A PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN INTERPRETATIVE MEMORY
Several years ago, during a winter spent in Egypt, I found within
myself an unexpected tendency to interpret racial and historic
experiences through personal reminiscences. I am therefore venturing to
record in this closing chapter my inevitable conclusion that a sincere
portrayal of a widespread and basic emotional experience, however
remote in point of time it may be, has the power overwhelmingly to
evoke memories of like moods in the individual.
The unexpected revival in my memory of long-forgotten experiences may
have been due partly to the fact that we have so long been taught
that the temples and tombs of ancient Egypt are the very earliest of
the surviving records of ideas and men, that we approach them with a
certain sense of familiarity, quite ready to claim a share in these
“family papers and title deeds of the race.”
We also consider it probable that these primitive human records
will stir within us certain early states of consciousness, having
learned, with the readiness which so quickly attaches itself to the
pseudo-scientific phrase, that every child repeats in himself the
history of the race. Nevertheless, what I, at least, was totally
unprepared to encounter, was the constant revival of primitive and
overpowering emotions which I had experienced so long ago that they had
become absolutely detached from myself and seemed to belong to some one
else--to a small person with whom I was no longer intimate, and who was
certainly not in the least responsible for my present convictions and
reflections. It gradually became obvious that the ancient Egyptians had
known this small person quite intimately and had most seriously and
naïvely set down upon the walls of their temples and tombs her earliest
reactions in the presence of death.
At moments my adult intelligence would be unexpectedly submerged by the
emotional message which was written there. Rising to the surface like a
flood, this primitive emotion would sweep away both the historic record
and the adult consciousness interested in it, leaving only a child’s
mind struggling through an experience which it found overwhelming.
It may have been because these records of the early Egyptians are so
endlessly preoccupied with death, portraying man’s earliest efforts to
defeat it, his eager desire to survive, to enter by force or by guile
into the heavens of the western sky, that the mind is pushed back into
that earliest childhood when the existence of the soul, its exact place
of residence in the body, its experiences immediately after death,
its journeyings upward, its relation to its guardian angel, so often
afforded material for the crudest speculation. In the obscure renewal
of these childish fancies, there is nothing that is definite enough
to be called memory; it is rather that Egypt reproduces a state of
consciousness which has so absolutely passed into oblivion that only
the most powerful stimuli could revive it.
This revival doubtless occurs more easily because these early records
in relief and color not only suggest in their subject-matter that a
child has been endowed with sufficient self-consciousness to wish to
write down his own state of mind upon a wall, but also because the
very primitive style of drawing to which the Egyptians adhered long
after they had acquired a high degree of artistic freedom, is the
most natural technique through which to convey so simple and archaic
a message. The square shoulders of the men, the stairways done in
profile, and a hundred other details, constantly remind one of a
child’s drawings. It is as if the Egyptians had painstakingly portrayed
everything that a child has felt in regard to death, and having, during
the process, gradually discovered the style of drawing naturally
employed by a child, had deliberately stiffened it into an unchanging
convention. The result is that the traveller, reading in these
drawings which stretch the length of three thousand years, the long
endeavor to overcome death, finds that the experience of the two--the
child and the primitive people--often become confused, or rather that
they are curiously interrelated.
This begins from the moment the traveller discovers that the earliest
tombs surviving in Egypt, the mastabas,--which resemble the natural
results of a child’s first effort to place one stone upon another,--are
concerned only with size, as if that early crude belief in the power
of physical bulk to protect the terrified human being against all
shadowy evils were absolutely instinctive and universal. The mastabas
gradually develop into the pyramids, of which Breasted says that “they
are not only the earliest emergence of organized men and the triumph of
concerted effort, they are likewise a silent, but eloquent, expression
of the supreme endeavor to achieve immortality by sheer physical
force.” Both the mastabas at Sahkara and the pyramids at Gizeh, in the
sense of Tolstoy’s definition of art as that which reproduces in the
spectator the state of consciousness of the artist, at once appeal to
the child surviving in every adult, who insists irrationally, after
the manner of children, upon sympathizing with the attempt to shut out
death by strong walls.
