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1 - The Gods of Sky and Field
The nature of God is conditioned by the physical surroundings in which the mind of Man first encounters Him. That this must be so is evident from the fact that, as the Creator of what is seen, God's powers may be deduced only from what is visible to the man seeking communion with the Godhead. And, in a like manner, the hypothetical omnipotence of an omnipotent God is imagined through the imperative wants of the worshipper. It is understandable that the paradise of the desert-dwelling Bedouin is eternally cool and melodious with the chuckle of ever-flowing fountains ....
In the beginning, as primitive Man realised, God had created that Man in His own image and likeness, as Man, in his idle moments, fashioned images of himself and his fellows out of lumps of clay. Not for nothing is the symbolism of Man's creation from earth or clay so widespread. Early Man knew well that, for him, as for all other created things, the inevitable pattern of life was 'earth to earth; ashes to ashes; dust to dust'. But, if Man, in his first 'religious' imaginings, believed himself to be created of God, and that, too, in God's image and likeness, how did early Man conceive the God who had made him? In the answer to that question - and it may be answered - we can state positively what were Man's first religious beliefs.
Man's - that is Early Man's - knowledge of God, the Gods, the World-Behind-This, was acquired, over what must have been a seemingly immeasurable period of time, empirically and pragmatically. But, at some point in his long ponderings, still illiterate Man must have 'listed' the obvious and main characteristics of God-Nature-the-Unseen as follows:
1. I could not make trees, animals, rocks, but He can.
2. I could not make it light, with the bright thing shining overhead; nor could I take the brightness away, so that it is hard to see. But He can.
So comes, to the primitive human mind, the two impressive characteristics of God/Nature: His power to make beyond any human power to make; and - with this power - a power to regulate, to control, what He has made.
3. This world in which I live seems to have a two-way, backwards-and-forwards pattern. It's bright, with that shining thing up above; and then it's not bright. And then it's bright again, and then it's not-bright again. And so on. And then, for a longer time (many sleeps) it's warm, and then it's cold. And then it's warm again, and then it's cold again. And so on.
4. When I go out to hunt, sometimes I contrive to trap or run down the quarry. I bring back, for my woman and my young, good meat. Then, again, there are days when I see many deer - even rabbit - and, no matter what I do, I can't catch a single thing. Does God/Nature let me catch something on my 'lucky' days? And, if so, does he prevent my catching something on my 'unlucky' days?
So comes one of the most persistent beliefs about the Godhead: Its capriciousness. And, from that disturbing thought comes the next - and it is a reassuring - thought: Is there anything that I may do to cajole this capricious Being to shew me favour? At this point begin, not merely prayer, but every religious ritual which has been devised and practised since Man's first spiritual awakening.
Early Man's conception of God/Nature being anthropomorphic - as indeed, it is still the conception of the average Modern Man - Man sought to influence God/Nature by behaving to his God as Man would have wished that others should behave to him. He made presents to God, to save Him from the boredom of hunting; to save Him, even more importantly, from the disappointment of a non-productive hunt. Man began to make sacrifices towards his God ...
How many centuries, how many millennia, passed before Man, still uneasily aware of the numinous nature of that world through which he strode; hunted and loved, ate and slept; began to observe and record the laws by which God/Nature regulated Man and his surroundings, we shall never know.
But, at some point in Man's development, he became aware, in addition to that awareness of himself which had marked his passage from the state of animal to the state of Man, of certain laws. He connected the yearly couplings of animals with the off-springing of their young; and, by analogy, he saw - or deduced - that his own pleasure-seeking with his woman (pleasure-seeking in unopposed submission to a blind impulse) made up a series of acts which, resembling those of the animals that he observed, produced, apparently, a similar result. His woman became big with young, as did the animals.
There must, he reasoned, be a connection between his - and the animal's — coupling, and the eventual birth of young: his own and the animals'.
From the realisation that, first, coupling preceded the birth of young, and, second, that coupling produced the young, Man's reasoning went further. His observation of the temporary changes which occurred in animals - and in himself -immediately before coupling began, called his attention to the genital organs, both of himself and observed animals.
To the non-scientific mind, there is something quite inexplicable - and so mysterious; 'magical' — about the simple mechanism of the male organ's tumescence. Why, limp and flaccid in its non-tumescent state, does it take on the characteristics of those horns which spring from the heads of animals? (Though - even more mysterious - the horn of deer and goat and aurochs was a permanent thing, whilst the analogical condition of Man's mentulum was merely a temporary affair.)
What early Man thought of this compulsive organ, which gave him pleasure when its rigidity forced him to seek the companionship of a female of his kind, we may guess from the fact that the Latin word that we have adopted, penis, means simply 'a tail'. Early Man must have regarded this appendage as the homologue of an animal's tail, save that, in himself, the 'tail' depended from the front, rather than from the back. But what caused this 'tail' so mysteriously to change its function, as its shape and general character changed?
