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object:1.37 - Oriential Religions in the West
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter


XXXVII. Oriental Religions in the West

THE WORSHIP of the Great Mother of the Gods and her lover or son was
very popular under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions prove that the two
received divine honours, separately or conjointly, not only in
Italy, and especially at Rome, but also in the provinces,
particularly in Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and
Bulgaria. Their worship survived the establishment of Christianity
by Constantine; for Symmachus records the recurrence of the festival
of the Great Mother, and in the days of Augustine her effeminate
priests still paraded the streets and squares of Carthage with
whitened faces, scented hair, and mincing gait, while, like the
mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, they begged alms from the
passers-by. In Greece, on the other hand, the bloody orgies of the
Asiatic goddess and her consort appear to have found little favour.
The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic
excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity of
the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the kindred but gentler rites
of Adonis. Yet the same features which shocked and repelled the
Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans and
barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were mistaken
for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory of a
new birth and the remission of sins through the shedding of blood,
have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally appealed to
peoples in whom the savage instincts were still strong. Their true
character was indeed often disguised under a decent veil of
allegorical or philosophical interpretation, which probably sufficed
to impose upon the rapt and enthusiastic worshippers, reconciling
even the more cultivated of them to things which otherwise must have
filled them with horror and disgust.

The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of crude
savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a multitude of
similar Oriental faiths which in the later days of paganism spread
over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the European peoples with
alien ideals of life gradually undermined the whole fabric of
ancient civilisation. Greek and Roman society was built on the
conception of the subordination of the individual to the community,
of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth,
as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual
whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy
in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the
public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good;
or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to
them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their
personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was
changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the
communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only
objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the
prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into
insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral
doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public
service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions,
and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he
regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The
saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic
contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal
of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who,
forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his
country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose
eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the
centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a
future life, and however much the other world may have gained, there
can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A
general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the
state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended
to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to
relapse into barbarism; for civilisation is only possible through
the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to
subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused
to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their
anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were
content to leave the material world, which they identified with the
principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for
a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian
philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle
Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and
conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the
march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had
turned at last. It is ebbing still.

Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the ancient
world competed against each other for the allegiance of the West was
the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of his worship
is attested by the monuments illustrative of it which have been
found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire. In respect
both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra appears to have
presented many points of resemblance not only to the religion of the
Mother of the Gods but also to Christianity. The similarity struck
the Christian doctors themselves and was explained by them as a work
of the devil, who sought to seduce the souls of men from the true
faith by a false and insidious imitation of it. So to the Spanish
conquerors of Mexico and Peru many of the native heathen rites
appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the Christian sacraments.
With more probability the modern student of comparative religion
traces such resemblances to the similar and independent workings of
the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the
secret of the universe, and to adjust his little life to its awful
mysteries. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the
Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity,
combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral
purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict
between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the
balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in
our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed
directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the
twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it
was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to
lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that
turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears
to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The
celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at
midnight they issued with a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth!
The light is waxing!" The Egyptians even represented the new-born
sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter
solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No
doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the
twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the
Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess;
in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly
identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as
they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of
December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ's birth,
and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time,
however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January
as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of commemorating the
birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the
fourth century it was universally established in the East. But at
the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century the
Western Church, which had never recognised the sixth of January as
the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the
true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern
Church. At Antioch the change was not introduced till about the year
375 A.D.

What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to institute
the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated
with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. "The
reason," he tells us, "why the fathers transferred the celebration
of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It
was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of
December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in
token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the
Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the
Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival,
they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be
solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth
of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has
prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth." The heathen origin of
Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by
Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate
that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on
account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great
rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because
of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of
the nativity of Christ.

Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the
birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to
transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was
called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no
intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same
sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the
Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the
festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which
fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in
Greece, Sicily, and Southern Italy bear in some respects a striking
resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the
Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen
predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this
adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than in
the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world; for the worship of
Adonis, while it flourished among the Greeks, appears to have made
little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never formed
part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might have
taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by the
similar but more barbarous worship of Attis and the Great Mother.
Now the death and resurrection of Attis were officially celebrated
at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March, the latter
being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as the most
appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who had been
dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to an ancient
and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the twenty-fifth of
March, and accordingly some Christians regularly celebrated the
Crucifixion on that day without any regard to the state of the moon.
This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia, Cappadocia, and Gaul,
and there seem to be grounds for thinking that at one time it was
followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition which placed the death of
Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and deeply rooted.
It is all the more remarkable because astronomical considerations
prove that it can have had no historical foundation. The inference
appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ must have been
arbitrarily referred to that date in order to harmonise with an
older festival of the spring equinox. This is the view of the
learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr. Duchesne, who points out that
the death of the Saviour was thus made to fall upon the very day on
which, according to a widespread belief, the world had been created.
But the resurrection of Attis, who combined in himself the
characters of the divine Father and the divine Son, was officially
celebrated at Rome on the same day. When we remember that the
festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient pagan
festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the Baptist
in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of water: that
the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted
the festival of Diana; that the feast of All Souls in November is a
continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead; and that the
Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the winter solstice in
December because that day was deemed the Nativity of the Sun; we can
hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in conjecturing that the
other cardinal festival of the Christian church--the solemnisation
of Easter--may have been in like manner, and from like motives of
edification, adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god
Attis at the vernal equinox.

At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more, that
the Christian and the heathen festivals of the divine death and
resurrection should have been solemnised at the same season and in
the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of Christ
at the spring equinox were Phrygia, Gaul, and apparently Rome, that
is, the very regions in which the worship of Attis either originated
or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard the coincidence as
purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the season at which in the
temperate regions the whole face of nature testifies to a fresh
outburst of vital energy, had been viewed from of old as the time
when the world was annually created afresh in the resurrection of a
god, nothing could be more natural than to place the resurrection of
the new deity at the same cardinal point of the year. Only it is to
be observed that if the death of Christ was dated on the
twenty-fifth of March, his resurrection, according to Christian
tradition, must have happened on the twenty-seventh of March, which
is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the Julian
calendar and the resurrection of Attis. A similar displacement of
two days in the adjustment of Christian to heathen celebrations
occurs in the festivals of St. George and the Assumption of the
Virgin. However, another Christian tradition, followed by Lactantius
and perhaps by the practice of the Church in Gaul, placed the death
of Christ on the twenty-third and his resurrection on the
twenty-fifth of March. If that was so, his resurrection coincided
exactly with the resurrection of Attis.

In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous
Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that
Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable
coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective
deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter
controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans
contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation
of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with
equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical
counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly
bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might
seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and
therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a
general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble
argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that
in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly
demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of
Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by
inverting the usual order of nature.

Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen
festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark
the compromise which the Church in the hour of its triumph was
compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals.
The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive missionaries, with
their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had been exchanged for the
supple policy, the easy tolerance, the comprehensive charity of
shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly perceived that if Christianity was
to conquer the world it could do so only by relaxing the too rigid
principles of its Founder, by widening a little the narrow gate
which leads to salvation. In this respect an instructive parallel
might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history
of Buddhism. Both systems were in their origin essentially ethical
reforms born of the generous ardour, the lofty aspirations, the
tender compassion of their noble Founders, two of those beautiful
spirits who appear at rare intervals on earth like beings come from
a better world to support and guide our weak and erring nature. Both
preached moral virtue as the means of accomplishing what they
regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the
individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that
salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from
suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which
they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties
but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in
practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently
renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out
their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister. If such
faiths were to be nominally accepted by whole nations or even by the
world, it was essential that they should first be modified or
transformed so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the
passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of
accommodation was carried out in after ages by followers who, made
of less ethereal stuff than their masters, were for that reason the
better fitted to mediate between them and the common herd. Thus as
time went on, the two religions, in exact proportion to their
growing popularity, absorbed more and more of those baser elements
which they had been instituted for the very purpose of suppressing.
Such spiritual decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at
the level of its great men. Yet it would be unfair to the generality
of our kind to ascribe wholly to their intellectual and moral
weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from
their primitive patterns. For it should never be forgotten that by
their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions
struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human
existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the
vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving
their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.





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