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THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
REVELATION
MYTHOLOGY
CORRESPONDENCES
In that clay shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria,
and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into
Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians. In that
day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a
blessing in the midst of the land. — Isaiah xix. 23-24.
Homo Coelestis est Septimus Dies in quo Dominus quiescit. —
SWEDENBORG.
REVELATION
MYTHOLOGY
CORRESPONDENCES
JAMES JOHN GARTH WILKINSON
JAMES SPEIRS
36 BLOOMSBURY STREET, LONDON
1887
[All Rights reserved]
3/3
CONTENTS.
The Dogma of Progress, ....
The Occasion of this Essay, .
Evolution versus Creation, ....
The Savage Man Proper and the Savage Man Universal
Parallelism between the two Men,
Consequences of putting the Savage Man in his Place,
A Plea for the Savage disallowed ; his Case does not bear it,
Reversion to the original Stock besets and threatens his
Honours, .......
Man in this World is an inevitable Religion and Supernature
of some sort,
Revelation touching Correspondences,
Mythology, ....
Idolatry, ....
Superstition, ....
Fontanelle's "forgotten common sense,"
The Greek Mythology originated in Greece ; piecemeal, but
rapidly, ....
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12
13
15
18
21
23
26
30
33
35
42
45
48
50
A n *-i'<VC\ *
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Each Mythology originates from and with its own Tracts of
Heathens, .....
It comes from Man, and is variously anthropoid,
A Note from the Elder Edda,
The Earliest Men and the Early Men : who they were,
The Church named Man or Adam in Genesis,
Planes of Personal Causes recently revealed. The World
Tree, ....
Saturnia Regna. Grecian and Scandinavian Mythology attests
a Primeval Golden Age, .
Scientism Opposes,
Literature and Poetry love Mythology,
Prometheus, ....
Hercules, ....
Swedenborg's Readings. Correspondences : the Horse,
Proofs of the Tradition of the Most Ancient Correspondences
among the Asiatic Nations,
Similarity of Myths all over the World — New Zealand,
The Israelites outlie Fontanelle's Views. Why?
And the Christian Church at its Beginning, .
Myths are the Natural Future States of Precedent Lost Revela
tions, ....
The Universal Compass of Exacting and consequently Exact
Sciences, .....
A Universal Serpent-Myth girdles the World,
The Giants of Revelation and of Mythology,
The Dwarfs, ....
54
56
58
60
61
63
65
68
69
7o
73
75
78
83
86
87
89
90
9i
95
104
CONTENTS.
The Unknown and the Unknowable : The Savage Men of the
Study, . . . . • • .108
Egypt, 115
Compound Animal Forms in the Word and in Mythology, . 124
The Age of Myths is past, . . . . .129
A Mode of Origin of Myths, . . . . .129
The Origin of Correspondences in the Adamic Men, . 131
Adam and Eve, the Proprium, . . . .132
Inspiration by and Revelation from Jehovah God began all
true Manhood, . . . . . 134
Declensions Perpetual, . . . . 136
Restorations Perpetual by and from the Divine : Successive
Churches, . . . . . -138
Heathen Religions at the Side : their Ways and Means, . 140
Uses of Mythologies as Schoolmasters and Art-Masters in
Language and ^Esthetics, . . . 144
Primeval Perception and its Streams of Memory and Tradi-
tion, . . . . . . .146
The Remainders of the Heathenisms . . . 149
Ethnologic -Geographical Light will come of the Biblical
Revelation of the Churches, . . . 151
Attestations from the Word. Nebuchadnezzar's Dream of the
Image. Daniel's Vision of the Divine Restorer, . 154
Divine History and Human History, . . .156
There is no such Thing as Pre-historic Man, and no such Man
as the Fontanellian Savage, . . . .157
Man's Epoch, and when he was put into Natural Creation, . 161
CONTENTS.
The Conditions on which Adam was Adam, and in the Garden
Eastward in Eden. Also Embryological Considerations.
Paleontology finds Monsters, but not evil Monsters, . 16S
Heredities die out in the Savage Man, . . . 1 75
The missing Link, and the Link that is not missing, . .180
The Africans, ....... 184
Professors, and not Savages, guilty of making Nature-Myths, 191
Correspondence is not Analogy. Nature corresponds generally
to the Spiritual World, but nothing in Nature to Nature, 194
Human Nature is all compact of Consanguinities, Ancestries
and Heredities, genuine Families of Mental States, . 196
Comparative Mythology : its new Christian Value, . . 198
Correspondences are the Administrators of Divine Justice and
Judgment, ...... 201
Help from Swedenborg, ..... 205
The Origin of Language, . . . . .215
Revelation and Mythology, ..... 222
APPENDIX.
Explanatory of Terms, ..... 225
Egypt, Assyria, Israel, ..... 227
Bacon's View of Mythology, ..... 231
PREFACE.
The Dogma of Progress.
i. Theology has suffered perversion from
the dogma of fuventus Mundi conceived
as implying progress as a necessary part of
the career of the social and individual man.
He cannot stand still : he is constituted in
movement ; but whether this shall be for
good or for evil, for better or for worse, de-
pends upon himself, and upon no necessity
outside him. It has depended in all ages
upon his reception, either in his heart, or
in his conscience, of the religious guidance
that was offered to him. Therefore at no
period of the world's history has the general
A
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
mankind been launched from infancy with
the fate of becoming adult in intelligence,
and wise in the end. This happy, and by
no means fated, result has been secured by
individuals in all ages, through religious
faithfulness, whatever the religion, provided
it contained in any measure an acknowledg-
ment of a divine Being, and command of a
life according thereto. But only by a false
analogy can this be applied to the race. The
race has not grown up from infancy, through
a virtuous youth, and steadfast middle age, to
a good old age. There is no progress of that
kind for man : none but a contingent and
dependent progress. On the contrary, the
Fall has been written out in Sacred History,
and attested by profane history, many times ;
it is strongly attested to-day ; and the infer-
ence is that man of himself is a creature of
the Fall ; and that if he and his societies
have not fallen utterly, and perished from
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 3
their place, some Lord of life apart from
man is the Redeemer and Sustainer.
2. One demonstration of this is afforded
by Progress itself: by Progress or forward
rapid movement which is considerable in
this age and cannot be ignored. There is
a dark spirit accompanying the progress ;
a spirit of pride and self-adoration which
is hostile to the spiritual and moral elements
and conditions on which truth leading to eood
depends. It is a subversive spirit, and leads
to a fall, and a progress in falling. Now
indeed it can only lead to individual and
national decadence ; but that is terrible
enough. The Redeemer and Saviour has
the future in His hands, and His Church
is secure. But the creed that the race is
necessarily rising to more excellent life by
its own progress is at war, in the votaries
of this creed, with whatever can be done for
them from above.
4 RE J 'ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
3. There is no adult infancy of the world
but a divinely communicated and humanly
received Innocence and the Wisdom of it;
no Adolescence but the same indwellings
growing and confirmed ; no full Age but
the same virtues again confirmed in constant
humility and love : and there is no decay,
decrepitude, or dying out, but selfishness,
corruption, and sin. As at first, so now, pro-
gress worth the name is everywhere subject
to these conditions.
4. Without careful heed to them, it is not
possible for Churches, States, or individuals,
to be aware if the speed which urges them
is towards human good, or backwards from
it. They cannot know otherwise whether
they are in the broad, or the narrow way,
on the road to life, or destruction. An
illustration may suffice. The weapons of
modern warfare, — there is incomparable
progress here ; but is it forwards for the
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 5
Christian man, or backwards ? Science,
Art, Wealth ; all the self-born virtues, and
their emulations ; hatred, revenge, and glory,
second murderous skill and invention ; and
tread the winepress of battle. But does not
the very existence of particular societies and
nations depend upon these violent arbitra-
ments ; and does not the wealth and perma-
nence of the faculties of violence also likewise
so depend ? Is not that vague general
boast, civilization, at the mercy of the
violence ; to say nothing of the substance
of common freedom in homes ? And are
not the issues in the hands of the most
unscrupulous and evil men, exalted by
excess of self-love into demoniacs ?
5. This is from the gross temporal
side ; and dominion over souls and
minds from the invisible spiritual side, is
even more destructive. It destroys the
man internally ; and at the same time con-
6 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
dones and indulges the outer works of his
devil.
6. The moral is, that all speculations
about the human race, and the lastingness
of particular parts of it, are futile, which do
not take account of the regeneration of
individual men, in which alone the new adult
infancy, adolescence and manhood can be
achieved and found. Civilization, whatever
it mean, and Savagery, are alike destitute of
these epochs. They can come but slowly.
Each evil thing in an individual has to be cast
out, and stopped from becoming hereditary.
The proportion of men and women in which
this arrest is effected, determines the ad-
vancement of the race ; the Lord being
constantly acknowledged as the Giver of its
victories and the Father of its good.
7. There is then no continuous develop-
ment of mankind per se, but only fatal
evolution of consequences ; spiritual gravi-
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 7
tation in person, space, and time. The
Laureate says truly " that through the ages
one increasing purpose runs," but more
doubtfully, that ''the thoughts of men are
widened by the circle of the suns." The
increasing purpose is of God's mind, not of
man's; but the widening of the thoughts
otherwise by solar procedure is temporal,
geographical and mechanical ; and in no-
wise just or integral. Thoughts were
widened so in Egypt, and so in Assyria ;
but the width did not last; it had not the
broadness of the " truth of good."
8. Progress as an idol has vast human
sacrifices to answer for : whole races offered
up to it in immolation. This is one
reason of our iterated refutation of the
current dogma of the savage man as the
well-head of life and history. We have no
quarrel with the savage, but only difference
with his mistaken patrons. Livingstone on
8 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
his last visit to England said of his dear
Africa which he was looking forward to,
" My many friends are there ; all of them are
heathens, and most of them are savages."
This is intelligible and humane ; and the
savage is in a £Ood almoner's care. But he
is out of place as a speculative beginning of
religion and church, and also of mythology.
He is no tent of the most ancient worship;
no floor to the Tabernacle of Abraham ; and
no foundation stone, ever so minerally
subterranean, to the Temple of Jerusalem ;
still less to the New Temple. He fits
into no such edifices. Neither theoretically
into societies as edifices. And to pose him
as having "a field- marshal's baton in his
knapsack," is to make progress fatal and
venomous. It means that he has his
cunning demagogues ; and rises up through
their creed, by his own right, into the mind
of rule as an admitted factor. Godless
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG V.
progress, of which he is the assumed
beginning, implies this. It means no divine
guidance, and therefore is the permitted push
of all the lusts of " the natural man." Take
two Statesmen, one of them a volume of
programme and progress, who obeys and
hothouses the likings and tendencies of his
masses ; the false hopes and ideals : and
another, who holds their deluge at bay ; and
letting whatever can endure, endure as long,
as ever it rightfully can ; altering wisely
without hearkening to dictates from below :
and you will have two results to justify our
positions. First, that Progress as an idol
and a heathenism immolates the races it
pretends to serve. And second, that Pro-
gress when it means Wisdom in wide action,
o
is the curb and blessing of mankind, and
the unflattering conscience and religion : the
progress of self-control. Also the place of
issue of stable liberty and its strong militia.
i o RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
9. Observe that the idolatrous progress
now so largely represented, pleads Fate, and
is actually the ultima ratio of the savage
man, and of his modern representative, ' the
people, the only source of all legitimate
power.' The other progress, of which little
may be extant, is founded in Freewill, and
knows by its special intellect that ages
may elapse before any of its ideals can be
gratified ; and also that the best and highest
ideals can never be realized here below.
The difference between the progress from
the savage upwards, and from the wise man
downwards is illustrated in every human
mind which attends to conduct. In regard
to attainment of professed objects, it is the
difference between the impossible and the
possible. The confirmed minions of fate
are bound to its abysses ; to the final com-
pulsions and the " eternal workhouses." The
men of Freewill, leaning upon its trials and
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y 1 1
ever correctible reasons, have two boundless
futures before them, — indigenes utriusque
mundi ; and a promised Kingdom.
10. The reader, it is hoped, — the gentle
reader, — will excuse, and even appreciate,
this preliminary walk, before entering a wide
field of dissertation, into some practical
consequences. No belief is so abstract,
especially if it comes from the inward places
of the will and understanding, as not to beat,
with the force of its descent, or the gush of
its ascent, with its free inspiration, or despotic
invasion, upon the ultimate platform of deeds
and works ; at first in a single mind, and
then in larger and greater fields of power.
And this is the justification we offer of our
disproof and rejection of what at first sight
may seem a harmless creed, — the dogma of
progress from the savage man.
PRELIMINARIES.
The Occasion of this Essay.
i i. The present slight attempt to indicate
an origin and place for Mythology not
generally accorded to it, was immediately
occasioned by Fontanelle s forgotten common
sense, an article in The St. James's Gazette,
of Oct. 20, 1886. The writer's solution
was the scientist view, that whatever is
odd and strange in Mythology, whatever is
hieroglyphic in distinction to plain modern
type ; whatever is not in literal accord with
the experience and exactitude of the present
day ; and cannot be tested as strict sensual
fact by evidence and especially by science ;
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. i 3
is to be relegated ultimately to the untutored
strivings and upward gropings of the savage
man. He is to be reckoned the original
Poet of it. And he is judged heavily by
the learned essayist, almost as if he were an
author deserving criticism, for his presump-
tuous mistakes and ignorance of the latest
agnosticism. I have attempted to show that
he is not guilty of the alleged authorship, and
that far other names and races are entitled
in it, and endorse it.
Evolution versus Creation.
i 2. The attitude of the scientist, I will not
say, scientific, and of a part of the literary,
I must not say, learned, world, to this
department, Mythology, is maintained in
the current teaching of the materialist
schools with respect to nature generally
and her origins and issues. Evolution is
the name for it. While holding absolutely
1 4. RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
that for mankind, and for all species of
things outside, rising from the ranks is the
order, discipline, and law, we hold besides
that there is a divine marshal who is the
source of this militant merit - order, and
Who has revealed Himself as such. His
therefore is the promotion from the dust
to the man, from the man to the angel, and
from the present to the future. Regarding
this merely as a theory, it would be hard
for the learned Essayist to say, after the
chain of evidence I produce, that the latter
view does not run through the facts, and
is not as workable as the contrary position
of the world - outcome from the savage
man. It might even seem that the writer
whom I thus meet is on the other hand guilty
of Myth, and in this particular is in the ranks
of those he looks down upon. And if so,
then a great part of our modern thoughts
about nature and her inherent tendency and
RE VELA T10N AND M YTHOLOG Y. 1 5
progress, is myth in an uninspired sense ;
namely in the risible sense in which our
friend means all myth : in the sense of
guesswork and strong baseless persuasions.
The Savage Man Proper and the Savage
Man Universal.
13. The savage man is becoming extinct
in two ways. In the first place, regarding
him as the savage proper, there is less and
less room for him in the spaces of the
human world. His generations stop,
stricken by their uselessness. The foothold
of man in creation is use. The savage is
of less and less use to the brethren, to the
general humanity. Contact with other and
higher races, even interbreeding, which
might be supposed to improve the species
in him, destroys him. It is for him a fatal
mesalliance, a mixture of destructions. He
cannot withstand the vicious mind and body
1 6 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
of civilization, the drinks and the lusts ;
they require a stronger constitution of
wickedness than his poor timber, to
outbreed and outlive them. For he is
naturally, with no help for it, near his end.
14. In the second place, there is another
savage man, also with an origin from
degeneracy, but with a different scope in
him, and, maybe in some rare cases, with a
different future. In distinction to the
savage proper, we may call this one the
savage universal. He lives in the human
woods and wildernesses, in the deserts of
man : really, though not always visibly,
beneath the bottom of the social scale.
The savage proper is in no relation to the
social scale, pressed upon from above by no
inequalities, but absolutely free for ruin.
But the other savage is ground down, and
might it would at first seem also be ground
up, and like plaster of Paris, harden towards
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 17
a new social individual, — if he chose. Who
is he ? By him we intend the mass of
helpless and decaying people, who, with
bodily powers intact or with powers ruined
ancestrally or personally, are of no use to
our Maximus Homo, to orderly organic
society. These savages are the opprobria
of civilization ; the disgrace of the state.
They exist in all ranks and classes, from
noble to simple; but in multitude at the
lowest end. A constant product of all ages,
they are especially numerous in luxurious
times. They are circumpressed by society.
If you could weed them out in mass from
the body corporate, and plant them away
from civilized intercourse in sufficient tracts
of wood and wilderness and hunting-ground,
the survivors of the exodus in a generation
or two would be all equal socially whatever
their ancestry ; they would forget the
previous towns and conditions, and would
i S RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
realize liberty and fraternity as such words
could belong to them. They would be
forced to foray for hourly subsistence. They
would be found clothed with the skins of
brutes if they were visited, and would
descend through the bronze and iron ages
to the stone age ; and would improvise the
lost arts in "celts" and flint implements.
Parallelism between the two Men.
15. Thus much requires to be said to
justify the view that the savage man is a
necessary decay and detritus wherever
mankind is on the downward slope, with
religion dying out, with conscience devoid
of a divine inspirer and ruler, and with
moral life at the mercy of the selfhood or
propriuwin of the abundant lusts and pretexts
of which it becomes the voluntary institute
and creation. Accordingly, in seeking for
this justificatory universal savage, we find
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 19
him in the useless man in all ranks and
conditions. We do not here intend the
criminal classes, the active artisans and
workmen of hell ; nor the sick and impotent,
who deserve all help, and loving pity ; but
the loafing man who is in some relation and
respect to society, though not of it. All
those, in fine, who whether well or ill have
no "good of use" in them. As we said above,
this savage man is imprisoned in society.
In fact, he disappears in it, and is content
so to disappear ; his denomination is not
known, and one has need of a philosophical
pin to pick him out like a whelk from his
shell of clothes. Indeed one reason of his
invisibility is, that society puts compulsory
cloth, more or less complete, or ragged,
upon him. Also there are no waste spaces
for him to escape to, and stand out. He
comes now into a full world, whereas the
savage proper went down into a deserted
2o RE 1 ELA TION AND M\ 'THOLOG Y.
and emptied world. He is gendered for
the most part in cities and towns, and
submits to their necessities because he
cannot get out of them. What regenera-
tion awaits him we know not. If not
actively evil, he might be educable, and
emerge from ne er-do-zvccl and loafing, and
leave charity undiseased by parasites on its
head and in its heart. But otherwise, like
the savage proper, he dies out ; though his
remains are concealed by civilization ; and
in that respect have not the same interest
for the scientists as the bones and imple-
ments and kitchen-middens of the savage
proper. Of course he originates nothing
but his own breed, and this for a time.
And as you get no mythology from the
savage proper, so you get no art or common
sense, no Shakespeare, Bacon or Tennyson
from the civilizee savage. We note then
that there is a running parallelism between
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V. 2 1
the two savages, of cause, mode, and con-
summation ; only taking into account the
different circumstances between the more
primitive world, and the world of primogeni-
ture, and of broad acres, deserted country-
sides and villages and big towns, of to-day.
Consequences of putting the Savage Man
in his Place.
16. It is pleasant to be candid, as our great
Bismarck is. And therefore we avow one
object, and that a principal object, of these
and the following humble studies. We have
long seen that if the savage man can
be truly and justly displaced from the
throne which he now occupies in the
imagination of the heart of scientism, and
stand no longer as the virtual seed and
blood royal of humanity, his overthrow will
have good consequences of riddance, and a
world of inferior wild pretenders will clear
22 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
out along with him. The series of infima
of which he is the last and most important
link, will be confronted in him, and denied
their " pass ; " and will no longer extend
fungoid relations to man ; unless in the
confession of admitted parasites, external
or internal ; so to be caught and dealt with.
This, while denying no progressive order,
will admit from above and from within,
creation which scientism abhors, and be
a safe frontier of wise fortresses against
the insurgent demos of things. The frontier
is of ends and causes, with substantial
garrisons of uses, and is held by One
Divine Man in Whom they love and live.
17. Divine intervention, unremitting and
continual, is thus the fact and the law
of every successive rank, and one rank
never passes into another. No mineral
can become a vegetable ; no vegetable can
ever be an animal ; and no animal a man.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 23
A great gulf, spiritual, is fixed between
each plane, and between the upper and
lower corresponding creations of each.
Ordained form is the castle of each
individual creature in all its multitudes, and
that castle is impregnable. And according
to the form is the creative influx into it.
And therefore it is that the forms of life
live ; that the forms of vegetation grow ;
and that the mineral form in all its varieties
underbuilds and materiates the rest. The
man-form is a man with a conscience on the
same conditions ; but of spiritual form and
organism. All descends from above, or
what is the same thing, comes forth from
within.
A Plea for the Savage disallowed ; his
Case does not bear it.
18. There is a possible consideration in
which scientism might still entrench and
24 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
defend its savage man, and put him forward
as the fons ct scaturigo of all our good
things. This namely. That the primitive
savage is not lightly to be identified with
the perishing savage tribes as we now know
them, in Tasmania, Australia, and elsewhere.
The vernal age of the savage should not
be confounded with his winter. For the
beginning of every true race has a zest
and a spring in it which is lost to power
and freshness as the series oldens. Young
love's dream illustrates here. Might
Fontanelle's presumed poetism of the savage
be an instance of this ? The assumption
of such a fellow begs the question. For
this new savage would be an abstraction
without a Genesis to lean upon, and no
relation to the old bones which are all we
know of the real savage man ; who by
his ways and means is clearly on the same
level in arts and senses with the existing
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 25
tribes of savages. I do not suppose that
the above plea would be acceptable to
scientism, amounting as it does to the claim
that the early wild man was an infant of
delights, a man of joyful genius, and was
himself a golden age. But were it taken
up, it would be a piece of the true doctrine,
which is, that man was created as a special
human form with no ancestral evil heredity,
though on the lowest scale of faculties and
powers, and was raised by his creator and
maker through a process of divine education
to his first estate when he became a
Celestial Man.
19. But otherwise the presumed origin
of the presumed primal savage is not a
ground for regarding him as a promising
young man, the launch of " the argosy of the
ages." The current view of his museum-
keepers is, that he is the child of the
Lucretian slime-world, and hails from a
26 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
low form of mollusks. Genius is joy, and
wants joy to live in. All birth too, after its
throes, comes into a prepared world of
mother and father, and the first smiles and
laughs of infants light and warm the world.
But the evoluted man comes by no love
and no parturition, but is made by the
struggle of his motherless self before he
is a self. How for the delight that begins
all good things is he different from the
slime and the fish, his wombless misfortunes ?
We must therefore give him up as the babe
of grace and the first poet ; and be content
with the old ultimate savage as scientific
sextons turn him up, and then turn him
over and over.
Reversion to the original Stock besets
and threatens his honours.
20. Great promise is held out on the
other hand by the eminent Sir John
RE VELA T10N AND M YTHOLOG V. 27
Lubbock in the very nudity and pocket-
lessness of the savage man as compared
with the elegant wealth of his presumed
children, — Art, Science, civilization, the moral
and the social worlds, natural religion, and
above all, endless progress and advancing
light and liberty. These, the alleged works
and institutions of his scientist descendants,
are indeed longissimo ccelo apart and away
from the bogmen and the cavemen, and
the flint implements. If the push and
generative impetus of the wild men have
kneaded up so vast a result, they are indeed
both promising and performing savages.
