VII.OUTGROWTHS AND PERVERSIONSOF THIS RITE.
Apart from the mooted question of the origin and development of man as man,–whether it be held that he came into being as an incident in the evolutionary progress of the ages, or that his creation was by a special fiat of the Author of all things,–it is obvious that there was a beginning, when man first appeared as a higher order of being than the lower animals then in existence. The distinguishing attribute of man, as distinct from the lower animals at their best, is the capacity to conceive of spiritual facts and forces. Even at his lowest estate man is never without an apprehension of immaterial and supernatural personalities, intangible yet real and potent. The lower animals at their highest, and under the most effective training, give no indication of the possibility of such a conception on their part.
Both the Bible record and the disclosed facts of science show man at the start in a primitive state, with only elemental beginnings of knowledge or thought or skill. No claim is made for him, by any advocate of his pre-eminence in creation, that he then had skill in the arts, or attainment in civilization, or that he was possessed of a religious theory or ritual of even the simplest character. It is a matter of interest and importance to trace the course of man’s progress from the first to the present time, and to see how the good and the evil showed themselves along the line, from the same germs of thought and conduct rightly used or misused. The primitive rite of the Threshold Covenant, here brought out as initial and germinative, seems to present a reasonable solution of the observed course in religious development and in religious perversions in the history of mankind from the beginning until now.
Before primitive man could have concerned himself seriously with the course of the heavenly bodies, or the changes of the seasons, or the points of compass and the correspondent shifting of the winds, he must have recognized the sacred mystery of life and its transmission. It would seem that a covenant involved in the union of twain made one over outpoured blood, with power from the Author of life for the transmission of life, must have been the primal religiousrite that brought man’s personal action into the clear light of a covenant relation with his Creator. Every subsequent development of the religious idea, good and bad, pure and impure, would seem to be traceable as an outgrowth, or as a perversion, of this elemental religious rite.
It would seem clear that the primal idea of a covenant union between two persons, and between those persons and their God, was found in the initial and primitive rite of marriage, with its outpoured blood, or gift of life, on the threshold of being; and that this rite contained in itself the germs of covenanting and of sacrifice, and the idea of an altar and a sacrament, where, and by which, man and God were brought into loving communion and union. Thus the beginning of religious rites was found in the primal Threshold Covenant as here portrayed.
Out of this beginning came all that is best and holiest in the thought of sacrifice and sacrament and spiritual communion. The very highest development of religious truth, under the guidance of progressive revelation from God, and of man’s growth in thought and knowledge with the passing ages, is directly in the line of this simple and germinal idea. Both the Bible record and the record of outside historytend to confirm this view of religious rites in their beginning and progress.
New life as a consequence of blood, or life, surrendered in holy covenanting, is a natural inference or outgrowth of the truth of the primal Threshold Covenant. Thus the thought of life after death, in the resurrection or in metempsychosis, comes with the recognition of the simple fact of the results of covenant union in the sight, and with the blessing, of the Author of life, in the rite of the Threshold Covenant.[599]
The transference of the altar of threshold covenanting, from the persons of the primary pair in the family to the hearthstone or entrance threshold of the home or family doorway, with the accompaniment of fire as a means of giving and sustaining life to those who sat at the common table or altar, in the covenant meal or sacrament of hospitality, brought about the custom of sacramental communion feasts with guests human and divine. And so, also, there came the rites of worship, with the altar of burnt sacrifice or of incense, and the marriage torch, and the doorway fire, and the threshold or hearthstone covenant at a wedding. Out of this thought there came gradually and naturally the prominence of the altar and the altar fire in privateand public worship, as it obtains both in the simpler and in the more gorgeous ecclesiastical rituals.[600]
In conjunction with the place of fire on the family altar in the Threshold Covenant, there came naturally the recognition of fire and warmth and light as gifts of God for the promotion and preservation of life to those who were dependent on him. Thus the sun as the life-giving fire of the universe came to be recognized as a manifestation of God’s power and love. Its agency in bringing new life after death, in the course of the changing seasons, led men to connect the movements of the heavenly bodies with God’s dealings with man in the line of his covenant love. The too common mistake has been of thinking of this view of celestial nature as the origin of man’s religious rites, instead of as an outgrowth of the primal religious rite, which antedated man’s study of, or wonder over, the workings of the elements and the course of the heavenly bodies.
