Erewhon Revisited | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected] from the 1916 A.
C. Fifield edition.

Erewhon Revisited
by Samuel Butler

Erewhon Revisited Twenty Years Later Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country
and by his Son.

I forget when, but not very long after I had published "Erewhon" in 1872, it occurred to
me to ask myself what course events in Erewhon would probably take after Mr. Higgs, as
I suppose I may now call him, had made his escape in the balloon with Arowhena. Given
a people in the conditions supposed to exist in Erewhon, and given the apparently
miraculous ascent of a remarkable stranger into the heavens with an earthly bride--what
would be the effect on the people generally?
There was no use in trying to solve this problem before, say, twenty years should have
given time for Erewhonian developments to assume something like permanent shape, and
in 1892 I was too busy with books now published to be able to attend to Erewhon. It was
not till the early winter of 1900, i.e. as nearly as may be thirty years after the date of
Higgs's escape, that I found time to deal with the question above stated, and to answer it,
according to my lights, in the book which I now lay before the public.
I have concluded, I believe rightly, that the events described in

Chapter XXIV.
of "Erewhon" would give rise to such a cataclysmic change in the old Erewhonian
opinions as would result in the development of a new religion. Now the development of
all new religions follows much the same general course. In all cases the times are more or
less out of joint--older faiths are losing their hold upon the masses. At such times, let a
personality appear, strong in itself, and made to seem still stronger by association with
some supposed transcendent miracle, and it will be easy to raise a Lo here! that will
attract many followers. If there be a single great, and apparently well-authenticated,
miracle, others will accrete round it; then, in all religions that have so originated, there
will follow temples, priests, rites, sincere believers, and unscrupulous exploiters of public
credulity. To chronicle the events that followed Higgs's balloon ascent without shewing
that they were much as they have been under like conditions in other places, would be to
hold the mirror up to something very wide of nature.
Analogy, however, between courses of events is one thing--historic parallelisms abound;
analogy between the main actors in events is a very different one, and one, moreover, of
which few examples can be found. The development of the new ideas in Erewhon is a
familiar one, but there is no more likeness between Higgs and the founder