Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/195

Rh between good and bad, in religion, lies not between this and that ritual, but between the simple and the perverted use of the same ritual. A Water-Dowser taught me the traditional method of cutting and handling the forked Divining-Rod; and I have no hesitation in affirming that what I witnessed was the remains of some old and very solemn ceremony. I went through the performances repeatedly with the Hazel as instructed by the Dowser; the forks were nearly all plain forked sticks. Afterwards I cut forks from all kinds of shrubs and trees growing in the neighbourhood of Greenstreet (Kent). I got a large collection. Some were like the horns of beetles, oxen, or stags; several would serve for Phallus symbols. One (from a hawthorn) had a thorn out in front and a longer one behind; and bore the most extraordinary resemblance to the hind quarters of an ape in a very nasty attitude. One, from a Honey-suckle, showed a perfect clean fork, a miniature copy of the pure Hazel fork, but with a spiral coil winding round and round it—a perfect picture of the Serpent in the Tree of Knowledge.

This inference illustrates how easily the symbols of a pure religion may slip over into being symbols of degrading idolatry ; and how unwise it would be to treat any ancient ritual as in itself and necessarily evil, only because priests have perverted it. This is more especially the case, because the Creator Inspirer, Who descends at the moment of contact between differentiated polars, is the object of worship of all inspired Genius. Adonis,—the god of vicious wasteful expenditure of force in the pursuit of mere sensuous pleasure, is the same word as Adonai, the Fertilizing Inspirer of the