X. THE DRAGON-SLAYER…

X. THE DRAGON-SLAYER

Demigods--Alcestis--Herakles--The Ghilghit Fiend--Incarnate deliverer of Ghilghit--A Dardistan Madonna--The religion of Atheism--Resuscitation of Dragons--St. George and his Dragon--Emerson and Ruskin on George--Saintly allies of the Dragon.

Theology has pronounced Incarnation a mystery, but nothing is simpler. The demigod is man's appeal from the gods. It may also be, as Emerson says, that 'when the half-gods go the gods arrive,' but it is equally true that their coming signals the departure of deities which man had long invoked in vain. The great Heraklean myth presents us the ideal of godlike force united to human sympathy. Ra (the Sun) passing the twelve gates (Hours) of Hades (Night) [247] is humanised in Herakles and his Twelve Labours. He is Son of Zeus by a human mother--Alcmene--and his labours for human welfare, as well as his miraculous conception, influenced Christianity. The divine Man assailing the monsters of divine creation represents human recognition of the fact that moral order in nature is co-extensive with the control of mankind. One expression of this perception is the Alcestis of Euripides, whose significance in relation to death we have considered. [248]

'Alcestis,' as I have written in another work, 'is one of the few ancient Greek melodramas. The majority of dramas left us by the poets of Greece turn upon religious themes, and usually they are tragedies. It is evident that to them the popular religion around them was itself a tragedy. Their heroes and heroines--such as Prometheus and Macaria--were generally victims of the jealousy or caprice of the gods; and though the poets display in their dramas the irresistible power of the gods, they do so without reverence for that power, and generally show the human victims to be more honourable than the gods. But the 'Alcestis' of Euripides is not a tragedy; it ends happily, and in the rescue of one of those victims of the gods. It stands as about the first notice served on the gods that the human heart had got tired of their high-handed proceedings, and they might prepare to quit the thrones of a universe unless they could exhibit more humanity.... Knowing that neither he nor any other deity can legally resist the decree of another deity, Apollo is reduced to hope for help from man. Human justice may save when divine justice sacrifices. He prophesies to Death that although he may seize Alcestis, a man will come who will conquer him, and deliver that woman from the infernal realm.... Then Hercules comes on the scene. He has been slaying lion and dragon, and he now resolves to conquer Death and deliver Alcestis. This he does.' [249]

In this pre-christian yet christian Passion Play, the part played by the heart of woman is equally heroic with that which represents the honour of man. So in the religion which followed there was an effort to set beside the incarnate vanquisher of infernal powers the pierced heart of Mary. But among all the legends of this character it were difficult to find one more impressive than that which Dr. Leitner found in Dardistan, and one which, despite its length, will repay a careful perusal. This legend of the origin of the Ghilghit tribe and government was told by a native.

'Once upon a time there lived a race at Ghilghit whose origin is uncertain. Whether they sprung from the soil or had immigrated from a distant region is doubtful; so much is believed that they were Gayupí, i.e., spontaneous, aborigines, unknown. Over them ruled a monarch who was a descendant of the evil spirits, the Yatsh, who terrorised over the world. His name was Shiribadatt, and he resided at a castle in front of which was a course for the performance of the manly game of Polo. His tastes were capricious, and in every one of his actions his fiendish origin could be discerned. The natives bore his rule with resignation, for what could they effect against a monarch at whose command even magic aids were placed? However, the country was rendered fertile, and round the capital bloomed attractive. The heavens, or rather the virtuous Peris, at last grew tired of his tyranny, for he had crowned his iniquities by indulging in a propensity for cannibalism. This taste had been developed by an accident. One day his cook brought him some mutton broth the like of which he had never tasted. After much inquiry as to the nature of the food on which the sheep had been brought up, it was eventually traced to an old woman, its first owner. She stated that her child and the sheep were born on the same day, and losing the former, she had consoled herself by suckling the latter. This was a revelation to the tyrant. He had discovered the secret of the palatability of the broth, and was determined to have a never-ending supply of it. So he ordered that his kitchen should be regularly provided with children of a tender age, whose flesh, when converted into broth, would remind him of the exquisite dish he had once so much relished. This cruel order was carried out. The people of the country were dismayed at such a state of things, and sought slightly to improve it by sacrificing, in the first place, all orphans and children of neighbouring tribes. The tyrant, however, was insatiable, and soon was his cruelty felt by many families at Ghilghit, who were compelled to give up their children to slaughter.

'Relief came at last. At the top of the mountain Ko, which it takes a day to ascend, and which overlooks the village of Doyur, below Ghilghit, on the other side of the river, appeared three figures. They looked like men, but much more strong and handsome. In their arms they carried bows and arrows, and turning their eyes in the direction of Doyur, they perceived innumerable flocks of sheep and cattle grazing on a prairie between that village and the foot of the mountain. The three strangers were brothers, and none of them had been born at the same time. It was their intention to make Azru Shemsher, the youngest, Rajah of Ghilghit, and, in order to achieve their purpose, they hit upon the following plan. On the already noticed prairie, which is called Didingé, a sportive calf was gambolling towards and away from its mother. It was the pride of its owner, and its brilliant red colour could be seen from a distance. 'Let us see who is the best marksman,' exclaimed the eldest, and, saying this, he shot an arrow in the direction of the calf, but missed his aim. The second brother also tried to hit it, but also failed. At last, Azru Shemsher, who took a deep interest in the sport, shot his arrow, which pierced the poor animal from side to side and killed it. The brothers, whilst descending, congratulated Azru on his sportsmanship, and on arriving at the spot where the calf was lying, proceeded to cut its throat and to take out from its body the titbits, namely, the kidneys and the liver.

'They then roasted these delicacies, and invited Azru to partake of them first. He respectfully declined, on the ground of his youth, but they urged him to do so, 'in order,' they said, 'to reward you for such an excellent shot.' Scarcely had the meat touched the lips of Azru than the brothers got up, and, vanishing into the air, called out, 'Brother! you have touched impure food, which Peris never should eat, and we have made use of your ignorance of this law, because we want to make you a human being [250] who shall rule over Ghilghit; remain, therefore, at Doyur.' Azru, in deep grief at the separation, cried, 'Why remain at Doyur, unless it be to grind corn?' 'Then,' said the brothers, 'go to Ghilghit.' 'Why,' was the reply, 'go to Ghilghit, unless it be to work in the gardens?' 'No, no,' was the last and consoling rejoinder; 'you will assuredly become the king of this country, and deliver it from its merciless oppressor!' No more was heard of the departing fairies, and Azru remained by himself, endeavouring to gather consolation from the great mission which had been bestowed on him. A villager met him, and, struck by his appearance, offered him shelter in his house. Next morning he went on the roof of his host's house, and calling out to him to come up, pointed to the Ko mountain, on which, he said, he plainly discerned a wild goat. The incredulous villager began to fear he had harboured a maniac, if no worse character; but Azru shot off his arrow, and, accompanied by the villager (who had assembled some friends for protection, as he was afraid his young guest might be an associate of robbers, and lead him into a trap), went in the direction of the mountain. There, to be sure, at the very spot that was pointed out, though many miles distant, was lying the wild goat, with Azru's arrow transfixing its body. The astonished peasants at once hailed him as their leader, but he exacted an oath of secrecy from them, for he had come to deliver them from their tyrant, and would keep his incognito till such time as his plans for the destruction of the monster would be matured.

'He then took leave of the hospitable people of Doyur, and went to Ghilghit. On reaching this place, which is scarcely four miles distant from Doyur, he amused himself by prowling about in the gardens adjoining the royal residence. There he met one of the female companions of Shiribadatt's daughter fetching water for the princess. This lady was remarkably handsome, and of a sweet disposition. The companion rushed back, and told the young lady to look from over the ramparts of the castle at a wonderfully handsome young man whom she had just met. The princess placed herself in a place from which she could observe any one approaching the fort. Her maid then returned, and induced Azru to come with her in the Polo ground, in front of the castle; the princess was smitten with his beauty, and at once fell in love with him. She then sent word to the young prince to come and see her. When he was admitted into her presence he for a long time denied being anything more than a common labourer. At last he confessed to being a fairy's child, and the overjoyed princess offered him her heart and hand. It may be mentioned here that the tyrant Shiribadatt had a wonderful horse, which could cross a mile at every jump, and which its rider had accustomed to jump both into and out of the fort, over its walls. So regular were the leaps which this famous animal could take that he invariably alighted at the distance of a mile from the fort, and at the same place. On that very day on which the princess had admitted young Azru into the fort King Shiribadatt was out hunting, of which he was desperately fond, and to which he used sometimes to devote a week or two at a time.

'We must now return to Azru, whom we left conversing with the princess. Azru remained silent when the lady confessed her love. Urged to declare his sentiments, he said that he would not marry her unless she bound herself to him by the most stringent oath; this she did, and they became in the sight of God as if they were wedded man and wife. He then announced that he had come to destroy her father, and asked her to kill him herself. This she refused; but as she had sworn to aid him in every way she could, he finally induced her to promise that she would ask her father where his soul was. 'Refuse food,' said Azru, 'for three or four days, and your father, who is devotedly fond of you, will ask for the reason of your strange conduct; then say, 'Father, you are often staying away from me for several days at a time, and I am getting distressed lest something should happen to you; do reassure me by letting me know where your soul is, and let me feel certain that your life is safe.' This the princess promised to do, and when her father returned refused food for several days. The anxious Shiribadatt made inquiries, to which she replied by making the already named request. The tyrant was for a few moments thrown into mute astonishment, and finally refused compliance with her preposterous demand. The love-smitten lady went on starving herself, till at last her father, fearful for his daughter's life, told her not to fret herself about him as his soul was of snow, in the snows, and that he could only perish by fire. The princess communicated this information to her lover. Azru went back to Doyur and the villages around, and assembled his faithful peasants. Them he asked to take twigs of the fir-tree, bind them together, and light them; then to proceed in a body with torches to the castle in a circle, keep close together, and surround it on every side. He then went and dug out a very deep hole, as deep as a well, in the place where Shiribadatt's horse used to alight, and covered it with green boughs. The next day he received information that the torches were ready. He at once ordered the villagers gradually to draw near the fort in the manner which he had already indicated.

King Shiribadatt was then sitting in his castle; near him his treacherous daughter, who was so soon to lose her parent. All at once he exclaimed, 'I feel very close; go out, dearest, and see what has happened.' The girl went out, and saw torches approaching from a distance; but fancying it to be something connected with the plans of her husband, she went back and said it was nothing. The torches came nearer and nearer, and the tyrant became exceedingly restless. 'Air, air,' he cried, 'I feel very ill; do see, daughter, what is the matter.' The dutiful lady went, and returned with the same answer as before. At last the torch-bearers had fairly surrounded the fort, and Shiribadatt, with a presentiment of impending danger, rushed out of the room, saying, 'that he felt he was dying.' He then ran to the stables and mounted his favourite charger, and with one blow of the whip made him jump over the wall of the castle. Faithful to its habit the noble animal alighted at the same place, but, alas! only to find itself engulfed in a treacherous pit. Before the king had time to extricate himself the villagers had run up with their torches. 'Throw them upon him,' cried Azru. With one accord all the blazing wood was thrown upon Shiribadatt, who miserably perished.'

Azru was then most enthusiastically proclaimed king, celebrated his nuptials with the fair traitor, and, as sole tribute, exacted the offering of one sheep annually, instead of the human child, from every one of the natives.

When Azru had safely ascended the throne he ordered the tyrant's place to be levelled to the ground. The willing peasants, manufacturing spades of iron, flocked to accomplish a grateful task, and sang whilst demolishing his castle:--

'My nature is of a hard metal,' said Shiri and Badatt. 'Why hard? I, Koto, the son of the peasant Dem Singh, am alone hardy; with this iron spade I raze to the ground thy kingly house. Behold now, although thou art of race accursed, of Shatsho Malika, I, Dem Singh's son, am of a hard metal; for with this iron spade I level thy very palace; look out! look out!' [251]

An account of the Feast of Torches, instituted as a memorial of this tradition, has already been given in another connection. [252] The legend, the festival, and the song just quoted constitute a noble human epic. That startling defiance of the icy-hearted god by the human-hearted peasant, that brave cry of the long cowering wretch who at last holds in his spade an iron weapon to wield against the hardness of nature, are the sublime pæan of the Dragon-slayer. Look out, ye snow-gods! Man's heart is there, and woman's heart; their courage, plus the spade, can level your palaces; their love will melt you, their arts and sciences kill you: so fatal may be torches!

All great religions were born in this grand atheism. As the worship of Herakles meant the downfall of Zeus, the worship of Christ meant the overthrow of both Jove and Jehovah. Every race adores the epoch when their fathers grew ashamed of their gods and identified them as dragons--the supreme cruelties of nature--welcoming the man who first rose from his knees and defied them. But in the end the Priests of the Dragon manage to secure a compromise, and by labelling him with the name of his slayer, manage to resuscitate and re-enthrone him. For, as we shall presently see, the Dragon never really dies.

Christianity did not fail to avail itself of the Dragon-slayer's prestige, which had preceded it in Europe and in Africa. It could not afford to offer for popular reverence saints less heroic than pagan warriors and demigods. The old Dragon-myths, especially those which made the fame of Herakles, were appropriated to invest saintly forms. St. Michael, St. Andrew, St. Margaret, and many another, were pictured subduing or treading on Dragons. Christ was shown crushing the serpent Sin, spearing the dragon Death, or even issuing from its impotent jaws, like Jason from the Dragon. [253] But in this competition for the laurels of dead Dragon-slayers, and fierce hostility to dragons already slain, the real Dragon was left to revive and flourish in security, and in the end even inherited the mantle and the palm of his own former conqueror.

The miscarriage of canonisation in the case of St. George is a small and merely curious thing in itself; but it is almost mystical in its coincidence with the great miscarriage which brought the cross of Christ to authorise the crucifixions of the men most like him for a thousand years.

Mr. John Ruskin has sharply challenged Ralph Waldo Emerson's penetrating touch on the effigy that decorates the escutcheons of England and Russia. 'George of Cappadocia,' says Emerson, 'born at Epiphania in Cilicia, was a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and an informer, he got rich and was forced to run from justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library, and got promoted by a faction to the episcopal throne of Alexandria. When Julian came, A.D. 361, George was dragged to prison. The prison was burst open by the mob, and George was lynched as he deserved. And this precious knave became in good time Saint George of England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and civility, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world.' Whereon Emerson further remarks that 'nature trips us up when we strut.'

It is certainly rather hard for the founder of the St. George Association to be told that his patron was no Dragon-slayer at all, but the Dragon's ally. Mr. Ruskin may be right in contending that whatever may have been the facts, they who made George patron saint of England still meant their homage for a hero, or at any rate not for a rogue; but he is unsatisfactory in his argument that our St. George was another who died for his faith seventy years before the bacon-contractor. Even if the Ruskin St. George, said to have suffered under Diocletian, could be shown historical, his was a very commonplace martyrdom compared with that of a bishop torn in pieces by a 'pagan' mob. The distant christian nations would never have listened to the pagan version of the story even had it reached them. A bishop so martyred would have been the very man to give their armies a watchword. The martyr was portrayed as a Dragon-slayer only as a title might be added to the name of one knighted, or the badge of an order set upon his breast; the heraldic device grew into a variant of the common legend which suggests the origin of the mythical George. 'The magician Athanasius, successively an opponent of Christianity, a convert, and a martyr, is his chief antagonist; and the city of Alexandria appears as the Empress Alexandria, the wife of Diocletian, and herself a convert and a martyr.' This sentence from Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography' tells more than Professor Ruskin's seventeenth-century authority. The Dragon is the same Athanasius whose creed sends forth its anathemas in churches dedicated to the Arian canonised for having slain him!

Though it be granted that they who made George of Cappadocia the ideal hero of England really intended their homage for a martyr and hero, it must equally be acknowledged that his halo was clearly drawn from Dragon-fire. He was a man who had taken to the sword, and by it perished; so much was known and announced in his canonisation. He was honoured as 'the Victor' among the Greeks, therefore to-day patron of Russia; as protector of Crusaders, therefore now patron of England; thus is he saint of a war waged by the strong against the weak, in interest of a church and priesthood against human freedom; therefore George was taking the side of the Dragon against Christ, restoring the priestly power he had assailed, and delivering up his brave brothers in all history to be nailed to Christianity as a cross.

Let George remain! Whether naming fashionable temples or engraved on gold coins, the fictitious Dragon-slayer will remain the right saint in the right place so long as the real Dragon-slayer is made to name every power he hated, and to consecrate every lie in whose mouth he darted his spear.

XI. THE DRAGON'S BREATH

Medusa--Phenomena of recurrence--The Brood of Echidna and their survival--Behemoth and Leviathan--The Mouth of Hell--The Lambton Worm--Ragnar--The Lambton Doom--The Worm's Orthodoxy--The Serpent, Superstition, and Science.

Asura has already been mentioned as the most ancient Aryan name for deity. The meaning of it is, the Breather. It has also been remarked that in the course of time the word came to signify both the good and the evil spirit. What this evil breath meant in nature is told in Leonardo da Vinci's picture of the expiring Medusa, referred to on p. 386, from whose breath noxious creatures are produced. It may have been that the artist meant only to interpret the Gorgon as a personification of the malarious vapours of nature and their organic kindred; if so, he painted better than he knew, and has suggested that fatal vitality of the evil power which raised it to its throne as a principle coeternal with good.

The phenomena of recurrence in things evil made for man the mystery of iniquity. The darkness may be dispersed, but it returns; the storm may clear away, but it gathers again; inundations, sickly seasons, dog-days, Cain-winds, they go and return; the cancer is cut out and grows again; the tyrant may be slain, tyranny survives. The serpent slipping from one skin to another coils steadily into the symbol of endlessness. In another expression it is the poisonous breath of the Dragon. It is this breath that cannot be killed; the special incarnations of it, any temporary brood of it, may be destroyed, but the principle in nature which produces them cannot be exterminated.

Dragon fables have this undertone to their brave strain. In the Rig Veda (v. 32) it is said that when Indra slew Ahi, 'another more powerful was generated.' Isaiah (xiv. 29) cries, 'Rejoice not thou, whole Palestina, because the rod of him that smote thee is broken: for out of the serpent's root shall come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit shall be a fiery flying serpent.' Herakles struggles with the giant robber, Antæus, only to find the demon's strength restored by contact with the earth. He kills one head of the Hydra only to see two grow in its place; and even when he has managed to burn away these, the central head is found to be immortal, and he can only hide it under a rock. That one is the self-multiplying principle of evil. The vast brood of Echidna in mythology expresses the brood of evil in nature. Echidna, daughter of Ge and Tartarus, Earth and Hell--phonetic reappearance of Ahi--is half-serpent, half-woman, with black eyes, fearful and bloodthirsty. She becomes the mother of fire-breathing Typhon, buried beneath the earth by Jove's lightning when he aspired to scale Olympus; of the Dragon that guarded the Hesperian garden; of the Sphinx which puzzled and devoured; of three-headed Cerberus; of the eagle that preyed on rock-bound Prometheus; of the Nemæan lion which Herakles slew; of Chimæra; and of Scylla the monster whom Homer describes sitting between two large rocks waylaying mariners on the way from Italy to Sicily,--possessing twelve feet, six long necks and mouths, each with three rows of rushing teeth.

The Dragon that Cadmus slew also had terrible teeth; and it will be remembered that when these teeth were sown they sprang up as armed men. Like them, the ancient Dragon-myths were also sown, broadcast, in the mental and moral fields, cleared and ploughed by a new theology, and they sprang up as dogmas more hard and cruel than the ferocious forces of nature which gave birth to their ancestral monsters.

What the superstitious method of interpreting nature, forced as it is to personify its painful as well as its pleasant phenomena, inevitably results in, finds illustration in the two great lines of tradition--the Aryan and the Semitic--which have converged to form the christian mythology.

The Hebrew personification, Jehovah, originating in a rude period, became invested with many savage and immoral traditions; but when his worshippers had reached a higher moral culture, national sentiment had become too deeply involved with the sovereign majesty of their deity for his alleged actions to be criticised, or his absolute supremacy and omnipotence to be questioned, even to save his moral character. Thus, the Rabbins appear to have been at their wits' end to account for the existence of the two great monsters which had got into their sacred records--from an early mythology--Behemoth and Leviathan. Unwilling to admit that Jehovah had created foes to his own kingdom, or that creatures which had become foes to it were beyond his power to control, they worked out a theory that Behemoth and Leviathan were made and preserved by special order of Jehovah to execute his decrees at the Messianic Day of Judgment. They probably corresponded at an earlier period with the gryphon, or grabber, and the serpent which bit, guardians at the gate of paradise; but the need of such guards, biters, and spies by the all-powerful all-seeing Shaddai having been recognised, the monsters had to be rationalised into accord with his character as a retributive ruler. Hence Behemoth and Leviathan are represented as being fattened with the wicked, who die in order to be the food of the righteous during the unsettled times that follow the revelation of the Messiah! Behemoth is Jehovah's 'cattle on a thousand hills' (Ps. i. 10). In Pireque de Rabbi Eliezur he is described as feeding daily upon a thousand mountains on which the grass grows again every night; and the Jordan supplies him with drink, as it is said in Job (xl. 23), 'he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan into his mouth.' In the Talmud these monsters are divided into two pairs, but are said to have been made barren lest their progeny should destroy the earth. They are kept in the wilderness of Dendain, the mythical abode of the descendants of Cain, east of Eden, for the unique purpose mentioned.

But now we may remark the steady progress of these monsters to the bounds of their mythological habitat. There came a time when Behemoth and Leviathan were hardly more presentable than other personified horrors. They too must 'take the veil,'--a period in the history of mythical, corresponding to extinction in that of actual, monsters. The following passage in the Book of Enoch is believed by Professor Drummond to be a later insertion, probably from the Book of Noah, and as early as the middle of the first century:--'In that day two monsters shall be divided; a female monster named Leviathan, to dwell in the abyss of the sea, above the sources of the waters; but the male is called Behemoth, which occupies with its breast a desolate wilderness named Dendain, on the east of the garden where the elect and righteous dwell, where my grandfather (Enoch) was taken up, being the seventh from Adam, the first man whom the Lord of the spirits created. And I asked that other angel to show me the might of these monsters, how they were separated in one day, and one was set in the depth of the sea, the other on the firm land of the wilderness. And he spoke to me, 'Thou son of man, thou desirest in this to know what has been concealed.' And the other angel who went with me, and showed me what is in concealment, spake, ... 'These two monsters are prepared conformably to the greatness of God to be fed, in order that the penal judgment of God may not be in vain.' [254]

We may thus see that there were antecedents to the sentiment of Aquinas,--'Beati in regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat.' Or, perhaps, one might say rather to the logic of Aquinas; for though he saw that it would be necessary for souls in bliss to be happy at vision of the damned or else deficient in bliss, it is said he could hardly be happy from thinking of the irreversible doom of Satan himself. It would appear that only the followers of the Genevan who anticipated his god's hell for Servetus managed to adapt their hearts to such logic, and glory in the endless tortures of their fellow-creatures.

An eloquent minister in New York, Octavius B. Frothingham, being requested to write out his views on the 'question' of everlasting damnation, began with the remark that he felt somewhat as a sportsman suddenly called upon to hunt the Iguanodon. Really it is Behemoth and Leviathan he was called to deal with. Leviathan transmitted from Jonah to the Middle Ages the idea of 'the belly of Hell,' and Behemoth's jaws expanded in the 'mouth of Hell' of the Miracle-plays; and their utility, as described in the Book of Enoch, perhaps originated the doctrine of souls tasting heavenly joys from the agonies of others. The dogma of Hell has followed the course of its prototype with precision. It has arrived at just that period when, as in the case of Enoch's inquiring, the investigator finds it has taken the veil. Theologians shake their heads, call it a terrible question, write about free-will and sin, but only a few, of the fatuous sort, confess belief in the old-fashioned Hell where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.

Let us now take under consideration the outcome of the Aryan Dragon, which has travelled far to meet Behemoth in the west. And it is probable that we could not, with much seeking, find an example so pregnant with instruction for our present inquiry as our little Durham folk-tale of the Lambton Worm.

This Worm is said to have been slain by Sir Lambton, crusader, and ancestor of the Earls of Durham. This young Lambton was a wild fellow; he was fond of fishing in the river Wear, which runs near Durham Castle, and he had an especial taste for fishing there on Sunday mornings. He was profane, and on Sundays, when the people were all going to mass, they were often shocked by hearing the loud oaths which Lambton uttered whenever he had no rise. One Sunday morning something got hold of his hook, pulled strong, and he made sure of a good trout; what was his disappointment when instead thereof he found at the end of his line a tiny black worm. He tore it off with fierce imprecations and threw it in a well near by. However, soon after this the young man joined the crusaders and went off to the Holy Land, where he distinguished himself by slaying many Saracens.