It is admitted by Sir John that a few
great slips have occurred in which empires
have tumbled out of men's hands, and
broken to pieces. Nay, not a few. The
earth is raised and thickly covered with
their potsherds ; and the ruin is directly
traceable to the baseness and evil of men.
28 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
But still the sum and substance of this
present age, for instance, is large and
surprising if credited to the troglodytes.
And yet the breakages of the self-made
crockery are a ground of fear for the
whole promise of the savage man, and for
the ratiocinations spun from him. And for
a reason of science. Is there not much
Darwinian true talk of reversion to original
types so soon as culture is intermitted
or careless. Chrysanthemums ungardened
are poor little flowers soon, and roses the
same. Men also can easily become lower
than brutes, and nations of such men cease
to be nations.
21. Reversion to the original type is
therefore on the evolutive ground a perilous
prospect; indeed an abyssal perspective.
For the first sad landing downwards is
the savaee man himself, with all the train
of cities and civilizations, religions and
RE VELA T10N AND MYTHOLOG Y. 29
societies, progresses, and scientisms, " tele-
scoped " and wrecked back in him by the
first collision with fate. But he cannot
stop here ; or rather he does stop here ;
and his ancestry, the headless mollusk, and
the pregnant mud, in cruel series, inherit
further backwards in the advancing deera-
o o
dation-field : and in the end the mineral
and gaseous and fire universes, the pre-
sumed evolvers of his extinguished life,
are the bottomless executors and adminis-
trators. The consolation is that these are
worked up again somewhere else into
similar ignominies. And so on for ever
and ever through " the boundless realm
of unending change," which is built of the
two biggest tumours in the pondering ovaries
of materialism, infinite time and infinite
space. Sure, the mud had better have been
downright humble mud, and the fish have
kept to his just scales. This, which is here
3 o REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
set down is, however, the plain end of all
boastings about and hopes from the savage
man as an aboriginal. It is the blue
empyrean of our admired and in his own
walk our admirable Tyndall.
22. On the other hand, the Divine Man
showing Himself by Revelation, and giving
Human Religion perpetually forth to acknow-
ledgment and life, is the true account of
all the manhood we possess, and of all
the natural blessings we enjoy; and the
denial of this Lord, and the heresies of
ourselves, are the sound explanation of all
our savagery, and of all our natural curses.
Man in this World is an inevitable
Religion and Supernature of some sort.
23. Man has been called a religious
animal, and the phrase has a truth in it.
The original impress of Jehovah God upon
him is so almighty, that even if he becomes
RE VELA T10N A ND M YTHOLOG V. 3 1
an animal, that dictate never leaves him,
but resides as a remainder in his nature,
and lives as religious tendency through
all his surviving vicissitudes. From this
ground the entire substance of humanity
down to a late period, has never, in any
sane part of it, been nature alone, but has
always been charged more or less feebly
with supernature. So much is this the
case that the naked apprehension of sensual
facts has been a late invention and dis-
covery, and is difficult to be maintained
by the scientific mind without a continual
controversy on the road with religious
influxions. Even so great a scientist as
Proctor keeps up a running fight with
these throughout his spirited bagpipe-march
from matter against spirit. All poetry,
all painting, has been thus impressed and
influenced ; and absolute realism is still
afar off, realism enlisting all the mental
32 REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
faculties. The reason is that there is a
God Who reveals Himself and hides Him-
self; and where He hides Himself, Atheism
is compelled to grope after Him in many
ways, and to invent towards Him in many.
Pressure from above, tradition from behind,
necessity of decency around, all work this
way. And there is only one Worker. In
this age, however, natural fact in its mere
omni-mental veracity, craves to be sought
and told ; and the reason here is that
spiritual fact, to which as ultimate truth
it belongs, wants it, as pyramids want
their bases, as society wants honesty, and
as Heaven wants its seedfield, the Earth.
And the final reason is that since the
Incarnation, and the perfect doctrine of it
now vouchsafed, the Christian Religion is
not only a Divine but also a strictly natural
and rational Religion ; and therefore finds its
testimony in all truth, and will repose upon it.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY. 33
REVELATION AND
MYTHOLOGY.
Revelation touching Correspondences.
24. "At this day it is not known what
correspondence is : but in the Most
Ancient times it was of all things well
known. To those indeed who lived then,
the Science of Correspondences was the
science of sciences ; and it was so universal
that all their Tablets and Books were written
by Correspondences. ... I am instructed
that the men of the Most Ancient Church,
which existed before the Flood, were of so
celestial a genius that they spake with the
angels of heaven, and they were empowered
to speak with them by and through corre-
c
34 R£ VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
spondences. Hence the state of their
wisdom came to be such in regard to
whatever thing they saw in the world, that
they thought of it not only naturally, but
spiritually at the same time ; therefore also
conjointly with the angels of heaven.
Furthermore I am instructed that the
Enoch who is spoken of in Genesis v. 21-24,
and those who were with him, collected
correspondences from the lips of the most
ancient men, and propagated the knowledge
of these correspondences to posterity. In
consequence of this, the science of corrre-
spondences was not only known in many
kingdoms of Asia, but also was cultivated
and worked, particularly in the land of
Canaan; in Egypt, Assyria, Chaldea, Syria,
Arabia ; and in Tyre, Sidon and Nineveh ;
and from thence it was carried over into
Greece; where, however, it was turned into
Fable, as may appear from the oldest
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 35
writings of the Greeks." Swedenborg, True
Christian Religion, n. 201, 202.
Mythology.
25. The absurdities of mythology is an
easy theme to a scientific and anti-
mythological age ; say in a word, to an age
of ratiocination and so-called rationalism.
It is forgotten that the greater part of what
we know of classical mythology is handed
down to us in poetry, and was presumably
not what it appears to be, an everyday
creed of religion influencing the minds of
the common people. There is no reason
to think that mythology stood in any such
relation to the mental condition of any
race, savage, or civilized, as, for instance,
dogmatic Christianity to-day occupies to the
hopes and fears of the nations which profess
it. Parts of mythology were indeed known
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
to the heathen conscience, as containing
the general belief in a future state; the
whole true doctrine of the Elysian Fields,
and of the retributions of Tartarus, are
among these parts; but Jupiter and Juno
and the Gods are aside of them. So also
for the warlike North. Valhalla is a
general record of an immortal state less dim
and more gross than the Elysian Fields ;
but there is nothing to show that the
commonalty of the Northern Races was
influenced in its everyday mind and
consciousness by Odin, Thor and Tyr.
These personifications, however they ori-
ginated, dwelt in heroic poetry, and became
a part of it, and appealed to the popular
mind from this embodiment.
26. A separation is here discernible
between a residual religion which had
still some guidance in it, and a mythology
which now belonged to the imagination,
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 37
the fancy, and the senses ; and which has
to be accounted for.
27. A corresponding separation may be
found for the same races between mytho-
logy as a lever of causation, and their plain
appreciation of causes and reasons in every-
day life. Like ourselves, and in some
departments more than ourselves, they were
artisans and handicraftsmen, workers in
metal, potters, architects and artists ; also
farmers and manufacturers, cultivators,
breeders of stock, hunters, and militant
tribes and peoples, beautiful in bow, sword,
spear and shield. The notions of causation
now attributed to them were no factors in
their day's works. In the mass of the people
such notions were hardly extant. The
myths supposed to hold them would soon
have died out had they not been conserved
in Poetry and Saga. As there was no
natural philosophy to speak of in the days
38 RE I 'ELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
coeval with the birth of mythology, so
whenever curiosity about origins arose, the
folks perhaps shrugged their shoulders in
poetry and saga, and ended questions, not
vexed by them as we are. But they did
not think as we think that they had solved
them. Their lives were natural and
practical notwithstanding the presence of
mythology in their midst. The great works
and traditions, the penetrating influences,
these races as wholes have left behind them,
are in evidence here.
28. Also they had kept for them somehow,
perhaps by their poetry in some union with
their common sense and natural religion, a
vital characteristic in both departments, the
religious and the philosophical, — that when
they did attempt to enter either, they were
not skeptics, or deniers of everything that
lies beyond the senses. This kept the
supernatural open for them in a measure ;
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 39
it rendered them willing recipients of the
gifts of all their Muses ; and made them
fontal in the style and manner and institu-
tion of the great Literature which by
Providence has followed in their wake.
29. In limiting the actual power of
mythology over the classic world, of which
we now chiefly speak, we cannot forget that
besides the mythologies we have also the
temples of the Gods and Goddesses still
standing over the South and the East, and
corresponding heathen edifices in the New
World, and in ruder lineaments in the
Scandinavian North. These signs betoken
something which we must call worship all
over the world in those extended days.
But was it anything of what we now mean
by worship ? Was it ecclesiasticism or
meeting, was it church or chapel ? Was
it even anything like the worship of the
Virgin and the Saints in the Romish Church ?
4 o RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
The question is an interesting one, and
touches upon the whole possible piety in
our sense of the Greek and Roman times.
If it was not worship, what was it ? Rather
it seems to have been an institution of
festivals of self-indulgence in the name of
the Gods ; voluptuous festivals, whether of
sensualism, or asceticism ; festivals of which
we have a faint survival in the social doings
of Christmas and Easter in Christian lands.
For given the phenomena of Christmas and
Easter, and the problem being to account for
them in the main, — Bacchus and the Satyrs
and Pan as presidents might be the
resultant induction for many houses. We
of course have worship and Christian
benefactions besides. The classic peoples
also had orgies and mysteries, summaries
and paroxysms of sensualism in the guise
of religious rites ; an abundant ritualism
in this fashion. But their Gods, though
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 41
personated through matchless sculpture, and
enshrined in Doric and Corinthian archi-
tecture, had no piety proper attached to
them, but were the sanctions of great
holidays, and their oracles were sought
for assurance and destiny-mongering by
their votaries, who, be sure, were not of the
common herd. In the manipulation of all
this, apart from worship, there was ample
room for the existence and maintainance of
a powerful Priesthood, as in the Papal
manipulation at the present day. And yet
it was not worship in the classic period, but
the occasional uncontrolled riot of the
natural man with pretexts for Gods ; and
it had no ordaining influence over life.
The corollary is, that this mythology with
its shrines, oracles and temples, however
it might lend itself to their lusts and vices,
yet by no means befooled the people in
their common human faculties in the manner
4: RE J ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
supposed by those who assume that the
myths are the evolution and creation of the
savage man himself, and that in them he
is bound in his own chains. On the
contrary, we begin to suspect, that they
are not the product of the savage ; and
were so to speak palmed upon civilized
populations, descending by methods not
difficult with knowledge now to hand, to
comprehend ; and did not greatly injure
their intelligence for the reasons already
stated. For if at one time almost every-
body received the mythical Gods, no one
in a rational sense believed them : and
common reason was thus intact.
Idolatry.
30. This leads to the question of Idolatry
with the same races. We commend the
subject to the learned as a new field. A
chasm exists between the Eastern Empires
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 43
with Egypt, and Greece and Rome in this
respect. The Worship of Baal in particular,
with its great Priesthood, was a genuine
Idolatry; and human sacrifices, even of sons
and daughters, entered into it. The Gods
of the nations required propitiation in this
way. These rites flourished among the
grandest communities in Biblical times.
They were altered traditions of the repre-
sentative sacrifices of the Ancient Church,
and survived in Christianity in the sacrifice
of the Son to appease the wrath of the
Father, and in the atonement supposed to be
effected thereby. This indeed attributes
the mind of fallen man to God, and deprives
Him of His unity. But it also attests the
earliest knowledge by perceptive revelation
that Christ would be a sacrifice in a true
sense as the Redeemer. A proof that these
powerful idolatries were the perversions of
a high primitive estate. The Gods of the
44 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
nations which the Israelites were com-
manded to war with and exterminate, were
the objects of this idolatrous Worship.
31. In Greece and Rome the case was
different, and the idols were of a milder kind.
It is doubtful whether human sacrifices
were perpetuated there. As Swedenborg
says, the ancient correspondences which
were at the root of all, "in Greece were
turned into Fable." The personalities of
the Asiatic demonolatry there disappeared,
and the Grecian Gods were human Greeks
on a higher platform. Note the progress
here. It was a progress not from any
savage state upwards, but came after huge
heathen civilizations and priesthoods ; and
after the Israelitish and Jewish Churches
had been planted by Jehovah in the world.
It was a permitted degradation and
diminution of colossal idolatries, in which
idolatry itself in its combat with Christianity
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 45
at length in its nominal forms died out ; to
survive however and stream onwards in
the Romish Babylon. The Grecian deities
descended from a new spiritual world into
a natural world already charged with the
coming of the Saviour ; mythology in them
was shorn of its greater infernalities, and a
chastened humanity such as the Greek could
represent was portrayed in some of his Gods.
Superstition.
32. It occurs to remark that idolatry and
mythology occupy in some sense an inverse
relation to superstition. Of course they
are penetrated and permeated by it. But
their forms absorb it, and it exists as a
sphere around them, rather than as a Figure.
The more definite the idol and the more
developed the mythology, the less do the
panic fears and reasonless hopes of man
prey upon the universal inane. They are
■16 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
concentrated upon the Gods so far as any
religiosity exists. Pan himself becomes one
of the deities, and is measurably limited
thereby. The dynasty of his fellow
divinities compels a human shape upon
him. The condition of a superstition thus
absorbed is not found to any extent unless
as a dying remainder among savage tribes.
Accordingly, except for their fetishes, which,
however, have no particular individualities,
they live in a limbo of vague superstition.
The remainders of all the previous churches
and races like disembodied ghosts are about
them, but in no recognizable shapes, and
the " cosmic sense " of these ghosts is the
very element of superstition. Savages may
indeed at times, through extraordinary
persons and occasional magical influences,
escape back in part into their lost mytho-
logical condition ; but otherwise they have
no mythologies, only fear of their own
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 47
dead men and women. And they stand
not as the beginnings but as the plain ends
of heathen humanity ; itself the termination
and mortification of a series of churches.
33. The same thing holds in a higher
sense with Christians. The Lord is their
Shepherd. The Divine Humanity of Christ
is their personal Redeemer and Saviour.
In proportion as they hold to this, their
daily lives and cares are taken up, borne,
and absorbed by Him. In proportion as
they quit the Divine Image, they live in
the superstitions of their own minds ; in the
carving out of their own destinies beyond
the day ; in fears for the future ; and in
fortune - tellings about death through the
stars, the cards, and " the spirits."
34. The superstitious state may be put
aside or abjured, it may be cast off by
instruction received from without, but it can
never of itself be developed into a higher
48 RE I 'ELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
condition. There is no radical element in it
but the lapsing savage man, the soil of decay.
35. There is an image of all things in
all things. In London to-day there is a
lowered image of the world since the
beginning. There is an upper, lower, and
middle stratum of spirits and bodies with
their several intentions, conscious and un-
conscious. The lower is not developed
into the higher, though the higher may
degrade itself into the lower, and the lower
by a godly life may raise itself and rise into
the higher. But the classes as wholes stand
in their own lines though individuals circulate
up and down in them. The savage men at the
bottom, of whom there are many, are not the
parents of the future age, and do not portend
or attain to its spiritual or bodily culture.
Fontanelle's forgotten common sense.
36. Coming now to Fontanelle as reported
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 49
by the learned Essayist in the St. James s
Gazette, we observe that his great man
believes that "the early men were in a
state of almost inconceivable savagery and
ignorance," and that the Greek and other
myths are inherited from human beings in
that condition. That the first narratives of
the earliest men were full of monstrous
things " because they were given out
by people bound to see a great many
things which had no existence." This,
says Fontanelle, was helped by such
" philosophy " as was even then extant,
and which made men look for " causes of
things." ( A philosophy which, on this
view, raised itself through a line of Greek
thinkers from Thales to Aristotle and Plato.)
And as these poor savages experienced that
they were themselves causes of effects, as
well as persons, they " sprang to the con-
clusion that all hidden causes were also
D
5 o RE VELA TION AND MYTHQLOG V.
persons." In which case their minds were
facile to universal and general propositions ;
and capable of striking near the centre.
The Greek Mythology originated in
Greece ; piecemeal, but rapidly.
$j. Now with regard to the position that
the Greek myths were inherited from a race
"in almost inconceivable savagery and
ignorance," what is the ground on which it
stands ? Where is the Greek mythology,
full of narratives, genealogies and details
now summarized in great dictionaries, before
and out of historic Greece ? Where is the
record of the bare savages from whom the
Greeks were descended ? All we can know
of the place of their mythology is, that it
probably originated as we have it in Greece.
And as Minerva came full-armed from the
aching brain of Jove, — what a divinity-
symbol is there, — so the masterpieces of
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOL OGY. 51
Greek mythology came fully formed from —
What ? We shall hope to find a dawning
answer to this in the sequel. In the mean-
time we assert provisionally that man is a
spirit among spirits at his best and at his
worst, and thus always in the background
has exceptional powers which beasts have
not ; powers more or less. There is a
history of Greek Literature, but no similar
history of Greek Mythology. Part by part
it probably originated oracle-wise in cursive
hours when the race was charged with it,
and ripe for its birth. Voluspd originated
thus in the North in its fulness of time ; a
Vala, an entranced Seeress, spoke it forth.
It was taken into record and memory, and
ages repeated it. It did not require a
longer labour than Sir Isaac Newton wanted
for receiving the concept of gravitation ;
though his was a somewhat different kind of
passivity. Such births, if we knew the mode
52 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
of them, never take long in their several
pieces. In the case of mythology especially
they are mere concepts ; they involve no
cucleellino- of the brain, and can be worked
out no further. They want no alteration.
They are given in full armour, such as it is,
whether of gold, or of brass. Fontanelle
knew nothing of this kind of birth, and
accordingly thought that this mythology,
which no doubt came from different tripods
bit by bit, but always in short seances, was
the product of the fogs of a struggling
causative faculty, and developed itself in the
Darwinian method through prehistoric ages.
But reason as we see had nothing directly
to do with it ; and when once the mytho-
logical oracie-door was opened, the multi-
tudinous details would come forth in one or
two generations. Not but what it could
proceed from grosser to finer, like all human
inventions, whether of Poetry, Drama, or any
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 5 3
kind of art and invention : but this is not
development from savagery or the brute
degree of the genus homo, but starting from
an adequate and powerful germ, and then
following the inevitable course of all human
powers and seeds in the succession of time :
the womb of some aiding form of society
receiving and nourishing them. The new
advance may indeed be a plane of fall from
a previous state ; but it transacts its own
stages, and makes a traject through them,
having a rise, a culmination, and a decline.
38. History is full of these lessons, and
in all great or typical nations there are such
series observable. In our own country we
have the age of cathedrals, the age of drama,
the age of railways, the age (now) of rail-
way novels. When these realizations have
done their work, ages of other genius prevail.
Each series is produced by its own spirits,
muses, or causes. The age of mythology
54 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y.
came so, but it could come on only Delphic
conditions.
Each Mythology originates from and
with its own Tracts of Heathens.
i
39. As the Grecian Mythology as an
organic product originated in Greece, so also
every Mythology arose in its specific form
in the countries in which it had place and
power, and in a sense was the product of
the land. Thus the Indian Mythology is
essentially Indian, and is of, and like, the
Indian peoples. The like is true of the
Scandinavian Mythology, the specific attri-
butes of which belong to the northern
peoples, and are peculiar to them, extend-
ing where they extended and penetrated.
There is no known case of the transplanting
of a mythology to heterogeneous races ;
there are no missionary " conversions " of this
kind. The Greek Mythology did indeed
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 5 5
overspread Rome, for the two states were
conterminous, and their civilizations were
level with each other, and Rome exhibits
early traces of being a participator in the
Grecian myths. Mythology thus is essenti-
ally gentile or heathen. The spirit which
engendered it is, however, in each case
common to the whole world, and lies in the
necessity to the mind of man to acknowledge
and make acquaintance with a power above
itself, and to open a way, by giving it a
Name or names, to that power. The
pressure of this necessity on a new race
came no doubt as an ancestral spirit from
a previous mythology, and was full of its
ancient germs ; but this spirit, thus seminal,
found its soil and matrix in the genius and
affections of the new people over whom it
brooded, and in them produced a new
heathendom and its proper myths. We
may say as a rule that down to Christ every
56 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
mythology was age by age becoming
smaller, less illustrious in its contents, and
spiritually less commanding and comprehen-
sive. See above, n. 31. The Gods of Asia
and Egypt are awful presences compared to
the genteel divinities of Greece. This dis-
accords with the Fontanellian origin of the
myths from savages upwards ; for it shows
that, in association with gigantic architecture,
they have been greatest in the greatest
nations and civilizations ; and have under-
gone continual paring down and decline
through one civilized heathenism after
another.
It comes from Man, and is variously
anthropoid.
40. Fontanelle does not indeed formulate
that the mythologies had a long incubation,
but the factors he assumes lead to this view.
If mythology is a gross and multiform
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 57
philosophy of causation, any such product
takes time to make, and has to be thought
out, and to receive its nomenclature. In
this case ages might elapse, and generations
of unskilled savages be enofao-ed. But how
could their raw material, liable to get into
disgust and be forgotten daily, commend
itself to memory and tradition ? How
should Hesiods and Homers treasure it up ?
These difficulties are removed by the fact
that civilized, artistic and poetic races,
with divination, magic, trance, mediumship,
exciting festivals and mysteries with tripod-
sitters in their midst, were the composite
field and agency of origin. The Greek
mythology also, as already observed in
speaking of superstition, was a rescue from
materialist pantheism. Truly the Sun
wheeling round the world, or revolving in
any way, wanted a driver, and Phcebus
Apollo, a human god of light, supplied the
53 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
want. This was better than material law
excluding divinity : better for the simple
Greek if such there were, than the savage
degree of mere eyesight and sensation
and mathematics. The whole movement
of heaven and earth exacts of the mind a
divine Charioteer ; and the doctrine now,
the oldest and the newest, is, that a personal
God is the mover, a divine Apollo ; and
that his appearing residence in heaven is
in a Sun, a Spiritual Sun. And Phcebus
more readily than materialist law, itself a
diffused superstition, is translateable into
this revealed truth.
A Note from the Elder Edda.
41. The Scandinavian Mythology is
strongly anthropoid in its own gross way ;
and even the stuff of its world is organic,
of Giant-human origin. Thus Ymir was
a Giant who " lived in the hoar of ages,
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y 59
when there was neither sand, nor sea, nor
cold waves ; when the earth was nowhere,
and high heaven nowhere ; there was the
gape of emptiness ; but no green herb."
Then Mundane things were made out of
Ymir. "Out of his flesh the earth was
shapen ; out of his bones the mountains :
heaven out of the head of the frosty Jotun ;
and the seas out of his sweat." There is
" a method in this madness ; " a pointing at
the human ground of creation ; which is as
it were not a raw material, but a prepared
pre-organism for the Genesis work of the
world-maker. " Let us make Man in our
Image;" the mere ground - nature being
already prospectively descended from him
and full of him. Note also hrimkaldr Jotun
= frost-giant ; as in a certain stage of
creation pointing to an era of cold, a purpose
of " mighty winters," stopping off the heat of
divine ends and intentions, and making the
6o REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
possible temperature which homo protoplastus
could endure. There is suggestion of wis-
dom too in the cold head of heaven. In
fact this myth like many others is as a seed
which can grow into various perceptions.
