by Revilo P. Oliver
Professor of the Classics, Retired; University of Illinois, Urbana
CHAPTER FOUR:
THEODICY
THIS IS THE REEF on which founder all religions that posit a supreme and benevolent god who is interested in mankind.
The Stoics constructed for their animus mundi a theodicy that evidently satisfied persons who were primarily interested in ethics and desiderated a system of moral certainties to stabilize societies. The Stoic answer was like that given in the Fourteenth Century by William of Occam and the other Nominalists, who saw that the only escape from the impasse was to assert that whatever the Christian god ordained, was,eo ipso, just. The Stoic answer could not content people who wanted a god who could and, if properly appeased, would interfere with the processes of nature and make miracles for his favorites: what use was a god who couldn’t do anything for you? William of Occam’s answer cannot content persons who have our innate and racial sense of justice and refuse to believe that unmerited suffering, agony and death inflicted on innocent and helpless individuals, can be right, no matter who orders it: who can respect a god who rewards evil and punishes good?
It is the business of theologians, of course, to devise arguments and rhetoric that will confuse the issue, and the theologians of all creeds have exhibited a high degree of ingenuity, but the only way to evade the problem of theodicy successfully is to assume, as do several of the Hindu cults, that metempsychosis provides a long series of incarnations that produce a spiritual and moral evolution of the individual from the very simplest and lowest forms of organic life through ascending forms of mammalian life to mankind and then on upward to superhuman species, who reside on the moon or in some place beyond human attainment, and eventually to gods in some well-furnished heaven. On this vast scale, the suffering that comes upon any individual in any one life shrinks to insignificance and, furthermore, is condign and just punishment for the misdeeds of an earlier life and is a necessary process of spiritual purification and evolution.
If the present life is the only one we shall have on earth it will do no good to say that divine injustice in it doesn’t matter because this life will be followed by a few hundred thousand years or a few million years or even an eternity in some heaven that will be equipped to prevent its inhabitants from dying of boredom after a few dozen centuries. To our racial mind, justice does matter and furthermore it is inherently unjust to make an infinite future depend on conduct during a few years by a person who was born with certain innate tendencies and capacities and placed in situations that more or less determined how his character would respond to them.
One of the important junctures in our civilization is marked by the short treatise De libero arbitrio,* written around 1436 by Laurentius Valla, who had the most incisive critical mind of the early Renaissance. Under the transparent veil of a dialogue about Apollo’s power to predict human conduct, Valla demonstrates that no god can be omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent.
* The text was well edited by Maria Anfossi (Firenze, 1934); I have not heard of a translation. Almost all scholars who concern themselves with the Humanists of the Renaissance assume that Valla could not have been so impious as to say anything that was bad for the salvation-business. It is true that at the end of the dialogue Valla says that he has proved that human reason cannot cope with the Divine Mystery, but I take that to be an anticipation of the notion of a "double truth," which enabled Pomponatius and many other philosophers of the age to affirm that they believed by faith what they had just proved to be impossible. In the Fifteenth Century men with inquiring minds had to take precautions to avoid being tortured to death if they annoyed the theologians. The hounds of Heaven were baying on Valla’s trail often enough as it was, and once he was saved only by the intervention of King Alfonso of Naples.
The proof is simple. Take one of the incidents, so common today, in which an obviously innocent little girl of five or six, old enough certainly to feel pain, is raped and blinded or raped and killed by one of the savages on which masochistic or sadistic British and Americans now dote. Now, if there is a god who oversees the lives of men and sparrows, did he foresee the conduct of the savage, whom he created and presumably endowed with a savage’s instincts? If he did not foresee it, he is not omniscient. If he did foresee it, was he able to prevent the child’s agony? If not, he is not omnipotent. If he had the power and did not use it, he willed the crime and he willed the suffering of the child, so he cannot be benevolent.
Theologians, of course, explain that if the girl had not been killed at that time, she might have grown up and become an atheist – or papa must have offended a deity who chose to take out his anger on both the innocent child and her mother (who, of course, may have done something to vex him).* Or we mustn’t think about it, because thinking is bad for souls. None of these explanations will satisfy an Aryan’s sense of justice.
* Every such incident has repercussions on persons other than those immediately involved. Years ago, an old man, with whom I was discussing the efforts of professional holy men to attribute the coincidences that are called luck to intervention by their deity, told me that his life had been shaped by an appointment he had kept when he was a young man. He had decided to keep that crucial appointment in the metropolis by taking a train that passed through his town in the early morning. That morning his alarm clock failed to ring, and when he awoke, he threw on his clothes and ran to the station, although he knew he could not reach it in time. He was fifteen minutes late, but that morning the train, for the first time in many months, was even later: it had been delayed when it struck an automobile on a grade crossing, killing the occupants. "If I had been superstitious," he said, "I would have decided that Jesus so loved me that he killed three persons, a man, his wife, and their child, to enable me to keep my appointment. Or, if the train had not been late, I would have been sure that my sins had so annoyed him that he slipped into my bedroom that night and tampered with the mechanism. But that would have drastically changed the life of my wife, whom I married later, and our children would never have been born. Of course, she and I might have married other spouses, changing both their lives and our own, and each of us would have had quite different children, who would have grown up to change the lives of many others and themselves engender children. The consequences of that accident at the grade crossing are almost infinite and incalculable, for, of course, we should have to consider also the victims and the results of their death."
Valla’s explanation did not too greatly perturb contemporary churchmen, for Christian ditheism then attributed such things to its anti-god, who either had on this earth a power that his celestial antagonist could not overcome or sneaked in to promote the dirty work when God wasn’t looking. Everyone knew, after all, that the Devil was so powerful that he had been able to carry a third of the Christian god up to high mountains and there try to bribe him. But with the current tendency to make Christianity a monotheism, the problem has to be faced.
