3. CHIEF PERVERSIONS.
With the world as it is, and with man as he is, every possibility of good has a corresponding possibility of evil. Good perverted becomes evil. Truth which, rightly used, proves a savor of life, will, when misused, prove a savor of death.[[601]] And that which is a symbol of truth becomes a means of misleading when looked at as if it were in itself the truth.
The primitive Threshold Covenant as an elemental religious rite was holy and pure, and had possibilities of outgrowth in the direction of high spiritual attainment and aspiring. But the temptation to uplift the agencies in this rite into objects deemed of themselves worthy of worship resulted in impurity and deterioration, by causing the symbol to hide the truth instead of disclosing it.
Among the earliest forms of a temple as a place of worship was the ziggurat, or stepped pyramid, erected as a mighty altar, with its shrine, or holy of holies, at the summit, wherein a bride of the gods awaited the coming of the deity to solemnize the primal Threshold Covenant in expression of his readiness to enter into loving communion with the children of men.[[602]] From this custom the practice of Threshold Covenanting at the temple doorways became incumbent on women of all conditions of society at certain times, and under certain circumstances, in certain portions of the world, as a proof of their religious devotion,[[603]] and thus there grew up all the excesses of sacred prostitution in different portions of the world.[[604]]
The prominence given to the two factors in the primitive Threshold Covenant as a sacred religious act, led to the perversion of the original idea by making the factors themselves objects of reverence and worship; and separately, or together, they came to be worshiped with impure and degrading accompaniments.
Reverence for the phallus, or for phallic emblems, shows itself in the earliest historic remains of Babylonia, Assyria, India, China, Japan, Persia, Phrygia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Abyssinia, Greece, Rome, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Spain, Great Britain, North and South America, and the Islands of the Sea. It were needless to attempt detailed proof of this statement, in view of all that has been written on the subject by historians, archæologists, and students of comparative religions.[[605]] It is enough to suggest that the mistake has too often been made of supposing that this “phallic worship” was a primitive conception of a religious truth, instead of a perversion of the earlier and purer idea which is at the basis of the highest religious conceptions, from the beginning until now.
Quite as widely extended, in both time and space, as the worship of the phallus as the symbol of masculine potency, is the recognition of the tree of life as the symbol of feminine nature in its fruit-bearing capacity. A single tree, or a grove of trees, or the lotus flower, the fig, or the pomegranate, with the peculiar form of their seed capsules, appear in all the earlier religious symbolisms, over against the phallus in its realistic or its conventional forms, as representative of reproductive life.[[606]]
In ancient Assyrian sculpture the most familiar representation of spiritual blessing was of a winged deity with a basket and a palm cone, touching with the cone a sacred tree, or again the person of a sovereign, as if imparting thereby some special benefit or power. This representation was long a mystery to the archeologist, but a recent scholar has shown that it is an illustration of a practice common in the East to-day, of carrying a cone of the male palm to a female palm tree, in order to vitalize it by the pollen.[[607]] The cone is one of the conventional forms of the phallus, worshiped as a symbol in the temples of the goddesses of the East in earlier days and later.[[608]] Hence this ancient Assyrian representation is an illustration of the truth that the primitive threshold covenant was recognized as the type of divine power, and covenant blessing, imparted to God’s representative, under the figure of the phallus and the tree.
It would seem, indeed, that the pillar and the tree came to be the conventional symbols of the male and female elements erected in front of an altar of worship,[[609]] and that, in the deterioration of the ages, these symbols themselves were worshiped, and their symbolism was an incentive to varied forms of impurity, instead of to holy covenanting with God and in God’s service. Therefore these symbols were deemed by true worshipers a perversion of an originally sacred rite, and their destruction was a duty with those who would restore God’s worship to its pristine purity.
Thus the command to Jehovah’s people as to their treatment of the people of Canaan was: “Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: but ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars [or male symbols], and ye shall cut down their Asherim [or trees as a female symbol]: for thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord [Jehovah], whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods.”[[610]] Here is a distinct reference to the primitive Threshold Covenant in its purity and sacredness, and to its perversion in the misuse of the phallus and tree in their symbolism.
Again the command was explicit to the Israelites: “Thou shalt not plant thee an Asherah of any kind of tree beside the altar of the Lord thy God, which thou shalt make thee. Neither shalt thou set thee up a pillar; which the Lord thy God hateth.”[[611]]
From the earliest historic times the serpent seems to have been accepted as a symbol of the nexus of union between the two sexes, and to be associated, therefore, with the pillar and the tree, as suggestive of the desire that may be good or evil, according to its right or wrong direction and use. Its place as a symbol has been at the threshold of palace and temple and home, with limitless powers of evil in its misuse.[[612]]
“Mighty snakes standing upright,” together with “mighty bulls of bronze” were “on the threshold of the gates” in ancient Babylon.[[613]] A serpent wreathed the phallus boundary stone (as if suggestive of its being a thing of life) on the threshold of Babylonian domains.[[614]] As a symbol of life and life-giving power the serpent stood erect above the head of the mightiest kings of Egypt, who gave and took life at their pleasure,[[615]] and it even accompanied the winged sun-orb in its manifestation of light and warmth and life over the grandest temples of ancient Thebes.[[616]] The Egyptian goddess Ket, or Kadesh, “Mistress of Heaven,” a divinity borrowed from the Semites, was represented as standing on a lioness, with lotus flowers, their stems coiled in circular form, in her right hand, and two serpents in her left hand, as she came with her offering to Min, or Khem, the god of generative force.[[617]] A similar representation of a goddess of life is found in ancient Assyrian remains.
