(5) Professor Diederichs has said that “in much ancient ritual it was thought that mystic communion with the deity could be obtained through the semblance of sex-intercourse—as in the Attis-Cybele worship, and the Isis-ritual.” (Farnell.) Reitzenstein says (op. cit., p. 20.) that the Initiates, like some of the Christian Nuns at a later time, believed in union with God through receiving the seed.
(6) Farnell, op. cit., iii. 176. Messrs. Gardner and Jevons, in their Manual of Greek Antiquities, above-quoted, compare the Eleusinian Mysteries favorably with some of the others, like the Arcadian, the Troezenian, the Aeginaean, and the very primitive Samothracian: saying (p. 278) that of the last-mentioned “we know little, but safely conjecture that in them the ideas of sex and procreation dominated EVEN MORE than in those of Eleusis.”
After all it is pretty clear that the early peoples saw in Sex the great cohesive force which kept (we will not say Humanity but at any rate) the Tribe together, and sustained the race. In the stage of simple Consciousness this must have been one of the first things that the budding intellect perceived. Sex became one of the earliest divinities, and there is abundant evidence that its organs and processes generally were invested with a religious sense of awe and sanctity. It was in fact the symbol (or rather the actuality) of the permanent undying life of the race, and as such was sacred to the uses of the race. Whatever taboos may have, among different peoples, guarded its operations, it was not essentially a thing to be concealed, or ashamed of. Rather the contrary. For instance the early Christian writer, Hippolytus, Bishop of Pontus (A.D. 200), in his Refutation of all Heresies, Book V, says that the Samothracian Mysteries, just mentioned, celebrate Adam as the primal or archetypal Man eternal in the heavens; and he then continues: “Habitually there stand in the temple of the Samothracians two images of naked men having both hands stretched aloft towards heaven, and their pudenda turned upwards, as is also the case with the statue of Mercury on Mt. Cyllene. And the aforesaid images are figures of the primal man, and of that spiritual one that is born again, in every respect of the same substance with that (first) man.”
This extract from Hippolytus occurs in the long discourse in which he ‘exposes’ the heresy of the so-called Naassene doctrines and mysteries. But the whole discourse should be read by those who wish to understand the Gnostic philosophy of the period contemporary with and anterior to the birth of Christianity. A translation of the discourse, carefully analyzed and annotated, is given in G. R. S. Mead’s Thrice-greatest Hermes (1) (vol. i); and Mead himself, speaking of it, says (p. 141): “The claim of these Gnostics was practically that the good news of the Christ (the Christos) was the consummation of the inner doctrine of the Mystery-institutions of all the nations; the end of them all being the revelation of the Mystery of Man.” Further, he explains that the Soul, in these doctrines, was regarded as synonymous with the Cause of All; and that its loves were twain—of Aphrodite (or Life), and of Persephone (or Death and the other world). Also that Attis, abandoning his sex in the worship of the Mother-Goddess (Dea Syria), ascends to Heaven—a new man, Male-female, and the origin of all things: the hidden Mystery being the Phallus itself, erected as Hermes in all roads and boundaries and temples, the Conductor and Reconductor of Souls.
(1) Reitzenstein, op. cit., quotes the discourse largely. The Thrice-greatest Hermes may also be consulted for a translation of Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris.
All this may sound strange, but one may fairly say that it represented in its degree, and in that first ‘unfallen’ stage of human thought and psychology, a true conception of the cosmic Life, and indeed a conception quite sensible and admirable, until, of course, the Second Stage brought corruption. No sooner was this great force of the cosmic life diverted from its true uses of Generation and Regeneration (1) and appropriated by the individual to his own private pleasure—no sooner was its religious character as a tribal service (2), (often rendered within the Temple precincts) lost sight of or degraded into a commercial transaction—than every kind of evil fell upon mankind. Corruptio optimi pessima. It must be remembered too that simultaneous with this sexual disruption occurred the disruption of other human relations; and we cease to be surprised that disease and selfish passions, greed, jealousy, slander, cruelty, and wholesale murder, raged—and have raged ever since.
(1) For the special meaning of these two terms, see The Drama of Love and Death, by E. Carpenter, pp. 59-61.
(2) Ernest Crawley in The Mystic Rose challenges this identification of Religion with tribal interests; yet his arguments are not very convincing. On p. 5 he admits that “there is a religious meaning inherent in the primitive conception and practice of ALL human relations”; and a large part of his ch. xii is taken up in showing that even such institutions as the Saturnalia were religious in confirming the sense of social union and leading to ‘extended identity.’
But for the human soul—whatever its fate, and whatever the dangers and disasters that threaten it—there is always redemption waiting. As we saw in the last chapter, this corruption of Sex led (quite naturally) to its denial and rejection; and its denial led to the differentiation from it of Love. Humanity gained by the enthronement and deification of Love, pure and undefiled, and (for the time being) exalted beyond this mortal world, and free from all earthly contracts. But again in the end, the divorce thus introduced between the physical and the spiritual led to the crippling of both. Love relegated, so to speak, to heaven as a purely philanthropical, pious and ‘spiritual’ affair, became exceedingly DULL; and sex, remaining on earth, but deserted by the redeeming presence, fell into mere “carnal curiosity and wretchedness of unclean living.” Obviously for the human race there remains nothing, in the final event, but the reconciliation of the physical and the spiritual, and after many sufferings, the reunion of Eros and Psyche.
There is still, however, much to be said about the Third State of Consciousness. Let us examine into it a little more closely. Clearly, since it is a new state, and not merely an extension of a former one, one cannot arrive at it by argument derived from the Second state, for all conscious Thought such as we habitually use simply keeps us IN the Second state. No animal or quite primitive man could possibly understand what we mean by Self-consciousness till he had experienced it. Mere argument would not enlighten him. And so no one in the Second state can quite realize the Third state till he has experienced it. Still, explanations may help us to perceive in what direction to look, and to recognize in some of our experiences an approach to the condition sought.