Certainly we can all vaguely remember, when death itself, or stories
of ghosts, had come to our intimate child’s circle, that we went about
saying to ourselves that we were “not afraid,” that it “could not come
here,” that “the door was locked, the windows tight shut,” that “this
was a big house,” and a great deal more talk of a similar sort.
In the presence of these primitive attempts to defeat death, and
without the conscious aid of memory, I found myself living over the
emotions of a child six years old, saying some such words as I sat
on the middle of the stairway in my own home, which yet seemed alien
because all the members of the family had gone to the funeral of a
relative and would not be back until evening, “long after you are
in bed,” they had said. In this moment of loneliness and horror, I
depended absolutely upon the brick walls of the house to keep out the
prowling terror, and neither the talk of kindly Polly, who awkwardly
and unsuccessfully reduced an unwieldy theology to child-language, nor
the strings of paper dolls cut by a visitor, gave me the slightest
comfort. Only the blank wall of the stairway seemed to afford
protection in this bleak moment against the formless peril.
Doubtless these huge tombs were built to preserve from destruction
the royal bodies which were hidden within them at the end of tortuous
and carefully concealed passages; but both the gigantic structures in
the vicinity of Memphis, and the everlasting hills, which were later
utilized at Thebes, inevitably give the impression that death is defied
and shut out by massive defences.
Even when the traveller sees that the Egyptians defeated their object
by the very success of the Gizeh pyramids--for when their overwhelming
bulk could not be enlarged and their bewildering labyrinths could
not be multiplied, effort along that line perforce ceased--there is
something in the next attempt of the Egyptians to overcome death which
the child within us again recognizes as an old experience. One who
takes pains to inquire concerning the meaning of the texts which were
inscribed on the inner walls of the pyramids and the early tombs, finds
that the familiar terror of death is still there although expressed
somewhat more subtly; that the Egyptians are trying to outwit death by
magic tricks.
These texts are designed to teach the rites that redeem a man from
death and insure his continuance of life, not only beyond the grave
but in the grave itself. “He who sayeth this chapter and who has been
justified in the waters of Natron, he shall come forth the day after
his burial.” Because to recite them was to fight successfully against
the enemies of the dead, these texts came to be inscribed on tombs, on
coffins, and on the papyrus hung around the neck of a mummy. But woe
to the man who was buried without the texts: “He who knoweth not this
chapter cannot come forth by day.” Access to Paradise and all its joys
was granted to any one, good or bad, who knew the formulæ, for in the
first stages of Egyptian development, as in all other civilizations,
the gods did not concern themselves with the conduct of a man toward
other men, but solely with his duty to the gods themselves.
The magic formulæ alone afforded protection against the shadowy dangers
awaiting the dead man when first he entered the next world and enabled
him to overcome the difficulties of his journey. The texts taught him
how to impersonate particular gods and by this subterfuge to overcome
the various foes he must encounter, because these foes, having at one
time been overcome by the gods, were easily terrified by such pretence.
When I found myself curiously sympathetic with this desire “to
pretend,” and with the eager emphasis attached by the Egyptians to
their magic formulæ, I was inclined to put it down to that secret
sympathy with magic by means of which all children, in moments of
rebellion against a humdrum world, hope to wrest something startling
and thrilling out of the environing realm of the supernatural; but
beyond a kinship with this desire to placate the evil one, to overcome
him by mysterious words, I found it baffling to trace my sympathy to a
definite experience. Gradually, however, it emerged, blurred in certain
details, surprisingly alive in others, but all of it suffused with the
selfsame emotions which impelled the Egyptian to write his Book of the
Dead.
