The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think,
from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it
will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repetition,
to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the
dawn of humanity on the earth--many hundreds of thousands or perhaps
a million years ago--there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a
gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain
stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena
of religious belief and religious ritual--these phenomena (whether in
the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by
step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution
concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the
strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all
over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have
been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
And the main stages of this psychologic evolution--those at any rate
with which we are here concerned--are Three: the stage of Simple
Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage
which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal
Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be
analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result--but at present I only
desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that
it is from them and from their passage one into another that there
has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange
panorama of humanity's religious evolution--its superstitions and
magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its
incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and
paintings and forms of art and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama
indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with
three great leading motives!
And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of
centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not
radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably
more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or
reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the
consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as
separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.
He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very
near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal
form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general
world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such
a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature.
And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before,
allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and
perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now.
It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same
sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion.
For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher
animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional
privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their
surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There
must have been a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at
any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet
'golden.'
It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.
The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates
(including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that
they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man
fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.
Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these
beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse,
or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them
and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we
could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired
the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age
of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.
And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand)
that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense
of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties
binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it
is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed
the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that
he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of
the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into
consciousness.
(1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between
man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be
found among the lower races."
Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution
of a child--somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)--when the
simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new
element--SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that
(in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So
in the evolution of the human race there has been a period--also marked
and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval
of time--when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of
THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance
of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question
arose: "How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can _I_
do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the
painful, and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added to life.
The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little
eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply
concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with
the larger life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life of
the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken
up.
(1) See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1
and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--where the
same age is tentatively suggested.
I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important that the
reader must excuse repetition. There came an inevitable severance, an
inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting
nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked
across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually)
became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows.
Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property
and possessions, set in. The influences of fellowship and solidarity
grew feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts
were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-activity and
self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were
less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew
louder and more insistent. Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered
his brother and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the Golden Age
closed their gates behind him. He entered upon a period of suffering--a
period of labor and toil and sorrow such as he had never before
known, and such as the animals certainly have never known. And in that
distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage, he
still remains to-day.
Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work. It would be
foolish and useless to rail against the process, or to blame any one for
it. It had to be. Through this dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had
to pass--if only in order at last to find the True Self which was (and
still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed
there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark
the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul's return
to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will
arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of
life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious
long time about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and
Self-conceit and Cruelty and Lust of oppression and domination, which
marks the present period, is past--and it WILL pass--then Humanity will
come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and
peace which has for so long been prophesied.
But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want
the reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old
psychologic unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led
to the whole panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round
himself, necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed
the sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The
sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization
of himself as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his
attributing a similar consciousness of some kind to the great Life
around him. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may
have felt before, it became clear to him now that beings more or less
like himself--though doubtless vaster and more powerful--moved behind
the veil of the visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and
Demons and Gods arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of
this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an
alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin.
If before, he had experienced fear--in the kind of automatic way of
self-preservation in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered
self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble
degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were
not always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived
or thought he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate
persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against
him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by
a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in
other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and
magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense
of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual
of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by
the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue of
ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn
to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of
his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic
meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common life and
remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and
rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and
demonic violence of passions which else indeed might easily rend the
community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early
stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting
this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of
SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet
logical order a whole series of religious institutions and beliefs,
which phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no
means unreal to our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the
psychological process was necessarily of similar general character in
every branch of the human race and all over the world, so the religious
evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much the same complexion
everywhere; and, though they differed in details according to climate
and other influences, ran on such remarkably parallel lines as we have
noted.
Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event,
the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place,
an enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age.
I dwell on the word "began" because I think it is probable that in its
beginnings, and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had
an infantile and very innocent character, quite different from its later
and more aggressive forms--just as we see self-consciousness in a little
child has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful
or grasping boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though
self-consciousness may have begun to appear in the human race at this
very early time (and more or less contemporaneously with the invention
of very rude tools and unformed language), there probably did elapse
a very long period--perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the
evils of this second stage of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller
has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various
branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early
period before the separation of these branches, there are not found
the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of
strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among
mankind AFTER the first formation and use of language.
That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were
APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many
thinkers; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so
very protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact
determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what
might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like
"go-hunting-kill-bear") without reference to individual personalities
and relationships; and that it was only at a later stage that words like
"I" and "Thou" came into use, and the holophrases broke up into "parts
of speech" and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If
true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal
language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals,
preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in
the forms of "I" and "Thou" and the grammar of personal actions and
relations. "They show that the plural and all other forms of number in
grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection
and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'" (3) According
to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, or
in any particular race or section of the human family, must have been
equally slow and hesitating; and it would be easy to imagine, as just
said, that there may have been a very long and 'golden' period at its
beginning, before the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher
forms.