For most of the time, this organ was dedicated to drawing off what we call "waste products', but which were far from that to pre-chemical Man. (1) But with tumescence, not only could the organ no longer be used to make water; its discharge had changed character entirely; its golden colour bleached out to a milky white, and its clear liquidity turned into an opaque viscidity. (Later, much later, when Man had come to recognise, in this milky substance, the Seed of Life, he would be impelled to reverence the mistletoe, in the lactic secretion of whose white berries he would see the concentrated essence of the human seed. That the mistletoe was most commonly encountered on the oak-tree, whose acorns bore so striking a resemblance to the male member - but again in a 'concentrated' likeness - made the oak-tree equally sacred, so much so that the Ancient Gauls, in adopting Latin, rejected the Latin word for 'oak', quercus, and for that Latin word substituted their own cassanus, 'sacred oak', from which descends modern French chêne.)
Even after the simple, effective mechanism of tumescence has been explained - a simple effective no-return valve to maintain the expansive force of the pressurised blood, together with adequate erector muscles - should the primitive sense of wonder be lessened by this 'revelation'? Ought one not still to marvel: 'How wonderful! And Who designed and 'programmed' this simple, effective mechanism?'
Yet to say that, because of the explanations and illustrations in our text-books of biology and physiology, we 'understand' the mechanism of human generation, is to call that understanding very much into question. If we - or is it 'we'? — knew as much as 'we' claim, how did the Thalidomide babies come amongst us? We may know more than did primitive Man in some respects - though there is no doubt that, in others, he knew more than we - but the implication of this statement is usually that we know everything - and that contention cannot possibly be supported.
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[1] Pre-chemical Man is the apposite term here. It means Man before the advent of modem chemical processes. Urine, in more primitive communities, has many useful purposes besides the highly important function of manuring. A powerful acid, urine plays an essential preliminary role in the curing of skins and furs, and in fulling cloth -that is, in removing the lanoline from raw wool. Its nitrogenous content contributed greatly to supplying an essential ingredient -saltpetre - of gunpowder. It has remarkable antiseptic properties, and is an efficient contraceptive. It has many other valuable qualities, most of them known to, and utilised by, Pre-chemical Man.
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In considering this mysterious change which came upon his body, primitive Man found himself once again pondering that quality of the capricious that he could not fail to have noticed as one of the fundamental characteristics of the Divine Power. What brought about this change? Why were its visitations not constant? It was true that - generally - the rigidifying of the generative organ occurred when the adult male was in the presence of a desirable female. But not always. Sometimes the change affected children - even very young children - who had yet come to no experience of sexual desire. And the change passed by men of fuller age, who still knew the sting of sexual appetite. The change, primitive Man reflected, was as capricious as the wind ...
Seeking an explanation, primitive Man found one satisfactory to him in the hypothesis of a Spirit of Life, which entered into Man in order to facilitate Man's reproducing his own kind. Indeed, this visitation was essential, since only when the male member was in a certain - 'right' - condition could the transmission of the seed from male to female be effected.
The tumescence, then, was an essential condition brought about by the presence of a Spirit of Life - invisible, yet potent - whose physical force might be not unjustly compared with the often terrifying pressure exerted by the odourless, tasteless, colourless, totally invisible wind. The worship of the phallus, as the 'shine' and 'tabernacle' of the errant Spirit of Life, had begun - the concomitant worship of the Female Principle, though inevitable, was to come later. 'Male and Female created them the Gods [Elohim]' belongs to a much later stage in dogmatic cosmogony.
Natural objects — especially stones - which seemed to resemble in shape the tumescent mentula were, from the earliest times, objects of reverence, as, indeed, they still are in many parts of the world, not excluding our own computer-enslaved land. A moment's reflection will persuade the reader that it was not the phallic shape which first made such objects holy, (2) as a conviction of the observer's part that the permanently phallic shape - or, rather, the permanent rigidity - betokened the permanent residence therein of that magically rigidifying Spirit of Life, which visited men only sporadically, but which honoured these stocks and stones with Its ineffable Presence continuously. Visiting the male member of generation, 'like angels' visits, short and far between', the Spirit of Life dwelt permanently it seemed in these rigid rocks and timbers. It was the immanent Divinity which made them holy.
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[2] As they are to this day in Ireland, Wales, Derbyshire, Normandy, Brittany, the Massif Central, the Pyrenean countries, India, South America and many other places throughout the world.
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I cannot find it in me to agree with the opinion of those who maintain that there have been within the past five thousand years, and, indeed, are, peoples ignorant of the connection between coition and human reproduction. We find this opinion maintained by Bertrand Russell, when, in commenting on Malinowski's The Sexual Life of Savages in North-west Melanesia, Russell mentions the absence of the word for 'father' in the Trobriand speech, because 'no such concept exists'. Charles Seltman, in Women in Antiquity, maintains the same opinion in greater detail: 'Missionaries could not get along without such an idea and name (i.e. of "father"), and they were forced to teach the Islanders the facts of procreation, which these happy people dismissed laughingly as plain nonsense.'
