We must not be blinded to the true significance of such myths by the often material, coarse, and vulgar images under which they are presented. Indeed, if they are properly comprehended, we may explain and redeem from obloquy much in the heathen legends which Arnobius[200] and other fathers of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement imprecation. We should consider whether they are not naïve symbols, chosen, with a crude innocence of evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally renewed life of nature.
This reflection will explain to us the true significance of those objects from ancient and savage cults which are preserved in the locked rooms of museums, in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and degradation. Such an interpretation would be sadly at variance with the fact.
There were, indeed, and often, licentious rites, deliberate indecencies, practised under the cloak of religion by unscrupulous rulers and debased priests. These were alienations and prostitutions of religion. In the genuine and primitive faiths, the symbols of the reproduction and transmission of life were frequent and public, and were not associated with thoughts or acts of debauchery. They were visible emblems of that Spirit of Life which, beyond all else, was the unifying instinct of religious expression.
This instinct led man everywhere to call upon God as Father, as parent of whatever is, “Pan-genitor,” as he is styled in the Orphic hymns. In every race, in all ages, have men’s prayers ascended to “Our Father who art in heaven.”
Were we to listen to the rude Australian, we should hear him invoking Papang, “Father”; or Mamin-gata, or Mungan-naur, “Our Father,” in his various dialects. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, it would be To-ta, “Our Father”; with the American tribes of the north, “grand-father,” or “great father”; in the Brahmānas of India, Pita, “Father”; with the Greeks and Romans, Dios Pater, “the heavenly Father”; and with the northern Vikings, Odin All-father.[201]
But a vital distinction has been claimed to exist between such terms and that fatherhood of God which we have been taught to acknowledge. “In heathen religions,” asserts an eminent writer, “the fatherhood of the gods is physical fatherhood only”; and this is repeated by many Christian theologians and commentators.[202]
It is easy to refute this assertion. It would not have been made but for religious partisanship. Ethnologists are well aware that the word for “Father” in primitive life is much more frequently a term of respect, applied to elders, than necessarily denotive of kinship. The father, Pita, of the Brahmānas is at once the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of all things, and far remote from physical parentage[203]; neither in American nor Australian myths is “the Father above” identified as the ancestor of the gens; among the Zulus, the best instructed missionaries report that Unkululu, the “Father” of their creeds, was not meant literally so, but only as “the means of helping the race into being”[204]; and this is the general sense of the term in every instance which I have analysed.
As some sort of a crude effort to express this comprehensibly, we find that frequently in primitive myths and art the god, regarded as the creator, is shown or spoken of as “androgynous,”—that is, of both sexes at once. He is addressed as “father-mother,” or “mother-father,”—bi-sexual rather than non-sexual in nature.[205] Such expressions are of constant occurrence, and some of the most objectionable portions of the ritual and of idolatrous art arose from the effort to translate this mystical characteristic into objective forms.
Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis, that which mythologists call the worship of “the reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven with the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or developed. Under one form or another, it is the impulse which ever appeals most potently to the human heart.
The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life. This it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is at the root of half the expressions of the religious sentiment. We may trace it from crude and coarse beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive peoples, through ever nobler and more delicate expressions, up through the celibate sacrifices of both sexes, spouses of God,[206] until in its complete expansion it reaches the perfect agape, where the union of the human with the divine in the life eternal, here on earth, or beyond, one and the same, is believed to have been reached.[207]