(1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their
simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we
should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not
differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase
and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.
(2) See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's
Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World called
America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness
is associated with the break-up of the holophrase.
(3) Themis, p. 471.
All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are
notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we
take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (homo
primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000
or 40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (homo sapiens) of
the Chellean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and
inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples, and 5,000 years
ago for the first actual historical records that have come down to us,
we may perhaps get something like a proportion between the different
periods. That is to say, half a million years for the purely animal man
in his different forms and grades of evolution. Then somewhere
towards the end of palaeolithic or commencement of neolithic times
Self-consciousness dimly beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow
germination and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic
period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago, and to-day
(we hope), reaching the climax which precedes or foretells its abatement
and transformation.
(2) Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93
and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.
(3) See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.
"Ethnology"; and Havelock Ellis, "The Origin of War," in The Philosophy
of Conflict and other Essays.
No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor periods greatly
LONGER than those here mentioned; but possibly there would be some
agreement as to the RATIO to each other of the times concerned: that
is, the said authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man
(1)-period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter
aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the Second
Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or fiftieth of the time of
the first period; and then--if they looked forward at all to a third
stage--would be inclined for obvious reasons to attribute to that again
a very extended duration.
(1) I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of
contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used it, but
with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as one feels towards
the animals themselves.
However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about
Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate
to the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist,
it is clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means
of expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in
attitudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate ritual,
in fact. (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt,
placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community,
sacramental Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be
expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often
so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.
'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere
flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements
of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or
of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became
a most important part of ritual.
(1) See ch. ix and xi.
So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pass on to
the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and
dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round
about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on
indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present
moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous
systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive
self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society
at large is perishing both in industry and in warfare through the
domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and
ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in
the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching
a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new
inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which
we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary
element of regeneration?
It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry into a further
stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through
some such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of
suffering, the mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSTITUTED, has to die. (1)
Self-consciousness has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new
form. Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring this
about. (2) And what is this new form in which consciousness has to
rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the world during countless
centuries have dated from that fatal attempt to make the little personal
SELF the centre of effort and activity, and since that attempt has
inevitably led to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind
itself and within the body of society, there is nothing left but
the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as its
foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the direct SENSE
AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout creation. The simple mind of
Early Man and the Animals was of that character--a consciousness, so
to speak, continuous through nature, and though running to points of
illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet at no
point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments. (And
it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have
already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct
and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but
clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate character of the
First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly extended
by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of
mentality--the consciousness of the Third Stage.
(1) "The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an
end," says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.
(2) One may remember in this connection the tapas of the Hindu
yogi, or the ordeals of initiates into the pagan Mysteries generally.
In order to understand the operation and qualities of this Third
Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now to consider in what more
or less rudimentary way or ways it figured in the pagan rituals and in
Christianity. We have seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or
the 'Grizzly' tribes of North American Indians in the neighborhood of
Mount Shasta paying their respects and adoration to a captive bear--at
once the food-animal, and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had
slain a bear--and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with
all due ceremonies observed, but privately for his own satisfaction. He
had committed, therefore, a sin theoretically unpardonable; for had he
not--to gratify his personal desire for food--levelled a blow at the
guardian spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from his
fellows by destroying its very symbol? There was only one way by which
he could regain the fellowship of his companions. He must make amends by
some public sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal
for himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan) in a common
feast, while at the same time, tensest prayers and thanks are offered to
the animal for the gift of his body for food. The Magic formula demanded
nothing less than this--else dread disaster would fall upon the man who
sinned, and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred similar
rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology--the first, in which
the individual member simply remains within the compass of the tribal
mind, and only acts in harmony with it; the second, in which the
individual steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an
action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third, in which,
to make amends and to prove his sincerity, he submits to some sacrifice,
and by a common feast or some such ceremony is received back again
into the unity of the fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is
consumed, and the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh,
the Savior of the tribe.
In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit is no longer merely
an Animal, or animal-headed Genius, but a quite human-formed Divinity,
still the same general outline of ideas is preserved--only with gathered
intensity owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The
Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just an ordinary
Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus or Jesus. He is betrayed
by one of his own followers, and suffers death, but rises again
redeeming all with himself in the one fellowship; and the corn and the
wine and the wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the
sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper of reconciliation.