It is probably impossible to devise for a monotheism a theodicy that will satisfy the Aryan mind. At least, no one has done it yet.
There is one more topic that must be considered in our hurried sketch of the evolution of religions with reference to what we suppose to be the innate mentality of our race. When we speak of any religion today, we automatically think of its priests, a specialized and professional clergy. That is not a necessary connection.
***
RITUAL AND ARYAN WORSHIP
RITUAL
Rituals are a common source of myths, much as one phase of the Germanic celebration of Christmas gave rise to the myth of Santa Claus, who, by the way, is a typically Aryan myth. (To anticipate a point we shall have to make later, ask yourself whether we "believe in" Santa Claus and then, would an observer come to earth, like Voltaire’s Micromégas, from a remote planet conclude that we "believed in" Santa Claus?) As everyone knows, the customs associated with Santa Claus are much older than the Christian coloring that has been given them. And finally we have an aetiological myth to explain the myth, in a story that is now having some success as an alternative to Dickens’ Christmas Carol, a tale by an obscure writer of popular fiction who imagined that Claus was a Roman named Claudius, who was "converted" at the Crucifixion and then became the first missionary to northern countries. In a less literate age, Seabury Quinn’s short story, written for a "pulp" magazine a few decades ago, would probably become an item of popular belief.
A good example of the persistence of ritual may be found in the Thesmophoria, the ceremony that Aristophanes so delightfully parodied in his well-known comedy. It was not an Aryan rite: it was practiced by the indigenous population of Greece when the first wave of Aryans arrived, and there are indications that for a considerable time many or most of the Greeks refused to have anything to do with the cult of the "Pelasgians" whom they had subdued. The purpose of the ritual, so far as we can determine from its performance in historical times, was to ensure that seeds planted in the autumn would germinate in the spring, but we have no idea what spirit or spirits the ritual was intended to placate or stimulate. When the Greeks took up the ritual, they decided, not unnaturally, that it must be associated with Demeter, their goddess of grain, and so they saw in the first day of the three-day ceremony a reference to her descent into the underworld. And suitable aetiological myths were produced. It is likely that the prohibition of pomegranates in the ritual contributed an important part of the myth of Persephone. The sacrifice of pigs certainly produced the myth of Eubuleus. And what was probably only a verbal similarity between the name of the secret cult objects and the Greek word for ‘law and order’ convinced the Greeks that the ceremony in some way commemorated the establishment of civilized society. And in our own time an anthropologist (Professor Agnes Vaughan) has elaborated a "scientific" explanation of the Thesmophoria that is just another aetiological myth.
Rituals are rationally inexplicable. Some, especially the cult dances of primitive tribes, may represent the "methectic collaboration with autochthonic spirits" that warms the minds of some anthropologists, but that explanation, at best, does not take us very far. When, for example, an Arval promises to sacrifice a spotless white heifer to Juno, if the goddess keeps her part of a bargain, why should Juno be interested? Oh yes, the animal is a heifer because Juno is female and her delicacy would be offended by a male offering; it is white, because she is a goddess of the world of light and a black animal would be suited only to a deity of the underworld; and it must be spotless because divinity demands what is perfect and rare. But what conceivable pleasure could Juno derive from watching her votaries banquet on Wiener Schnitzel while the inedible parts of the animal are burned on her altar? (The aetiological myth about Zeus’s mistake is, of course, humorous and in the vein of Aristophanes’ burlesque of the idea.) One can try to imagine explanations of Juno’s odd tastes, but after we have discoursed about totems and theromorphic spirits and the like, we end with the conclusion that is fundamental to all religions: in this instance, the gods are pleased by the sacrifice of an animal because animal sacrifices are pleasing to the gods. Q.E.D.
Primitive rituals are comparatively simple, no more complicated than the action and pattern of a traditional Morris dance, for example. Anyone can learn the ritual by listening attentively to someone who has performed it. No technical expertise is needed to make magic in this way. Even a fairly elaborate series of rituals is no more elaborate than the ritual of a Masonic lodge, for example, which imposes so little strain on mnemonic faculties that a local barber or automobile salesman or tavern-keeper could memorize his way to exaltation as a Worshipful Grand Master or Sublime Potentate, if his finances permitted.
This is a most important point. If we restrict the word ‘priest’ to specialists in the supernatural, a religion of rituals requires no priests. If a priest is just a man who performs a religious rite, then, in such a religion, any person, not an infant or of the wrong sex, may be a priest whenever occasion demands it.
What appears to be the native Aryan worship is therefore entirely feasible.
The essentials of native Aryan religious practice may be summarized in a few lines. The head of every household was its priest, who himself performed for his household such rites as the family tradition prescribed, usually or always including some sacra peculiar to the family line, and such other ceremonies as seemed appropriate to him. If wealthy and devoted to some particular god, he might erect an open altar or a modest temple (i.e., structure) to that deity on his own property, and the shrine would descend to his heirs in the usual way. The owner would determine whether other votaries of the god should be admitted to private property.
The tribe or the state was, in a sense, a great family and naturally had its own rites and gods to which it accorded a tribal or national worship. The rites were invariably performed by citizens, never by professionals. And, of course, the community had its own shrines and temples, which might be no more than a plot of ground in an open field or in a forest, but was usually an edifice as simple or elaborate as the community’s prosperity dictated.
The rites were conducted and sacrifices performed personally by persons, selected temporarily or permanently from the citizen body, who devoted to their duties a small amount of time occasionally taken from their normal occupations, and these citizens had no assistants other than a janitor to keep the temple clean and perhaps, if inclined to luxury, a slave or temporary employee to do the more messy jobs of butchering. The Thesmophoria we mentioned above were rites performed by married women, and in Athens the married women, wives of Athenian citizens and necessarily also daughters of Athenian citizens, in each Attic deme selected each year two of their number, financially able to bear the modest expenses, to organize and preside over the ceremonies, in collaboration, of course, with the women elected by the other demes. At Rome, all the great priesthoods were filled by the election or co-option of men (or, where appropriate, women) from the leading families, usually Patrician families. The offices were usually held for life, but were not hereditary, and there were exceptions. For example, the priestess of the Bona Dea in any year was, ex officio, the wife of the presiding magistrate for that year. The priesthoods were high political offices and were sought as honors or for the political power they conferred.