The Earliest Men and the Early Men :
who they were.
42. Fontanelle speaks as if he knows all
about the " earliest men" and the "early men,"
who however are two very different classes
of devolutions. In truth he knows nothing of
either of these departed humanities. Bound
in the ratiocinations of France, he sees many
things which have no existence. One of
these non-exstantia is, that the earliest men
were left to their own unaided state to rise
in the human scale. And the obverse, which
has existence, and which he does not see,
is, that their direct Father, Jehovah God,
helped them. The Bible in Genesis,
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 6 1
chapters i. to xi., as Bacon remarks, is
the only record there is of the earliest and
the early men ; there is no other ; it is a
spiritual record of their minds and souls,
which in their variations are the summits
and summaries of all history.
The Church named Man or Adam in
Genesis.
43. The Bible tells that the earliest men,
the Church or Inspiration named Adam, was
right in perceiving that "all hidden causes
are personal," because that race was created
and made in the image and likeness of God,
and God is One Person. Those men issuing
from Him, and by direct pressure of His
grace knowing and acknowledging Him,
yea, perceiving Him as their only Life,
could not be pantheists, any more than
a good son loving a good father and mother
could believe that the neighbourhood and
62 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
house he was born in had begot him. It
was, however, a late race, and an age-long
degradation of the race named Adam or
Man ; — a race that had descended by many
steps ; — which, still refusing Pantheism,
coined the fragments of perception, and of
tradition without perception, into personal
myths, of Jupiter and Juno, of Thor and
Odin, of Baal and Ashtaroth, of Brahma
and Vishnu ; and which after coining them,
preserved these myths in poem and story, —
in Fable, — and made the mythic persons do
duty vice God in not the explanation, but
the artful envelopment of the mysteries of
nature. Even so these myths, " incredible
and revolting " to scientism to-day, conserved
some shaping of the real creative cause in
the personality which lay in them ; they
were allowed for late nations and peoples
that wanted them ; and their committal to
Poetry was also an accommodation to a
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOGY. 63
memory that in deteriorating races would
have forgotten them apart from the amber-
conserving hardness of song. The same
poetic form also enabled them to resist the
dissolving agency of philosophy when it
came upon the scene, and also of any science
that might exist, and which of course was
averse to gods and goddesses.
Planes of Personal Causes recently
revealed. the world-tree.
44. These, the last poetical remainders of
the "science of correspondences," have a basis
from the spiritual world, which we now know
by a knowledge which is experimental and
unassailable, to contain all the persons who
have ever died from this and other planets.
All these are personal causes, and the laws
of nature and human nature carry out their
causation. They live in " the chance and
64 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG V.
change of the unsteady planets." The myths
contain hints and summaries of their presence.
The Edda, with its Yggdrasil, the World-
Tree, the Horse of Odin, the tremble and
vibration of nature — Yggr = vibration —
with the many destructive animals that gnaw
and consume its roots, its branches, and its
summit, — that myth is still something for
spiritual philosophy to dwell upon. No man
believed in the tree as a literal tree, any more
than in the trees of knowledge of good and
evil, and of life, in Genesis ; but it cor-
responded, and ever corresponds, to spiritual
experience in the world of men, and to much
physical fact in the world of nature ; and it
has Biblical sanctions and rebukes in it.
And from this example, whatever might
otherwise be said of these Myths, we see that
they are blunt and unsentimental, and do not
foster that modern softening of the brain and
hardening of the heart which is implied in
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 65
the Leibnitzian dogma, that " we live in the
best of all possible worlds."
Saturnia Regna. Grecian and Scandi-
navian Mythology attests a Primeval
Golden Age.
45. Moreover all the great mythologies
contained one core which is especially ' in-
credible and revolting " to the materialism of
the day, which assumes the dregs of the
winepress as the source of the wine of the
future. They all uttered some declaration
of a Golden Age from which the existing
man is a decline ; and some of them even
contained a prophecy of a restoration to
come at the end after purification by fire in
the fulness of time. Such is the case in
Voluspa, the book of creation and genera-
tion in the Edda. In its close, when slain
Baldur, the white, the pure, returns from
Hela, the lower earth, to the Earth of men,
66 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
the nations of the Righteous are received
into everlasting happiness by the Ruler come
to his kingdom, and the children of the
serpent are carried by Nidhoggr, the down-
hewer, the destroyer, the " serpent from
beneath," to the land of corpses, may we
say of the spiritually dead.
46. Again it is prophesied in the Book of
the Vala, that after the destruction of the
world, which is told in Apocalyptic symbols, —
the sun becoming black, and the serene stars
falling from heaven, — after the high heat has
played against heaven itself, — "the earth rises
vernal green a second time from the Ocean ;
and the gods meet on Ida-plains ; and dis-
course of the world - engirdling serpent ; 1
' In the Midgard serpent which girdles the world we have here
another testimony to the Biblical Correspondence of the Serpent in
the Word, as meaning, everywhere the sensual mind, — sensttale, —
which is the outermost, or encompassing mind, in which the amour
propre or proprium resides. In like manner with this, nearly the
whole of the particulars in Voluspa are susceptible of a Biblical
interpretation.
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOL OGY. 67
and call to mind the powers of fate, and the
ancient runes of thrice great Odin." And
moreover this. " The wonderful golden tables
shall there again be found in the grass ;
those which they had in the hoar of the ages."
What are these wonderful golden tables but
the record of the heavenly perceptions written
in the hearts of the first men, and now found
in Swedenborg's grass, for the understandings
of the present men to feed on ? 1
47. Again it is said in the Lay of
Vafthrudnir, that " after the mighty fivefold
winter a remnant of man is left ; that Life
and Life-desire are hoarded away in the
wood (holti) on the Mount of Mimir, the
golden treasurer," that a people may issue
from them in the end of days. " They are fed
on the dews of the morning, therefrom are
the ages born." Are these things spiritually
1 "Gramen significat id verum Ecclesice quod apud hominem
primum nascitur." Thus the restoration of the knowledge of cor-
respondences is in the first rejuvenescence of the celestial Church.
6S RE VELA TION AND M YTHOL OG Y.
looked at, "gross and irrational," the results
of a "state of almost inconceivable savagery
and ignorance," or of " mere ignorance and
superstition" ? Mythology contains others as
pregnant. I f present Christian belief had died
and vanished, and if no Second Coming of
Christianity had been vouchsafed, would not
such myths better serve the souls and minds
of the world's nations and peoples, than
Comteism, Darwinism, agnosticism and mate-
rialism considered as substitutes for religious
creed ?
Scientism Opposes.
48. Fontanelle and his learned reproducer
in the St. James s Gazette have indeed not
done justice to the Mythologies. Some of
their details are absurd, and some light and
satirical, though these might be spared
pedantic criticism, for they are mostly harm-
less. But scientism which aims at sensual
exactitude feels its dignity injured by their
REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y 69
existence, and cannot let any Myths be.
Like a great and admirable scientist who
could not bear the words " mao-ic lantern,"
but would have the thing called scientific
lantern, lest magic, which was out of his 39
articles, should be mentioned, and advertised.
49. Nor has Fontanelle any glimmer of a
rational origin for mythologies. His treat-
ment of Myths, and of the earliest and the
early men, exposes him to the judgment
of Solomon : these children are not in his
genesis. He is willing to destroy them, and
keep the dead halves for anthropological
science, but he cannot love them or take them
to his breast.
Literature and Poetry love Mythology.
50. Yet surely they must be worth some-
thing to the learned, and Literature would
mourn them if they were exiled. Take
Prometheus out of ^Eschylus and out of
70 RE VELA TION AND MYTH0L0G V.
Shelley, and furthermore as an influence and
seed out of the atmosphere of thought and
speculation; take Minerva and the rest of
the supernatures out of the Odyssey ; dis-
possess the Fates as the spinners of destiny,
and Pandora with her box of hope, "sole
boon of man ; " and a vast amount of pith
and beauty, to give these things no higher
value, would be cancelled out of humane
expression. Scientism will have to settle
these values in this field with the Poets.
We must leave that bargaining, and come
to other considerations.
Prometheus.
51. The learned Essayist asks, "Why
we have ceased to tell such tales ? " The
ages have them, and more are not required.
There was once a direct mind-market for
the growth ; there is none now. That is
one reason. Also, the representation of
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V. 7 1
spiritual things by natural symbols in this
manner has ceased as an active production.
It descended from the primitive revelation
to the earliest men, and took different forms
as it passed on in different nations. It
became idolatrous. But even here it em-
braced two factors: 1, Historical Influx,
— the traditional atmosphere of corre-
spondences and representations, now an
external but still powerful atmosphere of
impression ; and 2, an Influx from the
spiritual world close above those ages, and
pressing into them ; and impregnating them
with fragmentary conceptions of the broken
divine unity ; producing fables of as many
deities as outward nature and human nature
suggested to the sensual mind. Still these
deities, gods and demigods, were often in the
line of the ancient correspondences, and
carried a felicitous meaning in their record.
The fire that Prometheus stole from heaven
72 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
was the self-love with its powerful intellect
and genius severing itself from the divine
love, and originating a line of human inde-
pendencies with which Jupiter was offended ;
and the human counsel which arose, looking
before and after, was chained to hard limits,
and had a terrible vision of the state which
it had engendered : given in the eagle which
preyed upon the vitals of this new and
necessarily remorseful but unrepenting Pro-
prium. That can be one interpretation.
The fable may have any number of such ;
for by necessity of its kind, its possible
contents are fertile like the spawn of fish,
and can fill the ocean of man's thought with
shoals of true suggestions in faculty after
faculty and realm after realm. In that
respect these discredited Fables stand alone,
above all genius and imagination. 1 This
1 See the author's work, Human Science and Divine Reve-
lation, the chapter on Inspiration and Genius.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 73
one is an attestation of the Fall of man from
a seemingly dependent, but really free, to a
seemingly independent but really enchained
estate. The high mountain too to which
Prometheus was chained in the Caucasus
is at once the falsity and truth of the state ;
the falsity for Prometheus, the truth for the
nature of things. He mightily observes him-
self and his nature, and the truth observes him.
Hercules.
52. The labours of Hercules are another
myth which might be unfolded through
endless discourses : they might be sermons.
The eminent Swede, Siljestrom, an ex-
ceptional Educationist and Scientist, has
lately given us one exposition of this Fable,
interpreting it well of human enlightenment
and Religion, and the purified Civiliza-
tion proceeding from them. On the sub-
ject of Greek Symbolism generally, Rektor
74 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
Siljestrom says, " The Greek Fables are
thoroughly symbolical, and the Wisdom that
speaks from this mythology is so deep
and so comprehensive, that it is impossible
not to see the actual civilization of thousands
of years mirrored in it. How many Civili-
zations have flourished and passed away
before man has capacitated himself to per-
ceive the essence of culture as it is given in
the Sas:a of Hercules?" Tankebilder ur en
gammal mans Dagbok, Stockholm, 1885.
Bacon in his Wisdom of the Ancients, has
shown his sympathy in these things by many
fine interpretations, and especially by his
remarkable reading of the Myths of the
god Pan, which we commend to attention.
These and other reverent expositors of
the classic hieroglyphs, are considerable
counterweights to the virtual " stuff and
nonsense " solution of Fontanelle and his
learned successor.
HE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 7 S
Swedenborg's Readings. Correspondences :
the Horse.
53. Swedenborg, while marking these
things in contrast with Revelation, and even
with Assyrian, Asian and Egyptian mytho-
logies, by the diminutive distinction of
Fable, yet has given indications for the
interpretation of certain of them ; thus
attesting that some hand of the most
ancient divine cypher is upon them, and
that they can and will be considered with
profit by spiritual men. An example of this
occurs in his reading of the Winged Horse
Pegasus, a blow from whose hoof caused
the fountain of the Muses, Hippocrene, to
spring from Mount Helicon. Bellerophon
mounted this horse, and with his aid
destroyed Chimsera. Bellerophon was the
son of Sisyphus, the doomed hero of the
76 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
rolling stone in the place of punishment. 1
The horse, biblically, signifies the under-
standing; a winged horse, spiritual-intel-
lectual understanding. The apocalyptic
horses that came out of the Book, the
Word, the white, black, red, and pale horses,
signify the present understanding and
estimation of men as regards the Word ;
for what other thing comes out of a book
when read than the understanding and
estimate of it ? The White Horse on which
the Son of man rode is the power of
the pure truth of it. The armies in
Heaven followed Him on White Horses,
that is, lived in pure unfalsified under-
standings and life-followings of Him, the
'The horse is sometimes used in this sense in common discourse.
When Emerson lectured at Nottingham, Joseph Nenberg, the
translator of Carlyle's Frederick, asked him to explain some-
thing he had said in a discourse, which request Emerson evaded,
" For I am not riding that horse now." A correspondential way
of saying that he was not then in the spirit of that understanding
of things.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 77
Logos. And wherever the horse is
mentioned in the Holy Word, it signifies
either true, or false, understanding. This is
now, since Swedenborg, a universal induc-
tion valid in all particular instances. It
challenges disproof. Pegasus has the sig-
nification of some spiritual understanding;
the blow of his hoof is the ultimate sensual
power of it, unlocking on Mount Helicon —
mountains are Love, states of goodness,
" how beautiful on the mountains are the
feet of those who preach glad tidings " —
the fountain of the Muses, Hippocrene, the
Horse-fountain ; the understandings and
sciences of all the muses, which are the
ultimate effects and lives of all daily
inspirations of goodness upon earth.
Bellerophon on this understanding is also
the destroyer of Chimsera ; he dissipates
the fogs and hesitations that confound Use
and action.
7 8 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
54. Swedenborg's words are (in transla-
tion) : " By the Winged Horse, Pegasus, the
Ancients understood the intellect of the
truth by which wisdom is attained. By
the hoofs of his feet, the experiences
through which natural intelligence comes.
And by the Nine Virgins, knowledges and
sciences of every kind. These things are
now called Fables, but they were corre-
spondences, from which the primeval people
spoke." True Christian Religion, n. 693.
55. Mythology, therefore, in its better
parts, is parallel in its interior sense with
the Scriptures of the Old and New Testa-
ments.
Proofs of the Tradition of the Most
Ancient Correspondences among the
Asiatic Nations.
56. Swedenborg reckoned also with the
existence of correspondences among the
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 79
Asiatic nations, in which however the
correspondences did not so much take the
shape of mythical Fables, as of direct
tradition altered and heathenized, and
often converted into magical powers and
usages. The correspondences used in some
instances were however real and "most
ancient." The Greek Fables were unlike
this in powers ; they were a new point of
departure in a lesser race more distant from
Man or Adam ; and they had no ultimate
magic in them ; but were aesthetic oracles,
more or less significant. The following
shows Swedenborg's sounding-line at work
in touching on correspondences among the
Asiatic nations.
57. " To make it evident that the science
of correspondences was long preserved
among the nations in Asia, that is to say,
with those who were called diviners and
wise men, and sometimes magi, I will
So RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
adduce the following instance from i Sam.
chaps, v. and vi. We are there told that the
Ark, containing the two tables on which
the ten commandments were written, was
taken by the Philistines, and placed in the
house of Dagon in Ashdod, and that Dagon
fell upon his face to the earth before it;
and a second time that his head and both
the palms of his hands lay broken from
his body on the threshold. Also, on
account of the Ark, the people of Ashdod
and Ekron, to the number of several
thousands, were smitten with emerods,
and the land was devastated by mice.
The Philistines, therefore, summoned the
priests and diviners, who, to stay the
deadly destruction, came to this counsel.
They were to make five golden emerods
and five golden mice ; and a new cart ;
and to set the Ark upon it, with the
golden emerods and mice beside the Ark,
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY
and to have the cart drawn by two milch
kine tied to it, and bellowing 1 in the way
before it. The Ark was then to be sent
back to the children of Israel, by whom
the kine and the cart would be offered up
in sacrifice. And thus the God of Israel
was appeased. It is plain from the
signification of these several measures
prescribed by the Philistine diviners, that
they were correspondences. The significa-
tion is as follows : The Philistines themselves
signified those who are in faith separated
1 The kine were to be separated from their calves. The
text says, "bring their calves home from them:" i.e., break
their natural affection for their offspring. The authorized version
also has, "lowing as they went," but bellowing is what happens
under the circumstances. It indicates the strong compulsion that
was on them, evidently supernatural, to "take the straight way"
in opposition to their natural love : according to Svvedenhorg's
interpretation. Here it may further be observed, that the Phili-
stine diviners were acquainted with the history of the Lord's doings
for the Children of Israel and the Egyptians in Egypt ; for they
said to the Philistines : " Wherefore then do ye harden your hearts,
as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts ? When he
had wrought wonderfully among them, did they not let the people
go, and they departed ? "
F
S 2 RE I r ELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG V.
from charity. Dagon represented that
religious state. The emerocls, with which
they were smitten, signified the natural
loves, which are unclean if separated from
spiritual love. The mice signified the
devastation of the Church by falsifications
of truth. The new cart signified the natural
doctrine of the Church, for in the Word
a chariot signifies doctrine from spiritual
truths. The milch kine siofnified o/ood
natural affections. The golden emerods
signified the natural loves purified and
made ^ood. The golden mice siofnified
the vastation of the Church removed by
means of good ; for gold in the Word
signifies good. The bellowing of the kine
in the way signified the difficult conversion
of the concupiscences of evil in the natural
man into good affections. The sacrifices of the
kine with the cart as a whole burnt offering
signified that in this manner the God of
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 83
Israel was propitiated. All these things
which the Philistines did by the advice of
their diviners were correspondences ; from
which it is plain that the science of
correspondences was long maintained and
kept up among the Gentile nations."
Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion,
n. 203.
Similarity of Myths all over the
World — New Zealand.
58. Fontanelle observes that mythical
remainders are similar to themselves all
over the world ; which he attributes to
the fatal absurdity of the primitive savages
following everywhere the same natural
lines of development. We remark how-
ever that the races which produced the
myths are nowhere extant. Their geo-
graphical scope demonstrates, as Bacon
84 RE I 'ELA T10N A ND M YTHOLOG V.
clearly saw, a radiation from an original
dynamic centre.
59. Such remainders exist among the
New Zealanders, said by some to be now
the finest of the savage races. Sir George
Grey has a book on their fables. One of
these represents that Heaven and Earth
were at first close together, and touched
each other, so that there was no room
between them. But trees arose — trees —
and pushed up the heaven or sky; and
held earth and heaven apart. Note that
in Genesis trees also in the most ancient
men parted earth and heaven. Trees are
perceptions more or less, in this case
lessening and lowering perceptions. These
early men preserved as history by this
myth, wanted room for the play of their
own wills and ways, and it was accorded
to them in the perception that they had it
not, in which case they were permitted
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 85
to take it. They felt the primeval nearness
of heaven an intolerable pressure on their
lusts, and they had a new and to their
perception independent property of self
given them whereby they could live in
their own state-space. A pregnant record
that the Creator from the beginning has
allowed mankind to develop of their free-
will one plane of humanity after another,
each different from, and lower than, that
preceding it ; the history of all the early
part of these various and successive human
natures being kept for coming generations,
for great purposes, in the casket of myths.
Through Scripture and through mythology,
the history of created man is written
imperishably ; his whole arcane mind is
displayed ; and Revelation furnishes also
the divine complement which could not
fail ; showing by historical correspondences
how the Lord has followed the permitted
86 RE I ELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
outgoings of His creature, and provided
successive means for his upholding on each
stair of the descent ; and for his final
restoration.
The Israelites outlie Fontanelle's
Views. Why ?
60. The learned Essayist says further :
" Making an exception for the Israelites,
Fontanelle concludes that all nations made
the astounding part of their myths while
they were savages, and retained them from
custom and religious conservatism." But why
this exception which disproves the rule ? If
the Jews were not savages, and if the Old
Testament is in the category of myths, and
if Scripture is an indefeasible power in the
world, is there not here, in visible generation,
an origin of myths which contravenes the
position taken by our respected Author, that
myths arose in the vague and vacuous dark-
RE VELA TION A ND M 1 ' THOL OGY. 87
ness of savagery ; for here we have them
breaking forth in the midst of a great,
pertinacious and everyway peculiar people.
Also they came compulsorily and rebukingly
to that people, who constantly disregarded
them, and in spite of the thunders of" Moses
and the prophets," could not abide the pre-
scription of their " Myths," but disregarded
the teaching, and fell continually out of the
lines of " religious conservatism." Moreover
they knew nothing of the correspondences in
which the prophetic Word was written ; a
manifest sign that the spirit of the age, the
Jewish Zeitgeist, had nothing to do with the
production of the Prophecies, except to give
them the comminatory form which made them
applicable to the froward indomitable Jews.
And the Christian Church at its
Beginning.
6 1 . And why an exception for the Israelites
8S RE I ELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y.
and not for the Christians at their beginning- ?
According to Fontanelle's drift, much of the
Gospels must come under the head of Myths,
and the whole of the Apocalypse. And yet
these visible origins eighteen hundred years
ago, shed no light of confirmation on the
dictum that myths are the product of bare
savaees. Here of course we assume with
the sceptics that the supernatural in Holy
Scripture, wherever it occurs, is myth. But
in this case it is no struggle after causes and
reasons, no making of philosophical dolls in
savage nurseries, but viewed in all the con-
sequences that have come of it and been
connected with it, it is a portent that has
nothing to do with philosophy in its dawn,
but with philosophy at its wits' end ; the
portent of salvation, or damnation ; of heaven,
or hell.
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 89
Myths are the Natural Future States
of Precedent Lost Revelations.
62. Myths then properly so called are the
consequence of the decline and dying out of
Revelation and its commandments, and are
not the beginning of philosophies. The
mapping out of the astronomical heavens into
signs, the Bear and the Virgin, Orion and
the Pleiades, are indeed, besides convenience
for knowledge and nomenclature, mythical
strivings to connect the things of the natural
heaven with the things on earth ; in which
respect they are again derivations from the
ancient and inextinguishable Science of Cor-
respondences. But the races which originated
these things were highly scientific races, much
addicted as in Egypt to the Science of
Religion such as they had it ; and on the
go RE VELA TION A ND M 1 'TIIOL G Y.
merely human scale the long opposite of
savage tribes. 1
The Universal Compass of Exacting and
consequently exact sciences.
63. For there are sciences of all things.
We have sensual, physical and mathematical
sciences, and it is supposed that these are the
only clear sciences. But all real Biblical
fact and correspondency is also a subject of
science when it is ascertained. It is the
mightiest and most imperative of sciences.
So is all that belongs truly to the Church of
the Lord. So all the dealing of man with
man ; all human law, justice and judgment, is
a science. It can all be taught, in order that
the good and true way may be walked in. And
from the cognitions or knowledges of these
1 Sir Charles Lyell, speaking of Egypt with the writer, averred
that the myths of death and judgment and futurity, in that land,
were an anticipation of the Christian scheme, and that they
travelled over the lines of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
RE VELA T10N AND M YTHOLOG V. 9 1
many and many sciences, depend in time all
true intuitions even in the sensual, physical,
and mathematical spheres. That is to say,
they depend for their persistent will and
permanence on the religious sanity of man.
It is a matter of influx into different faculties.
And therefore science, the legitimate child of
conscience, has been possessed in its kind
and measure by all races ; but has no be-
ginning, but a vanishing end, among the
savaees. These therefore have initiated
neither sciences, philosophies, nor myths ; nor
the germs of them ; though they may be
devastated by the worms of the final supersti-
tions of all the three faculties.
