This is the latest in my series of posts republishing the writings of Colonel Charles Seymour, one of the most important esotericists of the twentieth century.

Summary: In this brief piece, Seymour contrasts (his vision of) the joyous nature-worship of antiquity with the ascetic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. Regrettably, he expresses contemporary racial ideas that we would not consider acceptable today. His embrace of Margaret Murray’s theories is likewise of its time.

June 1937

Some 3,000 years ago, two great religious reformers, both adepts of the Ancient Egyptian Mysteries, completed their twenty or more years of training and then took up the lifework for which they had been sent into incarnation. One of them, Moses, went to train the semitic races of the Arabian Peninsula. The other, Orpheus, went to Greece. The former produced a religion of fanaticism and harshness, and wove it around a God who became a sort of national policeman with a heavy hand. Orpheus taught a religion of joy and beauty, and wove it around a God who made Himself manifest in nature. Jesus came to relax the burdens that a wealthy and powerful priesthood had laid upon the common people, and they killed him, for he threatened vested interests.

Orpheus was slain for much the same reason by his own maddened followers. These two Great Ones stand, as it were, for the two poles of religious expression. The pole of the artist, and the pole of the moralist. There has always been conflict between those that belong to the pole of joy and beauty which delights the artistic soul, and followers of the pathological killjoy spirit which sees goodness only in unhappiness and looks upon lightheartedness as the sign of a sinful nature.

Today the conflict between these two poles of thought still exists, but with this difference. The artistic soul has abandoned, as a rule, all religion as a childish survival from the unhappy past. He is not irreligious but a-religious.

The idea of a God who is known through beauty and joy, and understood as the divine life immanent in Mother Nature, has never been quite lost to Western Europe and to England in particular. The English, it is said abroad, like to take their pleasures sadly, and to a certain extent this is true; but it is far more correct to say that the average Englishman likes to take his religion sadly, even when he has not any… to use an Irishism.

Yet side by side with this killjoy outlook, there has existed in England and Scotland a light-hearted nature-worship. There is historical evidence to show that the old Aryan concept of religion as the joyous worship of the great Father/Mother God who is manifested in nature has never been altogether absent from these Islands. It is not intended to imply that paganism is a perfect religion, or even a better religion than Christianity. The point is this: that the all too common middle-class attitude that God is best served by giving up all that makes life worth living is utterly foreign to the ancient European Tradition. It is the Jewish, oriental strain in Christianity that makes pessimistic asceticism a virtue instead of a pathology. The lice-covered beggars and sore-infested mendicants of medieval Europe are of the same type as the muck-covered modern fanatics and boil-smitten fakirs of Asia. It seems a queer idea to honour God as the Supreme Goodness, Truth and Beauty by a public exhibition of the worst ills of suffering flesh. To serve Him by making a living at His holy places out of dirt, ugliness, and often blatant fraud is an Asiatic trait foreign to ancient European religions.

Modern study of the historical documents of religion, folklore and myth, when carried out by the comparative method, has now led to certain new theories being raised by expert researchers, whose competency in their own line of work cannot easily be set aside. They say, for example, that ‘heathen’ rites of nature-worship were widespread in France, Spain and England end of the seventh century. This we know from the records of the Councils of Arles, Tours, Nantes and Toledo, as well as from the ‘Liber Penitentialis’ of Archbishop Theodore (died 690). Christianity at that time had hardly touched the life of the country people. It was confined very largely to the upper, middle, and governing classes in the towns. Again, in 1282 the priest of Inverkeithing ‘was presented before his Bishop for leading a fertility dance at Easter round the phallic figure of a god’. He was allowed to retain his benefice!

How many realize that in 1303 a Bishop of Coventry was accused in Rome of a number of crimes, amongst them… ‘quod diablo homagium fererat, et eum fuerit osculatus in tergo’. Again, in 1453, Guillaume Edeline, a Doctor of Theology and Prior of St Germain-en-Laye… ‘confessa ledit Sire Guillaume de sa bonne et franche voulente, avoir fait hommage audit ennemy en l’espece et semblence d’ung mouton, en le bas, sant par le fondement en signe de reverence et d’hommage…’ (M. Murray, The Witches in Western Europe, p. 127).

Human nature has some odd methods of compensation, and some strange ways of straightening out pathological tangles due to the repression of man’s natural desire for life in all its fullness. The witch-hunting of the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries was an effort to stamp out an old religion surviving from pre-Christian days. Its sin was that it celebrated with joy and laughter the great nature festivals. Today we know that any god other than the orthodox God was always made into a demon or a devil for the purposes of propaganda.