No taint of religious professionalism appears. It is true that one of the flaminates, that of the Flamen Dialis, was hedged about with traditional taboos (the purpose of which had long been forgotten), which severely limited the political and particularly the military careers of the holder of that office: that is why the young Caesar prudently refused it. Late in the Republic some politician raised the constitutional question whether one of the other flamens could be prevented from taking command of an army outside Italy, but in general a Roman priest was a citizen of prominence, and no one ever imagined that he should have any religious qualification for the position, other than a suitable lineage, usually Patrician birth.
If the tribe or state had a specific ceremony for the collectivity, the priest was always, ex officio, the chief of the tribe, the king of the state, or a magistrate who replaced the king if the monarchy had been eliminated. In Rome under Augustus, one of the signs that the state was being gradually and almost surreptitiously converted to a monarchy was that Augustus (and his successors) became the Pontifex Maximusex officio.
Aryan society doubtless included individuals who claimed some special skill in interpreting omens (one thinks of Tiresias) and religious enthusiasts. Such persons were free to communicate their opinions and might be asked for advice in perplexing situations, but they were citizens, received no emoluments, had no official standing, and could only offer advice which the king or responsible magistrate might or might not see fit to take (it was up to Agamemnon to decide whether he should pay attention to Tiresias’s monitions). There were no professional holy men. No one could gain wealth or grasp power by claiming to be an expert technician of the supernatural.
In short, the evidence supports the conclusion of Professor Hans F. K. Günther: "A priesthood as a more sacred class, elevated above the rest of the people, could not develop amongst the original Indo-Europeans. The idea of priests as mediators between the deity and men would have been a contradiction of Indo-European religiosity."* But there are difficulties.
* Religious Attitudes of the Indo-Europeans, translated by Vivian Bird and Roger Pearson (London, Clair Press, 1967). The question here is treated somewhat more fully in Ganther’s Die Nordische Rasse bei den Indogermanen Asiens (München, 1934) which has not been translated, so far as I know. The parts of Günther’s work that are most open to question are the dating of the cult of Odin and the supposed religious toleration in Iceland, neither of which is relevant here. It may be that here and there he is not sufficiently strict in weighing data favorable to his thesis. It is true that he holds our race in high esteem, and that, I need not say, is considered very sinful today.
Georges Dumézil, a sagacious and distinguished student of Aryan religions, has identified a "tripartite" modality of thought, an instinctive grouping of concepts in units of three, as characteristic of our racial mentality; which appears in everything from our fairy stories and other fiction, in which it is always the third attempt to solve a problem that succeeds, to the grouping of gods in triads, as in the Capitoline trinity at Rome (originally, Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus; later, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva) and the two Norse triads (Odin, Thor, and Tyr; Niord, Freyr, and Freyja) which were reduced to the trinity worshipped in the famous temple at Uppsala (Odin, Thor, and Freyr). Dumézil finds this same tripartite pattern in a social organization consisting of warriors, priests, and commoners, thus making a priestly class a native and necessary part of early Aryan society. We may counter this theoretical objection by arguing either that the tripartite thinking did not extend to social organization or that Dumézil has wrongly identified the three elements, which could be king (or equivalent), nobility, and commoners, or even aristocracy, plebeians, and serfs. And there is the solid evidence that the earliest Aryan societies of which we have knowledge show no certain trace of a priestly caste.
The real difficulty is that no societies have been more priest-ridden than India after the Aryan conquest, where a caste of priests achieved an effective monopoly of all religious rites, and Celtic Gaul, where the Druids had virtually unlimited power. In other Aryan societies we find a caste of professional holy men, as in ancient Persia, or a priesthood which, though not hereditary, has attained an ascendancy over the citizens and the state.
So drastic a change seems, at first sight, incredible. It seems most unlikely, a priori, that in India, for example, in a territory that was certainly conquered by the Aryan invaders and ruled by them, and on which they imposed their Indo-European language and presumably the culture it represented so thoroughly that all but the vaguest recollection of what had preceded them disappeared, the Aryan principalities and kingdoms should have developed a religion and a social structure that was "a contradiction" of Aryan religiosity. For this paradox, however, Professor Günther has a reasonable explanation. In all parts of the world, Aryan migrations, so far as we can discern, followed a pattern that must have been determined by our racial peculiarities. An Aryan tribe invades a desirable territory and subdues a much more numerous native population of a different race and is content to rule over them, instead of exterminating them and even their domestic animals, as the Jews claim to have done in Canaan and as the Assyrians may have done in some places. The natives, thus spared by what could be considered a biological blunder, were made subjects, but the majority of them were not enslaved or even reduced to serfdom; they and their native customs were probably treated with a measure of the toleration and protection that the Romans later accorded their subjects. The inevitable result was miscegenation, both biological and cultural. The consequence of the long and intimate association of the dominant Aryans with their subjects of a different race, Professor Günther says, was that "a spirit alien in nature," corresponding to the dilution and hybridization of the racial stock, "permeated the original religious ideas" of the Aryans and "then expressed in their language religious ideas which were no longer purely or even predominantly European [i.e., Aryan]." And he identifies certain elements in our race’s mentality and especially in its religiosity, especially the lack of fanaticism, which made it particularly susceptible to the contagion of alien superstitions. What happened, in other words, was a kind of spiritual mongrelization that, in all probability, largely preceded and certainly facilitated the biological mongrelization.