To describe it as a spiritual struggle is to use much too dignified
and definite a term; it was the prolonged emotional stress throughout
one cold winter when revival services--protracted meetings, they were
then called--were held in the village church night after night. I was,
of course, not permitted to attend them, but I heard them talked about
a great deal by simple adults and children, who told of those who
shouted aloud for joy, or lay on the floor “stiff with power” because
they were saved; and of others--it was for those others that my heart
was wrung--who, although they wrestled with the spirit until midnight
and cried out that they felt the hot breath of hell upon their cheeks,
could not find salvation. Would it do to pretend? I anxiously asked
myself, why didn’t they say the right words so that they could get up
from the mourners’ bench and sit with the other people, who must feel
so sorry for them that they would let them pretend? What were these
words that made such a difference that to say them was an assurance
of heavenly bliss, but if you failed to say them you burned in hell
forever and ever? Was the preacher the only one who knew them for sure?
Was it possible to find them without first kneeling at the mourners’
bench and groaning? These words must certainly be in the Bible
somewhere, and if one read it out loud all through, every word, one
must surely say the right words in time; but if one died before one was
grown up enough to read the Bible through--to-night, for instance--what
would happen then? Surely nothing else could be so important as these
words of salvation. While I did not exactly scheme to secure them, I
was certainly restrained only by my impotence, and I anxiously inquired
from everyone what these magic words might be; and only gradually did
this childish search for magic protection from the terrors after death
imperceptibly merge into a concern for the fate of the soul.
Perhaps, because it is so impossible to classify one’s own childish
experiences or to put them into chronological order, the traveller
at no time feels a lack of consistency in the complicated attitude
toward death which is portrayed on the walls of the Egyptian temples
and tombs. Much of it seems curiously familiar; from the earliest
times, the Egyptians held the belief that there is in man a permanent
element which survives--it is the double, the Ka, the natural soul in
contradistinction to the spiritual soul, which fits exactly into the
shape of the body but is not blended with it. In order to save this
double from destruction, the body must be preserved in a recognizable
form.
This insistence upon the preservation of the body among the Egyptians,
antedating their faith in magic formulæ, clearly had its origin, as in
the case of the child, in a desperate revolt against the destruction of
the visible man.
Owing to this continued insistence upon corporeal survival, the
Egyptians at length carried the art of embalming to such a state of
perfection that mummies of royal personages are easily recognized
from their likenesses to portrait statues. Such confidence did they
have in their own increasing ability to withhold the human frame from
destruction that many of the texts inscribed on the walls of the tombs
assure the dead man himself that he is not dead, and endeavor to
convince his survivors against the testimony of their own senses; or
rather, they attempt to deceive the senses. The texts endlessly repeat
the same assertion, “Thou comest not dead to thy sepulchre, thou comest
living”; and yet the very reiteration, as well as the decorations
upon the walls of every tomb, portray a primitive terror lest after
all the body be destroyed and the element of life be lost forever.
One’s throat goes dry over this old fear of death expressed by men who
have been so long dead that there is no record of them but this, no
surviving document of their once keen reactions to life.
Doubtless the Egyptians in time overcame this primitive fear concerning
the disappearance of the body, as we all do, although each individual
is destined to the same devastating experience. The memory of mine
came back to me vividly as I stood in an Egyptian tomb: I was a tiny
child making pothooks in the village school, when one day--it must
have been in the full flush of Spring, for I remember the crab-apple
blossoms--during the afternoon session, the A B C class was told that
its members would march all together to the burial of the mother of
one of the littlest girls. Of course, I had been properly taught that
people went to heaven when they died and that their bodies were
buried in the cemetery, but I was not at all clear about it, and I was
certainly totally unprepared to see what appeared to be the person
herself put deep down into the ground. The knowledge came to me so
suddenly and brutally that for weeks afterward the days were heavy with
a nameless oppression and the nights were filled with horror.
The cemetery was hard by the school-house, placed there, it had always
been whispered among us, to make the bad boys afraid. Thither the A B C
class, in awestruck procession, each child carefully holding the hand
of another, was led by the teacher to the edge of the open grave and
bidden to look on the still face of the little girl’s mother.
