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NA TURE 



[August 15, 1907 



for them ; and often his reading of the legends is less 

 convincing than would be (if it is allowed to use a frivolous 

 instance in such a connection) a similar explanation applied 

 to the story of Box and Cox — those obvious twins of Dark 

 and Light who occupied, turn and turn about, their cham- 

 ber, the World, under the benign influence of the landlady 

 of the tale, a manifest Earth-Mother of mythology. 



Many of the undoubted transferences which took place 

 under the Christian system cannot at this time of day be 

 certainly distinguished into the conscious and the uncon- 

 s.-ious. We know that saints of the Church have entered 

 often into the honour and the local habitations of pagan 

 deities. Mr. Frazer has told us how Si. Felicita has re- 

 placed Mephitis, the heathen personification of the poison- 

 ous gas of the pool of Frigento, and how .Adonis in Sicily 

 and Sardinia lives on as St. John. These instances might 

 be multiplied to many hundreds. We know, too, that 

 almost all our stated ecclesiastical festivals are continu- 

 ations of heathen feasts, so fiir as their dates and the 

 general nature of their commemorative significance are 

 concerned. What had to be changed has been changed, 

 but not more. Christmas has succeeded to the festival of 

 the winter solstice which celebrated the new birth of the 

 Sun ; Easter to the spring festival at which in many parts 

 of the Mediterranean world the Kature-Goddess, and 

 especially the death and resurrection of her .Son, were 

 commemorated. The .Assumption of the \"irgin replaces 

 the August feast of -Artemis and Diana in Greece and Italy. 

 The anniversary of St. George, so great a day in modern 

 Greece, seems to be the old Parilia ; St. John the Baptist 

 has taken on the heathen rites of midsummer, and you 

 may see the folk of Smyrna, Christian and Moslem alike, 

 jumping through fire to his honour on any St. John's Eve. 

 Very rarely, as in the case of the Feast of .AH Souls, the 

 late Christian adoption of which in the tenth century 

 happens to be known, can we ascribe these transferences to 

 any definite action of a leader cf the Church. Usually 

 we know no more than that where and when there was 

 once a pagan saint or a pagan feast there are new saints 

 and feasts of Christianity. But no reasonable person feels 

 ■ that the latter are discredited or lose anything of their 

 actual significance by the fact of their having a pre-Christian 

 pedigree. St. John may have succeeded to .Adonis, but he 

 is not .Adonis. Christmas may be the heir of the Saturn- 

 alia, but it is the Saturnalia no longer. To feel that the 

 sanctity of either is impaired by these facts is as if one 

 were to refuse reverence to the art-types of earlv Chris- 

 tianity, because most unquestionably these were not in- 

 vented fresh and new for the new religion. Whv should 

 they have been? If there were ready to hand images in 

 pagan art, fit to express the early Christian ideas, it would 

 have needed a miracle for the nascent Church to have 

 invented new ones. The human creative faculty in matters 

 of art is strictly limited as to types. Presentations of 

 Apollo or Orpheus were used naturally for the new Christ, 

 and those cf the Xature-Goddess of .Asia with her 

 Son for the new Mother and Child. How else 

 should gracious maternity have been represented? Last 

 year I showed in this Section certain torra-cotta images of 

 the Ephesian Goddess with her child, dated to the fourth 

 century before Christ, which might easily have been mis- 

 taken for Madonna figures of the Italian Renaissance ; and 

 last winter I saw in a newly excavated Coptic chapel of 

 the sixth century at Memphis a fresco painting of the 

 Virgin suckling her Son which was indistinguishable from 

 late representations of Isis. 



.As a matter of fact there is little fear that anthropologists 

 in demonstrating the fact of transference in such categories 

 of religious expression as these with which 1 have iust 

 been dealing will impair their religious efficiencv. For, 

 after all, how much is there not in the everyday expres- 

 sion of the religious sense among ourselves which has 

 suffered a transference in time and space so obvious that 

 no reflective mind can be unconscious of it? Consider onlv 

 the religious phraseology current among the simplest Chris- 

 tians all that mass of images and ideas proper to an alien 

 race and to the latitude and climate of the Mediterranean 

 in which, for exairole, the Presbvterian of Scotland ex- 

 presses the most pious of his aspirations. He "sighs for 

 the shadows of great rocks in a wearv land, for the plash 

 cf running waters, for the shade of the fig and the vine ; 



NO. 1972, VOL. 76] 



and, the most restless of men to whom all inaction is 

 hateful, he aspires to a heaven floored with the crystal 

 of Oriental imagery, where he shall for ever sit still. 

