Читать книгу The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 34, August, 1860 - Various - Страница 9

Life, in its central idea, is an entire and eternal solitude. Yet each individual nature so repeats—and is itself repeated in—every other, that there is insured the possibility both of a world-revelation in the soul, and of a self-incarnation in the world; so that every man's life, like Agrippa's mirror, reflects the universe, and the universe is made the embodiment of his life,—is made to beat with a human pulse.

We do all, therefore,—Hindu, Egyptian, Greek, or Saxon,—claim kinship both with the earth and the heavens: with the sense of sorrow we kneel upon the earth, with the sense of hope we look into the heavens.

The two Presences of the Eleusinia,—the earthly Demeter,2 the embodiment of human sorrow, and the heavenly Dionysus,3 the incarnation of human hope,—these are the two Great Presences of the Universe; about whom, as separate centres,—the one of measureless wanderings, the other of triumphant rest,—we marshal, both in the interpretations of Reason and in the constructions of our Imagination, all that is visible or that is invisible,—whatsoever is palpable in sense or possible in idea, in the world which is or the world to come. Incarnations of the life within us, in its two developments of Sorrow and Hope,—they are also the centres through which this life develops itself in the world: it is through them that all things have their genesis from the human heart, and through them, therefore, that all things are unveiled to us.

But these Two Presences have their highest interest and significance as foci of the religious development of the race: and inasmuch as all growth is ultimately a religious one, it is in this phase that their organic connections with life are widest and most profound. As such they appear in the Eleusinia; and in all mythology they furnish the only possible key for the interpretation of its mystic symbolism, its hieroglyphic records, and its ill-defined traditions.

Accordingly we find that all mythology naturally and inevitably flows about these centres into two distinct developments, which are indicated,—

1. In Nature; inasmuch as they are first made manifest through symbols which point to the two great forces, the active and the passive, which are concerned in all natural processes (sol et terra subjacens soli); and,

2. In the primitive belief among all nations, that men are the offspring of the earth and the heavens,—and in the worship equally prevalent of the sun, the personal Presence of the heavens, as Saviour Lord, and of the earth as sorrowing Lady and Mother.

Why the earth, in this primitive symbolism and worship, was represented as the Sorrowing One, and the sun as Saviour, is evident at a glance. It was the bosom of the earth which was shaken with storm and rent with earthquake. She was the Mother, and hers was the travail of all birth; in sorrow she forever gathered to herself her Fate-conquered children; her sorrowful countenance she veiled in thick mists, and, year after year, shrouded herself in wintry desolation: while he was the Eternal Father, the Revealer of all things, he drove away the darkness, and in his presence the mist became an invisible exhalation; and, as out of darkness and death, he called into birth the flowers and the numberless forests,—even as he himself was every morning born anew out of darkness,—so he called the children of the earth to a glorious rising in his light. Everything of the earth was inert, weighing heavily upon the sense and the heart, only waiting its transfiguration and exaltation through his power, until it should rise into the heavens; which was the type of his translation to himself of his grief-oppressed children.

Under these symbols our Lord and Lady have been worshipped by an overwhelming majority of the human race. They swayed the ancient world, from the Indians by the Ganges, and the Tartar tribes, to the Britons and Laplanders of Northwestern Europe,—having their representatives in every system of faith,—in the Hindu Isi and Isana, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, the Assyrian Venus and Adonis, the Demeter and Dionysus of Greece, the Roman Ceres and Bacchus, and the Disa and Frey of Scandinavia,—in connection with most, if not all, of whom there existed festivals corresponding, in respect of their meaning and use, with the Grecian Eleusinia.

Moreover, the various divinities of any one mythology—for example, the Greek—were at first only representatives of partial attributes or incidental functions of these Two Presences. Thus, Jove was the power of the heavens, which, of course, centred in the sun; Apollo is admitted to have been only another name for the sun; Æsculapius represents his healing virtues; Hercules his saving strength; and Prometheus, who gave fire to men, as Vulcan, the god of fire, was probably connected with Eastern fire-worship, and so in the end with the worship of the sun. Some of the goddesses come under the same category,—such as Juno, sister and wife of Jove, who shared with him his aerial dynasty; as also Diana, who was only the reflection of Apollo,4 as the moon of the sun, carrying his power on into the night, and exercising among women the functions which he exercised among men. The representatives of our Lady, on the other hand, are such as the ancient Rhea,—Latona, with her dark and starry veil,—Tethys, the world-nurse,—and the Artemis of the East, or Syrian Mother; to say nothing of Oreads, Dryads, and Nereids, that without number peopled the mountains, the forests, and the sea.