We may find a small but neat example of this process in the Thesmophoria we have mentioned above. In the Peloponnesus, these rites were practiced by the native population until the Dorian invasion; thereafter, for some centuries, the ceremonies persisted only in the mountain-girt hill country of Arcadia, which the Dorians had not taken the trouble to occupy; but then the Dorian conquerors, including the notoriously conservative Spartans, begin to practice themselves the alien ritual of the Thesmophoria, giving to it a name that was at least partly Greek and associating it with their own religious concepts.*
* There is an indubitable historical basis for this Greek tradition, first reported by Herodotus (II.171). The Greeks, naturally, had no means of knowing whence the Pelasgians (who were white, but of undetermined race) derived the ritual or with what superstitions the Pelasgians had associated it.
The process, so clearly illustrated by the Thesmophoria, probably took place in every territory that the Aryans subdued, and the cumulative effect must have been a religious and cultural perversion that could well have produced in India, for example, even so drastic a change as the eventual subjugation of the conquerors’ descendants to a caste of professional holy men. For an extreme and frightening example of what mongrelization can do to the minds of our race, we have only to consider the Guayakís of South America, who, as is conclusively shown by anthropological and especially anthropometric studies, contain a large admixture of Nordic blood and exhibit a cultural degeneracy noteworthy even among the Indian populations of that continent.†
† See Jacques de Mahieu, L’Agonie du Dieu Soleil (Paris, Laffont, 1974); there is a German translation (which I have not seen), but none in English, so far as I know. Cf. Nouvelle École, #24 (mars 1974), pp. 46 sqq, Pessimists, who assume that the present direction of society in Britain and the United States will continue unchanged and have the courage to extrapolate from it, may see in the Guayakís the prototypes of what is likely to be left of our race two or three centuries hence.
These considerations, and especially our race’s notorious lack of a racial consciousness and its concomitant generosity toward other races, adequately explain a corruption of its native religious tendencies, and accordingly we may accord to Professor Günther’s description of our pristine religiosity a high degree of probability, although the limitations of the available data preclude certainty. We may, however, observe that it is possible to go much farther in speculations that can be no more than suggestive.
L. A. Waddell was a distinguished scholar, although his achievements and reputation have been eclipsed because his pioneer attempt to read Sumerian as an Indo-European language was as mistaken as the work of his numerous contemporaries, who were trying to read it as a Semitic language.* On his misreading of Sumerian, he based an elaborate reconstruction of early history that, despite the great learning shown in it, necessarily collapsed with the failure of its foundation. That does not necessarily invalidate his startling suggestion that the name of the priestly caste that worked its way to power in India, Brãmanais a word derived from Semitic; that the institution of a class of professional priests in Sumeria was the work of the Semites that gradually took over Sumerian society; and that the priestly caste in India was derived from Sumeria.†
* We now know, of course, that Sumerian is neither Indo-European nor Semitic. The race of the Sumerians is uncertain; the possibility that they were Aryan cannot be excluded.
† Indo-Sumerian Seals Deciphered (London, 1925), passim; The Makers of Civilization in Race and History (New Delhi, Chand, 1968 = London, 1929), pp. 386 sqq. If Waddell completed and published the special work promised on p. 399, I have overlooked it. I think it probable that the Sanskrit brãhmana is cognate to the Latin flámen and is therefore Indo-European, but I need not tell anyone even casually acquainted with Indo-European philology, in which everything that is not obvious is extremely obscure, that no etymology of either of the two words is accepted by a majority of students. What is important is not the origin of the word, but of the idea that it represents. Note that there are several related words in Sanskrit that should be carefully distinguished: brãhma (neut.), perhaps best translated as ‘divine’; Brãhma or Brãhman (neut.), the impersonal, unknowable cosmopoietic force that is regarded as the ultimate and only eternal reality; Brãhman (masc.), the creator god who is a member of the Hindu Trinity; Brãhmana (masc.with fem. Brãhmani), a member of the highest and most venerable caste, born holy, and first of the twice-born; Brãhmana (neut.), one of the commentaries on the Vedas, some of which are interesting as showing early stages of the process by which rituals were so complicated and elaborated by interpretation as to make expert assistance desirable even before the rituals were made the monopoly of experts. It is uncertain which of these words should be regarded as the one from which the others were derived.
The etymology is probably wrong, but the suggestion is made the more impressive by the fact that Waddell in 1925 must have been prescient to anticipate that subsequent excavations would prove beyond doubt the presence in the Indus Valley of a relatively advanced civilization that flourished before the Aryan invasion and was very closely connected with the Sumerians so closely that it is possible that the Sumerians came to Mesopotamia from the Indus Valley.*
* Attempts to identify the civilized people of the Indus Valley as Dravidians on linguistic grounds are nugatory; on the most elaborate attempt to do so, see Arlene Zide and Kamil Zvelebil, The Soviet Decipherment of the Indus Valley Script (The Hague, Mouton, 1976). There are extraordinary similarities between that script and the rongo-rongo script of Easter Island and they are too great to be coincidental; from this fact, he who wishes may evoke romantic dreams of what might have been.
This suggests a question that will startle students who naïvely cling to the old notion that race is shown by geography or language.† What was the race of persons who contrived the establishment of priestly castes in ancient India and Persia? That the breathtaking question is not entirely idle will appear from indications that the dominant priesthoods may originally have been racial, especially the following:
The great hero of the priestly caste of Brahmans in India is Parasurãma, an incarnation of the god Vishnu and a great warrior (!), who extirpated the Ksatrias, the Aryan caste of warriors and rulers, by killing each and every member of the "kingly race" twenty-one times – a phenomenal overkill that suggests a Semitic imagination! The blessed event thus described is mythical, of course, but something did extirpate the warrior caste (unless some escaped to become the ancestors of the Rajputs (rãjaputras) as the latter claim), and by the Third Century, at the latest, supposedly Aryan states were ruled by kings who were Sudras, i.e., descendants of the dark-skinned race that the Aryans, and quite possibly their predecessors in the Indus Valley, had subdued and subjected to civilization. It is probable that the ruling caste was destroyed as Aryan aristocracies always are, by miscegenation, war, internal feuds, revolution, and superstition, but the racial animus of the Brahmans’ Saviour and of the Brahmans who devised and perpetuated the story is unmistakable.
