Theosophy - Hallowee'en: a festival of lost meanings by Alvin Boyd Kuhn
H
A L L O W E ' E N
A FESTIVAL OF LOST
MEANINGS
The large Merriam
Webster's dictionary gives the definition of Hallowe'en (spelled Halloween)
as "the evening preceding All Saints' Day; the eve of October 31. In many
countries Halloween is traditionally devoted to merrymaking, with playful ceremonies
and charms to discover future husbands and wives." Nothing more.
It is not unwarrantable
to predict that the time is not far distant when a world of more enlightened
intelligence will be able to look back upon the present age, particularly in
the Western area of civilization, and label it as the epoch in which the people
celebrated a series of religious festivals around the cycle of the year in nearly
total ignorance of their true significance. Certainly, whether or not this be
the future's judgment on our present state of semantic nescience, it is to be
presumed that if the departed souls of the Sages of antiquity are in any wise
in position to gaze down the corridors of history from their day to ours, they
must register uncomprehending dismay at the sight of our ghastly misconception
and utterly travestied motives in our commemoration of the great annual festivals
their dramatic genius instituted round the year. They must stand agape at the
sight of our mechanical parade of "holidays" and the completely distorted
spirit and elan with which we go through the perfunctory observance of one after
the other in total miscomprehension of the original inspiration and signification
of each in turn. It must afflict them with consternation to see how in the case
of every one of the cardinal festivals a true sense of the meaning to be dramatized
by the occasion has been overlaid by some outer, some material or superficial
reference that retains or conveys not the remotest relevance to the primal message.
While the divagation
from the basic meaning is egregious in every instance, it has perhaps swung
most outrageously far from prime character in the case of our Hallowe'en observance,
falling annually on the night of October 31. So profoundly is this true that
one risks little in possible misstatement in venturing the assertion that none
of the millions of revellers on that riotous night has the faintest real idea
of the significance of his carousal, or any idea that approaches within a country
mile of the original intent of the occasion. It is quite doubtful if one in
ten thousand even ventures a random guess as to why he goes out in the street
of town or village in grotesque disguise. He does it from the sheer force of
custom. He hardly bothers even to wonder why, because he knows nobody is going
to ask him about it. The meaning does not concern him, because society for ages
has ordained it that way, and it comes with the force and sanction of something
established under the unchallengeable authority of immemorial custom. If there
is perhaps a mite of idle curiosity about it, his wonder is fully satisfied
by the reflection that somewhere away back in past history it had its origin
in some meaningful situation, and now it is enough to know that it goes on by
the automatism of habit and tradition. Under the sweep of conventional mores
it comes each year to give him, if he is still in the fling of youthful urges,
an evening of semi-wild license, embroidered with the possibility of interesting
adventure. It is at any rate one evening when at least a partial escape can
be made from the restraints of rigid canons of moral conduct and a suppressed
original elemental tendency can be freely indulged. And this vaguely felt native
urge to wildness, if he but realized it, is the one link, though mostly all
unconscious, still remaining between his psyche and the primordial esoteric
significance of the jubilation on October 31.
The Hallowe'en rollicking
is not generally regarded as of major significance at all comparable with that
of Christmas or Easter. Yet it can be affirmed that, as it was originally conceived
and formulated, it was rated fully as important as these others. As a matter
of fact it stood as one of the four cardinal festivals of the entire year, embodying
the significance of one of the four cardinal points of the zodiac, -- the two
equinoxes and the two solstices -- and these four were considered the greatest
of all the ritual occasions in the year's round. It differs widely in character
from all other observances, having come to be regarded more as a secular festival
than one of religion. Festivals generally are designed to commemorate something
of positive value or of universal import, and therefore take on the aura of
solemnity. Mostly they deal with events of epic or national importance or of
profound religious significance. On the contrary, Hallowe'en gives vent to a
spirit of quite opposite cast, expressing frivolity, license, mischief. Outwardly
it stands at the very opposite pole from the serious or the sacred. Because
of its seemingly light and purely sportive character it has, as said, not been
evaluated as of first importance. Little do its wild celebrants realize that
its truly profound significance inheres in precisely this seemingly bizarre
and outlandish element of its observance.
But long established
customs do not take their rise out of nothing, nor out of wayward random impulses.
So we must ask: why the wild revel? Why the free fling in buffoonery, in rough
horseplay, in wanton, if limited destructiveness, in the ludicrous and the grotesque?
Why the freedom to indulge in sexual suggestiveness? Why the temporary let-down
in moral restraint? Why the wearing of masks? What can be the hidden import
of the general community turning out and acting like an untamed animal for one
night in the year? Why the candle shining through the grinning features of a
pumpkin, or the apple in a tub of water? Why the witch riding the skies on a
broomstick? Why the haunting revelry of imps and sprites and the stealthy prowling
of Satan himself? And why all this on the last night of October? Has it no more
pertinent significance than that it has grown out of a natural revolt against
the restraints of established moral and social decencies and sanctities in general
mores? Has it arisen as a revolt against the inhibitions of conventional norms,
as a sort of desperate resolve on the part of civilized society to indulge for
one night in the year in an escape into freedom of action behind a mask of anonymity?
Surely its roots of origin run deeper into the ground of human life and nature
than that. How deeply they penetrate into the common soil of our being will
be a revelation to the present world, which has lost all connection with the
primal ancient sources of its traditional mores and its great annual ceremonials.
We continue to go through the outward forms of these rituals, almost totally
oblivious of their meaning. So far from feeding the natural hunger of our collective
psyche on the rich food of sublime import in these formalities which our spiritual
health demands (minds and souls must be nourished with proper nutriment as well
as bodies), we are near to starving them on the dead outer husks of former semantic
constructions of sublime truth. The form survives, the meaning is lost. One
might say that Hallowe'en continues to be staged for the sheer fun and devilry
of it. All the while the world of culture is famished for the meat of living
power implicit in the stirring frolic of this night.
MAN
A QUATERNARY BEING
The festival, it
might be said, carries one-fourth of the symbolic representation of human life
as depicted in the great zodiacal figure or graph devised by the sapient genius
of ancient Sages. The zodiac (from the Greek word zodion, "a little animal")
was a semantic diagram of amazing ingenuity and comprehensiveness, to portray
the successive stages and salient features of man's evolution in the scale of
expanding being. A basic twelve steps in progress, or twelve segments of an
eventually complete divinization of his nature were the integral divisions of
the graph. But as these twelve were to be generated as the outcome of a trinitarian
subdivision of each of four grades or levels of the human consciousness, namely
sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual genius, the twelve differentiations
were clustered in four groups of three members each, cutting the zodiacal circle
of houses into the four quadrants. The boundaries were the lines cutting the
circle at the two solstices and the two equinoxes, giving us the equal-armed
cross in the circle. The yearly dates of these points were the twenty-first
(or twenty-second) of June (summer solstice), of September (autumn equinox),
of December (winter solstice) and of March (spring equinox).
What has been largely
lost out of present astrological study is the fact that the zodiac was to serve
as a pictorial or semantic representation of the evolution of man's divine soul
as it swung round the repeated cycles of life in many incarnations on the earth.
If his evolution was to be consummated by the development and final unification
of the twelve composite facets of divine faculty through the total experience
acquired in the run of the cycles, the process involved the generation of the
four grades of consciousness, each in threefold organization. What the blueprint
indicated then at the four "corners" of the zodiac was the generation
successively of sensation, the first grade or form of consciousness, at the
September point; of emotion at the December point; of mind at March; and of
spirit grade at the consummation of the round at June. Since the little sun
of fiery conscious potential in man was of kindred essence with the conscious
power behind the sun itself, its cycle of rotation was made in copy of the solar
orb's annual round. As the design was intended to register it, the soul was
conceived in germinal state at the June station, was integrated in a material
organism at the September date, was quickened to life after virtual "death"
under the incubus of body at December, and was raised to a new growth in a fresh
cycle beginning at March, under Easter symbolism.
September 21, then,
marks the date at which in the significance of zodiacal language the unit of
fiery spiritual essence, an emanation of creative Mind from the supreme Deity
which is to be the divine soul of man, descending from the heights of noumenal
activity toward manifestation in matter, crosses the line from pure mind force
into union with a grade of matter that, being attuned to its vibration, it can
mould into an instrument of expression of its potential capabilities of life
and consciousness. In more concise form of statement it there enters embodiment
in physical forms; it incarnates. The fundamental import of a great religious
ceremonial set for the autumn of the year would be involved in the meaning that
goes with the core doctrine of the Incarnation. Hallowe'en is par excellence
the ritualization of the Incarnation.
But, it will be remonstrated,
Hallowe'en does not fall on September 21 or reasonably near it. It comes forty
days after that date. How can it be relevant to the import of September 21?
The interval of the forty days between the fall equinox and October 31 holds
the answer to the question.
The number forty
is, as any Bible reader will know, almost omnipresent in the Scriptures. It
occurs sixty-four times in the Old Testament. Along with seven, ten and twelve,
it is one of the basic numerological keys to the recondite meaning and the cryptic
methodology of Bible writing. From certain fundamental data in the realm of
nature it had come in the ancient days, in the esoteric language of symbolism,
to connote the period of time that the egg, or seed of life, was immersed or
incubated in matter before "hatching" or germinating to make the start
of a new cycle. A seed has to go into the ground and "die" in order
to generate a new living organism for a new cycle of life. Forty days were calculated
as the time the wheat grains sown in the waters standing over the fields at
the inundation of the Nile River would take to germinate. The human embryo is
gestated in mother body in forty weeks. Forty was therefore the number symbol
of the interval of "death" of the germ of new life when incubated
in matter. It was the symbol of the dark interval preceding the dawn of a new
life cycle.
It was therefore
used in semantic science to intimate the involvement of soul or spirit in material
embodiment, and thus came to represent the whole life cycle itself. For a cycle,
or at any rate the manifest arc of it, is just that period in which soul entity
is involved in matter. It would dramatize the whole duration of any cycle of
birth, growth, maturation, decay and death, the entire span from birth to death.
