case of the Bees, calls the Spirit of the Hive. (1)
It would be difficult, nay impossible, to suppose that human beings
on their first appearance formed an entire exception in the process of
evolution, or that they were completely lacking in the very graces and
faculties which we so admire in the animals--only of course we see that
(LIKE the animals) they would not be SELF-conscious in these matters,
and what perception they had of their relations to each other or to
the world around them would be largely inarticulate and
SUB-conscious--though none the less real for that.
(1) See The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck; and for
numerous similar cases among other animals, P. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: a
factor in Evolution.
Let us then grant this preliminary assumption--and it clearly is not
a large or hazardous one--and what follows? It follows--since to-day
discord is the rule, and Man has certainly lost the grace, both physical
and mental, of the animals--that at some period a break must have
occurred in the evolution-process, a discontinuity--similar perhaps to
that which occurs in the life of a child at the moment when it is born
into the world. Humanity took a new departure; but a departure which for
the moment was signalized as a LOSS--the loss of its former harmony and
self-adjustment. And the cause or accompaniment of this change was the
growth of Self-consciousness. Into the general consciousness of the
tribe (in relation to its environment) which in fact had constituted
the mentality of the animals and of man up to this stage, there now was
intruded another kind of consciousness, a consciousness centering round
each little individual self and concerned almost entirely with the
interests of the latter. Here was evidently a threat to the continuance
of the former happy conditions. It was like the appearance of
innumerable little ulcers in a human body--a menace which if continued
would inevitably lead to the break-up of the body. It meant loss of
tribal harmony and nature-adjustment. It meant instead of unity a myriad
conflicting centres; it meant alienation from the spirit of the tribe,
the separation of man from man, discord, recrimination, and the fatal
unfolding of the sense of sin. The process symbolized itself in the
legend of the Fall. Man ate of the Tree of the knowledge of good and
evil. Sometimes people wonder why knowledge of any kind--and especially
the knowledge of good and evil--should have brought a curse. But the
reason is obvious. Into, the placid and harmonious life of the animal
and human tribes fulfilling their days in obedience to the slow
evolutions and age-long mandates of nature, Self-consciousness broke
with its inconvenient and impossible query: "How do these arrangements
suit ME? Are they good for me, are they evil for me? I want to know. I
WILL KNOW!" Evidently knowledge (such knowledge as we understand by
the word) only began, and could only begin, by queries relating to the
little local self. There was no other way for it to begin. Knowledge and
self-consciousness were born, as twins, together. Knowledge therefore
meant Sin (1); for self-consciousness meant sin (and it means sin
to-day). Sin is Separation. That is probably (though disputed) the
etymology of the word--that which sunders. (2) The essence of sin is
one's separation from the whole (the tribe or the god) of which one is
a part. And knowledge--which separates subject from object, and in its
inception is necessarily occupied with the 'good and evil' of the little
local self, is the great engine of this separation. (Mark! I say nothing
AGAINST this association of Self-consciousness with 'Sin' (so-called)
and 'Knowledge' (so-called). The growth of all three together is an
absolutely necessary part of human evolution, and to rail against it
would be absurd. But we may as well open our eyes and see the fact
straight instead of blinking it.) The culmination of the process and the
fulfilment of the 'curse' we may watch to-day in the towering expansion
of the self-conscious individualized Intellect--science as the handmaid
of human Greed devastating the habitable world and destroying its
unworthy civilization. And the process must go on--necessarily must
go on--until Self-consciousness, ceasing its vain quest (vain in both
senses) for the separate domination of life, surrenders itself back
again into the arms of the Mother-consciousness from which it originally
sprang--surrenders itself back, not to be merged in nonentity, but to be
affiliated in loving dependence on and harmony with the cosmic life.
(1) Compare also other myths, like Cupid and Psyche, Lohengrin
etc., in which a fatal curiosity leads to tragedy.
(2) German Sunde, sin, and sonder, separated; Dutch zonde, sin;
Latin sons, guilty. Not unlikely that the German root Suhn, expiation,
is connected; Suhn-bock, a scape-goat.
All this I have dealt with in far more detail in Civilization: its
Cause and Cure, and in The Art of Creation; but I have only repeated the
outline of it as above, because some such outline is necessary for the
proper ordering and understanding of the points which follow.
We are not concerned now with the ultimate effects of the 'Fall' of Man
or with the present-day fulfilment of the Eden-curse. What we want to
understand is how the 'Fall' into self-consciousness led to that great
panorama of Ritual and Religion which we have very briefly described
and summarized in the preceding chapters of this book. We want for the
present to fix our attention on the COMMENCEMENT of that process by
which man lapsed away from his living community with Nature and his
fellows into the desert of discord and toil, while the angels of the
flaming sword closed the gates of Paradise behind him.
It is evident I think that in that 'golden' stage when man was simply
the crown and perfection of the animals--and it is hardly possible
to refuse the belief in such a stage--he possessed in reality all the
essentials of Religion. (1) It is not necessary to sentimentalize over
him; he was probably raw and crude in his lusts of hunger and of sex;
he was certainly ignorant and superstitious; he loved fighting with
and persecuting 'enemies' (which things of course all religions
to-day--except perhaps the Buddhist--love to do); he was dominated often
by unreasoning Fear, and was consequently cruel. Yet he was full of that
Faith which the animals have to such an admirable degree--unhesitating
faith in the inner promptings of his OWN nature; he had the joy which
comes of abounding vitality, springing up like a fountain whose outlet
is free and unhindered; he rejoiced in an untroubled and unbroken
sense of unity with his Tribe, and in elaborate social and friendly
institutions within its borders; he had a marvelous sense-acuteness
towards Nature and a gift in that direction verging towards
"second-sight"; strengthened by a conviction--which had never become
CONSCIOUS because it had never been QUESTIONED--of his own personal
relation to the things outside him, the Earth, the Sky, the Vegetation,
the Animals. Of such a Man we get glimpses in the far past--though
indeed only glimpses, for the simple reason that all our knowledge of
him comes through civilized channels; and wherever civilization has
touched these early peoples it has already withered and corrupted
them, even before it has had the sense to properly observe them. It
is sufficient, however, just to mention peoples like some of the early
Pacific Islanders, the Zulus and Kafirs of South Africa, the Fans of the
Congo Region (of whom Winwood Reade (2) speaks so highly), some of the
Malaysian and Himalayan tribes, the primitive Chinese, and even the
evidence with regard to the neolithic peoples of Europe, (3) in order to
show what I mean.
(1) See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths, etc., introduction: "The
primitive life of humanity, in so far as it is not purely animal, is
religious. Religion is the parent stem which has thrown off, one by one,
art, agriculture, law, morality, politics, etc."
(2) Savage Africa, ch. xxxvii.
(3) See Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, ch. iii.
Perhaps one of the best ideas of the gulf of difference between the
semi-civilized and the quite primal man is given by A. R. Wallace in
his Life (Vol. i, p. 288): "A most unexpected sensation of surprise and
delight was my first meeting and living with man in a state of nature
with absolute uncontaminated savages! This was on the Uaupes river....
They were all going about their own work or pleasure, which had nothing
to do with the white men or their ways; they walked with the free step
of the independent forest-dweller... original and self-sustaining as the
wild animals of the forests, absolutely independent of civilization...
living their own lives in their own way, as they had done for countless
generations before America was discovered. Indeed the true denizen of
the Amazonian forests, like the forest itself, is unique and not to be
forgotten." Elsewhere (3) Wallace speaks of the quiet, good-natured,
inoffensive character of these copper-colored peoples, and of their
quickness of hand and skill, and continues: "their figures are generally
superb; and I have never felt so much pleasure in gazing at the finest
statue as at these living illustrations of the beauty of the human
form."
(3) Travels on the Amazon (1853), ch. xvii.
