Religion has already entered so significantly into my narrative that I feel I must apologise for a special dissertation on this subject. Yet I have never so far described the exact nature or scope of the Meleagrian faith which may be said to permeate and regulate the whole private and public existence of the people.
The inhabitants of Meleager—and in the ensuing statements, of course, I always except the hierarchy—are worshippers of the Sun, who is their sole deity. He is visible to them for a large portion of almost each day; he is tangible, in so far as they can feel the warmth of his beams; he is alive and in constant motion, as they watch him "ride the heavens like a horse" and disappear into the waters of the western sea only to uprear again next morning above the eastern horizon. As in the old Greek mythos, the Sun is popularly supposed to drive his golden chariot with its flaming wheels and with its yoke of fretting stallions across the dome of heaven, till finally god and car alike pass over the containing rim of the Meleagrian world. Below the flat surface of the land and sea the Sun-god inhabits a vast palace, whose splendours far exceed anything known to men. Here he rests after his daily labours amongst his numerous progeny, and refreshes himself after his late exertions undertaken solely for the benefit of the favoured race, that in the illimitable past he created in his own image. The firmament is his field of action; the space below the ground is his haven of retirement. At night the dome of heaven shorn of his effulgent presence is lighted only by the sparkling stars; "jewels of the Sun," as they are termed in Meleagrian parlance; or else the great vacant arc is illumined by the sickly lustre of the Moon. For the Moon stands to the Meleagrian mind, as it did largely to the antique and mediæval imagination, for all that is uncanny and malign. Few Meleagrians will walk abroad in clear moonlight, if they can reasonably avoid so doing; and in the many tales and legends that are current the Moon in her various phases and with her evil influence always occupies a prominent place. The oldest legend concerning the Moon, that is a legend parallel with such theories as the origin of the rainbow or the story of the Ark on Mount Ararat of the Jewish Pentateuch, relates how in the days of chaos there were two Suns, rivals, who fought one another for the possession of the beautiful world of Meleager; and that after a titanic combat, wherein the heavens thundered and the mountains belched forth fire and smoke, and the waters tossed and hissed furiously, the benign Sun conquered and slew the opposing deity, whose dead body still floats abroad in the sky, wherein it serves as an eternal trophy to the prowess of the victor. In the popular imagination however the corpse of the vanquished Moon is not wholly impotent for ill. A scintilla of mischievous vitality is still believed to lurk in its form, during the hours of the night, what time the Sun himself is absent from the heavens. The average Meleagrian therefore has a peculiar dread of the night, and of a moonlit night in a special degree. The practice of magic, both of the black and white types, is fairly common in all ranks of Meleagrian society, and its preparations and philtres are always popularly associated with the period of the Moon's fulness, when that deity's surviving spark of life is deemed most active.
The cult of the Meleagrians for the Sun not only recognises his vital warmth and fructifying properties, but also attributes to him the gathering or dispersal of the clouds which drop the refreshing rain upon the thirsty soil and swell the opening buds of tree and plant. The winds are also under the Sun's control, and are apparently regarded as his offspring, who sometimes disobey their august parent's injunctions, and either sportively or maliciously vex the people of Meleager with unwelcome gales that imperil the fisher-folk at sea, and injure the springing crops on land. But speaking broadly, the Meleagrian is of St James's opinion that "every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning." And in truth the unchangeable benignity and faithfulness of the Sun-god are so evident to his people that one can scarcely wonder at their fixed belief in his omnipresent power for good, and at his unsullied reputation of their sole benefactor.