The ancient genius for festival ordination succeeded in introducing at least
four periods of forty days into the round of the year. Taking the interval between
September 21 and October 31 as the first of these, a second one is the period
between Christmas on December 25 and February 2, the ancient Candlemas Day,
or the festival of the Purification of the Virgin from the corruption of a mortal
birth. The third dates from forty days before Easter to Easter morn, the Christian
Lent. A fourth runs from Easter, taken as the spring equinox date of March 21,
to the first of May, which latter date was of great prominence throughout all
ancient traditional ritualism. It is probable that several other periods running
from the first of a month to the tenth of the next month were taken as festival
epochs.
The "Holy Night"
or "Hallowed Even" was therefore set for the fortieth day following
the autumn equinox, with the signification that the soul entered incarnation
(Latin carno means "flesh") on September 21, ran its cycle of evolution
over its forty days of "incubation" or embodiment in the soil of human
life and on October 31 culminated its progress at the end in its final glorification
in the hallowed state of incipient godhood. It entered the cycle as the soul
of a mortal human being and emerged at the end in the blessed ranks of the gods.
The forty days typified the entire cycle. The thirty-first of October virtually
symbolizes, therefore, in a smaller cycle the same meaning that Easter dramatizes
in a cycle of six months, starting at September 21, or what Easter symbolizes
at the end of Lent. The soul in both cycles comes to its beatification at the
forty days' end.
As a matter of significant
fact, the glorified end date of this forty-day festival really falls on the
day following Hallowe'en, November first. This day is for the autumn precisely
what May first is for the spring in semantic relevance, and the two days are
just six months apart, each forty days after the equinox event. November first
has borne the festival name of All Saints' Day, or All Soul's Day. Obviously
it intimates the idea of the day when all souls become "saints," or
are divinely sanctified, that is, perfected as divine beings or gods. It connotes
the final apotheosization of the human when it is divinized, when from man it
becomes god. Hallowe'en is thus properly envisaged as the "Eve" of
All Saints' Day.
So Hallowe'en was
dated to come on the night before November 1 because it was intended to represent
the natural-man development antecedent and preparatory to the burgeoning out
of the spiritual flower on the following day, and all this was in strict accord
with the sagacious design of the ancient theurgists, the initiates in the wisdom
lore of a primeval revelation, who by this stratagem of dramatic genius fixed
on the eve before the chief festival a night of preparation for the main action
of the morrow. It went by the name (Greek) of parasceve, meaning "eve of
preparation;" or proeortia, "in advance of the going out."
It shrouds no deeper
mystery than that if one is going on a journey on a certain day, one would spend
the eve before in packing and other preparation. It might be said that the parasceve
almost meant this "packing of the baggage on the eve of the journey."
But the meaning runs deeper into the esoteric realm than any mere physical reference.
It was not a merely physical pilgrimage that the soul was preparing to begin
on November 1. All these festivals dramatize stages, aspects, processes of human
evolution, and their meaning is not to be considered as apprehended until it
is brought into reference to some vital facet of this evolution.
THE
HEYDAY OF THE ANIMAL
So what is there
in this sphere of relevance that can come in as a stage antecedent or initial
to the climactic flowering of man's divine nature? Obviously it is just the
physical bodily development that, as the John Baptist of the Gospels, must precede
and prepare the way for the outburst of the spiritual-man consummation by laying
the physical foundations for it. Spiritual evolution is impossible unless there
is first built up the material or organic instrumentalities to implement its
manifestations. "That was not first which is spiritual," says St.
Paul, "but that which is natural;" and the natural is the physical.
"First the stalk and then the ear and then the full corn in the ear."
There must be the green stem of the rose bush before there can be the rose.
In the human kingdom body comes first to build a brain and nervous system through
which a psychic and spiritual grade of consciousness can push outward to expression.
So it is the first,
the animal stage of our unfoldment that Hallowe'en vividly portrays, and the
day of glorification of all souls follows to crown this physical podium of human
life with the beautiful statue of spiritual man. This day of consummation closes
out the incubation period and the forty-day cycle ends with the climactic dramatization
of both the antecedent parasceve and the ultimate divine culmination in a two-phased
grand finale. It is significant also that while All Soul's Day is set as a daytime
observance, Hallowe'en is a night celebration. In the creation process night
precedes day, as, says the Bible, God brought forth light out of the darkness
of primordial night. The nocturnal character of Hallowe'en also arises from
the symbolism of the soul's immersion in matter during the preparatory stage
as being its night-time experience. In body the soul sits or gropes in material
darkness until the turn of the cycle brings the dawn of the spiritual day, when
it is awakened out of its dreamy condition in the shadows of unreality into
the bright day of its full vision of truth.
Hallowe'en has also
been designated in some traditions as the All Fools' Night. The connection of
this denomination with the ceremonial is involved in a measure of obscurity.
Yet there is a specific significance in what the word "fool" connotes
in reference to the soul's incarnation. For we have other indications of it
in the medieval personage, the jester or court fool in every baron's castle,
as well as in the odd fact that the Number I card in the symbolic collection
called the Tarot cards is designated the Fool. Also we have the poet's observation
that all human life is marked with folly: "What fools we mortals be!"
So the term obviously carries some intimation of deeper import. It must be seen
to have a measure of esoteric reference in the reflection that the soul, when
in bodily incarnation, is cut off from the full light of truth and wisdom, and
therefore lives under the dominion of demoniac powers, which, as presented so
clearly in the allegory of Job's divinely sanctioned tormenting at the hands
of the imps of darkness and evil, are given tutelary control over the infant
deity in man during its incubation and incipient stages of growth. St. Paul
elucidates this idea in the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians,
saying that as long as the soul is in the unawakened state of its childhood,
corresponding to the ungerminated state of the seed, it is under the supervision
of tutors and guardians and in servitude to the elements (indeed in several
passages "elementals") of the earth and the air, though it is at the
same time (potentially) "Lord of all."
Thus the characterization
of the soul in its bodily life as the "fool" carries deep philosophical
import. It was a most profound doctrine of the sapient Greek philosophy that
when the soul descends "from on high" into the realm of sense and
generation, "she" loses her clearer perspective of all real values
in the life of consciousness and is precipitated into every sort of incertitude
and finds her vision of "whole natures" distracted and diffracted
into distorted pictures of reality, her proper focus of vision and understanding
all confused by the wayward attractions of sense, passion and ignorance. In
this wretched condition caused by her loss of divine faculty, she gropes blindly
in the darkness of nescience, and perpetrates all manner of folly.
The first Tarot
card, called "The Fool," pictures the soul as a blooming carefree
youth striding gaily forth in such position that his next step will send him
plunging over the brink of a sheer precipice. This is the soul in the upper
world ready to descend into incarnation. Perhaps it is only in the cryptic intimations
of ancient occult science that the soul is given the appellation of fool, pointing
to the folly of leaving heaven for the hardships of earth. For often this recondite
methodology disguised its true purport by symbol or character of a nature suggestive
of the very opposite idea to the one intended to be conveyed to the initiated.
It is known that to some degree this science deliberately put out truths under
what have been called "blinds," in order to safeguard precious and
dangerous knowledge from the unworthy. In this case it seems obvious that the
arcane wisdom promulgators were not openly designing to give to the world the
teaching that the soul is guilty of folly for leaving heaven to gain its evolutionary
experience on earth. For if the soul remained forever in the world of spirit,
it would only perpetuate its static condition. If it is destined under the Cycle
of Necessity to take further steps in growth, it had to be transplanted in successive
lives on earth. "Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die,"
said Jesus, "it abideth alone. But if it die it bringeth forth much fruit."
Hardly has it been seen that this statement is the absolute confirmation of
the necessity and the naturalness of the "fall" of the soul into this
dark underworld of matter and the flesh, where alone it can ground itself for
a new cycle of growth. This is the law of the cosmos, and the soul commits no
folly (as religion has so universally imputed to her) in obeying its ordinances.
Yet, in the understood sense of the word, it does commit her to a long experience
of trial and "temptation" in her bodily life, in which her blundering
course of trial and error engages her in much "folly."
It must not be overlooked
that we have April 1 featured as an All Fools' Day. The motive for setting it
in the spring is readily seen. If the autumn began the incarnational period
of "folly," the spring would end it six months later. If the symbolism
were properly understood, it might be considered as appropriate to date the
feature at the end as well as at the beginning of the period in which the Fool
had his fling.
This function of
the "fool" character is more boldly presented in the personage of
the medieval castle fool or jester. It seems indubitable that the custom of
maintaining this odd actor in the social scheme arose out of the milieu of ancient
representative typism of the religious drama. As in the duality of the human
constitution there were the two forces of the universal polarity, the natural
and the spiritual, the bodily and the divinely intellectual, the human and the
celestial, and the higher unable to evolve its capacities apart from polarized
attachment to the lower, it seems clear that the idea was carried into the system
of society in the institution of the castle fool. He was a person of acknowledged
privilege, even in his folly. He was, in deeper sense, placed there to serve
as the foil, the goading force, the thorn in the flesh, the tempter and the
prodder of the Lord of the castle. He was to be the latter's alter ego, his
human counterpart and secondary self, to keep the Lord under stress and pressure
to maintain his true place of headship. It does not strain the imagery unduly
to put it that the jester was kept in the medieval household to make a "fool"
out of the baron, who of course in the type-drama represented the higher soul
self. The court fool went with the Lord as the body with its animal instincts
goes with the soul.
Astonishing material
confirming the elucidation is brought to light in data encountered in research.
