Part 9

(1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.

The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences. Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.

It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling, took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of the animals--and the angels.

To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in modern style on these things, I yet have no reasonable doubt that he felt (and FEELS, in those cases where we can still trace the workings of his mind) his essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If the animals with all their wonderful gifts are (as we readily admit) a veritable part of Nature--so that they live and move and have their being more or less submerged in the spirit of the great world around them--then Man, when he first began to differentiate himself from them, must for a long time have remained in this SUBconscious unity, becoming only distinctly CONSCIOUS of it when he was already beginning to lose it. That early dawn of distinct consciousness corresponded to the period of belief in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every object was invested with a halo of mystery or terror or adoration. Things were either tabu, in which case they were dangerous, and often not to be touched or even looked upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace and influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite which released their influence was also holy. William Blake, that modern prophetic child, beheld a Tree full of angels; the Central Australian native believes bushes to be the abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of passing women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame of fire, with Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put off his shoes for he felt that the place was holy; Osiris was at times regarded as a Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one in the acacia"--which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe; the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical use, (2) but so holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb it. The Burmese believe the things of nature, but especially the trees, to be the abode of spirits. "To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the Greek of long ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like fronds of the tamarind." (3)

(1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.

(2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.

(3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.

There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women (and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these, including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to fertilize them. (2)

(1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.

(2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.

One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became more conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms of the gods and the creeds--but of that process I will speak more in detail presently.

The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its timber, and other invaluable products--why should it not become the natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man's worship is ever drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful of the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and Serpent is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so potent in the life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds (or even the crops) is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent combined, and for all the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it reverence. In the Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance we have this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness (as a cure for the fiery serpents of lust); illustrations of the same are said to be found in the temples of Egypt and of South India, and even in the ancient temples of Central America. (1) In the myth of Hercules the golden apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans, the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories, says "the legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs which yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which the life, the fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the hero have their beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan origin: in India, Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."

(1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.

(2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.

Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake--the fascination of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason (from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions. No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship of Zeus and the Olympian gods.

(1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.

Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY LOOKED (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any that thrills one more with a sense of wizardry than just this very thing--to observe, each year, this disclosure of the Ear within the Blade--first a swelling of the sheath, then a transparency and a whitey-green face within a hooded shroud, and then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself and spiring upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat with pale visage appearing out of the ground."

(1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr stacon])."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.

If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation), what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would no doubt be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that where blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more generous?)--what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to propitiate the unseen power--even though the outline and form of the latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character, says (1): "The primitive conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again with the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a charm to ensure the growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the stately ritual of the temple." (2)

(1) The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.

(2) See ch. xv.

The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been offered at the grave of Osiris. We hear that the Indians in Ecuador used to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields when they sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same, allowing his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes GRIND their (male) victim, like corn, between two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to make me bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were particularly given to this kind of ritual--the very TEARS of the sufferer were an incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain. (1)

(1) The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.

And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct role as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body. "The tremendous mana of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual." (1) Even to us there is something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of this animal's glory of strength and fury and sexual power. No wonder the primitives worshiped him, or that they devised rituals which should convey his power and vitality by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts they ate his flesh and drank his blood as a magic symbol and means of salvation.

(1) Four Stages, p. 34.

VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS

It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a few more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic. Magic represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of Religion--i.e. the instinctive sense of Man's inner continuity with the world around him, TAKING SHAPE: a fanciful shape it is true, but with very real reaction on his practical life and feelings. (1) On the other side it represented the beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt not merely to FEEL but to UNDERSTAND the mystery of things.

(1) For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.