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THE MEDIUM AND DAYBREAK
LONDON, MAY 24, 1872.
No. 112.—VOL. III.
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GERALD MASSEY'S SECOND LECTURE AT
ST. GEORGE'S HALL.
The subject of Mr. Massey's second lecture was:
"Concerning a Spirit-World revealed to the Natural World by means of
Objective Manifestations; with a New Theory of the Tree of Knowledge of
Good and Evil." He commenced by saying that there were two
theories of man's origin: one assumed that he was struck off perfect
from the mint of creation, stamped with the image of God; the other,
that he was developed from the animal kingdom, and is gradually
approximating to the divine image. He held that the spirit of man
was as much a growth of nature as his physical form. Man did not
begin his career on this earth an angel ready made. It took ages
for him to arrive at the most rudimentary perceptions of morality.
Nor did this knowledge come from on high; it came by gradual unfoldment.
It was a reflection from man's inner perceptions. Man could not be
the image of God until that image was properly received. Man was
not formed in the image of God merely because he went on two legs
instead of four. The likeness had to be evolved in the spiritual
life from within. There was no such thing identifiable in the past
as the image of God. We could hardly imagine that such ideas were
likely to spring up in the human mind, when we see how hard it is to
keep them alive after all the revelations we have had.
Anthropologists and physiologists had done much by their researches
towards bringing about a right estimate as to the origin of man.
They had raked together the dead bones of fact, which Spiritualism would
now put together and endue with life. It was generally supposed
that the consciousness of a God had begun with the Hebrew race. It
was a well-known fact that polytheism had preceded monotheism; although
Max Müller and other philologists of his school argued that man
could not conceive of gods without first having the idea of one God;
polytheism must therefore have been an outgrowth of theism, they
concluded. He, however, considered this an erroneous conclusion,
it being evident that polytheism came first. What idea had the
peoples which preceded the Hebrews of a God? These ideas did not
belong to the world of nature, as distinguished from the spiritual.
They must have been evolved spiritually. There were some peoples
that had no idea of a God, others that had no idea of immortality.
There were languages which had no word for "God" or "soul."
Atheism was the night of the purely savage mind. Such must have
been the state of humanity in the prehistoric times—in the Stone Age.
"How did the invisible make itself known to the cave-dwellers
of the human mind?" continued Mr. Massey. "By becoming visible to
them," he answered. The first notion of man's fate after death and
of the existence of a spiritual world was received from visible
phenomenal demonstration. It was not excogitated, but the result
of experience. There were savages who did not believe because they
had not seen, while others believed because they had seen. Having
had tangible evidence in the form of spiritual apparitions, they
received their first notions of a spiritual state. It was
generally acknowledge that faith was the belief in things unseen.
The primal fact in connection with Jesus and his mission was, that he
rose again and revealed himself in person. He appeared to fulfil a
promise, and to prove continuity of existence. This was the
foundation of fact the Christian faith rested on. With all their
spiritual manifestations and intercourse with another world, his
disciples never seemed to grasp the idea of immortality before.
Jesus was truly the "first-born" of that people to reveal eternal life;
and although he had authenticated his mission time after time by
objective manifestations, he only established it by a belief in a
physical resurrection.
The lecturer here went into a clear and minute examination of
the origin of spiritual manifestations showing that apparitions were,
beyond doubt, the first form of the phenomena. And so physical
were these manifestations in many cases, that the seers of them took the
spirits for real men, as, for instance, when the angels appeared to
Abraham and to Lot. This, he maintained, followed by the vision
and the inward illumination, was the earliest form of spiritual
manifestation. It was very likely that the earliest apparitions
were of a very low kind, and their continued appearance may have given
rise to the various forms of belief in supernatural beings which are
found amongst all peoples. Fairies may have been the spirits of
the Old World. They were seen small of size, because they were
small of soul. Better spirits afterwards took their places; but
the traditions of seers would naturally remain, doubtless giving rise to
the still lingering fancies about sprites, gnomes, sylphs, brownies, &c.
As a curious instance of the gradual development of the idea of the dual
nature of man and human immortality, Mr. Massey noticed the fact that
amongst many primitive peoples the same word meant both "shadow'' and
"spirit."
The lecturer now entered into an elaborate examination of the
origin of forms of worship, tending to show that they were ever the
result of objective experiences, not of metaphysical deductions.