A Universal Serpent- Myth girdles the
World.
64. The influx of that earliest correspond-
ence-record of the Fall of Mankind by the
instrumentality of the serpent, has been of
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
such power, pressure and prevalence, that the
tokens of it are extant in myths inherited by
whole races, and in the fragments of extensive
edifices in Great Britain and France ; and
even now in Serpent-worship in Africa and the
West Indies. The Vaudoux rites involving
cannibalism, and the serpent which is their
centre, and which is sometimes installed if
not enshrined in the Catholic Churches,
have been described by Sir Spenser St. John,
as he knew the circumstances in Hayti. 1
Vaudoux is an importation of the black
magic of the Negro races in Africa. A sign
also that those enduring races are not savages
in the sense of decadence ; for they maintain
their myths, as they also increase and multi-
ply. This test may be applied to other races;
and account for the state of the North
American Indians, who seem to have fallen
1 Hayti, or the Black Republic : London, Smith, Elder & Co. ,
1884. Vaudoux is called Vodun on the African coast.
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V. 93
in Historical times from builders of Temples
to the position of hunters which they now
occupy. They have their Great Spirit, and
happy hunting fields beyond the Grave, yet
they are dying out, and their myths are dying
with them, though Longfellow is their Hesiod
and Homer.
65. The serpent - myth is perhaps the
most remarkable traditive survival of the
race called Adam, of which the primeval
church emphatically named Man in Genesis
was formed. The details of the serpent-
worship into which this divine correspondence
was degraded are gathered up in a learned
Treatise, " The Worship of the Serpent
traced throughout the World, attesting the
temptation and fall of Man by the in-
strumentality of a Serpent-Tempter ; " by the
Rev. John Bathurst Deane, 1833. This
book may be especially recommended to
New Church readers who wish to pursue
94 REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
the present case in its connexion with the
correspondences in Genesis. It shows that
even the names of places in our own country
are derived from man's ubiquitous serpent.
There are two ends to the story. The first
is that the inspired Genesis transcribed from
the ancient archives, and brought by Moses
to the Jews, gives an origin for it which is
given nowhere else, and adopts it into the
Religion which dominates the conscience of
the world. The second is that the races
which have degraded it into Myth, dracon-
tium and serpent rites, are not the origin
of it, but receive it without comprehension,
now indeed by " custom, and religious con-
servatism." In this fashion serpent-myths
are perpetuated in India, and the Emperor
of China sits on a dragon-throne.
RE I EL A TION AND M YTHOL OGY. 95
The Giants of Revelation and of
Mythology.
66. Genesis i. — xi. is the source from
which the mythical giants of the heathenisms
are derived. As before remarked, this
part of the Word is not historical, but
quasi-historical, written in Correspondences
suitably to the genius of the men of the
Most Ancient Church. Adam and Eve
are primeval Man created and made in
the image and likeness of Jehovah God,
in whom self-love and its dark persuasions
of the mind had not yet risen into rule.
This Man was no bio-oer in his own esteem
than his Maker designed him to be. He
was the child of God, and innocence made
him so, and innocence is small to itself, and
great only to its Maker. When this Adam
declined in posterity, and ceased to be,
96 RE VELA T10N A ND MYTHOLOG Y.
men had grown mighty in self-assertion,
and their proprium ruled over the primeval
religion. This in a measure is not difficult
to comprehend. Every wicked man who
retains his religion, and many do so, absorbs
it as a pretext, and ultimately as a sanction
and incentive, to the " deeds done in
the body ; " and out of his pious sins as
principles of action, makes a delightsome
God or Goddess who is verily himself.
The Thugs, the most pious murderers in
all India, practise their work, not without
the profit of equally pious robbery, under
the church-ritual of Siva, the goddess of
destruction ; and she, being a goddess, and
being verily themselves incorporate, smiles
on her and their Thuggee, and no conscience
is evoked, and no mercy intervenes. The
victims, lestibus the Thugs and the Goddess,
as sacrifices to her, go to heaven, — to bliss,
— and no harm is done. This is one case
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOL OG V. 97
of the marriage between Heaven and Hell,
between lust and religion.
67. In Genesis it is declared that "the
Sons of God saw the daughters of men
that they were fair, and they took them
wives of all which they chose." And also,
that " there were giants (Nephilim) in the
earth in those days, and especially after
that, — when the Sons of God came in unto
the daughters of man, and they bare to
them ; the same became mighty men which
were of old, men of a name. And Jehovah
saw that the wickedness of man was multi-
plied on the earth, and that the fashion of
the thoughts of his heart was only evil
every day." The final destruction of the
first genus of men is here revealed. It can
now to attentive ears be rationally explained.
68. In an inspired perceptive race like
the posterity of the most ancient Church,
here in full declension and corruption, what
G
9 S RE VELA TION A ND MYTHOL OGY.
are the Sons of God and the fair daughters
of men, as inhabiting the same individual
and collective will ? Do not think of them
as persons, but as influences and faculties
in a single person. There are no persons
other than this in the first eleven chapters
of Genesis : it is a history of Internals. The
Sons of God are the divine truths or
doctrinals of that Church ; these descend
directly from God into Man ; and are births
from Him. What in distinction are the
Daughters of Men ? They are the desires
and lusts of the same mind which receives
and contains the divine truths. The two
unite : the doctrines entering into the lusts,
and producing systematic monsters of evil.
One mind cannot hold the two without this
gendering. Especially under the sway of
a perverted Inspiration. There are many
smaller instances of this extant ; and all
confirmed wickedness and breach of divine
REVELATION AXD MYTHOLOGY. 99
and human laws, living in the same mind
with an acknowledged and professed re-
ligiosity, is some example of it. Murder,
pillage, inhumanity and anti-humanity, for
country and patriotism, or for humanity, is
a common form of it to-day. The daughter
of man is the lust waiting to be chosen at
free will ; the son of god now is the public
pretext of its gratification in the interest of
Church and Relio;ion.
69. The size, the Nephilim, the Gianthood,
is easily understood now. The " Son of
God" is a small internal principle in itself;
a little child in the midst, an inward voice,
a " small still voice," waiting only to be
loved and obeyed. The daughter of man
is a poor harlotry of nature demanding of
the mind to be controlled and rejected.
But put the two together in one conspiracy
of delighted consent, and a Monster of
irresistible and irreformable persuasion
ioo RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
comes. It comes in bigness, a devil of
divine right. Such minds, and the Most
Ancient Church at length, save the men
called Noah, consisted of nothing else, have
a stature of self-love that none can reason
with : they are as God ; and the deeper
down among them believe that they are
truly gods, that God has transfused His
divinity into them, and that there is no
longer a God in the universe. This, from
Swedenborg, is a rational account of their
self-made stature, — of the immane and the
Gigantic which is in them. The following
in his Coronis, n. 38, is ad clertnn.
70. "Infernum ex illis qui ab Antiquissima
Ecclesia fuerunt, est prae omnibus aliis
infernis atrocissimum. Consistit ex illis qui
in mundo crediderunt se esse sicut Deus,
secundum dolosum effatum Serpentis (Gen.
iii. 5) ; et profundius in illo inferno sunt
illi qui sibi persuaserunt quod prorsus dii
REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 101
essent, ex phantasia quod Deus Divinitatem
suam transfuderit in homines, et sic quod
non amplius esset Deus in universo. Ex
dira ilia persuasione efflatur ex illo inferno
funestus putor, qui inficit vicinias tarn ferali
tabe ut dum aliquis approximat, occupetur
primum tarn lymphato delirio ut mox post
singultus videatur sibi agonizare. Vidi
quendam in propinquo ibi occubuisse sicut
mortuus ; sed translatum inde revixisse.
Jacet id infernum in media plaga meridionali,
circum ductum vallis, super quibus stant
qui stentoriae tubae voce clamant, ' Ne
accede propius.' Audivi ex angelis qui
super illo inferno in coelo sunt quod
cacodaemones ibi appareant sicut colubri
torti in spiras inextricabiles, quod trahunt
ex sublestis illorum dolis et incantationibus,
quibus pellexerunt simplices ad assentiendum
quod sint dii, et quod non sit Deus praeter
illos."
io2 RE VELA T10N AND MYTHOLOG Y.
71. " The ancients who clothed all things
in the garb of fables, by the giants who
assaulted the camp of the Gods, and whom
Jove struck down with his lightnings, and
thrust under the fiery weight of Etna, under-
stood these spirits, and named them Cyclops.
They called their hells 'Tartara,' and 'Pools of
Acheron ; ' and the deeps in them 'Styx ; ' and
the dwellers there, ' Lernean Hydras.' '
72. Enough has been said to show how
gianthood was acquired. It is a wide
theme, and the facts are exhibited all over
the modern world ; but with this difference,
that there is no primeval religion of inspira-
tion to be profaned now, but the union
takes place on a lower level, between the
lusts of power, the scarlet woman for
instance, and divine right, in ecclesiastical
and political things ; neither partner to the
union having any alliance with the Sons of
God in Genesis ; though there is still
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 103
analogy between the two unions. Popes
and Czars therefore are no bigger in stature
than other people, even though Typhons
of measureless self within. But in the
primeval conditions, of correspondences,
gigantic stature, monstrosity of person, was
actually incubated ; in cruel statures arose
out of inward states. The Nephilim, and
the Sons of Anak in the land of Canaan,
were such. And that their progeny sub-
sisted in the time of Moses is evident from
the history in Numbers xiii. 2>3> where
the messengers sent to explore the land
reported as follows : " And there we saw
the Giants, the Sons of Anak, of the Giants ;
and we were in our own sight as grass-
hoppers, and so we were in their sight."
J2>- This broad ground of Revelation
now entered into clear reason, thus again
connects itself with the Mythologies as
their origin and fountain-head. The first
io4 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
Giants are revealed in the Word ; the later
Giants are their fabulous progeny. The
Greek mythology is populous with them
in its earliest stages, and their character-
istics tally with the Biblical stock. They
are associated with the serpent myths :
they are serpents as well as Giants.
The Gods abolish and supersede them.
The Northern Mythology also images them ;
they are the first denizens of space and time
through many dynasties, and are slain by
Odin and Thor. Thus we observe that the
savage element here as elsewhere is no
crudity of prehistoric man, but a monstrous
fungus sprouting out from the decay of the
holy, the high and the divine.
The Dwarfs.
74. Voluspa, the Divinations of the
Prophetess, tells that our first parents were
originally trees, Ask and Embla ; perhaps
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOGY. 105
Ash and Elm ; trees again biblically signify -
ing perceptions. In the Persian Mythology
also man and woman come from trees as the
trunks of life : their first sensations being
also perceptions. The dwarfs however pre-
cede mankind in the Northern Myths. There
were many of them ; and a volume might
be written concerning the correspondences
given in their names. Edda pronounces
strongly on the lastingness of their record.
" Their ancient pedigree shall be held in
mind as long as man's life endures." They
were created, at first as maggots, from the
flesh and blood of Ymir, and from his dusky
limbs ; and afterwards they took on human
shapes. We may not dwell on their tempt-
ing names ; full as they are of philosophy,
and psychology. But we select four of them
for especial consideration :
Nordhri ok Sudhri,
Austri ok Vestri.
io6 REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
In English, North, South, East, and West.
They are four Atlanticles supporting the four
corners of the heavens : the personal qualia
of the points of the compass ; and interesting
to the spiritual man. They are indeed mere
positions, and abodes of the will inside gravi-
tation ; of the ruling love in it : thought
knows as yet nothing of them, for they dwell
in their own rocks and stones, and retreat
into them ; and yet, though invisible, they
determine the polarity of nature, and are
cosmic fixations of things as they are. By
position understand the quality of the things
posed, and that this depends upon positive
order. The dwarfs are therefore here the
Caryatides under the natural temple. They
are not mentioned in the Word as the Giants
are. But East, West, North, and South are
continually spoken of: they are celestial
and spiritual positions, and have unvarying
spiritual interpretations. In the good sense
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y. 1 07
the East signifies love to the Lord, and
regard of Him and the neighbour from that
love. The West signifies the same love in
its setting and declension. The South
signifies spiritual intelligence, the culmina-
tion of mental light. The North, obscurity
of the spiritual understanding. The ultimate
allocation of all men is determined by these
pillars of justice and judgment, and final
character is revealed and opened as the
man is carried through the climates of them.
The dwarfs are therefore of two orders ; a
light and a dark ; and the dark signify
qualities exactly opposed to the quarters
above. "In heaven, those who constantly
turn their face to the Lord, and have their
East in Him, have the South at their right
hand, the North at their left, and the West
behind them ; and this holds howsoever they
turn." "In the hells, the East is behind,
because they hate the Lord. The North is
10S RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
at their right because they love fallacies and
their falsities. And the South is at their
left because they spurn the light of wisdom."
(Swedenborg.) The dwarfs therefore imply
the conversion of every man to his ruling love.
They underlie all faculties : the dwarf earth
of a single generation supports the mighty
and eternal heaven : it is the footstool of the
throne, and of Him Who sits upon it. No
man notices these spiritual poles ; but all
states of individuals and communities, and
of the inner mind, point according to them.
Mythology yields them up to Revelation.
Read the Word with some knowledge,
where East, West, North, and South occur,
and you will begin to see that these specific
things are signified by them.
The Unknown and the Unknowable :
The Savage Men of the Study.
75. The unknown and the unknowable lurk
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 109
at the bottom of scientist thought, and are
the spectral pokers of its chaos. One or
both of them is credited somehow with
nature's movement and manifestation. First
as to the Unknown. In a wide particular
sense we must grant its existence. When
a planet exhibits tractions not accounted for
by the planets around it, we know that a
pull is being made by another body to
which these habits are due. Measuring
and considering their evidence, the telescope
knowingly directed sees a new planet hitherto
unnoticed which balances the account. So
this unknown becomes known. Here how-
ever is the material unknown of to-day,
willing to be known to-morrow. But it has
no relationship to the scientist unknown.
There the mind sees the movement of
natural things ; the graduation from the
lowest up to man ; and appraises them as
a serial chain ; but leaves an assumed
no EE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
unknown behind them ; perhaps to answer
for them, and certainly for itself; having
no care to do more than casually recognize
this unknown. The telescopes of the ob-
servatory of the unknown are in fact
directed downwards and backwards, not up-
wards and onwards ; and into each problem
of perturbation, not into the primal cause of
it. Thus a philosophical X stands as an
inaccessible adytum in what ought to be
Cosmic Knowledge ; secretly filling it from
beofinnino- to end with unknownism or
agnosticism. This unknown stands on the
same ground as the Fontanellian Savage :
there is no such ens, he, she, or it, excepting
for phantasy ; and if there were, its existence,
as well as itself, would be unknown ; worth-
less to talk about. And why is there no
such entity ? Because the Creator in the
beginning of Man revealed Himself as the
Word ; being otherwise inscrutable, and un-
RE VELA T10N AND MYTHOLOG Y. 1 1 1
known and unknowable, because dwelling in
light inaccessible. He therefore completed
the human mind by filling the otherwise
infinite gap between Himself and the finite
soul at first, and since by daily filling it ;
namely, with the knowledge of Himself.
And so for those who will take half the
trouble to understand the Word which they
spend over the works, and often over their
own dreams of the works, the unknown of
the natural man can perish out of wisdom,
then out of intelligence, and then out of
science and out of sense ; and become
a common dock and place of sentence for
other similar inventions : being thenceforth
remembered as the degradation of the mind,
and not as its mystery : and God manifested
in Christ can take its place.
76. The Unknown belongs in part to the
intellect, and in part to the will ; but the
Unknowable has on it the mark of special
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
personal dominion ; being as it were an
imperial edict. It is the moral confirmation
of the Unknown, now become a determination
of persuasion. In this lower pit the ears, the
hearkening parts of wise men, are filled by
their proper fingers with egotistical wax, so
that no divine instruction shall penetrate.
The unknown may be resolved into the
known under affectionate schooling about
great circumstances ; especially if there be
any rift in its absoluteness. Paul, when he
found an altar " to the unknown God," said
to the men of Athens, "Whom therefore ye
ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."
But this was not a wholly fantastical un-
known, but the unknown God ; already an
ABC and letter of authority by which
gentle willing men could begin their lesson,
and learn to read their Bible. With the
confirmed Unknowable the case is different.
Whatever any man won't know is for that
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
will unknowable. It bars the mind from
everything but delightful picked knowledge
got at by yourself and your similars. Other-
wise it dwells in darkness inaccessible. Its
ambition is more than the vanity of the
unknown ; it would procrustianize mankind.
What J cannot know, no man can know, no
man shall know, is its heart. It comprehends
a whole realm and order of things which we
naturally dislike, such dislike having de-
bauched the will. Especially therefore a
Supreme Ruler, say, the Divine Truth
revealed, is hated as an interfering justice
and judgment over life and thought. And
then the hostility is extended to a Ruler of
outward nature.
J 7. These considerations are not irrelevant
to the main position of our essay ; which is
again, as we said above, that God's Word,
Let there be light, stands at the beginning
of soul, mind and faculties, and declares the
ii
1 1 4 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y.
highest origins thouerhout. as subservient to
the highest purposes,
78. The unknowable defrauds us of our
greatest springs of perception, and shuts the
influx-gates of the genius of honest specula-
tion against us. It locks us into cells destitute
of rational furniture. The old workers with
creative tools, — end, cause and effect, —
belonging only to the Supreme Will here
ignored, are not to hand ; but only push
and opportunity, the endless, causeless, and
effectless dwarfs of our anti- cosmic clay.
The residue of our fortune is blind nature,
blind philosophy, and scientist advertisement.
This again is plainly, sooner or later, the
broad road through the Plagues of Egypt
and the destruction in the Red Sea, to the
savage man. Of him beware. He dogs the
footsteps of the greatest minds, and has been
the finish of the self-will and self-delusion of
many proud Civilizations.
RE VELA T10N A ND M YTHOL OGY. 115
Egypt.
79. The prechristian Myths have led
erudite men to the inference that the In-
carnation is a plagiarism from Egyptian and
Indian lore ; and that Egypt, spiritually the
house of bondage to Israel, is the fountain of
the ancient religions. The History of Jesus
Christ, however, is plainly historical, and
also, as we now know, correspondential-
historical, which the Myths are not ; and the
Incarnation runs through the four Gospels,
and is the seed and root of them. Were it
not a divine as well as a natural event, the
life of Christ would no more be questioned
than the recorded birth and life of Julius
Caesar. And though the History be used as
a spiritual vehicle, it still stands on the
ultimate ground of fact. Revelation has its
own way and purpose in telling things ; which
] 16 KEVELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
is not our way. There are human ways
which illustrate it. Drama, for instance.
The life of Julius Caesar is presented in
Shakespeare's drama of him. The fitting
details are woven into the Dramatic form.
No criticism exacts literality here. Character-
istic summaries, almost "correspondences"
sometimes, point the essence of the man.
And though the Drama is no continuous
photograph of his apparent existence, it
holds, according to good judges, the quality
of his real life. That is, it gives the reader
the best idea of him. So in a greater sense
with the Gospels as lives of Christ ; they are
Revelations of His Life : and also divinely
written in Correspondences. The Incarnation
founds these Revelations. The common
events, of place, person, and succession, react
back ; and claim the history for the natural
world. Egyptian myths are of no world ;
they belong to neither time, place nor
RE VELA T10N AND M YTHOLOG V. 117
person ; but to astronomy perhaps, and to
astrology.
80. Genesis sounds our first note of the
Incarnation. " The seed of the woman shall
bruise the serpent's head." It was the
perception of the Most Ancient Church that
Christ must come. This was also written in
the Ancient Word, from which the first
eleven chapters of Genesis are taken. For
Swedenborg brings to light a divine Word
antecedent to our Scriptures ; but which in
process of time was lost. The Book of
Jasher and the Wars of Jehovah belonged to
it ; and are quoted in the Bible. To repeat
what has already been stated (n. 24), —
" The Noahtic or Ancient Church was spread
through the whole of Asia ; especially over
Syria, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Chaldsea, the
land of Canaan and its borders, Philistia,
Egypt, Tyre, Sidon, Nineveh: and also over
Arabia and Aethiopia ; and in process of
1 1 8 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
time into Great Tartary ; and thence down to
the shores of the Black Sea ; and over Africa.
All the nations of the world have been
addicted to worship under a specific religion,
and no religion is possible without a revelation
of some kind, propagated in each case from
one nation to another." Egypt and India,
with their two continents, were therefore at
one time actual branches of the Ancient
Church, and handed down the Noahtic
Revelation. Their minds grew from it as
their stem. They afterwards underwent
spiritual defection ; yet the light of that
Church was their residue of life. Its Word
in their memories, fragmentary indeed and
perishing, became a plane of rankness and
corruption for necromancers and magicians
to lust in. With correspondences as tools,
and spiritualisms to handle them, mythology
came forth on the tablets of defaced revelation.
Their Myths are therefore altered traditions
REVELA T10N AND MYTHOLOGY. 119
of the celestial perception of the Advent of
God-man as the Redeemer. Their incarna-
tions and Avatars are collateral witnesses to
this event. If the world of men was at first
a tree of perceptions, a living, vibrating
Yggdrasil (n. 44), it is impossible that such
a seed planted as a soul in it, as that God
would come into nature in the fulness of
time to seek and to save, should not be a
speaking life through the descendants of
Adam. Every race not straightly perishing,
must energize and deliver down this originally
perceptive knowledge according to its own
genius and hold upon nature. The minds of
Egypt and India obeyed this spirit. Egypt,
the representative intellect of Science, and
of the square precision of sensual nature,
including its religions and heathen ecclesi-
asticisms, obeyed its own ambitious Nile of
tendency, and presented countless mytho-
logical transformations, and births and
i ;o RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
rebirths of men and gods. And as its first
genius descended, and went towards spiritual
vastation, it laid hold of the astronomical
heaven and earth, of day and night, of sun,
moon, and constellations, to pour its inherited
persuasions through them, and to deify and
humanize them and their laws. When
Egypt thus fell down into the lusts of
magical knowledge, it came into direct
struggle with the remains of the primitive
Revelation ; and into heresy with its
Church ; and the magnitude of the strife is
shown in the hugeness of the nature which
reigned in it ; and in its unburied remains :
and its keenness is to-day seconded by the
delight with which certain of the learned
haunt its ruined history ; and oppose it to
the Gospels of Christ. This direct struggle
of Egypt and the Asiatic nations with Revela-
tion still partially extant, gives some reason
for the crushing weight of its mythology,
RE VELA T10N A ND M YTHOLOG Y. 121
compared with that of Greece, which was in
no such struggle, but received the seeds of
its inventions of myth from Egypt, and grew
them unopposed in its own lighter ground
(n- 39).
81. We cannot do justice here to the
providential remainders which were still kept
for Egypt ; to the natural immortality of its
souls : and the judgment for good, or for
evil, which awaited them. The residue
carefully chosen would be a little Bible
for its simple sons. This is beside our
scope ; which is to show this mythology also
as an illegitimate offspring of the Revealed
Word. We only remark that excepting the
practical virtue in these remainders, there is
no spiritual light in them ; and that here also
" the horses (understandings) of Egypt are
horses of flesh and not of spirit."