But while he was off there things were going on badly around Durham Castle. Some peasant passing that well into which the youth had cast the tiny black worm looked into it, and beheld a creature that made him shudder,--a diabolical big snake with nine ferocious eyes. A little time only had elapsed before this creature had grown too large for the well to hold it, and it came out and crawled on, making a path of desolation, breakfasting on a village, until it came to a small hill. Around that hill it coiled with nine coils, each weighty enough to make a separate terrace. One may still see this hill with its nine terraces, and be assured of the circumstances by peasants residing near. Having taken up its headquarters on this hill, the nine-eyed monster was in the habit of sallying forth every day and satisfying his hunger by devouring the plumpest family he could find, until at length the people consulted an oracle--some say a witch, others again a priest--and were told that the monster would be satisfied if it were given each day the milk of nine cows. So nine cows were got together, and a plucky dairymaid was found to milk the cows and carry it to the dragon. If a single gill of the milk was missing the monster took a dire revenge upon the nearest village. This was the unpleasant situation which young Lambton found when he returned home from the crusades. He was now an altered man. He was no longer given to fishing and profanity. He felt keenly that by raising the demon out of the river Wear he had brought woe upon his neighbours, and he resolved to engage the Worm in single combat. But he learned that it had already been fought by several knights, and had slain them, while no wounds received by itself availed anything, since, if it were cut in twain, the pieces grew together again. The knight then consulted the oracle, witch or priest, and was told that he could prevail in the combat on certain conditions. He must provide himself with special armour, all over which must be large razor-blades. He must manage to entice the worm into the middle of the river Wear, in whose waters the combat must take place. And, finally, he must vow to slay as a sacrifice the first living thing he should meet after his victory. These conditions having been fulfilled, the knight entered the stream. The dragon, not having received his milk as usual that morning, crawled from his hill seeking whom he might devour, and seeing the knight in the river, went at him. Quickly he coiled around the armour, but its big razors cut him into many sections; and these sections could not piece themselves together again because the current of the river washed them swiftly away.

Now, observe how this dragon was pieced together mythologically. He is a storm cloud. He begins smaller than a man's hand and swells to huge dimensions; that characteristic of the howling storm was represented in the howling wolf Fenris of Norse Mythology, who was a little pet, a sort of lapdog for the gods at first, but when full grown broke the chains that tied him to mountains, and was only fettered at last by the thread finer than cobweb, which was really the sunbeam conquering winter. Then, when this worm was cut in two, the parts came together again. This feature of recurrence is especially characteristic of Hydras. In the Egyptian 'Tale of Setnau,' Ptah-nefer-ka saw the river-snake twice resume its form after he had killed it with his sword,--he succeeded the third time by placing sand between the two parts; and what returning floods taught the ancient scribe remained to characterise the dragon encountered by Guy of Warwick, which recovered from every wound by dipping its tail in the well it had guarded. The Lernean Hydra had nine heads, the Lambton Worm nine eyes and nine folds, and drank nine cows' milk. His fondness for the milk of cows connects him straightly with the dragon Vritra, whom Indra slew because he stole Indra's cows (that is, the good clouds, whose milk is gentle rain, and do no harm), and shut them up in a cavern to enjoy their milk himself. That is the oldest Dragon fable on record, and it is said in the Rig-Veda that beneath Indra's thunderbolt the monster broke up into pieces, and was washed away in a current of water. Finally, in being destroyed at last by razor blades, the dragon is connected with that slain by Ragnar, in whose armour the sun-darts of Apollo had turned to icicles. In the 'Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrach,' preserved by Olaus Wormius, it is said that King Ella of Northumberland having captured that terror of the North (8th cent.), ordered him to be thrown into a pit of serpents. His surname, Lodbrach, or Hair Breeches, had been given because of his method of slaying a Worm which devastated Gothland, whose king had promised his daughter to the man who should slay the same. Ragnar dressed himself in hairy skins, and threw water over the hair, which, freezing, encased him in an armour of ice. The Worm, unable to bite through this, was impaled by Ragnar. Another version is that Ragnar killed two serpents which the King of Gothland had set to guard his daughter, but which had grown to such size that they terrified the country. It may be observed that the Lambton story christianises the Ragnar legend, showing that to be done in atonement for sin which in the other was done for love. The Cornish legend of St. Petrox has also taken a hint from Ragnar, and announces the rescue of christians from the serpent-pit in which the pagan hero perished. The icicles reappear on the slayer of the dragon of Wantley, represented by long spikes bristling from his armour.

The Knight Lambton, remembering his vow to slay as a sacrifice the first living thing he might meet after the combat, had arranged that a dog should be placed where it would attract his eye. But it turned out that his own father came rushing to him. As he could not kill his father, he consulted the oracle again to know what would be the penalty of non-fulfilment of his vow. It was that no representative of the family should die in his bed for nine generations. The notion is still found in that neighbourhood that no Earl of Durham has since then died in his bed. The nine generations have long passed since any crusading Lambton lived, but several peasants of the district closed their narrative with, 'Strange to say, no Earl of Durham has died in his bed!' At the castle I talked with a servant on the estate while looking at the old statues of the knight, worm, and dairymaid, all kept there, and he told me he had heard that the late Earl, as death drew nigh, asked to sit up--insisted--and died in a chair. If there be any truth in this, it would show that the family itself has some morbid feeling about the legend which has been so long told them with pride. The old well from which the little worm emerged a monster is now much overgrown, but I was told that it was for a long time a wishing-well, and the pins cast in by rustics may still be seen at the bottom of it.

Pins are the last offerings at the Worm's Well; 'wishes' its last prayers; but where go now the coins and the prayers? To propitiate a power and commute a doom resting upon much the same principles as those represented in the Lambton legend. A community desolated because one man is sinful miniatures a world's doom for Adam's sin. The demand of a human sacrifice is more clear in the Sockburn story, where Conyers offered up his only son to the Holy Ghost in the parish church before engaging the Dragon, that being a condition of success prescribed by the 'Oracle' or 'Sybil.' This claim of the infernal powers represented by the Worm--many-eyed, all-seeing--cannot be set aside; Lambton's filial love may resist it only to have it pass as the hereditary doom of his family, representing an imputed sin. 'For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, and visit the sins of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generation.'

There are processes of this kind in nature, hereditary evils, transmitted diseases and disgraces, and afflictions of many through the offences of one. But a fearful Nemesis follows the deification and adoration of them. 'How can I be happy in heaven,' said a tender-hearted lady to her clerical adviser, 'when I must see others in hell?' 'You will be made to see that it is all for the best.' 'If I am to be made so heartless, I prefer to go to hell.' This genuine conversation reports the doom of all deities whose extension is in dragons. Hell implies a Dragon as its representative and ruler. Theology may induce the abject and cowardly to subject their human hearts to the process of induration required for loyalty to such powers, but in the end it makes atheism the only salvation of brave, pure, and loving natures. The Dragons' breath has clouded the ancient heavens and blighted the old gods; but the starry ideals they pursue in vain. Behemoth has supplied sirloins to many priesthoods for a long time, but he has at last become too tough even for their teeth, and they feed him less carefully every year. Nay, he is encountered now and then by his professional feeders, and has found even in Westminster Abbey his Guy of Warwick.

Nor could this desp'rate champion daunt A Dun Cow bigger than elephant; But he, to prove his courage sterling, Cut from her enormous side a sirloin.

The Worms--whether Semitic Leviathan or Aryan Dragon--are nearly fossilised as to their ancient form. The sacrifice of Jephtha's daughter to the one, and of young Conyers to the other, found commutation in the case of man's rescue from Satan by Christ's descent to Hades, and in the substitution of nine uneasy deaths for the demanded parricide in the Lambton case; and the most direct 'survival' of these may be found in any country lad trying to cure his warts by providing a weed for them to adhere to. Their end in Art was in such forms as this starveling creature of Callot's (Fig. 32), whose thin, spectacled rider, tilting at St. Anthony, denotes as well the doom of all powers, however lofty, whose majesty requires tali auxilio et istis defensoribus. The Dragon passes and leaves a roar of laughter behind him, in which even St. Anthony could now join. But Leviathan and Lambton Worm have combined and merged their life in a Dogma; it is a Dogma as remorseless and voracious as its prototype, and requires to be fed with all the milk of human kindness, or it at once begins to gnaw the foundations of Christendom itself. Christianity rests upon the past work of the Worm in Paradise, and its present work in Hell. It makes no real difference whether man's belief in a universe enmeshed in serpent-coils be expressed in the Hindu's cowering adoration of the venomous potentate, or the christian's imprecation upon it: fundamentally it is serpent-worship in each case. Vishnu reposes on his celestial Serpent; the god of Dogma maintains his government by support of the infernal Serpent. Fear beheld him appearing in Durham to vindicate the mass and the Sabbath; but the same fear still sees him in the fiery world punishing Sabbath-breakers and blasphemers against his Creator and chief. That fear built every cathedral in Christendom, and they must crumble with the phantasm evoked for their creation.

The Serpent in itself is a perfect type of all evil in nature. It is irreconcilable with the reign of a perfectly good and omnipotent man over the universe. No amount of casuistry can explain its co-existence with anthropomorphic Love and Wisdom, as all acknowledge when a parallel casuistry attempts to defend any other god than their own from deeds that are, humanly considered, evil. It is just as easy to defend the jealousy and cruelty of Jove, on the ground that his ways are not as our ways, as it is to defend similar tempers in Jehovah. The monster sent by one to devour Prometheus is ethically atwin with the snake created by the other to bite the heel of man.

