really free Society will accept and make use of all that has gone
before. If, as we have suggested, historical forms and customs are the
indication of tendencies and instincts which still exist among us, then
the question is, not the extinction of these tendencies, but the finding
of the right place and really rational expression for them. That the
various customs of past social life do subsist on beneath the surface of
modern society, we know well enough; and it seems likely that society in
the future will have to recognize and to a certain extent transform
these. In fact, in recognizing it will inevitably transform, for it will
bring them out from darkness into light, and from the old conditions and
surroundings of the past societies into the new conditions of the
modern. Polygamy, for instance, or some related form of union, supposing
it really did spontaneously and naturally arise in a society which gave
perfect freedom and independence to women in their relation to men,
would be completely different in character from the old-world polygamy,
and would cease to act as a degrading influence on women, since it would
be the spontaneous expression of their attachment to each other and to a
common husband; Monogamy, under similar circumstances, would lose its
narrowness and stuffiness; and the life of the Hetaira, that is of the
woman who chooses to be the companion of more than one man, might not be
without dignity, honor, and sincere attachment.
Again it is easy to see, if the sense of cleanness in sex ever does come
in, if the physical body ever becomes clean (which it certainly is not
now-a-days), clean and beautiful and accepted, within and without—and
this of course it can only be through a totally changed method of life,
through pure and clean food, nakedness to a large extent, and a kind of
saturation with the free air and light of heaven; and if the mental and
moral relation ever becomes clean, which can only be with the freedom of
woman and the sincerity of man, and so forth; it is easy to see how
entirely all this would alter our criticism of the various
sex-relations, and our estimate of their place and fitness.
In the wild and even bacchanalian festivals of all the earlier nations,
there was an element of Nature-sex-mysticism which has become lost in
modern times, or quite unclean and depraved; yet we cannot but see that
this element is a vital and deep-lying one in humanity, and in some form
or other will probably reassert itself. On the other hand, in the
Monkish and other ascetic movements of Christian or pre-Christian times,
with their efforts towards a proud ascendancy over the body, there was
(commonly sneered at though it may be in the modern West) an equally
vital and important truth,[22] which will have to be rehabilitated. The
practices of former races and times, however anomalous they may
sometimes appear to us, were after all in the main the expression of
needs and desires which had their place in human nature, and which still
for the most part have their place there, even though overlaid and
suppressed beneath existing convention; and who knows, in all the
stifled longings of thousands and thousands of hearts, how the great
broad soul of Humanity—which reaches to and accepts all times and
races—is still ever asserting herself and swelling against the petty
bonds of this or that age? The nearer Society comes to its freedom and
majority the more lovingly will it embrace this great soul within it,
and recognizing in all the customs of the past the partial efforts of
that soul to its own fulfillment will refuse to deny them, but rather
seek, by acceptance and reunion, to transform and illumine them all.
Possibly, to some, these remarks will only suggest a return to general
confusion and promiscuity; and of course to such people they will seem
inconsistent with what has been said before on the subject of the real
Marriage and the tendency of human beings, as society evolves, to seek
more and more sincerely a life-long union with their chosen mate; but no
one who thinks twice about the matter could well make this mistake. For
the latter tendency, that namely “from confusion to distinction,” is in
reality the tendency of all evolution, and cannot be set aside. It is in
the very nature of Love that as it realizes its own aim it should rivet
always more and more towards a durable and distinct relationship, nor
rest till the permanent mate and equal is found. As human beings
progress their relations to each other must become much more definite
and distinct instead of less so—and there is no likelihood of society in
its onward march lapsing backward, so to speak, to formlessness again.
