REMARKS AND NOTES

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

1.

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

1 to have been born like the other sungods, 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 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

1 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 recognised--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 recognise 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

Footnotes

155:1 These dates have shifted now by two or three weeks owing to the equinoctial precession.

156:1 The date of his birth was not fixed till A.D. 531--when it was computed by a monkish astrologer.

158:1 Note especially the ordeals through which the youth of so many savage races have had to pass before being admitted to manhood.