The religious systems of all uncivilised peoples were based on the
evidences of the senses. The West Indian islanders had carved
idols in the shape of spirits that had appeared to them in apparition.
Religion in the abstract, he continued, came from the seeing of spirits.
In Florida the natives worshipped evil spirits, because they considered
they needed propitiating, while the good ones did not. Thus
primitive worship was a sheer grovelling fear. It was a well-known
fact that amongst the Sioux Indians the fear of spirits had deterred
from murder. Thus we obtained an insight into the might of
propitiatory sacrifices,
But we must hurry over this portion of the lecture, as space will not
permit us even to make mention of many very interesting points that were
touched upon, as, for instance, the worship of ancestors amongst many
savage tribes, the forms of divination used by others, and the gradual
development of the idea of immortality—all of which should have been
heard to be appreciated. Such, said Mr. Massey, was the manner in
which man had groped his way towards God. One thus saw how some
form of worship would originate. Seers, standing, as it were,
betwixt heaven and earth, would become sacred, and priesthoods would be
established. How natural it would be to found churches where
spirits had manifested themselves, and so give them a house for their
use. Consider Peter's first exclamation on beholding the
transfiguration of Christ: "Master, it is good for us to be here: let us
make three tabernacles."
The lecturer said he knew of very few facts in modern
Spiritualism which might not be traced in the past. The
spirit-voice was heard by Moses on the occasion of the manifestation of
the burning bush. It was in this way that Socrates apprehended the
warning of his daemon: he heard the spirit speaking with the audible
voice. The fact of the spirit-voice speaking through a medium must
be granted by those who believe that Balaam's ass spoke to his master.
Again, in the case of Belshazzar's feast, we had the direct
spirit-writing. The modern mediumistic circle was the earliest
form of worship known. From the Druidic circle, the round towers
of Ireland, the magic circle of the necromancers, to the modern English
"church," Scotch "kirk," German "kirche," French "cirque," and the term
"domestic circle," all had their origin in the early spiritualistic
practices. Christ alluded to this primitive circle when he said:
"When two or three gather together in my name, I will be with them."
He would not limit his meaning to the fact that objective signs were to
be given, but it was known that these signs were given. The
Pentecostal service was the link between the two worlds. The early
church arose out of the manifestations, and the word "prophet"
originally signified "medium." Thus "the Lord"—the Israelites
spoke of all spirits manifesting as "the Lord," or in similar terms—in
speaking to Aaron and Miriam, said: "If there be a prophet among you, I,
the Lord, will make myself known unto him in a vision." The
so-called "men of God," too, were mediums, occupying a similar position
to those of the present day, that is, they were consulted on all manner
of things, important or unimportant, and they likewise received pay for
their services. Thus Saul had only 7½d with him when he went to
consult "the Lord," through Samuel, about his father's lost asses.
After speaking of the ancient belief in a man's familiar
spirit or genius, and instancing the scene with the soothsayer in
"Antony and Cleopatra," the lecturer said the staff of Hermes was the
wand of the magnetisers, but that, like many other facts of the same
kind, had come to be looked upon as mere fable. The Fijian still
magnetised himself by looking at a whale's tooth. There were many
ways of producing the magnetic sleep or abnormal vision. Fasting
was one way, and one very much practised both in olden times and amongst
savage tribes even at the present day. The Egyptians and other
ancient people knew of animal magnetism. Tobacco and various drugs
had even produced this condition. While speaking of potions, the
lecturer mentioned the case of Esdras, who was the greatest writing
medium the world had seen, he having professed to have re-written the
whole of the lost books of the law. This immense work was done in
a trance produced by a drink prepared by spirits, and it took him forty
days and nights, assisted by five ready writers.
It was well known that the Soma juice was made use of in the
rites of the Hindoos, though it was hardly known what it was.
There were few persons living who were masters of the ancient mysteries,
and the ritual was fast dying out. Six thousand years ago this
Soma-juice was used to produce the divine intoxication. The tree
which produced this divine juice was supposed to be the religious
fig-tree. In the second Rig Veda there was
reference made to this tree. Birds sat on it, eating the fruit.