We discover that the typical ancient ritual features two principal characters,
a hero and a buffoon. These two share many adventures together and live on terms
of the greatest familiarity, -- quite naturally, since they live together in
the same body! Here we have the soundest reason for the special privilege accorded
the fool to jest at the expense of the castle baron. For the god and the irresponsible
joker were made bedfellows in the same hostelry. And to crown it all, we read
that "fools were considered sacred on the seventh day." One is driven
to conjecture as to what infinite tragedy has afflicted human life in the large
as the result of the ingrained religious infatuation that only the soul of man
is "sacred," while the body is held as foul, as base and worthy only
of being crucified in the interests of the spirit. The animal "fool"
at any rate comes into the recognition of his sacred function on his "seventh
day."
Still another designation
for Hallowe'en was in old English history Nutcracker Night. The symbolic relevance
embodied in the term would not seem to be too difficult to resolve. It has already
been elucidated that the soul enters body at the September date of the year's
cycle, and it can enter it only as seed of its future growth. The commonest
form of seed in the vegetable kingdom is the nut. Once planted in the soil of
human life, the evolutionary task of the divine potential is to crack open the
shell and bring out the kernel for the purposes of new growth. Hence the figure
of nut-cracking.
And what amazing
and enlightening significance lives for our dull intellection in the analogy
of the vegetable seed with the soul-seed! We plant the hard nut of a walnut
or a hickory tree in the ground. To open out a way for the life-germ in the
kernel to burst forth, nature must crack open, or rot away the outer shell.
This outer covering, the ark which houses it during the dissolution of its parent
tree, must die away. And as it dies, the life innate in the kernel begins to
increase. So it is with the divine soul encased in the womb of man's outer physical
"shell." St. Paul says that as we die unto the old first Adamic nature
and all its bodily instincts, we begin to live all anew in the higher nature
of the second Adam, the Christly consciousness. So, like the snake in the springtime,
we must slough off the texture of the physical body, or let it "rot away,"
so that the divine life of a Christly being may rend the veil of the mortal
temple and begin to take root for its new growth in beauty. Nature's instruction
is infallible.
Related in the general
context of the autumn memorials to Hallowe'en is the name given to the September
equinoctial date, -- Michaelmas. Four of the seven "Angels of the Presence,"
the primordial archangels, were allotted to the four cardinal stations of the
cross in the zodiac: Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel. The station of Michael
was at the autumn equinox. Hallowe'en then fell forty days after Michaelmas.
Gerald Massey, the greatest of all Egyptologists, traces the name Michael to
the Egyptian Makhu, the god holding the balance on the zodiacal horizon line,
and the Hebrew word for God, El, or Makhu-el, the Lord of the Balance, one of
the titles given to the Christ deity holding the balance between soul and body
in man's constitution.
THE
GODS IN REVEL
It is thus intimated
to us that the prime motif of Hallowe'en is revelry, in the wilder spirit of
animal sportiveness. It requires a more penetrating philosophical insight, however,
to discern the deeper involvements and the revealing appropriateness of this
phase of the festival's meaning. It is inwoven in the context of the principles
of the arcane wisdom of old.
The prime datum,
of course, is the sheer fact that the ceremonial celebrates the entry of our
units of soul into their animal bodies here on earth. It is the festival of
the "in-fleshing" of units of spiritual essence, the incarnation.
The Latin carno is "flesh." The divine emanations of cosmic mind,
uttered by the "voice of God," are what St. John calls the Word, the
Logos, and this Logos becomes "fleshed," that is, the active ensouling
and creative principle is embodied in fleshly forms. Massey with great insistence
asserts that the Egyptian word for the mummy, which, as type of that which lives
forever even in its "death" in matter, is Karast, is undoubtedly the
origin of the Greek Christos and the English Christ. Perhaps this cannot be
categorically established as correct. Yet it would meet every demand of symbolic
consistency if its claims to this honor were exhaustively examined.
A most interesting
and suggestive word that derives from carno, flesh, contributes grist to our
mill of elucidation. This is the word "carnival." The dictionary states
that it originally sprang from the "putting away of meat" in Roman
Catholic countries, Italy being especially mentioned, and the season extended
from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday. Its period of actual observance were the last
few days before Lent, with its chief focus of celebratory rites on Shrove Tuesday,
the day before Lent. This day was marked by the confession of sins before a
priest, after which there was a free indulgence in rollicking and merrymaking.
The note of rejoicing was no doubt the expression of happiness over the consciousness
of absolution from sin. Also perhaps it was inspired by the sombre reflection
that six weeks of austerity, privation even to fasting, were about to begin.
This motive might have been expressed by the shibboleth, "Let us eat, drink
and be merry, for tomorrow we enter gloom."
The gist of the
meaning of "carnival" at any rate is the note of revelry carried to
wild excess, and as the dictionary has it, "merrymaking, especially of
an indecorous character." But the axial idea embodied in the word must
definitely be the giving of free rein to the instincts and impulses of the "flesh,"
the indulgence in carnality. The second part of the word is given as deriving
from the Latin levare, "to lift, to elevate." So that instead of connoting
originally the "putting away of meat," it might with more directness
have been intended to signify the "exhaltation of the flesh." For
this in effect is precisely what the celebration became. It was carnality given
vent in "carnivality."
For a grasp of the
basic elements of the celebration's appropriateness, it is necessary to emphasize
the item that is the central axis about which the whole meaning revolves. This
is the fact that the human body is the product of the evolution of animal life,
that it is in and of itself, just the highly developed animal. Plato defines
man as through intellect a god, but through body an animal. Ancient mythology
and Scriptural writings represent the interrelationship between the Heroes,
the divine beings who come to earth, and the various animals they all have to
meet, combat and slay. The only animals connoted by these myths and allegories
are these animal bodies into which the god-souls effect entry. This item is
one of the pointed keys whose loss in the early centuries plunged all interpretative
effort into obscurity and error.
A few Scriptural
references to the animal nature of man may profitably be introduced. The allegory
of Daniel thrown into the lion's den can at once be seen as the soul's imprisonment
in animal body, for in incarnation the spark of divinity is "cribbed, cabined
and confined" in the "den of the animal. In Marks' Gospel (I:13) one
verse condenses the entire story of the Temptation. Prefacing that Jesus was
led by the spirit into the wilderness forty days to be tempted of Satan, the
narrative covers in six words the entire content of the experience, after which
"angels ministered unto him." And what are these six words? "And
was with the wild beasts." Here is conclusive evidence that the Temptation
was just a poetic graph for the incarnation. All the temptation that soul ever
meets arises from the side of the body in which it has taken up its lifetime
habitation.
From the apocryphal
Epistle to the Romans of Ignatius we take a most revealing verse. The dramatized
Christ is speaking, and says: "For I am the wheat of God, and I shall be
ground between the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread
of Christ." The Christ has said that we must eat his very body, to become
immortal. And we, the human entities, are those wild beasts between whose teeth
the divine essence within us is being constantly ground. Yet that divine essence
is the bread of life on which we feed.
In the Book of Ezekiel,
speaking to the souls he is about to dispatch to this nether world, God says:
"I will fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." "The underworld
awaits thy coming," he declared elsewhere. And before his soul-children
migrated to earth, there were none but animals here to receive such royal visitants.
A Chinese legend
says that the infant prince, son of the king, was thrown out into the pig-yard
and left to the mercy of the swine, which, however, saved him. The library of
mythology abounds in legends of heroes who were cast out in the wilds but were
nurtured by animals. Jesus was himself born in a stable among the animals. In
the basic myth of Rome's founding, we find the twins Romulus and Remus thrown
out and suckled by the she-wolf, the fratricide of Remus and the saving of Romulus
to build the city. A volume could be filled with similar myths and constructions
in ancient lore. Sometimes the animal is charactered as a giant, ogre, sea monster
or dragon.
But the material
that most cogently connects the incarnation with the Hallowe'en motif of rough
and sportive animal behavior is found in the fourth chapter of the Book of Daniel.
Interpreting the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, the prophet of the Lord revealed that
the king (always typing the divine soul) should be driven out from among men,
his dwelling should be with the beasts of the field, he should eat grass like
cattle, he should be drenched with the dews of heaven (indicating night-time,
the universal glyph for incarnation), until "seven years" passed over
him (the glyph for a completed cycle) and he learned that the Most High ruled
over the kingdom of men. A later verse tells of the fulfilment of the dream:
the king was driven out from among men, and did eat grass like oxen, his body
was wet with the dews of heaven, his hair grew like eagles' feathers and his
nails like the claws of a bird. As sanity forbids our taking this as veridical
personal history of the man Nebuchadnezzar-- and certainly there is no evidence
of its having happened to this king-- we have here one of the most positive
proofs of the allegorical character of Biblical literature. But the most pointed
item in this allegory is the statement that "an animal's mind shall be
given unto him," which is latter followed by the statement that "his
mind became like the mind of an animal." It was to take the transforming
experience of the whole cycle (of seven years) to enable the king, the soul,
to do just what Plato asserts it must do to recover the memory of its lost intellectual
Paradise. For the Daniel paralogue states that when the experience was over,
the king announced that "my reason returned unto me." We lose the
paradisical consciousness when our souls leave heaven for earth. We live in
an animal's body (Isaiah says: "We live in darkness like the dead.")
And in the early stages of this lower world existence we exercise an animal's
grade of mind. We will regain Paradise at the end, when our "reason"
returns unto us.
Here indeed is found
the Hallowe'en motif and spirit. Our souls have taken lodgement in the bodies
of animals, and in the first stages they have no other awareness or knowledge
than that they are just the animal creatures with the animal mind. Our behavior
in this long inceptive period of the incubation ordeal is purely that of ourselves
acting like animals. Our real divine nature at that epoch is shrouded in oblivion,--Plato's
great doctrine of the "loss of divine memory." It lies deeply submerged
under the animal grade of mind which occupies the open field of consciousness.
Only later, and only completely at the end of the cycle, will it have been awakened
and developed its latent powers to full spiritual rulership of the life. Hallowe'en
is designed to commemorate our sensual activity, our grade of animal-mindedness
which in this earthly existence foreruns the birth of the spirit. That is the
core of the festival's recondite meaning.
