Part 12 (1/2)
We must see how important a part Dancing played in that great panorama of Ritual and Religion (spoken of in the last chapter) which, having originally been led up to by the 'Fall of Man,' has ever since the dawn of history gradually overspread the world with its strange procession of demons and deities, and its symbolic representations of human destiny.
When it is remembered that ritual dancing was the matrix out of which the Drama sprang, and further that the drama in its inception (as still to-day in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in connection with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand how all this ma.s.s of ceremonial sacrifices, expiations, initiations, Sun and Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic communions and celebrations, mystery-plays, dramatic representations, myths and legends, etc., which I have touched upon in the preceding chapters--together with all the emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the wonderment which they represented--have practically sprung from the same root: a root deep and necessary in the psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show that they will all practically converge again in the end to one meaning, and prepare the way for one great Synthesis to come--an evolution also necessary and inevitable in human psychology.
In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few pages back, occur those well-known words whose repet.i.tion now will, on account of their beauty, I am sure be excused:--
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light and whence it flows He sees it in his joy; The youth who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day.
Wordsworth--though he had not the inestimable advantage of a nineteenth-century education and the inheritance of the Darwinian philosophy--does nevertheless put the matter of the Genius of the Child in a way which (with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we scientific moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now that the Child does not come into the world with a mental tabula rasa of entire forgetfulness but on the contrary as the possessor of vast stores of sub-conscious memory, derived from its ancestral inheritances; we all admit that a certain grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic quality, in the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these racial inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and that after birth the impact of the outer world serves rather to break up and disintegrate this harmony than to confirm and strengthen it. Some psychologists indeed nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child is not only 'Father of the man,' but superior to the man, (1) and that Boyhood and Youth and Maturity are attained to not by any addition but by a process of loss and subtraction. It will be seen that the last ten lines of the above quotation rather favor this view.
(1) ”Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in the course of his short life goes very much farther along the road of degradation and premature senility.” (Man and Woman, by Havelock Ellis, p. 24).
But my object in making the quotation was not to insist on the truth of its application to the individual Child, but rather to point out the remarkable way in which it ill.u.s.trates what I have said about the Childhood of the Race. In fact, if the quotation be read over again with this interpretation (which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that the 'birth' spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively self-conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured, unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the parable unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly. THAT birth certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace and intuition and instinctive perfection of the animals was lost. But the forgetfulness was not entire; the memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an Eden-garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance the first tribal men, on the edge of but not yet WITHIN the civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.
As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-consciousness was also the period of the dawn of the practical and inquiring Intellect; it was the period of the babyhood of both; and so we perceive among these early people (as we also do among children) that while in the main the heart and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for a long period futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as the mind left the ancient bases of instinct and sub-conscious racial experience it fell into a hopeless bog, out of which it only slowly climbed by means of the painfully-gathered stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science.
”Heaven lies about us in our infancy.” Wordsworth perceived that wonderful world of inner experience and glory out of which the child emerges; and some even of us may perceive that similar world in which the untampered animals STILL dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man in the history of the race was long ago driven. But a curse went with the exile. As the Brain grew, the Heart withered. The inherited instincts and racially acc.u.mulated wisdom, on which the first men thrived and by means of which they achieved a kind of temporary Paradise, were broken up; delusions and disease and dissension set in. Cain turned upon his brother and slew him; and the shades of the prison-house began to close. The growing Boy, however, (by whom we may understand the early tribes of Mankind) had yet a radiance of Light and joy in his life; and the Youth--though travelling daily farther from the East--still remained Nature's priest, and by the vision splendid was on his way attended: but
At length the Man perceived it die away.
And fade into the light of common day.
What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to take it so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race, its early and pathetic clinging to the tradition of the Eden-garden, its careless and vigorous boyhood, its meditative youth, with consciousness of sin and endless expiatory ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of salvation, and finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the world-slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!
Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our main line of thought, we may point out that while early peoples were intellectually mere babies--with their endless yarns about heroes on horseback leaping over wide rivers or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles through the air, and their utter failure to understand the general concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already said, by no means fools; certainly not such fools as many of the arm-chair students of these things delight to represent them. For just as, a few years ago, we modern civilizees studying outlying nations, the Chinese for instance, rejoiced (in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity and absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and failed entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently sensible people; so in the case of primitive men we have been, and even still are, far too p.r.o.ne to catalogue their cruelties and obscenities and idiotic superst.i.tions, and to miss the sane and balanced setting of their actual lives.
Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance with his subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918 an article on ”The Primitive Medicine Man” in which he shows that the latter is as a rule anything but a fool and a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he hocuspocuses his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-man's excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth, or of wounds and fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning or trephining--all of which operations, he admits, may be accompanied with grotesque and superst.i.tious ceremonies, yet show real perception and ability. We all know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--what a considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which the modern art of healing owes to the ancient medicine-man, and it may be again mentioned that one of the most up-to-date treatments--the use of a prolonged and exclusive diet of MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start in severe cases--has really come down to us through the ages from this early source. (1) The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett says, is largely a 'faith-healer' and 'soul-doctor'; he believes in his vocation, and undergoes much for the sake of it: ”The main point is to grasp that by his special initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises--not to speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and ecstasy, which he may inherit by nature and have improved by art--he HAS access to a wonder-working power.... And the great need of primitive folk is for this healer of souls.” Our author further insists on the enormous play and influence of Fear in the savage mind--a point we have touched on already--and gives instances of Thanatomania, or cases where, after a quite slight and superficial wound, the patient becomes so depressed that he, quite needlessly, persists in dying! Such cases, obviously, can only be countered by Faith, or something (whatever it may be) which restores courage, hope and energy to the mind. Nor need I point out that the situation is exactly the same among a vast number of 'patients'
to-day. As to the value, in his degree, of the medicine-man many modern observers and students quite agree with the above. (2) Also as the present chapter is on Ritual Dancing it may not be out of place to call attention to the supposed healing of sick people in Ceylon and other places by Devil-dancing--the enormous output of energy and noise in the ritual possibly having the effect of reanimating the patient (if it does not kill him), or of expelling the disease from his organism.
(1) Milk (”fast-milk” or vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with ceremony from the milky and s.e.m.e.n-like sap of certain plants, and much used in sacrificial offerings. (See Monier-Williams. Sanskrit Dictionary.)
(2) See Winwood Reade (Savage Africa), Salamon Reinach (Cults, Myths and Religions), and others.
With regard to the practical intelligence of primitive peoples, derived from their close contact with life and nature, Bishop Colenso's experiences among the Zulus may appropriately be remembered. When expounding the Bible to these supposedly backward 'n.i.g.g.e.rs' he was met at all points by practical interrogations and arguments which he was perfectly unable to answer--especially over the recorded pa.s.sage of the Red Sea by the Israelites in a single night. From the statistics given in the Sacred Book these naughty savages proved to him absolutely conclusively that the numbers of fugitives were such that even supposing them to have marched--men, women and children--FIVE ABREAST and in close order, they would have formed a column 100 miles long, and this not including the baggage, sheep and cattle! Of course the feat was absolutely impossible. They could not have pa.s.sed the Red Sea in a night or a week of nights.
But the sequel is still more amusing and instructive. Colenso, in his innocent sincerity, took the side of the Zulus, and feeling sure the Church at home would be quite glad to have its views with regard to the accuracy of Bible statistics corrected, wrote a book embodying the amendments needed. Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of protest and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition for the time being from his bishopric! While at the same time an avalanche of books to oppose his heresy poured forth from the press. Lately I had the curiosity to look through the British Museum catalogue and found that in refutation of Colenso's Pentateuch Examined some 140 (a hundred and forty) volumes were at that time published! To-day, I need hardly say, all these arm-chair critics and their works have sunk into utter obscurity, but the arguments of the Zulus and their Bishop still stand unmoved and immovable.
This is a case of searching intelligence shown by 'savages,' an intelligence founded on intimate knowledge of the needs of actual life. I think we may say that a similarly instinctive intelligence (sub-conscious if you like) has guided the tribes of men on the whole in their long pa.s.sage through the Red Sea of the centuries, from those first days of which I speak even down to the present age, and has in some strange, even if fitful, way kept them along the path of that final emanc.i.p.ation towards which Humanity is inevitably moving.
XII. THE s.e.x-TABOO
In the course of the last few chapters I have spoken more than once of the solidarity and continuity of Christianity, in its essential doctrines, with the Pagan rites. There is, however, one notable exception to this statement. I refer of course to Christianity's treatment of s.e.x. It is certainly very remarkable that while the Pagan cults generally made a great deal of all sorts of s.e.x-rites, laid much stress upon them, and introduced them in what we consider an unblus.h.i.+ng and shameless way into the instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,' on the whole took quite the opposite line--ignored s.e.x, condemned it, and did much despite to the perfectly natural instincts connected with it. I say 'the Christian Church,' because there is nothing to show that Jesus himself (if we admit his figure as historical) adopted any such extreme or doctrinaire att.i.tude; and the quite early Christian teachers (with the chief exception of Paul) do not exhibit this bias to any great degree. In fact, as is well known, strong currents of pagan usage and belief ran through the Christian a.s.semblies of the first three or four centuries. ”The Christian art of this period remained delightfully pagan. In the catacombs we see the Saviour as a beardless youth, like a young Greek G.o.d; sometimes represented, like Hermes the guardian of the flocks, bearing a ram or lamb round his neck; sometimes as Orpheus tuning his lute among the wild animals.” (1) The followers of Jesus were at times even accused--whether rightly or wrongly I know not--of celebrating s.e.xual mysteries at their love-feasts. But as the Church through the centuries grew in power and scope--with its monks and their mutilations and asceticisms, and its celibate clergy, and its absolute refusal to recognize the s.e.xual meaning of its own acclaimed symbols (like the Cross, the three fingers of Benediction, the Fleur de Lys and so forth)--it more and more consistently defined itself as anti-s.e.xual in its outlook, and stood out in that way in marked contrast to the earlier Nature-religions.
(1) Angels' Wings, by E. Carpenter, p. 104.
It may be said of course that this anti-s.e.xual tendency can be traced in other of the pre-Christian Churches, especially the later ones, like the Buddhist, the Egyptian, and so forth; and this is perfectly true; but it would seem that in many ways the Christian Church marked the culmination of the tendency; and the fact that other cults partic.i.p.ated in the taboo makes us all the more ready and anxious to inquire into its real cause.
To go into a disquisition on the s.e.x-rites of the various pre-Christian religions would be 'a large order'--larger than I could attempt to fill; but the general facts in this connection are fairly patent. We know, of course, from the Bible that the Syrians in Palestine were given to s.e.xual wors.h.i.+ps. There were erect images (phallic) and ”groves” (s.e.xual symbols) on every high hill and under every green tree; (1) and these same images and the rites connected with them crept into the Jewish Temple and were popular enough to maintain their footing there for a long period from King Rehoboam onwards, notwithstanding the efforts of Josiah (2) and other reformers to extirpate them. Moreover there were girls and men (hierodouloi) regularly attached during this period to the Jewish Temple as to the heathen Temples, for the rendering of s.e.xual services, which were recognized in many cases as part of the ritual.