Search -
The Evil Eye, Thanatology, and Other Essays
The Evil Eye Thanatology and Other Essays Author:Roswell Park Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RELATION OF THE GRECIAN MYSTERIES TO THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIANITY EVER since mentality has been an attribute of mankind, man has appreciated that he is ... more »surrounded by a vast incomprehensible mystery which ever closes in upon him, and from whose environment he may never free himself. The endeavor to solve this mystery has on one hand stimulated his reasoning power, and on the other nearly paralyzed it. Having no better guidance he has in all time attributed to a Great First Cause powers and faculties, even shape and form, more or less human; thus from time immemorial God or the Gods have been given a kingdom, a throne, some definite form, and even offspring. To him or them have been given purely human attributes, and they have been supposed to possess human passions and to be capable of love, wrath, strength, etc. In nearly all ages lightning, for instance, has been regarded as an expression of divine fury. As intelligence advanced the number of Gods was reduced and their manifestations classified and studied more or less imaginatively; and so while men have always acknowledged the impossibility of explaining the great mysteries of creation and of space, they have seemed to find itnecessary to create other equally inscrutable mysteries of purely human invention, such as the incarnation, the trinity, the resurrection, vicarious salvation, metempsychosis, and the like. History shows the love of mystery to be contagious as well as productive of its kind, and the origin of mystic teachings as well as of most secret societies bears out these statements. Secrets, guarded by fearful oaths, personified by meaningless emblems, concealed either in language unintelligible to others, or else hidden in terms whose special meaning is known only to the initiated, made attractive by spe...« less