The scheme of public and private worship has evidently been modelled on features found in Pagan, Mohammedan and Christian religious systems. The brief prayer to the Sun's majesty, which I have quoted elsewhere, that is uttered by all on their knees at the hours of sunrise and sunset, savours in principle of the terse invocations to Allah, deemed by Mahomet as most suitable to the human temperament and understanding. On the other hand, the weekly obligatory holiday derives probably from Jewish tradition. Again, the elaborate ceremonies held annually in the principal temple whereat the King offers incense in public at the crystal altar of the Sun seem to recall the mediæval pageants of the Roman Church, though possibly they may be copied from much older forms of worship on the Earth. But in contrast with these strictly spiritual forms, it is noteworthy that the occasions of births, deaths and marriages are treated in a civilian spirit, if I may so express it. Births are merely registered or reported to the appointed members of the council or their itinerant officials; marriage is almost wholly a betrothal within the family circle, and consists of an exchange of rings between the bride and bridegroom in the presence of their respective relations. Death is accompanied with small display of ceremony. Cremation is compulsory here, and after the corpse has been duly prepared, a pyre is made either in the garden of the deceased's home or else in a public enclosure utilised for the purpose. In aristocratic or wealthy families the ashes are generally preserved within the family chapel or mausoleum; those who are poor or indifferent merely leave the little urn in the public columbarium. There are regular charges by the Government for the performance of cremation, varying with the opulence or poverty of the family applying. Death is never attended with any demonstration of woe or wailing, or indeed by any sort of openly expressed mourning, except in the case of widows and orphans, who usually hold themselves in retirement for a month or so after the event. To mourn loudly or to give vent to excessive grief is regarded as ill-bred, at any rate in the upper classes, as also indicating the fear lest the departed one may not through his life have earned the full benefits of the Hereafter, which is the due reward of every well-behaved citizen. Of course, genuine sorrow and desolation are not scorned or mocked; such feelings are respected by those outside, but it is the custom and aim of the Meleagrians to conceal their feelings as assiduously as possible; and indeed to hide a stricken heart under a smiling face is accounted no small virtue in itself, and in the nobility a necessary proof of gentle manners.
Death is universally regarded as the portal to another life, which may be either material in the form of a reincarnation on the planet itself, or of a spiritual or higher phase of existence in the mystical realm of the Sun-god. In any case, it is held that the continuity of personal existence is not interrupted by the accident of death, though there is no definite opinion or belief as to the nature of the new life that succeeds. Having no literature in print or script, naturally all such theories of the Hereafter are very nebulous, so that numerous views as to the nature of the future life are held, though all such views are variable rather than contradictory or combative. Thus many aver that the Meleagrian never really dies, but that a death in one spot merely connotes a birth in another; and that the individual is born again and again, each time into a different social sphere, till finally he becomes a member of the hierarchy, whose priests when they expire are absorbed directly into the family of the Sun-god.
And here I may state that, paradoxical though it may appear, the theory of the Hereafter is apparently held as firmly by the hierarchy as by the people at large. Of course the opinions of these enlightened persons differ fundamentally from those of the ignorant mass of the Meleagrians, whose easy-going theory of transmigration of soul, or rather of vital personality, is naturally repugnant and absurd to their educated minds. Their aspirations are necessarily more lofty, though what their actual fixed belief is I cannot tell, and I much doubt whether any member of the hierarchy could explain it satisfactorily himself. For these councillors have full cognizance of all the faiths and creeds, to say nothing of the numerous forms of un-faith and philosophic doubt, that flourish on our Earth, to guide or hinder them in their choice of a definite religion; yet I am assured, and I believe the assurance, they all cling to the belief of the Hereafter in spite of the knowledge of their own Great Imposture and their close acquaintance with terrestrial ethics. Probably the simple but precise religious education of their childhood produces a mental soil wherein agnosticism and infidelity positively refuse to take root and flourish; and though they must have received a most painful rebuff in the total destruction of their early religious teaching, yet their minds are so attuned thereby that they merely cast about with more or less success to find some suitable theory or form of belief that will fill the aching void created by the recent revelation of The Secret and all that it implies. That any one of them has actually been converted to any Herthian creed, I very gravely doubt. From generation to generation for some two thousand years these councillors have watched so many prophets and messiahs arise in all corners of our Earth, and again they have noted the beginning, the rise, the zenith, the decline and the extinction of so many cults;—how can they possibly assert which is or was the genuine form of belief? Their conclusions, if conclusions they can be called, remain as a sealed book to me; and though I have taken part in many arguments on this weighty subject with the Arch-priest and also with other members of the hierarchy, I shall never really catch a firm grip of this elusive religious fata morgana of the Meleagrian intellectuals. In one important respect however I have learned that the councillors are pretty unanimous—namely, in extolling the expressed opinion of St Paul that the blessing of the Hereafter is not necessarily an inalienable gift to man. "The wages of sin is death," and "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?" are, I know, maxims that are admitted and approved by these all-knowing members of the hierarchy. Sin, they hold, is any disobedience or treachery in connection with their sacred trust of ruling the people of Meleager for their own good; and the failure or omission to perform plain duty brings its own punishment in the shape of Death, not the casual death of the body but a complete blotting out and annihilation of the soul, the termination of progressive personality both now and for ever. This view of their responsibilities acts as a warning voice in the ear of each councillor, who may ever be tempted to a possible betrayal of his trust either towards his own order or towards the Meleagrian people; and it is perhaps this sense of an automatic obliterating Nemesis that makes the elaborate machine of Meleagrian state craft work so smoothly in the hands of those who are alike strictly accountable both as rulers and servants of the community.