But it is just the advantage of this onward movement towards
definiteness that it allows—as in the evolution of all organic life—of
more and more differentiation as the life rises higher in the scale of
existence. If society should at any future time recognize—as we think
likely it will do—the variety of needs of the human heart and of human
beings, it will not therefore confuse them, but will see that these
different needs indicate different functions, all of which may have
their place and purpose. If it has the good sense to tolerate a
Nature-festival now and then, and a certain amount of animalism let
loose, it will not be so foolish as to be unable to distinguish this
from the deep delight and happiness of a permanent spiritual mating; or
if it recognizes in some case, a woman’s temporary alliance with a man
for the sake of obtaining a much-needed child, it will not therefore be
so silly as to mark her down for life as a common harlot. It will allow
in fact that there are different forms and functions of the
love-sentiment, and while really believing that a life-long comradeship
(possibly with little of the sexual in it) is the most satisfying form,
will see that a cast-iron Marriage-custom which, as to-day, expects two
people either to live eternally in the same house and sit on opposite
sides of the same table, or else to be strangers to each other—and which
only recognizes two sorts of intimacy, orthodox and criminal, wedded and
adulterous—is itself the source of perpetual confusion and
misapprehension.
No doubt the Freedom of Society in this sense, and the possibility of a
human life which shall be the fluid and ever-responsive embodiment of
true Love in all its variety of manifestation, goes with the Freedom of
Society in the economic sense. When mankind has solved the industrial
problem so far that the products of our huge mechanical forces have
become a common heritage, and no man or woman is the property-slave of
another, then some of the causes which compel prostitution,
property-marriage, and other perversions of affection, will have
disappeared; and in such economically free society human unions may at
last take place according to their own inner and true laws.
Hitherto we have hardly thought whether there were any inner laws or
not; our thoughts have been fixed on the outer; and the Science of Love,
if it may so be called, has been strangely neglected. Yet if, putting
aside for a moment all convention and custom, one will look quietly
within himself, he will perceive that there are most distinct and
inviolable inner forces, binding him by different ties to different
people, and with different and inevitable results according to the
quality and the nature of the affection bestowed—that there is in fact
in that world of the heart a kind of cosmical harmony and variety, and
an order almost astronomical.
This is noticeably true of what may be called the planetary law of
distances in the relation of people to one another. For of some of the
circle of one’s acquaintance it may be said that one loves them
cordially at a hundred miles’ distance; of others that they are dear
friends at a mile; while others again are indispensable far nearer than
that. If by any chance the friend whose planetary distance is a mile is
forced into closer quarters, the only result is a violent development of
repulsion and centrifugal force, by which probably he is carried even
beyond his normal distance, till such time as he settles down into his
right place; while on the other hand if we are separated for a season
from one who by right is very near and who we know belongs to us, we can
bide our time, knowing that the forces of return will increase with the
separation. How marked and definite these personal distances are may be
gathered from considering how largely the art of life consists in
finding and keeping them, and how much trouble arises from their
confusion, and from the way in which we often only find them out after
much blundering and suffering and mutual recrimination.
So marked indeed are these and other such laws that they sometimes
suggest that there really is a cosmic world of souls, to which we all
belong—a world of souls whose relations are eternal and clearly-defined;
and that our terrestrial relations are merely the working-out and
expression of far antecedent and unmodifiable facts—an idea which for
many people is corroborated by the curious way in which, often at the
very first sight, they become aware of their exact relation to a
new-comer. In some cases this brings with it a strange sense of previous
intimacy, hard to, explain; and in other cases, not so intimate, it
still will seem to fix almost instantaneously the exact propinquity of
the relation—so that though in succeeding years, or even decades of
years, the mutual acquaintanceship may work itself out with all sorts of
interesting and even unexpected developments and episodes, yet this mean
distance does not vary during the whole time, so to speak, by a single
hair’s breadth.