No passage that
has been encountered in much study seems to picture with adequate clarity and
vividness the basic evolutionary situation as does a citation from the works
of the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. Commenting on the mental metamorphosis
superinduced by the soul's migration from heaven to earth, he writes:
"They began
to revel in free will; they indulged in their own movement; they took the wrong
path. Then it was that they lost the knowledge that they sprang from that divine
order. They no longer had a true vision of the Supreme or of themselves. Smitten
with longing for the lower, rapt in love of it, they grew to depend upon it;
so they broke away as far as they were able."
Forgetting that
they were princelings of the heavenly kingdom, now enwrapped in the coats of
animal skin, their divine potential reduced if not smothered by the deadening
blanket of the body's sensuous life, they took themselves to be the physical
creatures they outwardly were. And as outer form shapes itself over the likeness
of the inward soul that pours itself out through it, it was not long until animal
propensity transformed the environing body into the animal semblance. St. Paul
so forcibly expresses this idea when he says that "they changed the glory
of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man,
and of birds, and of four-footed beasts and of creeping things." That phase
of the incarnation is just what the Hallowe'en carousal is designed to portray.
The exposition could
run into great elaboration. As there are many kinds of animals, with each giving
a different expression of brutish propensity, the reveling throngs in city streets
are at liberty to exhibit a wide variety of antics. What is to be understood
and weirdly felt in the scene is the sense of a being potentially of god stature
glaring out through the eyes and features of an animal, a god grimacing like
a beast. And all of this is most appropriate to introduce the next and most
impressive and meaningful particular of the Hallowe'en drama.
THE
MASK OF THE PERSONALITY
This prominent feature
is the mask behind which all revelers hide their identity. Hardly have we ever
caught even the shadow of the light that is hidden behind this enigmatic symbol.
From it we gleam a new revelation, one which incontrovertibly corroborates the
thesis of interpretation here advanced.
What is disclosed
to us, as the outstanding item of the revelry, is the spectacle of humans masquerading
in the outer features and habiliments of an animal. In addition to being a carnival,
Hallowe'en is par excellence a masquerade. Human features are overlaid and hidden
behind the outer clothing of an animal. For, let us make no mistake about this,
those masks and those masquerading costumes were originally the heads and hides
of animals. The author had conceived that this must be so considerably in advance
of his finding confirmation of the fact. That came in further research. It was
found that participants in the Mithraic Mysteries wore animal masks. But much
direct testimony to the fact was encountered in a most valuable work, The Hero:
A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, by Lord Raglan (Oxford University Press,
New York). A condensation of his findings in a lifelong research may be given
in a quotation from our own volume, Who Is This King of Glory? (p. 87) as follows:
"The incarnation
of the divine soul in man's animal body is the basis of all the legends of the
sorcerer's turning the hero or his men into animals, or their disguising themselves
as animals. The animal mask of Hallowe'en is the survival and replica of the
same thing, for the masks were originally the hides of animals! The prominence
given this phase of the drama's meaning is attested by what Raglan writes (p.
261). He says that a prominent feature of every type of traditional narrative
is the man in animal form, or the animal that can speak."
This must be so
because there is but one central theme to the drama of human life, viz. the
interrelated history of the two components of man's life, soul and body, god
and animal.
Hallowe'en is the
masquerade ball of the ego-soul in man. He is a (potential) god, yet here he
is cavorting in the disguise of the beast. And this is not mere histrionic fantasy,
but the actual truth of the situation in which he finds himself. His heavenly
Father has sent him forth out of the celestial palace to don the habiliments
of a race of lower beings and be the monitors, verily the gods of these creatures.
The young god, comely
and radiant in the first bloom of his youth before the animal brutishness has
marred his visage and contorted his beauty into coarseness, soon registers the
contortions of his features in forms of ugliness. This element of the interpretation
was so pronounced in the ancient purview of the incarnational drama that it
became distinguished as the doctrine of the god's "disfigurement."
The impingement of the beastly nature upon the impressible consciousness of
the young god distorted the latter's features into painful deformity. So prominent
indeed was this aspect of the semantic delineation that when the Christian movement
in the early centuries transmogrified the spiritual drama into the personal
biography of the man Jesus, one party in the Church strongly contended that
in bodily appearance the Nazarene was an ugly, deformed, wizened and decrepit
little old man! (The evidence for this is to be found in Lundy's valuable old
work, Monumental Christianity.) Isaiah in chapter 52 depicts this facet of meaning:
"His visage
was so marred, more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men; disfigured
till he seemed a man no more, deformed out of the semblance of a man."
Again we read: "He
hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that
we should desire him." In one striking picturization of the god in this
condition, the wisdom of old Egypt presents a graphic portrayal. It is the divine
voice speaking and it assures the young god: "I shall remove for thee the
contortions of thy face." As the animal proclivities marred and contorted
his visage, so would the gracious deific power smooth and beautify, eventually
glorify the twisted faces of the young deities undergoing what the Greeks called
the agon, to which we need but add the "y" to catch the ground meaning.
Over the stretch of that early period of the god's childhood, sense sat on the
throne of his immature development. Sensuality stamped its coarse image on face
and feature. Comus was king of the "carnival" and the sportive imps
of the underworld made merry in this their night of riot. So we have the scenario
of the god wallowing, as it were, in a sensuous debauch of semi-brutish revelry.
The eyes that looked out through the animal disguise are those of a god, but
they gleam and glint with the force of sensual passion as their light is diffracted
by the gross medium through which they shine.
And perhaps nobody
has ever more pointedly told us the cosmic necessity for the descent of these
units of potential godhood into the lair of the beasts than has Thomas Taylor,
profound expositor of the Greek philosophers. He writes:
"Without this
participation of intellect in the lowest department of corporeal life, nothing
but the irrational soul and a brutal life would subsist in the dark and fluctuating
abode of the body."
The animal races
("three genera of mortals" Plato in the Timaeus calls them), which
could progress by the natural biological impetus to the levels of sensation
and feeling (of pleasure and pain), could advance no further up the ladder without
receiving from above the implantation of the germ of mind in their organic constitution.
To effect the polarization of the negative forces of sense and emotion with
the positive energies of mind and spirit (the union of earth and water with
air and fire) God sent forth his sons, "only-begotten" of mind, not
of matter, and germinally linked their spiritual potential with the physical
nature of the lower beings, to lead them over the gap between sense and mind
and be in effect their "gods." "You shall be their gods and they
shall be your people," he promised them.
MAN'S
TWO VOICES
But it is when we
come to examine the etymological as well as the philosophical significations
of the mask that we gain a wondrous new vision of the festival's profounder
import. The path of this luminous understanding runs back to the Latin word
for "mask." A veritable flash of illumination floods in upon us when
we find that this word is persona. It is composed of per, "through,"
and sonum, "sound." When in Rome the actors donned the mask (which
was all the "costume" they affected for their parts), their voices
sounded through the mask. This was to convey the idea that though the voice
was that of the actor himself, yet in sounding through the mask it became the
voice of the character he personated. And still further light breaks in upon
our minds when we apply all this to the Hallowe'en representation. We then realize
that this animal form which our soul tenants is the personality through which
our god's voice issues carrying the force and form of his divine being out to
expression in our entire life. The god in us can only speak out through the
lips of our animal selves. It is for us now to wonder with how much distortion
they reach expression in our outer world. Yes, our human selves, body, senses,
feelings are that mask of personality through which the voice of our inner deity
sounds out its message. And it is sad to reflect how often it issues as the
voice of the animal and not that of the god. The weird grimaces of the faces
of the October rioters are to us the eternal reminder of our carnal nature,
which religion too unanimously had made the evil tempter of the human race.
The god, enjoying, as Plotinus shows so clearly, the opportunity to indulge
in the free activity of creative will in his own right and in his own domain,
felt "in his blood" the delight of adventure in the exercise of his
new powers and glowed with eagerness to try his constructive efforts upon the
plastic nature of matter. For the Father had put him in charge of a small kingdom
of cosmos, a miniature world, made over the image of higher worlds, so that
when he became proficient in its rulership he could be given dominion over larger
universes. It was inevitable that, still in his callow youth, untried and ignorant,
impetuous, inexperienced and inexpert, he would run wild in his wielding of
the powers in the body he was to rule. The Greek myth of Phaeton, son of Apollo,
rashly essaying to drive the sun-chariot of his father across the sky and letting
it get out of hand, so that the Sun-God had to strike him down to save the world,
is a variant graph of the same conception. It is no derogation of the theological
presupposition underlying this delineation of evolutionary process that the
youthful god in man's nature had to indulge in a veritable revel of license
in his use of the powers of the body which is the kingdom he is given to rule.
Otherwise we must ask how he would ever learn their power and master the art
of bringing them under his control for their true function in the upward movement
which carries both him and them forward to grander being.
As he took the reins
of directive rulership in his hands and whipped up the fiery seeds of the physical
chariot he must learn to drive, he became familiar with their capabilities and
their power, saw how they could be exploited for high service and at any rate
took keen note of the outcome of his efforts. It was in this way that his rioting
with them brought a return to invaluable benefit to himself. For it is out of
reflection upon the consequences of our acts that mind is born. And only when
mind assumes full direction of the soul's employment of the life forces will
the still higher birth of spirit be brought to pass. Even the fool's folly becomes
in the end, through the pain that follows it, life's appointed schoolmaster,
our pedagogue in growth. Out of our wildest orgies eventually emerge the principles
of wisdom. Our reason returns unto us.
For when the ripening
powers of thought begin to take clear note of the consequences of "wasting
our substance in riotous living," mind comes forward and exerts its sovereign
prerogative in the way of opposing its mandates to the wild surges of the animal
propensities. For now mind knows that the sense and the emotions have a beneficent
role in the order, for the proper playing of which they must be kept in leash,
to be exercised in due and not inordinate measure and proportion, as the Greeks
have so well taught.
Here, then, begins
the great Battle of Armageddon, the inner conflict between soul and sense in
man's conscious life. The lower forces, like wild horses, are strong and rampant.
