Ruggieri

CHAPTER I - God and the Gods

We are accustomed to think of Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism as the three monotheistic faiths, and all the rest as polytheistic and pagan. But if we look more closely into things we shall find that the most polytheistic religions are at heart monotheistic, and that even the avowedly monotheistic have a certain kinship with polytheism in certain of their aspects.

Monotheism and polytheism are fundamental twin principles representing the one and the many. A religion which had not got a monotheistic basis has never been conceived by the human mind. Even the most primitive animists have some concept of a father of the gods who made heaven and earth and exercises some sort of rule over the innumerable devils of their devotion. The more highly evolved and philosophical a polytheism becomes, the more clearly does it conceive of the One Who creates and dominates the many.

The nearest approach to monotheism that exists is ultra-Protestant Christianity, which has lost its angelology; and even this is a Di-theism, because it worships God the Son as well as God the Father. Concerning God the Holy Ghost, of which it has little understanding, it keeps silence and for all practical purposes ignores It. Catholic Christianity has replaced the gods with the saints, and develops and encourages what is called dulia, the veneration paid to minor and specialized manifestations of the divine. The different saints, by virtue of their personal experiences and consequent presumed sympathies, preside over different aspects of human needs and activities. St Christopher is the patron saint of all travellers. There are also local saints, the patrons of localities, to whom pilgrimages are made and prayers are said. What is the difference between this concept and that of the polytheistic Hindu, with his scores of deities, specialized and localized? What is the difference in principle between Ganesa, god of money-lenders, and Christopher, patron saint of travellers?

The only real difference lies in the fact that the instructed Catholic does not pray to the saint as the dispenser of blessings, but implores the saint to intercede for him with Deity. This is a subtle but important point. The uninstructed Catholic, however, makes his prayers and little offerings direct to the saint, troubled by no such fine distinctions; his attitude is exactly the same as that of the uninstructed Hindu. The invocation of a specialized power, believed to be specially appropriate to the occasion, and therefore more efficacious than a generalized beneficence, is deep-rooted in human nature. The out-patient at the hospital scornfully rejects advice on hygiene and demands a bottle of physic, as strongly flavoured and highly coloured as possible.

It is an ineradicable trait in human nature to want something definite and tangible that it can see and handle; St Thomas, the doubting disciple, is the patron saint of many more than those who call upon his name; and be it noted that Our Lord did not express any marked disapproval of his caution, but bid him make his experiment and prove for himself.

It is because of the very nature of our minds that we need this definiteness and tangibility; for our minds are built up by experience of sensory images, and they know no other language. It is only by means of the calisthenics of meditation that the power to conceive abstract ideas is built up, and those less highly developed intellectually never succeed in build*Ag it. For them translation into terms of concrete imagery is essential. The One God is for the initiate—the many must have the Many. God must incarnate, must be made man before He can come within range of man's awareness.

The relationship of concept is in many cases a relationship in fact where the more local of the Catholic saints are concerned. A very small amount of archaeological research serves to prove that the local saints are in a very large number of cases local pagan deities, or deities that had important local festivals, which have been taken over, festivals and all, by the Roman Catholic Church when she was organizing her field of missionary activity.

There was great wisdom in this, for local deities and local festivals were a source of income to the neighbourhood, and their abolition would have caused not only local hardship, but resistance and rebellion. The wise thing, and the simple thing, in dealing with ignorant folk, was to rechristen the deity and canonize him, and provide him with an appropriate legend. Then the old folk carried on the profitable business of the festival-cum-fair, and the young folk were entertained by the legend, and everybody was happy in their simple way, and in one generation the conversion was effected without inflicting hardship on anybody. The Roman Catholic Church is a very wise church, and adapts her methods to the nature of the human mind instead of trying to alter human nature from what it is to what it ought to be as a preliminary to salvation.

In the pagan faiths the same principles prevail. The simple soul likes gods and plenty of them, full-flavoured and highly coloured; but the instructed and thoughtful man develops the idea of the God behind the gods, the Creator and Sustainer, Whose nature determines the nature of His creation; right relationship with Whom is essential to man's welfare in this world and the next. This is not a God Who will be satisfied with burnt offerings, but demands a righteous life.

Monotheistic Judaism upon its orthodox side bears much resemblance in spirit to Protestant Christianity, which latter, in actual fact, draws its inspiration from the Old Testament far more than from the New. But mystical Judaism, the Judaism of the Qabalah, knows the Ten Holy Archangels, the spirits before the throne, and innumerable choirs of angels, their servitors. These are the exact analogue of the saints and gods of other faiths. So much so that there exist what are called the tables of correspondences, in which saints, gods, and angels are classified together under their respective headings; and no honest student, with the facts before him, cares to upset that classification, little as it may appeal to a one-way mind, to whom the truth has been delivered once for all in his own little Bethel with the tin roof.

In order to understand a man's point of view we need to put ourself in his place and enter into it imaginatively, even if not sympathetically. We owe a great deal of our misconceptions of other people's faiths to the fact that the first translators of their holy books were in many cases Christian missionaries, and these reserved for the expression of their own teaching all words that had a laudatory meaning, and reserved for the teachings of their opponents, even when these were identical with their own upon specific points, words that had debased associations. If the words that were translated as gods had been translated as archangels, as they ought to have been, we should have had a much better understanding with some of our spiritual neighbours, though of course we might not have contributed so liberally to missionary societies as we have done had we realized that the spiritual plight of these our brethren was by no means desperate.

The different great faiths evolved at different epochs of the world's history and represent different stages of spiritual development. Those who have studied esoteric science know that the different levels of consciousness which correspond to the different planes developed at successive epochs of cosmic evolution. If the great faiths be examined from the standpoint of consciousness—that is to say, from the standpoint of psychology rather than theology, it will be found that they correspond to these different phases of development.

Each religion builds upon the basis left behind by its predecessor, even when it repudiates it and all its works and looks upon its gods as devils. Each religion tries to give a complete answer to the riddle of the Sphinx. But it will be remembered that the riddle of the Sphinx had four clauses, and it is generally to be found that each new faith comes to answer one or another of these clauses and leaves the rest of the problem untouched.. Each faith, then, specializes, and at the same time tends to become one-sided.

We shall find that the faith held as the official exoteric religion of his race is the faith that speaks to a man's conscious mind; that his personal religion, if he has any, is the product of his superconscious mind; and that the primitive folk-religion of his race rules over his unconscious mind and fills it with its symbols and images. The racial past lives on in the subconscious mind of each of us, as the Zurich school of psychology recognizes; but it can be evoked to visible appearance in a manner which no orthodox psychologist is acquainted with. It is this evocation of the racial past which is the key to certain forms of