Is it possible, we may ask (in the light of such experiences), that
there really is a Free Society in another and deeper sense than that
hitherto suggested—a society to which we all in our inmost selves
consciously or unconsciously belong—the Rose of souls that Dante beheld
in Paradise, whose every petal is an individual, and an individual only
through its union with all the rest—the early Church’s dream, of an
eternal Fellowship in heaven and on earth—the Prototype of all the
brotherhoods and communities that exist on this or any planet; and that
the innumerable selves of men, united in the one Self, members of it and
of one another (like the members of the body) stand in eternal and
glorious relationship bound indissolubly together? We know of course
that the reality of things cannot be adequately expressed by such
phrases as these, or by any phrases, yet possibly some such conception
comes as near the truth as any one conception can; and, making use of
it, we may think that our earthly relations are a continual
attempt—through much blindness and ineffectualness and failure—to feel
after and to find these true and permanent relations to others.
Surely in some subtle way if one person sincerely love another, heart
and soul, that other becomes a part of the lover, indissolubly wrought
into his being.[23] Mentally the two grow and become compact together.
No thought that the lover thinks, no scene that he looks on, but the
impress of his loved one in some way is on it—so that as long as he
exists (here or anywhere) with his most intimate self that other is
threaded and twined inseparable. So clinging is the relation. Perhaps in
the outer world we do not always see such relations quite clear, and we
think when death or other cause removes the visible form from us that
the hour of parting has come. But in the inner world it is clear enough,
and we divine that we and our mate are only two little petals that grow
near each other on the great Flower of Eternity; and that it is because
we are near each other in that unchanging world, that in the world of
change our mortal selves are drawn together, and will be drawn always,
wherever and whenever they may meet.
But since the petals of the immortal Flower are by myriads and myriads,
so have we endless lessons of soul-relationship to learn—some most
intimate, others doubtless less so, but all fair and perfect—so soon as
we have discovered what these relationships really are, and are in no
confusion of mind about them. For even those that are most distant are
desirable, and have the germ of love in them, so soon as they are
touched by the spirit of Truth (which means the fearless statement of
the life which is in us, in poise against the similar statement of life
in others); since, indeed, the spirit of Truth is the life of the whole,
and only the other side of that Love which binds the whole together.
Looking at things in this light it would seem to us that the ideal of
terrestrial society for which we naturally strive is that which would
embody best these enduring and deep-seated relations of human souls; and
that every society, as far as it is human and capable of holding
together, is in its degree a reflection of the celestial City. Never is
the essential, real, Society quite embodied in any mundane Utopia, but
ever through human history is it working unconsciously in the midst of
mortal affairs and impelling towards an expression of itself.
At any rate, and however all this may be, the conclusion is that the
inner laws in these matters—the inner laws of the sex-passion, of love,
and of all human relationship—must gradually appear and take the lead,
since they alone are the powers which can create and uphold a rational
society; and that the outer laws—since they are dead and lifeless
things—must inevitably disappear. Real love is only possible in the
freedom of society; and freedom is only possible when love is a reality.
The subjection of sex-relations to legal conventions is an intolerable
bondage, but of course it is a bondage inescapable as long as people are
slaves to a merely physical desire. The two slaveries in fact form a
sort of natural counterpoise, the one to the other. When love becomes
sufficient of a reality to hold the sex-passion as its powerful yet
willing servant, the absurdity of Law will be at an end.
Surely it is not too much to suppose that a reasonable society will be
capable of seeing these and other such things; that it will neither on
the one hand submit to a cast-iron system depriving it of all grace and
freedom of movement, nor on the other hand be in danger of falling into
swamps of promiscuity; but that it will have the sense to recognize and
establish the innumerable and delicate distinctions of relation which
build up the fabric of a complex social organism. It will understand
perhaps that sincere Love is, as we have said, a real fact and its own
justification, and that however various or anomalous or unusual may be
the circumstances and combinations under which it appears, it demands
and has to be treated by society with the utmost respect and
reverence—as a law unto itself, probably the deepest and most intimate
law of human life, which only in the most exceptional cases, if at all,
may public institutions venture to interfere with.
