Part 2 (1/2)

The Hindoos pa.s.sed from crude views to more abstract and refined concepts just as the Egyptians and Greeks did. In the Vedic period, there are many contradictory statements about the creation of the world and of the G.o.ds. Heaven and earth are spoken of as the parents of the G.o.ds, and at the same time the G.o.ds are said to have built, or woven, the whole world. When we remember that there was little distinction at first between nature and the G.o.ds, we are not surprised at this contradiction. Moreover, as one writer suggests, this contradiction seems only to have enhanced the mystery of the conception. When religion enters, logic is not always desired.

Another conception which we find in Hindoo thought is that of a world-egg. This a.n.a.logy is so natural that we are not surprised to discover it. Let us glance at one of the accounts given in the Satapatha Brahmana: ”In the beginning this universe was water, nothing but water. The waters desired, 'How can we be reproduced?' So saying, they toiled, they performed austerity. While they were performing austerity, a golden egg came into existence. Being produced, {36} it then became a year. Wherefore this golden egg floated about for the period of a year. From it in a year a male came into existence, who was Praj.a.pati.... He divided this golden egg.... In a year he desired to speak. He uttered 'bhur,' which became this earth; 'bhuvah,' which became this firmament; and 'svar,' which became that sky.... Desiring progeny, he went on wors.h.i.+ping and toiling. He conceived progeny in himself; with his mouth he created the G.o.ds....”

This account of the creation is characteristic of Hindoo thought as it pa.s.ses from the frank admiration of nature, which distinguishes the Vedic period, to what more nearly approaches theosophic speculation.

Yet there is no genuine break with the animism of primitive times. The waters are thought of as desiring, that is, they are held to be alive and vaguely conscious. The belief that words are inseparable from things should again be noted. ”Bhur” becomes the earth, and ”svar”

becomes the sky.

In the course of time, Hindoo thought became more abstract and sophisticated without having achieved any method which would lead to tested knowledge. An a.n.a.logy may make clearer to the reader the vicious intellectual situation. Imagine the subtle minds of the Mediaeval scholastics, without the material furnished them by the Greek philosophy, and obliged to exercise themselves upon magic, myth and legend. The very energy and subtlety of their intellects would lead them into all sorts of phantasmagoria. Theosophy--and a large share of what is called theology--is simply a refining and subtilizing of mythology. The more difficult and abstract the thought, the more significance {37} it is a.s.sumed to possess. The penetrative and exploring power of mere untested speculation is taken for granted.

Words throw a spell over the mind because nothing of a more positive character is before it to counteract their charm. Even to-day we all know of people who like to employ such terms as force, and unity, and spirit, and will. The very vagueness of the words exercises a fascination which smothers the slight demand for explanation. Just as the Jews of the Dispersion spoke of Wisdom as the first-born creature of G.o.d and gave this abstraction an objective existence, so the Hindoo poets and theosophists explained the world in terms which seem to the scientifically trained mind subjective and irrelevant. For all its apparent profundity, such an outlook represents a lower stage than that which science has reached. Subtlety is not enough; it must be a servant to the right methods of investigation. Dialectic and imaginative vividness cannot give truth to ideas not adapted to explain the sort of a world we live in.

Those creation stories developed by the Hebrews with the aid of the Babylonians have had most influence on Western thought and, therefore, deserve considerable attention. The motives and mental processes at work are, however, essentially those which we have already examined.

Unfortunately, we have only hints here and there in the Old Testament of the more primitive traditions which were worked over and built upon by the priests and prophets. Moreover, the Yahweh religion seems to have been adopted quite late and to have made easy a break with the older tales. Probably few readers of the Bible, who have not made a systematic study of Semitic literature, are aware that ancient strands of {38} folk-lore are scattered through it. In Psalm 74, for instance, there is a good instance of primitive views: ”Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength; Thou breakest the head of Leviathan in pieces....

Thou didst cleave fountain and flood.” In Job, likewise, there are references to these deeds of Yahweh in the far past. Very few casual readers ask themselves who Rahab and the Flying Serpent and Leviathan were. Now investigation has shown that we have, in these references to the deeds of Yahweh, fragments of the Babylonian myth of creation.

