The Alchemy Key.pdf - Veritas File System

aces the belief is current that the souls of those waiting to become
incarnate dwell in the trees, so much so that many races think that a
woman can become pregnant if the seed or flower of certain trees falls on
her. Thus certain Central African races believe that if the purple blossom
of the banana tree falls on the back of a woman, even though she be
unmarried, she will have a baby. 21
In this belief we have the cause and origin of many stories well
known to the students of folk-lore in which a virgin gives birth to a child
because she has smelt a flower, eaten a fruit, or perhaps merely handled
either. For example, Attis himself is said to have been born because his
virgin mother, Nana, placed a certain seed in her bosom. Nana,
incidentally, means Mother, and is of course the name of the Great
Mother. Probably the answer given to the inquisitive child to-day who
wants to know whence the new baby has come, namely, that it was grown
on a gooseberry bush, is the worn down tradition of this once almost
universal belief. Fantastic as it sounds, even now many tribes do not know
that a woman cannot become a Mother without the help of a man. 22 They
say that she becomes a mother only when a soul which is waiting for the
opportunity can slip inside her, and the most common method adopted by
these waiting embryos is to hide themselves in a seed or flower, or merely
fall from a bush on to a woman. Races who still hold these beliefs are the
tribes of New Guinea and the Australian blacks. Hence to these people
there is nothing very remarkable in a virgin birth.
Now all these tribes believe in re-incarnation, and their line of
argument runs somewhat as follows:—We bury our dead in the ground,
and lo, a tree or plant grows from the spot. This contains the life-principle
of him who dies, his soul is in it, and from it he leaps into a woman and so
once more is born. Frankly, the modern man who, while acknowledging
that a human being has a soul, appears to believe that that soul is created
by the same procedure that creates the infant’s body is even more
illogical, for how can a material act create an immaterial and immortal
being?
The doctrine of re-incarnation attaches to the Spirit of Vegetation
in a much higher degree. The God dies and is buried, a tree springs up
21
Rev. J. Roscoe, “The Baganda,” pp.47 sq.
22
Prof. Malinowski, “The Beliefs of the Trobriand Islands, New
Guinea.”
447