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.