XIII
Although I have described the three estates of the realm as being clearly delineated by their social boundaries, yet there is one element of union betwixt them all that I have so far left unnoticed. This I may call the intellectual bond that in some degree seems to weld together these three well-defined classes. There is, of course, no literature in the accepted term amongst the Meleagrians, for they own neither books nor manuscripts, the power to read and write being vested solely in the educated hierarchy. On the other hand, the brains of the people are at least as quick and comprehensive as are those of Earth-dwellers, whilst the tenacity of memory in the more gifted individuals is amazing. In our English life, even in this generation of compulsory popular education, it is no uncommon thing to meet with persons in the humbler ranks of society who despite all these modern boasted advantages have for one reason or another failed to acquire or to remember the arts of reading and writing. Some proportion of such illiterates is undoubtedly of inferior mentality, but a large fraction also consists of persons whose minds are conspicuously acute and retentive. Again and again when on the Earth have I been struck by the marked ability of invention and memory displayed by certain individuals who cannot decipher a journal nor write a letter. On the other hand, the mass of the semi-educated, who are all voracious readers of the trashy or unwholesome printed stuff of the present time, are appallingly, hopelessly ignorant of all things that are worth learning or remembering. In Meleager, with its literary limitations, intellect is shown not in a smattering of ill-digested education, but in natural taste, in the exercise of memory, and in exceptional powers of invention. One reads in works belonging to the past of the improvvisatori of Italy, of the bards of mediæval Wales, of the minnesinger of Germany, of the troubadours of Provence, and it is this obsolete type of self-culture that dominates and guides the aspiring Meleagrian mind. There exists hardly a family or household in each estate that does not possess at least one member who is born with a definite taste or instinct for mental prowess, which is shown in his capacity to learn and retain in youth the myths or poems repeated to him by his elders. From these early and simple efforts of the mind such an one passes to the higher plane of invention and of composition. A stripling so endowed is almost always persuaded to persevere; his tales or verses are listened to and discussed with all seriousness by his friends and family; and if his efforts come to find favour he may by degrees win a reputation that will tend to spread. The popular class in particular produces many such orators, whether they declaim original matter or the works of others. These persons are in frequent demand at all gatherings in their immediate circle, whilst a certain proportion of them are able to obtain a wider notoriety and to gain their living from the fees they receive for their powers of entertainment. In these successful instances the poet or entertainer, if he be of humble origin, will often be invited to appear and recite in the houses of his superiors; and if his good luck or genuine talents lead him yet further, it is not unlikely he may eventually, if he be so minded, obtain a species of social adoption into a higher sphere than that of his birth. It is no very uncommon thing for an improvvisatore so endowed to be finally elected into the estate of the nobility, and to be allowed the use of the crimson robe, though such a privilege is never extended to his wife or family. Having once attained to this eminence, in spite of his plebeian origin he is of course eligible to be entered as a neophyte, which is the first step towards ultimate admission to the ranks of the hierarchy.
This then is the ladder that has occasionally assisted certain naturally gifted members of the lower social orders to ascend even to the council of state; thus it is that the intellectual cream of the Meleagrian populace is enabled to rise to the surface. No doubt the proportion of plebeians in that exclusive assembly is very small; still such a consummation is shown to be not wholly unattainable, and the hope of so exalted an honour, however remote and improbable, acts as a spur to such persons of the middle and lower classes as own exceptional abilities and possess the ambition to serve their country in this wise.
Meleagrian poetry, to which I am of necessity or politeness compelled to sit a constant listener, seems to me to be at least on a level with that of my former country; whilst the tales, be they amorous, didactic, gruesome or comical, are often delightful in themselves and are moreover always related with a charm and restraint of manner that might well be adopted by our own professional lecturers who have the backing of innumerable libraries behind them. There is in fact an enormous quantity of what I may call floating unwritten literature of considerable value; for any tale or poem which happens to hit the taste of an audience soon becomes public property, and is learned by rote and repeated by other less successful orators, so that the author's fame becomes widespread. I have only to add that the ear, the wit and the memory of this illiterate race are all so delicately adjusted and attuned that it is no easy matter for the average would-be entertainer to acquire popularity and high recompense in his self-chosen profession. It is only a very few who rise to general esteem and to high honour and affluence; whilst of the others a large proportion are content to cultivate a good method and modest style of recitation, and only to declaim the works of such as have already attained a definite celebrity.