82. The learned parallels between Horus
and Christ, resolving the Saviour into a Solar
1 22 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
Myth and Gnostic hypothesis, uncover the
fact, that we are here dealing with a theo-
logical question, and that such speculations
are motived by a resolute denial of the Fall
and the redemption of mankind as absurd
and impossible. In fact, this department of
Archaeology is apt in the hands of some, like
speculative scientism, to be passionately
antitheological ; and to recall the Apocalyptic
collocation of " that City which is spiritually
called Sodom and Egypt, where also the Lord
was crucified."
83. The final materialism of Egypt stands
out in its care for dead bodies ; in its
mummies animal and human : it is the
typical credence of the value of the tomb,
and of the resurrection of the natural carcase.
Excepting its curious language and lore, the
possibly recoverable genesis of its Myths,
and its confirmations of the Bible, the only
religious instruction to be got from it lies in
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 123
its extinction as a great human organ once.
To found evolution and a modern cultus
upon it, were to go from death to life.
84. There is then another evidence in the
coincidences of Egyptian Mythology to the
presence in the human soul, if no longer in a
docile mind, of an expected Incarnation. The
pressure of this in the old world was universal.
First in the Most Ancient Church as percep-
tion. Next, in the Ancient Church as instruc-
tion : producing in time a reflected moon of
light for the ancient nations. Then in the
Israelitish and Jewish Word, and especially in
the Prophets. All Creation groaned and
travailed with it. As Bacon says, Prophecy
is still to be regarded as History, but before
the event : time not entering into it. So are
we brooded over, in our light and in our
darkness, with great coming events, and
with Mercy's presentiments.
t 24 RE VELA T10N AND MYTHOLOG Y.
Compound Animal Forms in the Word
and in Mythology.
85. Revelation, by Visions, and by waking
Seership, has also brought to the mind of
man composite representatives in which
various beasts enter into one creature,
forming compound animals ; and others in
which man and animal are conjoined. The
Prophets and the Apocalypse present many
instances of this. All these are rationally
and spiritually significative when their
meaning is revealed. To enumerate .them
would require a volume. They belong to
the internal sense of the Word ; and they
have attestation in human nature ; for the
qualities of men are sometimes discerned
as those of specific animals, and a single
man may have several such animals in his
character ; a Shakespeare or a Browning
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 125
might poetize him with the head and face
of one beast, with the breast of another, and
with the limbs and claws of a third ; and
painters might truly colour him so. Horace
puts man together organ- wise in this very
fashion. Demos is commonly known as a
many - headed monster. This comes of
Revelation, deeply agent in the causal
recesses of the human soul and personality.
The emblems and insignia which nations
apply to themselves attest the same thing :
the double-headed Eagle, and the like. To
say nothing of the great traditional mirror
of Heraldry. The learned can supply such
facts in great variety. But a reflex of them
exists in Mythology as a derivative from
Revelation. The Indian Myths are full of
these compound creatures. They were
sculptured in ancient Assyria, where we
have the human-headed bulls ; and the
Sphinx leads off an abounding line of such
126 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG V.
hieroglyphs in Egypt. The Centaur occurs
among the Greek Myths. All these have
grounds and reasons in heathen man. It is
however in the spiritual world and its
divine ground that they find their original
and their justification. There the Cherubs
are full of eyes before and behind. This
plasticity of forms so fixed to us is a
devolution from a Power Who makes and
unmakes forms at will in creative right and
might to express Himself in the Logos.
With Him all things are Words of the
Word, and the language is infinite in its
imagery, and the images are bodies of real
creation. The living combinations too are
endless, and exist among the people to whom
they correspond. It is not expedient to
dwell further on this theme. Swedenborg
has treated it fully : see his Apocalypse
Revealed. The rational mind can there be
instructed about it ; and learn the necessity
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 127
of these divine appearances, and the mean-
ing of each spiritual form. " The earth hath
bubbles as the water hath," as Shakespeare
says of the witches in Macbeth. These
forms are exhalations of the spiritual earths
in correspondence with their societies, and
are prophetic of their futures.
86. For the most part on the evil side
the forms are monstrous, and embody the
persuasions and dogmas of false religions,
which make the composite mind into the
various shapes portrayed : for such per-
suasions and dogmas confirmed are spiritually
constructive and organic, although churches
and societies here have no conception
of the strange beasts they are living
in. They are especially representative of
and correspondent to false principles ; the
Dragon in the Apocalypse, for instance,
embodies the cardinal heresy of justification
by faith alone, and the clergy who are
1 2S RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
in this creed confirmed are its organic
monads.
Sy. Such forms occur chiefly in the
Prophets and in the Apocalypse, and not
in the earlier books of the Word. But the
spiritual world contains them ; and therefore
they are represented in Mythology, all of
which is post-revelational. The human mind
wills, thinks, and engenders and produces,
in the current of the spiritual downrush to
which it has yielded itself, or opened the
door. Here it may be remarked that the
aee and date of the several books of the
Bible as criticism deals with them, is of no
importance to these subjects : whether Moses,
or who, wrote the Five Books, matters not.
They stand on the internal sense. And they
embody the most ancient correspondences
gathered up by Cain, and then by Enoch, and
hand down in a divinely-inspired Word the
perceptive Church of the earliest mankind.
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOC V. 129
The Age of Myths is past.
88. There are reasons why these things
have been kept. One is that they could
not in their degraded and hideous forms be
wrenched from the sensual man, without
doing violence to his nature. They are the
children of his life and proprium. Another
reason is, not merely that they corrobor-
ate Scripture, — the Word, — but that the
science of correspondences now restored, will
ultimately teach the meaning of them to
all races, and so help to win them back by
their own memorial archives and traditions
to Christ, to Whom all correspondences
converge, and in Whom all myths disappear.
Who thus also shall bruise the Serpent's head.
A Mode of Origin of Myths.
89. A word of surmise on the immediate
origin of myths considered as new points
1
1 30 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY.
of departure ; namely, on their mode of
origin. The history of spiritual-mental
states, veritably, the Theological History
given by Swedenborg, makes the divine
origin of correspondences plain. Read
through carefully the First Volume of his
Arcana Ccelestia to be apprised of this
fact. Every instructor of the people
now, every well-meaning and enlightened
Journalist, especially the very gifted Editor
of the St. James s Gazette, ought to be
acquainted with it. He will find in it a
clear resuscitation for our knowledge and
benefit of races in long succession and series
which have passed away, but which were
the youngest and eldest children of Jehovah
God ; and of their love and its now incom-
prehensible Wisdom. This great Palimpsest
of obliteration and recovery, is for our
reading, that we may live again into the
Word. Let me tell that learned man that
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOL OGY. 131
these Revelations also shed a supreme light
upon Society and Politics, because they
show from an imperturbable divine stand-
point what human nature really is.
The Origin of Correspondences in the
Adamic Men.
90. The knowledge of correspondences
was given in the regenerated life, not of the
race of Adam, but of the race named Adam ;
the race of Adam was a declension. These
earliest men in the proper sense of Man,
were the earliest, the celestial, Church.
Adam gave things — they came to him — their
names, and Jehovah, who inspired him,
accepted his nomenclature. And by per-
ception from his Creator and Maker he
possessed the meaning of things in this
world of forms, as corresponding to spiritual
things ; and in expressing the spiritual
things, the natural things were the names
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
that flowed from them and fitted them. Of
course as common sense is not excluded
by, but is the base and support of, spiritual
sense, so also for the race named Adam,
in handling natural things and their uses
and functions (which made them into
correspondences), the series of expressions
was different, and did not proceed from the
inmost where Jehovah was, but through
space and time, from one natural thing to
another, in a very practical daily life, through
marriage, human companionship, and the
sweetness of natural light and duty.
Language itself was doubtless given on
these two planes.
Adam and Eve, the Proprium.
91. He, therefore, this supreme race, this
" Adam which was the Son of God," spoke
by Creations, and the Word which was
with him spoke by the same. All these
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 133
earliest generations were called by single
proper names, as marking that every Society
whether on earth or in heaven is one man.
In this presiding divine Word the serpent
was the sensual nature, harmless, benign
and all-fruitful in its place, and Eve was the
Selfhood, the amour propre, what Sweden-
borg calls the Proprium. There was
nothing " ignorant " or "savage," but some-
thing divinely lovely, powerful and beautiful
in speaking as God and His Word speak,
by creations. When the mode of speech
sprang from within, it gave the sense that
spiritual states of love and wisdom were
being created. And divine and human
converse was active with true substances
building the temple of life. This speech
was different to our words and letters,
which of themselves are intrinsically
unmeaning. It was a human body of
speech, having in it the heart of the men
•34
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
of the golden years, and heaven and earth
reciprocally engendered in it. In hushes
of expression it could express volumes
as Genesis and the Apocalypse express
them to souls.
Inspiration by and Revelation from
Jehovah God began all true Manhood.
92. Revelations were thus the beginning,
for man with his freewill had to be raised
from the dust of the ground, from the
"preadamite" man, homo protoplastus, as
Swedenborg calls him, — not from the pre-
historic man, — into the Church called Adam.
Nothing else could be initiatory to a per-
fectly helpless creature like man just made,
but God alone. In defect of natural father
and mother, God and His particular
ministering spirits l of course tended him, and
1 " Let us make man in our own image : " the plural form here
refers to " the ministry of men-angels." See Swedenborg on Genesis,
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V. 1 35
were themselves his unknown circumstances.
The ultimate Revealer, the First and the
Last, Who was and Who is and Who is
to come, was in the background, accom-
modate by appearances stage by stage to
every the minutest state of the creature who
was to be first his Image, and then his
Likeness and Vicegerent. And so by in-
cessant Revelations, divine as the bosom
of God, and more tenderly natural than the
mother's breast, and by their instructions,
and by implicit following and obedience, out
of the man made from dust, the Adam Man
was born. Visions and dreams, those
earliest and least intrusive of helps to
the pure and unsuperstitious, were also
attendant instructors sent from heaven ;
for in the innocent perpetual advance of
man's spiritual state to its culmination in
chap. i. ver. 26, in Arcana Ccckstia, n. 50. N.B.—A.W angels have
risen from the ranks, or in other words, have once been men.
1 36 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
the celestial state, no impurity of hereditary
evil and falsity could spoil or deflect the
influx, or lay hold of it, as would be the
case at the present day with the most of
men, for personal ends.
93. If man from a mere shape and shell
of humanity became a living soul from the
inbreathing or inspiration of the breath of
God into his nostrils, it is clear to reason
that the inspiration was continued in every
direction necessary to endow the creature
in compliance with his own God -given
faculties, and to lead him and her into life.
This has become an intellectual fact after
being revealed as an indispensable work of
the divine providence in the Arcana Ccelestia
of Swedenborg.
Declensions Perpetual.
94. The primitive mind was thus charged
with supernal and angelic influences ; and
RE VELA T10N AND M YTHOLOG V. 137
to a great extent received them consciously,
and conversed with angels in the language
of correspondences, in which also the First
Word was written, and in which our Old
and New Testaments accordingly are
also written. But this state of perception
did not continue. The stages of its
decline, to its end, are written in Genesis.
But this is not the place to dwell upon
them further. Suffice it to say that from
the earliest times the human mind was
stored with a multitude of correspondences
which had been mighty as actual powers in
the past, and it still had some use and abuse
of them. But as the Adamic ages closed
up like a scroll, the unity which reigned
in them and over them, the unity of God
was lost, and the objects of nature which
embodied the correspondences, or certain
presumed regents and spirits of nature,
were worshipped. But with varying degrees
138 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG I r .
of grossness. The powers of the mind, the
events of life and time, and the depart-
ments of nature, — the Sun, Moon and Stars,
— -thus had gods assigned to them. It was
a perfectly consequent and so to speak
natural result of the degradation of a per-
ceptive church : embodied false perceptions,
real hallucinations of the then powerful
religious influx, were the issues. This
disintegrating end may have occurred
rapidly, on the facilis descensus principle,
for the ages of the patriarchs do not signify
periods, but like all biblical numbers, they
are states of life.
Restorations Perpetual by and from the
Divine : Successive Churches.
95. A stream of new human propria evoked
and inspired, was however continued through
the medium of New Dispensations, and in the
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 139
Church after the Flood, perception was lost,
and a new organon, of conscience, before
uncreated, because perception superseded it,
was eiven to Mankind. A new human
centre and nature signified by the Church
named of Noah. This also was destroyed in
successive generations of lapsing heredities.
In distinction from the Adamic Church this
was a spiritual Church, with external truth,
not internal love, for a centre : truth com-
municated not to inspired people, but to
an instructable conscience by an external
inspired or Divine Word. A third point
of divine departure was a natural Church,
the Israelitish, in which the natural good
and truth of life were enjoined and preserved.
Correspondences were still possessed by and
taught in this third dispensation. The
Jewish Church, a continuation of this, was
a merely ritual or representative Church,
which possessed neither perception, nor
1 40 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
conscience, nor natural good, as centres,
but its mission was obedience to the Ten
Commandments, and representation in rites
and forms of the correspondences in the
Jewish Word, on which the remaining
communication of heaven with man was
founded.
Heathen Religions at the Side : their
Ways and Means.
96. Alongside this great highway of
Providences, the Churches which were its
stations sent out as they declined roads
of heresies, and ultimately institutions of
idolatries, in which the Word of Jehovah
was perverted and abused. These are the
Heathen Religions. And here specially
Mythologies and False Words and Worships
originated, not from naked Celts, or skin-
clad cave or lake- dwellers, but from the
lovers of empire on its first and highest
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 141
thrones, seeking assistance, like Macbeth
with the witches, at the cauldrons of self
love from magical influx. In no sense
divine Revelations, they were remainders
in the wreck after the three disastrous
voyages of self-made humanity. Still they
were of the nature of food, these relics
of the science of correspondences. In
Greece, 1 and possibly in Asia and in Egypt,
these correspondences were draped afresh,
clothed with the flesh of those races, and
1 " Apollo's oracle at Delphi was one of the most celebrated in
Greece. Delphi, which is in Phocis, was situated on the slopes
of Mount Parnassus, and was originally called Pytho [the Serpent].
In the centre of the temple dedicated to Apollo was a small open-
ing in the ground, from which mephitic exhalations rose from time
to time. When the oracle was to be consulted, a priestess, called
Pythia, [of the serpent again,] was placed upon a tripod, or three-
footed seat or table, which stood over the chasm. All the words
she uttered while intoxicated by the vapours were supposed to
contain revelations from Apollo, and were carefully noted down,
converted into verse by a poet employed for the purpose,
and communicated by the priests to the people. . . . The temple
at Delphi was the depository of immense riches, the offerings of
kings and private persons who had received favourable answers
from the oracle." {A Smaller Classical Mythology, p. 77. Edited
by Dr. William Smith, 1882.)
1 42 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
with poetry and myth. Another factor
supervened, a busy and a common one —
our old acquaintance, even — Spiritism. It
was a mimicry of the primeval revelations.
These were converse with God and His
Angels ; but this new appetite of man was
for necromancy ; for questioning the fates,
and learning the ultimate upshot of things
from dead ancestors.
97. Spiritism as it exists at this day
has thus a use for the New Church in
the light it sheds upon what happens to
the human mind at the end of Churches ;
when one section of those who are vastated
of religious truth goes to Atheism, and
another section proceeds to make a new
religion for itself with the worship of the
common man, now called " Humanity,"
for its Cult. The boldest part of the
latter host goes to Spiritism ; hopes and
fears and dreams of good in it ; and gives
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 143
forth relations of the spirit-world from its
own familiars. These stories are not mytho-
logies now, because the science of corre-
spondences is not extant among the familiar
spirits. They are presumed interviews with
the departed on the old lines of space
and time, matter and person ; for the most
part flatteries of infidelity, and denials of
spiritual consequences in favour of the world
and the flesh. They are opiates and in-
toxicants, and eminently persuasions. But
nevertheless they are illustrations of what
would be correspondence in a former age ;
and of the magical mode of it.
98. Without taking note of spiritism,
which where it is not a mortal imposture
is a power, though often an infernal one,
it would be difficult at this day to
understand the mode of production of the
mythologies, or to see them in any con-
nected series with other religious events.
1 44 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
Undoubtedly, they belong by telegraph and
telephone to the Ancient Magic, and sit
upon its oracular stools. Emperors also still
consult the mediums. The Pythoness, the
Serpent-woman, attests in her name the old
worship of the serpent, whose seducing voice
was the earliest word uttered from below.
Uses of Mythologies as Schoolmasters
and Art-Masters in Language and
^Esthetics.
99. But let it not be forgotten, as we
remarked in the beginning, that the Greek
Myths, of the Divine Providence, were
received out of the spiritual world into a
literature young, strong, and destined to
endure for what we may call, "all time;" a
literature that like a Church was a new
departure in the culture of mankind ; that
the myths were purged and beautified in it ;
and that the pythonesses lost their hoarse-
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 145
ness as their oracles were re-echoed through
the Poetry of Greece, and reflected from the
walls and vaults of its Temples. " For-
ward stept the perfect Greek," says Emerson.
And Myth partook of his step through epic,
drama, sculpture and architecture, and became
an admissible thread for illustration and beauty
in all even Christian literature. The Word
had presently to be translated for the whole
world, and language in its more modern life
was thus distilled from Hybla and Parnassus,
to sweeten and ennoble it for its sacred work.
100. There were here two subordinate
inspirations at work. First, the Delphic
Mediumship in its rugged possibilities.
This uttered the old heathen gods afresh,
and as is usual with mediumship, altered
them in names of qualities to the Greek
temperament and exaction, early and late ;
so that here we have an old pressure
or tradition, and a new starting point.
K
i 4 6 RE I ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
Secondly, a band of poets standing around
the tripods, and down the historic series;
receiving, handing on, and finally bringing
up, the myth-offspring. Another new
imprint. These poets, the first purely
human art-creators, had in them from
the spiritual side, and also from a real
mission which impelled them, a more than
Promethean Genius. Looking at them as
the primitive novelists of the myths, they
could not but mould and temper them in
the interest of art and beauty ; and give
them a stamp and a shape suitable for
currency in the universal literary mind.
Primeval Perception and its Streams of
Memory and Tradition.
ioi. There are then two ways and two
series. There is perception, for the earliest
races, of true correspondences : tradition,
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY. 1 47
memory and memorial of such corre-
spondences for the early races ; dictation
of divine messages in correspondences to
the Israelites and the Jews ; the Gospels
and the Apocalypse written in corre-
spondences to the Christian Church. And
now a full revelation of what the corre-
spondences are and signify in the
commissioned writings of Swedenborg.
This is the direct series, attesting the
divinity of the Word. The collateral
human series is the Mythologies. In their
antecedents and accompaniments, these
Mythologies signify and involve powerful
nations and states of mind ; huge emanci-
pations from the order of heaven ; exalta-
tions of human genius ; poetry ; imagination
and fancy corresponding : serpentine science,
vast, hissing and erect ; the birth of
pyramids and colossal architectures ; earth-
dominating and heaven-scaling ambitions,
1 48 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OG Y.
national and individual ; and still, above
them, and within, written in the laws of
their nature, and on the walls of it, fluent
traces of the ancient correspondences coming
sideways and askance. Add to this that all
these heathen races had the pressure of
their ancestors by magnetic co-heredity
above them ; and then add Spirit-Medium-
ship ; and it will be evident that Mythology
came from many and great Factors. Also
that every piece of it is an end and not a
beo-inninof : a nil de sac of human nature,
and at no time a philosophy for it, or any
struggle after a philosophy.
102. It is indeed well that correspondential
mythology is now barren so far as pro-
pagation is concerned. Its creations are
too lasting where rapid perishability and
cremation are the better end. Even
where it falls into nursery tales, it survives
one scientific hypothesis of the world after
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V. 149
another. Jack the Giant-Killer, a son of
old Thor, and a functional relation of Jove,
who was also a Giant-Killer, has a longer
lease in him than Modern Thought, and is
in possession on its merits. It is a gracious
circumstance that our illustrissimi are
ephemeral ; that their scientisms are not
communicated by mediums on tripods, but
by the passing learned ; that they have
" short sentences," and escape out of the
pillories of time by the bills of mortality.
But mythology is not transitory thus.
The Remainders of the Heathenisms.
103. Following the series of the Churches
indicated above, it may be clear that each
of them has left its own particular ruins
behind it ; its heathen remainders and
desolations. The Serpent-worship extant
still, and once in power all over the gentile
1 50 RE I ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
world, is one record of the destroyed
Adamic or celestial Church, the most ancient
of the churches. The heathenisms of
Babylon and Assyria and of the nations of
Canaan ; also of Egypt, and finally of
Greece and Rome, are the fragments and
perverted correspondences of the Ancient,
Noahtic, or spiritual Church ; and of the
memories of the Israelitish or natural
Church : these have vast branches still
subsisting as diverse heathenisms in the
great East and its islands. Lastly, the
Jews are the Jews, themselves the fossils of
the Jewish Church. Old Clothes, not disre-
spectfully, but spiritually spoken, are their
mythology. The same inevitable conse-
quences of doctrinal and religious apostasy
and decline are extant in the Christian
Church. Though it has no mythology, it
has Dogmas which correspond. Its
plurality of divine persons ; its finite human
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY. 1 5 1
passions in the Allfather, interpretable
away from their grossness by no law of
correspondences, as Jehovah is interpretable
all through the Word of the Old Testament ;
the Son, the dispenser of indulgences for
all lives through faith alone in His imputed
Merits : these are truly the final fables of
the first Christian Church, though the word,
Christian, rescues it from the denomination
of heathenism ; because it has pleased the
Lord to plant in its very place a New
Christian Church.
Ethnologic - Geographical Light will
come of the blblical revelation of
the Churches.
104. It is credible that with these divine
informations from the Word regarding the
successive Churches, the history of Idolatry
and Myth will be written afresh, so that the
152 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
various Mythologies may be allocated to the
true centres of which they are the deflexions
and corruptions, and of which at first they
were the profanations. This however is a
matter for the more learned to undertake.
The New Church will have its keen-sighted
explorers who will dig in these mounds, and
unearth their monuments. Fresh evidence
will probably be found there of the geo-
graphical distribution of races, particularly
with regard to their extension and outward
migration from a common centre ; myths,
where they still occur, being the signposts
backwards and forwards ; pointing from the
land of Canaan to Africa ; and from the
Mexican and the Peruvian to the Polynesian
and the Esquimaux. For at first sight it is
not feasible that the members of the human
family, created as we now know indisputably
for a primeval Eden which they inhabited
and tasted, were driven by anything but the
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V. 153
compulsive fact of a declining spiritual life,
and force from without, vis major, put upon
it, to Finland or Greenland or Western
Africa, or the remote islands of the sea.
But this subject in its pursuit belongs to
another time and place.
105. Finally we may see that the concentric
waves of correspondential mythology are
exhausted in their last force and representa-
tion in the state of the whole of the savage
tribes. They are the terminal sand of the
human sea ; the kronic ends of atheism and
self-development in life and mind, typical
self-made men ; and exhibitions of such.
Ages of destructive passions and revenges,
of unbrotherly collidings, ages of lusts, and
of glory, have gone before in terrible logic,
and gendered these remains of human forms
and faculties ; which now, as Sir John
Lubbock well says, demand our brotherly
care. They belong to Allfather with a
i 14 REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
second helplessness the opposite of the first.
