The Outer Court — Fourth Degree
“They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.” — Psalm 115:8 (King James Version, 1611)
The thirty-second chapter of the Book of Exodus contains one of the oldest accounts of how an idol is made. It is also one of the most practical.
Moses has gone up the mountain and has not come back. The people grow restless and go to Aaron, his brother, and ask him to make them gods to go before them. Aaron does not refuse. He asks them to break off the golden earrings of their wives, their sons and their daughters, and to bring them to him. They do. He melts the gold, shapes it with a graving tool into a calf, and the people say: these be thy gods, O Israel.
Nobody in the story steals the gold. It is brought in freely, one earring at a time, by the people who will afterwards bow down to what is made of it. The idol consists of nothing but what its worshippers gave.
⬥
The Makers
The Psalms return to the subject in plain language. The idols of the nations, says the 115th Psalm, are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths but they speak not, eyes but they see not, ears but they hear not. Then comes the verse that turns the matter around: they that make them are like unto them, and so is every one that trusteth in them.
The idol cannot see, and in time those who serve it stop seeing too. The mouth that does not speak produces worshippers who have nothing left to say.
The Book of Daniel gives the scene its public form. King Nebuchadnezzar sets up a golden image on the plain of Dura, sixty cubits high, and issues a decree. When the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery and dulcimer sound, every people, nation and language is to fall down and worship. The music plays, and all of them fall down. The king does not have to force each person individually. The decree, the music and the sight of everyone else kneeling do the work. Three young men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, stay on their feet. They are thrown into the furnace for it.
⬥
The Gold
The North tells the same story in a different register. It does not speak of an image on a plain. It speaks of gold, and of what gold does to those who hold it.
In the Völsunga saga and the Eddic poems about Sigurd, the dwarf Andvari is robbed of his treasure. He lays a curse on it, and on a ring above all: it will be the death of everyone who owns it. The gold passes to Hreidmar, who is killed by his own son Fafnir for it. Fafnir takes the whole hoard for himself, lies down on it, and becomes a dragon, the worst of serpents. He guards it for years and has no use for any of it. He has become what he serves.
Nobody in the story rules the ring. The ring rules everyone who touches it, one owner after another, and outlives them all.
The oldest poem of the North puts it more darkly still. In the Völuspá, the seeress remembers a woman called Gullveig, a name whose first half is the old word for gold. The gods pierce her with spears and burn her in the hall of the High One. She is burned three times and born three times, and still she lives. Soon afterwards, the seeress says, came the first war in the world.
⬥
The Prizes
The Greeks turned the same pattern into philosophy. In the seventh book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes his cave. Prisoners sit chained with their backs to a fire, watching shadows pass along the wall and taking them for the real world.
One detail is easy to overlook. The prisoners, Socrates says, are in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows, and to remark which came first and which followed after. The cave has its own hierarchy and hands out its own rewards, and the most honoured prisoners are those who read the shadows best.
When one prisoner is freed, climbs out into the daylight and comes back down to tell the others, they laugh at him. And if anyone tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, Socrates says, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death.
On what the same book allows its rulers, see Which Is to Be Master.
⬥
What Remains
Three traditions tell the story in three registers. The Bible names the idol outright. The North hides it in gold and dragons. The Greeks turn it into a question of knowledge. In all three, the idol consists of what its worshippers bring: earrings, obedience, attention. In all three, it gives something back, whether gods to go before, an owner’s pride or a prize for reading shadows. And in all three, the few who refuse to bow pay for it: three men in a furnace, a man dragged back into the cave.
An idol has always been made of what its worshippers bring to it.
What becomes of it on the day they stop bringing?
The Outer Court is a series in degrees. Previous: [That Religion in Which All Men Agree]. Next: The Window.
