Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning | Page 5

religion with man's own body and the tremendous force of sex residing
in it--emblem of undying life and all fertility and power. It is clear
also--and all investigation confirms it--that the second-mentioned phase
of religion arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned--that is,
that men naturally thought about the very practical questions of food
and vegetation, and the magical or other methods of encouraging the
same, before they worried themselves about the heavenly bodies and
the laws of THEIR movements, or about the sinister or favorable
influences the stars might exert. And again it is extremely probable that
the third-mentioned aspect--that which connected religion with the
procreative desires and phenomena of human physiology--really came
FIRST. These desires and physiological phenomena must have loomed
large on the primitive mind long before the changes of the seasons or of
the sky had been at all definitely observed or considered. Thus we find
it probable that, in order to understand the sequence of the actual and
historical phases of religious worship, we must approximately reverse
the order above-given in which they have been STUDIED, and
conclude that in general the Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic
and the propitiation of earth-divinities and spirits came second, and
only last came the belief in definite God-figures residing in heaven.

At the base of the whole process by which divinities and demons were
created, and rites for their propitiation and placation established, lay
Fear--fear stimulating the imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in
orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness.
Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the
human mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its
nature was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being
no figure or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were
correspondingly no figures or images of beings who might threaten or
destroy that self. So it was that the imaginative power of fear began
with Self-consciousness, and from that imaginative power was unrolled
the whole panorama of the gods and rites and creeds of Religion down
the centuries.
The immense force and domination of Fear in the first self-conscious
stages of the human mind is a thing which can hardly be exaggerated,
and which is even difficult for some of us moderns to realize. But
naturally as soon as Man began to think about himself--a frail phantom
and waif in the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature and mode
of operation he was entirely ignorant--he was BESET with terrors;
dangers loomed upon him on all sides. Even to-day it is noticed by
doctors that one of the chief obstacles to the cure of illness among
some black or native races is sheer superstitious terror; and
Thanatomania is the recognized word for a state of mind ("obsession of
death") which will often cause a savage to perish from a mere scratch
hardly to be called a wound. The natural defence against this state of
mind was the creation of an enormous number of taboos--such as we
find among all races and on every conceivable subject--and these
taboos constituted practically a great body of warnings which regulated
the lives and thoughts of the community, and ultimately, after they had
been weeded out and to some degree simplified, hardened down into
very stringent Customs and Laws. Such taboos naturally in the
beginning tended to include the avoidance not only of acts which might
reasonably be considered dangerous, like touching a corpse, but also
things much more remote and fanciful in their relation to danger, like
merely looking at a mother- in-law, or passing a lightning-struck tree;
and (what is especially to be noticed) they tended to include acts which

offered any special PLEASURE or temptation--like sex or marriage or
the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos surrounded these things too, and the
psychological connection is easy to divine: but I shall deal with this
general subject later.
It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations made life
anything but easy to early peoples; but, preposterous and unreasonable
as some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of
compelling the growth of self-control. Fear does not seem a very
worthy motive, but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely
animal passions, and introduced order and restraint among them.
Simultaneously it became itself, through the gradual increase of
knowledge and observation, transmuted and etherealized into
something more like wonder and awe and (when the gods rose above
the horizon) into reverence. Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the
early beginnings (in the Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there
has been a gradual development--from crass superstition, senseless and
accidental,