X. THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER

From the consideration of the world-wide belief in a past

Golden Age, and the world-wide practice of the Eucharist,

in the sense indicated in the last chapter, to that of the

equally widespread belief in a human-divine Saviour, is

a brief and easy step. Some thirty years ago, dealing

with this subject,[1] I wrote as follows:--"The true Self

of man consists in his organic relation with the whole body

of his fellows; and when the man abandons his true Self

he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The

mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man

will drop off and die. But when the outer man tries to

separate himself from the inner, the unit-man from the

mass-Man, then the reign of individuality begins--a false

and impossible individuality of course, but the only means

of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality."

And further, "Thus this divinity in each creature, being

that which constitutes it and causes it to cohere together,

was conceived of as that creature's saviour, healer--healer

of wounds of body and wounds of heart--the Man within

the man, whom it was not only possible to know, but whom

to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This,

I take it, was the law of health--and of holiness--as

accepted at some elder time of human history, and by

us seen as through a glass darkly."

[1] See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.

I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our

pride of Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses

of tribal life--that these elder people perceived as a matter

of fact and direct consciousness the redeeming presence

(within each unit-member of the group) of the larger life

to which he belonged. This larger life was a reality--

"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he

called it by the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name

of a Nature-divinity, or by the name of some gracious

human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra, Attis, Orpheus,

or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity

itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living

incarnate Being by the realization of whose presence the little

mortal could be lifted out of exile and error and death and

suffering into splendor and life eternal.

It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship

of "Saviours" all over the world, from China to Peru,

can only be ascribed to the natural working of some such

law of human and tribal psychology--from earliest times

and in all races the same--springing up quite spontaneously

and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the mere

contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil,

long before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into

the heads of all these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great

a compliment both to the power and the ingenuity of his

Satanic Majesty--though the ingenuity with which the

early Church DID itself suppress all information about these

pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited

to Satan! And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous

and universal consent of belief to have sprung

by mere contagion from one accidental source would seem

equally far-fetched and unlikely.

But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling

belief in human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread

legend of their birth from Virgin-mothers. There is hardly

a god--as we have already had occasion to see--whose

worship as a benefactor of mankind attained popularity

in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and

America--who was not reported to have been born from a

Virgin, or at least from a mother who owed the Child

not to any earthly father, but to an impregnation from

Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more

astonishing because the belief in the possibility of such

a thing is so entirely out of the line of our modern thought.

So that while it would seem not unnatural that such a legend

should have, sprung up spontaneously in some odd benighted

corner of the world, we find it very difficult to

understand how in that case it should have spread so rapidly

in every direction, or--if it did not spread--how we are

to account for its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these

widely sundered regions.

I think here, and for the understanding of this problem,

we are thrown back upon a very early age of human

evolution--the age of Magic. Before any settled science

or philosophy or religion existed, there were still certain

Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had

a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact

affected it deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder';

to hear thunder, to imitate it, even to mention it, are sure

ways of rousing superstitious attention and imagination.

Such another word is 'Serpent,' another 'Tree,' and so

forth. There is no one who is insensible to the reverberation

of these and other such words and images[1]; and

among them, standing prominently out, are the two

'Mother' and 'Virgin.' The word Mother touches the deepest

springs of human feeling. As the earliest word

learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with the

heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor

must we forget that in a primitive state of society (the

Matriarchate) that influence was probably even greater

than now; for the father of the child being (often as not)

UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more

intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about

it which has remained even until to-day. But if that

word rooted itself deep in the heart of the Child, the

other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for the full

grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too,

has never lost.

[1] Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of

such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the

square, the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like

3, 4, 5, etc., quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.

There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects

of human worship was the Earth itself, conceived of

as the fertile Mother of all things. Gaia or Ge (the earth)

had temples and altars in almost all the cities of Greece.

Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of

all the gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored

far and wide as the gracious patroness of the crops and

vegetation. Ceres, of course, the same. Maia in the Indian

mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms of Nature

and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so

forth. The Earth, in these ancient cults , was the mystic

source of all life, and to it, as a propitiation, life of all

kinds was sacrificed. [There are strange accounts of a huge

fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in the midst, and

of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep and

corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames.[1]]

It was, in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been

the earliest and most spontaneous of cults--the worship

of the Earth-mother, the all-producing eternal source of

life, and on account of her never-failing ever-renewed

fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.

[1] See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.

But when the Saviour-legend sprang up--as indeed I

think it must have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and

people after people, independently--then, whether it

sprang from the divinization of some actual man who

showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows

"sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification

of the tribe itself as a god, in either case the question of the

hero's parentage was bound to arise. If the 'saviour'

was plainly a personification of the tribe, it was obviously

impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal mother. In

that case--and if the tribe was generally traced in the

legends to some primeval Animal or Mountain or thing

of Nature--it was probably easy to think of him (the

saviour) as, born out of Nature's womb, descended perhaps

from that pure Virgin of the World who is the

Earth and Nature, who rules the skies at night, and stands

in the changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped

(as we have seen) in the great constellation Virgo. If, on

the other hand, he was the divinization of some actual

man, more or less known either personally or by tradition to

his fellows, then in all probability the name of his mortal

mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his

father, that side of parentage being, as we have said,

generally very uncertain, it would be easy to suppose some

heavenly Annunciation, the midnight visit of a God, and what

is usually termed a Virgin-birth.

There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspiring

to this conclusion. One is the condition of affairs

in a remote matriarchial period, when descent was reckoned

always through the maternal line, and the fatherhood

in each generation was obscure or unknown or

commonly left out of account; and the other is the

fact--so strange and difficult for us to realize--that among

some very primitive peoples, like the Australian aborigines,

the necessity for a woman to have intercourse with a

male, in order to bring about conception and child-birth,

was actually not recognized. Scientific observation had not

always got as far as that, and the matter was still under

the domain of Magic![1] A Virgin-Mother was therefore a

quite imaginable (not to say 'conceivable') thing; and indeed

a very beautiful and fascinating thing, combining

in one image the potent magic of two very wonderful

words. It does not seem impossible that considerations

of this kind led to the adoption of the doctrine or legend

of the virgin-mother and the heavenly father among so many

races and in so many localities--even without any contagion

of tradition among them.

[1] Probably the long period (nine months) elapsing between

cohabitation and childbirth confused early speculation on the

subject. Then clearly cohabitation was NOT always followed by

childbirth. And, more important still, the number of virgins of a

mature age in primitive societies was so very minute that the

fact of their childlessness attracted no attention--whereas in

OUR societies the sterility of the whole class is patent to

everyone.

Anyhow, and as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination

of the legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father

of the gods, visited Semele, it will be remembered, in the

form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great

saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated

Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who

slew the Gorgons (the powers of darkness) and saved

Andromeda (the human soul[1]). Devaki, the radiant Virgin

of the Hindu mythology, became the wife of the

god Vishnu and bore Krishna, the beloved hero and prototype

of Christ. With regard to Buddha St. Jerome

says[2] "It is handed down among the Gymnosophists, of India

that Buddha, the founder of their system, was brought forth

by a Virgin from her side." The Egyptian Isis, with

the child Horus, on her knee, was honored centuries

before the Christian era, and worshiped under the names

of "Our Lady," "Queen of Heaven," "Star of the Sea,"

"Mother of God," and so forth. Before her, Neith, the

Virgin of the World, whose figure bends from the sky over

the earthly plains and the children of men, was acclaimed

as mother of the great god Osiris. The saviour Mithra,

too, was born of a Virgin, as we have had occasion to

notice before; and on the Mithrais monuments the mother

suckling her child is a not uncommon figure.[3]

[1] For this interpretation of the word Andromeda see The Perfect

Way by Edward Maitland, preface to First Edition, 1881.

[2] Contra Jovian, Book I; and quoted by Rhys Davids in his

Buddhisim.

