In order to understand the operation and qualities of this Third Consciousness, it may be of assistance just now to consider in what more or less rudimentary way or ways it figured in the pagan rituals and in Christianity. We have seen the rude Siberyaks in North-Eastern Asia or the ‘Grizzly’ tribes of North American Indians in the neighborhood of Mount Shasta paying their respects and adoration to a captive bear—at once the food-animal, and the divinity of the Tribe. A tribesman had slain a bear—and, be it said, had slain it not in a public hunt with all due ceremonies observed, but privately for his own satisfaction. He had committed, therefore, a sin theoretically unpardonable; for had he not—to gratify his personal desire for food—levelled a blow at the guardian spirit of the Tribe? Had he not alienated himself from his fellows by destroying its very symbol? There was only one way by which he could regain the fellowship of his companions. He must make amends by some public sacrifice, and instead of retaining the flesh of the animal for himself he must share it with the whole tribe (or clan) in a common feast, while at the same time, tensest prayers and thanks are offered to the animal for the gift of his body for food. The Magic formula demanded nothing less than this—else dread disaster would fall upon the man who sinned, and upon the whole brotherhood. Here, and in a hundred similar rites, we see the three phases of tribal psychology—the first, in which the individual member simply remains within the compass of the tribal mind, and only acts in harmony with it; the second, in which the individual steps outside and to gratify his personal SELF performs an action which alienates him from his fellows; and the third, in which, to make amends and to prove his sincerity, he submits to some sacrifice, and by a common feast or some such ceremony is received back again into the unity of the fellowship. The body of the animal-divinity is consumed, and the latter becomes, both in the spirit and in the flesh, the Savior of the tribe.
In course of time, when the Totem or Guardian-spirit is no longer merely an Animal, or animal-headed Genius, but a quite human-formed Divinity, still the same general outline of ideas is preserved—only with gathered intensity owing to the specially human interest of the drama. The Divinity who gives his life for his flock is no longer just an ordinary Bull or Lamb, but Adonis or Osiris or Dionysus or Jesus. He is betrayed by one of his own followers, and suffers death, but rises again redeeming all with himself in the one fellowship; and the corn and the wine and the wild flesh which were his body, and which he gave for the sustenance of mankind, are consumed in a holy supper of reconciliation. It is always the return to unity which is the ritual of Salvation, and of which the symbol is the Eucharist—the second birth, the formation of “a new creature when old things are passed away.” For “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God”; and “the first man is of the earth, earthly, but the second man is the Lord from heaven.” Like a strange refrain, and from centuries before our era, comes down this belief in a god who is imprisoned in each man, and whose liberation is a new birth and the beginning of a new creature: “Rejoice, ye initiates in the mystery of the liberated god”—rejoice in the thought of the hero who died as a mortal in the coffin, but rises again as Lord of all!
Who then was this “Christos” for whom the world was waiting three centuries before our era (and indeed centuries before that)? Who was this “thrice Savior” whom the Greek Gnostics acclaimed? What was the meaning of that “coming of the Son of Man” whom Daniel beheld in vision among the clouds of heaven? or of the “perfect man” who, Paul declared, should deliver us from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God? What was this salvation which time after time and times again the pagan deities promised to their devotees, and which the Eleusinian and other Mysteries represented in their religious dramas with such convincing enthusiasm that even Pindar could say “Happy is he who has seen them (the Mysteries) before he goes beneath the hollow earth: that man knows the true end of life and its source divine”; and concerning which Sophocles and Aeschylus were equally enthusiastic? (1)
(1) See Farnell’s Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 194; also The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, by S. Cheetham, D.D. (London, 1897).
Can we doubt, in the light of all that we have already said, what the answer to these questions is? As with the first blossoming of self-consciousness in the human mind came the dawn of an immense cycle of experience—a cycle indeed of exile from Eden, of suffering and toil and blind wanderings in the wilderness, yet a cycle absolutely necessary and unavoidable—so now the redemption, the return, the restoration has to come through another forward step, in the same domain. Abandoning the quest and the glorification of the separate isolated self we have to return to the cosmic universal life. It is the blossoming indeed of this ‘new’ life in the deeps of our minds which is salvation, and which all the expressions which I have just cited have indicated. It is this presence which all down the ages has been hailed as Savior and Liberator: the daybreak of a consciousness so much vaster, so much more glorious, than all that has gone before that the little candle of the local self is swallowed up in its rays. It is the return home, the return into direct touch with Nature and Man—the liberation from the long exile of separation, from the painful sense of isolation and the odious nightmare of guilt and ‘sin.’ Can we doubt that this new birth—this third stage of consciousness, if we like to call it so—has to come, that it is indeed not merely a pious hope or a tentative theory, but a FACT testified to already by a cloud of witnesses in the past—witnesses shining in their own easily recognizable and authentic light, yet for the most part isolated from each other among the arid and unfruitful wastes of Civilization, like glow-worms in the dry grass of a summer night?
Since the first dim evolution of human self-consciousness an immense period, as we have said—perhaps 30,000 years, perhaps even more—has elapsed. Now, in the present day this period is reaching its culmination, and though it will not terminate immediately, its end is, so to speak, in sight. Meanwhile, during all the historical age behind us—say for the last 4,000 or 5,000 years—evidence has been coming in (partly in the religious rites recorded, partly in oracles, poems and prophetic literature) of the onset of this further illumination—“the light which never was on sea or land”—and the cloud of witnesses, scattered at first, has in these later centuries become so evident and so notable that we are tempted to believe in or to anticipate a great and general new birth, as now not so very far off. (1) (We should, however, do well to remember, in this connexion, that many a time already in the history the Millennium has been prophesied, and yet not arrived punctual to date, and to take to ourselves the words of ‘Peter,’ who somewhat grievously disappointed at the long-delayed second coming of the Lord Jesus in the clouds of heaven, wrote in his second Epistle: “There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” (2))
(1) For an amplification of all this theme, see Dr. Bucke’s remarkable and epoch-making book, Cosmic Consciousness (first published at Philadelphia, 1901).
(2) 2 Peter iii. 4; written probably about A.D. 150.
I say that all through the historical age behind us there has been evidence—even though scattered—of salvation and the return of the Cosmic life. Man has never been so completely submerged in the bitter sea of self-centredness but what he has occasionally been able to dash the spray from his eyes and glimpse the sun and the glorious light of heaven. From how far back we cannot say, but from an immense antiquity come the beautiful myths which indicate this.
Cinderella, the cinder-maiden, sits unbeknown in her earthly hutch;
Gibed and jeered at she bewails her lonely fate;
Nevertheless youngest-born she surpasses her sisters and endues a garment of the sun and stars;
From a tiny spark she ascends and irradiates the universe, and is wedded to the prince of heaven.