Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningCarpenter, Edward
Religion
Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning
Carpenter, Edward
Christianity and other religions; Mythology; Paganism; Religion
Let us examine into this a little more closely. A lark soaring in the
eye of the sun, and singing rapt between its "heaven and home" realizes
no doubt in actual fact all that those two words mean to us; yet
its realization is quite subconscious. It does not define its own
experience: it FEELS but it does not THINK. In order to come to the
stage of THINKING it would perhaps be necessary that the lark should
be exiled from the earth and the sky, and confined in a cage. Early Man
FELT the great truths and realities of Life--often I believe more purely
than we do--but he could not give form to his experience. THAT stage
came when he began to lose touch with these realities; and it showed
itself in rites and ceremonials. The inbreak of self-consciousness
brought OUT the facts of his inner life into ritualistic and afterwards
into intellectual forms.
Let me give examples. For a long time the Tribe is all in all; the
individual is completely subject to the 'Spirit of the Hive'; he
does not even THINK of contravening it. Then the day comes when
self-interest, as apart from the Tribe, becomes sufficiently strong to
drive him against some tribal custom. He breaks the tabu; he eats the
forbidden apple; he sins against the tribe, and is cast out. Suddenly he
finds himself an exile, lonely, condemned and deserted. A horrible sense
of distress seizes him--something of which he had no experience before.
He tries to think about it all, to understand the situation, but
is dazed and cannot arrive at any conclusion. His one NECESSITY is
Reconciliation, Atonement. He finds he cannot LIVE outside of and
alienated from his tribe. He makes a Sacrifice, an offering to his
fellows, as a seal of sincerity--an offering of his own bodily suffering
or precious blood, or the blood of some food-animal, or some valuable
gift or other--if only he may be allowed to return. The offering is
accepted. The ritual is performed; and he is received back. I have
already spoken of this perfectly natural evolution of the twin-ideas
of Sin and Sacrifice, so I need not enlarge upon the subject. But two
things we may note here: (1) that the ritual, being so concrete (and
often severe), graves itself on the minds of those concerned, and
expresses the feelings of the tribe, with an intensity and sharpness of
outline which no words could rival, and (2) that such rituals may have,
and probably did, come into use even while language itself was in an
infantile condition and incapable of dealing with the psychological
situation except by symbols. They, the rituals, were the first effort of
the primitive mind to get beyond, subconscious feeling and emerge into a
world of forms and definite thought.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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