The Threshold Covenant; or, The Beginning of Religious Rites

by H. Clay Trumbull

3. CHIEF PERVERSIONS.

With the world as it is, and with man as he is, every possibility of good has a corresponding possibility of evil. Good perverted becomes evil. Truth which, rightly used, proves a savor of life, will, when misused, prove a savor of death.[^[601]] And that which is a symbol of truth becomes a means of misleading when looked at as if it were in itself the truth.

The primitive Threshold Covenant as an elemental religious rite was holy and pure, and had possibilities of outgrowth in the direction of high spiritual attainment and aspiring. But the temptation to uplift the agencies in this rite into objects deemed of themselves worthy of worship resulted in impurity and deterioration, by causing the symbol to hide the truth instead of disclosing it.

Among the earliest forms of a temple as a place of worship was the ziggurat, or stepped pyramid, erected as a mighty altar, with its shrine, or holy of holies, at the summit, wherein a bride of the gods awaited the coming of the deity to solemnize the primal Threshold Covenant in expression of his readiness to enter into loving communion with the children of men.[^[602]] From this custom the practice of Threshold Covenanting at the temple doorways became incumbent on women of all conditions of society at certain times, and under certain circumstances, in certain portions of the world, as a proof of their religious devotion,[^[603]] and thus there grew up all the excesses of sacred prostitution in different portions of the world.[^[604]]

The prominence given to the two factors in the primitive Threshold Covenant as a sacred religious act, led to the perversion of the original idea by making the factors themselves objects of reverence and worship; and separately, or together, they came to be worshiped with impure and degrading accompaniments.

Reverence for the phallus, or for phallic emblems, shows itself in the earliest historic remains of Babylonia, Assyria, India, China, Japan, Persia, Phrygia, Phoenicia, Egypt, Abyssinia, Greece, Rome, Germany, Scandinavia, France, Spain, Great Britain, North and South America, and the Islands of the Sea. It were needless to attempt detailed proof of this statement, in view of all that has been written on the subject by historians, archæologists, and students of comparative religions.[^[605]] It is enough to suggest that the mistake has too often been made of supposing that this “phallic worship” was a primitive conception of a religious truth, instead of a perversion of the earlier and purer idea which is at the basis of the highest religious conceptions, from the beginning until now.

Quite as widely extended, in both time and space, as the worship of the phallus as the symbol of masculine potency, is the recognition of the tree of life as the symbol of feminine nature in its fruit-bearing capacity. A single tree, or a grove of trees, or the lotus flower, the fig, or the pomegranate, with the peculiar form of their seed capsules, appear in all the earlier religious symbolisms, over against the phallus in its realistic or its conventional forms, as representative of reproductive life.[^[606]]

In ancient Assyrian sculpture the most familiar representation of spiritual blessing was of a winged deity with a basket and a palm cone, touching with the cone a sacred tree, or again the person of a sovereign, as if imparting thereby some special benefit or power. This representation was long a mystery to the archeologist, but a recent scholar has shown that it is an illustration of a practice common in the East to-day, of carrying a cone of the male palm to a female palm tree, in order to vitalize it by the pollen.[^[607]] The cone is one of the conventional forms of the phallus, worshiped as a symbol in the temples of the goddesses of the East in earlier days and later.[^[608]] Hence this ancient Assyrian representation is an illustration of the truth that the primitive threshold covenant was recognized as the type of divine power, and covenant blessing, imparted to God’s representative, under the figure of the phallus and the tree.

It would seem, indeed, that the pillar and the tree came to be the conventional symbols of the male and female elements erected in front of an altar of worship,[^[609]] and that, in the deterioration of the ages, these symbols themselves were worshiped, and their symbolism was an incentive to varied forms of impurity, instead of to holy covenanting with God and in God’s service. Therefore these symbols were deemed by true worshipers a perversion of an originally sacred rite, and their destruction was a duty with those who would restore God’s worship to its pristine purity.

Thus the command to Jehovah’s people as to their treatment of the people of Canaan was: “Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: but ye shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars [or male symbols], and ye shall cut down their Asherim [or trees as a female symbol]: for thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord [Jehovah], whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods.”[^[610]] Here is a distinct reference to the primitive Threshold Covenant in its purity and sacredness, and to its perversion in the misuse of the phallus and tree in their symbolism.