But this tree, which bore the fruit used in the Soma sacrifices to
produce intoxication and the somnambulic sleep, was lost. The
Hindoos imagined all creation originated in this fig-tree. Bearing
fruit that had the power to induce somnambulism, it was considered to
place man on a par with the gods. Its branches were looked upon as
the meeting place of gods and men, and the Soma drink became the drink
of immortality. The Egyptians also had their sacred fig-tree—the
sycamore fig-tree—and they frequently pictured the souls of the deceased
as birds perching on its branches. The Athenians had their
religious fig-tree; it was planted all along the sacred road between
Athens and Eleusis, and the Soma of the Hindoos, suggested the lecturer,
became the Nepenthe of the Greeks. Turning to
Zoroaster, we met with two trees, one named the "white fig," and the
other the "painlesstree." Both these, it was thought, were the
same as the one the Hindoos believed the world to be made from.
Now the fruit of this tree was supposed to give immortality to
whomsoever drank of its juice; the other produced a narcotic which
destroyed pain. Here again we found a fig-tree which produced the
sleep-giving fruit, the fruit of immortality. We had the same two
trees planted in the garden of Eden—tree tree of life, and the tree of
knowledge of good and evil. They were doubtless the same as the
tree of life and the painless tree of Zoroaster, which were fig-trees,
and the tree of knowledge of good and evil was doubtless a fig-tree
also. How it ever came to be called an apple-tree the lecturer
could not imagine. The effect of eating the fruit of the tree of
knowledge was to make the partaker thereof wise. "The wise," in
the Zendavesta, meant the spirits, and from
time immemorial seers had been called "wise men" and "wise women."
In the Zendavesta we had the fact with reference to the trees, in
Genesis the mere allegory of the fact.
Passing to Mr. Massey's deductions from these facts, he said
his summing up of the whole matter was that Moses, like Zoroaster,
wished to put an end to the dark worship of spirits, which had become a
fearful abomination, in favour of the God of life and light, the idea of
whom was then dawning on the world. He accordingly worked out that
system of theology which has played so important a part in the world's
history; and to make the whole of more effect, he introduced the famous
myth of the fig-tree, whose mortal taste, in the words of Milton,
"brought death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden."
"And so much," said the lecturer, "for the famous forbidden fruit tree,
the shadow of which has darkened and dwarfed the souls of men for
thousands of years; so much for the dread curse of humanity, the 'fall,'
which was the cause of our natural depravity—the 'original sin;' and
penalty of everlasting pain inherited by us all through the
transgression of Adam. With the doctrine of the 'fall' down goes
the doctrine of the 'atonement,' as vulgarly understood; for it was out
of the wood of that much-misrepresented fig-tree that they cut the
Calvinistic Cross of Christ."
We have had to give the merest synopsis of Mr. Massey's full
and minute line of argument, as space would not permit us to do more.
In speaking of the later Spiritualism of the Jews, the lecturer said
they made the common mistake to believe that all spiritual
manifestations must be divine. Moses, however, had reason to know
better; he recognised what we know at the present time—that when the
sight was open abnormally, it was so for the evil as well as the good.
Diseased conditions were the natural playground for spirits. We
must bear in mind that spirit-communion did not depend on moral purity.
The most immoral persons might be mediums, in which cases immoral
spirits would be co-workers. This was why the witchcraft and black
magic of the middle ages were prohibited. It was necessary to
remember that it was the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
The law that like attracts like governs in the other world as well as
here. Fleshly purposes would ensure fleshly results. There
were spirits who administered to fleshly devices; they could derive more
pleasure from such than we could. Indeed, we could have but a
faint idea of what spirits were capable. Papal bulls were not made
against certain kinds of spirit-intercourse for nothing, nor was the
idea of a personal devil founded on nothing. Think of a personal
motive on the other side—of a spirit having a vested interest in all
your ill-doing!
Moses looked upon the old religions as devil-worship, and not
without warrant, thought Mr. Massey. Hideous customs, horrible
rites, underlie those old scriptural allusions. The "broth of
abomination" meant the eating of infants. Such abominations were
demanded by their oracles; there were spirits who delighted in the sight
of blood. This was the belief of the early Christian Fathers, and
the sight of blood had been such a temptation to many that it could not
be explained in any other way. To Moses these things were facts,
and he tried to rid the world of such iniquities; he made a parable
which had been misunderstood ever since; he tried to lead the Israelites
out of Egypt by many ways; he made a strenuous effort to get at the One
God. The lecturer did not believe that, when on Mount Sinai, Moses
really conversed with the Almighty, as is generally believed. It
was the common custom amongst the Hebrews to consider spirit-influences
as coming direct from God. In this connection we give the
following passage on
THE HEBREW MEDIUMS.
