personified, as was that between life and death, destruction and
re-creation; in allegories and fables which poetically represented the
apparent course of the Sun; who, descending toward the Southern
Hemisphere, was figuratively said to be conquered and put to death by
darkness, or the genius of Evil; but, returning again toward the
Northern Hemisphere, he seemed to be victorious, and to arise from the
tomb. This death and resurrection were also figurative of the succession
of day and night, of death, which is a necessity of life, and of life
which is born of death; and everywhere the ancients still saw the combat
between the two Principles that ruled the world. Everywhere this contest
was embodied in allegories and fictitious histories: into which were
ingeniously woven all the astronomical phenomena that accompanied,
preceded, or followed the different movements of the Sun, and the
changes of Seasons, the approach or withdrawal of inundation. And thus
grew into stature and strange proportions the histories of the contests
between Typhon and Osiris, Hercules and Juno, the Titans and Jupiter,
Ormuzd and Ahriman, the rebellious Angels and the Deity, the Evil Genii
and the Good; and the other like fables, found not only in Asia, but in
the North of Europe, and even among the Mexicans and Peruvians of the
New World; carried thither, in all probability, by those Phœnician
voyagers who bore thither civilization and the arts. The Scythians
lamented the death of Acmon, the Persians that of Zohak conquered by
Pheridoun, the Hindūs that of Soura-Parama slain by Soupra-Muni, as the
Scandinavians did that of Balder, torn to pieces by the blind Hother.
The primitive idea of infinite space existed in the first men, as it
exists in us. It and the idea of infinite time are the first two innate
ideas. Man cannot conceive how thing can be added to thing, or event
follow event, forever. The idea will ever return, that no matter how
long bulk is added to bulk, there must be, still beyond, an empty void
_without_ limit; in which is _nothing_. In the same way the idea of time
without beginning or end forces itself on him. _Time_, without events,
is also a _void_, and _nothing_.
In that empty void space the primitive men knew there was no light nor
warmth. They _felt_, what we know scientifically, that there must be a
thick darkness there, and an intensity of cold of which we have no
conception. Into that void they thought the Sun, the Planets, and the
Stars went down when they set under the Western Horizon. Darkness was to
them an enemy, a harm, a vague dread and terror. It was the very
embodiment of the evil principle; and out of it they said that he was
formed. As the Sun bent Southward toward that void, they shuddered with
dread: and when, at the Winter Solstice, he again commenced his
Northward march, they rejoiced and feasted; as they did at the Summer
Solstice, when most he appeared to smile upon them in his pride of
place. These days have been celebrated by all civilized nations ever
since. The Christian has made them feast-days of the church, and
appropriated them to the two Saints John; and Masonry has done the same.
We, to whom the vast Universe has become but a great _machine_, not
instinct with a great SOUL, but a _clockwork_ of proportions
unimaginable, but still infinitely less than infinite; and part at least
of which we with our orreries can imitate; we, who have measured the
distances and dimensions, and learned the specific gravity and
determined the orbits of the moon and the planets; we, who know the
distance to the sun, and his size; have measured the orbits of the
flashing comets, and the distances of the fixed stars; and know the
latter to be suns like our sun, each with his retinue of worlds, and all
governed by the same unerring, mechanical laws and outwardly imposed
forces, centripetal and centrifugal; we, who with our telescopes have
separated the galaxy and the nebulae into other stars and groups of
stars; discovered new planets, by first discovering their disturbing
forces upon those already known; and learned that they all, Jupiter,
Venus, and the fiery Mars, and Saturn and the others, as well as the
bright, mild, and ever-changing Moon, are mere dark, dull opaque clods
like our earth, and not living orbs of brilliant fire and heavenly
light; we, who have counted the mountains and chasms in the moon, with
glasses that could distinctly reveal to us the temple of Solomon, if it
stood there in its old original glory; we, who no longer imagine that
the stars control our destinies, and who can calculate the eclipses of
the sun and moon, backward and forward, for ten thousand years; we, with
our vastly increased conceptions of the powers of the Grand Architect of
the Universe, but our wholly material and mechanical view of that
Universe itself; we cannot, even in the remotest degree, _feel_, though
