August 15, 1907] 



NA TURE 



399 



fluence on the momentous civilisation of its later time — 

 that race which has been rescued from long oblivion by 

 Schliemann in Greece and Troy, and by Evans and others 

 in the Isles. The more we learn of this great Nature- or 

 Mother-Goddess, the more primaeval and predominant is 

 the position she is seen to hold. All round the Eastern 

 Mediterranean she was before all created things : she 

 became the mother of a son by spontaneous generation or 

 some other process independent of the male — an idea, it 

 may be remarked, which presents no impossiblity to the 

 minds of very primitive races,. some of whom even at this 

 day do not connect fertilisation and conception as cause 

 and effect. With her son she produced all life ; she gave 

 her son to the humanity so created, and humanity killed 

 him that it might live ; he revived and returned again to 

 his mother, was again killed, and so the cycle of the 

 seasons revolved. So far as concerns Him in all his 

 avatars Mr. Frazer's book may be consulted. As for Her, 

 a Woman still holds the same place in the religious belief 

 of the old races of the same region, wherever they have 

 escaped assimilation by conquering races and faiths from 

 beyond the border. Hear any Greek or Italian peasant 

 in a moment of excitement or danger. He calls on no 

 Person of the Trinity, but on the Virgin. For him her 

 pow'er does not come from her Motherhood of her Son. 

 Indeed. I have known Christian countrymen of a West 

 Anatolian valley to whom that motherhood was evidently 

 unknown, and when spoken of remained without interest 

 or significance. She is a self-sufficient, independent em- 

 bodiment of divinity, to whom the ruder folk of Mediter- 

 ranean lands offer their prayers and pay their vows alone. 

 She and no other is beseeched to grant increase and fer- 

 tilitv ; she and no other is credited with the highest direc- 

 tion of human affairs. But to say, as so often is said, 

 that, for instance, in Greek lands the Panaghid is simply 

 a survival of Artemis or .Aphrodite under another name, 

 is to convey a false impression. She stands for the same 

 principle of divinity as they ; she has taken on, as I shall 

 point out presently, even the feasts and the ritual of her 

 predecessor ; and she has often made peculiarly her own 

 the spots especially sacred to the earlier Mother-Goddess. 

 But, as I take it, she is not worshipped now in Ephesus 

 or Cyprus merely because there was once a dominant cult 

 of .Artemis or Aphrodite in these places, but because to the 

 peoples of a wide Mediterranean region it is still, as it 

 always was, a religious necessity to embody their idea of 

 divinity in the feminine : and I would state the relation 

 of the Christian Virgin-Goddess to the pagan one rather 

 in this wav — that, coming from without, she gained accept- 

 ance at once for herself, and probably also, in a great 

 measure, gained acceptance for the whole creed vi'ith which 

 she was connected, because she offered a possible personifi- 

 cation of the same principle which had always been 

 dominant in the local religion. 



Why that principle was so deeply rooted in the peoples 

 of this particular region I cannot pretend precisely to say. 

 To ascribe it, as has been suggested, to the original pre- 

 valence of Muttcrrecht is probably to mistake effect for 

 cause. The principle has its roots deeper down than even 

 the matriarchal system. In a general way we may hold 

 it the result of a peculiar mental concentration upon the 

 idea of generation and reproduction of life, upon the 

 increase of man, the brute creation, and the earth. In 

 these processes the more obvious part played by the female 

 in Nature inevitably t^nds among primitive peoples, who 

 are comparatively peaceful and more of agriculturists and 

 herdsmen than warriors or hunters, to make woman seem 

 the sole condition of their being and the predominant 

 arbiter of their destinies. More we can hardly say. We 

 cannot determine whether there were peculiar geographical 

 conditions in the dawn of time, which, either in some 

 other home or in the Eastern Mediterranean region itself, 

 predisposed the ancestors of the actual races of the latter 

 to this cult of the reproduclive force. One can but bear 

 witness that at the present day this idea is an obsession 

 of these inhabitants wherever they remain in a com- 

 paratively simple state of society. -All their thoughts, 

 their prayers, and their iictions seem to be inspired by 

 It, and ' of all their thoughts, their prayers, and 

 their actions — so far as they have not been warped to 

 'the Father-God of the Southern Semites by the armed 



pressure of an alien folk from the warlike steppes of 

 Northern -Asia — Mary, the Panaghii, is the focus. 



