Why Pagan Symbolism Is Indestructible

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages opened by an abstract. *Its argument is psychological rather than doctrinal*, and it is one of the shrewdest short pieces in the section — an explanation of why religions change their names far more readily than their character.

It begins with an observation about novelists that seems at first to be beside the point: the degree of genius exhibited in works of fiction by the most renowned novelists depends largely on the intensity of interest they felt in their childhood for nursery tales — and, more generally, the older a man becomes the more strongly he clings to, and the more clearly he seems to see, the events of his early childhood. That is then applied to whole peoples, which is the move the file exists to make. The Greeks of the days of Pericles, who euhemerized a whole pantheon of gods and goddesses and from whom Phidias immortalised the Olympian Jupiter and Athena Promachos, could have no other descendants, she says, than the ones they actually have — the Virgin-and-saint-worshipping Hellenes of her own day. The conclusion drawn is stated as a general law: the form of worship depends more on the respective idiosyncrasies of races than on their powers of reasoning, and the natural sympathies or antipathies of the forefathers will always be reflected more or less in later generations. Hence the title — pagan symbolism is indestructible because it was never really replaced, only renamed. The closing formulation is the one to carry away, and it applies well beyond its subject: it is but names and forms that change, ideas remain the same; and the older a faith, the stronger it clings to the relics of its youth.

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