This is a traveller's tale that I myself am inclined to dismiss laughingly as plain nonsense. A very clear realisation of the facts of procreation is evidenced by the ancient tale of Onan (Genesis, 38, 8 and 9), and perhaps even more clearly by the surgical practice of the Australian aborigines - so, incorrectly, called, for they appear to have migrated to Australia about 6,000 years ago. Though the contact with European settlers and visitors over the past two centuries has inevitably had a sophisticating effect upon these primitive people (as I write, one has become an international tennis star), when contact was first made at the end of the eighteenth century, there could hardly have been a more primitive culture than that of the Australian Blackfellow.
Yet, for all the primitive character of the culture, it had come to so competent an understanding of the mechanism of procreation that the central ceremony of these aborigines' 'bar mitzvah' is a surgical operation, performed with a stone drill, by which each boy newly promoted to official manhood is provided with one of the most effective - as it must surely be one of the most ancient - contraceptive devices in the world.
The hole, which remains permanently open, is drilled at the root of the penis, just where it joins the scrotum, and acts as a drain-away for the seminal canal. In a poor - poor only in the material sense, of course - culture, the birth-rate must be strictly controlled. Where it is not permitted to a Blackfellow couple to have children, coition is practised with the drain-away open, the seminal fluid passing out through the artificial meatus. Where a child is permitted, by the decision of the tribe's elders, to a married couple, the hole is closed by the tip of a finger held against it, and the seminal fluid, on ejaculation, passes up the penis and out of the natural meatus in the normal fashion.
So ingenious and effective a method of birth-control could have been conceived and devised only amongst a people more than merely superficially cognisant of the facts of procreation - and yet, even today, the Blackfellow is reckoned as amongst the most 'backward' of the world's peoples.
When primitive Man traced the functional connection between his coupling with a woman and the woman's eventual pregnancy, he came, as an inevitable result of that association of facts, to pay (not the phallus so much as the sporadic rigidity of) the phallus reverence and worship. But he did not worship the phallus; he worshipped only that Divine Power which took up its temporary residence in the phallus, whose irregular tumescence primitive Man saw as a theophany. It was the Divine Power which 'exalted his horn', and which, with the appropriate spiritual pressure, might be induced, as was later promised to the Hebrew prophets, to 'exalt his horn for ever'.
We shall see, at this critical point in Man's search for the facts of Nature/God, that some of the human seekers were convinced that, with the identification of the tumescent phallus with a visitation of the Divine Spirit, they had come to the ultimate revelation. We shall see, too, that the religion of the Witches - that is, the ancient Fertility Cult - passed, in no important point, beyond this 'revelation', upon which the whole later structure of the Fertility Cult was erected.
But others were not satisfied that, in identifying the tumescence of the phallus with the actual presence of the Maker-Spirit, they had come to the ultimate truth. They went further; they sought to discover the identity - or, at least, the nature -of this all-immanent Godhead; and, in their search through all classes of all created beings, they found It under many aspects. Their keen observation traced the connection between sunlight and growth; and eventually they began to seek the Godhead, not in erratic rigidities of the phallus, but in something — what was it? - the Sun? - the Sky, of which the Sun was only a passing adornment (however important to Man's world)? - or something ever more distant, something far more total?
Long before the Law of Conservation of Energy had been defined in the nineteenth century, some inspired human minds had groped their way towards a dim apprehension of the truth that there was - there must be - a law of the conservation of Divine Purpose, that the immanence of the Godhead must mean that God/Nature was not only everywhere, but that everything, no matter how small, no matter how large, no matter how seemingly trivial, no matter how apparently important: that everything, everywhere, was a manifestation, a theophany, of the Divine Purpose. But to this sublime understanding of 'what made the Universe tick' not everyone attained. It is certain that Akhenaten so conceived the universe that a single Divine Will ruled and managed; but not to everyone came this bold vision. Some thinkers and seekers got no farther than to think of the Godhead as Something-Up-Above - perhaps simply because it seemed reasonable to postulate a Being who could see more by being so far above the world that It surveyed. Such were the meditative minds among the Aryans, who named this supernal Being 'Sky-Father' - the 'Zeus-Pater' of the Greeks, the 'Dies-pitar' (later 'Iuppiter') of the Romans, the 'Dia' of the Celts, the 'Zio' of those ancient Teutons to whom both Greeks and Romans fearfully ascribed an only half-human (3) origin.
But to many - one may almost consider them the majority -the Godhead; omnipotent, omniscient, immanent and transcendent as It might be; was still the more credible as It seemed the nearer, and thus the more familiar. It was from these only mildly adventurous thinkers and seekers - worshippers of stocks and stones, of meteorites and phalli, of trees and wells and streams and albino animals and cross-eyed men - that we must trace the descent of the Fertility Cult in its purest form; that is to say, the religion of the nomad hunter to whom the facts of procreation were strictly those which seemed to explain the reproduction of animals - his prey and ... himself.
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[3] The Teutones were believed to have sprung from the aberrant union of those female demons who lay in wait for unwary travellers through the dense Hercynian Forest. Those familiar with modern history will have no difficulty in subscribing to this theory.
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