SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS ABOUT CONCEPTION
We shall not be so surprised at the number of these ancient myths of miraculous births if we remember that it was not until many hundreds of years later than the eras in which they originated that the physiological processes of sexual generation were understood. Even among races who practiced the artificial fertilization of plants, it was not suspected until quite recently that this fertilization was analogous to sexual generation.
These ancient peoples knew enough to make these stories appear wonderful, but not enough to make them incredible. All conception seemed miraculous, and so abnormal conception was but a small step further on the road of incomprehensibility.
Man in his most primitive state does not, it seems, connect births with sexual unions. That this relation of cause and effect should not be recognized may appear incredible to more sophisticated people, but that it is not recognized is well attested, and is, really, not so curious as it at first sight appears.
The interval between the relative union and its consequence is so long that the two events would not necessarily appear to men of very low mental development as cause and effect, any more than to animals sequences divided by even comparatively short intervals of time can appear to be relative causes and effects.
Immediate or almost immediate results alone strike animals and savages of the most primitive types as connected with their antecedents. It has been found that even at the present day certain aboriginal Australian natives believe that births are caused by the entrance into prospective mothers of ancestral spirits, and have no connection with the union of the sexes.
Such unions can, they know, take place without any result, and it has apparently not struck them that births never take place without such previous unions. Even if the anthropologists-Messrs. Spencer and Gillen-who report this misunderstanding, are themselves partly mistaken, and the natives do recognize some sort of connection between the two events, it appears undoubted that these savages consider that the real conception is brought about by some action of these spiritual agents- the ancestral spirits. Among races inclined to be sterile such a belief might easily arise.
It is thought by some anthropologists that this idea, which still survives in Queensland, was once common to all mankind in the animistic stage of culture, and this indeed appears highly probable when we think of our ancestors even in those days as little better, mentally, than animals, who certainly cannot connect the gratification of a transient passion with its long subsequent, and not inevitable, result.
The Aruntas of Australia "believed that conception was occasioned by the woman passing near a Churinga-a peculiarly shaped piece of wood or stone, in which a spiritchild was concealed, which entered into her." Here we have a case in which animism might easily develop into a' cult resembling phallic worship, while as yet the phallus itself is unconnected with fertility.
In one Red Indian tribe the women believed that the soul of a dying person was capable of impregnating them, and those who desired to become mothers flocked to the bedside of the dying.
Even at a far more advanced stage of culture a kindred belief persists. Thus the Amazons, a mythical nation of female warriors and no men, were fabled to reproduce themselves without male assistance. And, besides the Amazons, there have been traditions of many other nations composed only of women. Of one of these, which lived on the "Isle of Women" in the Chinese Sea, and of another, which inhabited an island on the coast of Sumatra, it was said that the women were fertilized by the wind.
In ancient times there was a widespread notion that women sometimes conceived by the wind. Hiawatha was said to be a son of the west wind; and many other mythical heroes owed their existence to that wind, or to the east wind or the south wind.
Even in comparatively recent times men believed that "certain animals were accustomed to conceive by the wind and the breeze," and argued that therefore procreation by the Spirit of God was not even wonderful!
Virgil also noted the stories of mares being often fertilized by the wind:-
"Et saepe sine ullis Conjugiis vento gravidae, mirabile dictu."
In this connection it is instructive to note that in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where, for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, the natives have artificially fertilized the date palms by brushing the pollen of the male palm on to the ovaries of the female date, it was only quite recently that they learnt that the process they were helping to carry out was a sexual one. They had empirically discovered that the process was necessary, but up till then had believed that its effect was to prevent some disease-or evil spirit-from shrivelling up the young dates.
Even in England a few years ago it was customary to root up the male hop plants as useless encumbrances, and it was not until numerous experiments had been made that the hop-growers were persuaded to believe that the wind-borne pollen of the male hop was necessary for the full development of the female fruit. They knew that male fructification was necessary if the seed was required to germinate, but they did not realize that it was also necessary if the fruit was to swell. If even in the twentieth century such mistakes could be made as to ignore the necessity for male fructification, what was not possible in the days before physiology had even been dreamt of?