In summing up the results of such a study as this, of primitive customs and their outgrowth, it is necessary only to suggest a few of the more prominent lines of progress from the elemental beginning, leaving it to the student and thinker to follow out these, and to find others, in his more careful and further consideration of the subject in its varied ramifications.It is sufficient now to affirm that the Old Testament and the New point to this primitive rite of the Threshold Covenant as a basis of their common religious ritual; and that gleams of the same germinal idea show themselves in the best features of all the sacred books of the ages. It would be easy, did time and space allow, to follow out in detail the indications that all modes of worship in sacrifice, in oblation, in praise, and prayer, in act and in word, are but natural expressions of desire for covenant union with Deity, and of joy in the thought of its possession, as based on the fact of such covenanting sought and found in the primal religious rite of the human race.
With the world as it is, and with man as he is, every possibility of good has a corresponding possibility of evil. Good perverted becomes evil. Truth which, rightly used, proves a savor of life, will, when misused, prove a savor of death.[601]And that which is a symbol of truth becomes a means of misleading when looked at as if it were in itself the truth.
The primitive Threshold Covenant as an elemental religious rite was holy and pure, and had possibilities of outgrowth in the direction of high spiritual attainment and aspiring. But the temptation to uplift theagencies in this rite into objects deemed of themselves worthy of worship resulted in impurity and deterioration, by causing the symbol to hide the truth instead of disclosing it.
Among the earliest forms of a temple as a place of worship was the ziggurat, or stepped pyramid, erected as a mighty altar, with its shrine, or holy of holies, at the summit, wherein a bride of the gods awaited the coming of the deity to solemnize the primal Threshold Covenant in expression of his readiness to enter into loving communion with the children of men.[602]From this custom the practice of Threshold Covenanting at the temple doorways became incumbent on women of all conditions of society at certain times, and under certain circumstances, in certain portions of the world, as a proof of their religious devotion,[603]and thus there grew up all the excesses of sacred prostitution in different portions of the world.[604]
The prominence given to the two factors in the primitive Threshold Covenant as a sacred religious act, led to the perversion of the original idea by making the factors themselves objects of reverence and worship;and separately, or together, they came to be worshiped with impure and degrading accompaniments.
Reverence for the phallus, or for phallic emblems, shows itself in the earliest historic remains of Babylonia, Assyria, India, China, Japan, Persia, Phrygia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Abyssinia, Greece, Rome, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Spain, Great Britain, North and South America, and the Islands of the Sea. It were needless to attempt detailed proof of this statement, in view of all that has been written on the subject by historians, archæologists, and students of comparative religions.[605]It is enough to suggest that the mistake has too often been made of supposing that this “phallic worship” was a primitive conception of a religious truth, instead of a perversion of the earlier and purer idea which is at the basis of the highest religious conceptions, from the beginning until now.
Quite as widely extended, in both time and space, as the worship of the phallus as the symbol of masculine potency, is the recognition of the tree of life as the symbol of feminine nature in its fruit-bearing capacity. A single tree, or a grove of trees, or the lotus flower, the fig, or the pomegranate, with the peculiar form oftheir seed capsules, appear in all the earlier religious symbolisms, over against the phallus in its realistic or its conventional forms, as representative of reproductive life.[606]
In ancient Assyrian sculpture the most familiar representation of spiritual blessing was of a winged deity with a basket and a palm cone, touching with the cone a sacred tree, or again the person of a sovereign, as if imparting thereby some special benefit or power. This representation was long a mystery to the archeologist, but a recent scholar has shown that it is an illustration of a practice common in the East to-day, of carrying a cone of the male palm to a female palm tree, in order to vitalize it by the pollen.[607]The cone is one of the conventional forms of the phallus, worshiped as a symbol in the temples of the goddesses of the East in earlier days and later.[608]Hence this ancient Assyrian representation is an illustration of the truth that the primitive threshold covenant was recognized as the type of divine power, and covenant blessing, imparted to God’s representative, under the figure of the phallus and the tree.