Our poor knees quaked and quavered as we stood shelterless and
unattended by family protection or even by friendly grown-ups; for
the one tall teacher, while clearly visible, seemed inexpressively
far away as we kept an uncertain footing on the freshly spaded earth,
hearing the preacher’s voice, the sobs of the motherless children,
and, crowning horror of all, the hollow sound of three clods of earth
dropped impressively upon the coffin lid.
After endless ages the service was over and we were allowed to go down
the long hill into the familiar life of the village. But a new terror
awaited me even there, for our house stood at the extreme end of the
street and the last of the way home was therefore solitary. I remember
a breathless run from the blacksmith shop, past the length of our
lonely orchard until the carriage-house came in sight, through whose
wide-open doors I could see a man moving about. One last panting effort
brought me there, and after my spirit had been slightly reassured by
conversation, I took a circuitous route to the house that I might
secure as much companionship as possible on the way. I stopped at
the stable to pat an old horse who stood munching in his stall, and
again to throw a handful of corn into the poultry yard. The big turkey
gobbler who came greedily forward gave me great comfort because he
was so absurd and awkward that no one could possibly associate him
with anything so solemn as death. I went into the kitchen where the
presiding genius allowed me to come without protest although the
family dog was at my heels. I felt constrained to keep my arms about
his shaggy neck while trying to talk of familiar things--would the cake
she was making be baked in the little round tins or in the big square
one? But although these idle words were on my lips, I wanted to cry
out, “Their mother is dead; whatever, whatever will the children do?”
These words, which I had overheard as we came away from the graveyard,
referred doubtless to the immediate future of the little family, but in
my mind were translated into a demand for definite action on the part
of the children against this horrible thing which had befallen their
mother.
It was with no sense of surprise that I found this long-forgotten
experience spread before my eyes on the walls of a tomb built four
thousand years ago into a sandy hill above the Nile, at Assuan. The
man so long dead, who had prepared the tomb for himself, had carefully
ignored the grimness of death. He is portrayed as going about his
affairs surrounded by his family, his friends, and his servants;
grain is being measured before him into his warehouse, while a scribe
by his side registers the amount; the herdsmen lead forth cattle for
his inspection; two of them, enraged bulls, paying no attention to
the sombre implication of tomb decoration, lower their huge heads,
threatening each other as if there were no such thing as death in the
world. Indeed, the builder of the tomb seems to have liked the company
of animals, perhaps because they were so incurious concerning death.
His dogs are around him, he stands erect in a boat from which he spears
fish, and so on from one marvelous relief to another, but all the time
your heart contracts for him, and you know that in the midst of this
elaborately prepared nonchalance he is miserably terrified by the fate
which may be in store for him, and is trying to make himself believe
that he need not leave all this wonted and homely activity; that if his
body is but properly preserved he will be able to enjoy it forever.
Although the Egyptians, in their natural desire to cling to the
familiar during the strange experience of death, portrayed upon the
walls of their tombs many domestic and social habits whose likeness to
our own household life gives us the quick satisfaction with which the
traveller encounters the familiar and wonted in a strange land, such a
momentary thrill is quite unlike the abiding sense of kinship which is
founded upon the unexpected similarity of ideas, and it is the latter
which are encountered in the tombs of the eighteenth century dynasty.
The paintings portray a great hall, at the end of which sits Osiris,
the god who had suffered death on earth, awaiting those who come before
him for judgment. In the center of the hall stands a huge balance
in which the hearts of men are weighed, once more reminiscent of a
childish conception, making clear that as the Egyptians became more
anxious and scrupulous they gradually made the destiny of man dependent
upon morality, and finally directed the souls of men to heaven or hell
according to their merits.
There is a theory that the tremendous results of good and evil,
in the earliest awakening to them, were first placed in the next
world by a primitive people sore perplexed as to the partialities
and injustices of mortal life. This simple view is doubtless the one
the child naturally takes. In Egypt I was so vividly recalled to my
first apprehension of it, that the contention that the very belief in
immortality is but the postulate of the idea of reward and retribution,
seemed to me at the moment a perfectly reasonable one.