A still more remarkable example of the ancient modes of thought regarding fertilization is to be found in the old custom of "marrying" trees by binding them together. This was supposed to render them more fertile, and may have been purely symbolic, as the custom betrays no physiological knowledge or intention. This and the fertilization of date palms, to which we have already referred, were probably regarded in the same way as the Pathans of Gilgit regarded their ceremony of mixing sprigs of a sacred cedar tree with their wheat grain before they sowed the latter, as a means of increasing the yield of the plant through the services of the spirit of the tree whose assistance was thus invoked. Disease was driven away and fruitfulness increased, they thought, by this good Spirit of Vegetation.
In some parts of Germany the "Yule Straw" was, and perhaps still is, bound round fruit trees "for the purpose of fertilizing them"; the origin of the custom, and of other similar customs to which we have referred, being doubtless connected with sympathetic magic.
By sympathetic magic is meant all those customs by which primitive races attempted to coerce the forces of nature, or the spiritual beings which, in their minds, corresponded to the forces of nature. For example, they believed that if they poured water on the ground the gods or spirits would be compelled to send rain; that if they lit a fire near a crop the sun would be forced to shine upon and warm that crop; and that if they connected their seed grain with anything which contained the spirit of one of the Vegetation Gods, or one of the Spirits of Fertility, that seed would become imbued with fruitfulness.
But, apart from the superstitions of sympathetic magic, myths grew out of the apparent facts of vegetable reproduction.
In some of the oldest stories told about Isis, the goddess has no partner. Osiris has not yet appeared upon the scene, and Isis lives a lonely life among the marshes. There, without any male assistance, she gives birth to a son.
It is probable that the idea behind this story is derived from the apparently immaculate birth of vegetation from seeds. That plants are reproduced by a sexual process was not known to the originators of such myths; and vegetation, it seemed to them, required only moisture for the purpose of reproducing itself. Hence the goddess of fertility conceiving amid the ponds and marshes, and hence too the stories of the first creation taking place on the damp shores of the ocean.
Men eventually began to notice, and to speculate upon, the constantly recurring, and apparently miraculous, death and rebirth of vegetation, the dead seed sown in the womb of the earth and called to life again by the rays of the sun. In the language of the poets, the Earth was the Mother of all things, and the Sun-the Sun-God-was the Father of all things. The poetical language of prophets is soon taken literally, and taught by the priests as describing material facts. Perhaps even in this case the "prophets" and poets meant it literally. Perhaps -even probably-they did regard Earth as a real mother, and the Sun as a real father.
That their knowledge of nature was very limited we have many proofs, and we need not be surprised that this was so. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had many very curious beliefs about reproduction. They thought that there were no female scarabs, and that the males reproduced their kind by depositing their seed in balls of dung, whence in due time young scarabs were produced.
On the other hand, they believed that there were no male vultures, and that consequently the female vultures produced their young parthenogenetically. Of the methods by which some other animals conceived and brought forth their young as strange, or even stranger, tales are told.
Conception, birth, and growth are all wonderful processes. Scientific study has revealed to moderns some of their secrets. The scientific method is to weigh, to measure, to compare, and to record, and never to accept guesses as facts.
The ancient method-with a few notable exceptions- was unscientific. Guesses, and the more wonderful the more acceptable, were received as facts; and so these wonderful processes were thought more wonderful still.
The Alchemists, postulating an unwarrantable analogy between inorganic matter and organic life, believed that their art consisted in joining male to female. For example, lead was considered to be male and orpiment to be female, so by their conjunction something valuable, perhaps gold or even the Philosopher's Stone itself, might be produced.
The affinity for each other of certain elements-a real fact which the Alchemists had noticed-was explained as due to their opposite sexes. Mercury (quicksilver), which has remarkably strong affinities for some other elements, was much discussed in this respect.
Some said that it was male, others that it was female. Eventually it seems to have been thought that it was itself hermaphrodite, the product of two substances themselves respectively male and female, and the parent of all other substances.
All things were divided by these speculators into male and female classes; water and fire were male, earth and air female. They hoped artificially to bring about generative processes which they thought were actually going on all the time in hidden places out of the sight of man.
A curious sidelight is thrown upon the then current ideas of animal generation in the course of a discussion between two of these Alchemists as to how it was that, when gold was produced-as, according to their erroneous theory, it actually was produced-by the union of quicksilver and sulphur, nothing of the substance of the sulphur could afterwards be detected in the gold. One Bernard Trevisanus explains this alleged fact by quoting Aristotle's opinion that "in a human embryo, when it is conceived in the womb, there remains nothing of the father's seed . . . . but the seed of the man doth only coagulate the menstrual blood of the woman."