It would seem, indeed, that the pillar and the tree came to be the conventional symbols of the male and female elements erected in front of an altar of worship,[609]and that, in the deterioration of the ages, these symbols themselves were worshiped, and their symbolism was an incentive to varied forms of impurity, instead of to holy covenanting with God and in God’s service. Therefore these symbols were deemed by true worshipers a perversion of an originally sacred rite, and their destruction was a duty with those who would restore God’s worship to its pristine purity.
Thus the command to Jehovah’s people as to their treatment of the people of Canaan was: “Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: but ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars [or male symbols], and ye shall cut down their Asherim [or trees as a female symbol]: for thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord [Jehovah], whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: lest thou make a covenantwith the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods.”[610]Here is a distinct reference to the primitive Threshold Covenant in its purity and sacredness, and to its perversion in the misuse of the phallus and tree in their symbolism.
Again the command was explicit to the Israelites: “Thou shalt not plant thee an Asherah of any kind of tree beside the altar of the Lord thy God, which thou shalt make thee. Neither shalt thou set thee up a pillar; which the Lord thy God hateth.”[611]
From the earliest historic times the serpent seems to have been accepted as a symbol of the nexus of union between the two sexes, and to be associated, therefore, with the pillar and the tree, as suggestive of the desire that may be good or evil, according to its right or wrong direction and use. Its place as a symbol has been at the threshold of palace and temple and home, with limitless powers of evil in its misuse.[612]
“Mighty snakes standing upright,” together with “mighty bulls of bronze” were “on the threshold of the gates” in ancient Babylon.[613]A serpent wreathed the phallus boundary stone (as if suggestive of its being a thing of life) on the threshold of Babylonian domains.[614]As a symbol of life and life-giving power the serpent stood erect above the head of the mightiest kings of Egypt, who gave and took life at their pleasure,[615]and it even accompanied the winged sun-orb in its manifestation of light and warmth and life over the grandest temples of ancient Thebes.[616]The Egyptian goddess Ket, or Kadesh, “Mistress of Heaven,” a divinity borrowed from the Semites, was represented as standing on a lioness, with lotus flowers, their stems coiled in circular form, in her right hand, and two serpents in her left hand, as she came with her offering to Min, or Khem, the god of generative force.[617]A similar representation of a goddess of life is found in ancient Assyrian remains.
In the representation of Nergal, the lord of theunder world, in the ancient Babylonian mythology, the phallus and the serpent were identical.[618]Beltis-Allat, consort of Nergal, and lady of the under world, brandished a serpent in either hand. She was guardian of the waters of life which were under the threshold of the entrance of her realm.[619]
That which was primarily a holy instinct became, in its perversion, a source of evil and a cause of dread; hence the serpent became a representative of evil itself, and the conflict with it was the conflict between good and evil, between light and darkness. This is shown in the religions of ancient Babylonia, Egypt, and India, and Phœnicia and Greece, and Mexico and Peru, and various other countries.[620]
Vishnoo and his wife Lakshmi, from whom, according to Hindoo teachings, the world was produced, and by whom it continues or must cease, are represented as seated on a serpent, as the basis of their life and power.[621]Siva, also, giver and destroyer of life, iscrowned with a serpent, and a serpent is his necklace, while the symbol of his worship is thelinga in yoni.[622]A mode of Hindoo worship includes the placing of a stonelingabetween two serpents, and under two trees, the one a male tree and the other a female tree.[623]And in various ways the serpent appears, in connection with different Hindoo deities, as the agent of life-giving or of life-destroying.[624]A suggestive representation of Booddha as the conqueror of desire shows him seated restfully on a coiled serpent, the hooded head of which is a screen or canopy above his head.[625]
Apollo, son of Zeus, was the slayer of the man-destroying serpent at Delphi; yet the serpent, when conquered, became a means of life and inspiration to others.[626]Æsculapius, the god of healing, a son of Apollo, was represented by the serpent because he gave new life to those who were dying. Serpents were everywhere connected with his worship as a means of healing.[627]The female oracle who represented Apollo at Delphi sat on a tripod formed of entwined serpents.[628]Serpents on the head of Medusawere a means of death to the beholder; and these serpents were given to Medusa instead of hair because of her faithlessness and sacrilege in the matter of the Threshold Covenant.[629]Thus the good and the evil in that which the serpent symbolized were shown in the religions of the nations of antiquity, and serpent worship became one of the grossest perversions of the idea of the primitive Threshold Covenant.