The incident of my childhood around which it had formulated itself was
very simple. I had been sent with a message--an important commission it
seemed to me--to the leader of the church choir that the hymn selected
for the doctor’s funeral was “How blest the righteous when he dies.”
The village street was so strangely quiet under the summer sun that
even the little particles of dust beating in the hot air were more
noiseless than ever before. Frightened by the noonday stillness and
instinctively seeking companionship, I hurried toward two women who
were standing at a gate talking in low tones. In their absorption they
paid no attention to my somewhat wistful greeting, but I heard one of
them say with a dubious shake of the head that “he had never openly
professed nor joined the church,” and in a moment I understood that she
thought the doctor would not go to heaven. What else did it mean, that
half-threatening tone? Of course the doctor was good, as good as any
one could be. Only a few weeks before he had given me a new penny when
he had pulled my tooth, and once I heard him drive by in the middle of
the night when he took a beautiful baby to the miller’s house; he went
to the farms miles and miles away when people were sick, and everybody
sent for him the minute they were in trouble. How could any one be
better than that?
In defiant contrast to the whispering women, there arose in my mind,
composed doubtless of various Bible illustrations, the picture of an
imposing white-robed judge seated upon a golden throne, who listened
gravely to all those good deeds as they were read by the recording
angel from his great book, and then sent the doctor straight to heaven.
I dimly felt the challenge of the fine old hymn in its claim of
blessings for the righteous, and was defiantly ready at the moment to
combat the theology of the entire community. Of my own claim to heaven
I was most dubious, and I simply could not bring myself to contemplate
the day when my black sins should be read aloud from the big book; but
when the claim of reward in the next world for well-doing in this, came
to me in regard to one whose righteousness was undoubted, I was eager
to champion him before all mankind and even before the judges in the
shadowy world to come.
This state of mind, this mood of truculent discussion, was recalled by
the wall paintings in the tomb of a nobleman in the Theban hills. In
an agonized posture he awaits the outcome of his trial before Osiris.
Thoth, the true scribe, records on the wall the just balance between
the heart of the nobleman, which is in one pan of the scale, and
the feather of truth which is in the other. The noble appeals to his
heart, which has thus been separated from him, to stand by him during
the weighing and not to bear testimony against him. “Oh, heart of my
existence, rise not up against me; be not an enemy against me before
the divine powers; thou art my Ka that is in my body, the heart that
came to me from my mother.” The noble even tries a bribe by reminding
the Ka that his own chance of survival is dependent on his testimony
at this moment. The entire effort on the part of the man being tried
is to still the voice of his own conscience, to maintain stoutly his
innocence even to himself.
The attitude of the self-justifying noble might easily have suggested
those later childish struggles in which a sense of hidden guilt, of
repeated failure in “being good,” plays so large a part, and humbles a
child to the very dust. That the definite reminiscence evoked by the
tomb belonged to an earlier period of rebellion may indicate that the
Egyptian had not yet learned to commune with his gods for spiritual
refreshment.
Whether it is that the long days and magical nights on the Nile lend
themselves to a revival of former states of consciousness, or that I
had come to expect landmarks of individual development in Egypt, or,
more likely still, that I had fallen into a profoundly reminiscent
mood, I am unable to state; but certainly, as the Nile boat approached
nearer to him “who sleeps in Philæ,” something of the Egyptian feeling
for Osiris, the god to whom was attributed the romance of a hero
and the character of a benefactor and redeemer, came to me through
long-forgotten sensations. Typifying the annual “great affliction,”
Osiris, who had submitted himself to death, mutilation, and burial in
the earth, returned each Spring when the wheat and barley sprouted,
bringing not only a promise of bread for the body but healing and
comfort for the torn mind; an intimation that death itself is
beneficent and may be calmly accepted as a necessary part of an ordered
universe.
Day after day, seeing the rebirth of the newly planted fields on the
banks of the Nile, and touched by a fresh sense of the enduring miracle
of Spring with its inevitable analogy to the vicissitudes of human
experience, one dimly comprehends how the pathetic legends of Osiris,
by providing the Egyptian with an example for his own destiny, not only
opened the way for a new meaning in life, but also gradually vanquished
the terrors of death.
