Seven Planets play some lordly or terrifying part. The great Mithras
Liturgy, unearthed by Dieterich from a magical papyrus in Paris,[146:1]
repeatedly confronts the worshipper with the seven vowels as names of
'the Seven Deathless Kosmokratores', or Lords of the Universe, and
seems, under their influence, to go off into its 'Seven Maidens with
heads of serpents, in white raiment', and its divers other Sevens. The
various Hermetic and Mithraic communities, the Naassenes described by
Hippolytus,[146:2] and other Gnostic bodies, authors like Macrobius and
even Cicero in his _Somnium Scipionis_, are full of the influence of the
seven planets and of the longing to escape beyond them. For by some
simple psychological law the stars which have inexorably pronounced our
fate, and decreed, or at least registered the decree, that in spite of
all striving we must needs tread their prescribed path; still more
perhaps, the Stars who know in the midst of our laughter how that
laughter will end, become inevitably powers of evil rather than good,
beings malignant as well as pitiless, making life a vain thing. And
Saturn, the chief of them, becomes the most malignant. To some of the
Gnostics he becomes Jaldabaoth, the Lion-headed God, the evil
Jehovah.[147:1] The religion of later antiquity is overpoweringly
absorbed in plans of escape from the prison of the seven planets.
In author after author, in one community after another, the subject
recurs. And on the whole there is the same answer. Here on the earth we
are the sport of Fate; nay, on the earth itself we are worse off still.
We are beneath the Moon, and beneath the Moon there is not only Fate but
something more unworthy and equally malignant, Chance--to say nothing of
damp and the ills of earth and bad daemons. Above the Moon there is no
chance, only Necessity: there is the will of the other six
Kosmokratores, Rulers of the Universe. But above them all there is an
Eighth region--they call it simply the Ogdoas--the home of the ultimate
God,[147:2] whatever He is named, whose being was before the Kosmos. In
this Sphere is true Being and Freedom. And more than freedom, there is
the ultimate Union with God. For that spark of divine life which is
man's soul is not merely, as some have said, an ἀπόρροια τῶν ἄστρων, an
effluence of the stars: it comes direct from the first and ultimate
God, the Alpha and Omega, who is beyond the Planets. Though the
Kosmokratores cast us to and fro like their slaves or dead chattels, in
soul at least we are of equal birth with them. The Mithraic votary, when
their wrathful and tremendous faces break in upon his vision, answers
them unterrified: ἐγώ εἰμι σύμπλανος ὑμῖν ἀστήρ, 'I am your fellow
wanderer, your fellow Star.' The Orphic carried to the grave on his
golden scroll the same boast: first, 'I am the child of Earth and of the
starry Heaven'; then later, 'I too am become God'.[148:1] The Gnostic
writings consist largely of charms to be uttered by the Soul to each of
the Planets in turn, as it pursues its perilous path past all of them to
its ultimate home.
That journey awaits us after death; but in the meantime? In the meantime
there are initiations, sacraments, mystic ways of communion with God. To
see God face to face is, to the ordinary unprepared man, sheer death.
But to see Him after due purification, to be led to Him along the true
Way by an initiating Priest, is the ultimate blessing of human life. It
is to die and be born again. There were regular official initiations. We
have one in the Mithras-Liturgy, more than one in the Corpus Hermeticum.
Apuleius[148:2] tells us at some length, though in guarded language, how
he was initiated to Isis and became 'her image'. After much fasting,
clad in holy garments and led by the High Priest, he crossed the
threshold of Death and passed through all the Elements. The Sun shone
upon him at midnight, and he saw the Gods of Heaven and of Hades. In the
morning he was clad in the Robe of Heaven, set up on a pedestal in
front of the Goddess and worshipped by the congregation as a God. He had
been made one with Osiris or Horus or whatever name it pleased that
Sun-God to be called. Apuleius does not reveal it.
There were also, of course, the irregular personal initiations and
visions of god vouchsafed to persons of special prophetic powers. St.