They die out here. But there is another
world for the orood am0 nor them after this
o o
one ; conscience is inextinguishable in them ;
and there, through tutelage appointed by the
Divine mercy and its wisdom, they will be
raised towards Man again, and find their
own room in the house of many mansions :
all good States and Kingdoms helping them
so long as they are here.
Attestations from the Word. Nebu-
chadnezzar's Dream of the Image.
Daniel's Vision of the Divine Re-
storer.
i 06. The great drama of divine-human
history here indicated, from the Man Adam
to the savage man, is written down in
Nebuchadnezzar's dream as divined by the
Prophet Daniel.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V. 1 5 5
107. " Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a
great image. This image, which was mighty,
and whose brightness was excellent, stood
before thee ; and the aspect thereof was
terrible. As for this image, his head was of
fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver,
his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of
iron, his feet part of iron, and part of clay.
Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out
without hands, which smote the image upon
his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake
them in pieces. Then was the iron, the
clay, the brass, the silver and the gold,
broken in pieces together, and became like
the chaff of the summer threshing-floors ; and
the wind carried them away, that no place was
found for them ; and the stone that smote
the image became a great mountain, and filled
the whole earth." Daniel, chap. ii. 31-36.
1 08. Also further : the ultimate end achieved
for mankind by the incarnation is as follows.
i 56 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
1 09. " I saw in the night visions, and, behold
there came with the clouds of heaven one
like unto a son of man, and he came even to
the Ancient of Days, and they brought him
near before him. And there was given unto
him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom,
that all the peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him : his dominion is an ever-
lasting dominion, which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom that which shall not be
destroyed." Daniel, chap. vii. 13, 14.
Divine History and Human History.
110. History is twofold, Human and
Divine. Human History tells what man-
kind has done, and what its outward
fates have been. Divine History tells what
mankind itself was and is, and records its
several dooms. The persons of prominent
men in space and time are the subject of the
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 1 57
historian, always with some reference, often
a slender one, to the people of whom they
were the chiefs. This department is a
superficial romance, indispensable to be well
told. But divine History tells of the fates
of all souls in their collective capacity, and
of the Spiritual Judgment upon them in this
collective, and in their individual, capacity
also. The Word, the Logos, is the sole
resort of this latter history. Its annals are
the record, infinite in detail, of the
inheritances of good and evil, and the
consequences of each.
There is no such Thing as Pre-historic
Man, and no such Man as the
Fontanellian Savage.
hi. Taking the writings of Swedenborg
for what they are, a historical Revelation of
the states of humanity from the beginning
153 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY.
to this day ; and onwards ; for it rounds in
with the whole future, — a Revelation of the
First and of the Second Adam, — it is clear
that, spiritually, there are no prehistoric
times so far as mankind is concerned ; for
ages preparatory for man are ages of moving
matter and life, and though (in time) before
history whether sacred or profane, they are
incommensurate with history, and cannot be
named of it. They are simply unhistoric
and ante-human ; that is, there are no men
or women in them. The Lord God has
written the history of the Man who is the
one subject of history, and " let there be
light " (from Him, obviously Divine Light),
is the dawn and the seed of it. Before this
there is homo protoplastus ; recorded, yet
scarcely historic ; the clay awaiting the
potter : " the earth waste and void, and
darkness upon the face of the deep." And
every man by creation and birth is in a
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V. 1 59
lower sense homo protoplastas at first. But
all that can be known of man's primal
history is known from the extended and
detailed internal sense of Scripture now
unlocked ; the divine cypher in which it
is written has been opened both in the
spiritual and natural worlds, as was needful,
to Swedenborg. 1 Thus our brethren, for
such they were and are ; the lake-dwellers
and the cave-men ; " the troglodytes, pile-
villagers, and bog-people," as Virschow calls
them ; who contended with the abundance
of wild beasts for a dole of nature, occupy
so to speak no period in annals. They are
neither of primal history, which is Divine,
nor of secondary history, which is human ;
not prehistoric but post-historic ; the cessa-
1 I desire to recommend to the reader's attentive perusal, The
Garden of Eden, a little book by the Rev. John Doughty, pro-
curable from James Speirs, 36 Bloomsbury St., London, W.C.
It is a popular but adequate statement of the doctrine-history of
the Most Ancient Church, and will materially assist as a first book
towards the understanding of the early chapters of Genesis.
1 60 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y.
tions, ends and extinctions of History :
undynastical dust : the impotent ends of
sex and genesis. Also they were hunted
creatures, aboriginal nowhere. And on
the upward road they lead nowhere. Body
and flesh, albeit alive and for their hour
propagating, are destinies for museums,
and subjects of natural history. Scientism
has its own views in making much of their
bones. Science dealing with facts alone,
and not insurgent against its better self, is,
however, of great use and profit. A strong
divinity shapes its ends. Dispossessed of
unseemly hypotheses, it attests biblical truth
in its exhibition of these earth-born children ;
the lowest evidences of the height and depth
of the Fall. But like buildings and temples
once, now worn down to " the ground from
which they were taken," science has a
monopoly of them, and is the common grave
and respectful mound of such lost tribes.
REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY. i6i
Man's Epoch, and when he was put into
Natural Creation.
112. What is the relation of the foregoing
facts to the Geological record ? Genesis,
chapters i. and ii., deals neither with Geo-
genesis nor with Geology, but with the first
human will and understanding ; with Adam
or Man. This is proved and known, and
to those who recognize it, there is no contest
between Revelation on this head, and
modern knowledge. The antiquity of man,
the epoch in which he first appeared on the
material scene, is out of the direct scope of
the informations of Heaven. Science has
exclusive possession of the question at
present. Eden, indeed, and the garden
planted eastward in it by the Lord God,
implies a place, possibly related to the
four rivers which correspondentially went
L
1 6- RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY.
out from it ; a place, because man was
always a man, and was created in space and
time; and therefore his first abode both for
revelation and reason is in some sort a
geographical reality. As to time and its
antiquity, what years meant then is not
revealed, or otherwise ascertained ; the
successive curves in the spiral of time are
unknown quantities ; but successive states
of man, the relations of his will and
understanding to his Creator and Maker,
are instead of times, and also of spaces, in
the Word ; these periods and places are
human, and heavenly, and not astronomical,
or geographical ; and now are known. Yet
some parts beyond conjecture have visible
faces, and faith and reason are the two eyes
that see them. Man appeared upon earth
when a motherly spot was ready for him ;
when there was a proper environment. He
was no playmate or plaything of ichthyosaurus
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 163
and plesiosaurus. In the measured cooling
of time and space, at length an Eden climate
was exactly reached ; a balmy centre capable
of a garden and a home in it worthy of God
and His infants. A pleasant spot designate,
as our Tyndall might grant, in the willing
bosom of the sun. The growing and living
creatures in that area were suitable and
amenable. The first sons and daughters of
God, one or many, babies, or adults ; in any
case, the youngest always, though now
reckoned the oldest humanity ; did not pass
their heart's babyhood, its infancy, or its
nursery days, among cave-bears and hairy
rhinoceroses : the cradle and early walks
of Allfather's children were watched and
accompanied by better maids than these.
Also we know nothing of their natural
sepulture ; nothing of their bones, which
perchance were not ossified and not
fossilizeable like ours. The bones called
1 64 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
prehistoric are none of theirs. Noscunhir
a sociis. These latter bones are of recent
savages contemporary with evil beasts.
Such details, however, have nothing to do
except inferentially with the downright
Word of Genesis. It deals with the first
religion, which is necessarily the first Man.
But these things may flow as approximate
streams of clear common sense from its truths.
1 13. Among the foremost defenders of the
sacredness and validity of Genesis 1 stands
the name of the late Thomas Karr Callard,
F.G.S., an indefatigable explorer of whatever
1 The controversy about Genesis as with reservations a literal
account of the Creation enlists great names pro and con. We
must hope that the Spiritual Sense honestly studied in Swedenborg's
Arcana Ccelestia may decide the question on a higher ground.
Such a study is worthy of the genius of a Huxley. The difficulty
for the scientific man lies in admitting that there is a Word of
God in the case. Let him then try it as a hypothesis. The
difficulty for the believer lies in opening his mind to perceive
that the Word must have divine contents not visible in the
letter ; and that the justification of the Bible rests on these.
Read also Swedenborg's Apocalypse Revealed, for ample materials
for forming a judgment on the whole subject.
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 1 65
belongs to the so-called " prehistoric man."
His treatises are of importance from the
doubt they cast on the human origin of many
of the celts and edged flints of which so much
capital of antiquity has been made : out of
which indeed has been conjured up the
geologist's Frankenstein, the Palaeolithic
man, whom T. K. Callard has probably put
to his final rest. See his pamphlet, The
Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of
Man reconsidered, 1875. He travelled far
and wide in the interest of his Bible, and
brought a mine of experience to bear on his
special subject. The views in this paper
are not indeed his ; but the purpose of
both is the same : to derive from Genesis
an undeniable account of God's Creation,
which account obviously God alone can give.
And if, as we hold, Genesis gives a divine
account of all spiritual creation, it would be
difficult to decline the possibility that light
1 66 REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
must come from thence illustrating natural
creation. Not indeed the external and
so - called material events presumed by
Astronomy, and the planetary changes
unearthed by Geology, which are not
creation, but formation and arrangement
subsequent ; but the divine process which
like a soul informs and underlies and builds
up the body of every world ; as the human
soul builds up by ends and causes of God's
own in it, its human form and body as its
effect. This is creation and divine archi-
tecture; and except by Swedenborg it is a
realm of real creation which has been
entered by no man. See his Work, The
Worship and Love of God.
1 14. "Dean Stanley," remarks Mr. Callard,
" says of the earlier Biblical records, that
they were not, and could not be, literal
and prosaic matter-of-fact descriptions of
the beeinninsf of the world, of which, as
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 1 67
of its end, no man knoweth, or can con-
ceive, except by figure and parable." "If
we were prepared," Mr. Callard says, "to
accept the teaching of the earlier Biblical
records as simply teaching by figure and
parable, we should still expect that these
figures and parables should be the embodi-
ments of truths, or else they would be to
us worse than useless. But it would be
very difficult to find any figurative or para-
bolical meaning in these early records that
would harmonize with the teaching concern-
ing the Antiquity of Man. What meaning,
for example, was intended to be conveyed
by those Biblical records, when they say that
'God created man in His own image'?
Surely Paleolithic man was not created in
the image of God ; the image of the lowest
savage, just one remove from the brute, was
all that was impressed upon him. What
again could have been the parabolical teach-
1 68 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OG Y.
ing of the fall of man ? Surely there was
no room for Palaeolithic man to fall." (T. K.
Callard, in the preface to op. cit., supra.)
From which it appears that this pious and
thoughtful writer rejected the idea that the
Man or Adam of Genesis was in any way
identical or contemporaneous with the hypo-
thetical prehistoric man of the scientists.
Dean Stanley also rightly divined that
creation could be imaged forth by figure and
parable ; which was the nearest thing he
could say to the embodiment of its truths
in correspondences.
The Conditions on which Adam was Adam,
and in the garden eastward in eden.
Also Embryological Considerations.
Palaeontology finds Monsters, but
not evil Monsters.
i 1 5. We may further conceive rationally
that this prime estate, depending upon the
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 169
relation of Jehovah to the selfhood or p7'o-
prium with freewill as its determinant, was,
like the conscience and the spiritual and moral
natures, now a perishable state ; and that when
the first Adam, the living soul, was insurgent,
and disobedient to the heavenly influx, the
primitive personality was defaced, perhaps
rapidly, the fall standing only one chapter
away from the perfected creation. Thereby
the order of things was essentially changed,
because man, the end and summit, changed
himself, and was changed. The inspirations
in him, in a world still of correspondences,
became a new and vast creation around him.
The earth was cursed for his sake, and it
yielded thorns and thistles. The creatures
which were fcetal in nature, the huge animals
that were feeders of it with life, the realm of
fossils now, gave place to another order of
creations of malign intent, which had man-
kind not for their end and crown, but for
1 70 RE I ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
their prey. The earlier forms separated
from their epoch, the colossal mammoths and
lizards, look shocking and ugly indeed, but
yet not more so than the fcetal forms of all
animals, which are repulsive, and not meant
to be gazed upon unless by scientific eyes.
But notwithstanding this, the early evolutions
out of the fervid waters and the steaming
earth, which in the letter are commanded to
bring forth beast, bird and creeping thing,
the Deinotheria, Iguanodons, Pterydactyla,
and all the brood, were not inimical to man,
for man was not in their days. They were
Ymirs (see n. 41) in preparatory nature,
introducing into it a needful influx of life.
(See the chapter, " Man's Place in Nature "
in the Author's work on Human Science and
Divine Revelation, where "Zoo-Statics" are
treated of.) These teeming monsters preyed
indeed upon each other, in which regard the
human foetus also is an example. It contains
RE VELA TION A AY? MYTHOLOG Y. 171
many organs and channels of organism which
are indispensable to it, and are its state, and
these are consumed for the permanent ones
by advancing exigencies of life. Other and
ultimately higher functions eat them up and
destroy them. These deciduous parts are
the human organization tending to birth and
preparing for it. They die out ; perhaps
destroy each other because they have served
their turn in the torrid womb, and fulfilled
their work. The lasting organs clearly feed
upon them. Nay, does noc the human
embryo also live upon human food, and
consume the willing fortunate mother ? But
evil beasts are not of this order, but come
out of perverse man, are images of him,
and associate with him on equal terms
when at last he grounds in the savage state.
116. Spermatozoa are examples of the
forms that may occur in the human initia-
ments themselves ; serpentine forms ; and
1 7 2 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
similar cases of monstrose appearance will
readily suggest themselves to the students of
embryology. Such forms are however in the
direct lineage of the physical man. They tend
to humanity. But when the whole creation
was in embryo, the to us strange evolutions of
life were preparatory to man, and ended with
themselves, breeding no successors. They
were the vitals of the then world, without
which it would have been dead animally. It
is not wonderful that we do not understand
their forms, since science has no imagination
of their preparatory functions in the world-
oro-anism. The religious mind which has
not studied these things, may easily be led
to suppose that the " poor monsters " dis-
interred were evil beasts because to it they
are ugly ; and so may be led to grant evil
before man, and find it difficult to believe in
a primitive Eden : or to follow the Word
where it says, " And God saw all that
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 173
He had made, and behold it was very-
good."
1 1 7. There is also another consideration
derived from common experience to be
alleged for monstrous and colossal forms ;
namely, from Arts and Inventions ; which
are the human types of creations. The killing
of Giants has humane significance here. As
a rule, the progress of invention in the mind
and its works in nature, is from the great to
the small, from the unwieldy to the shapely.
Trace any perfected machine through its
developments to what it at length becomes,
and you find so much put aside, so much
simplicity put on, so much handiness got at
the expense of weight and complexity ; so
much compactness and tendency to smallness,
not littleness, attained. The machine may
be said to feed on its early stages and to
absorb them. If the trial of them had not
been gone through, it could not have reached
174 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY.
the final elegance of its use. It was a
monster at first, having decorum of per-
fection constantly in view : this being at
length gained by elimination and rejection.
Divine creation in this respect seems to be
similar to human creation. So also, age by
age, each last century is worked off into an
exiguous remainder which stands for the
purpose of the lives and works now in hand.
We do not find in this scheme that the
lowest form budges from its place ; it is
reproduced on its own level by a more
advanced creation, which is the lowest still.
E.g. a font of types is at the bottom now
where it was with Caxton, and never becomes
a cerebrum.
1 1 8. These indeed are sidelong considera-
tions, though they may be suggested by
what is directly revealed on the "golden
tables " of the Word. Science thus perhaps,
ignoring the savage man as an origin, and
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 175
looking at Geology and Palaeontology, and
then at survivals and Natural History,
through the lens of the spiritual Genesis,
may see further into the natural Genesis
than is possible with her present optical
means.
Heredities die out in the Savage Man.
119. According to our good old friend,
Herbert Spencer, " Out of Savages unable
to count up to the number of their fingers,
and speaking a language containing only
nouns and verbs, arise at length our
Newtons and Shakespeares." This occurs,
he opines, by the increment of passive and
active habits and faculties represented
continually in fresh brain structures and
combinations, and transmitted hereditarily
to new generations of similar accumulators ;
each age tending to stand upon the
shoulders of the last, till the flint implement
1 76 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
becomes a rifled cannon, and the imitative
"bow-wow," a Macbeth and a Hamlet. We
do not find that sequence in things, or these
amplifications from savage cerebrums. On
the contrary, nothing is more distinctive of
the savage man than decay of Nature, — than
the dying out of his heredities ; and we may
safely infer from this, the obliteration of
much of the complex mechanism of his
brains. He is thus thriftless to the fortunes
of his forefathers, and his only increment is
increased loss of natural parts ; often attended
however with a development of the sense
of outward spheres of distance, smells, and
the like, as a transient compensation. This
privilege approximates him to the instinctive
animals. By degradations or natural vices
and " vastations" it would be conceivable
that a Newton or Shakespeare line of men
should become savages ; but the reverse
process is impossible. The reason is mental
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOL OCY. 177
and cerebral. The savage loses ancestry by-
parting with ancestral qualities one by one,
and with their nerve and brain correspond-
ents. Whether his head becomes measurably
smaller or not is a question ; but that the
contents of his skull grow more and more
worthless for transmitting quality, is beyond
dispute. His inherited life dwindles until
he has no past and no future ; no common
but only a single private memory, and he
is a waif and stray of an hour, a foundiing :
a denatured eggless butterfly going back
through a caterpillar and ending in a stone.
As we read him, he parts with his heredities
one after another as the pages of a volume,
until nothing but the blank leaves at the
beginning a nd the end of him, are left. In
these conditions, in permanence of nature he
is below the beasts ; a fact which differences
him for ever from the animal tribes, from the
ascidian to the elephant. Their instincts are
M
1 78 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
indestructible, and cannot be lost, though
they are superficially altered by circum-
stances, and also by domestication, and
other relations to mankind ; and the surface-
changes can be transmitted by constant
care to the breeds, and become heredities ;
always, however, liable to relapse into the
original form, — the degrd brut, from which
they began ; with the instinct still intact, and
capable of being developed and varied again
and again as at first. But man has no
permanent instincts, except in a figurative
sense ; and originating from the Creator with
a blank mind having freewill and initial
conscience within it and above it, and con-
sequently with a capacity for spiritual good,
or evil ; for rising or falling in his life ; he
is instructible by parents from without and
by heaven from within ; and by passive
faculties or senses, by reasons, and their
upper faculty, intelligence, he can acquire
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 179
knowledge, and transmute it into habits not
the result of instincts ; but of the action of a
superior mind or conscience upon an inferior,
or proprium. Therefore the more he goes
down in the scale, the less his knowledge or
science is to him ; the less considerate his
cerebrum and cerebellum become ; the less
of truly human form he transmits to his
offspring ; and in the end the inheritance of
the race in him is spent and wasted ; and
the hopeless savage appears. The con-
trary creed, though built through laborious
volumes, seems to us a magical persuasion
of the antitheistic mind, in no way differing
in baselessness and irrationality from the
grossest dogmas of theological creeds. It
leaves Man out, not philosophizes towards
him.
1 80 RE I ELA TION AND MYTH O LOG Y.
The missing Link, and the Link that is
not missing.
120. In closing with our friend, the
Savage Man, we must notice the "missing
link ; " for such a gap there is, though in
a sense opposite to the scientist view.
The chain of creation verily is broken ; and,
depending, as it does, for its strength upon
the will of mankind, it is snapped in the
individual and the collective man every day ;
and in the great Churches which have
existed in the world, it is utterly broken for
them at the close of the epoch of each. It
is the chain that conjoins Man to God ; and
holds the only Missing Link. " Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God above all things, and
thy neighbour as thyself. On these two
commandments hang all the Law and the
Prophets^ Here Christ declares the Word
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 1 8 1
and obedience to its First and Second great
commandments, to be a chain ; and the
actual links of it are the two loves of God
and the neighbour perpetually practised in
the church of daily life.
121. The link which is not missing is the
link which likens, not conjoins, man to the
beasts. Descend as he may, he can never
be a beast ; for no beast can ever do wrong
in the sense of disobedience to God's Com -
mandments. A tiger is cruel, but not in the
sense, or with the delight, that a man is : it
is a cruel machine by nature and nature's
pleasure, but cannot be a devil. A horse,
or a dog, can violate his training, and disap-
point his master ; but no sane man blames
him as a morally, still less as a spiritually,
responsible creature. He can succumb to
temptation ; but he has only one plane, the
senses, in which his instincts and reasons lie ;
and no higher mind to fortify him, or to
i S2 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
rebuke him. He bears immediate, but not
remote, consequences. A man, however,
can descend below the beasts, and it vilifies
them when he is called a beast.
122. Looking thus from above downwards
at these two links, the lower and contrarious
chain with as many links as there are human
evils and lusts, can in no proper scientific sense
be said to be missing. As Bacon observes
of something else, " it is not deficient but
redundant." By its cunning iron hooks it
likens and assimilates mankind to the fierce
and treacherous creatures of the forest and
the wilderness ; to serpent and monkey, to
wolf and bear, to vulture and crocodile.
And yet notwithstanding the broad strands
of cerebrum and cerebellum, of flesh and
bone, and their delights, which liken him
thus to the conscienceless animals, he is
blind enough to put on a thousand scientist
spectacles to pore after the "missing
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 1 83
link." He does not see the wood for the
trees.
1 23. This all too common link, however,—
missed but nowise missing, — is in no affinity
with the fabulous monster supposed to be
intermediate between man and the beasts.
Intermediacy between the possible image of
God and possible personification of Satan,
and any living machine or zoomagnet, is
absurd. The very likeness between the two
is in this world a mere analogy. The stream
of things from the mineral to man, is a
highway of ascending order standing as a
pedestal for the human summit ; but there
is nothing creative in it excepting the
Creator ; and each part of the series is an
end in itself, and terminates a step of the
order for itself: its Use making it sub-
stantial, and causing its arrest into some
fixed form of individuality ; or what is the
seme thing, of service. If it exhausted
1 84 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
itself in the ascent, and became something
else, creation would be a bog, and no founda-
tion for the temple it is to bear. But to
realize this truth, it is indispensable to be
aware by acknowledgment of a creation and
also of a Creator. He can realize it for you.
But if you make the world out of your own
head, or make the world make itself out of
its own tail, the savage man in you will
engender with the "missing link" also in
you, and your faculties will be re-born as
mothers of chimseras.
The Africans.
i 24. By the Savage Man in the preceding
pages we understand primarily him whose
remains are found in connexion with flint
implements and other rude resources of
existence ; and more inferentially those tribes
which are dying out, being unable to enter
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 185
either upon property on the earth, or into
labour for property as a means of livelihood.
This is necessary to be stated ; because
otherwise some readers might include among
such savages ancient nations still extant and
abiding ; some of whose ways are savage
enough, and whose superstitions are manifold
and degrading. It may be a problem at any
time whether certain races are not dying
out ; but this speculation we do not touch ;
but are concerned only with the actual fact
of disappearance as the past mark and clear
process of the Savage Man.
125. Among the nations which might be
taken for granted as savages we will specify
the peoples of Africa, and the Negroes in
particular. The latter, however, lack the
first characteristic of the Savage Man ; they
do not die out, but are rooted and enduring.