In all these matters it is surprising to-day what children we are—how we
take the innumerable flowers and try to snip and shape all their petals
and leaves to one sorry pattern, or how with a kind of grossness we
snatch at and destroy in a few moments the bloom and beauty which are
rightfully undying. Perhaps it will only be for a society more fully
grown than ours to understand the wealth and variety of affectional
possibilities which it has within itself, and the full enchantment of
the many relations in which the romance of love by a tender
discrimination and aesthetic continence is preserved for years and
decades of years in, as it were, a state of evergrowing perfection.
SOME REMARKS
ON THE
EARLY STAR AND SEX WORSHIPS
There seems to be a certain propriety in the fact that two of the oldest
and most universal cults have been the worship of the stars on the one
hand, and of the emblems of sex on the other. The stars, the most
abstract, distant and universal of phenomena, symbols of changeless law
and infinitude, before which human will and passion sink into death and
nothingness, and sex, the very focus of passion and desire, the burning
point of the will to live; between these two poles the human mind has
swayed since the eldest time.
With these earlier worships, too, the later religions have mingled in
inextricable but not meaningless entanglement. The Passover, the
greatest feast of the Jews, borrowed from the Egyptians, handed down to
become the supreme festival of Christianity, and finally blending in the
North of Europe with the worship of the Norse goddess Eastre, is as is
well known closely connected with the celebration of the Spring equinox
and of the passing over of the sun from south to north of the equator—i.
e., from his winter depression to his summer dominion. The Sun, at the
moment of passing the equinoctial point, stood 3,000 years ago in the
Zodiacal constellation of the Ram or he-lamb. The Lamb, therefore,
became the symbol of the young triumphant god. The Israelites (Exodus
xii. 14) were to smear their doorways (symbol of the passage from
darkness to light) with the blood of the Lamb, in remembrance of the
conflict of their god with the powers of darkness (the Egyptians). At an
earlier date—owing to the precession of the equinoxes—the sun at the
spring passage stood in the constellation of the Bull; so, in the older
worships of Egypt and of Persia and of India, it was the Bull that was
sacred and the symbol of the god. Moses is said to have abolished the
worship of the Calf and to have consecrated the Lamb at the passover—and
this appears to be a rude record of the fact that the astronomical
changes were accompanied or followed by priestly changes of ceremonial.
Certainly it is curious that in later Egyptian times the bull-headed god
was deposed in favor of the ram-headed god Ammon; and that Christianity
adopted the Lamb for the symbol of its Savior. Similarly, the Virgin
Mary with the holy Child in her arms can be traced by linear descent
from the early Christian Church at Alexandria up through the later
Egyptian times to Isis with the infant Horus, and thence to the
constellation Virgo shining in the sky. In the representation of the
Zodiac in the Temple of Denderah (in Egypt) the figure of Virgo is
annotated by a smaller figure of Isis with Horus in her arms; and the
Roman church fixed the celebration of Mary’s assumption into glory at
the very date (15th August) of the said constellation’s disappearance
from sight in the blaze of the solar rays, and her birth on the date
(8th Sept.) of the same constellation’s reappearance.[24]
The history of Israel reveals a long series of avowedly sexual and solar
worships carried on alongside with that of Jehovah—worships of Baal,
Ashtaroth, Nehushtan, the Host of Heaven, etc.—and if we are to credit
the sacred record, Moses himself introduced the notoriously sexual Tree
and Serpent worship (Numbers xxi. 9, and 2 Kings xviii. 4); while
Solomon, not without dramatic propriety, borrowed from the Phoenicians
the two phallic pillars surmounted by pomegranate wreaths, called Jachin
and Boaz, and placed them in front of his temple (1 Kings vii. 21). The
Cross itself (identical as a symbol with the phallus of the Greeks and
the lingam of the East), the Fleur de Lys, which has the same
signification, and the Crux Ansata, borrowed by the early Christians
from Egypt and indicating the union of male and female, are woven and
worked into the priestly vestments and altar-cloths of Christianity,
just as the astronomical symbols are woven and worked into its Calendar,
and both sets of symbols, astronomical and sexual, into the very
construction of our Churches and Cathedrals. Jesus himself—so entangled
is the worship of this greatest man with the earlier cults—is
purported[25] to have been born like the other sun-gods, Bacchus,
Apollo, Osiris, on the 25th day of December, the day of the sun’s
re-birth (i. e., the first day which obviously lengthens after the 21st
of December—the day of the doubting apostle Thomas!) and to have died
upon an instrument which, as already hinted, was ages before and all
over the world held in reverence as a sexual symbol.