† So far as I know, not even the most advanced "Liberals" today would identify as Englishmen everyone who writes a passable English or everyone who lives in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Until fairly recent times, however, historians have blithely assumed that everyone who wrote in Sanskrit, at least before a comparatively late date, was an Aryan, and that everyone who lived in Rome or even in the vast territory of the Roman Empire was a Roman, unless clearly identified as of other nationality and race and this so long as the Empire lasted as a political unit and long after the Romans had become, for all practical purposes, extinct. It is true that very often – even usually – we have no means of knowing the race of an individual who has adopted a civilized name. For example, we would naturally suppose that L. Caecilius Iucundus, the wealthy banker of Pompeii, had been a Roman, if his vanity had not led him to commission the repulsive portrait that shows him to have been some intruder from Asia Minor.
The Magi, also, were an hereditary caste of holy men, who claimed lineal descent from an especially godly clan or tribe in Media. The language of the Magi and their holy books is uncertain: it may have been Aramaic, the Semitic tongue that was the common language of the Persian Empire (including its administration), since Persian was not widely understood by the subjects. As is well known, one of the Magi tried to grab the Persian Empire by impersonating the deceased brother of Cambyses, and when the impersonator was unmasked and killed, it was believed that he had been the leader or agent of a conspiracy of the Magi to take over the Empire, and popular indignation in the capital resulted in the famous Magophonia, which sounds very much like a pogrom, because the religion seems not to have been affected by it. There is no hint of a religious schism, such as that between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, and Darius himself recorded his unaltered piety in extant inscriptions. An alien caste of priests would naturally have enlisted members of the dominant race as accomplices in one way or another, and the latter could have carried on, perhaps with gratification, after their principals or superiors had been massacred. If, for example, all the Catholic priests in Italy today were massacred on religious grounds, we cannot imagine how Italy could remain a Catholic nation; but if the hierarchy and its favorites were composed of aliens – Irish, for example – and they were massacred on racial grounds, the nation’s religion would not necessarily be compromised and might even be stimulated.
It is true that both the Brahmans and the Magi loudly claimed to be ãrya, but it is not inconceivable that they began by using the word in its general meaning, ‘noble, excellent,’ and claiming for themselves the transcendent excellence of their holiness, extending the ambiguous word, by the verbal trickery common to theologians, to a racial signification. Nor would such a supercherie be impossible for clever white men of a different race dwelling among Aryans who exhibited such physical diversity, as in color of hair and eyes, as is taken for granted today. As we all know, many Jews now not only pretend to be Englishmen or Frenchmen or Americans, but, if not betrayed by too grossly alien features and if moderately discreet in their conduct, are actually accepted as such by the general populace, which exhibits the characteristically Aryan disregard of race. A comparable masquerade might not have been impossible in India and Persia.
These remarks, needless to say, are intended to suggest what speculations could be based on some neglected items in our fragmentary information about the early history of Aryan nations. If an hypothesis were based on them, it would pose some startling questions, e.g., was the caste system in India originally based, not on a distinction between Aryans and non-Aryans, but on a distinction between white and dark-skinned races? It would require a reconsideration of all the evidence for the early history of India so drastic that the very prospect would freeze the blood of a modern historian.
The speculations, furthermore, are irrelevant here. No one would contend that Aryans have not been pirates, bandits, and swindlers, exploiting their racial kinsmen; it would be absurd to ask whether they could not also have become professionals in religion!
It will suffice to have indicated the likelihood that our racial psyche, though highly susceptible to alien ideas and superstitions, is innately averse from granting power and influence to professional holy men. This may help us understand some otherwise puzzling episodes in our racial history.
***
SHAMANS
WHATEVER the origin of professional priesthoods and their claim that a strange expertise is necessary to mediate between their human customers and the invisible supernatural beings that are supposed to have power over nature, that origin was also the beginning of an interminable history of sordid chicanery, fraud, and forgery. The holy man’s prosperity and even his livelihood depend on his ability, or the ability of the caste or professional organization to which he belongs, to convince ordinary mortals that he has powers they do not possess.
In the third of his Dialogues, Renan, speculating about the consequences of the scientific research that, even in his day, was giving governments ever increasing power to control and coerce a populace, noted the inadequacy of religion as a means of social control. The structure of Hindu society, he observed, ultimately depended on the Brahmans’ claim to have supernatural powers, including that of blasting a human being with a glance from their holy eyes. "But no human being has ever been blasted by a Brahman. He is therefore using an imaginary fear to support a mendacious creed." The Brahman’s authority (and income) therefore depended on a bluff. To make his point, Renan simplified his statement by ignoring the prevalent (and non-Aryan) mentality of the masses of polyphyletic India at the time that the Brahmanic superiority was firmly established, but he has made clear by a sharp contrast the problem that confronts all professional priesthoods, whether a class of individuals without formal organization or a body of disciplined professionals directed by a person or central office that has quasi-despotic authority over them.