As in the matter of phallic worship and tree worship, so in this of the worship of the serpent, it would seem unnecessary to multiply illustrations of its prominence in various lands, when so many special treatises on the subject are already available.[630]It is only necessary to emphasize anew the fact that the evident thought of the symbol is an outgrowth or a perversion of the idea of the primitive Threshold Covenant.
The form of the Bible narrative, portraying the first temptation and the first sin, seems to show how early the symbolism of the tree and the serpent was accepted in popular speech. From that narrative as it stands it would appear that the first act of human disobedience was incontinence, in transgression of a specificcommand to abstain, at least for a time, from carnal intercourse. Desire, as indicated by the serpent, prompted to an untimely partaking of the fruit of the forbidden tree, and the consequences of sin followed. The results of this act of disobedience, as recorded in the sacred text,[631]make evident the correctness of this view of the case. When the Bible narrative was first written, whenever that was, the terms “tree,”[632]“fruit” of the tree,[633]“knowledge,”[634]“serpent,” were familiar figures of speech or euphemisms, and their use in the Bible narrative would not have been misunderstood by readers generally. Probably there was no question as to this for many centuries. It was not until the dull prosaic literalism of the Western mind obscured the meaning of Oriental figures of speech that there was any general doubt as to what was affirmed in the Bible story of the first temptation and disobedience.[635]
Philo Judæus at the beginning of the Christian era, seems to understand this as the meaning of the narrative in Genesis, and he applies the teachings of thatnarrative accordingly.[636]There are indications that the rabbis looked similarly at the meaning of the Bible text. There are traces of this traditional view in different Jewish writings.[637]
Evidently the original meaning was still familiar in the early Christian ages. But its becoming connected with false doctrines and heresies, as taught by the Ophites and other Gnostic sects, seems to have brought the truth itself into disrepute, and finally led to its repudiation in favor of a dead literalism.[638]The curse resting on the serpent, in consequence of the first sin of incontinence, was the degradation of the primitive impulse,[639]unless uplifted again by divine inspiration.[640]Because of their breach of the covenant of divine love our first parents were expelled from their home of happiness, and the guardians of the threshold forbade their return to it.[641]
In the closing chapters of the New Testament, as in the opening chapters of the Old, the symbolism of thetree and the serpent, and the covenant relations involved in crossing the threshold, appear as familiar and well-understood figures of speech. “The dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,”[642]representing unholy desire, is shut out from the precincts of the New Jerusalem. Within the gates of that city is there the tree of life watered by the stream that flows from under the throne of power.[643]The city threshold is the dividing line between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. “Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the murderers, and the idolators, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.”[644]
Thus it is in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, at their beginning and at their close. And there are traces of the same truth in the teachings of the various religions, and of the more primitive customs and symbolisms. The all-dividing threshold separates the within from the without; and a covenant welcome there gives one a right to enter in through the gates into the eternal home, to be a partaker of the tree of life, with its ever-renewing and revivifying fruits.