They are capable of home life in Africa,
and cultivate the soil. Where they have
1 86 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
no contact with the civilized man they are
predatory and brutal ; waging incessant wars
with neighbouring tribes ; and probably from
old times have been authors and accomplices
in the sale of men, women and children, — in
the initiament of black negro slavery. Yet
as races they are preserved, while so many
of the historical nations, also addicted to the
practice of enslavement, have died out. No
doubt there are reasons for this permanence,
as there are reasons for the perpetuation of
the Jews, the individual nomads of civilization.
We mean deep or spiritual reasons.
126. One great fact is patent about the
captured Negro and also his descendants ;
he is of use to the world he lives in. In the
West Indies and in the United States he
demonstrates that he holds his own on this
practical ground. He is a group of industrial
peoples. Evidently what is essential to him
is to have another race over him to enjoin
RE I ELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 1 87
the duties and morals of his newer existence :
where this fails, as in Hayti, he relapses
into African conditions. The Frenchman
once dispossessed in the island of St.
Domingo left him masterful and in ruins.
He is probably incapable of any but com-
pulsory civilization. We do not here mean
slavery ; but the laws and pressures which
constitute the existing control of the world ;
and which represent our present derivation
of the Ten Commandments as influencing
Society. The laws of states may be dim
reflexions of these, but they are what all
honest men have to obey. The Negro has
them engrafted upon him, and he is a
sufficiently fixed quantity to be capable of
enduring the graft, and surviving it. In
this sense where there are white men to
reign, there are nations of Christian Negroes ;
fruitful of progeny, prospering, and promising.
127. Moreover, as we hear, the Negro,
1 88 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
since his emancipation from personal slavery,
is still a labourer for his master, as well as
on his own account ; and raises crops for the
commerce of the world.
128. He has characteristics of his own
apart from those of his white brethren. As
in all new conditions, he is overweening, and
has not yet found his level as a freedman.
But there lies in him a simple-mindedness
and a religious humility which white Christen-
dom does not possess. Clever and quick-
seeing, he is incapable of intellectual per-
versions ; they are nothings to him : dogmas
do not possess him : indeed he has little
of intellect that is separable from his warm
affections. The very qualities that make
him subservient and utile to the Mahometan,
the Arab and the Turk, are spiritually of
value. Docility, and not servility but
possible faithful servanthood, stand forth
in him. The Negroes exemplify service,
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 1 89
and all they want, in order to burn and to
shine, is good masters, or a law - abiding
society around them. They are eminently
capable of affectional religion, and John
Wesley, the man of " dear Jesus," is their
present help in time of need. Labour in
tropic heat, and social skill in common
ministrations, are their quality ; and offices
of the affections ; for childhood and nursing
are native in the hearts of their women.
129. First of men on this earth, with no
mundane experience about the Negro Race,
Swedenborg, from higher experience, declared
remarkable things about the then hunted and
enslaved blacks, saying that they had in
them a " celestial " genius, and that the good
among them are at last particularly white
in the veracious upper world which shows
us all in our true colours. This is doubtless
the reason that their angels have touched to
the quick the conscience of the nineteenth
190 REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
century, and that generous-hearted men, the
Clarksons, Wilberforces, Lincolns, Emersons,
and an army of other good men and women,
had no rest day or night until the chains of
their slaves were broken. The wars of
emancipation have already been mighty
for them, and must continue until their
homes are safe everywhere under the final
olive trees on this earth.
130. Therefore for reasons of nature, use
and service ; of progeny as the sand of the
sea ; of affection and religion ; yea now of
spiritual revelation ; and of the manifest help
and protection of heaven through human in-
strumentality; we conclude that the black men
are out of the class of the savage man. Their
cruel transplantation, which has not destroyed
their affections, has made them into orderly
and peculiar families of nations ; and perhaps
in time under white guidance will convert a
force of them into armies, for the " redemption,
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y. 191
regeneration, and disenthralment " of their
brother-nations in the dark Continent.
Professors, and not Savages, guilty of
making Nature-Myths.
131. As we are here engaged to some
extent with the mode of interpretation of
mythology, so far as to show that its inner
contents demonstrate its origin to be from
above, and not from below, we will briefly
notice the application of it to nature, which
has been attempted by Finn Magnusson for
the Scandinavian Mythology, and by other
authors and thinkers for the systems of Greece
and India, and for other mythologies and
myths. See Baring Gould's popular works,
passim. According to this view, Apollo and
the other Gods are nothing else than
personifications of the great phenomena
of nature. The exploits and fortunes of
192 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
Apollo are the changes of the Sun through
the Seasons. The Python he slays is the
night or the winter ; etc. These puerilities
are interpretations of the myths from nature
to nature ; and are of the same kind as the
identification of the Great Beast in the
Apocalypse with Napoleon Buonaparte, etc.
What we have discerned in the myths, is,
the remains of a correspondence between
spiritual and not natural things and the
fictitious historicals in the myths. The
nature theory, however, would import
that the races of men had it in them to
anthropomorphize the great and small
things of nature, and to set them acting
and talking as men and women. But this
belongs to the exploded view of the savage
man, godless, as the progenitor of the human
family ; the constitutional seed of language
and the arts. No motive can be imagined
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 193
in him, the prosiest of the prose of outworn
human character ; for going so far towards
poetry, as to make the plain useful sun into
a beautiful God ; or to raise external nature,
in which the savage was a gravitating
element, dying out, into a theatre of super-
natural beings, with manifold dramas for its
properties. Now evidently the dramatization
of nature in mythology, anthropomorphic
for the most part as it needs must be, is
readily accounted for on the true principle
of the fall of man, and is not accounted for
on the notion of a self-effected struggle
upwards, which is not the known history
or lesson of any race. There are many
tumbles for nations as for men ; but no
uprising of the degraded except from with-
out the nature which is in fall. The truth,
the Christ in some form, must come to them
from without to lift them up : obedience to
it in life so lifts them ; and all else is their
1 94 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG V.
own gravitation, swifter and more swift, to
their end in the dust.
Correspondence is not Analogy. Nature
corresponds generally to the spiri-
TUAL World, but nothing in Nature
to Nature.
132. Nevertheless all nature does corre-
spond to spiritual things, but indirectly.
That is to say, not by immediacy of states
of life, but through all successions of space
and time. Thus the divine Apollo, if we
may for a moment clothe Christianity in
mythological garments, has the natural Sun
with its heat and light corresponding to
Him ; and it works through nature with His
Love and wisdom by its correspondences
and material equations. To discern some
of these is the highest science, and is a
spiritual Philosophy ; and they are visible
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 195
even in the obscurity of mythology. But
mythology itself, already imbedded in nature,
leads to nothing but arbitrary fancy work
when it is carried out as meaning nature,
and not mind and spirit. It is the old story
of materialism, now so prevalent in many
fields. You have your Man given, your
Apollo, and instead of conversing with his
interior life through his plain face, and
understanding him, you vivisect him into
Nature's Sun and Moon, and in the end
convert him into dust and ashes. The
Greeks did indeed turn correspondences
into fabulous matter ; but they were still
correspondences though perverted, cor-
rupted, and debased ; and they were never
the almanacs or weather-registers of the
savage man.
133. The fixed field of nature, with the
iron-clanking rule of space and time directing
it, is no platform to which even myth and
1 96 RE VELA TION A ND MYTHOLOG V.
mythology can apply themselves. They
are borrowed from man's spirit, and are
significant there only. Sunrise and sunset,
thunder and lightning, are sunrise, sunset,
thunder and liohtninof, and cannot be recast
into other forms. But on the spiritual side
these natural words in the Word all dwell
in man, are therefore anthropomorphic for
good or evil ; and in declining races this
character comes manifestly forth in a crowd
of Gods and goddesses, and natural super-
natures and superstitions. (Of these Dr.
William Smith reckons that there were some
thirty thousand in the Greek mythology
alone.)
Human Nature is all compact of Consan-
guinities, Ancestries and Heredities,
genuine Families of Mental States.
134. There is a law in human nature as it
goes onwards to its manifold goals and be-
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 197
gettings, by which all things have progeny,
and are as fathers, mothers, sons and
daughters in the unrolling of time. The
advance pushes back the fathers into grand-
fathers ; and at length into remote ancestors
and "most ancient" peoples. The seed is
there, and the river which we now are comes
from the first head-waters of it. So it
is with mythology also. Its Grandsire is
revelation of the spiritual world. Its Father
is the recorded memory and use of this
revelation for another church. Mythology
itself is the wandering Ishmael, the child of
the bondwoman, or of a spurious but still
necessary religion. The interpretation is
the last thing, and follows the fates of the
fontal revelation. The finale always is to
sink the entire drama of the once celestial
and spiritual man into nature and modern
laneuaee, and to consume its ashes there.
This is the scientist and philosophast road
198 REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
towards the savage man. It occurred in
Asia and in Egypt, and probably presided
at the nomenclature of the constellations.
If there were not still a revealed Lord God,
the end of it would be universal metaphysics,
and then, failing nourishment on their east
wind, mental suicide of disgust and despair.
Comparative Mythology : its new
Christian Value.
135. Comparative mythology is not charge-
able with this, but should be versed in tracing
the likeness and parallelism of Myths in
various races and ages ; and also in purging
the true mythological body from the accretions
of fancy and imagination, which are not the
factors of genuine myths. For instance, when
the cows of Audhumbla 1 are said to be the ice-
1 The derivation of these words is marked as uncertain in the
Lexicons ; but Saehrimnir seems likest to the rime or foam of the
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 199
bergs, it is clear that fancy frames the cypher
and the analogue. Also when the boar
Saehrimnir, the ever-renewed banquet of the
yEsir in Valhalla, is alive and whole every
morning after being eaten in the midday
repast, and is named from the foam of the
sea, which foam never suffers, or fails, we
plainly see that poetry is at work ; and that
it has caught hold of a huge analogy of
unfailing supply. It is a simile used as a
correspondence. The boar-coinage gives a
rude richness to the table. But here the
whole platform is from nature to nature ;
and though there is a mental element and
sueeestion in the conceit, it has no spiritual
contents, and mythology washes its hands
sea; and if Audhumbla is from Audhr = void, and hiim = darkness, it
may mean the polar darkness, of which the icebergs are the fed and
feeding cows. This is not myth, but the common allegorizing
habit of the poetical Norse language. Sec Sveinbjorn Egillson's
Lexicon Poelicum throughout. The rime of the sea is a storm-food,
and is appropriate to the fighting dynasty which reigned in Valhalla.
If they had a second course it might be Mother Carey's chickens.
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOL OG Y.
of it. When the study of " comparative
mythology " is advanced, it forms a valuable
attestation of the great network of heathenism
as having a universality and organic oneness
which proclaims its descent from the earliest
and the early religions and Churches of
Jehovah. An opinion indeed prevails that
the multitudinous myths which resemble
Bible things, discredit and disprove the
sacred character of the latter ; but when
once it is established that the Word not
only stands above, but in time precedes, all
heathenisms ; and that the highest humanity
was at the beginning, and because it was at
the beginning will again be at the end ; this
other opinion, dear to a school of natural-
ists, falls to the ground. Now the previous
position is established in the Arcana
Ccelestia and the great series of Sweden-
borg's Writings.
136. Baring Gould well says in his chapter
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 201
on the " Legend of the Cross," that it is
founded on the fact " that the cross was a
sacred sign long before Christ died upon it.
And how account for this ? . . . I see no
difficulty in believing that it formed a portion
of the primeval religion, traces of which exist
over the whole world among every people.
. . . The use of the cross as a symbol of
life and regeneration ... is as widely spread
over the world as the belief in the ark of
Noah."
Correspondences are the Administrators
of Divine Justice and Judgment.
137. Bear now in mind in judging of the
foregoing little treatise, that Correspondences
as they are here meant, are extant only in the
Inspired Word ; and that it is the perversion
of these correspondences which gave rise to
all the mythologies. For the Word is
202 RE VELA TION AND M YTHCLOG Y.
written in natural language, but according
to the laws and visible appearances of the
spiritual world. This constitutes it the
medium of communication between the Lord
and the Church, between heaven and earth.
And the spiritual world is quite similar in
outward appearance to the natural world,
and contains in its immensity all the objects
of universal nature, and indefinitely more
besides. But it differs from the lower or
natural creation in this one respect, that each
thing, realm and sphere of it corresponds by
divine justice and mercy to the individuals,
societies, and greater and greatest organiza-
tions, of the angels and spirits, of the human
people, who are in it. Hence in designating
any object ; as sun, moon, and stars ; as
domestic or wild animals ; as birds or fishes ;
as trees or plants ; as stones or minerals ;
the spiritual quality of the individual and
the society of which the apparent object is
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOGY. 203
the outcome, is the matter intended in the
Word. You might read the quale of the
society in the turf it treads on and in the
trees which embosom it. The objects in
fact are the mere appearances of human
states of good and evil, truth and falsity ;
they are virtues and vices embodied. Such
being the case, they represent and signify
with infinite variety all those things in man ;
and because they represent and signify, they
correspond to them. In this ultimate, fixed
and lower world nothing so represents, signi-
fies, or corresponds. The sun shines upon
the evil and the good; the summer warms
and the winter chills them both alike. But
there is no winter in heaven ; because the
hearts there are devoid of the love of self,
which is spiritual cold ; and there is no sun
in hell ; because the infinite Love shuts
itself away by merciful impassable barriers
from those whose evil freedom it would
2C4 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y.
infringe ; and whom therefore its ardent fire
of unselfishness would destroy. These then
are specimens of the correspondences which
were universally contained and perceived by
the men of the first Church and most ancient
Religion. They were intuitively known by
the transfluence of heaven where such cor-
respondences are the law, through their minds
open to angelic influence and conversation.
The Word in them was a constant and in-
tuitive communication, written on their souls,
and flowing through their perceptions into
their senses. And hence the objects of this
world seemed also to be correspondential by
constantly suggesting their spiritual similars
in the celestial abodes. This was in the
beginning of God's Fatherhood, and of the
religion of His infantine children kneeling
around Him ; and this is what in its extinc-
tion died out into the several planes ol
mythology.
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY.
Help from Swedenborg.
138. To enable the reader to comprehend
more easily the perceptive state of the
earliest men, by some analogy with the
condition of the human mind to-day, and
to show that there is no realism of things
which outlies the characteristic states of the
will, or which, as Bacon phrases it, is not
" steeped in the affections," we cite the
following passage from Swedenborg.
139. "For the men of the most ancient
Church there was no other than internal
worship ; such worship as exists in heaven,
for heaven so communicated with man in
them, that the two made one. This com-
munication consisted in the Perception
often spoken of above. Therefore because
the internal man in them was angelic, they
were sensible indeed of the external things
206 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
belonging to the body and the world, but
they did not care for them. In all the
objects of the senses they perceived a some-
thing divine and celestial. For example,
when they saw a high mountain, they did
not perceive the idea of the mountain, but
the idea of height ; and in the height they saw
heaven, and the Lord. Hence it came to
pass that the Lord was said to dwell in the
highest, and Himself was called the most
Hieh and the most Ex-cellent; and after-
wards the worship of the Lord was held on
mountains. So again when they perceived
the morning, it was not the mere morning
of the day, but the celestial morning, the
morning- and dawn in the mind. Hence
the Lord was the Morning, the East and
the Dawn. So when they saw a tree with
its fruit and leaves, they did not heed these
at all, but they saw man in them ; love and
charity in the fruit ; and faith in the leaves.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 207
Hence the man of the Church was not only
compared to a tree, and to a Paradise, and
his endowments to fruit and leaves, but he
was also called these very names. Such are
those who live in the celestial and ano-elic
idea. Men of every capacity can understand
that each general or common idea rules all
the particulars which belong to it; for
instance, all the objects of the senses, all
which the mind of the man sees, or hears ;
and in such wise rules them, that he takes
no heed to the objects save in so far as they
enter into his general idea. To him who is
glad at heart, all the things which he hears
and sees appear joyous and smiling. But to
the sorrowful man all are sad and distressing.
So it is in every case. The general affection
is in all its circumstances, and makes the man
see and hear whatever is about him in that
affection. The rest is irrelevant and non-
apparent, absent and nothing to him. Apply
RE J ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
this to the man of the Most Ancient Church.
Whatever he saw with his eyes was for him
celestial ; and all and singular things were in
a manner alive. From this the nature of his
Divine Worship may be clearly seen. It
was internal and in no wise external. But
the Church declined in his posterity, and
then the above-mentioned perception, the
communication with heaven, began to perish,
and a different order of things arose. Men
then no longer perceived the Celestial in the
objects of the senses as heretofore, but the
mundane, and this, more and more as the
residue of perception grew smaller. And
in the last posterity immediately before the
flood they found nothing in objects but
worldly, bodily, and earthly things. So
heaven was separated from man, and
only communicated with him very remotely.
Communication with hell was then brought
to pass ; and the general idea, the origin
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y 209
of the ideas of all the particulars, came
from thence. Then when any celestial idea
offered itself, it was a thing of naught, and
at last man refused to acknowledge the
existence of the spiritual and celestial at all.
In fact the state was changed and turned
upside down. As this event was foreseen
by the Lord, provision was made, that the
doctrinals of faith should be conserved, so
that mankind might know from them what
the celestial was, and what the spiritual.
Those who were called Cain and Enoch
collected these doctrinals from the Man of
the Most Ancient Church : and therefore it
is said of Cain that a mark was put upon him,
that no one might slay him ; and of Enoch,
that he was taken by God. These doctrinals
consisted merely in significatives, and in a
manner in enigmatic cyphers ; they declared
what the things upon earth signified ; to wit,
the mountains ; namely things in heaven,
o
2 1 o RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y.
and the Lord. What the morning and the
East ; namely again things in heaven, and
the Lord. What the different kinds of trees
and their fruits signified ; man namely, and
the celestial things belonging to him. Their
doctrinals consisted of such teachings collected
from the significatives of the Most Ancient
Church. Their writings therefore were of
the same character. And as they admired
and seemed to themselves to behold a divine
and celestial character in such things, and
also because of their antiquity, so worship
had inception, and was permitted, out of
these and the like teachings ; and was
held on mountains, in groves, and among
trees. Hence too their pillars in the
open air : and ultimately their altars and
burnt offerings ; which became in the end
the principal forms in all worship. This
worship originating from the Ancient Church,
spread to its posterity, and to all the
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
nations round about." {Arcana Ccelesiia,
n. 920.)
140. This extract translated somewhat
freely, gives a synopsis from one point of
the Most Ancient Man, and of the Ancient
Man ; and restates all we have had to say
on Revelation and Mythology. It is fruitful
in many directions. It leads to consider
what the life of the most internal men was,
seeing that they also had daily duties in the
natural world, and did them from instantaneous
perception. The Paradise which they in-
habited, truly adult in love and its wisdom
as they were, was a fostering cradle to the
celestial good that was in them. They were
not students or philosophers, but veritable
working seers engaged with the truest life
in close company with angels; and the central
beatitude of nature was in a sense both their
church and their mother. They were not
therefore lost in their own perceptions, as
2 1 2 RE VELA TION AND M I "THOLOG V.
the superficial reader might imagine, but
they saw things as they really were ; full of
God, and binding to love, light, and conduct
in every dear human relation. Nor was ap-
preciation lost but heightened and intensified
by seeing things through and through as
optic words of twelvefold crystal ; but each
stair of perception was a sublime resting-
place for thankfulness and delight. Art may
picture this, and the Poet imagine towards
it, but it is a lost divine art to live it. We
forbear to venture further on an endless
theme. This state, therefore, so remote
from man and nature to-day, is not a dream
of idlesse, but a supreme theatre of use and
service.
141. See on this subject Bishop South's
fine sermon on the state of Adam. I read it
long years ago. For lack of knowledge now
given, the Bishop regarded Adam as a single
person, and not as the primeval or Most
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 1 1 3
Ancient Church ; and was not aware that
the Flood-ages intervened destructively be-
tween that Church and subsequent mankind.
He says however truly that the mind of
Adam lived " in direct fervours of love to
God, and in collateral emissions of charity
to Man." I quote from memory. Also that
" an Aristotle was but the ruins of an Adam."
We may say that glacial epochs of heathenism,
in which providential effacement of whole
planes of human life and its kingdoms
occurred, intervened between the Greek
mind and the Ancient Church. Aristotle
was not therefore a ruin in any relation to
Adam; but a new and lower point of de-
parture, with service in his great faculty
for many generations, to the present time ;
perhaps contributing some organic sinews
to the doctrinal body of truths which are
now revealed to us.
142. Finally in treating of the inward life
2i4 REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
of the first men, that is, of the most ancient
Church, we find their derivatives in the
correspondences collected and preserved by
Cain and Enoch, and serving as Media for
the two succeeding Churches down to the
coming of Christ ; when the outward use
of Correspondences, excepting in the case of
Baptism and the Holy Supper, ceased. But
of the most Ancient Church itself there are
no other direct remains : as the first divine
making of a collective man it is extinct. It
was changed into a new condition of religion
in the secondary humanity called Noah ; — in
the Noahtic Church. Nevertheless it is not
extinct as a life; but reappears personally
and individually wherever man or woman
by regeneration is opened into the celestial
degree of affection and perception. Such
scattered instances are the seed and promise
of the second golden ages of the New
Jerusalem ; which city will comprise all sorts
RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOL OGY. 215
and conditions of men, natural, spiritual, and
celestial. But with regard to the Most Ancient
Church as an inspired organ raising up the
human family to become the immediate sons
of Jehovah God, the only possible record of
it is by the correspondences in the Sacred
Scripture. This is intimately internal-his-
torical, and not external ; it stands within
and above History, and is the beginning
of the present Word ; related indeed to
all subsequent records, and illuminating
them : but the frailty and transiency of the
celestial state, as it were morning dew, and
of its successions, demands, what it has,
nothine less than a divine recorder.
The Origin of Language.
143. Among the things involved in the
creation of man is also the origin of language.
For the Man here meant, coming by virtue
216 REVELA T10N AND MYTHOLOGY.
of Creation direct from Jehovah God, is the
Celestial Man, often spoken of above. He
carried in him and with him the first fortunes
of the human race, and was a man of all
heavenly gifts in the conditions of nature.
He perceived that all he was and had was
free gift, and also that in this perception
alone he was able to take it and to keep it.
1 44. One of these divine gifts was language
as an expressive organ of human love and
its wisdom. It was given for intercourse
with God in worship, in praise and thanks-
giving; and in prayer. Also for intercourse
with angels. And for the association on all
grounds of man with man ; for it begot the
introduction of man to his fellows ; it welded
him into a society. Like his brain, his heart
and his lungs, it was an organic inspiration
in him, for, living soul and living body, he
was himself a momentaneous inspiration ;
with a finite freewill and a percipient mind
REVELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 217
to receive it. (Genesis ii. 7 ; Luke iii. 38.)
His speech was a language of correspond-
ences ; he called natural things by celestial
names. It was adequate and answerable
to the whole ground of things ; for this
is implied in correspondence. When he
named the creatures from their perceived
or self-evident celestial origin, Jehovah
assented ; the speech through him was a
creation like the creatures themselves : it was
as it were the Word written on his heart,
warm and luminous, speaking.
145. This language was both visible and
audible in the beginning ; it was both
volume and speech. The celestial face of
Man was the volume. The eyes and the
lips, and the entire open sanctuary of
expression, corresponded organically to the
innocence, wisdom and sincerity within.