The Brahmans’ prestige (and income) depended primarily on their theology and their supposed intimacy with, and expert knowledge of, the gods and the means of influencing them. This they augmented with stories about Brahmans, perhaps especially gifted ones (rishis), who, in some distant place or time, had blasted a discourteous person with a glance or impregnated a virgin by focusing his thought on her or resurrected a dead man with an incantation. Those tales edified the gullible, but there were, especially before the days of Brahmanic ascendancy, wicked individuals with materialistic tendencies who might doubt what they had not actually seen, and it was necessary to impress them. Clever and dexterous holy men found ways to do that, and thus was bom the magic for which India acquired a reputation that was no doubt deserved at one time, although our own more adroit magicians regard the techniques as crude and almost childish by their more sophisticated standards. No Hindu fakir could compete with an ordinarily accomplished magician, to say nothing of such experts as Houdini and James Randi.
The only question is the extent of conscious fraud and deception in all religions. It is not a simple question. A well-known religious technique, which has been studied by some very competent anthropologists, is used by the Eskimo shamans. The observers have noted, by the way, that the shamans, although mentally more alert than their tribesmen, are always neurotic individuals, spiritually consumed with envy of men who are admired by the tribe for courage, skill in hunting, the virility that attracts women, or even good luck, so that the shamans are covertly malevolent toward a society that respects qualities they do not possess. They maintain their prestige by using hypnotism on the simple-minded, and by performing the less-demanding tricks of prestidigitation and illusion employed by our stage magicians. A somewhat more sophisticated stunt consists of swallowing a thin bladder that is filled with seal’s blood; at the psychological moment, the shaman ruptures the bladder by contracting his abdominal muscles and vomits up a small flood of blood, thus mightily impressing with his sanctity his open-mouthed and goggle-eyed customers.
The trick is obviously a hoax and the shaman must know it, but some responsible anthropologists report that, so far as they can determine, the shaman actually believes that he is exercising a power given him by supernatural forces with which he communicates in trances. That seems incredible to us at first sight and until we remember that the shamans belong to a race that has a mentality so different from our own that we are illogical if we expect logic from them or try to set limits to what such minds may be able to believe.
Aryans, if sane, do not delude themselves when they use trickery. For example, when the little Fox girls, bored in bed and inclined to mischief, thought of a way to scare their silly mamma, and their adult half-sister shrewdly perceived the revenue-producing virtues of the spirits of the dear departed, they inaugurated one of the most successful and lucrative rackets of modern times, which kept simpletons agog for almost a century, and produced some "Mediums" of really noteworthy ingenuity and dexterity – some, indeed, who imposed on such surprising suckers as Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle and Sir Oliver Lodge when those otherwise intelligent gentlemen were emotionally overwrought. Now it is absolutely certain that all the successful "spiritualistic mediums," from the sub-adolescent little girls whose pranks started the craze to the individuals who are trying today to revive a discredited business, are conscious frauds who exploit the gullibility of the insatiably credulous and the sorrow of the bereaved. There have been psychopathic individuals whose hallucinations convinced them they could communicate with ghosts, but their addled minds lacked the cunning to impose on many persons.
The "mediums," however, leave us with a psychological problem of great importance, since we are dealing with Aryans. About most of the famous spook-raisers there can be no doubt: they were very adroit magicians and competent actors (or, more commonly, actresses) who cynically exploited human credulity and irrationality for profit or for the pleasure of notoriety. But the careers of some make it seem likely that they had a certain perverse sincerity. They knew that they were perpetrating hoaxes, of course, but they evidently had religious convictions and had convinced themselves that they were performing a great and pious service by so deluding others as to instill in them belief in the existence and purposes of the supernatural beings in whose reality the "medium" herself actually believed by an act of faith. Outrageous deceit may, and often does, accompany a sincere faith, paradoxical as that fact seems to a coolly rational mind. And if we do not bear that fact in mind, there is much that we will misunderstand in the history of religions.
There is another factor of very great importance that we must take into account: the hallucinatory power of many botanicals. The investigations of R. Gordon Weston have made it virtually certain that the somaof the Brahmans and the homa (haoma) of the Magi was the sacred mushroom (Amanita muscaria), which is probably the greatest single source of religious experiences, although there are, of course, many others. Incidentally, it may be worthy of note that Weston is of the opinion that the sacred mushroom was not used by the priests at Eleusis in the celebrated mysteries that gave to so many Greeks an assurance of immortality; from a cursory inspection of the records, he thinks that as many as four other hallucinatory drugs may have been used at various times.* Needless to say, the pious phamacopia was always a professional secret of the holy men, wherever it was used, and investigators must depend chiefly on the experiences reported by initiates, often inadvertently, since they were sworn to silence in most cults.
* See Weston’s contribution to Flesh of the Gods, edited by Peter Furst (New York, Praeger, 1972), pp.194 sq. Scores of volumes and hundreds of articles have been devoted to attempts to detemine the nature of the Eleusinian Mysteries from the hints let fall by initiates who were bound by dire oaths not to disclose their experiences, but I do not recall having read one that took into account the probable use of hallucinatory drugs. Recent archaeological excavations have permitted a more accurate description of the sanctuary; see George Mylonas, Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries (Princeton University, 1961).
The hallucinations induced by such drugs partly depend on the preconceptions of the mind that experiences them; in other words, persons who have ingested the drug see, in large part, what they expect to see, usually accompanied by visual illusions of extraordinary brilliance and often beauty and perhaps auditory illusions that are in some way distorted or intensified. In other words, a person who drank an adequate quantity of soma for the purpose of "elevating his consciousness" to perception of a "higher world" was likely to see gods as he had imagined them, but as part of hallucinations so vivid and intense, surpassing everything in his waking experience, as to seem wonderful revelations of the supernatural. If the soma were administered to him without his knowledge – in a cup of ordinary wine, for example – he would probably see images drawn from his subconscious mind, accompanied, of course, by illusions so vivid that they command the credence of persons who have no knowledge of the psychagogic power of some pharmaca. Now a professional holy man who administers such a potion to his clients must (at least, if Aryan) know what he is doing, but it is quite possible that he, having himself experienced such hallucinations, is himself persuaded of their reality and believes that the sacred mushroom or whatever other hallucinogen he is using does have the miraculous power of disclosing to mortal perception the mirific realities of a supernatural world. He may delude others, himself deluded. In the nature of things, of course, we can never be sure of the hidden thoughts and secret beliefs of any individual, and there are many circumstances in which it would be unjust to assume fraud when other explanations are not unlikely, especially when we have scientific knowledge that makes the world somewhat less mysterious to us than it was to the person whom we are judging.