Man is saved from the superstitious evolution of the venomous Serpent into a Dragon by recognising its real evolution as seen by the eye of Science. Science alone can tell the true story of the Serpent, and justify its place in nature. It forbids man his superstitious method of making a god in his own image, and his egotistic method of judging nature according to his private likes and dislikes, his convenience or inconvenience. Taught by Science man may, with a freedom the barbarian cannot feel, exterminate the Serpent; with a freedom the christian cannot know, he may see in that reptile the perfection of that economy in nature which has ever defended the advancing forms of life. It judges the good and evil of every form with reference to its adaptation to its own purposes. Thus Science alone wields the spear of Ithuriel, and beneath its touch every Dragon shrinks instantly to its little shape in nature to be dealt with according to what it is.

XII. FATE

Dorè's 'Love and Fate'--Moira and Moiræ--The 'Fates' of Æschylus --Divine absolutism surrendered--Jove and Typhon--Commutation of the Demon's share--Popular fatalism--Theological fatalism--Fate and Necessity--Deification of Will--Metaphysics, past and present.

Gustave Dorè has painted a picture of 'Love and Fate,' in which the terrible hag is portrayed towering above the tender Eros, and while the latter is extending the thread as far as he can, the wrinkled hands of Destiny are the boundaries of his power, and the fatal shears close upon the joy he has stretched to its inevitable limit. To the ancient mind these two forms made the two great realms of the universe, their powers meeting in the fruit with a worm at its core, in seeds of death germinating amid the play of life, in all the limitations of man. They are projected in myths of Elysium and Hades, Eden and the Serpent, Heaven and Hell, and their manifold variants.

Perhaps there is no one line of mythological development which more clearly and impressively illustrates the forces under which grew the idea of an evil principle, than the changes which the personification of Fate underwent in Greece and Rome. The Moira, or Fate with Homer, is only a secondary cause, if that, and simply carries out the decrees of her father, Zeus. Zeus is the real Fate. Nevertheless, while this is the Homeric theory or theology, there are intimations (see chap. xxvii. part 4) that the real awe of men was already transferred from Zeus to the Erinnyes. This foreshadows a change of government. With Hesiod we find, instead of one, three Moiræ. They are no longer offspring of Zeus, but, as it were, his Cabinet. They do not act independently of him, but when, in pursuance of their just counsels, Zeus issues decrees, the Moiræ administer them. Next we find the Moiræ of Hesiod developed by other writers into final Recorders; they write the decrees of Zeus on certain indestructible tablets, after which they are irrevocable and inevitable. With Æschylus we find the Moiræ developed into independent and supreme powers, above Zeus himself. The chained Prometheus looks not to Zeus but to Fate for his final liberation.

Chorus. Who, then, is the guide of Necessity?

Prometheus. The tri-form Fates and the unforgetting Furies.

Cho. Is Zeus, then, less powerful than they?

Prom. At least 'tis certain he cannot escape his own doom.

Cho. And what can be Zeus' doom but everlasting rule?

Prom. This ye may not learn; press it not.

Cho. Surely some solemn mystery thou hidest.

Prom. Turn to some other theme: for this disclosure time has not ripened: it must be veiled in deep mystery, for by the keeping of this secret shall come my liberty from base chains and misery.

These great landmarks represent successive revolutions in the Olympian government. Absolutism became burthensome: as irresponsible monarch, Zeus became responsible for the woes of the world, and his priests were satisfied to have an increasing share of that responsibility allotted to his counsellors, until finally the whole of it is transferred. From that time the countenance of Zeus, or Jupiter, shines out unclouded by responsibility for human misfortunes and earthly evils; and, on the other hand, the once beautiful Fates are proportionately blackened, and they become hideous hags, the aged and lame crones of popular belief in Greece and Rome, every line of whose ugliness would have disfigured the face of Zeus had he not been subordinated to them.

Moira means 'share,' and originally, perhaps, meant simply the power that meted out to each his share of life, and of the pains and pleasures woven in it till the term be reached. But as the Fates gained more definite personality they began to be regarded as having also a 'share' of their own. They came to typify all the dark and formidable powers as to their inevitableness. No divine power could set them aside, or more than temporarily subdue them. Fate measured out her share to the remorseless Gorgon as well as to the fairest god. But where destructive power was exercised in a way friendly to man, the Fates are put somewhat in the background, and the feat is claimed for some god. Such, in the 'Prometheus' of Æschylus, is the spirit of the wonderful passage concerning Typhon, rendered with tragic depth by Theodore Buckley:--'I commiserated too,' says the rock-bound Prometheus, 'when I beheld the earth-born inmate of the Cilician caverns, a tremendous prodigy, the hundred-headed impetuous Typhon, overpowered by force; who withstood all the gods, hissing slaughter from his hungry jaws, and from his eyes there flashed a hideous glare as if he would perforce overthrow the sovereignty of Jove. But the sleepless shaft of Jupiter came upon him, the descending thunderbolt breathing forth flame which scared him out of his presumptuous bravadoes; for having been smitten to his very soul he was crumbled to a cinder, and thunder-blasted in his prowess. And now, a hapless and paralysed form, is he lying hard by a narrow frith, pressed down beneath the roots of Ætna. And, seated on the topmost peaks, Vulcan forges the molten masses whence there shall burst forth floods, devouring with full jaws the level fields of fruitful Sicily; with rage such as this shall Typhon boil over in hot artillery of a never glutted fire-breathing storm; albeit he hath been reduced to ashes by the thunderbolt of Jupiter.'

In this passage we see Jove invested with the glory of defeating a great demon; but we also recognise the demon still under the protection of Fate. Destiny must bear that burthen. So was it said in the Apocalypse Satan should be loosed after being bound in the Pit a thousand years; and so Mohammed declared Gog and Magog should break loose with terror and destruction from the mountain-prison in which Allah had cast them. The destructive Principle had its 'share' as well as the creative and preservative Principles, and could not be permanently deprived of it. Gradually the Fates of various regions and names were identified with the deities, whose interests, gardens, or treasures they guarded; and when some of these deities were degraded their retainers were still more degraded, while in other cases deities were enabled to maintain fair fame by fables of their being betrayed and their good intentions frustrated by such subordinates. Thus we find a certain notion of technical and official power investing such figures as Satan, Ahriman, Iblis, and the Dragon, as if the upper gods could not disown or reverse altogether the bad deeds done by these commissioners.

But the large though limited degree of control necessarily claimed for the greatest and best gods had to be represented theologically. Hence there was devised a system of Commutation. The Demon or Dragon, though abusing his power, could not have it violently withdrawn, but might be compelled to accept some sacrifice in lieu of the precise object sought by his voracity. These substitutions are found in every theological system, and to apply them to individuals constitutes the raison d'être of every priesthood. In the progress towards civilisation the substitutes diminish in value, and finally they become merely nominal and ceremonial,--an effigy of a man instead of the man, or wine instead of blood. At first the commutation was often in the substitution of persons of lower for others of higher rank, as when slaves or wives were, or are, sacrificed to assure paradise to the master or husband. Thus, Death is allowed to take Alcestis instead of Admetus. A higher degree of civilisation substitutes animals for human victims. In keeping with this is the legend of Christ's sending demons out of two men into a herd of swine: [255] which, again, is referable to the same class of ideas as the legend that followed concerning Jesus himself as a vicarious offering; mankind in this case being the herd, as compared with the son of a god, and the transfer of the Satanic power from the human race to himself, for even a little time, being accepted in theology as an equivalent, on account of the divine dignity of the being who descended into hell. It was some time, however, before theology worked out this theory as it now stands, the candid fathers having rejoiced in the belief that the contract for commutation on its face implied that Christ was to remain for ever in hell, Satan being outwitted in this.

The ancient Babylonian charms often end with the refrain:--'May the enchantment go forth and to its own dwelling-place betake itself,' Every evil spirit was supposed to have an appropriate dwelling, as in the case of Judas, into whom Satan entered, [256] and of whom it is said he 'by transgression fell, that he might go to his own place. [257] Very ingenious are some of the ancient speculations concerning the habitations and congenial resorts of demons. In some regions the colour of a disease on the skin is supposed to indicate the tastes of the demon causing it; and the spells of exorcism end by assigning him to something of the same hue. The demon of jaundice is generally consigned to the yellow parrots, and inflammation to the red or scarlet weeds. Their colours are respected. Humanity is little considered in the Eastern formulas of this kind, and it is pretty generally the case that in praying against plague or famine, populations are often found selecting a tribe to which their trouble is adjured to betake itself. 'May Nin-cigal,' says a Babylonian exorcism, 'turn her face towards another place; may the noxious spirit go forth and seize another; may the female cherub and the female demon settle upon his body; may the king of heaven preserve, may the king of earth preserve!'