These creatures are monsters whom Yahweh makes captive before he orders the original chaos into a cosmos. In doing this, he is a counterpart of Marduk, the Babylonian creator. These monsters, like the G.o.ds who conquer them, are only personified forms of phenomena in the heavens above and the earth beneath. Let us now consider the stories of creation given in Genesis. It is not widely enough known that there are two distinct accounts which, although they are externally combined, can easily be separated even in the English translation. The oldest version begins with chapter two, verse five. This version is called the prophetic account. It a.s.sumes that the world already exists and concerns itself only with man's appearance, the inst.i.tution of marriage, and the general features of man's life. G.o.d forms man out of the dust of the ground, as a potter molds his clay, and breathes into him the breath of life. He places him in a garden to dress and keep it. But the incidents which follow are so familiar to every one that there is no need to repeat them. Scholars have pointed out that this account is very similar to that current in Babylonia. The motives are like those found in the Gilgamish and Adapa {39} myths. The differences in general tone and in geographical details can readily be explained by the later date--about the eighth century--and the character of the Palestinian landscape. Those who read Hebrew will note the difference in vocabulary between the second chapter in Genesis and the first, while those who are confined to the English translation should especially note that the two words, Lord and G.o.d, are combined in the prophetic account. There are many nave, and obviously primitive, touches in this creation story which give it a quaint charm.

Only those, however, who are themselves nave in their outlook upon the world can dream of taking it as other than folk-lore. I must confess that it is a mystery to me that so many fairly educated men can take it as anything but what it so obviously is, a creation myth.

The creation story, told in the first chapter, is called by scholars the priestly account. It is post-exilic and, so, relatively late. The foundation consists of mythical ideas which go back to the mists of antiquity. From these were derived certain terms which are scarcely translatable into English. The reader has been further confused by a poetic and inexact rendering of many Hebrew phrases. The ”spirit of G.o.d” is literally the ”wind of G.o.d,” an idea which probably is historically connected with the Babylonian tale of how Marduk uses the wind as his instrument in his fight against Tiamat, the monster of the deep. Tiamat has become Tehom, translated as the ”deep.”

In spite of the lapse in verse 26, into the language of polytheism, the priestly account represents a late theological level in which creation is conceived as the pa.s.sage of will and word into existence. The effect is {40} majestic and intensely dramatic in its simplicity. Yet how else can critical thought portray creation? An omnipotent, personal G.o.d is necessarily conceived as one who has the power to call things into being. To ask how he does this is meaningless, for it ignores the stark power which is a.s.sumed. In accordance with the genius of the Semite, then, G.o.d was pictured as a monarch whose very will brought forth without effort. But a little reflection must convince us that this conception neither makes creation thinkable in any genuine sense nor proves its occurrence. We have merely attained the idealization of the creation myth, its most perfect form.

The Christian conception of the creation rests largely upon the Hebrew account. The uncritical way in which this was studied and accepted, previous to the rise of modern science and the higher criticism, remains a marvel to those who are not acquainted with the psychology of religion. Sanctioned by religion, idealized myth naturally held its own until something positive arose to dispute it. The Church Fathers, the scholastics, and the leaders of the Reformation accepted the stories in Genesis as revelations. They believed that there was a G.o.d and that he had revealed to man what he had done and what his plan of salvation was. These myths fitted into their view of the world as an essential and harmonious ingredient of it. What motive would there be for skepticism? Luther states that ”Moses is writing history and reporting things that actually happened.” ”G.o.d was pleased,” says Calvin, ”that a history of the creation should exist.” Of course, no really educated man of to-day can accept this att.i.tude unless he wishes to sin against his reason. It is {41} unfortunate that there has not been sufficient openness of mind to make possible a wider extension of the knowledge which scholars have been acc.u.mulating. The only candid thing to do is to cla.s.s these Hebrew stories of the creation with the myths which grew up in other parts of the world. All represent attempts to picture a beginning of things as they are, by appeal to a magnified and magical personal agency. Those early thinkers did the best they could do with the ideas they had at hand. They were innocent of our modern understanding of nature as a scene of impersonal, causal processes. To try to find science in mythology is like looking upon Dante's _Divine Comedy_ as a tale of real adventure.

It is interesting to study the speculations which Christian thinkers have evolved upon the question of creation. Usually, the idea of a creation of the physical world out of nothing by a fiat has been favored. ”I am the Lord, that maketh all things; that stretches forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth.” Such is the natural goal of the idea of a creation. Yet a moment's reflection makes us realize that the position is entirely deductive and without a shred of evidence. To a.s.sign to a hypothetical agent called G.o.d powers sufficient to produce what experience tells us exists explains nothing.

The primary a.s.sumption, of course, is that there must have been a creation. But the conception of evolution has attacked that a.s.sumption at its very foundation.

Of late, there have been attempted compromises with the idea of evolution. May not G.o.d guide the course of natural change? But this outlook meets with certain difficulties. In the first place, was the physical {42} world created? If so, it must have been the best of all possible physical worlds, or else G.o.d is either not omnipotent or not omniscient or not ideally good. And when these questions are raised, we pa.s.s immediately into a field of mere speculation. The centuries have been witnesses of disputes between advocates of different dogmas.

At present, there seems to be a revival of interest in the idea of a limited and youthful deity struggling against odds to make the world livable. But G.o.d becomes a part of the universe in every sense, and so we are led to the idea that the physical world was not created but is, rather, co-existent with deity. Of course, there are many possible variations on the theme, and human ingenuity will exhaust itself in combining these possibilities in various ways.

The truth is, that these theological speculations carry us nowhere.

Myth and dialectical acuteness, however skillfully blended, cannot add to our genuine knowledge of the world. Instead, they create new problems of their own which cannot be settled, because there is no way of testing and verifying the various solutions. In short, the premises are at fault and must be outgrown and left behind. Our experience no longer suggests to us the idea of a supernatural agency at work, nor are we so p.r.o.ne to think of an act of creation some few thousands of years in the past. We have largely outgrown the mythological setting out of which theology arose, and it is tradition and the lack of a more positive view which enable it to retain for us any semblance of plausibility. There is nothing inherently irrational in the idea of creation; it simply bears witness to a looser, more personal world in which annihilation and {43} origination were familiar events, because man saw only the surface of things and was not able to follow the continuities which bind things together underneath. The principle of conservation, which is one of the grand achievements of science, is like a two-edged sword: it destroys not only the belief in an absolute annihilation but, likewise, the belief in an absolute beginning.

Slowly, but surely, this new view of nature will have its effect and undermine the more nave hypothesis of a creation. The emotional reverberation of the accustomed forms of speech, reenforced by the mental habits encouraged by religion, will die out only gradually. Man is instinctively romantic and tends to dramatize the world. His favorite categories are personal, and he has a profound distaste for the impersonalism of science. Only the slow pressure of actual knowledge will lift him to a truer view of the world in which he finds himself.

{44}

CHAPTER IV

MAGIC AND RITUAL

Early man had not the conception of natural law that we now possess.

In order even partially to understand his att.i.tude toward things, the man of to-day must abstract from the idea of law and regularity which he has shot through nature, and ignore the knowledge about the antecedents of events which close observation and careful experiment have furnished him with. In the case of magic, just as in the case of mythology, he who wishes to see eye to eye with those who lived long ago must rid himself for the time being both of the knowledge which science has acc.u.mulated and of the mental habits of enquiry and causal explanation which have been fostered by it. These habits and this knowledge have become such a part of us that we are not fully conscious of them and of their importance. They are like the clothes we wear or the forms of politeness which we go through with automatically. It is only after the twentieth-century man delves into folklore or reads accounts of the beliefs and practices of the past, that he realizes that he stands on the shoulders of innumerable generations as the inheritor of a long process of mental evolution. Nothing, perhaps, can make him realize this fact more vividly than a study of magic.

What is magic? The best answer is to give examples {45} of magic. ”In the Malay Peninsula the magician makes an image like a corpse, a footstep long. If you want to cause sickness, you pierce the eye and blindness results; or you pierce the waist and the stomach gets sick.

If you want to cause death, you transfix the head with a palm twig; then you enshroud the image as you would a corpse and pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then you bury it in the middle of the path which leads to the place of the person whom you wish to charm, so that he may step over it.” Ancient agriculture is full of magic rites designed to ward off evils. ”To this day a Transylvanian sower thinks he can keep birds from the corn by carrying a lock in the seedbag.” To this day, again, in Roumania, Serbia and parts of Germany, the peasants try to bring on a rain by sprinkling water on a young girl. It is supposed that nature will follow suit, and send a beneficent shower upon the thirsty earth. Magic is, then, an ingenious way of making or leading nature to do what you want it to do. As Professor Murray writes: ”Agriculture used to be entirely a question of religion; now it is almost entirely a question of science. In antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would probably a.s.sume that the barrenness was due to pollution, or offense somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offenses, or at any rate those of his neighbors and ancestors, and when he eventually decided the cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical const.i.tution of the soil, but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the imaginary being he had offended. A modern man in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at any rate {46} in the earlier stages; he would say it was a case for deeper plowing or for basic slag.”

Magic is a way of controlling things. Imitate the act desired, in a certain way, and it will come to pa.s.s. Talismans and amulets, again, possess a secret power for good and evil. Ancient societies built up a lore of this kind, adding to material objects the agency of demons under the control of magicians. This lore is practically a feature of the past. Even white magic is no longer good form, no longer accredited by the dominant social mind. It slinks into out-of-the-way places beyond the public eye. Yet research is showing that these seemingly discredited beliefs and points of view seldom completely disappear. They smolder beneath the surface and flame up now and then in a startling way to remind us that society in its evolution does not carry all its members along at the same rate. The historian is surprised to find that rites which are given an exalted place in various religions are magical at heart, and go back to beliefs which have long been discredited in other settings.

Some who have specialized in folklore and anthropology are very pessimistic as to the degree in which the scientific outlook upon nature is replacing the more primitive att.i.tude a.s.sociated with magic.