In her essential identification with the religious sense of 

 these peoples, therefore, the Virgin is no mere survival. 

 But in an accidental or secondary sense her actual per- 

 sonality may, perhaps, be so regarded in the region in 

 question if we are careful to exclude from the word all 

 connotation of superfluity or decaying energy. Her cult 

 may be brought under that body of beliefs, observances, 

 and practices which have demonstrably passed from earlier 

 religious system to later by processes of transference, 

 usually unconscious, but often half-conscious, and un- 

 doubtedly in some cases wholly conscious. Where the 

 process has been unconscious or half-conscious these beliefs, 

 observances, and practices have survived in the new sys- 

 tem because the religious sense of the masses felt in- 

 stinctively that they were necessary to its expression. They 

 cannot therefore be regarded as survivals with any 

 implication of decay or death. They were necessities 

 under the former system ; they remained necessities under 

 the later, and may be living forces and vital expressions of 

 the human desire for relation with the divine under the 

 new as much as under the old. Where the process has 

 been conscious a popular demand for their survival as 

 necessities has been appreciated by leaders of the system, 

 and observances and forms of ritual have been consciously 

 taken from the old system to express a principle still active 

 under the new. Often we are in a position to know that 

 the old beliefs, observances, and forms did not accord with 

 the highest ideals of the most advanced professors of the 

 new system, and that they came to be consciously adopted 

 bv compromise in the interests of the more rapid and per- 

 manent establishment of the latter among inferior intel- 

 ligences. They w^ere better than the worse, if not as good 

 as the best. Of these Dr. Bigg is speaking in the preface 

 to his book " The Church's Task under the Roman 

 Empire " when he says, " The most significant changes 

 in history were not imposed upon the Church by the 

 bishops from above, but forced upon the bishops by the 

 pressure of popular opinion from below." .A well-known 

 example is supplied by the early history of Islam, when 

 the Prophet, having learned in exile at Medina, what 

 many of his apostles have since had to learn, that the 

 Semitic masses could not be weaned to a perfectly spiritual 

 system, came to terms with the primaeval worship of the 

 .Arabian Goddess in Mecca and displaced her personality by 

 retaining many expressions of the popular cult of her ; 

 and, as so often has happened in similar cases of religious 

 transference, those expressions remaining to this day the 

 most strictly observed by Moslems, testify still to the 

 vitality of the religious necessity which lay and lies behind 

 them. .And not only the early history of Islam, but the 

 early history of Christianity offers instances of such con- 

 scious transference, some of which may be read of in 

 Sir William Ramsay's works, e.g., in " The Church in the 

 Roman Empire," where he deals with that strange story 

 of Glycerius the Cappadocian deacon, who broke out at a 

 certain great gathering of Christians at Venasa, one of 

 the holiest of the pagan high places of the land, and 

 revived the former orgiastic form of cult by leading a band 

 of enthusiastic maidens dancing and singing through the 

 hills to the glory of Christ crucified. .Condemned in haste 

 by the stern Basil of Caesarea, the recalcitrant deacon found 

 an apologist and a protector in no less saintly a priest 

 than Gregory of Nazianzos, who knew better than his 

 Metropolitan how real and deep a local religious instinct 

 lav beneath this scandalous manifestation, and how much 

 better it were to bend to the service of the Church, than 

 to break, the relisrious zealots who had expressed it. 

 .Another curious collection of such transferences may be 

 found in a recent work of Mr. Rendel Harris, which he 

 entitled "The Heavenly Twins." Here are set out an 

 immense number of facts and suggestions tending to show 

 how the early Church adapted to its ends the cult of th- 

 Dioscuri or of similar twin gods known by other names 

 both in the West and East, a cult which expressed a certain 

 conception of the relation between human and divine, salu- 

 tary and indeed necessary to many pagan minds. The 

 book needs to be read in a critical spirit, for the author 

 has been led on by the fascination of myth-interpretation 

 to find his twin nature-gods wherever he turns to look 



NO. IQ/.', VOL. 76] 