The god himself is eager to ride them to sensational adventure. Even the Bible
asserts that he "rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race." He is in
his youth and the conquest of life in its red morning glow beguiles him on.
But the conflict
grows grim and tense as mind begins to impose a checkrein upon the native energies
of the animal. And the battle rages on, as again and again the balance between
the god's evolving mind and the con trolled forces of the body is upset and
must be re-established. Inharmony, internal strife fills the temple of the body
and racks the peace of both contenders. The strong powers of the sense life
refuse stubbornly to take the bit or obey the reins.
In this phase of
the subject we are browsing in the field into which modern psychology, more
particularly psychoanalysis, has moved in its search for the springs of human
motive. Here, as spirit in its growing discernment and deepening wisdom tightens
the reins on sensuality, the animal soul, finding its automatisms and customary
fling of gratifications summarily inhibited, sets up disturbances of violent
nature. The sense life operates under the law of the subconscious; its activities
are automatic, once the consciousness at that level is fixated in their grooves.
When opposed, balked or denied altogether, there is a damming up of forces that
create insufferable pressures and rend the unity of life. Here is the spring-source
of neuroses, psychopathic disturbances, frustrations and conflicts of every
sort. The higher soul, on its part, will not too long abide submissively the
body's obdurate ignorance of its needs for the proper conditions of growth.
So the mighty war of the polar opposites goes - shall we say?--merrily on. Now
the animal, the dragon, again the divine infant, gains the upper hand. The child
Hercules is pictured as grappling with the two great serpents that come up out
of the sea and seek to strangle him in his cradle. David, the youth, slays his
Goliath by implanting a stone, universal ancient arcane symbol of the divine
unit of mind, in the center of the giant's forehead. Evolution slays the old
first Adam, the sense nature, by developing the power of mind. For the ancients
pictured mind as the serpent-charmer, the magician that puts the dragon to sleep
and lets the imprisoned maiden of soul escape from his vile cave.
When medical science
speaks of a balanced mind, or an unbalanced one, it seems not to have in view
any definite force in relation to which it is in or out of balance. We are left
to assume that it is evenly and harmoniously balanced with itself, or with the
forces that flow through it. There need not be this indefiniteness. The duality
that is basic to all life tells us with what element or force it must be balanced.
It must equilibrate its working with the bodily energies of animal consciousness,
that is, with sense and emotional desire. Against these the soul does battle
with its weapons, mind and spiritual will. These higher faculties are not to
crush, but to control, order and utilize the two lower forces to promote the
interests of both sides. The balance is between soul and sense. The conflict
is not to terminate in the victory of the one and the destruction of the other.
It is going to eventuate in the wedding of the two when they have learned to
like each other well enough to harmonize their opposing forces in equilibrium
and stabilization in complementary fulfilment of the functions of both. All
polar opposition is to be consummated in the union of the two, out of which
is to be generated the birth of their progeny, the glorified Christ-in-man.
All new values are born, as the German philosopher Hegel so brilliantly has
formulated it, out of the tension of opposites. And long ago the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus asserted that "war is the father of all things," meaning
that all things have their birth in the pangs of stress and strain, the opposition
of attraction and repulsion.
OUR
SATURNALIA
It is perhaps permissible
to say that our Hallowe'en is the modern vestigial survival of the great ancient
Roman festival of the Saturnalia. The date of the modern celebration does not
match that of the Roman holiday, which came on December 17. But in general character
the two bear close resemblance to each other. In the Roman version there was
riot and revelry, masks, license, even to the union of the sexes, and buffoonery.
A quotation given by the Christian historian Epiphanius (regarded as a very
unreliable purveyor of the truth) from the Codex Marcianus, states that Christ
was born on the sixth of January, thirteen days after the winter solstice, which,
the passage affirms, the Greeks - whom he calls Idolaters - celebrate on the
twenty-fifth day of December with a festival which is called Saturnalia by the
Romans, Kronia by the Egyptians and Kikellia by the Alexandrians. The passage
dates the twenty-fifth as the day when the "division takes place which
is the solstice," and that the Christ, born then, was "incarnated
among men" on January sixth, thirteen days thereafter. The thirteen days
were ordained, it is stated, in the cosmic plan from the fact that "it
needs must have been that this should be a figure of our Lord Jesus Christ himself
and of his twelve disciples, who made up the number of the thirteen days of
the increase of light." It seems pertinent to say here that what "needs
must have been" is just the product of folly and a travesty of truth that
result whenever structures of symbolism and allegory are put into the hopper
of credulous literalism and are ground out into the pan of alleged history.
If standard reference
books date the Saturnalia on December 17, and churchly documents like this Codex
Marcianus place it on December 25, it seems evident that, since most festivals
of ancient provenance were holidays covering periods of days, three, seven or
ten predominantly, there is the greatest likelihood that the Saturnalia was
a seven-day festival matching very closely the structure of the Christian Passion
Week. That is to say, it was set to bring seven days (really eight) before a
date that would bring its climactic significance to a final head on a day that
was itself the date of axial movement. The date in the case was December 25,
and that was fixed to fall three days after the true day of the winter solstice,
December 22, by the insertion of the three symbolic days so often added to the
central date to typify the period of incubation of spirit in matter before new
birth. (Fuller elucidation of this methodology is to be found in the author's
major works.) In esoteric purview a seven-day festival graphed most aptly the
whole form-structure of creation "in seven days." And it was customary
to date the beginning of the festal seven days ahead of what would be the climactic
day that would appropriately crown the whole week with a glorious finale.
But deeper research
into the forms of ancient festivals reveals a singular and very meaningful datum
that appears to have been completely lost out of modern religious or scholarly
ken. This is the baffling fact that nearly all festivals running seven days
were carried on an extra, or eighth day, called by the ancient Jews an azaret,
or added day, a "morrow after the Sabbath," and by the Greeks an epibda.
What seems to have been the esoteric motif of this schematism was the fact that
a septave was conceived to carry human evolution over the terrain of one full
plane or level of conscious development, yet to round out the cycle it was considered
necessary to add one more day, on which, symbolically, the current of life that
had completed one sevenfold grade of being would be safely launched on the first
rung of the next higher grade or scale above it, ready to begin its seven-step
progress thereon. This may be seen on any piano, where one complete tonal expression
embraces the seven keys plus the eighth, which rounds out the octave. The fact
that we call each group of seven keys an octave hints at the recondite purport
behind the "added" eighth day. Several ancient festivals began on
a Sabbath and ended on the next Sabbath, thus rounding out a complete cycle,
in addition to placing the life impulse in position to begin its next cycle
above.
So then a seven-day
period that would be crowned in its final spiritual significance with an azaret,
or eighth day, and ordained to terminate on December 25 would have to be set
to begin on December 17. There otherwise seems to be no astrological schematism
that would make December 17 a day of direct significance per se, unless it be
that so many festal occasions in the old Jewish dispensation fell on the seventh
day of the tenth month, giving sheer numerical importance to the number seventeen.
It was a common
feature of the Roman Saturnalia that masters exchanged places with their slaves,
even appointing one of them to reign as king, in full actual authority, for
the duration of the holiday. Further study reveals that many celebrations of
New Year's Day in many lands were featured by the exchange of positions between
king and a subject, marked even by exchange of attire, the king donning the
slave's habiliments and the latter being royally outfitted and crowned. All
this, appropriate to the import of New Year's Day, when ends an old period and
begins a new, rings out an old regime to ring in a new, has its reflection still
in Hallowe'en in the exchange between the god in the human castle and the castle
fool. The god permits the fool to reign and revel for the night. And the man
dons and disports himself in the fool's attire.
But the matter of
the exchange of clothing is preserved in a slightly varied form in our celebration
through the arrangement of the wearing of suits of two different colors, divided
down the middle. Here is another item of basic reference. It typifies the very
relevant fact that man's nature is dually compounded and dually divided, soul
and body, god and animal. He is two elements, two grades of conscious being,
and the divided suit denotes this duality. That is, he is such when his soul
is in the period of incarnation, and it is not to be forgotten that Hallowe'en
is the festival of the incarnation. A most pertinent background of this aspect
of the celebration is found in the philosophy which Plato expounded in the Symposium,
where he elaborates the theory that the soul of man, as itself dual, splits
as it were into two halves, one embodied in a male, the other in a female body,
so that the affinity drives the two to seek and unite with each other in earthly
life. It proclaimed the philosophy of twin souls, or affinities.
But a sententious
statement, from which indeed the Greek philosopher almost certainly inherited
the idea, is found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, virtually proclaiming the
same theory, in the sentence: "The soul makes its journey through Amenta
in the two halves of sex." (Amenta is the Egyptian "underworld,"
which, however, is no dark limbo lying below our earth, but that good earth
itself, "under" as lying below the heaven world.) There is little
ground of authority in all ancient philosophy for crediting the thesis that
a soul is or can be itself split in two, with one part masculine and the other
feminine. What is back of Plato's romantic spiritual rhapsodizing and what is
the real sense of the Egyptian statement is doubtless the truth that original
primordial essence out of which all things emerge to manifest in the dual expression
of spirit and matter splits apart (as the first verse of Genesis affirms) into
the polarity, so that a unit of soul, which must itself be indivisible - as
attested by its character as "individual"--must naturally seek and
aim to unite itself with its congenial material organism, which it indeed "marries"
by entering its very womb and impregnating it for fecundity. Often the body
is spoken of as the "wife" of the soul. And every god in the Hindu
pantheon was united with his sakti, or material force through which alone he
could exercise his creative function. Always it seems necessary to revise the
aberrations of popular misunderstanding of basic elements in traditional inheritances
and restore lost primal meaning to empty forms.