It is always the return to unity which is the ritual of Salvation, and
of which the symbol is the Eucharist--the second birth, the formation of
"a new creature when old things are passed away." For "Except a man be
born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God"; and "the first man is of
the earth, earthly, but the second man is the Lord from heaven." Like
a strange refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this
belief in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a
new birth and the beginning of a new creature: "Rejoice, ye initiates
in the mystery of the liberated god"--rejoice in the thought of the hero
who died as a mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!
Who then was this "Christos" for whom the world was waiting three
centuries before our era (and indeed centuries before that)? Who was
this "thrice Savior" whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the
meaning of that "coming of the Son of Man" whom Daniel beheld in vision
among the clouds of heaven? or of the "perfect man" who, Paul declared,
should deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God? What was this salvation which time after
time and times again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and
which the Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious
dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say "Happy
is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the
hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source
divine"; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally
enthusiastic? (1)
(1) See Farnell's Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194;
also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London,
1897).
Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already said, what
the answer to these questions is? As with the first blossoming of
self-consciousness in the human mind came the dawn of an immense cycle
of experience--a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil
and blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely necessary
and unavoidable--so now the redemption, the return, the restoration has
to come through another forward step, in the same domain. Abandoning
the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to
return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this
'new' life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation, and which
all the expressions which I have just cited have indicated. It is
this presence which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and
Liberator: the daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more
glorious, than all that has gone before that the little candle of the
local self is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the
return into direct touch with Nature and Man--the liberation from the
long exile of separation, from the painful sense of isolation and
the odious nightmare of guilt and 'sin.' Can we doubt that this new
birth--this third stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so--has
to come, that it is indeed not merely a pious hope or a tentative
theory, but a FACT testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the
past--witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic
light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among the arid and
unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a
summer night?
Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness an immense
period, as we have said--perhaps 30,000 years, perhaps even more--has
elapsed. Now, in the present day this period is reaching its
culmination, and though it will not terminate immediately, its end is,
so to speak, in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age behind
us--say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years--evidence has been coming in
(partly in the religious rites recorded, partly in oracles, poems and
prophetic literature) of the onset of this further illumination--"the
light which never was on sea or land"--and the cloud of witnesses,
scattered at first, has in these later centuries become so evident and
so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to anticipate a great
and general new birth, as now not so very far off. (1) (We should,
however, do well to remember, in this connexion, that many a time
already in the history the Millennium has been prophesied, and yet not
arrived punctual to date, and to take to ourselves the words of
'Peter,' who somewhat grievously disappointed at the long-delayed
second coming of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of heaven, wrote in his
second Epistle: "There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking
after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming?
for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were
from the beginning of the creation." (2))
(1) For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke's
remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published
at Philadelphia, 1901).
(2) 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.
I say that all through the historical age behind us there has been
evidence--even though scattered--of salvation and the return of the
Cosmic life. Man has never been so completely submerged in the bitter
sea of self-centredness but what he has occasionally been able to dash
the spray from his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of
heaven. From how far back we cannot say, but from an immense antiquity
come the beautiful myths which indicate this.
Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly hutch;
Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;
Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues
a garment of the sun and stars;
From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe,
and is wedded to the prince of heaven.
How lovely this vision of the little maiden sitting unbeknown close to
the Hearth-fire of the universe--herself indeed just a little spark from
it; despised and rejected; rejected by the world, despised by her two
elder sisters (the body and the intellect); yet she, the soul, though
latest-born, by far the most beautiful of the three. And of the Prince
of Love who redeems and sets her free; and of her wedding garment the
glory and beauty of all nature and of the heavens! The parables of
Jesus are charming in their way, but they hardly reach this height of
inspiration.
Or the world-old myth of Eros and Psyche. How strange that here again
there are three sisters (the three stages of human evolution), and the
latest-born the most beautiful of the three, and the jealousies and
persecutions heaped on the youngest by the others, and especially by
Aphrodite the goddess of mere sensual charm. And again the coming of the
unknown, the unseen Lover, on whom it is not permitted for mortals to
look; and the long, long tests and sufferings and trials which Psyche
has to undergo before Eros may really take her to his arms and translate
her to the heights of heaven. Can we not imagine how when these things
were represented in the Mysteries the world flocked to see them, and the
poets indeed said, "Happy are they that see and seeing can understand?"
Can we not understand how it was that the Amphictyonic decree of the
second century B.C. spoke of these same Mysteries as enforcing the
lesson that "the greatest of human blessings is fellowship and mutual
trust"?