Paul, we may remember, knew personally a man who had actually been
snatched up into the Third Heaven, and another who was similarly rapt
into Paradise, where he heard unspeakable words;[149:1] whether in the
body or not, the apostle leaves undecided. He himself on the road to
Damascus had seen the Christ in glory, not after the flesh. The
philosopher Plotinus, so his disciple tells us, was united with God in
trance four times in five years.[149:2]
We seem to have travelled far from the simplicity of early Greek
religion. Yet, apart always from Plotinus, who is singularly aloof, most
of the movement has been a reaction under Oriental and barbarous
influences towards the most primitive pre-Hellenic cults. The union of
man with God came regularly through _Ekstasis_--the soul must get clear
of its body--and _Enthousiasmos_--the God must enter and dwell inside
the worshipper. But the means to this union, while sometimes allegorized
and spiritualized to the last degree, are sometimes of the most
primitive sort. The vagaries of religious emotion are apt to reach very
low as well as very high in the scale of human nature. Certainly the
primitive Thracian savages, who drank themselves mad with the hot blood
of their God-beast, would have been quite at home in some of these
rituals, though in others they would have been put off with some
substitute for the actual blood. The primitive priestesses who waited in
a bridal chamber for the Divine Bridegroom, even the Cretan Kourêtes
with their Zeus Kourês[150:1] and those strange hierophants of the
'Men's House' whose initiations are written on the rocks of Thera, would
have found rites very like their own reblossoming on earth after the
fall of Hellenism. 'Prepare thyself as a bride to receive her
bridegroom,' says Markos the Gnostic,[150:2] 'that thou mayst be what I
am and I what thou art.' 'I in thee, and thou in me!' is the ecstatic
cry of one of the Hermes liturgies. Before that the prayer has been
'Enter into me as a babe into the womb of a woman'.[150:3]
In almost all the liturgies that I have read need is felt for a
mediator between the seeker after God and his goal. Mithras himself saw
a Mesîtês, a Mediator, between Ormuzd and Ahriman, but the ordinary
mediator is more like an interpreter or an adept with inner knowledge
which he reveals to the outsider. The circumstances out of which these
systems grew have left their mark on the new gods themselves. As usual,
the social structure of the worshippers is reflected in their objects of
worship. When the Chaldaeans came to Cos, when the Thracians in the
Piraeus set up their national worship of Bendis, when the Egyptians in
the same port founded their society for the Egyptian ritual of Isis,
when the Jews at Assuan in the fifth century B. C. established their own
temple, in each case there would come proselytes to whom the truth must
be explained and interpreted, sometimes perhaps softened. And in each
case there is behind the particular priest or initiator there present
some greater authority in the land he comes from. Behind any explanation
that can be made in the Piraeus, there is a deeper and higher
explanation known only to the great master in Jerusalem, in Egypt, in
Babylon, or perhaps in some unexplored and ever-receding region of the
east. This series of revelations, one behind the other, is a
characteristic of all these mixed Graeco-Oriental religions.
Most of the Hermetic treatises are put in the form of initiations or
lessons revealed by a 'father' to a 'son', by Ptah to Hermes, by Hermes
to Thoth or Asclepios, and by one of them to us. It was an ancient
formula, a natural vehicle for traditional wisdom in Egypt, where the
young priest became regularly the 'son' of the old priest. It is a form
that we find in Greece itself as early as Euripides, whose Melanippe
says of her cosmological doctrines,
'It is not my word but my Mother's word'.[152:1]
It was doubtless the language of the old Medicine-Man to his disciple.
In one fine liturgy Thoth wrestles with Hermes in agony of spirit, till
Hermes is forced to reveal to him the path to union with God which he
himself has trodden before. At the end of the Mithras liturgy the
devotee who has passed through the mystic ordeals and seen his god face
to face, is told: 'After this you can show the way to others.'
But this leads us to the second great division of our subject. We turn
from the phenomena of the sky to those of the soul.
* * * * *
If what I have written elsewhere is right, one of the greatest works of
the Hellenic spirit, and especially of fifth-century Athens, was to
insist on what seems to us such a commonplace truism, the difference
between Man and God. Sophrosynê in religion was the message of the
classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a
lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first _Theos_. At
any rate the primeval kings and queens were treated as divine.[152:2]
Just for a few great generations, it would seem, humanity rose to a
sufficient height of self-criticism and self-restraint to reject these
dreams of self-abasement or megalomania. But the effort was too great
for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and
rulers--all people in fact who can command an adequate number of
flatterers--become divine beings again. Let us consider how it came
about.