The eventual union
of the two selves, or two natures in man was undoubtedly prominent in the mental
context of the significance of the Saturnalia. For the human action that would
directly dramatize this union was indeed all too prominently in evidence in
the ancient carnival in honor of the god Saturn. Indeed the celebration tended
always to run to sexual excess. Sheer and sublime cosmic principle, which became
a fundamentally true conception in the philosophical abstract, all too readily
became the plausible motivation to carry it out in physical actuality. Especially
when in incarnation the body was for long the king over the soul, the motive
to give free rein to the body's instincts ran strongly toward expressing itself
in sexual union. One statement concerning the Saturnalia tells us that "copulations
did much abound." The same tendency was found running to gross excess in
the early centuries in the celebration of the Christian festival of love, called
the Agape. This word is the Greek name for the love that is not of the flesh,
but in its fullest sense divine or spiritual love. Yet in the meetings of the
early Christian sectaries, held at one time mostly in the cemeteries at night,
the excesses ran to such proportions that the Church heads were constrained
finally to interdict the gatherings altogether.
Perhaps it is the
fainter reflection of this realistic dramatization of the love-and-union motive
that is still to be noted in the form and spirit of liberty and license which
does prevail strongly in the Hallowe'en carnival. The mask, affording anonymity,
provides an added incentive to personal approach and suggestive familiarity.
And such familiarity is less resented. The bars are definitely let down. Much
ancient tradition held that this was the night that Satan and his hosts were
free and on the prowl, so that the occasion is colored a bit darkly with the
suggestion that evil is in the air and has license to work its deviltry.
But how much of
the profounder theological esotericism was basic in determining the form which
the ceremonial took it is difficult to say. One finds without exception in diligent
research that all these ordinances of old time sprang from, and embodied in
symbolic or dramatic form the most recondite and abstruse conceptions which
the highest genius of mankind held as to the reality and the meaning of life
and the world. We can turn to St. Paul's Epistles and find that he unequivocally
set forth the thesis that the soul, resident in the spiritual spheres before
incarnation, was not "under the law," and was untainted by sin. But
when the "command" came home to it and brought it down to earth, there
it came under the law of the flesh and the seductions of carnality, and from
the side of the body "sin sprang to life" (Romans 7) and lured the
deity down to his spiritual "death." He directly states that the cosmic
command (improperly translated "commandment") that transferred him
from the dreamy bliss of heaven to the open life in body meant spiritual "death"
to him. This agrees, too, with Plotinus' statement that the young deities ran
amuck in wild libertinism when given control of the body, and had not yet learned
to ride and tame this spirited steed. How clearly this facet of a true theology
is mirrored in the hilarity of our Hallowe'en!
THE
THREE WITCHES
But Hallowe'en is
witches' night" also. It seems definitely that this eerie character of
the witch, who plays so prominent a role in the festival's "witchery,"
is one of those dramatis personae of arcane mystery representation that is to
be, so to say, read in reverse meaning. Outwardly of an unbeautiful aspect and
character, aged, semi-evil in influence, the character is probably not at all
on the negative or sinister side, but on the contrary personalized the divine
soul itself. It may be said that she is the god in disguise, the deity masquerading
in what the ancient sages denominated the "feminine phase" of the
soul's life. Matter was universally typified as feminine, as indeed it has to
be, seeing that it performs the mother function in all living creation. So that
when the soul, charactered as masculine always, descends and clothes itself
in material body, it is allegorized as having turned feminine. It has put on
its earth-mother's robes.
That the witch,
however, is intrinsically masculine is to a degree proved by the derivation
and etymology of the word. It is from the same stem of Anglo-Saxon background
which gives the German wissen, "to know," and our words wit, wizard,
wise and others. Here is a clue that can not be ignored or slighted. The personation
represents the knowledge constituent in man's being, and this can not be aligned
with the body. It must go with the soul. And Soul is masculine.
In Shakespeare's
Macbeth the poet, who was steeped in esoteric lore, gives us the eerie scene
of the three witches dancing around the fire burning under the cauldron of hellish
brew, a steaming, seething concoction of all things connected with dark night
and dark moon. These poetize the animal or natural ingredients which nature
has thrown together to consummate the human being. But around the fire dance
the three witches, and it seems indubitable that they represent the three component
elements of the knowing principle in man, which in Hindu terms are Atma-Buddhi-Manas,
but in English are spirit-soul-mind. The godhead was always given as trinitarian.
And man himself embodies a divine Trinity in exact replica of the cosmic Trinity.
And what a vivid representation of our human life this scene draws! In us the
dark sinister forces and elements of the lower bodily life are stewing in a
ferment, are seething in constant agitation, as sense and emotion embroil us
in the heat of their hot blood and passion. All the while the triform soul circles
round and round, in cycle after cycle, as incarnation brings it again and again
down to flit about the bodily fires of lust and sensuous life.
But we are told
that the witch comes riding through the skies on a broomstick. Symbolism probably
has a deep message for us in this device of semantic fancy, since it would seem
to mean that the knowing principle, which all Scripture says does "come
down out of heaven," was the gift of the divine fire of the gods to mortals
(the Promethean "fire") and was itself emblemed by the element of
air. All words for spirit, soul and mind in nearly all languages are the same
as for air, wind or breath, as anima, pneuma, spiritus,--the latter from Latin
spiro, "to breathe." Man spiritual is composed of the essences typed
by fire and air, the natural man by those typed by water and earth. And we can
well think that the knowledge principle could be depicted as coming down from
heaven to make a clean sweep of all the noxious impurities of the carnal nature.
Knowledge is ultimately the only broom that will sweep out the psychological
muck and dirt of the animal obsession. If this is not the basic meaning intended
in the witch-and-broom item, the recondite reference of the construction must
be "occult" indeed. That mind is the agency indicated as sweeping
out, cleansing, purging the filth and rubbish of the animal self is evidenced
universally in the literature of the ancient wisdom. One of the twelve labors
of Hercules was the job of cleansing the Augean stables.
THE
MOON
And when the witch
rides the skies the moon is shining down upon her. Ah! the moon! Her pale light
is the very aura of witchery. And what is her contribution to the semantic play?
It might be suggestive enough to answer that in giving vent to the carnal impulses
the soul goes "lunatic" (Latin: luna, "the moon") for this
one night. She is bewitched by the moonlight. For she is seduced by the witchcraft
of the body. And this body, says the tomes of ancient occult knowledge, was
generated from the astral sheath developed in a physical existence of beings
on the moon! Plutarch, one of the last of the ancient esotericists, tells us
that man derived his physical body from the earth, his mental body from Venus,
his spirit body from the sun, but his emotion body from the moon. And over it
as a matrix man's physical body was formed of earthy material. It is lunar influence
that affects the two lower bodies, avers the arcane astrological science; it
is solar influence that dominates the two upper bodies, the mental and the spiritual.
But when soul migrates from heaven to earth she comes first predominantly under
the lunar forces, which bestir in the body the fires of sense and emotion.
And now we have
another and again a reverse intimation of the symbolism of witchery. It is remarkable
how the significance of the chief symbols of ancient semantic art operate, so
to say, in both directions. They can be applied, with directions reversed, to
both the higher and the lower segments of our constitution. The symbol of intoxication,
for instance, can have apt reference to the divine mania (as Plato terms it)
of spiritual exaltation; likewise it can typify the befuddlement of spirit by
the strength of the lower appetencies. One can be intoxicated either by soul
or by sense. Each can intoxicate the other, but of course in a different plane.
So it is with witchery. The soul can work its charm on the body; at a different
level the body can enchant the spirit. And it does so in the very fashion depicted
by the Hallowe'en frenzy. Only it is not then a "fine frenzy flowing,"
but a gross and coarse one. Yet the soul succumbs to its seduction, for ultimate
evolutionary gains.
In ancient times
it was Hecate who was the queen of the Saturnalian revels. She is the most conspicuous
and dominant of the several goddess of the moon. The lunar deities, always feminine,
were represented as triform, or with three faces. Or the lunar power was apportioned
to three goddesses, Diana-Hecate-Lucina. In one mode of interpretation the triplicity
was based on the fact that each member of the spiritual triad of spirit-soul-mind
that was to be incorporated in humanity would have to be mated with his "wife,"
or sakti.
But Hecate's number
was six. Her very nature is from the Greek word 'ex (hex), meaning six. One
may not always be certain of some of the significations carried by numbers in
the ancient hermetic methodology, but it would appear that the basic connotation
of this number six has positive reference to the whole world of manifestation,
the lower world,--if it is really legitimate to put it in the inferior position
and rating in the scale. There are two and possibly more fundamental considerations
that were determinative in giving six its significance in the relations associated
with it. The most massive one is that six is the number of sides or faces to
a cube, which figure is ineluctably the type of all existential form in the
world of three dimensions. If the physical world be the lower world, in distinction
from the spiritual realm, then its representative number must be six. Any solid
object must be viewed as having the possibility of extension in six directions,
perpendicular to its six faces. Six would therefore stand as the number of the
world of manifested objective existence.
The second potent
factor is that this world is generated and completed in six stages of formative
activity. A seventh is to follow, but this is not an additional day of creative
work, for God finished the physical creation on the sixth "day." Therefore
it is that Philo asks who can fittingly celebrate the glory and majesty of the
number six. He calls it "the festal day of all the earth." And again
he rhapsodizes over it as "the virgin among numbers, the motherless nature,
most akin to the monad and the beginning." He says that after God had completed
the physical creation "according to the perfect nature of the number six,"
he hallowed the following day as "the birthday of the world."
Six is then the
number marking the completion of the material universe, which, in the truest
sense of the word, is not completed until its material formation is crowned
with its spiritual diadem of glory of consciousness, the work of the seventh
stage. Six gives to the world its physical objectification, which is but the
woody stem,--to use a figure - on which the lovely flower of divine being is
to burgeon forth. As St. Paul delineates it over the trope of birth, the natural
creation has to wait for its crown in the manifestation of the Sons of God.
Six completes the world physically; seven haloes it with the splendor of conscious
light.
Hence out of contrast
with seven, six takes on the hues of incompleteness, of insufficiency, defect,
lack, darkness and all aspects opposite to the glorification of consciousness.