Until quite recent times, the mysterious potency of the sacred mushroom and similar botanical poisons was the closely guarded secret of certain orders of holy men, who transmitted knowledge of it orally or only in enigmatic or cryptic allusions in writing.* Even today, we have not ascertained how hallucinations are excited in otherwise sane minds by the numerous drugs that are often designated by the offensive neologism "psychedelic."† We only know that they induce in the victim hallucinations that are so vivid that they seem to him as real as, or even more real than, his perceptions of quotidian reality, from which they differ so drastically as to seem supernatural.
* There is thus ample justification for the method followed by John Allegro in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (New York, Doubleday, 1970), although I fear the learned and distinguished scholar sadly overworks some of his etymologies.
† The neologism, if not an ignorant error for psychodeletic, is not only improperly formed, but even more improperly derived from dÁloj, ‘clear, manifest,’ evidently for the purpose of suggesting that fits of insanity "expand the mind’s awareness" or make visible a "higher reality." This hoax naturally pleases, in one way or another, the numerous and diverse gangs that have vested interests in promoting superstitions about a "spiritual world" or in inhibiting rationality in our people.
The delusions frequently include visions of praeterhuman beings, evidently drawn from the subconsciousness of the victim.* In other words, the drugs induce a temporary insanity from which the victim may recover without being aware of what has happened to him, and some of the drugs, at least, if frequently ingested, bring on, by a cumulative effect, a permanent mental alienation. We also know of various psychopathic conditions that involve continuous delusions, less spectacular, it is said, than those evoked by drugs, but more or less permanent, and deform only a part of the mind, so that these forms of madness do not preclude a forced rationality of conduct and are often accompanied by a very high degree of cunning. Persons suffering from these mental diseases or deformations may not seem insane to their contemporaries and may acquire prestige as prophets and the like. While they often employ fraud and deceit, the delusions from which they suffer cannot be classed as intentional.
* In one case, a university student in his mid-twenties, having ingested a synthetic hallucinogen of great potency, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate, fled in panic down a street until he encountered a middle-aged woman, whom he wildly implored to save him from the demons who were pursuing him. He was said not to have been superstitious when sane, but it is likely that his subconscious mind retained stories about devils and fiends he had heard in his childhood or even later.
We must often remain in doubt about prominent figures in the history of religions, even in recent times. Emanuel Swedenborg was a man of the highest intellectual ability, eminent as one of the greatest and most versatile men of the Eighteenth Century: he wrote Latin verse of exceptional merit; was a mathematician of note; was brilliant as a civil and military engineer; was an influential member of the Swedish House of Nobles and distinguished for his studies in political economy and mercantile theory; was an expert on metallurgy and mining; made discoveries in palaeontology, optics, physics, chemistry that anticipated discoveries made a century after his work in those fields had been obscured by his later activities; and was a pioneer in studying the structure and functioning of the human brain. There was no scientist more distinguished in the Europe of his time. It is true that he had religious interests and tried to ascertain how the brain was controlled by the soul, but this cannot explain why, in 1745, when he was fifty-seven, he was suddenly accosted by various angels, who gave him a Cook’s tour of Heaven and Hell, and introduced him to "God, the Lord, Creator and Redeemer of the World," who gave him a commission to save mankind from the bloody piety of the various Christian sects then still engaged in perpetual war to extirpate heresy. Anyone who reads the nine volumes of his Arcana coelestia and its infernal sequel will be impressed by the ingenuity with which the author uses the theological device of allegorical interpretation no less than by the wild phantasmagoria of his hallucinations. Now Swedenborg, who had a high and evidently deserved reputation for personal integrity, was too famous to have sought notoriety, and neither sought nor obtained profit. So we remain suspended between the three possible explanations: (a) he perpetrated a calculated and brilliant hoax in the hope of ending the religious antagonisms that were still squandering the blood and energy of Europe; (b) he, perhaps inadvertently, ingested some extract of the sacred mushroom or a comparable drug that induced hallucinations he mistook for actual experiences; or (c) his mind, overheated by speculations or debilitated by premature senility, lapsed into one form of insanity.
For men such as Swedenborg, ancient or modem, one must feel sympathy and a certain respect, however we explain their activities, but there are not many of them. Throughout history, with a melancholy consistency, holy men have been imposters and swindlers, differing only, it would seem, in skill and sophistication. But our contemporaries seem to regard mention of that fact as a social impropriety, if not an obscenity.
Perhaps no archaeological find in the Western Hemisphere is more famous than the colossal heads, nine feet high, skillfully sculptured in hard basalt, that were unearthed at La Venta in Tabasco. Commonly assigned to various dates between 800 B.C. and 350 B.C., they enter prominently into every discussion of early navigation from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Mexico and are a prime datum in every theory concerning the race of such visitors to the Western Hemisphere and the cause of their coming; and even apart from such controversies, the heads naturally excite curiosity in themselves. Most of the references to them, however, omit the datum that in the central head a small tube was patiently bored through the basalt from the mouth to a point behind the ear as a speaking-tube for the convenience of a priest, who thus communicated the Word of God to his True Believers, whoever they were.