The face, nowise double, was the most
consummate and definite language, a varying
1 8 RE J ELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
tablet of the constant effluxes of the soul :
a human Shekinah of words of light.
146. The voice was lower and secondary in
place and perfection. It also corresponded,
but more outwardly, to the same intimate
affections and perceptions of the man : it
was inspirationally automatic as well as
freely voluntary.
147. All this follows, as we now know by
revelation, from the concept of the Celestial
Man ; and his Creation by Jehovah. For
the Celestial man, the Most Ancient Church,
is the key to religious history ; and ultimately
to mundane History. It is the Church of
the primeval gifts and origins, and the
substance of their survivals.
14 8. It also follows from the same ground
that the human form and organism was at the
beginning in the Adam a natural celestial
form ; capable of loving and receiving such
supreme gifts, and finding blessedness in them.
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 219
They were given because they could not be
otherwise acquired. They are revealed now,
revealed rationally, because to discover them
otherwise is beyond the reach of the human
understanding. By contrast therefore we
now perceive that the human form as we
possess it, is not what it was when it
came fresh from the hands of its Creator and
Maker. It is not now His image, or likeness,
except internally by regeneration, the out-
ward sienature of which awaits its manifesta-
tion in the spiritual world. At present, a
thousand ages have deposited the seeds
of actual sin, and the evils of inheritance,
within it, and deformed its primeval state.
Eye and lip and voice have carried out
these degradations, and the seats of life
are truncated, disfibrated and confused.
The lapsing man becomes withered and
extinct, not abstractly but organically, and
the reeenerate man must be born again
220 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
organically. The human form of the
Adamic "likeness" of Jehovah God cannot
therefore be submitted in thought even
anatomically to any argument or criterion
derived from the bodies and powers of men
at the present day.
149. The words of the first or Most Ancient
Man, full of direct perception, had no
thought in them as we use and reckon
thought. They were Yea, Yea, and Nay,
Nay, each with a whole significance ;
cumbrous with no hieroglyphics, and subtle
with no obscurities. They were not spoken
from, or modified by, anything we call
intellect ; but were merely sonorous with
love, and vocal with wisdom.
1 50. Language thus given to mankind as
a constitutional endowment, it was with it as
with the Science of Correspondences ; it was
perpetuated in declining ages by the ear and
the memory ; that is to say, so much of it was
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
traditive as did not evanesce and perish in
its delivery to the lower human nature after
the Flood ; since which event it has come
down in its many streams to this day. See
Swedenborg, Arcana Ccelestia, vol. i., chaps.
i-xi. Also' like the most ancient Cor-
respondences, of which it was an expressive
part, it has given rise to its own Mythologies.
These are the attempts of earth-born Science
to invent an origin for, and an account of,
the divine gift of speech : which are the
verbose myths of the learned.
151. We are therefore again warned to de-
sist from seeking the origin of language from
the eloquence of the appetites of a prehistoric
life, which has no existence but in the speech-
less beasts. The beasts however have their
pregnant lesson ; they come provided with
sufficient tongues, as Man came ; they have
the two endowments, of expressive features
and sounds, given in their bodies and natures,
222 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG V.
of adequate use and meaning for their loves
and lives.
152. We conclude that a natal celestial
Word written on man's heart was the begin- \
ning of human speech ; that a revelation has
made this known ; and that the Creator's
Omnipotent Word itself is the origin of
language.
Revelation and Mythology.
153. The ground of Revelation is that the
Lord God created mankind from the dust of
the lowest natural state, through Freewill
which is individual man, into His Image and
Likeness. The spiritual man — intelligence
— is His image, and the celestial man —
Love — is His likeness. Revelation and the
Creation of Man or Adam are coequal and
coeval, indeed identical. God, turning
His face to His creature, is a divine and
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 223
infinite Man. All thought which truly and
lovingly knows Him, sees His human
divinity and divine humanity. What is the
same thing, He is Our Father. He spoke
to Man in His own speech made man's
speech, as from the first his creator, in-
structor, and Redeemer. The Word is His
speech. First it was written in Man's
heart, inspired as perception there, and
breathed forth by man in ineffable thoughts
and namings, the heavens of language. The
entire Adam spoke it. The divine-human
form reigned by love ; a form inalienable
and incorruptible. It holds man by bonds
that cannot be broken. Man strove with it
and inverted his own humanity. But the
form was with him still : it involves the
root principle of the world and of every
creature. So in Mythology there is nothing
but the human form, or derivatives of it.
Through fetish, through idols of wood and
224 REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
stone, whether vegetable, serpentine, animal,
or human, this necessity, human form, sur-
vived, as the ground and spring of embodi-
ment. All can be assigned back to the
Word and its Correspondences. This is
the conclusion "shorn of details. God and
religion are personal, and mythology is
derivatively personal. Infinite man and
finite man are the agents. At peace to-
gether, or not at peace. Historically and
theologically the gap of ages is bridged over,
and become a highway in the divine Genesis
since the veil of the letter is lifted up.
APPENDIX.
Explanatory of Terms.
154. A few words are used in the foregoing
pages in a sense requiring explanation. The
word Celestial throughout as applied to Man
or Adam signifies the inspired man of the
affections with their perceptions : the affec-
tions of love to God and the neighbour ; and
the perceptions of wisdom that enable the
man to carry such affections into Works.
The word Spiritual belongs to the man of
conscience and its intelligence, acted on from
without by the divine truths of the command-
ments ; the supremacy of duty to God and
man being the spiritual man's life. On this
subject Swedenborg says : " There are two
loves according to which the heavens are
p
226 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOGY.
distinguished, celestial love, and spiritual
love : celestial love is love to the Lord, and
spiritual love is love towards the neighbour.
These loves are distinguished by this, that
celestial love is the love of good, and spiritual
love is the love of truth ; for those who are
in celestial love do uses from the love of
good, and those who are in spiritual love do
uses from the love of truth. The marriage
of celestial love is with wisdom, and the
marriage of spiritual love is with intelligence ;
for it is wisdom's way to do good from good,
but it is the way of intelligence to do good
from truth : wherefore celestial love doeth
good, and spiritual love doeth truth." The
word Proprittm has been sometimes em-
ployed, because there is no complete English
term for it. Amour propre, in a fundamental
sense, may be correlative to it in French.
The proper selthood or individual nature of
the man is implied ; the ruling natural love
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 227
embedded in the sensual plane or degree,
full of the evils of the character, hereditary
and actual. Its organic function is to react
against the faculties and motives above it.
And being outermost, it holds and binds
every man to his own personality. The
more he has of it under subjection, the
higher he can become by regeneration. The
Propi'ium is the battlefield of Heaven and
Hell in man.
Egypt, Assyria, Israel.
155. Egypt, where it is mentioned in the
Word, always signifies the natural man, speci-
fically with regard to his mind in its capacity
and desire for knowledges (cognitions) and
sciences on their own account, or to gratify
and carry out the proprium. Assyria always
signifies the rational man, the ratiocinator or
rationalist. Israel is the spiritual man, over
228 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
whom divine truth is in power. These
significations belong indeed to the Ancient
Church, but apply to mankind for ever. The
text on the title-page is therefore clear. It
is a prophecy of the order when what is
spiritual reigns by free choice in the mind's
several parts of influence and power. First,
a new state signified by "that day;" and
then a highway for informations and ex-
periences from the active collecting and
knowing mind into the active reason above
it : a highway from Egypt to Assyria.
Then as an end for the way so far, commerce
of consociation, between science and right
reason ; the entry of science into the rational
man, and of the rational man into the
scientific : each limiting and enlarging the
other to its own conditions : the Egyptian
first coming to Ashur ; and then the
Assyrian into Egypt : experience gathered
from without, the basis of thought : reason,
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 229
so far, the provisional judge. Up to this
point the history of the opening natural mind
is written down in these correspondences of
nations. As a condition of this highway of
commerce between them, the Egyptian is to
serve with the Assyrian; those two great
abodes of the amour propre, science and the
reasoning power, are both to acknowledge
that they are servants, and that they are
willing to own to a mind from above. They
need its control to be of human use. Another
new state is now proclaimed in the words
repeated, "that day." It is the voice of the
mind's Master, the spiritual man. He comes
unobtrusively : Israel is to be the third with
Egypt and Assyria; the third is the com-
pletion, the three in one, the all in all. Such
is the signification of three in its fractions
and in the whole. The freewill ruling now
resides in the Israel, and is its especial faculty,
and science and reason belong to revealed
230 REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY.
Truth : a blessing in the midst of the land.
The midst is the inmost ; the land is the
Lord's Church : Egypt and Assyria are both
within it ; free and fruitful : and the blessing
of serving the spiritual faculties of man is
their portion and wealth. Observe the place
of Egypt as first in time in the threefold
unity. The knowledges, of Correspondences
and the like, are implied ; and a new spiritual
and natural life.
156. We see from this statement that
humanity is created in spiritual and psychical
planes, in diversities of genius and genus,
corresponding to national characteristics and
geographical sites and climates. And being
one body, a mundane representative of the
Maximus Homo above, each of these national
minds, Egypt, Assyria, Israel and others, is
a different part of the universal man. In
modern times also, as Swedenborg says,
there are nations corresponding in their
REVELATION AND MYTHOLOGY. 231
places to the Biblical Nations of the old
world. So this earth and the dwellers in it
are nothing less than a veiled mind of the
most specialized organic description : if you
will, a cerebrum and cerebellum with all their
world of dependent nerves. The collective
genius of each race is however spiritually
unknown in the world excepting where the
Word has revealed it. The history of each,
its wars and destinies, is the outcome of its
character as a province in the great human
form.
Bacon's View of Mythology.
157. A few extracts from Bacon's Wisdom
of the Ancients will show how the mind of
the reputed modern Father of Induction
reached forward towards a later and greater
light.
158. " The earliest antiquity," Bacon says,
232 RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V.
" lies buried in silence and oblivion, excepting
the remains we have of it in Sacred Writ.
This silence was succeeded by poetical fables ;
and these, at length, by the writings we
now enjoy : so that the concealed and secret
learning of the ancients seems separated from
the history and knowledge of the following
ages, by a veil, or partition-wall of fables,
interposing between the things that are lost,
and the things that remain."
159. "It would be rash and almost pro-
fane, to detract from the honour of allegory
and parable in general. For since religion
delights in such shadows and disguises, to
abolish these were, in a manner, to prohibit
all intercourse betwixt things divine and
human."
160. Here is a foregleam of the function of
Correspondences in the Word, as understood
on their respective planes in both worlds,
and thus as constituting a divine means of
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG Y. 233
union between the two, — between heaven
and earth.
161. Again — " Many of these fables by
no means appear to have been invented by
the persons who relate and divulge them ;
whether Homer, Hesiod, or others. Who-
ever attentively considers the thing, will
find that they are delivered down by those
writers, not as matters then first invented
and proposed, but as things received and
embraced in earlier ages. As they are
differently related by writers nearly con-
temporaneous, it is easily perceived that
the relaters drew from a common stock of
ancient tradition. This principally raises
my esteem of these fables ; which I
receive, not as the product of the age, or
invention of the Poets, but as sacred
relics, gentle whispers, and the breath of
better times ; which from the traditions
of more ancient nations, came at length
2 34 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG Y.
into the flutes and trumpets of the
Greeks."
162. "In the first ages ... all things
abounded with fables, parables, similes, com-
parisons, and allusions ; which were not
intended to conceal, but to inform, and teach.
... As hieroglyphics were in use before
writing, so were parables in use before argu-
ments. And even to this day, if any man
would let new light in upon the human
understanding, and conquer prejudice, with-
out raising contests, animosities, oppositions,
or disturbance, he must still go in the
same path, and have recourse to the like
method of allegory, metaphor and allusion.
The knowledge of the early ages was
either great, or happy ; great, if they by
design made this use of trope and figure ;
happy, if whilst they had other views, their
knowledge afforded matter and occasion to
noble contemplations."
RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y. 235
163. "The ancient Mythology seems to
us like a vintage ill pressed and trod ; for
though something has been drawn from it,
yet all the more excellent parts remain
behind, in the grapes that are untouched."
164. Here is another passage worthy of
record : —
" It may pass for a further indication of a
concealed and secret meaning, that some of
these fables are so absurd, and idle, in their
narration, as to show and proclaim an
allegory even afar off. A fable that carries
probability with it, may be supposed to be
invented for pleasure, or in imitation of
history ; but those fables that could never
be conceived, or related in this way, must
surely have a different use. For example,
what a monstrous fiction is this, that Jupiter
should take Metis to wife ; and as soon as
he found her pregnant, eat her up ; whereby
he also conceived, and out of his head
236 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
brought forth Pallas armed ? Certainly
no mortal could, but for the sake of the
moral it couches, invent such an absurd
dream : so much out of the road of
thought."
165. It is no part of the object of these
pages to furnish interpretations of the ancient
myths excepting cursorily and incidentally,
the main purpose being to indicate that they
have not only a most ancient, but the highest
primordial origin and golden record. Bacon
shows here that their very strangeness is a
witness to their eminent capacity of contents.
It is not indeed every odd metamorphosis
or incongruous story of which this can be
inferred. But when we find a myth occur-
ring in a mythological system many parts of
which openly display an arcane sense ; and
that system repeated for several races of
men in collateral forms, we may safely infer
that such a myth cannot be set aside as a
RE VELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V. 237
magazine of absurdity. Many parts of
mythology are indeed isolated inventions,
about which we may use a phrase of
Montaigne, that " their inanity gives them
reverence and weight ; " they being unduly
received among the noble myths, and so
coming within the scope of popular credulity.
Even this however is a proof of mythic
power and influence derived from the body
of true mythology. But for the other sort,
their perturbation of parts and movements,
their unnaturalness in short, only shows that
they are deflected from all common form by
a planet of meanings above them and within
them. That is their Mathesis.
166. Bacon as a Natural Philosopher of
History, and man of the State, assigned to
many of the Myths a political signification,
particularly with regard to public order ; the
means and managements for conserving it ;
and the rights, duties and counsels of kings .
238 RE VELA TION AND MYTHOLOG Y.
also, the Typhons, swellings, and insurrections
that threaten States or Establishments ; and
what the ends of disturbers are, and how
they themselves end. In this he in nowise
strained the rights of the method he took
deliberately in hand, as the way of founding
the knowledge of nature including human
nature on a new basis of certainty. For if
mythological narrations as quasi-historic can
be opened upwards into spiritual series, as he
often attempted, and can correspond to the
truths of the soul as Revelation imparts
them, so they can be opened at the side
upon the theatre of general social disposition
and action, which is an ultimate outcome of
the spiritual states of the Collective man.
Here we have a justification of the manifold
meanings brought out of Holy Scripture,
and also out of the Myths which are de-
scended from it in heathen nations. These
correspondential cyphers are for all time,
REVELA TION AND M YTHOLOG V. 239
and turn a diurnal face to human life and all
that it is on all its planes and tiers, ascending
and descending. The mind objects that
the Vala or Prophetess, of the Myth for
instance, never thought of to-day's inter-
pretation, still less intended it. Not con-
sciously indeed, but generatively ; for the
Myth-form is not artistic or philosophical,
but pre-eminently and actively generative.
Its faculty and business of generation knows
not that any children will proceed from it,
nor what children, nor what the first
child contains. Sufficient that it is legiti-
mate, and owned by a spiritual father. To
every myth worth the name there is there-
fore a spiritual sense, a moral sense, and a
political and social sense ; and these vary
like light and heat ; and like love, duty, and
works ; with the days ; and are inexhaustible.
The tripod authors of the myths are the
passive mothers of them, and utter no voice
240 RE VELA TION A ND M YTHOLOG V.
against an interminable progeny. Only the
sense and application must always be, as
Bacon says, i?i majorem Dei Gloriam, and
also ad usus humanos ; a condition in which
he is divinely reinforced by Swedenborg.
I xN D E X.
Adam, the most ancient Church,
91 ; Revelation the beginning
of the Adamic man, 92.
Assyria, its correspondence, 155.
Bacon and the Bible, 42 ; his
Wisdom of the Ancients, and
estimate of Fable and Parable,
157-166.
Callard, Thomas Karr, his
Antiquity of Man reconsid
113, 114.
Celestial Man, the, is the key to
all origins, 153 ; definition of
him, 154.
Church, the most ancient, 24 ;
can have none but a Divine
recorder, 143 ; the Man or Adam
of Genesis, 43 ; the Noahtic or
Ancient Church covering the
ancient World, 80.
Comparative mythology, 135.
Consanguinities, ancestries, and
heredities of mental states and
derivations. Revelation and
mythology followed these lines,
134-
Correspondences from Sweden-
borg, 24 ; in Africa and Asia,
24 ; the correspondences of the
Most Ancient Church, gathered
up by Cain and Enoch, for the
Ancient Church, and transmitted
thence to posterity, 87, 139 ;
origin in the Adamic Men,
through perception, 90 ; corre-
spondence is not analogy, 131 ;
correspondences are Divine
administrators, 137.
Creations preparing the world
for man: world- embryology,
115; foetal forms not to be
confounded with malign or
hell-creations, ibid.
Declensions of Man from his
Churches, perpetual, 95.
Delphi, its oracle, 96, 100.
Doctrinals, the, of the Ancient
Church handed down the per-
ceptions of the Most Ancient,
*39-
Dogmas the myths of the first
Christian Church, 103.
Doughty, Rev. John, his Garden
of Eden, in.
Dwarfs, the, in Voluspa ; what
they signify ; examples from
four of them, North, South,
East and West ; signification
and divine function of these
quarters in the Word, 74.
Earliest men, and Early men,
who ? 42.
Edda, the Elder, Vmir, glacial
creations, 41 ; Yggdrasi'l, the
World Tree, 44 ; Vbluspa ;
Baldur ; tin- Midgard set penl ,
the golden tables found again;
the new race of men, 45. See
Dwarfs.
Egillson, Sveinbjorn, his Lexicon
Poeticttm, 135.
Egypt. =science and cognit.
62 ; once a branch of the ancient
Church ; received its Divine
Influx ; transformed it into its
242
INDEX.
own mythologies ; communi-
cated it to Greece, 80 ; corre-
spondence of Egypt, 155.
Embryology and deciduous crea-
tions, 116.
Emerson, 99.
End, cause and effect are the in-
struments of all sane reason, 78.
Fall, the, Man a creature of, 1 ;
learned contempt of it, 82.
Fontanelle's "forgotten common
sense," 36, 48 ; his Savage Man
never existed, 111.
Genesis, the most ancient Church,
Adam or Man, revealed in its
internal sense, 43, and passim ;
also the ancient Church or
Noah, 80.
Giants, the, their myths come
from Genesis, 66; the spiritual
account of them ; their common-
ness to-day ; the Nephilim ;
the sons of God and the
daughters of men, what, 69 ;
the giant-serpents of the Most
Ancient Church, 70 ; the giants
in the Greek and Norse
Mythologies, 73.
Gospels, the four lives of Christ,
plainly historical, though corre-
spondential, 79.
Heathen religions alongside
divine churches, 92.
Heathenisms, their remainders,
103.
Hercules, 52.
History, Divine and human, no.
Idolatry, the inverse of supersti-
tion, 32.
Incarnation, the, stands in time
and above time, 79 ; attested by
all the mythologies, and all their
gods, 84.
Inventions are perfected into
smallness of size and greatness
of use, like creations, 117.
Language, origin of, 143 ; a
twofold celestial gift, visible
and audible, 145 ; its innateness
follows from the concept of the
celestial man, 147 ; language,
like correspondences, in lowered
from, afterwards perpetuated
by memory and hearsay, and
divided as a Delta for nations,
150 ; the beasts are images of
connate languages, but not tha
savage man, 151.
Link, the missing, and the not
missing, 120.
Magic, 98.
Man -Adam, when created, 112,
140.
Man's bodily constitution ana-
tomically different now from the
first estate, 148.
Mythology — Fontanelle's origin for
it ; received into poetry, 25 ; did
not subvert common life, 26, 27 ;
Greek, originated in Greece,
oracularly; northern, by Trance-
mediums, and rapidly, 37 ; grew
in fineness, ib. ; originated from
its own heathens, 39 ; is anthro-
poid, 40 ; attests a golden age,
45 ; literature and poetry love
it, 50 ; often parallel to the
Testaments, 55; in New Zealand,
5Q ; its age is past, and why, 88 ;
important use drawn out of
Greek Myths, 99 ; mythologies
collateral to the several churches,
10 1 ; had many and great fac-
tors, but philosophy was not
of them, ibid.; its lastingness
compared with hypotheses of
thought, 102. See Bacon and
Siljestrom.
Myths in their extensions yield
ethnologic - geographical light,
104.
Nature-Myths, Finn Magnus-
son and Baring Gould, 131.
Negroes, the, do not belong to
the Savage Man, 124 ; revela-
tion about them, 129.
Oracles, consulted by emperors,
LYDEX.
-43
Paleolithic Man. See Thomas
Karr Callard.
Perception, 90, ioi, 138. See
Trees.
Prehistoric man never existed, in.
Progress, its dogma, 1 ; its con-
ditions, 3 ; its destructions, 4,
5, 8 ; its fatalism, 9 ; its savage
origin, 10.
Prometheus, 51.
Proprium, the, what, 91, 154.
Revelation and the Creation of
man are co-equal, coeval, and
identical, 153.
Savage Man, the, proper, and
the universal, 13 ; his useless-
ness and extinction, 13, 14, 15 ;
the good of rightly placing him,
17 ; he accounts for nothing but
his own bones, 20, 21 ; supersti-
tion is his remainder, 34 ; he is
the end and exhaustion of re-
ligion and mythology, 105 ;
what else he is, in ; heredities
die out in him ; he accumulates
only decay, 119 ; the belief in
him as an origin a magical
antitheistic persuasion, ibid.
Serpent-myth, the, its universality,
65, 91, 98.
Siljestrom, P. A. , his valuation of
the myth of Hercules, 52.
South, Bishop, his Adam. 141.
Spencer, Herbert, his views of
prowess from the savage, 119.
Spiritism an active factor in heathen
myth-making, 97.
Spiritual man, the, defined, 154.
Spiritual world and personal
causes, 44.
Stanley, Dean, sound conclusions
about creation and parable, 114.
Swedenborg : correspondence of
the horse ; of Pegasus ; Hippo-
crene ; the White Horse ; the
horse signifies true or false
understanding ; mountains sig-
nify love, 53 ; correspondences
among the Asiatics ; the plague
of emerods and mice stayed by
correspondences, 57 ; the Divine
key to the Word given to him,
in. See Negroes. Perception
in the celestial man, 138.
Trees correspond to perceptions,
44. 59. 74-
Unknown, the, and the unknow-
able, in the scientist sense have
no rightful existence, 75 ; the
unnecessary unknown oppresses ,
and the unknowable maims the
mind, 75, 76.
Uses, the Adam-man of percep-
tion supreme in them, 140.
WORD, the, involves the Incarna-
tion fromjthe beginning. There
was a Divine Word before
our Scriptures, 80 ; compound
animal forms in the Word and
in mythology, 85 ; such forms
when monstrous are appear-
ances of clerical societies banded
in false dogmas ; the Dragon
in the Apocalypse, 86 ; the in-
ternal sense is the unassailable
Word, 87 ; Nebuchadnezzar's
dream of the ages, 107 ; Daniel's
Vision, 109.
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