First there was the explicit recognition by the soberest philosophers of
the divine element in man's soul.[153:1] Aristotle himself built an
altar to Plato. He did nothing superstitious; he did not call Plato a
god, but we can see from his beautiful elegy to Eudemus, that he
naturally and easily used language of worship which would seem a little
strange to us. It is the same emotion--a noble and just emotion on the
whole--which led the philosophic schools to treat their founders as
'heroes', and which has peopled most of Europe and Asia with the
memories and the worship of saints. But we should remember that only a
rare mind will make its divine man of such material as Plato. The common
way to dazzle men's eyes is a more brutal and obvious one.
To people who were at all accustomed to the conception of a God-Man it
was difficult not to feel that the conception was realized in Alexander.
His tremendous power, his brilliant personality, his achievements
beggaring the fables of the poets, put people in the right mind for
worship. Then came the fact that the kings whom he conquered were, as a
matter of fact, mostly regarded by their subjects as divine
beings.[154:1] It was easy, it was almost inevitable, for those who
worshipped the 'God'[154:2] Darius to feel that it was no man but a
greater god who had overthrown Darius. The incense which had been burned
before those conquered gods was naturally offered to their conqueror. He
did not refuse it. It was not good policy to do so, and
self-depreciation is not apt to be one of the weaknesses of the born
ruler.[154:3] But besides all this, if you are to judge a God by his
fruits, what God could produce better credentials? Men had often seen
Zeus defied with impunity; they had seen faithful servants of Apollo
come to bad ends. But those who defied Alexander, however great they
might be, always rued their defiance, and those who were faithful to him
always received their reward. With his successors the worship became
more official. Seleucus, Ptolemaeus, Antigonus, Demetrius, all in
different degrees and different styles are deified by the acclamations
of adoring subjects. Ptolemy Philadelphus seems to have been the first
to claim definite divine honours during his own life. On the death of
his wife in 271 he proclaimed her deity and his own as well in the
worship of the Theoi Adelphoi, the 'Gods Brethren'. Of course there was
flattery in all this, ordinary self-interested lying flattery, and its
inevitable accompaniment, megalomania. Any reading of the personal
history of the Ptolemies, the Seleucidae or the Caesars shows it. But
that is not the whole explanation.
One of the characteristics of the period of the Diadochi is the
accumulation of capital and military force in the hands of individuals.
The Ptolemies and Seleucidae had at any moment at their disposal powers
very much greater than any Pericles or Nicias or Lysander.[155:1] The
folk of the small cities of the Aegean hinterlands must have felt
towards these great strangers almost as poor Indian peasants in time of
flood and famine feel towards an English official. There were men now on
earth who could do the things that had hitherto been beyond the power of
man. Were several cities thrown down by earthquake; here was one who by
his nod could build them again. Famines had always occurred and been
mostly incurable. Here was one who could without effort allay a famine.
Provinces were harried and wasted by habitual wars: the eventual
conqueror had destroyed whole provinces in making the wars; now, as he
had destroyed, he could also save. 'What do you mean by a god,' the
simple man might say, 'if these men are not gods? The only difference is
that these gods are visible, and the old gods no man has seen.'
The titles assumed by all the divine kings tell the story clearly.
Antiochus Epiphanês--'the god made manifest'; Ptolemaios Euergetês,
Ptolemaios Sôtêr. Occasionally we have a Keraunos or a Nikator, a
'Thunderbolt' or a 'God of Mana', but mostly it is Sôtêr, Euergetês and
Epiphanês, the Saviour, the Benefactor, the God made manifest, in
constant alternation. In the honorific inscriptions and in the writings
of the learned, philanthropy (φιλανθρωπία) is by far the most prominent
characteristic of the God upon earth. Was it that people really felt
that to save or benefit mankind was a more godlike thing than to blast
and destroy them? Philosophers have generally said that, and the vulgar
pretended to believe them. It was at least politic, when ministering to
the half-insane pride of one of these princes, to remind him of his
mercy rather than of his wrath.