So is it in regions and times which we generally think of as semi-barbarous. But every now and then communities which fancy themselves civilised and enlightened are brought face to face with the popular fatalism in its pagan form, and are shocked thereat, not remembering that it is equally the dogma of vicarious satisfaction or atonement. A lady residing in the neighbourhood of the Traunsee, Austria, informs me that recently two men were nearly drowned in that lake, being rescued at the last moment and brought to life with great difficulty. But this incident, instead of causing joy among the neighbours of the men, excited their displeasure; and this not because the rescued were at all unpopular, but because of a widespread notion that the Destinies required two lives, that they would have to be presently satisfied with two others, and that since the agonies of the drowning men had passed into unconsciousness, it would have been better to surrender the selected victims to their fate. At Elsinore, in Denmark, when the sea moans it is said to 'want somebody,' and it is generally the case that some story of a person just drowned circulates afterwards.

While the early mythological forms of the Fates diminish and pass away as curious superstitions, they return in metaphysical disguises. They gather their kindred in primitive sciences and cosmogonies, and finding their old home swept free of pagan demons, and, garnished with philosophic phrases, they enter as grave theories; but their subtlety and their sting is with them, and the last state of the house they occupy is worse than the first.

Yes, worse: for all that man ever won of courage or moral freedom, by conquering his dragons in detail, he surrenders again to the phantom-forces they typified when he gives up his mind to belief in a power not himself that makes for evil. The terrible conclusion that Evil is a positive and imperishable Principle in the universe carries in it the poisonous breath of every Dragon. It lurks in all theology which represents the universe as an arena of struggle between good and evil Principles, and human life as a war of the soul against the flesh. It animates all the pious horrors which identify Materialism with wickedness. It nestles in the mind which imagines a personal deity opposed by any part of nature. It coils around every heart which adores absolute sovereign Will, however apotheosised.

All of these notions, most of all belief in a supreme arbitrary Will, are modern disguises of Fate; and belief in Fate is the one thing fatal to human culture and energy. The notion of Fate (fatum, the word spoken) carries in it the conception of arbitrariness in the universe, of power deliberately exerted without necessary reference to the nature of things; and it is precisely opposed to that idea of Necessity taught by Science, which is another name for the supremacy of Law. Happily the notion of a universe held at the mercy of a personal decree is suicidal in a world full of sorrows and agonies, which, on such a theory, can only be traced to some individual caprice or malevolence. However long abject fear may silence the lips of the suffering, rebellion is in their hearts. Every blow inflicted, directly or permissively, by mere Will, however omnipotent, every agony that is consciously detached from universal organic necessity, in order that it may be called 'providential,' can arouse no natural feeling in man nobler than indignation. The feeling of a suitor in a court of law, who knows that the adverse judgment that ruins him has no root in the facts or the law, but proceeds from the prejudice or whim of the judge, can be nowise different from that of a mother who sees her son stricken down by death, and hears at his grave that he was consumed by the wrath of a god who might have yielded to her prayer, but refused it. The heart's protest may be throttled for a time by the lingering coil of terror, but it is there, and christian theologians will be as anxious to protect their deity from it, at whatever cost to his sovereignty, as their predecessors who invented the Cabinet of Women to relieve Jove from responsibility.

Metaphysics--which appear to have developed into the art of making things look true in words when their untruth in fact has been detected--have indeed already set about the task just predicted. Eminent divines are found writing about matter and spirit, freedom and natural law, as solemnly as if all this discussion were new, and had never been carried out to its inevitable results. They can only put in christian or modern phraseology conclusions which have been reached again and again in the history of human speculation. The various schools of Buddhist and Vedantist philosophy have come by every conceivable route to their fundamental unity of belief in God, Soul, and Matter; in a pessimist visible nature, an ideal invisible nature, and a human soul held in matter like a frog in a snake's mouth, but able by certain mysterious, mostly metaphysical or verbal, tactics, to gain release, and pass into a corresponding situation in the deity.

'As a king, whose son had strayed away from him and lived in ignorance of his father among the Veddahs (wild men), will, on discovering his son, exclaim, 'Come to me, my darling son!' and make him a participator of the happiness he himself enjoys, even so will the Supreme God present himself before the soul when in distress--the soul enmeshed in the net of the five Veddahs (senses), and, severing that soul from Pâsam (Matter), assimilate it to himself, and bless it at his holy feet.'

It is too late for man to be interested in an 'omnipotent' Personality, whose power is mysteriously limited at the precise point when it is needed, and whose moral government is another name for man's own control of nature. Nevertheless, this Oriental pessimism is the Pauline theory of Matter, and it is the speculative protoplasm out of which has been evolved, in many shapes, that personification which remains for our consideration--the Devil.

I. DIABOLISM

Dragon and Devil distinguished--Dragons' wings--War in Heaven-- Expulsion of Serpents--Dissolution of the Dragon--Theological origin of the Devil--Ideal and actual--Devil Dogma--Debasement of ideal persons--Transmigration of phantoms.

'We are all nothing other than Wills,' says St. Augustine; and he adds that of the good and bad angels the nature is the same, the will different. In harmony with this John Beaumont says, 'A good desire of mind is a good God.' [1] To which all the mythology of Evil adds, a bad desire of mind is a Devil. Every personification of an evil Will looks beyond the outward phenomena of pain, and conceives a heart that loves evil, a spirit that makes for wickedness. At this point a new element altogether enters. The physical pain incidentally represented by the Demon, generalised and organised into a principle of harmfulness in the Dragon, begins now to pass under the shadow cast by the ascending light of man's moral nature. Man becomes conscious of moral and spiritual pains: they may be still imaginatively connected with bodily agonies, but these drop out of the immediate conception, disappear into a distant future, and are even replaced by the notion of an evil symbolised by pleasure.

The fundamental difference between either a Demon or Dragon and a Devil may be recognised in this: we never find the former voluntarily bestowing physical pleasure or happiness on man, whereas it is a chief part of the notion of a Devil that he often confers earthly favours in order to corrupt the moral nature.

There are, indeed, apparent exceptions to this theorem presented in the agatho-dragons which have already been considered in our chapter on the Basilisk; but the reader will observe that there is no intimation in such myths of any malign ulterior purpose in the good omens brought by those exceptional monsters, and that they are really forms of malevolent power whose afflictive intent is supposed to have been vanquished by the superior might of the heroes or saints to whose glory they are reluctantly compelled to become tributary.

Undoubtedly the Dragon attended this moral and religious development of man's inward nature very far, and still occupies, as at once prisoner and gaoler in the underworld, a subordinate relation to it. In the long process he has undergone certain transformations, and in particular his attribute of wings, if not derived from the notion of his struggle against holier beings, seems to have been largely enhanced thereby. The exceptional wings given to serpents in Greek art, those, for instance, which draw Demeter and Persephone in their chariot, are trifling as compared with the fully-developed wings of our conventional Dragon of the christian era. Such wings might have been developed occasionally to denote the flying cloud, the fire-breathing storm, or explain how some Ráhu was enabled to pursue the sun and moon and swallow them temporarily in the phenomena of eclipse. But these wings grew to more important dimensions when they were caught up into the Semitic conception of winged genii and destroying angels, and associated with an ambitious assault on heaven and its divine or angelic occupants.

'There was war in Heaven,' says the Apocalypse. The traditional descriptions of this war follow pretty closely, in dramatic details, other and more ancient struggles which reflect man's encounters with the hardships of nature. In those encounters man imagined the gods descending earthward to mingle in the fray; but even where the struggle mounted highest the scenery is mainly terrestrial and the issues those of place and power, the dominion of visible Light established above Darkness, or of a comparatively civilised over a savage race. The wars between the Devas and Asuras in India, the Devs and Ahuras in Persia, Buddha and the Nagas in Ceylon, Garúra and the Serpent-men in the north of India, gods and Frost-giants in Scandinavia, still concern man's relation to the fruits of the earth, to heat and frost, to darkness or storm and sunshine.

But some of these at length find versions which reveal their tendency towards spiritualisation. The differences presented by one of these legends which has survived among us in nearly its ancient form from the same which remains in a partly mystical form will illustrate the transitional phase. Thus, Garúra expelling the serpents from his realm in India is not a saintly legend; this exterminator of serpents is said to have compelled the reptile race to send him one of their number daily that he might eat it, and the rationalised tradition interprets this as the prince's cannibalism. The expulsion of Nagas or serpents from Ceylon by Buddha, in order that he might consecrate that island to the holy law, marks the pious accentuation of the fable. The expulsion of snakes from Ireland by St. Patrick is a legend conceived in the spirit of the curse pronounced upon the serpent in Eden, but in this case the modern myth is the more primitive morally, and more nearly represents the exploit of Garúra. St. Patrick expels the snakes that he may make Ireland a paradise physically, and establish his reputation as an apostle by fulfilling the signs of one named by Christ; [2] and in this particular it slightly rises above the Hindu story. In the case of the serpent cursed in Eden a further moralisation of the conflict is shown. The serpent is not present in Eden, as in the realms of Garúra and St. Patrick, for purposes of physical devastation or pain, but to bestow a pleasure on man with a view to success in a further issue between himself and the deity. Yet in this Eden myth the ancient combat is not yet fairly spiritualised; for the issue still relates, as in that between the Devas and Asuras, to the possession of a magical fruit which by no means confers sanctity. In the apocalyptic legend of the war in heaven, [3] the legend has become fairly spiritualised. The issue is no longer terrestrial, it is no longer for mere power; the Dragon is arrayed against the woman and child, and against the spiritual 'salvation' of mankind, of whom he is 'accuser' and 'deceiver.'

