The Ghost Cults

87:4.1Ghost fear was the foun­tain­head of all world re­li­gion; and for ages many tribes clung to the old be­lief in one class of ghosts. They taught that man had good luck when the ghost was pleased, bad luck when he was an­gered.

87:4.2As the cult of ghost fear ex­panded, there came about the rec­og­ni­tion of higher types of spir­its, spir­its not def­i­nitely iden­ti­fi­able with any in­di­vid­ual hu­man. They were grad­u­ate or glo­ri­fied ghosts who had pro­gressed be­yond the do­main of ghost­land to the higher realms of spir­it­land.

87:4.3The no­tion of two kinds of spirit ghosts made slow but sure prog­ress through­out the world. This new dual spiritism did not have to spread from tribe to tribe; it sprang up in­de­pen­dently all over the world. In in­flu­enc­ing the ex­pand­ing evo­lu­tion­ary mind, the power of an idea lies not in its re­al­ity or rea­son­able­ness but rather in its vivid­ness and the uni­ver­sal­ity of its ready and sim­ple ap­pli­ca­tion.

87:4.4Still later the imag­i­na­tion of man en­vi­sioned the con­cept of both good and bad super­nat­u­ral agen­cies; some ghosts never evolved to the level of good spir­its. The early monospiritism of ghost fear was grad­u­ally evolv­ing into a dual spiritism, a new con­cept of the in­vis­i­ble con­trol of earthly af­fairs. At last good luck and bad luck were pic­tured as hav­ing their re­spec­tive con­trol­lers. And of the two classes, the group that brought bad luck were be­lieved to be the more ac­tive and nu­mer­ous.

87:4.5When the doc­trine of good and bad spir­its fi­nally ma­tured, it be­came the most wide­spread and per­sis­tent of all re­li­gious be­liefs. This du­al­ism rep­re­sented a great re­li­gio-philo­sophic ad­vance be­cause it en­abled man to ac­count for both good luck and bad luck while at the same time be­liev­ing in super­mor­tal be­ings who were to some ex­tent con­sis­tent in their be­hav­ior. The spir­its could be counted on to be ei­ther good or bad; they were not thought of as be­ing com­pletely tem­per­a­men­tal as the early ghosts of the monospiritism of most prim­i­tive re­li­gions had been con­ceived to be. Man was at last able to con­ceive of super­mor­tal forces that were con­sis­tent in be­hav­ior, and this was one of the most mo­men­tous dis­cov­er­ies of truth in the en­tire his­tory of the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion and in the ex­pan­sion of hu­man phi­los­o­phy.

87:4.6Evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion has, how­ever, paid a ter­ri­ble price for the con­cept of dual spiritism. Man’s early phi­los­o­phy was able to rec­on­cile spirit con­stancy with the vi­cis­si­tudes of tem­po­ral for­tune only by pos­tu­lat­ing two kinds of spir­its, one good and the other bad. And while this be­lief did en­able man to rec­on­cile the vari­ables of chance with a con­cept of un­chang­ing super­mor­tal forces, this doc­trine has ever since made it dif­fi­cult for re­li­gion­ists to con­ceive of cos­mic unity. The gods of evo­lu­tion­ary re­li­gion have gen­er­ally been op­posed by the forces of dark­ness.

87:4.7The tragedy of all this lies in the fact that, when these ideas were tak­ing root in the prim­i­tive mind of man, there re­ally were no bad or dishar­mo­nious spir­its in all the world. Such an un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion did not de­velop un­til af­ter the Cali­gas­tic re­bel­lion and only per­sisted un­til Pen­te­cost. The con­cept of good and evil as cos­mic co-or­di­nates is, even in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, very much alive in hu­man phi­los­o­phy; most of the world’s re­li­gions still carry this cul­tural birth­mark of the long-gone days of the emerg­ing ghost cults.