Again there came a faint memory of a child’s first apprehension
that there may be poetry out-of-doors, of the discovery that myths
have a foundation in natural phenomena, and at last a more definite
reminiscence.
I saw myself a child of twelve standing stock-still on the bank of a
broad-flowing river, with a little red house surrounded by low-growing
willows on its opposite bank, striving to account to myself for a
curious sense of familiarity, for a conviction that I had long ago
known it all most intimately, although I had certainly never seen the
Mississippi River before. I remember that, much puzzled and mystified,
at last I gravely concluded that it was one of those intimations of
immortality that Wordsworth had written about, and I went back to my
cousin’s camp in so exalted a frame of mind that the memory of the
evening light shining through the blades of young corn growing in a
field passed on the way has remained with me for more than forty years.
Was that fugitive sense of having lived before nearer to the fresher
imaginations of the Egyptians, as it is nearer to the mind of a child?
and did the myth of Osiris make them more willing to die because the
myth came to embody a confidence in this transitory sensation of
continuous life?
Such ghosts of reminiscence, coming to the individual as he visits
one after another of the marvellous human documents on the banks of
the Nile, may be merely manifestations of that new humanism which is
perhaps the most precious possession of this generation, the belief
that no altar at which living men have once devoutly worshipped, no
oracle to whom a nation long ago appealed in its moments of dire
confusion, no gentle myth in which former generations have found
solace, can lose all significance for us, the survivors.
Is it due to this same humanism that, in spite of the overweight of
the tomb, Egypt never appears to the traveller as world-weary, or as
a land of the dead? Although the slender fellaheen, whom he sees all
day pouring the water of the Nile on their parched fields, use the
primitive shaduf of their remote ancestors, and the stately women bear
upon their heads water-jars of a shape unchanged for three thousand
years, modern Egypt refuses to belong to the past and continually makes
the passionate living appeal of those hard-pressed in the struggle for
bread.
Under the smoking roofs of the primitive clay houses lifted high above
the level of the fields, because resting on the ruins of villages which
have crumbled there from time immemorial, mothers feed their children,
clutched by the old fear that there is not enough for each to have
his portion; and the traveller comes to realize with a pang that the
villages are built upon the bleak, barren places quite as the dead are
always buried in the desert because no black earth can be spared, and
that each new harvest, cut with sickles of a curve already ancient when
Moses was born, in spite of its quick ripening, is garnered barely in
time to save the laborer from actual starvation.
Certain it is that through these our living brothers, or through the
unexpected reactions of memory to racial records, the individual
detects the growth within of an almost mystical sense of the life
common to all the centuries, and of the unceasing human endeavor to
penetrate into the unseen world. These records also afford glimpses
into a past so vast that the present generation seems to float upon its
surface as thin as a sheet of light which momentarily covers the ocean
and moves in response to the black waters beneath it.
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at first seem disconnected, she has made out of them, because of their
bearing on all of her sex, a powerful unified narrative.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
The Ways of Women
BY IDA M. TARBELL
_Cloth, 12mo, $1.00_
What are the activities and responsibilities of the average normal
woman? This is the question which Miss Tarbell considers in this book.
Despite the change in the outward habits, conduct, points of view,
and ways of doing things, which marks the present age, Miss Tarbell
maintains that certain great currents of life still persist. To
consider that these are lost in the new world of machines and systems
is, she holds, only to study the surface. The relation to society and
to the future of the old and common pursuits of the woman is her theme,
which at once makes the volume appear as a sort of supplement to her
previous work, “The Business of Being a Woman.”
“A book of hopeful, cheerful thoughts ... a very human book, worthy of
careful reading.”
--_Literary Digest._
“A striking exposition of present-day woman’s ways.”
--_Philadelphia North American._
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
Transcriber’s Notes
Errors in punctuation have been fixed.