The Alchemists were, comparatively speaking, men of a scientific habit of thought. All men of their day had the strangest ideas about the generative forces of nature.
The occurrence of spontaneous generation was believed in by nearly all men until quite recently, and in the early centuries of the Christian era the theory was sometimes brought forward to explain the otherwise apparently unaccountable existence, not only of minute organisms, but of large mammals. St. Augustine, in his "City of God," describes the peopling of some islands with animals spontaneously generated; and even much later than St. Augustine's day men were convinced that such events were of occasional, if not indeed of frequent, occurrence.
As regards smaller organisms, we all know how the mites in cheese, and the still smaller organisms of putrefaction, were believed, until quite recently, to arise spontaneously in suitable matter.
It was not until towards the end of the eighteenth century that the true facts about the fertilization of queen bees were discovered by a Frenchman, who examined a young queen on her return to the hive after her nuptial flight and found indisputable evidence of what had lately occurred to her. Until then, and even for some time after then, parthenogenesis and many much stranger theories were held as explanations of the production of bee grubs.
In Roman times the supposed capacity of the virgin female bee for producing large numbers of young caused bees to be regarded as emblems of chastity, and it was for long considered dangerous for unchaste persons to approach a beehive, lest the outraged inhabitants should sting him or her to death.
Until less than a century ago it was firmly believed by most people who interested themselves in such matters that eels were metamorphosed hairs dropped into ponds from the tails of horses.
Even as late as the Middle Ages illegitimate children were often said-and, much more wonderful, believed- to have been born without the intervention of a male parent, but from the effects of a purely spiritual connection with "Incubi."
And later still men have been sufficiently credulous to credit the tales of girls who asserted that their infants were the result of bathing in the same river as, though afar off from, men whose seed was supposed to have floated down stream and impregnated them.
It is said that the original reason why men who were forbidden by their religion to eat the flesh of animals, or even to eat eggs, were allowed to eat fish was that the latter were supposed not to procreate their kind by the conjunction of the sexes, and therefore not to possess souls! The Buddhist may eat fish, though he may eat no other flesh. The Catholic (who may have inherited his modified custom through Gnostic sources from Buddhism) is allowed to eat fish on fast days, when he may not eat flesh.
These facts may at first sight appear to have no bearing upon the question under discussion, but they are illuminating for us, as they show that even the most elementary physiological facts of this kind are very easily misunderstood or overlooked until their real nature is explained by scientific observers, and that in very primitive times myths could very easily arise which-as is the case with all myths-would survive long after the natural course of events was fully understood by most men.
The inhabitants of Asia Minor, Syria, Babylonia, and Egypt were, in the first century of our era, no longer so ignorant as the Queenslanders referred to above. They were comparatively highly civilized races, but they inherited myths which arose in a transitional period. They themselves would not invent entirely new myths of that kind, but they would accept, repeat, and re-apply old myths invented by their less well-informed ancestors.
Many of them regarded these stories with the same kind of affection as orthodox religious people today feel for their creeds, and some-like certain of the latter, as we shall see hereafter-were ready to do a considerable amount of editing so as to bring their old beliefs more or less into line with new ideas. The philosophers continually rationalized the old stories, explaining them away as allegories; but the unphilosophical reversed that process, and turned the metaphors of poets into what they regarded as history and what we call myths.
Thus it was that the mystical doctrines of the Gnostics gradually- became materialized so as to correspond with the pagan stories, and so as to compete with the latter for popular favour.
If we desire, as fully as is possible at this distance of time, to comprehend the mental atmosphere in which this Virgin Birth story arose, we must study-so far as the fragmentary records which have come down to these days permit-the doctrines of the Gnostic philosophers and theologians who flourished in and before the second century A.D. That atmosphere is indeed so different from our own that it is scarcely possible for modern men fully to appreciate the mental processes of those in whose minds the various doctrines took shape; and, in any case, here we can only very briefly refer to a few of the ideas held by the various theosophical speculators who called themselves Gnostics.
That those ideas influenced at least one of the evangelists is undoubted; that they played an important part in the evolution of the Incarnation doctrine is almost as certain.
In the next chapter we will consider the Gnostic conceptions of Christ.
Next: CHAPTER V SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS ABOUT CONCEPTION