It is the number of the world and of life as yet unillumined. It is the numerical
sign of the nether world of darkness, of spiritual benightedness, which is the
region in the universe denominated hell, hades, sheol (Hebrew) and Amenta (Egyptian).
It is the number of that underworld into which all the mythological heroes,
themselves personifications of divine soul, descend to wage their battle with
"the elements of the world," "the powers of darkness," the
imps of Satan and the gates of hell. Had theology preserved the knowledge that
the underworld of mythology and the hell of the creeds were just this our own
lovely world, the counsels of sane understanding would have prevailed in the
Western milieu instead of the maunderings of folly.
One might say that
six thus becomes the numerical symbol of the incarnation of deity in matter.
We have seen it equate inerrantly the material world, the feminine, night, and
we shall see its relation to water. Next we shall see its surprising connection
with sex. This is what we should expect, since it is only when the soul is buried
down in body (which is seven eighths water!) that the full polarity of sex is
manifest. "In heaven there is neither marriage nor given in marriage."
The soul there is described as sexless, more or less androgynous, epicene. It
is only when incarnation has completely segregated the opposite ends of the
polarity in separate physical embodiments that the magic potency of the sex
attraction is generated. So six brings the divine unit down into the region
of sex. The surprise that awaits us is that the word "sex" is virtually
the word "six." Some one has wittily said that it has struck sex o'clock
in the world. (A magazine rack would seem to indicate it.) He spoke doubtless
more aptly than he suspected. How insistently does St. Paul exhort us to be
on guard against what seems in his estimation to be the most injurious, most
flagrant of sins against the spirit -- concupiscence! "Abstain from fleshly
lusts which war against the soul," he admonishes us. In theology the onus
of the "original sin" so disastrously perpetrated by our "first
parents" is proclaimed to have been their first indulgence in sexual relations.
By sex man lost his Paradise, is the obsession of pious spiritual religionism.
By spirit he must regain it, is the general theological presupposition. The
first Adam was carnal, of the earth, earthy, and of the flesh, fleshy. The Christ,
second Adam, is of the spirit, spiritual.
THE
WITCHING HOUR
With hex being the
Greek word for "six," and six being virtually synonymous with sex,
the witch being the noetic or mind principle masquerading in its "feminine
phase," one may be prepared to learn without too great astonishment that
the German word for "witch" is Hex, and for "witchcraft"
Hexerei. It does not inordinately stretch the fitness of sense if one were to
say that when the soul is "sixed" it is "sexed" and "hexed,"
i.e., bewitched, using a word in colloquial vogue. For the Greek "six"
is the German "witch," Hex. It is so often in the lost roots of language
that the true links of ideas that cryptically connect elements in the meaningful
constructions of ancient semantic art are to be found. Even our dictionaries
in many instances fail to trace words to their real sources. In this case they
do not tell us that the root of hex (and probably of sex, as "h" and
"s" interchange thousands of times) is the ancient hieroglyphic Egyptian
word for "magician," hekau.
But there is much
more that concerns us with Hecate, the moon goddess whose name is "six."
And general mythicism itself has hardly in any lucid manner told us of the interrelated
connotations of the moon and its pale witching light, much less why specifically
the moon is so prominent a hieroglyph of Hallowe'en. And here shines forth from
the dark night of human unintelligence the moon ray of hidden wisdom indeed,
for those who will not obdurately persist in scorning the conceptual genius
of ancient sages. Instruction, those wise ones knew, gleamed forth for the brain
of man from every object and phenomenon in nature. So it was from nature, which
can not utter an untrue syllable, that the perspicacious minds of the theurgists
of old time drew their logoi, their noetic principles of truth. And how oracularly
did the wan light of the moon bespeak to them the sermon of that other and brighter
light, now reduced to but a faint dim glow by its burial under the cover of
the body, which our divine souls from a world of sun-radiance above would bring
into our lives!
As one studies the
positions and aspects of sun and moon over the period of a lunar revolution
of twenty-eight days, it becomes almost a conviction that God structuralized
the scenic effects to poetize in beautiful form the analogous relation of the
sunlight of our inner spiritual divinity to our lower and purely human "moonlight"
grade of intelligence. Genesis says that God fixed two lights in the firmament
to illumine the earth, the great light to rule by day, the lesser light by night.
When one grasps the chief figure under which ancient sapiency depicted the soul's
time of incarnation, not as its daytime, but its night-time -- it being then
submerged in the darkness of a body of earth and water, poetized as a dungeon,
cave or dark underworld -- one will for the first time sense the beauty of the
poetic, but entirely real, picturization of moonlight as the symbol of the soul's
mighty light of the sun when that light is dimmed and obscured by its having
to shine out in our life through the medium or the mask of our physical organism.
Moonlight is the sun's own light, but relayed to us only by reflection from
the body of the moon. The analogy of this with our divine light is perfect,
when applied to our situation. The soul is itself a portion, a fragment, a ray
of the light of our higher divine sun of intellect radiating out from cosmic
Mind itself. But though it is that very light that lighteth every man that cometh
into the world, it can not shine on us directly. In a remarkable little allegorical
graph found in the Book of Exodus God informs us that as his glory comes close
to us he will place his hand over our eyes, so that we will not be blinded by
its overpowering strength, and when he shall have passed, we will be able to
gaze safely upon his hinder part. If the frontal aspect of God is blazing glory
of spirit, then the hinder side is matter. And in all arcane science the sun
symbolized spirit and the moon matter. So it is matter that shields our feeble
vision from the ineffable and unbearable splendor of spiritual light. Are we
surprised, then, to find that our Scriptures tell us that "the Lord God
is a sun and a shield"? And again how marvellously nature follows the poetism
here! For we can not gaze into the light of the sun by day, but may safely look
into the face of the moon at night!
Clearly natural
typism here teaches us that in the "night-time" of our incarnation
the light of the spirit can not impact upon us directly, but reaches us only
through the medium of brain and mind, only as reflected from the plane surface
of human consciousness. The sun's light comes to us by night reflected from
the moon; the soul's greater light likewise comes to us here in body reflected
from or transmitted through the more opaque texture of the physical organism,
which, as has been noted, derives its nature from an evolution on the moon.
All religion asseverates that in the heaven world souls bask in the great undimmed
light of God's effulgence. Equally they assent to the assumption that in the
flesh they are cut off from direct incidence or vision of the celestial light.
"We live in darkness like the dead," says Isaiah. "Now we see
through a glass darkly," cries St. Paul. But it is still true that a glass,
or any medium not too opaque, will transmit or reflect a portion at least of
a light that falls upon it. This glass, this mirror is the mind, the power of
human intelligence which man can burnish until it conveys a clearer and sharper
image of the true divine radiance of divine thought that falls upon it from
the Sun of Truth above. In its reduced form it is the moonlight reflection of
our diviner genius symboled by the sun.
And this is the
moonlight of Hecate, light reflected from God himself. It is our heavenly radiance
of soul power, but now dimmed by its medium of transmission through the flesh.
Though we are removed from God when imprisoned in body, his illumination still
reaches us, diminished in measure and brilliance by reflection from the moon
element in our nature.
It may not be inappropriate
to cite here a sentence from an unpublished work of the author anent the Hecate
influence:
"This light
that stands in close relation to man's life in the darkness of incarnation is
Hecate; the moon-spirit, the light-by-night, the half-obscured, half-dimmed,
half- deceiving uncertain light of man's purely human intelligence; that reflected
light of higher divine radiance that is bedimmed and subdued as it tries to
shine in the murky mists of human sense and emotion that arise, like the mist
that arose out of the ground in Genesis, from the lower marshes of the body's
instincts, to water the whole face of the adamah" (ground).
It can not fail
to strike one as a thing most impressive that, as it is discerned in this analogy,
the light of man's human intelligence is indeed and in verity the reflection
of God's own omniscient Mind-light. But our vision of it is not clear. Under
the obscuration of our ignorance and mental darkness it is reduced to the half
light of moonlight.
THE
SPELL OF HECATE
Throughout all religious
mythology there rings that continuous note of man's haunting dread of the Hecate
influence, his fear of the dark night, his shuddering affright at the appearance
of ghosts, that for all their insubstantiality are the more terrifying because
of their shadowy, indistinct and unknown character; and all the spectral and
eerie awesomeness of the night. In the semi-darkness of his mind sober reason
is undermined by uncertainty and nameless terror strikes the soul. Darkness
robs us of our keen faculties by which we guard our safety. And these vague
apprehensions are the exact analogue of the very real loss of vision and consequent
bewilderment and trepidation which overwhelm our balance when we are thrust
down into the bristling shades of the underworld. For down here the clear outlines
and forms of truth are blotted out or blurred and grotesquely distorted amid
the surging mists of sensuality and passion.
A frequent item
introduced in the run of witchcraft and sorcery in world tradition was the rite
of Hecate worship which was enacted at midnight of a full moon night at a country
cross-roads, or at three cross-roads. Often it was the custom to set up at the
middle point of the crossing roads an effigy of the enemy or the object of a
projected witch-spell. Here enters the symbol of the cross, to emblemize that
in this "nightlife" of the soul, the two elements of spirit and matter
cross each other. And the effigy would well depict the human, who is in a way
of considering it, just the outer unreal straw-man, or effigy, of the divine
man within.
Hecate is closely
connected with Hermes as conductor of the dead through the darkness of the underworld.
She is accompanied
by the souls of the dead, who are not ghosts, but souls deadened, as Virgil
puts it, by mortal bodies and members subject to death. She held the keys of
death and hell and the pit of the abyss. In this office she was called Kleidophorus,
Bearer of the Key, and a Festival of the Key was dedicated to her, in which
she was prayerfully entreated to open the gates of the pit to let the "dead"--the
living on earth in "death" of soul--return to life above.