Wendland in his brilliant book, _Hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, calls
attention to an inscription of the year 196 B. C. in honour of the young
Ptolemaios Epiphanês, who was made manifest at the age of twelve
years.[156:1] It is a typical document of Graeco-Egyptian king-worship:
'In the reign of the young king by inheritance from his
Father, Lord of the Diadems, great in glory, pacificator of
Egypt and pious towards the gods, superior over his
adversaries, Restorer of the life of man, Lord of the Periods
of Thirty Years, like Hephaistos the Great, King like the Sun,
the Great King of the Upper and Lower Lands; offspring of the
Gods of the Love of the Father, whom Hephaistos has approved,
to whom the Sun has given Victory; living image of Zeus; Son
of the Sun, Ptolemaios the ever-living, beloved by Phtha; in
the ninth year of Aëtos son of Aëtos, Priest of Alexander and
the Gods Saviours and the Gods Brethren and the Gods
Benefactors and the Gods of the Love of the Father and the
God Manifest for whom thanks be given:'
The Priests who came to his coronation ceremony at Memphis proclaim:
'Seeing that King Ptolemaios ever-living, beloved of Phtha,
God Manifest for whom Thanks be given, born of King Ptolemaios
and Queen Arsinoe, the Gods of the Love of the Father, has
done many benefactions to the Temples and those in them and
all those beneath his rule, being from the beginning God born
of God and Goddess, like Horus son of Isis and Osiris, who
came to the help of his father Osiris (and?) in his benevolent
disposition towards the Gods has consecrated to the temples
revenues of silver and of corn, and has undergone many
expenses in order to lead Egypt into the sunlight and give
peace to the Temples, and has with all his powers shown love
of mankind.'
When the people of Lycopolis revolted, we hear:
'in a short time he took the city by storm and slew all the
Impious who dwelt in it, even as Hermes and Horus, son of Isis
and Osiris, conquered those who of old revolted in the same
regions . . . in return for which the Gods have granted him
Health Victory Power and all other good things, the Kingdom
remaining to him and his sons for time everlasting.'[157:1]
The conclusion which the Priests draw from these facts is that the
young king's titles and honours are insufficient and should be
increased. It is a typical and terribly un-Hellenic document of the
Hellenistic God-man in his appearance as King.
Now the early successors of Alexander mostly professed themselves
members of the Stoic school, and in the mouth of a Stoic this doctrine
of the potential divinity of man was an inspiring one. To them virtue
was the really divine thing in man; and the most divine kind of virtue
was that of helping humanity. To love and help humanity is, according to
Stoic doctrine, the work and the very essence of God. If you take away
Pronoia from God, says Chrysippus,[158:1] it is like taking away light
and heat from fire. This doctrine is magnificently expressed by Pliny in
a phrase that is probably translated from Posidonius: 'God is the
helping of man by man; and that is the way to eternal glory.'[158:2]
The conception took root in the minds of many Romans. A great Roman
governor often had the chance of thus helping humanity on a vast scale,
and liked to think that such a life opened the way to heaven. 'One
should conceive', says Cicero (_Tusc._ i. 32), 'the gods as like men
who feel themselves born for the work of helping, defending, and saving
humanity. Hercules has passed into the number of the gods. He would
never have so passed if he had not built up that road for himself while
he was among mankind.'
I have been using some rather late authors, though the ideas seem
largely to come from Posidonius.[159:1] But before Posidonius the sort
of fact on which we have been dwelling had had its influence on
religious speculation. When Alexander made his conquering journey to
India and afterwards was created a god, it was impossible not to reflect
that almost exactly the same story was related in myth about Dionysus.
Dionysus had started from India and travelled in the other direction:
that was the only difference. A flood of light seemed to be thrown on
all the traditional mythology, which, of course, had always been a
puzzle to thoughtful men. It was impossible to believe it as it stood,
and yet hard--in an age which had not the conception of any science of
mythology--to think it was all a mass of falsehood, and the great Homer
and Hesiod no better than liars. But the generation which witnessed the
official deification of the various Seleucidae and Ptolemies seemed
suddenly to see light. The traditional gods, from Heracles and Dionysus
up to Zeus and Cronos and even Ouranos, were simply old-world rulers and
benefactors of mankind, who had, by their own insistence or the
gratitude of their subjects, been transferred to the ranks of heaven.
