The religious calendar of Numa is based upon that of the Magi; it is a sequence of feasts and mysteries, recalling throughout the secret doctrine of initiates and perfectly adapting the public enactments of the cultus to the universal laws of Nature. Its arrangement of months and days has been preserved by the conservative influence of Christian regeneration. Even as the Romans under Numa, we still hallow by abstinence the days consecrated to the commemoration of birth and death; but for us the day of Venus is sanctified by the expiations of Calvary. The gloomy day of Saturn is that during which our incarnate God sleeps in His tomb, but He will rise up, and the life which He promises will blunt the scythe of Kronos. That month which Romans dedicated to Maia, the nymph of youth and flowers, the young mother who smiles upon the year’s first-fruits, is consecrated by us to Mary, the mystical rose, the lily of purity, the heavenly mother of the Saviour. So are our religious observances ancient as the world, our feasts are like those of our forefathers, for the Redeemer of Christendom came to suppress none of the symbolic and sacred beauties of old initiation. He came, as He said Himself, in reference to the figurative Law of Israel, to realise and fulfil all things.
CHAPTER VI
SUPERSTITIONS
Superstitions are religious forms surviving the loss of ideas. Some truth no longer known or a truth which has changed its aspect is the origin and explanation of all. Their name, from the Latin superstes, signifies that which survives; they are the dead remanents of old knowledge or opinion.
Ever governed by instinct rather than by thought, the common people cleave to ideas through the mediation of forms, and it is with difficulty that they modify their habits. The attempt to destroy superstitions impresses them always as an attack on religion itself, and hence St. Gregory, one of the greatest popes in Christendom, did not seek to suppress the old practices. He recommended his missionaries to purify and not destroy the temples, saying that “so long as a people have their old places of worship they will frequent them by force of habit and will thus be led more easily to the worship of the true God.” He said also: “The Bretons have fixed days for feasts and sacrifices; leave them their feasts and do not restrain their sacrifices; leave them the joy of their festivals, but from the state of paganism draw them gently and progressively into the estate of Christ.”
It came about in this manner that older pious observances were replaced by holy mysteries with scarcely a change of name. There was, for example, the yearly banquet called Charistia, to which ancestral spirits were invited, so making an act of faith in universal and immortal life. The Eucharist, or supernal Charistia, has replaced that of antiquity, and we communicate Easter by Easter with all our friends in heaven and on earth.[113] Far from maintaining the old superstitions by such adaptations, Christianity has breathed soul and life into the surviving signs of universal beliefs.
That science of Nature which is in such close consanguinity with religion, seeing that it initiates men into the secrets of Divinity, that forgotten science of Magic, still lives undivided in hieroglyphical signs and, to some extent, in the living traditions or superstitions which it has left outwardly untouched. For example, the observation of numbers and days is a blind reminiscence of primitive magical dogma. As a day consecrated to Venus, Friday was always considered unlucky, because it signified the mysteries of birth and death. No enterprise was undertaken on Friday by the Jews, but they completed thereon the work which belonged to the week, seeing that it preceded the Sabbath, or day of compulsory rest. The number 13, being that which follows the perfect cycle of 12, also represents death, succeeding the activities of life; and in the Jewish Symbolum the article relating to death is numbered thirteen. The partition of the family of Joseph into two tribes brought thirteen guests to the first Passover of Israel in the Promised Land, meaning thirteen tribes to share the harvests of Canaan. One of them was exterminated, being that of Benjamin, youngest of the children of Jacob. Hence comes the tradition that when there are thirteen at table the youngest is destined to die quickly.[114]
The Magi abstained from the flesh of certain animals and touched no blood. Moses raised this practice into a precept, on the ground that it is unlawful to partake of the soul of animals, which soul is in the blood. It remains therein after their slaughter, like a phosphorus of coagulated and corrupted Astral Light, which may be the germ of many diseases. The blood of strangled animals digests with difficulty and predisposes to apoplexy and nightmare. The flesh of carnivora is also unwholesome on account of the savage instincts with which it has been associated and because it has already absorbed corruption and death.
“When the soul of an animal is separated violently from its body,” says Porphyry, “it does not depart, but, like that of human beings which have died in the same way, it remains in the neighbourhood of the body. It is so retained by sympathy and cannot be driven away. Such souls have been seen moaning by their bodies. It is the same with the souls of men whose bodies have not been interred. It is to these that the operations of magicians do outrage, by enforcing their obedience, so long as the operators are masters of the dead body in whole or in part. Theosophers who are familiar with these mysteries, with the sympathy of animal souls for the bodies from which they are separated, and with their pleasure in approaching these, have rightly forbidden the use of certain meats, so that we may not be infected by alien souls.”
Porphyry adds that prophecy may be acquired by feeding on the hearts of ravens, moles and hawks; here the Alexandrian theurgist betakes himself to the processes of the Little Albert, but though he lapses so quickly into superstition it is by entering a wrong path, for his point of departure was science.[115]
To indicate the secret properties of animals, the ancients said that at the epoch of the war of the giants, various forms were assumed by the gods with a view to concealment, and that they resumed these subsequently at pleasure. Thus, Diana changed into a she-wolf; the sun into a bull, lion, dragon and hawk; Hecate into a horse, lioness and bitch.