we may partially and imperfectly _imagine_, how those great, primitive,
simple-hearted children of Nature felt in regard to the Starry Hosts,
there upon the slopes of the Himalayas, on the Chaldean plains, in the
Persian and Median deserts, and upon the banks of that great, strange
River, the Nile. To them the Universe was _alive_--instinct with forces
and powers, mysterious and beyond their comprehension. To them it was no
machine, no great system of clockwork; but a great live creature, an
army of creatures, in sympathy with or inimical to man. To them, all was
a mystery and a miracle, and the stars flashing overhead spoke to their
hearts almost in an audible language. Jupiter, with his kingly
splendors, was the Emperor of the starry legions. Venus looked lovingly
on the earth and blessed it; Mars, with his crimson fires, threatened
war and misfortune; and Saturn, cold and grave, chilled and repelled
them. The ever-changing Moon, faithful companion of the Sun, was a
constant miracle and wonder; the Sun himself the visible emblem of the
creative and generative power. To them the earth was a great plain, over
which the sun, the moon, and the planets revolved, its servants, framed
to give it light. Of the stars, some were beneficent existences that
brought with them Spring-time and fruits and flowers,--some, faithful
sentinels, advising them of coming inundation, of the season of storm
and of deadly winds; some heralds of evil, which, steadily foretelling,
they seemed to cause. To them the eclipses were portents of evil, and
their causes hidden in mystery, and supernatural. The regular returns of
the stars, the comings of Arcturus, Orion, Sirius, the Pleiades, and
Aldebaran, and the journeyings of the Sun, were voluntary and not
mechanical to them. What wonder that astronomy became to them the most
important of sciences; that those who learned it became rulers; and that
vast edifices, the Pyramids, the tower or temple of Bel, and other like
erections everywhere in the East, were builded for astronomical
purposes?--and what wonder that, in their great child-like simplicity,
they worshipped Light, the Sun, the Planets, and the Stars, and
personified them, and eagerly believed in the histories invented for
them; in that age when the capacity for belief was infinite; as indeed,
if we but reflect, it still is and ever will be?
If we adhered to the literally historic sense, antiquity would be a mere
inexplicable, hideous chaos, and all the Sages deranged: and so it would
be with Masonry and those who instituted it. But when these allegories
are explained, they cease to be absurd fables, or facts purely local;
and become lessons of wisdom for entire humanity. No one can doubt, who
studies them, that they all came from a common source.
And he greatly errs who imagines that, because the mythological legends
and fables of antiquity are referable to and have their foundation in
the phenomena of the Heavens, and all the Heathen Gods are but mere
names given to the Sun, the Stars, the Planets, the Zodiacal Signs, the
Elements, the Powers of Nature, and Universal Nature herself, therefore
the first men worshipped the Stars, and whatever things, animate and
inanimate, seemed to them to possess and exercise a power or influence,
evident or imagined, over human fortunes and human destiny.
For ever, in all the nations, ascending to the remotest antiquity to
which the light of History or the glimmerings of tradition reach, we
find, seated above all the gods which represent the luminaries and the
elements, and those which personify the innate Powers of universal
nature, a still higher Deity, silent, undefined, incomprehensible, the
Supreme, one God, from Whom all the rest flow or emanate, or by Him are
created. Above the Time-God Horus, the Moon-Goddess or Earth-Goddess
Isis, and the Sun-God Osiris, of the Egyptians, was Amun, the
Nature-God; and above him, again, the Infinite, Incomprehensible Deity,
ATHOM. BREHM, the silent, self-contemplative, one original God, was the
Source, to the Hindūs, of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. Above Zeus, or
before him, were Kronos and Ouranos. Over the Alohayim was the great
Nature-God AL, and still beyond him, Abstract Existence, IHUH--He that
IS, WAS, and SHALL BE. Above all the Persian Deities was the Unlimited
Time, ZERUANE-AKHERENE; and over Odin and Thor was the Great
Scandinavian Deity ALFADIR.
The worship of Universal Nature as a God was too near akin to the
worship of a Universal Soul, to have been the instinctive creed of any
savage people or rude race of men. To imagine all nature with all its
apparently independent parts, as forming one consistent whole, and as
itself a unit, required an amount of experience and a faculty of
generalization not possessed by the rude uncivilized mind, and is but a
step below the idea of a universal Soul.
