(1) It is important to note, however, that this same democratic tendency was very marked in Mithraism. “Il est certain,” says Cumont, “qu’il a fait ses premieres conquetes dans les classes inferieures de la societe et c’est l’a un fait considerable; le mithracisme est reste longtemps la religion des humbles.” Mysteres de Mithra, p. 68.
(2) See Glover’s Conflict of Religions in the early Roman Empire, ch. viii.
(3) See Toutain, Cultes paiens, vol. ii, conclusion.
XIV.
THE MEANING OF IT ALL
The general drift and meaning of the present book must now, I think, from many hints scattered in the course of it, be growing clear. But it will be well perhaps in this chapter, at the risk of some repetition, to bring the whole argument together. And the argument is that since the dawn of humanity on the earth—many hundreds of thousands or perhaps a million years ago—there has been a slow psychologic evolution, a gradual development or refinement of Consciousness, which at a certain stage has spontaneously given birth in the human race to the phenomena of religious belief and religious ritual—these phenomena (whether in the race at large or in any branch of it) always following, step by step, a certain order depending on the degrees of psychologic evolution concerned; and that it is this general fact which accounts for the strange similarities of belief and ritual which have been observed all over the world and in places far remote from each other, and which have been briefly noted in the preceding chapters.
And the main stages of this psychologic evolution—those at any rate with which we are here concerned—are Three: the stage of Simple Consciousness, the stage of Self-consciousness, and a third Stage which for want of a better word we may term the stage of Universal Consciousness. Of course these three stages may at some future time be analyzed into lesser degrees, with useful result—but at present I only desire to draw attention to them in the rough, so to speak, to show that it is from them and from their passage one into another that there has flowed by a perfectly natural logic and concatenation the strange panorama of humanity’s religious evolution—its superstitions and magic and sacrifices and dancings and ritual generally, and later its incantations and prophecies, and services of speech and verse, and paintings and forms of art and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with three great leading motives!
And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him. He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature. And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before, allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now. It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion. For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There must have been a period resembling a Golden Age—some condition at any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet ‘golden.’
It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose. The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates (including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them. Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse, or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them and have only wondered with our true commercial instinct what profit we could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature. And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand) that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed the REALITY of this sense—though so far buried and subconscious that he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into consciousness.
(1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460, edn. 1903) says: “The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races.”
Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution of a child—somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)—when the simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new element—SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that (in the depth of the infant’s eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So in the evolution of the human race there has been a period—also marked and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval of time—when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question arose: “How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can I do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the painful, and so on?” From that moment a new motive was added to life. The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with the larger life which once dominated it—the life of Nature, the life of the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken up.