[3] See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 332, and Dupuis' Origins of

Religious Beliefs.

The old Teutonic goddess Hertha (the Earth) was a Virgin,

but was impregnated by the heavenly Spirit (the

Sky); and her image with a child in her arms was to

be seen in the sacred groves of Germany.[1] The Scandinavian

Frigga, in much the same way, being caught in the embraces

of Odin, the All-father, conceived and bore a son, the

blessed Balder, healer and saviour of mankind. Quetzalcoatl,

the (crucified) saviour of the Aztecs, was the son of

Chimalman, the Virgin Queen of Heaven.[2] Even the Chinese

had a mother-goddess and virgin with child in her arms[3];

and the ancient Etruscans the same.[4]

[1] R. P. Knight's Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 21.

[2] See Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 176,

where it is said "an ambassador was sent from heaven on an

embassy to a Virgin of Tulan, called Chimalman . . . announcing

that it was the will of the God that she should conceive a son;

and having delivered her the message he rose and left the house;

and as soon as he had left it she conceived a son, without

connection with man, who was called Quetzalcoat], who they say is

the god of air." Further, it is explained that Quetzalcoatl

sacrificed himself, drawing forth his own blood with thorns; and

that the word Quetzalcoatlotopitzin means "our well-beloved son."

[3] Doane, p. 327.

[4] See Inman's Pagan and Christian Symbolism, p. 27.

Finally, we have the curiously large number of BLACK

virgin mothers who are or have been worshiped. Not

only cases like Devaki the Indian goddess, or Isis the

Egyptian, who would naturally appear black-skinned or

dark; but the large number of images and paintings of

the same kind, yet extant--especially in the Italian

churches--and passing for representations of Mary and

the infant Jesus. Such are the well-known image in the

chapel at Loretto, and images and paintings besides in

the churches at Genoa, Pisa, Padua, Munich and other

places. It is difficult not to regard these as very old Pagan

or pre-Christian relics which lingered on into Christian

times and were baptized anew--as indeed we know many

relics and images actually were--into the service of the

Church. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"; and there is

I believe more than one black figure extant of this

Diana, who, though of course a virgin, is represented

with innumerable breasts[1]--not unlike some of the archaic

statues of Artemis and Isis. At Paris, far on into Christian

times there was, it is said, on the site of the present

Cathedral of Notre Dame, a Temple dedicated to 'our Lady'

Isis; and images belonging to the earlier shrine would

in all probability be preserved with altered name in the

later.

[1] See illustration, p. 30, in Inman's Pagan and Christian

Symbolism.

All this illustrates not only the wide diffusion of the doctrine

of the Virgin-mother, but its extreme antiquity.

The subject is obscure, and worthy of more consideration

than has yet been accorded it; and I do not feel able to

add anything to the tentative explanations given a page

or two back, except perhaps to suppose that the vision

of the Perfect Man hovered dimly over the mind of the

human race on its first emergence from the purely animal

stage; and that a quite natural speculation with

regard to such a being was that he would be born from a

Perfect Woman--who according to early ideas would

necessarily be the Virgin Earth itself, mother of all things.

Anyhow it was a wonderful Intuition, slumbering as it

would seem in the breast of early man, that the Great Earth

after giving birth to all living creatures would at last bring

forth a Child who should become the Saviour of the

human race.

There is of course the further theory, entertained by

some, that virgin-parturition--a kind of Parthenogenesis--

has as a matter of fact occasionally occurred among mortal

women, and even still does occur. I should be the last

to deny the POSSIBILITY of this (or of anything else in Nature),

but, seeing the immense difficulties in the way of PROOF of

any such asserted case, and the absence so far of any

thoroughly attested and verified instance, it would, I

think, be advisable to leave this theory out of account

at present.

But whether any of the EXPLANATIONS spoken of are right

or wrong, and whatever explanation we adopt, there remains

the FACT of the universality over the world of this legend--

affording another instance of the practical solidarity and

continuity of the Pagan Creeds with Christianity.