In the beginning man had the WORD; and that WORD was from God; and out
of the living POWER communicated to man in and by that WORD, came THE
LIGHT of His Existence.
God made man in His own likeness. When, by a long succession of
geological changes, He had prepared the earth to be his habitation, He
created him, and placed him in that part of Asia which all the old
nations agreed in calling the cradle of the human race, and whence
afterward the stream of human life flowed forth to India, China, Egypt,
Persia, Arabia, and Phœnicia. HE communicated to him a knowledge of the
nature of his Creator, and of the pure, primitive, undefiled religion.
The peculiar and distinctive excellence and real essence of the
primitive man, and his true nature and destiny, consisted in his
likeness to God. HE stamped His own image upon man's soul. That image
has been, in the breast of every individual man and of mankind in
general, greatly altered, impaired, and defaced; but its old,
half-obliterated characters are still to be found on all the pages of
primitive history; and the impress, not entirely effaced, every
reflecting mind may discover in its own interior.
Of the original revelation to mankind, of the primitive WORD of Divine
TRUTH, we find clear indications and scattered traces in the sacred
traditions of all the primitive Nations; traces which when separately
examined, appear like the broken remnants, the mysterious and
hieroglyphic characters, of a mighty edifice that has been destroyed;
and its fragments, like those of the old Temples and Palaces of Nimroud,
wrought incongruously into edifices many centuries younger. And,
although amid the ever-growing degeneracy of mankind, this primeval word
of revelation was falsified by the admixture of various errors, and
overlaid and obscured by numberless and manifold fictions, inextricably
confused, and disfigured almost beyond the power of recognition, still a
profound inquiry will discover in heathenism many luminous vestiges of
primitive Truth.
For the old Heathenism had everywhere a foundation in Truth; and if we
could separate that pure intuition into nature and into the simple
symbols of nature, that constituted the basis of all Heathenism, from
the alloy of error and the additions of fiction, those first
hieroglyphic traits of the instinctive science of the first men, would
be found to agree with truth and a true knowledge of nature, and to
afford an image of a free, pure, comprehensive, and finished philosophy
of life.
The struggle, thenceforward to be eternal, between the Divine will and
the natural will in the souls of men, commenced immediately after the
creation. Cain slew his brother Abel, and went forth to people parts of
the earth with an impious race, forgetters and defiers of the true God.
The other Descendants of the Common Father of the race intermarried with
the daughters of Cain's Descendants: and all nations preserved the
remembrance of that division of the human family into the righteous and
impious, in their distorted legends of the wars between the Gods, and
the Giants and Titans. When, afterward, another similar division
occurred, the Descendants of Seth alone preserved the true primitive
religion and science, and transmitted them to posterity in the ancient
symbolical character, on monuments of stone: and many nations preserved
in their legendary traditions the memory of the columns of Enoch and
Seth.
Then the world declined from its original happy condition and fortunate
estate, into idolatry and barbarism: but all nations retained the memory
of that old estate; and the poets, in those early days the only
historians, commemorated the succession of the ages of gold, silver,
brass, and iron.
In the lapse of those ages, the sacred tradition followed various
courses among each of the most ancient nations; and from its original
source, as from a common centre, its various streams flowed downward;
some diffusing through favored regions of the world fertility and life;
but others soon losing themselves, and being dried up in the sterile
sands of human error.
After the internal and Divine WORD originally communicated by God to
man, had become obscured; after man's connection with his Creator had
been broken, even outward language necessarily fell into disorder and
confusion. The simple and Divine Truth was overlaid with various and
sensual fictions, buried under illusive symbols, and at last perverted
into horrible phantoms.
For in the progress of idolatry it needs came to pass, that what was
originally revered as the symbol of a higher principle, became gradually
confounded or identified with the object itself, and was worshipped;
until this error led to a more degraded form of idolatry. The early
nations received much from the primeval source of sacred tradition; but
that haughty pride which seems an inherent part of human nature led each
to represent these fragmentary relics of original truth as a possession
peculiar to themselves; thus exaggerating their value, and their own
importance, as peculiar favorites of the Deity, who had chosen them as
the favored people to whom to commit these truths. To make these
fragments, as far as possible, their private property, they reproduced
them under peculiar forms, wrapped them up in symbols, concealed them in
allegories, and invented fables to account for their own special
possession of them. So that, instead of preserving in their primitive
simplicity and purity these blessings of original revelation, they
overlaid them with poetical ornament; and the whole wears a fabulous
aspect, until by close and severe examination we discover the truth
which the apparent fable contains.
