Pagan and Christian Creeds: VII. Rites Of Expiation And Redemption

VII.

RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION

There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably beautiful book The Story of my Heart--a passage well known to all lovers of that prose-poet--in which he figures himself standing "in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory," and pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery of life. "Is there any theory, philosophy, or creed," he says, "is there any system of culture, any formulated method, able to meet and satisfy each separate item of this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome that will leave more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the sun burns. . . . Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to be

In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand times No! there is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which will meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the human whirlpool." And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew the history of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of human endeavor had been found absolutely correct and universally applicable--so that every human being would be compelled to pass through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or system; and yet there is something--as Jefferies prophetically felt and with a great longing desired--that can satisfy; and that, the root of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the consciousness of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us: it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity.

The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and abstract--are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and having no real substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they will say) is a history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra and Agni and Kali and Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus Christ

And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at the matter. These gods and creeds are only projections of the human mind. But all the same it misses, does this view, the essential fact. It misses the fact that there is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not directly see it) as well as the existence of a solid form which intercepts that light. Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of the world-consciousness--so deep indeed that the vast majority of individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned outwards is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions passing across their sky; they are unaware that the latter are only shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting their own minds. 1 The vast majority of people have never observed their own minds; their own mental forms. They have only observed the reflections cast by these. Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three degrees of reality. There are the mere shadows--the least real and most evanescent; there are the actual mental outlines of humanity (and of the individual), much more real, but themselves also of course slowly changing; and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the glorious light of the world-consciousness. Of this last it may be said that it never changes. Every thing is known to it--even the very impediments to its shining. But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that

1 Of the Canaanites it was said that "even their daughters they have burnt in the fire to their gods"; 2 and of the King of Moab, that hen he saw his army in danger of defeat, "he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead and offered him for a burnt-offering on the wall!" 3 Dr. Frazer 4 mentions the similar case of the Carthaginians (about B.C. 300) sacrificing two hundred children of good family as a propitiation to Baal and to save their beloved city from the assaults of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles. And even so we hear that on that occasion three hundred more young folk volunteered to die for the fatherland.

The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to their gods Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are described in much detail by Sahagun, the Spanish missionary of the sixteenth century. The victims were mostly prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered by thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol or figure of the god as largely plated with gold and holding his hands palm upward and in a downward sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The

1 As the procession approached the temple, the members of it wept and danced and sang, and here again the abundance of tears was taken for a good augury of rain. 2

Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous figures--that of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid with gold and precious stones; and beside it were "braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and the savor of incense were the sacrifice."

Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account of the sacrifice of a perfect youth at Easter-time--which date Sahagun connects with the Christian festival of the Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had been held in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every luxury and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four courtesans as he desired) had been granted him. At the last and on the fatal day, leaving his companions and his worshipers behind, be slowly ascended the Temple staircase; stripping on each step the ornaments from his body; and breaking and casting away his flutes and other musical instruments;

It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is related concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage (see Diodorus Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould's Religious Belief, vol. i, p. 375).

1 that the offering of one's life to the gods was "sometimes voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening a sure passage into Paradise."

Dr. Frazer describes 2 the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far removed in space and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D. and the Babylonians perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim

man for the male gods, of a woman for each goddess. 1 The latter victims were regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in, each case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the god with the sacrifice [? victim], and of both with the officiating priest. The connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the celebrants. Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who communicated." 2

Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know a mere thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human sacrifice all over the world. We hold up our hands in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli dropping children from his fingers into the flames, but we have to remember that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content to describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about the floor of Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did

1 that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord "omnipresent, knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without whom Man is as nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and purity, under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence." How can we reconcile St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the religious belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties? Perhaps we can only reconcile them by remembering out of what deeps of barbarism and what nightmares of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and is even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also that the ancient ceremonies and rituals of Magic and Fear remained on and were cultivated by the multitude in each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits had attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that even to the present day in each individual the Old and the New are for a long period thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to believe that the practice of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at any rate to the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and convincing. To-day [1918] we are witnessing in the Great European War a carnival of human slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke all the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical ages; and when we ask the why and wherefore of this

1 At

one man should actually die, but (what is far more important) that each man should be ready and willing to die in that cause, when the occasion and the need arises. Taken in its larger meanings and implications Sacrifice, as conceived in the ancient world, was a perfectly reasonable thing. It should pervade modern life more than it does. All we have or enjoy flows from, or is implicated with, pain and suffering in others, and--if there is any justice in Nature or Humanity--it demands an equivalent readiness to suffer on our part. If Christianity has any real

Footnotes

101:1 See, in the same connection, Plato's allegory of the Cave, Republic, Book vii.

105:1 Exodus xxxiv. 20

105:2 Deut. xii. 31.

105:3 2 Kings iii. 27.

105:4 The Golden Bough, vol. "The Dying God," p. 167.

106:1

106:2 "A los niños que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevábanlos en unas literas sobre los hombros, estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores: iban tañendo, cantando y bailando delante de ellos . . . Cuando llevában los niños a matar, si llevában y echaban muchos lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los llevában porque tomaban pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas en aquel año." Sahagun, Historia Nueva España, Bk. II, ch. i.

107:1 Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.

107:2 Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. See also S. Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.

108:1 Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae. It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from all guilt and avert the wrath of the god [the Sun]. A man and a woman, as representing the male and female population, were led about with a garland of figs [fertility] round their necks, to the sound of flutes and singing. They were then scourged, sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore. (Nettleship and Sandys.)

108:2 A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.

109:1 Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.

112:1 See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris Phrygiis, quæ Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea