The reverse conception, however, has prevailed in religious systems, polytheistic or monotheistic. Man has projected on the cloudy unknown the magnified picture of his own individuality and shuddered with terror at the self-created plantasm, like the peasant frightened by the spectre of the Brocken, formed by the distorted image of himself. In his happier moments, with his hopes gratified, the same vice of thought, still active, prevented him from conceiving any higher ideal than his better self. “Everywhere the same tendency was observed; the gods, always exaggerations of human power and passions, became more and more personifications of what was most admirable and lovable in human nature, till in Christianity there emerged the avowed ideal man.” What could it end in but anthropomorphism, or pantheism, or, rejecting both, a Religion of Humanity, with a background of an imbecile Unknowable?
Is it necessary to point out how none of these conclusions can satisfy the enlightened religious sentiment? How anthropomorphism, which makes God in the image of man, instead of acknowledging that man is made in the image of God, belittles divinity to a creature of passions and caprices? How pantheism, increasing God at the expense of man, wipes out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad “good in the making,” and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence of personality? And how the denial of all possible knowledge of the absolute digs away the only foundation on which sanity can establish a religion, and then palms off material comfort as the proper food for religious longing?
The long story of religious effort is not from fetichism to monotheism, as Comte read it; nor is its only possible goal inside the limits of the ego, as Feuerbach and the other Neo-Hegelians assert; but it is on its theoretical side to develope with greater and greater distinctness the immeasurable reality of pure thought, to dispense more and more with the quantification of the absolute, and to avoid in the representation of that Being the use of the technic of concrete existence.
Little by little we learn that the really true is never true in fact, that the really good is never good in act.139 Carefully cherishing this distinction taught by mathematics and ethics, the religious mind learns to recognize in that only reality darkly seen through the glass of material things, that which should fix and fill its meditations. Passing beyond the domain of physical law, it occupies itself with that which defines the conditions of law. It contemplates an eternal activity, before which its own self-consciousness seems a flickering shadow, yet in that contemplation is not lost but gains an evergrowing personality.
This is the goal of religious striving, the hidden aim of the wars and persecutions, the polemics and martyrdoms, which have so busied and bloodied the world. This satisfies the rational postulates of religion. Does some one say that it does not stimulate its emotional elements, that it does not supply the impulses of action which must ever be the criteria of the true faith? Is it not a religion at all, but a philosophy, a search, or if you prefer, a love for the truth?
Let such doubter ponder well the signification of truth, its relation to life, its identity with the good, and the paramount might of wisdom and a clear understanding, and he will be ready to exclaim with the passionate piety of St. Augustine: “Ubi inveni veritatem, ibi inveni Deum meum, ipsam veritatem, quam, ex quo didici, non sum oblitus.”
From this brief review of its character, the Myth will be seen to be one of the transitory expressions of the religious sentiment, which in enlightened lands it has already outgrown and should lay aside. So far as it relates to events, real or alleged, historic or geologic, it deals with that which is indifferent to pure religion; and so far as it assumes to reveal the character, plans and temper of divinity, it is too evidently a reflex of man’s personality to be worthy of serious refutation where it conflicts with the better guide he has within him.
THE CULT, ITS SYMBOLS AND RITES
SUMMARY
The Symbol represents the unknown; the Rite is the ceremony of worship.
A symbol stands for the supernatural, an emblem for something known. The elucidation of symbolism is in the laws of the association of ideas. Associations of similarity give related symbols, of contiguity coincident symbols. Symbols tend either toward personification (iconolatry), or toward secularization. The symbol has no fixed interpretation. Its indefiniteness shown by the serpent symbol, and the cross. The physiological relations of certain symbols. Their classification. The Lotus. The Pillar. Symbols discarded by the higher religious thought. Esthetic and scientific symbolism (the “Doctrine of Correspondences”).
Rites are either propitiatory or memorial. The former spring either from the idea of sacrifice or of specific performance. A sacrifice is a gift, but its measure is what it costs the giver. Specific performance means that a religious act should have no ulterior aim. Vicarious sacrifice and the idea of sin.
Memorial rites are intended to recall the myth, or else to keep up the organization. The former are dramatic or imitative, the latter institutionary. Tendency of memorial rites to become propitiatory. Examples.
CHAPTER VI
THE CULT, ITS SYMBOLS AND RITES
As the side which a religious system presents to the intellect is shown in the Myth, so the side that it presents to sense is exhibited in the Cult. This includes the representation and forms of worship of the unknown power which presides over the fruition of the Prayer or religious wish. The representation is effected by the Symbol, the worship by the Rite. The development of these two, and their relation to religious thought, will be the subject of the present chapter.
The word Symbolism has a technical sense in theological writings, to wit, the discussion of creeds, quite different from that in which it is used in mythological science. Here it means the discussion of the natural objects which have been used to represent to sense supposed supernatural beings. As some conception of such beings must first be formed, the symbol is necessarily founded upon the myth, and must be explained by it.
A symbol is closely allied to an emblem, the distinction being that the latter is intended to represent some abstract conception or concrete fact, not supposed to be supernatural. Thus the serpent is the emblem of Esculapius, or, abstractly, of the art of healing; but in its use as a symbol in Christian art it stands for the Evil One, a supernatural being. The heraldric insignia of the Middle Ages were emblematic devices; but the architecture of the cathedrals was largely symbolic. Both agree in aiming to aid the imagination and the memory, and both may appeal to any special sense, although the majority are addressed to sight alone.
Symbolism has not received the scientific treatment which has been so liberally bestowed on mythology. The first writer who approached it in the proper spirit was Professor Creuzer.140 Previous to his labors the distinction between pictographic and symbolic art was not well defined. He drew the line sharply, and illustrated it abundantly; but he did not preserve so clearly the relations of the symbol and the myth. Indeed, he regarded the latter as a symbol, a “phonetic” one, to be treated by the same processes of analysis. Herein later students have not consented to follow him. The contrast between these two expressions of the religious sentiment becomes apparent when we examine their psychological origin. This Professor Creuzer did not include in his researches, nor is it dwelt upon at any length in the more recent works on the subject.141 The neglect to do this has given rise to an arbitrariness in the interpretation of many symbols, which has often obscured their position in religious history.
What these principles are I shall endeavor to indicate; and first of the laws of the origin of symbols, the rules which guided the early intellect in choosing from the vast number of objects appealing to sense those fit to shadow forth the supernatural.
It may safely be assumed that this was not done capriciously, as the modern parvenue makes for himself a heraldric device. The simple and devout intellect of the primitive man imagined a real connection between the god and the symbol. Were this questioned, yet the wonderful unanimity with which the same natural objects, the serpent, the bird, the tree, for example, were everywhere chosen, proves that their selection was not the work of chance. The constant preference of these objects points conclusively to some strong and frequent connection of their images with mythical concepts.
The question of the origin of symbols therefore resolves itself into one of the association of ideas, and we start from sure ground in applying to their interpretation the established canons of association. These, as I have elsewhere said, are those of contiguity and similarity, the former producing association by the closeness of succession of impressions or thoughts, the latter through impressions or thoughts recalling like ones in previous experience. When the same occurrence affects different senses simultaneously, or nearly so, the association is one of contiguity, as thunder and lightning, for a sound cannot be like a sight; when the same sense is affected in such a manner as to recall a previous impression, the association is one of similarity, as when the red autumn leaves recall the hue of sunset. Nearness in time or nearness in kind is the condition of association.
The intensity or permanence of the association depends somewhat on temperament, but chiefly on repetition or continuance. Not having an ear for music, I may find it difficult to recall a song from hearing its tune; but by dint of frequent repetition I learn to associate them. Light and heat, smoke and fire, poverty and hunger so frequently occur together, that the one is apt to recall the other. So do a large number of antithetical associations, as light and darkness, heat and cold, by inverse similarity, opposite impressions reviving each other, in accordance with the positive and privative elements of a notion.