Though some of the peoples just mentioned may be said to belong to
different grades or stages of human evolution and physically some no
doubt were far superior to others, yet they mostly exhibit this simple
grace of the bodily and mental organism, as well as that closeness of
tribal solidarity of which I have spoken. The immense antiquity, of
the clan organization, as shown by investigations into early marriage,
points to the latter conclusion. Travellers among Bushmen, Hottentots,
Fuegians, Esquimaux, Papuans and other peoples--peoples who have been
pushed aside into unfavorable areas by the invasion of more warlike
and better-equipped races, and who have suffered physically in
consequence--confirm this. Kropotkin, speaking of the Hottentots, quotes
the German author P. Kolben who travelled among them in 1275 or so. "He
knew the Hottentots well and did not pass by their defects in silence,
but could not praise their tribal morality highly enough. Their word is
sacred, he wrote, they know nothing of the corruption and faithless arts
of Europe. They live in great tranquillity and are seldom at war with
their neighbors, and are all kindness and goodwill to one another." (1)
Kropotkin further says: "Let me remark that when Kolben says 'they are
certainly the most friendly, the most liberal and the most benevolent
people to one another that ever appeared on the earth' he wrote a
sentence which has continually appeared since in the description of
savages. When first meeting with primitive races, the Europeans usually
make a caricature of their life; but when an intelligent man has
stayed among them for a longer time he generally describes them as the
'kindest' or the 'gentlest' race on the earth. These very same words
have been applied to the Ostyaks, the Samoyedes, the Eskimos, the Dyaks,
the Aleuts, the Papuans, and so on, by the highest authorities. I also
remember having read them applied to the Tunguses, the Tchuktchis, the
Sioux, and several others. The very frequency of that high commendation
already speaks volumes in itself." (2)
(1) P. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, p. 90. W. J. Solias also speaks in
terms of the highest praise of the Bushmen--"their energy, patience,
courage, loyalty, affection, good manners and artistic sense" (Ancient
Hunters, 1915, p. 425).
(2) Ibid, p. 91.
Many of the tribes, like the Aleuts, Eskimos, Dyaks, Papuans, Fuegians,
etc., are themselves in the Neolithic stage of culture--though for the
reason given above probably degenerated physically from the standard of
their neolithic ancestors; and so the conclusion is forced upon one
that there must have been an IMMENSE PERIOD, (1) prior to the first
beginnings of 'civilization,' in which the human tribes in general led a
peaceful and friendly life on the earth, comparatively little broken
up by dissensions, in close contact with Nature and in that degree
of sympathy with and understanding of the Animals which led to the
establishment of the Totem system. Though it would be absurd to credit
these tribes with any great degree of comfort and well-being according
to our modern standards, yet we may well suppose that the memory of
this long period lingered on for generations and generations and was
ultimately idealized into the Golden Age, in contrast to the succeeding
period of everlasting warfare, rancor and strife, which came in with the
growth of Property with its greeds and jealousies, and the accentuation
of Self-consciousness with all its vanities and ambitions.
(1) See for estimates of periods ch. xiv; also, for the
peacefulness of these early peoples, Havelock Ellis on "The Origin of
War," where he says "We do not find the WEAPONS of warfare or the WOUNDS
of warfare among these Palaeolithic remains ... it was with civilization
that the art of killing developed, i. e. within the last 10,000 or
12,000 years when Neolithic men (who became our ancestors) were just
arriving."
I say that each tribe at this early stage of development had within it
the ESSENTIALS of what we call Religion--namely a bedrock sense of its
community with Nature, and of the Common life among its members--a sense
so intimate and fundamental that it was hardly aware of itself (any more
than the fish is aware of the sea in which it lives), but yet was really
the matrix of tribal thought and the spring of tribal action. It
was this sense of unity which was destined by the growth of
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS to come to light and evidence in the shape of all
manner of rituals and ceremonials; and by the growth of the IMAGINATIVE
INTELLECT to embody itself in the figures and forms of all manner of
deities.
Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark soaring in the
eye of the sun, and singing rapt between its "heaven and home" realizes
no doubt in actual fact all that those two words mean to us; yet
its realization is quite subconscious. It does not define its own
experience: it FEELS but it does not THINK. In order to come to the
stage of THINKING it would perhaps be necessary that the lark should
be exiled from the earth and the sky, and confined in a cage. Early Man
FELT the great truths and realities of Life--often I believe more purely
than we do--but he could not give form to his experience. THAT stage
came when he began to lose touch with these realities; and it showed
itself in rites and ceremonials. The inbreak of self-consciousness
brought OUT the facts of his inner life into ritualistic and afterwards
into intellectual forms.
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.