This is the most incomprehensible and mysterious of the powers of nature. When all the adjuncts or accidents of every kind so interesting to the passions and feelings of man are considered, it is not wonderful that this subject should be found in some way or other to have a place among the first of the human superstitions. Thus every where we find it accompanying the triune God, called Trimurti or Trinity, just described, under the very significant form of the single obelisk or stone-pillar, denominated the Lingham or Phallus,[1] and the equally significant Yoni or Cteis, the female organ of generation: sometimes single, often in conjunction. The origin of the worship of this object is discussed at large in my Celtic Druids, and will be found in the index by reference to the words Phallus, Linga, Lithoi.
8. The next step after man had once convinced himself of the existence of a God would be, I think, to discover the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Long before he arrived at this point, he must have observed, and often attempted to account for, the existence of moral evil. How to reconcile this apparent blot in the creation to the beneficence of an all-powerful Creator, would be a matter of great difficulty: he had probably recourse to the only contrivance which was open to him, a contrivance to which he seems to have been driven by a wise dispensation of Providence, the doctrine of a future state of existence, where the ills of this world would find a remedy, and the accounts of good and evil be balanced; where the good man would receive his reward, and the bad one his punishment. This seems to me to be the probable result of the contemplation of the existence of evil by the profound primeval oriental philosophers, who first invented the doctrine of the Trinity.
9. Other considerations would lend their assistance to produce the same result. After man had discovered the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the metempsychosis followed the doctrine of the reproduction or regeneration by the third person of the triune God, by a very natural process, as the doctrine of the triune God had before arisen by an easy process from the consideration by man of the qualities of the beings around him. Everywhere, throughout all nature, the law that destruction was reproduction appeared to prevail. This united to the natural fondness for immortality, of which every human being is conscious, led to the conclusion, that man, the élite of the creation, could not be excepted from the general rule; that he did but die to live again, to be regenerated; a consciousness of his own frailty gradually caused a belief, that he was regenerate in some human body or the body of some animal as a punishment for his offences, until by repeated penances of this kind, his soul had paid the forfeit of the crimes of its first incarnation, had become purified from all stain, and in a state finally to be absorbed into the celestial influence, or united to the substance of the Creator. As it happens in every sublunary concern, the law of change corrupted these simple principles in a variety of ways; and we find the destroyer made into a demon or devil, at war with the Preserver or with the Creator. Hence arose the doctrine of the two principles opposed to each other, of Oromasdes and Arimanius in perpetual war, typified by the higher and lower hemisphere of the earth, of winter and summer, of light and darkness, as we shall find developed in a variety of ways. What could be so natural as to allot to the destroyer the lower hemisphere of cold and darkness, of winter, misery, and famine? What so natural as to allot to the beneficent Preserver the upper hemisphere of genial warmth, of summer, happiness, and plenty? Hence came the festivals of the equinoxes and of the solstices, much of the complicated machinery of the heathen mythology, and of judicial astrology.
From similar trains of reasoning arose the opinion that every thing in nature, even the world itself, was subject to periodical changes, to alternate destructions and renovations—an opinion,
- ↑ Religion de l’Antiquité, par Cruizer, Notes, Introd. p. 525.