This brief reference to the laws of applied thought, – too brief, did I not take for granted that they are generally familiar – furnishes the clue to guide us through the labyrinth of symbolism, to wit, the repeated association of the event or power recorded in the myth with some sensuous image. Where there is a connection in kind between the symbol and that for which it stands, there is related symbolism; where the connection is one of juxtaposition in time, there is coincident symbolism. Mother Earth, fertile and fecund, was a popular deity in many nations, and especially among the Egyptians, who worshipped her under the symbol of a cow; this is related symbolism; the historical event of the execution of Christ occurred by crucifixion, one of several methods common in that age, and since then the cross has been the symbol of Christianity; this is coincident symbolism. It is easy for the two to merge, as when the cross was identified with a somewhat similar and much older symbol, one of the class I have called “related,” signifying the reproductive principle, and became the “tree of life.” As a coincident symbol is to a certain extent accidental in origin, related symbols have always been most agreeable to the religious sentiment.
This remark embodies the explanation of the growth of religious symbolism, and also its gradual decay into decorative art and mnemonic design. The tendency of related symbolism is toward the identification of the symbol with that for which it stands, toward personification or prosopopeia; while what I may call the secularization of symbols is brought about by regarding them more and more as accidental connections, by giving them conventional forms, and treating them as elements of architectural or pictorial design, or as aids to memory.
This tendency of related symbolism depends on a law of applied thought which has lately been formulated by a distinguished logician in the following words: “What is true of a thing, is true of its like.”142 The similarity of the symbol to its prototype assumed, the qualities of the symbol, even those which had no share in deciding its selection, no likeness to the original, were lumped, and transferred to the divinity. As those like by similarity, so those unlike, were identified by contiguity, as traits of the unknown power. This is the active element in the degeneracy of religious idealism. The cow or the bull, chosen first as a symbol of creation or fecundity, led to a worship of the animal itself, and a transfer of its traits, even to its horns, to the god. In a less repulsive form, the same tendency shows itself in the pietistic ingenuity of such poets as Adam de Sancto Victore and George Herbert, who delight in taking some biblical symbol, and developing from it a score of applications which the original user never dreamt of. In such hands a chance simile grows to an elaborate myth.
Correct thought would prevent the extension of the value of the symbol beyond the original element of similarity. More than this, it would recognize the fact that similarity does not suppose identity, but the reverse, to wit, defect of likeness; and this dissimilitude must be the greater, as the original and symbol are naturally discrepant. The supernatual, however, whether by this term we mean the unknown or the universal – still more if we mean the incomprehensible – is utterly discrepant with the known, except by an indefinitely faint analogy. In the higher thought, therefore, the symbol loses all trace of identity and becomes merely emblematic.
The ancients defended symbolic teaching on this very ground, that the symbol left so much unexplained, that it stimulated the intellect and trained it to profounder thinking;143 practically it had the reverse effect, the symbol being accepted as the thing itself.
Passing from these general rules of the selection of symbols, to the history of the symbol when chosen, this presents itself to us in a reciprocal form, first as the myth led to the adoption and changes in the symbol, and as the latter in turn altered and reformed the myth.
The tropes and figures of rhetoric by which the conceptions of the supernatural were first expressed, give the clue to primitive symbolism. A very few examples will be sufficient. No one can doubt that the figure of the serpent was sometimes used in pictorial art to represent the lightning, when he reads that the Algonkins straightly called the latter a snake; when he sees the same adjective, spiral or winding, (ἑλικοιεδης) applied by the Greeks to the lightning and a snake; when the Quiché call the electric flash a strong serpent; and many other such examples. The Pueblo Indians represent lightning in their pictographs by a zigzag line. A zigzag fence is called in the Middle States a worm or “snake” fence. Besides this, adjectives which describe the line traced by the serpent in motion are applied to many twisting or winding objects, as a river, a curl or lock of hair, the tendrils of a vine, the intestines, a trailing plant, the mazes of a dance, a bracelet, a broken ray of light, a sickle, a crooked limb, an anfractuous path, the phallus, etc. Hence the figure of a serpent may, and in fact has been, used with direct reference to every one of these, as could easily be shown. How short-sighted then the expounder of symbolism who would explain the frequent recurrence of the symbol or the myth of the serpent wherever he finds it by any one of these!
This narrowness of exposition becomes doubly evident when we give consideration to two other elements in primitive symbolism – the multivocal nature of early designs, and the misapprehensions due to contiguous association.
To illustrate the first, let us suppose, with Schwarz144 and others, that the serpent was at first the symbol of the lightning. Its most natural representation would be in motion; it might then stand for the other serpentine objects I have mentioned; but once accepted as an acknowledged symbol, the other qualities and properties of the serpent would present themselves to the mind, and the effort would be made to discover or to imagine likenesses to these in the electric flash. The serpent is venomous; it casts its skin and thus seems to renew its life; it is said to fascinate its prey; it lives in the ground; it hisses or rattles when disturbed: none of these properties is present to the mind of the savage who scratches on the rock a zigzag line to represent the lightning god. But after-thought brings them up, and the association of contiguity can apply them all to the lightning, and actually has done so over and over again; and not only to it, but also to other objects originally represented by a broken line, for example, the river gods and the rays of light.
This complexity is increased by the ambiguous representation of symbolic designs. The serpent, no longer chosen for its motion alone, will be expressed in art in that form best suited to the meaning of the symbol present in the mind of the artist. Realism is never the aim of religious art. The zigzag line, the coil, the spiral, the circle and the straight line, are all geometrical radicals of various serpentine forms. Any one of these may be displayed with fanciful embellishments and artistic aids. Or the artist, proceeding by synecdoche, takes a part for the whole, and instead of portraying the entire animal, contents himself with one prominent feature or one aspect of it. A striking instance of this has been developed by Dr. Harrison Allen, in the prevalence of what he calls the “crotalean curve,” in aboriginal American art, a line which is the radical of the profile view of the head of the rattlesnake (crotalus).145 This he has detected in the architectural monuments of Mexico and Yucatan, in the Maya phonetic scrip, and even in the rude efforts of the savage tribes. Each of these elective methods of representing the serpent, would itself, by independent association, call up ideas out of all connection whatever with that which the figure first symbolized. These, in the mind entertaining them, will supersede and efface the primitive meaning. Thus the circle is used in conventional symbolic art to designate the serpent; but also the eye, the ear, the open mouth, the mamma, the sun, the moon, a wheel, the womb, the vagina, the return of the seasons, time, continued life, hence health, and many other things. Whichever of these ideas is easiest recalled will first appear on looking at a circle. The error of those who have discussed mythological symbolism has been to trace a connection of such adventitious ideas beyond the symbol to its original meaning; whereas the symbol itself is the starting-point. To one living in a region where venomous serpents abound, the figure of one will recall the sense of danger, the dread of the bite, and the natural hostility we feel to those who hurt us; whereas no such ideas would occur to the native of a country where there are no snakes, or where they are harmless, unless taught this association.
Few symbols have received more extended study than that of the cross, owing to its prominence in Christian art. This, as I have said, was coincident or incidental only. It corresponded, however, to a current “phonetic symbol,” in the expression common to the Greeks and Romans of that day, “to take up one’s cross,” meaning to prepare for the worst, a metaphor used by Christ himself.
Now there is no agreement as to what was the precise form of the cross on which he suffered. Three materially unlike crosses are each equally probable. In symbolic art these have been so multiplied that now two hundred and twenty-two variants of the figure are described!146 Of course there is nothing easier than to find among these similarities, with many other conventional symbols, the Egyptian Tau, the Hammer of Thor, the “Tree of Fertility,” on which the Aztecs nailed their victims, the crossed lines which are described on Etruscan tombs, or the logs crossed at rectangles, on which the Muskogee Indians built the sacred fire. The four cardinal points are so generally objects of worship, that more than any other mythical conception they have been represented by cruciform figures. But to connect these in any way with the symbol as it appears in Christian art, is to violate every scientific principle.
Each variant of a symbol may give rise to myths quite independent of its original meaning. A symbol once adopted is preserved by its sacred character, exists long as a symbol, but with ever fluctuating significations. It always takes that which is uppermost in the mind of the votary and the congregation. Hence, psychology, and especially the psychology of races, is the only true guide in symbolic exegesis.
Nor is the wide adoption and preservation of symbols alone due to an easily noticed similarity between certain objects and the earliest conceptions of the supernatural, or to the preservative power of religious veneration.
I have previously referred to the associations of ideas arising from ancestral reversions of memory, and from the principles of minimum muscular action and harmonic excitation. Such laws make themselves felt unconsciously from the commencement of life, with greater or less power, dependent on the susceptibility of the nervous system. They go far toward explaining the recurrence and permanence of symbols, whether of sight or sound. Thus I attribute the prevalence of the serpentine curve in early religious art largely to its approach to the “line of beauty,” which is none other than that line which the eye, owing to the arrangement of its muscles, can follow with the minimum expenditure of nervous energy. The satisfaction of the mind in viewing symmetrical figures or harmonious coloring, as also that of the ear, in hearing accordant sounds, is, as I have remarked, based on the principle of maximum action with minimum waste. The mind gets the most at the least cost.
The equilateral triangle, which is the simplest geometrical figure which can enclose a space, thus satisfying the mind the easiest of any, is nigh universal in symbolism. It is seen in the Egyptian pyramids, whose sides are equilateral triangles with a common apex, in the mediæval cathedrals, whose designs are combinations of such triangles, in the sign for the trinity, the pentalpha, etc.
The classification of some symbols of less extensive prevalence must be made from their phonetic values. One class was formed as were the “canting arms” in heraldry, that is, by a rebus. This is in its simpler form, direct, as when Quetzalcoatl, the mystical hero-god of Atzlan, is represented by a bird on a serpent, quetzal signifying a bird, coatl a serpent; or composite, two or more of such rebus symbols being blended by synecdoche, like the “marshalling” of arms in heraldry, as when the same god is portrayed by a feathered serpent; or the rebus may occur with paronymy, especially when the literal meaning of a name of the god is lost, as when the Algonkins forgot the sense of the word wabish, white or bright, as applied to their chief divinity, and confounding it with wabos, a rabbit, wove various myths about their ancestor, the Great Hare, and chose the hare or rabbit as a totemic badge.147
It is almost needless to add further that the ideas most frequently associated with the unknown object of religion are those, which, struggling after material expression, were most fecund in symbols. We have but to turn to the Orphic hymns, or those of the Vedas or the Hebrew Psalms, to see how inexhaustible was the poetic fancy, stirred by religious awe, in the discovery of similitudes, any of which, under favoring circumstances, might become a symbol.
Before leaving this branch of my subject, I may illustrate some of the preceding comments by applying them to one or two well known subjects of religious art.
A pleasing symbol, which has played a conspicuous part in many religions, is the Egyptian lotus, or “lily of the Nile.” It is an aquatic plant, with white, roseate or blue flowers, which float upon the water, and send up from their centre long stamens. In Egypt it grows with the rising of the Nile, and as its appearance was coincident with that important event, it came to take prominence in the worship of Isis and Osiris as the symbol of fertility. Their mystical marriage took place in its blossom. In the technical language of the priests, however, it bore a profounder meaning, that of the supremacy of reason above matter, the contrast being between the beautiful flower and the muddy water which bears it.148 In India the lotus bears other and manifold meanings. It is a symbol of the sacred river Ganges, and of the morally pure. No prayer in the world has ever been more frequently repeated than this: “Om! the jewel in the lotus. Amen” (om mani padme hum). Many millions of times, every hour, for centuries, has this been iterated by the Buddhists of Thibet and the countries north of it. What it means, they can only explain by fantastic and mystical guesses. Probably it refers to the legendary birth of their chief saint, Avalokitesvara, who is said to have been born of a lotus flower. But some say it is a piece of symbolism not strange to its meaning in Egypt,149 and borrowed by Buddhism from the Siva worship. In the symbolic language of this sect the lotus is the symbol of the vagina, while the phallus is called “the jewel.” With this interpretation the Buddhist prayer would refer to the reproductive act; but it is illustrative of the necessity of attributing wholly diverse meanings to the same symbol, that the Buddhists neither now nor at any past time attached any such signification to the expression, and it would be most discrepant with their doctrines to do so.150
Another symbol has frequently been open to this duplicate interpretation, that is, the upright pillar. The Egyptian obelisk, the pillars of “Irmin” or of “Roland,” set up now of wood, now of stone by the ancient Germans, the “red-painted great warpole” of the American Indians, the May-pole of Old England, the spire of sacred edifices, the staff planted on the grave, the terminus of the Roman landholders, all these objects have been interpreted to be symbols of life, or the life-force. As they were often of wood, the trunk of a tree for instance, they have often been called by titles equivalent to the “tree of life,” and are thus connected with the nigh innumerable myths which relate to some mystic tree as the source of life. The ash Ygdrasyl of the Edda, the oak of Dordona and of the Druid, the modern Christmas tree, the sacred banyan, the holy groves, illustrate but faintly the prevalence of tree worship. Even so late as the time of Canute, it had to be forbidden in England by royal edict.
Now, the general meaning of this symbol I take to be the same as that which led to the choice of hills and “high places,” as sites for altars and temples, and to the assigning of mountain tops as the abodes of the chief gods. It is seen in adjectives applied, I believe, in all languages, certainly all developed ones, to such deities themselves. These adjectives are related to adverbs of place, signifying above, up or over. We speak of the supernatural, or supernal powers, the Supreme Being, the Most High, He in Heaven, and such like. So do all Aryan and Semitic tongues. Beyond them, the Chinese name for the Supreme Deity, Tien, means up. I have elsewhere illustrated the same fact in native American tongues. The association of light and the sky above, the sun and the heaven, is why we raise our hands and eyes in confident prayer to divinity. That at times, however, a religion of sex-love did identify these erect symbols with the phallus as the life-giver, is very true, but this was a temporary and adventitious meaning assigned a symbol far more ancient than this form of religion.
In this review of the principles of religious symbolism, I have attempted mainly to exhibit the part it has sustained in the development of the religious sentiment. It has been generally unfavorable to the growth of higher thought. The symbol, in what it is above the emblem, assumes more than a similarity, a closer relation than analogy; to some degree it pretends to a hypostatic union or identity of the material with the divine, the known to sense with the unknown. Fully seen, this becomes object worship; partially so, personification.
There is no exception to this. The refined symbolisms which pass current to day as religious philosophies exemplify it. The one, esthetic symbolism, has its field in musical and architectural art, in the study and portraiture of the beautiful; the other, scientific symbolism, claims to discover in the morphology of organisms, in the harmonic laws of physics, and in the processes of the dialectic, the proof that symbolism, if not a revelation, is at least an unconscious inspiration of universal truth. This is the “Doctrine of Correspondences,” much in favor with Swedenborgians, but by no means introduced by the founder of that sect. The recognition of the identity in form of the fundamental laws of motion and thought, and the clearer understanding of the character of harmony which the experiments of Helmholtz and others give us, disperse most of the mystery about these similarities. The religion of art, as such, will come up for consideration in the next chapter.
The second form of the Cult is the Rite. This includes the acts or ceremonies of worship. Considered in the gross, they can be classed as of two kinds, the first and earliest propitiatory, the second and later memorial or institutionary.
We have but to bear in mind the one aspiration of commencing religious thought, to wit, the attainment of a wish, to see that whatever action arose therefrom must be directed to that purpose. Hence, when we analyze the rude ceremonies of savage cults, the motive is extremely apparent. They, like their prayers, all point to the securing of some material advantage. They are designed