These being the conflicting elements in the breast of man; the old
inheritance or original dowry of truth, imparted to him by God in the
primitive revelation; and error, or the foundation for error, in his
degraded sense and spirit now turned from God to nature, false faiths
easily sprung up and grew rank and luxuriant, when the Divine Truth was
no longer guarded with jealous care, nor preserved in its pristine
purity. This soon happened among most Eastern nations, and especially
the Indians, the Chaldeans, the Arabians, the Persians, and the
Egyptians; with whom imagination, and a very deep but still sensual
feeling for nature, were very predominant. The Northern firmament,
visible to their eyes, possesses by far the largest and most brilliant
constellations; and they were more alive to the impressions made by such
objects, than are the men of the present day.
With the Chinese, a patriarchal, simple, and secluded people, idolatry
long made but little progress. They invented writing within three or
four generations after the flood; and they long preserved the memory of
much of the primitive revelation; less overlaid with fiction than those
fragments which other nations have remembered. They were among those who
stood nearest to the source of sacred tradition; and many passages in
their old writings contain remarkable vestiges of eternal truth, and of
the WORD of primitive revelation, the heritage of old thought, which
attest to us their original eminence.
But among the other early nations, a wild enthusiasm and a sensual
idolatry of nature soon superseded the simple worship of the Almighty
God, and set aside or disfigured the pure belief in the Eternal
Uncreated Spirit. The great powers and elements of nature, and the vital
principle of production and procreation through all generations; then
the celestial spirits or heavenly Host, the luminous armies of the
Stars, and the great Sun, and mysterious, ever-changing Moon (all of
which the whole ancient world regarded not as mere globes of light or
bodies of fire, but as animated living substances, potent over man's
fate and destinies); next the genii and tutelar spirits, and even the
souls of the dead, received divine worship. The animals, representing
the starry constellations, first reverenced as symbols merely, came to
be worshipped as gods; the heavens, earth, and the operations of nature
were personified; and fictitious personages invented to account for the
introduction of science and arts, and the fragments of the old religious
truths; and the good and bad principles personified, became also objects
of worship; while, through all, still shone the silver threads of the
old primitive revelation.
Increasing familiarity with early oriental records seems more and more
to confirm the probability that they all originally emanated from one
source. The eastern and southern slopes of the Paropismus, or
Hindukusch, appear to have been inhabited by kindred Iranian races,
similar in habits, language, and religion. The earliest Indian and
Persian Deities are for the most part symbols of celestial light, their
agency being regarded as an eternal warfare with the powers of Winter,
storm, and darkness. The religion of both was originally a worship of
outward nature, especially the manifestations of fire and light; the
coincidences being too marked to be merely accidental. Deva, God, is
derived from the root _div_, to shine. Indra, like Ormuzd or
Ahura-Mazda, is the bright firmament; Sura or Surya, the Heavenly, a
name of the Sun, recurs in the Zend word Huare, the Sun, whence Khur and
Khorshid or Corasch. Uschas and Mitra are Medic as well as Zend Deities
and the Amschaspands or "immortal Holy Ones" of the Zend-Avesta may be
compared with the seven Rishis or Vedic Star-God, of the constellation
of the Bear. Zoroastrianism, like Buddhism, was an innovation in regard
to an older religion; and between the Parsee and Brahmin may be found
traces of disruption as well as of coincidence. The original
Nature-worship, in which were combined the conceptions both of a
Universal Presence and perpetuity of action, took different directions
of development, according to the difference between the Indian and
Persian mind.
The early shepherds of the Punjaub, then called the country of the Seven
Rivers, to whose intuitional or inspired wisdom (Veda) we owe what are
perhaps the most ancient religious effusions extant in any language,
apostrophized as living beings the physical objects of their worship.