Surely nobody could be 'deceived' by 'a great fiery-red Dragon, having seven heads and ten horns'! In this vision the Dragon is pressed as far as the form can go in the symbolisation of evil. To devour the child is its legitimate work, but as 'accuser of the brethren before God day and night' the monstrous shape were surely out of place by any mythologic analogy; and one could hardly imagine such a physiognomy capable of deceiving 'the whole world.' It is not wonderful, therefore, that the Dragon's presence in heaven is only mentioned in connection with his fall from it. It is significant that the wings are lost in this fall; for while his 'angelic' relationship suggests the previous wings, the woman is able to escape the fallen monster by the two wings given her. [4] Wingless now, 'the old serpent' once more, the monster's shape has no adaptation to the moral and religious struggle which is to ensue. For his shape is a method, and it means the perfection of brute force. That, indeed, also remains in the sequel of this magnificent myth. As in the legend of the Hydra two heads spring up in place of that which falls, so in this Christian legend out of the overthrown monster, henceforth himself concealed, two arise from his inspiration,--the seven-headed, ten-horned Beast who continues the work of wrath and pain; but also a lamb-like Beast, with only two horns (far less terrible), and able to deceive by his miracles, for he is even able to call down fire from heaven. The ancient Serpent-dragon, the expression of natural pain, thus goes to pieces. His older part remains to work mischief and hurt; and the cry is uttered, 'Be merry, ye heavens, and ye that tabernacle in them: woe to the earth and the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath because he knows that he has a short time.' [5] But there is a lamb-like part of him too, and his relation to the Dragon is only known by his voice.

This subtle adaptation of the symbol of external pain to the representation of the moral struggle, wherein the hostile power may assume deceptive forms of beauty and pleasure, is only one impressive illustration of the transfer of human conceptions of evil from outward to inward nature. The transition is from a malevolent, fatal, principle of harmfulness to the body to a malevolent, fatal, principle of evil to the conscience. The Demon was natural; the Dragon was both physical and metaphysical; the Devil was and is theological. In the primitive Zoroastrian theology, where the Devil first appears in clear definition, he is the opponent of the Good Mind, and the combat between the two, Ormuzd and Ahriman, is the spiritualisation of the combat between Light and Darkness, Pain and Happiness, in the external world. As these visible antagonists were supposed to be exactly balanced against each other, so are their spiritual correlatives. The Two Minds are described as Twins.

'Those old Spirits, who are twins, made known what is good and what is evil in thoughts, words, and deeds. Those who are good distinguished between the two; not so those who are evil-doers.

'When these two Spirits came together they made first life and death, so that there should be at last the most wretched life for the bad, but for the good blessedness.

'Of these two Spirits the evil one chose the worst deeds; the kind Spirit, he whose garment is the immovable sky, chose what is right.' [6]

This metaphysical theory follows closely the primitive scientific observations on which it is based; it is the cold of the cold, the gloom of the darkness, the sting of death, translated into some order for the intellect which, having passed through the Dragon, we find appearing in this Persian Devil; and against his blackness the glory of the personality from whom all good things proceed shines out in a splendour no longer marred by association with the evil side of nature. Ormuzd is celebrated as 'father of the pure world,' who sustains 'the earth and the clouds that they do not fall,' and 'has made the kindly light and the darkness, the kindly sleep and the awaking;' [7] at every step being suggested the father of the impure world, the unkindly light, darkness or sleep.

The ecstasy which attended man's first vision of an ideal life defied the contradictory facts of outward and inward nature. So soon as he had beheld a purer image of himself rising above his own animalism, he must not only regard that animalism as an instigation of a devil, but also the like of it in nature; and this conception will proceed pari passu with the creation of pure deities in the image of that higher self. There was as yet no philosophy demanding unity in the Cosmos, or forbidding man to hold as accursed so much of nature as did not obviously accord with his ideals.

Mr. Edward B. Tylor has traced the growth of Animism from man's shadow and his breathing; Sir John Lubbock has traced the influence of dreams in forming around him a ghostly world; Mr. Herbert Spencer has given an analysis of the probable processes by which this invisible environment was shaped for the mental conception in accordance with family and social conditions. But it is necessary that we should here recognise the shadow that walked by the moral nature, the breathings of religious aspiration, and the dreams which visited a man whose moral sense was so generally at variance with his animal desires. The code established for the common good, while necessarily having a relation to every individual conscience, is a restriction upon individual liberty. The conflict between selfishness and duty is thus inaugurated; it continues in the struggle between the 'law in the members and the law in the spirit,' which led Paul to beat his body (hypopiaxomai) to keep it in subjection; it passes from the Latin poet to the Englishman, who turns his experience to a rune--

I see the right, and I approve it too; Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.

As the light which cast it was intense, even so intense was the shadow it cast beneath all it could not penetrate. Passionate as was the saintliest man's love of good, even so passionate was his spiritual enemy's love of evil. High as was the azure vault that mingled with his dreams of purity, so deep was the abyss beneath his lower nature. The superficial equalities of phenomena, painful and pleasurable, to his animal nature had cast the mould into which his theories of the inward and the moral phenomena must be cast; and thus man--in an august moment--surrendered himself to the dreadful conception of a supreme Principle of Wickedness: wherever good was there stood its adversary; wherever truth, there its denier; no light shone without the dark presence that would quench it; innocence had its official accuser, virtue its accomplished tempter, peace its breaker, faith its disturber and mocker. Nay, to this impersonation was added the last feature of fiendishness, a nature which found its supreme satisfaction in ultimately torturing human beings for the sins instigated by himself.

It is open to question how far any average of mankind really conceived this theological dogma. Easy as it is to put into clear verbal statement; readily as the analogies of nature supply arguments for and illustrations of a balance between moral light and darkness, love and hatred; yet is man limited in subjective conceptions to his own possibilities, and it may almost be said that to genuinely believe in an absolute Fiend a man would have to be potentially one himself. But any human being, animated by causeless and purposeless desire to inflict pain on others, would be universally regarded as insane, much more one who would without motive corrupt as well as afflict.

Even theological statements of the personality of Evil, and what that implies, are rare. The following is brave enough to be put on record, apart from its suggestiveness.

'It cannot be denied that as there is an inspiration of holy love, so is there an inspiration of hatred, or frantic pleasure, with which men surrender themselves to the impulses of destructiveness; and when the popular language speaks of possessions of Satan, of incarnate devils, there lies at the bottom of this the grave truth that men, by continued sinning, may pass the ordinary limit between human and diabolic depravity, and lay open in themselves a deep abyss of hatred which, without any mixture of self-interest, finds its gratification in devastation and woe.' [8]

On this it may be said that the popular commentary on cases of the kind is contained in the very phrase alluded to, 'possession,'--the implication being that such disinterested depravity is nowise possible within the range of simple human experience,--and, in modern times, 'possessions' are treated in asylums. Morbid conditions, however, are of such varied degrees that it is probable many have imagined a Being in whom their worst impulses are unrestrained, and thus there have been sufficient popular approximations to an imaginative conception of a Devil to enable the theological dogma, which few can analyse, to survive.

It must not be supposed, however, that the moral and spiritual ideals, to which allusion has just been made, are normally represented in the various Devils which we have to consider. It is the characteristic of personifications, whether celestial or infernal, to supersede gradually the ideas out of which they spring. As in the fable of Agni, who is said to have devoured his parents when he was born, a metaphor of fire consuming the two sticks which produce it, religious history shows both deities and devils, by the flame of personal devotion or hatred they engender, burning up the ideas that originate them. When instead of unconscious forces and inanimate laws working to results called good and evil, men see great personal Wills engaged in personal conflict, the universe becomes a government of combat; the stars of heaven, the angels and the imps, men and women, the very plants and animals, are caught up in the battle, to be marshalled on one side or the other; and in the military spirit and fury of the struggle the spiritual ideals become as insignificant beneath the phantom-hosts they evoked as the violets and daisies which an army tramples in its march. There is little difference at last between the moral characteristics of the respective armies of Ormuzd and Ahriman, Michael and Satan; their strategy and ferocity are the same. [9] Wherever the conception is that of a universe divided into hostile camps, the appropriate passions are kindled, and in the thick of the field, where Cruelty and Gentleness met, is seen at last a horned Beast confronted by a horned Lamb. [10] On both sides is exaltation of the horn.