Their inspiration, Mr. Massey contended, was by no means so
free from evil interference or so unmixed with error as has been
believed. It was as natural in the early times for the lowest
forms of one's own spirit-manifestation to be attributed to the
immediate presence and agency of Deity, as it may be in our day for the
loftiest to be set down to the Devil. "I venture to doubt whether
the Hebrews had any more certitude in the matter than we have to-day.
Then, as now, the tree must be judged by its fruits, good or evil.
I do not think they had so much, as they had not the same openness to
the Spirit of Truth; had not our means of judging betwixt truth and
error; had not that revelation in Christ—the illuminated image of
immortal love—which we have to judge the spirit-messengers by.
Their "Thus saith the Lord" might often have been announced as "This
saith the Devil," because the thing said was devilish. "God spake
these words." Well, that depends on whether the words are like
God. It could not be our God, nor a true messenger of his, that
ordered the wanton slaughter of men, women, and children as if they were
not creatures of God's making. It could not be our God that held
the sun still in his hand like a stopped watch until the Israelites
should glut themselves with slaughter, and reel back drunken with human
gore. This was a mistake of theirs. Their fervour may have
been divine, but it must have been devilishly fed. The later
writer of the "Acts" calls that an angel of the Lord—simply a spirit—who
appeared in the burning bush, and who spake to Moses in Mount Sinai, and
gave them living oracles in the wilderness. Moses himself calls it
God. In his account of the burning bush, the angel of God and the
Deity are mixed in one. The difficulty of identification in the
case of good or bad spirits must have been great. Why should the
lying spirit that foretold falsely in the mouths of Ahab's four hundred
prophets have been limited to that single deception? Ezekiel
assures us that these prophets had often misled them with lies, and
foretold vain things; proclaimed visions when they had seen nothing;
divined falsely, and raised their "Thus saith the Lord," when He had not
spoken to them. If half-a-dozen pretended angels of the Lord were
to come to any Spiritualist of the present day and tell him to get up
and sharpen his knife and slay his child as a sacrifice pleasing to God,
I doubt if he would believe them. He might wonder whether the good
angel that was to prevent it might arrive in time. The Hebrew
mediums often misinterpreted their messages; the character of God was
frequently misinterpreted in consequence, and the Christian world has
been misled ever since, because it ignorantly assumed that there was an
infallible inspiration, and anything opposed to it must come from the
Devil. It has endeavoured to discredit and ignore all other
revelation on purpose to set this up as the only divine, in utter
ignorance that as regards the modes of manifestation all other
revelation of God amongst all peoples was based on the same natural
facts.
They did all eat the same spiritual meat, and all drink the
same spiritual drink, as did the Hebrew mediums. God's light is
hidden under all that shines, and there has never been known such a
thing as infallible mortal mediumship. We can trace progress all
through it, from the most shadowy representation of the spiritual world
made to the savage mind up to the revelation made in Christ, who came to
inaugurate the reign of the Holy Spirit in place of devil, or demon, of
the past.
The same book that chronicles the turning of water into wine
by Jesus Christ also credits the Egyptian magi with turning water into
blood. And they were Persian magi—that is, spiritual mediums —who
had their intimation of the Star that had risen on earth by the star
which shone for them in heaven. They knew, as we say, as if by
magic, of the coming of Christ, and started on their way, nothing
doubting, with their presents. And when they had found him, they
were warned in a dream by God not to return the way they came, lest they
should fall into the hands of Herod.
Mr. Massey brought his lecture to a close with the following
well-merited allusion to the manner in which Spiritualism is treated by
the conservators of public opinion:—
Scientific Philistinism and Cockney impudence, having climbed
nearly to the summit of the nineteenth century, will turn round and
assure you that the whole phenomena called Spiritualism are an illusion
of the sense and a delusion of the soul. All that ever was seen
has been glamour, and all that ever was heard is hallucination.
The veil of visible things has never been lifted, never grown diaphanous
with spiritual light, and the forms and figures of things to come have
never been shadowed forth from the other side. It is all a
phantasmagoria projected on the curtain by the magic lantern of a
diseased subjectivity, flickering reflections of fever, and dancing
images of delirium thrown on it from the morbid brains of those who
stand on this side. Mr. Tyler has carefully collected a vast
amount of illustration of primitive Spiritualism for the purpose of
showing that there is nothing spiritual in it—that one half the
phenomena comes from an over-full stomach, the other half from an
over-empty stomach. That "other world " is but a mirage seen by
the wanderers in the wilderness of this. "Pat," said a passer-by,
"what are the bells ringing so for to-day?" "Bells ringing?" says
Pat—"divil a bit; it's only a singing I've got in me ears; that is all!"
It's only a singing we've got in our ears, a glamour in our eyes.
Spiritualism is the world-wide hysteria epidemical in all times and
among all peoples. As to the seers and visionists, not only did
they not see any other world when they shut their eyes on this—not only
were they pitiable poor blind beggars whom all scientific men ought to
rush at and "give them two black eyes for being blind," but they are
charged with shamming their blindness. First, it is impossible to
believe in them, because they were so blind; and next, we are not to
credit them because they were such impostors as to sham their blindness.
The phenomena is real for as to-day, therefore it is real for
us in the past; and it is altogether useless to wriggle and try to make
a distinction between what they call sacred and profane history.
The facts are one. They stand together, or together fall.
The whole phenomena rest on the same basis of absolute fact, and are not
open to be made a question of relative belief by those who recognise no
facts to go upon, and therefore refuse to believe; or those who, having
no belief, altogether deny the facts; or those whose professed belief is
for the first time tested in the presence of facts.
Did you ever read by the light of a glow-worm laid on the
page of a book? I have so read in the dark, and next morning by
the grey light of open day found my little lamp had gone out; there was
no glow whatever—it was nothing more than a little grey worm. My reading
must surely be hallucination, the merest illusion of the night, in the
face of this common daylight fact to which every person could
testify—that the thing could not shine by day.
Spiritualism is that luminous worm which has shone with its
tiny lamp divinely lit through all the darkness of the past. I
have read some curious pages to-day by the light or it.
Nevertheless, the physical seer will take it up in the broad, open day
of science, and show you that it has no lamp—it does not shine;
therefore it never did shine, and all stories told of its luminosity are
lies. For all that, it is a glow-worm still, and goes on shining
under its own conditions. Moreover, it begins to shine by day, and
lives on with an enlarging light by which we can for the first time see
to read many mysteries of the past, decipher the inscriptions written on
old torture-rooms and prison-cells and graves of those who were before
their time, and make out the features of primitive facts which have been
almost effaced or overgrown with fable. It is at once the oldest
and the
newest spiritual light in the world.
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WHO'S WHO
(Friedrich) Max
Müller, (1823–1900),
Sanskritist and philologist. Born at Dessauin
Germany, he became a naturalized British citizen in 1855. Following
studies in Berlin and Paris, Müller moved to
London in 1846 and to Oxford in 1848. He became a member of Christ
Church College in 1851, when he gave his first series of lectures on
comparative philology, and remained connected with the University for
the rest of his life. Müller was suspicious of Darwin's work on
human evolution, and attacked his view of the development of human
faculties. He analysed mythologies as rationalisations of natural
phenomena, primitive beginnings that we might denominate "protoscience"
within a cultural evolution.
His pioneering work in the fields of Vedic studies, comparative philology,
comparative mythology, and comparative religion, became obsolete within
his life owing to the rapid advance of knowledge in these fields. His
work in comparative mythology and comparative religion was largely based
on philological identifications which were later demonstrated to be
untenable, and his philological methodology was replaced by the nascent
science of anthropology. Nevertheless, he remains a notable pioneering
researcher in these fields.
The Rig Veda — a collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns counted
among the four Hindu religious texts known as the Vedas. Likely
composed around 1500–1300 BC, it the oldest texts of any Indo-Iranian
language, one of the world's oldest religious texts, and the oldest of a
religious tradition with unbroken continuity.
Zarathushtra, usually known in English as Zoroaster,
was an ancient Persian prophet, famous in classical antiquity as
the founder of the religion of the Magi. The teachings of
Zoroaster are presented in seventeen liturgical, texts, or "hymns", the
yasna which is divided into groups called Gāthās, its fundamental
precepts being Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta (Good Thoughts, Good Words,
Good Deeds). Generally accepted as a historical figure, efforts to
date Zoroaster range between the 18th and the 6th centuries BC, but
around 1000 BC is generally accepted making Zoroaster a candidate as the
founder of the earliest religion based on revealed scripture.
Zendavesta — a collection of
the sacred texts of the Zoroastrian religion (see Zoroaster above). |