First in this order of Deities stands Indra, the God of the "blue" or
"glittering" firmament, called Devaspiti, Father of the Devas or
Elemental Powers, who measured out the circle of the sky, and made fast
the foundations of the Earth; the ideal domain of Varouna, "the
All-encompasser," is almost equally extensive, including air, water,
night, the expanse between Heaven and Earth; Agni, who lives on the fire
of the sacrifice, on the domestic hearth, and in the lightnings of the
sky, is the great Mediator between God and Man; Uschas, or the Dawn,
leads forth the Gods in the morning to make their daily repast in the
intoxicating Soma of Nature's offertory, of which the Priest could only
compound, from simples a symbolical imitation. Then came the various
Sun-Gods, Adityas or Solar Attributes, Surya the Heavenly, Savitri the
Progenitor, Pashan the Nourisher, Bagha the Felicitous, and Mitra the
Friend.
The coming forth of the Eternal Being to the work of creation was
represented as a marriage, his first emanation being a universal mother,
supposed to have potentially existed with him from Eternity, or, in
metaphorical language, to have been "his sister and his spouse." She
became eventually promoted to be the Mother of the Indian Trinity, of
the Deity under His three Attributes, of Creation, Preservation, and
Change or Regeneration.
The most popular forms or manifestations of Vishnu the Preserver, were
his successive avataras or historic impersonations, which represented
the Deity coming forth out of the incomprehensible mystery of His
nature, and revealing Himself at those critical epochs which either in
the physical or moral world seemed to mark a new commencement of
prosperity and order. Combating the power of Evil in the various
departments of Nature, and in successive periods of time, the Divinity,
though varying in form, is ever in reality the same, whether seen in
useful agricultural or social inventions, in traditional victories over
rival creeds, or in physical changes faintly discovered through
tradition, or suggested by cosmogonical theory. As Rama, the Epic hero
armed with sword, club, and arrows, the prototype of Hercules and
Mithras, he wrestles like the Hebrew Patriarch with the Powers of
Darkness; as Chrishna-Govinda, the Divine Shepherd, he is the Messenger
of Peace, overmastering the world by music and love. Under the human
form he never ceases to be the Supreme Being. "The foolish" (he says, in
Bhagavad Ghita), "unacquainted with my Supreme Nature, despise me in
this human form, while men of great minds, enlightened by the Divine
principle within them, acknowledge me as incorruptible and before all
things, and serve me with undivided hearts." "I am not recognized by
all," he says again, "because concealed by the supernatural power which
is in me; yet to me are known all things past, present, and to come; I
existed before Vaivaswata and Menou. I am the Most High God, the Creator
of the World, the Eternal Poorooscha (Man-World or Genius of the World).
And although in my own nature I am exempt from liability to birth or
death, and am Lord of all created things, yet as often as in the world
virtue is enfeebled, and vice and injustice prevail, so often do I
become manifest and am revealed from age to age, to save the just, to
destroy the guilty, and to reassure the faltering steps of virtue. He
who acknowledgeth me as even so, doth not on quitting this mortal frame
enter into another, for he entereth into me; and many who have trusted
in me have already entered into me, being purified by the power of
wisdom. I help those who walk in my path, even as they serve me."
Brahma, the creating agent, sacrificed himself, when, by descending into
material forms, he became incorporated with his work; and his
mythological history was interwoven with that of the Universe. Thus,
although spiritually allied to the Supreme, and Lord of all creatures
(Prajapati), he shared the imperfection and corruption of an inferior
nature, and, steeped in manifold and perishable forms, might be said,
like the Greek Uranus, to be mutilated and fallen. He thus combined two
characters, formless form, immortal and mortal, being and non-being,
motion and rest. As Incarnate Intelligence, or THE WORD, he communicated
to man what had been revealed to himself by the Eternal, since he is
creation's Soul as well as Body, within which the Divine Word is written
in those living letters which it is the prerogative of the
self-conscious spirit to interpret.
The fundamental principles of the religion of the Hindūs consisted in
the belief in the existence of One Being only, of the immortality of the
soul, and of a future state of rewards and punishments. Their precepts
of morality inculcate the practice of virtue as necessary for procuring
happiness even in this transient life; and their religious doctrines
make their felicity in a future state to depend upon it.