The confusion of ancient mythology did not so much regard its subjective elements as its external development, and even here is easily accounted for by the mingling of tribes and nations, hitherto isolated in their growth,—but who, as they came together, in their mutual recognition of a common faith under different names and rites, must inevitably have introduced disorder into the external symbolism. But even out of this confusion we shall find the whole Pantheon organized about two central shrines,—those of the Mater Dolorosa and the Dominus Salvator,—which are represented also in Christendom, though detached from natural symbols, in the connection of Christianity with the worship of the Virgin.

The Eleusinia, collecting together, as it did, all the prominent elements of mythology, furnishes, in its dramatic evolution through Demeter and Dionysus, the highest and most complete representation of ancient faith in both of its developments. In a former paper, we have endeavored to give this drama its deepest interpretation by pointing to the human heart as the central source of all its movements. We shall now ask our readers to follow us out into these movements themselves,—that, as before we saw how the world is centred in each human soul, we may now see how each soul develops itself in the world; for thither it is that the ever-widening cycles of the Eleusinian epos will inevitably lead us.

And first as an epos of sorrow: though centring in the earthly Demeter, yet its movement does not limit itself by the remembrance of her nine days' search; but, in the torch-light procession of the fifth night, widens indefinitely and mysteriously in the darkness, until it has inclosed all hearts within the circuit of its tumultuous flight. Thus, by some secret sympathy with her movements, are gathered together about the central Achtheia all the Matres Dolorosoe,—our Ladies of Sorrow;—for, like her, they were all wanderers.

They were so by necessity. All unrest involves loss, and thus leads to search. It matters not if the search be unsuccessful; though the gadfly sting as sharply the next moment as it did the last, still so must continue her wanderings. Therefore that Jew, whose mythic fate it is to wait forever upon the earth, the victim of an everlasting sorrow, is also an everlasting wanderer. All suffering necessitates movement,—and when the suffering is intense, the movement passes over into flight.

Therefore it is that the epos of suffering requires not merely time for its accomplishment, but also space. Ulysses, the "much-suffering," is also the "much-wandering."

Thus our Lady in the Eleusinian procession of search represents the restless search of all her children.

Migrations and colonizations, ancient or modern,—what were they but flights from some phase of suffering,—name it as we may,—poverty, oppression, or slavery? It was the same suffering Io who brought civilization to the banks of the Nile.

Thus, from the very beginnings of history or human tradition, out of the severities of Scythian deserts there has been an endless series of flights,—nomadic invasions of tribes impelled by no merely barbarian impulse, but by some deep sense of suffering, flying from their Northern wastes to the happy gardens of the South. In no other way can you account for these movements. If you attribute them to ferocity, what was it that engendered and nourished that? Call them the results of a Divine Providence, seeking by a fresher current of life to revive systems of civilization which through long ages of luxury have come to frailty,—still it was through this severity of discipline alone that Providence accomplished its end. Besides, these nomads were fully conscious of their bitter lot; and those who fled not in space fled at least in their dreams,—waiting for death at last to introduce them to inexhaustible hunting-grounds in their happy Elysium.

The very mention of Rome suggests the same continually repeated series of antecedent tragedy and consequent wandering,—pointing backward to the fabled siege of Troy and the flight of Aeneas,—"profugus" from Asia to Italy,—and forward to the quick-coming footsteps of the Northern profugi, who were eager, even this side the grave, to enter the Valhalla of their dreams.

It is said that the Phoenician cities sent out colonies from a desire of gain, and because they were crowded at home. It is said, too, that, in search of gold, thousands upon thousands went to El Dorado, to California, and Australia; but who does not know that the greater part of these thousands left their homes for reasons which, if fully exposed, would reveal a tragedy in view of which gold appears a glittering mockery?

The great movement of the race westward is but an extension of this epic flight. Thus, the Pilgrim Fathers of New England,—the grandest profugi of all time,—or even the bold adventurers of Spain, would have been moved only by intense suffering, in some form, to exchange their homes for a wilderness.

The world is full of these wanderings, under various pretences of gain, adventure, or curiosity, hiding the real impulse of flight. So with the strong-flowing current in the streets of a great city; for how else shall we interpret this intricate net-work of human feature and movement,—this flux of life toward some troubled centre, and then its reflux toward some uncertain and undefined circumference?

And as Nature is the mirror of human life, so at the source of those vast movements by which she buries in oblivion her own works and the works of man there is hidden the type of human suffering, both for the race and the individual. And hence it is, that, over against the eternal solitude within us, there ever waits without us a second solitude, into which, sooner or later, we pass with restless flight,—a solitude vast, shadowy, and unfamiliar in its outline, but inevitable in its reality,—haunting, bewildering, overshadowing us!

* * * * *

"Who is it that shall interpret this intricate evolution of human footsteps, in its meaning of sorrow?—who is it that shall give us rest?" Such is the half-conscious prayer of all these fugitives,—of our Lady and all her children. This it is which gives meaning to the torch-light procession on the fifth night of the Festival; but to-morrow it shall find an answer in the Saviour Dionysus, who shall change the flight of search into the pomp of triumph.

* * * * *

But let us pause a moment. It is Palm Sunday! We are not, indeed, in Syria, the land of palms. Yet, even here,—lost in some far-reaching avenue of pines, where one could hardly walk upon a summer Sunday without such sense of joy as would move him to tears,—even here all the movements of the earth and the heavens hint of most jubilant triumph. Thus, the green grass rises above the dead grass at our feet; the leaf-buds new-born upon the tree, like lotos-buds springing up from Ethiopian marble, give token of resurrection; the trees themselves tower heavenward; and in victorious ascension the clouds unite in the vast procession, dissolving in exhalation at the "gates of the sun"; while from unnumbered choirs arise songs of exultant victory from the hearts of men to the throne of God!

But whither, in divine remembrance,—whither is it that upon this Sunday of all Sundays the thoughts of Christendom point? Back through eighteen hundred years to the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, followed by the children crying, "Hosanna in the highest heavens!" Of this it is that the processions of Nature, in the resurrections of birth and the aërial ascension of clouds,—of this that the upward processions of our thoughts are commemorative!

Thus was the sixth day of the Eleusinia,—when the ivy-crowned Dionysus was borne in triumph through the mystic entrance of Eleusis, and from the Eleusinian plains, as from our choirs to-day, ascended the jubilant Hosannas of the countless multitude;—this was the Palm Sunday of Greece.

Close upon the chariot-wheels of the Saviour Dionysus followed, in the faith of Greece, Aesculapius and Hercules: the former the Divine Physician, whose very name was healing, and who had power over death, as the child of the Sun; and the latter, who by his saving strength delivered the earth from its Augean impurities, and, arrayed in celestial panoply, subdued the monsters of the earth, and at last, descending to Hades, slew the three-headed Cerberus and took away from men much of the fear of death. Such was the train of the Eleusinian Dionysus. If Demeter was the wanderer, he was the conqueror and centre of all triumph.

And this reminds us of his Indian conquest. What did it mean? Admit that it may have been only the fabulous march in triumph of some forgotten king of mortal birth to the farthest limits of the East. Still the fact of its association with Dionysus stands as evidence of the connection of human faith with human victory. Let it be that Dionysus himself was only the apotheosis of victorious humanity. In strict logic this is more than probable. Yet why apotheosize conquerors at all? Why exalt all heroes to the rank of gods?

The reason is, that men are unwilling to draw a limited meaning from any human act. How could they, then, connecting, as they did, all victory with hope,—how could they fall short of the most exalted hope, of the most excellent victory; especially in instances like the one now under our notice, where the material circumstances of the conquest as well as of the conqueror's life have passed out of remembrance; when for generations men have dwelt upon the dim tradition in their thoughts, and it has had time to grow into its fullest significance,—even finding an elaborate expression in sacred writings, in symbolic ritual, and monumental entablature? Osiris, who subjected men to his reign of peace, was also held to be the Preserver of their souls. Even Caesar, had he lived two thousand years before, might have been worshipped as Saviour. All extended power, measured by duration in time or vast areas of space, becomes an incarnate Presence in the world, which awes to the dust all who resist it, and exalts with its own glory all who trust in it. Achtheia mourns all failures; and here it is that the human touches the earth. But they who conquer, these are our Saviours; they shall follow in the train of Dionysus; they shall lift us to the heavens, and sanctify in our remembrance the Sunday of Palms!

But Dionysus not only looks back with triumphant remembrance to ancient conquest, but has his victories in the present, also, and in the great Hereafter. For triumph was connected with all Dionysiac symbols, hints of which are preserved to us in representations found upon ancient vases: such, for instance, as the figure of Victory surmounting the heads of the ivy-crowned Bacchantes in their mystic orgies; or the winged serpents which bear the chariot of the victor-god,—as if in this connection even the reptiles, whose very name (serpentes