For that is the exact meaning of making them divine: they are classed
among the true immortals, the Sun and Moon and Stars and Corn and Wine,
and the everlasting elements.
The philosophic romance of Euhemerus, published early in the third
century B. C., had instantaneous success and enormous influence.[160:1]
It was one of the first Greek books translated into Latin, and became
long afterwards a favourite weapon of the Christian fathers in their
polemics against polytheism. 'Euhemerism' was, on the face of it, a very
brilliant theory; and it had, as we have noticed, a special appeal for
the Romans.
Yet, if such a conception might please the leisure of a statesman, it
could hardly satisfy the serious thought of a philosopher or a religious
man. If man's soul really holds a fragment of God and is itself a divine
being, its godhead cannot depend on the possession of great riches and
armies and organized subordinates. If 'the helping of man by man is
God', the help in question cannot be material help. The religion which
ends in deifying only kings and millionaires may be vulgarly popular but
is self-condemned.
As a matter of fact the whole tendency of Greek philosophy after Plato,
with some illustrious exceptions, especially among the Romanizing
Stoics, was away from the outer world towards the world of the soul. We
find in the religious writings of this period that the real Saviour of
men is not he who protects them against earthquake and famine, but he
who in some sense saves their souls. He reveals to them the _Gnôsis
Theou_, the Knowledge of God. The 'knowledge' in question is not a mere
intellectual knowledge. It is a complete union, a merging of beings.
And, as we have always to keep reminding our cold modern intelligence,
he who has 'known' God is himself thereby deified. He is the Image of
God, the Son of God, in a sense he _is_ God.[161:1] The stratum of ideas
described in the first of the studies will explain the ease with which
transition took place. The worshipper of Bacchos became Bacchos simply
enough, because in reality the God Bacchos was originally only the
projection of the human Bacchoi. And in the Hellenistic age the notion
of these secondary mediating gods was made easier by the analogy of the
human interpreters. Of course, we have abundant instances of actual
preachers and miracle-workers who on their own authority posed, and were
accepted, as gods. The adventure of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra[161:2]
shows how easily such things could happen. But as a rule, I suspect, the
most zealous priest or preacher preferred to have his God in the
background. He preaches, he heals the sick and casts out devils, not in
his own name but in the name of One who sent him. This actual present
priest who initiates you or me is himself already an Image of God; but
above him there are greater and wiser priests, above them others, and
above all there is the one eternal Divine Mediator, who being in
perfection both man and God can alone fully reveal God to man, and lead
man's soul up the heavenly path, beyond Change and Fate and the Houses
of the Seven Rulers, to its ultimate peace. I have seen somewhere a
Gnostic or early Christian emblem which indicates this doctrine. Some
Shepherd or Saviour stands, his feet on the earth, his head towering
above the planets, lifting his follower in his outstretched arms.
The Gnostics are still commonly thought of as a body of Christian
heretics. In reality there were Gnostic sects scattered over the
Hellenistic world before Christianity as well as after. They must have
been established in Antioch and probably in Tarsus well before the days
of Paul or Apollos. Their Saviour, like the Jewish Messiah, was
established in men's minds before the Saviour of the Christians. 'If we
look close', says Professor Bousset, 'the result emerges with great
clearness, that the figure of the Redeemer as such did not wait for
Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnôsis, but was
already present there under various forms.'[162:1] He occurs notably in
two pre-Christian documents, discovered by the keen analysis and
profound learning of Dr. Reitzenstein: the Poimandres revelation printed
in the _Corpus Hermeticum_, and the sermon of the Naassenes in
Hippolytus, _Refutatio Omnium Haeresium_, which is combined with
Attis-worship.[162:2] The violent anti-Jewish bias of most of the
sects--they speak of 'the accursed God of the Jews' and identify him
with Saturn and the Devil--points on the whole to pre-Christian
conditions: and a completely non-Christian standpoint is still visible
in the Mandaean and Manichean systems.