The promotion of holiness often demanded devices more ingenious than speaking-tubes, and inspired a great variety of mechanical, acoustical, and chemical contrivances. Even our scanty sources on thaumaturgic technology in the ancient world describe some of them. Hero of Alexandria, in his famous essay on mechanics, shows the construction of a number of miracle-making machines, but we know that even more elaborate ones were in use in various temples to show the ways of god to man. Unfortunately, we do not have a description of the apparatus that was used to make gods and other supernatural beings appear on a wide curtain of smoke or vapor, but an optical lens must have been used. Manifestations of divinity were not limited to temples. A common procedure was to take a pious person to the middle of an open field on a moonless night when some deity, such as Hecate, was scheduled to be passing by; the sucker was warned to keep his head covered and not to look on divinity, but he, of course, always risked a glance when the holy man’s concealed accomplice set fire to a falcon or hawk that had been covered with tow and pitch or doused in petroleum; the anguished screaming of the blazing-bird as it flew frantically away always helped instill the fear of god and suitable generosity in the worshipper.
It would be a waste of time to multiply examples of religious techniques in the Classical world amid the first great civilization of our race, but we may mention one measure of its decline. Livy knew from his sources the secret of the miraculous torches that were carried by hysterical females during the Bacchanalian craze, excited by a Greek-speaking evangelist in 186 B.C., but in the Second Century, Suetonius, Cassius Dio, and Pausanias mention chemically similar miracles without indicating that they did not believe them to be of supernatural origin. One hopes those authors were not so credulous, but they lived in a century in which both reason and our race were nearing their end in the mongrelized Empire that was still called Roman.
Where the skill to perform miracles is lacking, visual demonstration must be replaced by appeals to the imagination. The arts of oratory and creative writing, with rhetoric nicely adjusted to the comprehension and prejudices of the audience, can produce an effect almost as strong, and have the great advantage that they can body forth in the mind of the hearer or reader marvels that could not be performed on even the most elaborately equipped stage. Nothing is more persuasive than narratives purportedly by eye-witnesses of miracles, preferably supported by theological pronouncements made by a divinely-inspired prophet or by the god himself.
A student of religions must carefully distinguish between myths and the kind of compositions that we may call gospels. Among Aryans, myths do not purport to be history and are not so considered by intelligent adults, whereas gospels purport to be veracious and accurate reports of events that actually happened and of words that were actually uttered.
The Homeric poems are sometimes called "the Bible" of the Greeks. The epithet is grossly misleading. The two epics were indeed the writings that every literate Greek read, but he did not imagine they were history. He knew they were poetry. He knew that the Trojan War had taken place, and he believed – more or less – in the existence of the gods Homer mentions and was willing to believe that the Greek gods had been active, some on the Greek side and some on the Trojan, for he did not have the irrational fanaticism to suppose that the war had been a contest between right and wrong or that there were evil gods. But he knew that Homer had not been present at Troy and had never known anyone who had been. The poet had worked from uncertain and often conflicting traditions, from which he had selected the ones that suited his purpose, and these he had arranged and elaborated with details that were as much his own invention as the hexameters themselves. The epics were beautiful and memorable descriptions of what might have happened, but no one was obliged to believe they were truthful. An intelligent Greek believed the Iliad and Odyssey much as we believe Hamlet or King Lear or The Tempest. They were literature.
The Greeks intelligently understood that all the stories about their gods were myths. No one knew — no one could know what had actually happened. The gods probably existed, and certain traditional rituals and ceremonies were thought to propitiate or please them, and their intentions might be learned from certain oracles; furthermore, persons of extraordinary ability and achievement doubtless enjoyed divine favor and might trace their lineage to heroes, that is, to the children of gods by mortals. But no one could possibly know whether Zeus had abducted Europa or Perseus had slain the Gorgon and rescued Andromeda or Hercules had saved Alcestis from Thanatos. And since no one could know what had happened (if anything!), every poet, every story-teller was free to reshape the story in accordance with his own artistic instincts and his purpose in writing.
The same reasonable attitude appears in the Norse myths. The gods probably exist, and one should perform the traditional ceremonies in their honor, unless one is prepared to take the possible consequences of failing to do so. The Völuspá may well be right and it mirrors our Weltanschauung and essential pessimism, but, after all, no one can be sure that the sibyl was right or has been reported correctly. As for the Rígsþula, one would have to be feeble-minded to suppose that the story of Heimdall was intended to be believed:* it is, on the very face of it, a fantasy on the theme, (probably historical) that the primitive inhabitants of Scandanavia were Lapps, who were subdued by a migration of brown-haired Aryans, who were in turn forced to accept the mild overlordship of a band of blond Nordics. When the skalds recited their verses before a Norse chieftain and retinue of warriors, the listeners, who must have had a high native intelligence,† knew that the skald was inventing a large part of his story about the gods and heroes, and, what is more, many of the episodes were designedly humorous and intended to provoke laughter.**
* Who could seriously believe that a god created mankind by visiting existing households and in some way influencing the offspring of his host and hostess?
† The auditors, most of them illiterate, must have had both memories that retained an enormous oral literature and extraordinary mental agility to understand the skald’s kennings, i.e., the designation of common things by elliptical allusions, many of them invented by the skald as part of his poetic technique. A modern reader, even if he has read a fair amount of Norse literature, is likely to be nonplussed by such expressions as "the brandisher of Gungnir" (=Odin), "the burden of the gallows" (=Odin), "Kvasir’s blood" (=the art of poetry), "Ymir’s blood" (=the ocean), "the speech of the giants" (=gold), the price of the otter" (=gold), and hundreds of similar expressions, Without Sturluson’s description of the art and modern commentaries based on his, we should be hopelessly at sea. But the skald’s audience was delighted by his wit.
** Occasionally we are frankly told that given sagas were "good entertainment" (góð skemmtan) or were recited "for amusement" (til gamans). The question is how many of the episodes that seem so grotesque to us in the adventures of the gods were taken seriously by the audience and how many were what we call "comic relief"?
To the Aryan mind, at least, myths differ toto caelo from gospels: the former are exercises of the imagination; the latter purport to be history.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment