Pagan and Christian Creeds [47]
its death, they made their reparation BEFORE, bringing all sorts of presents and food to it for a long anterior period, and paying every kind of worship and respect to it. The same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia, in some of the cities of Greece as I have already mentioned, the actual bull sacrificed was the handsomest and most carefully nurtured that could be obtained; it was crowned with flowers and led in procession with every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I have already pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead of a bull or a goat or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated, it was a custom (which can be traced very widely over the world) to feed and indulge and honor the victim to the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony, arraying him often as a king and placing a crown upon his head, by way of acknowledgment of the noble and necessary work he was doing for the general good.
What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging especially to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and beloved a tree--the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of Attis! when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis was placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the glorious youth--who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk of Winter-- was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree?[1] At some earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his body bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the maidens to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and male enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice (as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their virile organs--symbols of fertility in return for the promised and expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For the ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and lamentation, but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a festival of resurrection, when it was discovered-- just as in the case of Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had flown. How strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life made in order to bring salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.
[1] See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta noctibus pIangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur."
Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call gods, it is important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though it dealt in 'spirits'--the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea of gods. It had not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and governing the world in solemn conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus or
What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging especially to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and beloved a tree--the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of Attis! when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis was placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the glorious youth--who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk of Winter-- was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree?[1] At some earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his body bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the maidens to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and male enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice (as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their virile organs--symbols of fertility in return for the promised and expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For the ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and lamentation, but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a festival of resurrection, when it was discovered-- just as in the case of Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had flown. How strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to the story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life made in order to bring salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection and the empty coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.
[1] See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta noctibus pIangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur."
Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call gods, it is important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though it dealt in 'spirits'--the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea of gods. It had not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and governing the world in solemn conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus or