Gold from the Tomb of Tradition
30 JUNE 2011
GOLD FROM THE TOMBS OF TRADITION.
When death and apparent extinction overtake any genus of things, whether spiritual or natural, remains are left and stored away. We see this throughout nature, and in continuous human life. It is as though the past, if need be, have a second coming. So the Ichthyosaurs has a mental resurrection in Geology, for many purpose. These remains we are now considering tell us of former and in some cases of ancient times. At first they are the dry bones of history; at last perhaps the heart and lungs of it. in many cases they are reproving spirits. They show us that our long buried ancestors sometimes discovered and possessed things which we think are our mental property, and first exist now. Also that by some vice these have been lost, and are again offered to us for grave purposes. The earliest things are the most denied or degraded, and their Second Coming is the most difficult to be realised.
For the strict purpose of this work, I cite two or three cases of Remains belong to matter and events; cases which show that not every man, but only rare men in the ages, have the gift of discerning remains even when almost already matters before the senses, such things as require a mind’s eye with a reasonable speculation of belief in it to see them.
First I give the instance which suggested my metaphorical title above.
Able learned men have lived before Dr. Schliemann, and ten thousand of them have read Homer, and followed his old song. Yet Schliemann alone sufficiently believed that there was an exact past visible through the Poem. “For my part,” says he, “I have always firmly believed in the Trojan War; my full faith in Homer and in the tradition has never been shaken by modern criticism, and to this faith of mine I am indebted for the discovery of Troy and its Treasure…I never doubted that a king of Mycenae by name Agamemnon, his charioteer Eurymedon, a Princess Cassandra, and their followers, had been treacherously murder by Egisthus or Clytemnestra, and I firmly believed in the statement of Pausanias, that the murdered persons had been interred in the Acropolis….My firm faith in the traditions made me undertake my late excavations in the Acropolis, and led to the discovery of the five tombs, with their immense treasures” (Schliemann’s Mycene, pp. 334-335”. But see the whole of chapter x., which is rich in testimonies to the substantial old-world memory that is enshrined, in this case and others, in many-voiced tradition.
Here we have the greatest of heathen poems treated as record and inventory, and found to be accurate in both respects; and a man with faith enough in Homer, and in tradition possessing, environing, and following him, set to work with his spade, and digs out the golden armour and buried treasures of the King of Men and his murdered companions. It is an object lesson on the fruits of faith. To many persons the antiquity of events suffices to discredit their record. To a Schliemann, what was buried 4000 years ago is as buried today: it can be dug up; and having a reason for the faith that is in him, a working faith, he digs, and gets it.
This is a verified tradition: a delivered knowledge or cognition proved into a material fact. Now take the case of the Norse discovery of America from Greenland in the ninth century. It is written down in more than one record, and especially in the Greenland Saga. For ages it was as an idle tale. It was rather despised than disbelieved; too faintly read to be considered. The first long look at it would provoke laughter; the second skepticism. It is, however, as solidly true as that Iceland and America exist; now verified by observations given in the Saga, of the length of the solar days; of the configuration of the coast; and by particulars climatic, regional, and anthropological. It might have been known hundreds of years ago, but it was too remote in centuries for learned belief. And so the discovery of Vinland the Good was regarded as a fable. And yet Vinland must have been somewhere; and bring to the west of Greenland, it could not be in any other place than America, which continent was well known in the late centuries during which the Sagas have been studied.
This was history invisible to infidelity. Consider also the Phoenician voyage or voyages round Africa, and the tardy belief in them. They are assured by the fact beyond invention by the Phoenicians, that the voyagers had the east on their left hand in going down the Africa coast, but from the cape had the east on they right. Inasmuch as they came home by the latter way, they circumnavigated Africa. I am not prepared to say when this entered history in the form of rational belief. And as we are now back in Africa, we remember the Pygmies at length accessible to general belief, and the Mountains of the moon. Homer and Herodotus speak of both Pygmies and the Mountains. These account could come through long tradition. It is obvious also that travelling merchants made the wonders of the dark continent known from end to end, in remote ages, and that the knowledge few about on its own wings in that early time when rational unscientific belief abounded, and all facts could be received, not only because they were likely, but because to everyday life they were unlikely, if only they were strongly attested and simply told by presumably honest folks. For there are indeed many facts can never be scientific facts; that is, which can never be attested at call by those who disbelieve them and profess to wish to prove them by experiment and repetition. All spiritual things fall under this impossibility. You can never teach a confirmed evil man that it is blessed to be good until he alters himself. An ingrained sceptic enjoying his condition is inaccessible to any evidence that assaults the happiness of his mind,---the proud delight of his scorn. And the disbelieving state, which at first wreaks its anger upon miracles, becomes so incensed against faith of all kinds as to paralyse the reasonable and most useful faculty of it in the learn, so that there are in an age only one or two Schliemanns who see any promise in a historical mine, and will take the trouble to win its gold.
These latter instance are mainly important at present, not because we have lost much by not crediting that America was discovered by the Iceland navigators many centuries before the Spaniards found it; or that Africa was circumnavigated in remote ages by the Phoenicians, and colonised by Cartaginian Hanno; but because of the affront to tradition itself. We should own the mistake of this. It is human testimony in the most subtle and the broadest realms of its memory that is at stake: it is the collective memory of the world containing we know not what possible remains to be revived into clear objects by slight indications. For reasonable belief, kindly Faith in the consensus of the Forefathers, is as a sensitive plate which, held wisely before the past, even before the celestial past, the spiritual past, and the natural past, will receive, increase, and perpetuate—yea, confirm—the stars of knowledges all over the blank ceiling of the house of our night. And then the grave of the past will disappear, and we shall see the human firmament.