But she was again
the triform deity; goddess of the moon in heaven; goddess of souls in the dark
underworld of death and hell; and goddess of the sea. This accounts for her
being pictured as a goddess with three faces. She aided Zeus in his battle with
the giants, which was won on the sixth day. Beside the three heads, she is given
six arms and feet. Her daughter Scylla by Apollo (union of sun and moon!) had
six heads. Hecate's day, the sixth, was considered unfavourable for plants,
but good for the birth of males, not of girls. She was the patroness of those
who go to sea and of those who fish. Fish were offered in her worship on Friday,
the sixth day. Personifications of her in other goddesses, such particularly
as Atergatis and Semiramis, were actually dubbed "Fish-Mothers." She
is goddess of the sea by virtue of the fact that as she rules over the lower
or moon element in human life, she must have power over the body, which is itself-seven-eighths
water.
A scholiast in Euripides
says that the moon of three days is called Selene; of six days Artemis (Diana);
of fifteen days Hecate. This determines Hecate as the goddess of the full moon,
as this came on the fifteenth lunar day. However, her function embraced as well
the features that were adumbrated by the three dark days of the moon. The fact
of her union with the great solar deity Apollo unmistakably identifies her as
the moon at the full, for then sun and moon are "married" in glory,
although they are considered as being married again at the dark day of the lunar
cycle, and their conjunction then is taken as their copulation.
Again the witchery
exercised by the moonlight upon lovers is a demonstration of nature's magical
influence and stands as a vindication and redemption of much profound mythical
romanticism from imputed childishness of primitive minds. It might be analyzed
as the mystic sense in two souls of their awareness of their instinctive need
and longing for union of the two forces of their polarity. The paleness of the
moonlight almost audibly speaks to them of their groping alone in the semi-darkness
of mortal life and renders them sensible of their yearning to find the solace
and joy of union. It hints in a deep psychological way at the feeling that love
is the light that can illumine their darkness.
Whether it was a
custom derived from the ancient past or an extraneous and gratuitous feature
introduced adventitiously later, the illuminated "pumpkin face" can
be seen to have pertinent symbolic meaning. It is a vegetable, standing for
the natural element in man, and the cut-in features of eyes, nose and mouth
make it representative of human life. It therefore graphs the life of humanity
at its human level, a living natural organism with a light of intelligence glowing
in side his head. It is quite closely matched by the allegory connected with
Gideon in his war with the Midianites in the Book of Judges. Choosing three
hundred volunteers, he bade them mould clay pitchers, placing a candle inside
each. When the battle was joined in the darkness these men were to dash down
their pitchers to the ground as the enemy drew near. At the sight of so much
light suddenly released by the shattering of the pitchers, the host of the Midianites
turned and fled in terror. So the pumpkin head can betoken for our thought the
presence of a great light that shines out through our dark features even in
this "dark night of the world."
The origin likewise
of the trick of "bobbing apples" in a tub of water is obscure, yet
can yield meaning when its symbolic analogues are scanned. The apple has stood
in symbolism as the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge in the garden of
the world. It is the fruit of the seed of that divine essence that is the soul
of humanity. And always water typifies life in the body, which is mostly composed
of that element. The apple floating in water is at once the emblem of the soul
flung into the water of incarnate life and thus undergoing a "baptism,"
but not sinking down to be overwhelmed in its depths. The Scriptures carry out
this poetism in the "miracle" of Jesus walking on the water and not
sinking. Man is not able to redeem his apple-soul out of its submerged condition
with his physical strength, his hands. For it is not physical power that is
to save the soul from sinking down into elemental life; it is mind alone that
can save it out of the "water" of sense. So the prescribed task is
to lift it with the head, that is, with the mouth that can speak the words of
wisdom and love that can save it.
There would not
seem to be any profoundly hidden meaning to the noisy character of the celebration.
Noise naturally, or at least inevitably goes with revelry. The discussion has
so far not brought in one of the names prominently given to the Saturnalia in
the early days in some nations. It was called the Hilaria. It was definitely
the Feast of Hilarity.
THE
UNHOLY RIFT
This open character
of spontaneous mischief and rollicking license, as the chief motif of the religious
festival, can inspire some sombre reflections upon the glaring contrast it presents
with the tone of our modern religion. While not all religious worship today
can be said to be of the ultra-serious or solemn type, nevertheless hardly anywhere
now could a ritual so unreservedly featuring sensual liberty and unbridling
the animal impulses even only symbolically, be ceremonialized in our day. So
far has the pendulum of reaction swung in the other direction that most religious
sentiment at present openly condemns and severely rebukes anything tending to
give free play to the purely human side of our natures. In dour mood and in
solemn mien religion today exhorts its devotees to beware the snares of the
wily tempter who is ever watchful to seduce us away from holiness through the
enticements of worldly pleasure. In spite of this heavy blanket of pietism we
of course still do celebrate the Hallowe'en, and the Mardi Gras gives a great
southern city its annual fling of jollity in the profane spirit. But these occasions
are not considered to be even remotely religious ceremonials. They are held
to be purely secular fun and entertainment, a social feature. And orthodox religious
sentimentality frowns on them.
When religion lost
touch with its ancient esoteric bases, which permitted worship to include reference
to the physical side of man's duality, and thus made place, by virtue of its
integrated relation to spirit, for the function of the body, it was inevitably
led to stamp the odium of evil upon all the purely physical part of our life.
With the accentuation of value placed exclusively upon the spiritual, all bodily
expression, particularly in the hedonistic direction, had to be banned as worldly,
sensual, devilish. One must keep oneself unspotted from the world. This trend
reached the limit of its extreme development when it decreed that not only pleasures
accruing from sense expression, but all pleasure was religiously sinful per
se. Piety had so far swept the field that severity and austerity were the supreme
marks of true religion. In spite of the Bible's own statement that "a merry
heart doeth good like a medicine," religion had ousted gaiety from any
legitimate place in the life of devotion. Such frivolities as dancing, card
playing and the theater were ostracized from the sancta of religion.
All this becomes
the more strange in view of the historical fact that religious worship, ceremonialism
and ritual were quite certainly a development from the ancient Mystery theatricals
of the pre-Christian day; that chanting and hymn-singing grew out of the choral
dances or tribal incantations; and that the regular pack of playing cards is
a modern version of an original pictorially symbolic system of spiritual representations
of the principles of soul-body relationship or of elements of consciousness,
such as the well-known collection of the Tarot cards of the Bohemians. Even
modern games, such predominantly as chess and cribbage, were structuralized
in the pattern of number values found to subsist in the divine creation of the
world.
It is the likely
truth that the segregation by religion of secular and profane interests and
affairs from the area of the divine, sacred and holy has been close to the most
disastrous error in human cultural procedure. It is a grave question whether,
in first reading its own definition into the terms "sacred" and "holy,"
and making that definition synonymous with its own determination of values,
organic religion has not perpetrated an aberration of the most calamitous character.
When the religious mind detached spiritual culture and science from the interests
of the physical and denounced the latter as "of the devil," it committed
the uncritically credulous masses of mankind to a grievous and perilous schizophrenia.
And this severance, this illegitimate divorce, this setting in hostility to
each other the two characters in human life that are basically -- though in
polarity -- one, and in fact are destined to "marry" to generate the
Christ-in-man, John Dewey has pronounced the most disastrous of all enmities.
It has sundered the psychological unity of the human mind; it has cleft the
integrity of consciousness; it has divided the house of the human spirit against
itself. And with what fatal results in foul unbrotherliness, in the clashing
of narrow bigotries, in the reign of fanatical superstition, in the fiendishness
of persecution, war and carnage, all in the name of the Holy Spirit, one may
with sickened heart read in the annals of Western history.
Truly enough, spirit
and flesh are set in polar "opposition" to each other. But all theology
went tragically awry when in a degenerate age of philosophical decay, it came
to the shallow conclusion that, because the two were in positive-negative counterbalance
with each other, they were therefore ranged as opponents in the field of values,
enemies in the battle of good and evil. This disposition of forces in the conflict
gave ground for the supposition that the good must triumph by destroying the
evil antagonist. Here was the baneful miscarriage of the mental faculty in the
religious domain. Sense and sanity should never have lost the balance of knowledge
that the opposition, the "enmity" if you will, was that of male and
female, husband and wife, not that of man and his enemy. It was to be grasped
as the opposition of function in a cosmic device for the beneficence of life;
not the opposition of positive good and its evil thwarting.
The tradition that
demons of all grades were let loose to work havoc on the night of Hallowe'en
simply bespeaks the free activity of the forces of the negative pole in the
duality. The stress and strain that is to be consummated in marriage could not
be waged efficaciously if one party was free and the hands of the other tied.
"Satan" must be allowed to have his go at God's most righteous servant
Job. The bodily impulses, instincts and propensities, which religion has eternally
insisted must be mercilessly crushed down, must have their development since
they are to be controlled and utilized in the service of the spirit in the end.
But in the early stages of the incarnational embroilment they long run rampant
over the undeveloped reason and intelligence and their untamed fling in free
riot gave ancient sagacity the basis of the night of Saturnalia. It is the free
and irresponsible stage of the spirit's youth as he moves forward to the task
of becoming co-creator with his heavenly Father. He is intoxicated with the
glorious joie de vivre and the esprit d' aventure. According to the arcane teachings
of the past he had rebelled against the "inane passivity" and "morbid
inactivity" in the purely ideal life in the heaven world, and longed for
the chance to exercise his latent forces and faculties in self-conscious creative
activity in concrete existence. God is described as exercising his creative
powers for the sake of Lila, the pleasure, the delight, the play, sport and
recreation of gods as of men. Made in his image and likeness, his Sons likewise,
and the more eagerly for their youthfulness, plunge into the work of physical
creation with eager zest. As Plotinus said, they reveled in free will, ran wild,
overspent their forces, plunged into excess in wrong directions. The light that
Hecate furnished them was pale and wan, too feeble to enable them to see clearly
the right paths. But in the morning would come Apollo's radiant sun in full
intellectual power of knowledge and wisdom, and the night of sinister and eerie
ghostliness would turn into the morn of the glorification of All Souls. |