In the representation of Nergal, the lord of the under world, in the ancient Babylonian mythology, the phallus and the serpent were identical.[[618]] Beltis-Allat, consort of Nergal, and lady of the under world, brandished a serpent in either hand. She was guardian of the waters of life which were under the threshold of the entrance of her realm.[[619]]
That which was primarily a holy instinct became, in its perversion, a source of evil and a cause of dread; hence the serpent became a representative of evil itself, and the conflict with it was the conflict between good and evil, between light and darkness. This is shown in the religions of ancient Babylonia, Egypt, and India, and Phœnicia and Greece, and Mexico and Peru, and various other countries.[[620]]
Vishnoo and his wife Lakshmi, from whom, according to Hindoo teachings, the world was produced, and by whom it continues or must cease, are represented as seated on a serpent, as the basis of their life and power.[[621]] Siva, also, giver and destroyer of life, is crowned with a serpent, and a serpent is his necklace, while the symbol of his worship is the linga in yoni.[[622]] A mode of Hindoo worship includes the placing of a stone linga between two serpents, and under two trees, the one a male tree and the other a female tree.[[623]] And in various ways the serpent appears, in connection with different Hindoo deities, as the agent of life-giving or of life-destroying.[[624]] A suggestive representation of Booddha as the conqueror of desire shows him seated restfully on a coiled serpent, the hooded head of which is a screen or canopy above his head.[[625]]
Apollo, son of Zeus, was the slayer of the man-destroying serpent at Delphi; yet the serpent, when conquered, became a means of life and inspiration to others.[[626]] Æsculapius, the god of healing, a son of Apollo, was represented by the serpent because he gave new life to those who were dying. Serpents were everywhere connected with his worship as a means of healing.[[627]] The female oracle who represented Apollo at Delphi sat on a tripod formed of entwined serpents.[[628]] Serpents on the head of Medusa were a means of death to the beholder; and these serpents were given to Medusa instead of hair because of her faithlessness and sacrilege in the matter of the Threshold Covenant.[[629]] Thus the good and the evil in that which the serpent symbolized were shown in the religions of the nations of antiquity, and serpent worship became one of the grossest perversions of the idea of the primitive Threshold Covenant.
As in the matter of phallic worship and tree worship, so in this of the worship of the serpent, it would seem unnecessary to multiply illustrations of its prominence in various lands, when so many special treatises on the subject are already available.[[630]] It is only necessary to emphasize anew the fact that the evident thought of the symbol is an outgrowth or a perversion of the idea of the primitive Threshold Covenant.
The form of the Bible narrative, portraying the first temptation and the first sin, seems to show how early the symbolism of the tree and the serpent was accepted in popular speech. From that narrative as it stands it would appear that the first act of human disobedience was incontinence, in transgression of a specific command to abstain, at least for a time, from carnal intercourse. Desire, as indicated by the serpent, prompted to an untimely partaking of the fruit of the forbidden tree, and the consequences of sin followed. The results of this act of disobedience, as recorded in the sacred text,[[631]] make evident the correctness of this view of the case. When the Bible narrative was first written, whenever that was, the terms “tree,”[[632]] “fruit” of the tree,[[633]] “knowledge,”[[634]] “serpent,” were familiar figures of speech or euphemisms, and their use in the Bible narrative would not have been misunderstood by readers generally. Probably there was no question as to this for many centuries. It was not until the dull prosaic literalism of the Western mind obscured the meaning of Oriental figures of speech that there was any general doubt as to what was affirmed in the Bible story of the first temptation and disobedience.[[635]]
Philo Judæus at the beginning of the Christian era, seems to understand this as the meaning of the narrative in Genesis, and he applies the teachings of that narrative accordingly.[[636]] There are indications that the rabbis looked similarly at the meaning of the Bible text. There are traces of this traditional view in different Jewish writings.[[637]]
Evidently the original meaning was still familiar in the early Christian ages. But its becoming connected with false doctrines and heresies, as taught by the Ophites and other Gnostic sects, seems to have brought the truth itself into disrepute, and finally led to its repudiation in favor of a dead literalism.[[638]] The curse resting on the serpent, in consequence of the first sin of incontinence, was the degradation of the primitive impulse,[[639]] unless uplifted again by divine inspiration.[[640]] Because of their breach of the covenant of divine love our first parents were expelled from their home of happiness, and the guardians of the threshold forbade their return to it.[[641]]
In the closing chapters of the New Testament, as in the opening chapters of the Old, the symbolism of the tree and the serpent, and the covenant relations involved in crossing the threshold, appear as familiar and well-understood figures of speech. “The dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan,”[[642]] representing unholy desire, is shut out from the precincts of the New Jerusalem. Within the gates of that city is there the tree of life watered by the stream that flows from under the throne of power.[[643]] The city threshold is the dividing line between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. “Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are the dogs, and the sorcerers, and the fornicators, and the murderers, and the idolators, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.”[[644]]
Thus it is in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, at their beginning and at their close. And there are traces of the same truth in the teachings of the various religions, and of the more primitive customs and symbolisms. The all-dividing threshold separates the within from the without; and a covenant welcome there gives one a right to enter in through the gates into the eternal home, to be a partaker of the tree of life, with its ever-renewing and revivifying fruits.