I have just read the ASTRONOMICAL ADDRESS by Dr. W. Huggins, F. R. S., to the British Association at Cardiff, and he suggests my thoughts here. The following sublimity will illustrate what an organic parts, deeply religious attention exercised from age to age, will show in those heavenly places which overarch us in the Holy Word, and under which we walk on in the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the Divine Humanity.
Dr. Huggins says: “the heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars. The brighter stars cluster into well-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of steams and convoluted windings and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which become richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky way.
“We, who form part of the emblazonry, can only see the design distorted and confused; here crowded, there scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those, which are real.
“Can we suppose that each luminous point has no more relation to those near it than the accidental neighbourship of grains of sand upon the shore, or of particles of the wind-blown dust of the desert? Surely every star from Sirius and Vega, down to each grain of the light-dust of the Milky way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams and spiral windings which mark the general design are reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each point shifting its position by miles every second, though from the august magnitude of their distances from us and from each other it is only by the accumulated movement of years or of generations that some small changes of relative position reveal themselves.
“The deciphering of this wonderfully intricate constitution of the heavens will undoubtedly be one of the chief astronomical works of the coming century” pp. 33, 34).
Dr. Huggins says: “the heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars. The brighter stars cluster into well-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of steams and convoluted windings and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which become richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky way.
“We, who form part of the emblazonry, can only see the design distorted and confused; here crowded, there scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those, which are real.
“Can we suppose that each luminous point has no more relation to those near it than the accidental neighbourship of grains of sand upon the shore, or of particles of the wind-blown dust of the desert? Surely every star from Sirius and Vega, down to each grain of the light-dust of the Milky way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams and spiral windings which mark the general design are reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each point shifting its position by miles every second, though from the august magnitude of their distances from us and from each other it is only by the accumulated movement of years or of generations that some small changes of relative position reveal themselves.
“The deciphering of this wonderfully intricate constitution of the heavens will undoubtedly be one of the chief astronomical works of the coming century” pp. 33, 34).
Dr. Huggins says: “the heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars. The brighter stars cluster into well-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of steams and convoluted windings and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which become richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky way.
“We, who form part of the emblazonry, can only see the design distorted and confused; here crowded, there scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those, which are real.
“Can we suppose that each luminous point has no more relation to those near it than the accidental neighbourship of grains of sand upon the shore, or of particles of the wind-blown dust of the desert? Surely every star from Sirius and Vega, down to each grain of the light-dust of the Milky way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams and spiral windings which mark the general design are reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each point shifting its position by miles every second, though from the august magnitude of their distances from us and from each other it is only by the accumulated movement of years or of generations that some small changes of relative position reveal themselves.
“The deciphering of this wonderfully intricate constitution of the heavens will undoubtedly be one of the chief astronomical works of the coming century” pp. 33, 34).
Dr. Huggins says: “the heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars. The brighter stars cluster into well-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of steams and convoluted windings and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which become richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky way.
“We, who form part of the emblazonry, can only see the design distorted and confused; here crowded, there scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those, which are real.
“Can we suppose that each luminous point has no more relation to those near it than the accidental neighbourship of grains of sand upon the shore, or of particles of the wind-blown dust of the desert? Surely every star from Sirius and Vega, down to each grain of the light-dust of the Milky way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams and spiral windings which mark the general design are reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each point shifting its position by miles every second, though from the august magnitude of their distances from us and from each other it is only by the accumulated movement of years or of generations that some small changes of relative position reveal themselves.
“The deciphering of this wonderfully intricate constitution of the heavens will undoubtedly be one of the chief astronomical works of the coming century” pp. 33, 34).Dr. Huggins says: “the heavens are richly but very irregularly inwrought with stars. The brighter stars cluster into well-known groups upon a background formed of an enlacement of steams and convoluted windings and intertwined spirals of fainter stars, which become richer and more intricate in the irregularly rifted zone of the Milky way.
“We, who form part of the emblazonry, can only see the design distorted and confused; here crowded, there scattered, at another place superposed. The groupings due to our position are mixed up with those, which are real.
“Can we suppose that each luminous point has no more relation to those near it than the accidental neighbourship of grains of sand upon the shore, or of particles of the wind-blown dust of the desert? Surely every star from Sirius and Vega, down to each grain of the light-dust of the Milky way, has its present place in the heavenly pattern from the slow evolving of its past. We see a system of systems, for the broad features of clusters and streams and spiral windings which mark the general design are reproduced in every part. The whole is in motion, each point shifting its position by miles every second, though from the august magnitude of their distances from us and from each other it is only by the accumulated movement of years or of generations that some small changes of relative position reveal themselves.
“The deciphering of this wonderfully intricate constitution of the heavens will undoubtedly be one of the chief astronomical works of the coming century” pp. 33, 34).
Now as the photographic light-registering plate is revealing many of these wonders of the past momently advancing into the present, in the material heavens, so the higher human attention, now first possible in the New Church,—registering the Light of the Word,—can show us conditions of humanity beyond our intermittent faculties, and which departed in the beginning from the celestial and spiritual worlds |