I have only touched the fringe of this great subject. The more it is
examined into the more remarkable is the mass of corroborative matter
belonging to it. The conclusion towards which one seems to be impelled
is that these two great primitive ideas, sexual and astronomical, are
likely to remain the poles of human emotion in the future, even as they
have been in the past.
Some cynic has said that the two great ruling forces of mankind are
Obscenity and Superstition. Put in a less paradoxical form, as that the
two ruling forces are Sex and the belief in the Unseen, the saying may
perhaps be accepted. To call the two Love and Faith (as Dr. Bucke does
in his excellent book on “Man’s Moral Nature”) is perhaps to run the
risk of becoming too abstract and spiritual.
Roughly speaking we may say that the worship of Sex and Life
characterized the Pagan races of Europe and Asia Minor anterior to
Christianity, while the worship of Death and the Unseen has
characterized Christianity. It remains for the modern nations to accept
both Life and Death, both the Greek and the Hebrew elements, and all
that these general terms denote, in a spirit of the fullest friendliness
and sanity and fearlessness.
A curious part of all the old religions, Pagan or Christian—and this
connects itself with the above—is Asceticism: that occasional instinct
of voluntary and determined despite to the body and its senses. Even in
the wildest races, rejoicing before all things in the consciousness of
Life, we find festivals of fierce endurance and torments willingly
undergone with a kind of savage glee;[26] and during the Christian
centuries—monks, mystics, and world-spiting puritans—this instinct was
sometimes exalted into the very first place of honor. I suppose it will
have to be recognized—whatever absurd aberrations the tendency may have
been liable to—that it is a basic thing in human nature, and as
ineradicable in its way as the other equally necessary instinct towards
Pleasure. To put it in another way, perhaps the ordinary Hedonism makes
a mistake in failing to recognize the joy of Ascendancy, and (if it is
not a “bull” to say so) the pleasure which lies in the denial of
pleasure. In order to enjoy life one must be a master of life—for to be
a slave to its inconsistencies can only mean torment: and in order to
enjoy the senses one must be master of them. To dominate the actual
world you must, like Archimedes, base your fulcrum somewhere beyond.
In such moods a man delights to feel his supremacy, not only over the
beasts of the field, but over his own bodily and mental powers: no
ordinary pleasure so great, but its rejection serves to throw out into
relief this greater; no task so stern, but endurance is sterner; no pain
so fierce but it wakes the soul to secret laughter. If there is
something narrow in the creed of the ascetic on its negative side—that
of denial—one cannot but feel that on its positive side, the
establishment of authority and kingship, it has a real and vital
meaning.
In another mood, however (equally undeniable and important), man
acknowledges his delight in life, and gives the rein to his desires to
chariot him to the extremest bounds of his kingdom. The kiss of the
senses is beautiful beyond all and every abstraction; the touch of the
sunlight, the glory of form and color, the magic of sweet sound, the joy
of human embraces, the passion of sex—all so much the more perfect
because they are as it were something divine made actual and realizable.
In such a mood asceticism in any form seems the grossest impiety and
folly, and the pursuit of the Unseen a mere abandonment of the world for
its shadow.
Are not these two moods both necessary—the great rhythmical heart-beat,
the systole and diastole, of the human soul? The one, a going forth and
gathering of materials from all sources, the other an organizing of them
under the most perfect light, or rather (it may be said) a consumption
of them to feed the most perfect flame; the one centrifugal, the other
centripetal; the one individual, the other universal; and so forth—each
required for the purposes of the other, and making the other possible?