Whether or not our predecessors really heard the choiring of the young-eyed cherubim, or whether the music was merely in their souls is a point immaterial to the present inquiry, which simply concerns itself with the physical remains of that poetic once-upon-a-time temperament which at some period or other was prevalent,[72] and has left its world-wide imprints on river names, such as the Irish “Morning Star”.[73] One would have supposed it quite superfluous at this time of day to have to claim imagination for the anonymous ancients who mapped the whole expanse of heaven into constellations, and wove fairy-tales around the Pleiades and every other group of stars, and it is simply astonishing to find a Doctor of Divinity writing to-day in kultured complacency: “It is to the imagination of us moderns alone that the grandeur of the universe appeals,[74] and it was relatively late in the history of religion—so far as can be reconstructed from the scanty data in our possession that the higher nature cults were developed.”[75]
Is it wonderful that again and again the romantic soul of the Celtic peasantry has risen against the grey dogmas of official Theology, and has expressed itself in terms such as those taken down from the mouth of a Gaelic old woman in 1877: “We would dance there till we were seven times tired. The people of those times were full of music and dancing stories, and traditions. The clerics have extinguished these. May ill befall them! And what have the clerics put in their place? Beliefs about creeds and disputations about denominations and churches! May lateness be their lot! It is they who have put the cross round the heads and the entanglements round the feet of the people. The people of the Gaeldom of to-day are anear perishing for lack of the famous feats of their fathers. The black clerics have suppressed every noble custom among the people of the Gaeldom—precious customs that will never return, no, never again return.”[76]
There are features about the wisdom of the ancients which the theologian neither understands nor tries to understand,[77] and it is like a breath of fresh air to find the Bishop of Oxford maintaining, “We have got to get rid of everything that makes the sound of religion irrational, and which associates it with bygone habits of thought in regard to science and history”. Sir Gilbert Murray has recently expressed the opinion that “it is the scholar’s special duty to trim the written signs in our old poetry now enshrined back into living thought and feeling”; but at present far from forwarding this desideratum scholarship not only discountenances imagination, but even eliminates from consideration any spiritual idea of God. To quote from a modern authority: “Track any God right home and you will find him lurking in a ritual sheath from which he slowly emerges, first as a dæmon or spirit of the year, then as a full-blown divinity.... The May King, the leader of the choral dance, gave birth not only to the first actor of the drama, but also, as we have just seen, to the God, be he Dionysus or be he Apollo.”[78]
The theory here assumed grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward than the ritual of ancient festivals.
Speaking of that extremely remote epoch when the twilight and mists of morning shed dim-looming shapes and flickering half lights about the path of our scarcely awakened race, The Athenæum a year or two ago remarked: “No wonder that to such purblind eyes men appear as trees, and trees as men—Balder the Beautiful as the mystic oak, and the oak as Balder”. This passage forms part of a congratulation that the work of Sir James Frazer is now complete, and that The Golden Bough “has at length carried us forward into broad daylight”.
I have studied the works of Sir James Frazer in the hope of finding therein some insight as to the origin and why of custom, but I have failed to perceive the broad daylight of The Athenæum’s satisfaction.
One might lay down The Golden Bough without a suspicion that our purblind ancestors ever had a poetic thought or a high and beautiful ideal, and it is probable that scholarship will eventually arraign Sir James Frazer for this suggestio falsi. In the meanwhile it should hardly be necessary to enter a caveat against the popular idea that we are now “in broad daylight”. The value of The Golden Bough lies largely in the evidence therein adduced of what may be termed universal ritual. But all ritual must have originated from ideas, and these original ideas do not seem to have entered the horizon of Sir James Frazer’s speculations. What reason does he suppose lurked necessarily behind, say, the sacred fire being kindled from three nests in three trees, or by nine men from nine different kinds of wood? And why do the unpleasant Ainos scrupulously kill their sacred bear by nine men pressing its head against a pole?
It is now the vogue to resolve every ancient ceremony into a magic charm for producing fire, or food, or rain, or what not, and there is very little doubt that magic, or sacred ceremonies, verily sank, in many instances, to this melancholy level. But, knowing what history has to tell us of priestcraft, and judging the past from the present, is it not highly likely that the primitive divine who found his tithes and emoluments diminishing from a laxity of faith would spur the public conscience by the threat that unless sacred ceremonies were faithfully and punctually performed the corn would not flourish and the rain would either overflow or would not fall?[79]