 These ideas one meets at every turn, not only in religious, 

 but in the secular, thoughts of every Oriental or South 

 European. Among us they appear in religion only, known 

 for manifest exotics, but not the less full of religious 

 significance, even to the lease congruous Christian. 



Ere I leave this second class of Survivals let me revert 

 again for a moment to the cult of the \'irgin in the Nearer 

 East. It is possible, even probable, that -Mary, the mother 

 of Jesus, also owes her divine, or at least semi-divine, posi- 

 tion in the Christian system to such a conscious effort by 

 leaders of the Church as those to which we have just 

 alluded. It is a well-known fact that neither the primary 

 nor the secondary authorities for the first two centuries of 

 Christianity supply any warrant for the position which she 

 was to hold later. They are, in fact, almost silent about 

 her. Nor has Christian archa-ology discovered any better 

 evidence of her glorification above other holy women during 

 that time. It seems established that it was not till the 

 third century that she began to assume semi-divinity. By 

 the fourth her position was sufficiently exalted to cause the 

 schism associated with the name of Nestorius, whatever 

 the real views of that ecclesiastic may have been ; but it 

 was not till .A.D. jii that she was officially acknowledged 

 by a General Council to be divine in virtue of her Thec- 

 tokia. her .Motherhood of God. It is diflicult not to believe 

 that this is one of the examples of the general fact which 

 I have just quoted from Dr. Bigg, and that the bishops 

 assembled at Ephcsus on that occasion were tardily con- 

 ceding a demand f(-r the recognition of the feminine prin- 

 cinle in divinitv made even more and more openly by the 

 voice of the common people alt round the Eastern Mediter- 

 ranean. We are told indeed in a contemporary letter 

 written by one present in Ephesus at the time that the 

 populace of the city itself, that immemorial seat of a 

 Virgin-Goddess, gathered about the church while the Council 

 was sitting, and put pressure en the bishops when they 

 showed signs of wavering in their decision to proclaim the 

 Theot6kos by condemning Nestorius; and that when the 

 decree had at last gone forth the Ephesians went wild with 

 jov. Their Great Mother had come again to her own. 



Once established, or, more probably, little by little while 

 she was gaining recognition, the Christian Virgin appro- 

 priated the festival dates, the holy places, and even the 

 rites of her predecessors. Here we approach a third class 

 of survivals. The great .August feast of .Artemis, as 1 have 

 said, became that of the .Assumption of Our I^ady ; temples, 

 groves, sacred springs, and other holy spots of Nature- 

 worship were transferred to the new patroness of all life 

 and fertility. There are hundreds of places in .Anatolia, 

 Greece, and .Syria which might be called to testify. One 

 of singular interest I visited a few years ago, that wild 

 spot in the Lycian mountains where the ever-burning gase- 

 ous flames of the Chim?era break out in a clearing of the 

 forest. Here, on the foundations of a temple, stands the 

 ruin of a church built ever the largest vent of the fire. 

 Islam has decreed that the goddess of the earth-flames be 

 no lonL'er openly adored, but all the bushes which grow 

 about the ruin I found hung with mouldering rags of quite 

 modern date, witnesses that her cult is not yet dead in the 

 hearts of shepherds and woodmen. On the wall of a ruined 

 convent hard by is a half-effaced fresco of Mary. And for 

 persistent rites and ceremonies let me ouote once more 

 the anointing of the great corner-stones of the ruined shrine 

 of Paphian .Anhrodite — thp " Oneen," as she is called etiortlv 

 in inscriptions in the old Cypriote character. This observ- 

 ance takes place on the Feast of the .Assumption of the 

 Virgin, to whose honour, under the name PanaghiA Chrv- 

 sopolitissa — the Lady of the Golden City — a church stands 

 hard by in the precinct of the Temple. Even Moslems in 

 Cyprus at times of stress reveal the pre-Islamic secret of 

 their souls and bow down before the holy icon of the 

 Virgin, painted, it is believed, by St. Luke, wafted oversea 

 to the same Paphian shore as Venus of old, and kept by the I 

 Monastery of Kykko. and carried in procession round fields ' 

 to brinrt rain and hlp«s their increase, .'^o too do thev •'^ 

 the remoter parts of Egypt. When I was being taken over 

 the Church of the Convent of St. fieiiiiana, in the n-arsh- 

 land of the Northern Delta, I saw a woman kneeling and 