We need only look at the outcome of the gentle and lowly Jesus through the exigencies of the church militant to see how potent are such forces. Although lay Christians of ordinary education are accustomed to rationalise their dogmas as well as they can, and dwell on the loving and patient characteristics of Jesus, the horns which were attached to the brow of him who said, 'Love your enemies' by ages of Christian warfare remain still in the Christ of Theology, and they are still depended on to overawe the 'sinner.' In an orthodox family with which I have had some acquaintance, a little boy, who had used naughty expressions of resentment towards a playmate was admonished that he should be more like Christ, 'who never did any harm to his enemies.' 'No,' answered the wrathful child, 'but he's a-going to.'

As in Demonology we trace the struggles of man with external obstructions, and the phantasms in which these were reflected until they were understood or surmounted, we have now to consider the forms which report human progression on a higher plane,--that of social, moral, and religious evolution. Creations of a crude Theology, in its attempt to interpret the moral sentiment, the Devils to which we now turn our attention have multiplied as the various interests of mankind have come into relations with their conscience. Every degree of ascent of the moral nature has been marked by innumerable new shadows cast athwart the mind and the life of man. Every new heaven of ideas is followed by a new earth, but ere this conformity of things to thoughts can take place struggles must come and the old demons will be recalled for new service. As time goes on things new grow old; the fresh issues pass away, their battlefields grow cold; then the brood of superstition must flit away to the next field where carrion is found. Foul and repulsive as are these vultures of the mind--organisms of moral sewage--every one of them is a witness to the victories of mankind over the evils they shadow, and to the steady advance of a new earth which supplies them no habitat but the archæologist's page.

II. THE SECOND BEST

Respect for the Devil--Primitive atheism--Idealisation--Birth of new gods--New gods diabolised--Compromise between new gods and old--Foreign deities degraded--Their utilisation.

A lady residing in Hampshire, England, recently said to a friend of the present writer, both being mothers, 'Do you make your children bow their heads whenever they mention the Devil's name? I do,' she added solemnly,--'I think it's safer.'

This instance of reverence for the Devil's name, occurring in a respectable English family, may excite a smile; but if my reader has perused the third and fourth chapters (Part I.) of this work, in which it was necessary to state certain facts and principles which underlie the phenomena of degradation in both Demonology and Devil-lore, he will already know the high significance of nearly all the names which have invested the personifications of evil; and he will not be surprised to find their original sanctity, though lowered, sometimes, surviving in such imaginary forms after the battles in which they were vanquished have passed out of all contemporary interest. If, for example, instead of the Devil, whose name is uttered with respect in the Hampshire household, any theological bogey of our own time were there mentioned, such as 'Atheist,' it might hardly receive such considerate treatment.

The two chapters just referred to anticipate much that should be considered at this point of our inquiry. It is only necessary here to supplement them with a brief statement, and to some extent a recapitulation, of the processes by which degraded deities are preserved to continue through a structural development and fulfil a necessary part in every theological scheme which includes the conception of an eternal difference between good and evil.

Every personification when it first appears expresses a higher and larger view. When deities representing the physical needs of mankind have failed, as they necessarily must, to meet those needs, atheism follows, though it cannot for a long time find philosophical expression. It is an atheism ad hoc, so to say, and works by degrading particular gods instead of by constructing antitheistic theories. Successive dynasties of deities arise and flourish in this way, each representing a less arbitrary relation to nature,--peril lying in that direction,--and a higher moral and spiritual ideal, this being the stronghold of deities. It is obvious that it is far easier to maintain the theory that prayers are heard and answered by a deity if those prayers are limited to spiritual requests, than when they are petitions for outward benefits. By giving over the cruel and remorseless forces of nature to the Devil,--i.e., to this or that personification of them who, as gods, had been appealed to in vain to soften such forces,--the more spiritual god that follows gains in security as well as beauty what he surrenders of empire and omnipotence. This law, illustrated in our chapter on Fate, operates with tremendous effect upon the conditions under which the old combat is spiritualised.

An eloquent preacher has said:--'Hawthorne's fine fancy of the youth who ascribed heroic qualities to the stone face on the brow of a cliff, thus converting the rocky profile into a man, and, by dint of meditating on it with admiring awe, actually transferred to himself the moral elements he worshipped, has been made fact a thousand times, is made fact every day, by earnest spirits who by faithful longing turn their visions into verities, and obtain live answers to their petitions to shadows.' [11]

However imaginary may be the benedictions so derived by the worshipper from his image, they are most real as they redound to the glory and power of the image. The crudest personification, gathering up the sanctities of generations, associated with the holiest hopes, the best emotions, the profoundest aspirations of human nature, may be at length so identified with these sentiments that they all seem absolutely dependent upon the image they invest. Every criticism of such a personification then seems like a blow aimed at the moral laws. If educated men are still found in Christendom discussing whether morality can survive the overthrow of such personifications, and whether life were worth living without them, we may readily understand how in times when the social, ethical, and psychological sciences did not exist at all, all that human beings valued seemed destined to stand or fall with the Person supposed to be their only keystone.

But no Personage, however highly throned, can arrest the sun and moon, or the mind and life of humanity. With every advance in physical or social conditions moral elements must be influenced; every new combination involves a recast of experiences, and presently of convictions. Henceforth the deified image can only remain as a tyrant over the heart and brain which have created it,--

Creatura a un tempo E tiranno de l'uom, da cui soltanto Ebbe nomi ed aspetti e regno e altari. [12]

This personification, thus 'at once man's creature and his tyrant,' is objectively a name. But as it has been invested with all that has been most sacred, it is inevitable that any name raised against it shall be equally associated with all that has been considered basest. This also must be personified, for the same reason that the good is personified; and as names are chiefly hereditary, it pretty generally happens that the title of some fallen and discredited deity is advanced to receive the new anathema. But what else does he receive? The new ideas; the growing ideals and the fresh enthusiasms are associated with some fantastic shape with anathematised name evoked from the past, and thus a portentous situation is reached. The worshippers of the new image will not accept the bad name and its base associations; they even grow strong enough to claim the name and altars of the existing order, and give battle for the same. Then occurs the demoralisation, literally speaking, of the older theology. The personification reduced to struggle for its existence can no longer lay emphasis upon the moral principles it had embodied, these being equally possessed by their opponents; nay, its partisans manage to associate with their holy Name so much bigotry and cruelty that the innovators are at length willing to resign it. The personal loyalty, which is found to continue after loyalty to principles has ceased, proceeds to degrade the virtues once reverenced when they are found connected with a rival name. 'He casteth out devils through Beelzebub' is a very ancient cry. It was heard again when Tertullian said, 'Satan is God's ape.' St. Augustine recognises the similarity between the observances of Christians and pagans as proving the subtle imitativeness of the Devil; the phenomena referred to are considered elsewhere, but, in the present connection, it may be remarked that this readiness to regard the same sacrament as supremely holy or supremely diabolical as it is celebrated in honour of one name or another, accords closely with the reverence or detestation of things more important than sacraments, as they are, or are not, consecrated by what each theology deems official sanction. When sects talk of 'mere morality' we may recognise in the phrase the last faint war-cry of a god from whom the spiritual ideal has passed away, and whose name even can survive only through alliance with the new claimant of his altars. While the new gods were being called devils the old ones were becoming such.

The victory of the new ideal turns the old one to an idol. But we are considering a phase of the world when superstition must invest the new as well as the old, though in a weaker degree. A new religious system prevails chiefly through its moral superiority to that it supersedes; but when it has succeeded to the temples and altars consecrated to previous divinities, when the ardour of battle is over and conciliation becomes a policy as well as a virtue, the old idol is likely to be treated with respect, and may not impossibly be brought into friendly relation with its victorious adversary. He may take his place as 'the second best,' to borrow Goethe's phrase, and be assigned some function in the new theologic régime. Thus, behind the simplicity of the Hampshire lady instructing her children to bow at mention of the Devil's name, stretch the centuries in which Christian divines have as warmly defended the existence of Satan as that of God himself. With sufficient reason: that infernal being, some time God's 'ape' and rival, was necessarily developed into his present position and office of agent and executioner under the divine government. He is the great Second Best; and it is a strange hallucination to fancy that, in an age of peaceful inquiry, any divine personification can be maintained without this patient Goat, who bears blame for all the faults of nature, and who relieves divine Love from the odium of supplying that fear which is the mother of devotion,--at least in the many millions of illogical eyes into which priests can still look without laughing.

Such, in brief outline, has been the interaction of moral and intellectual forces operating within the limits of established systems, and of the nations governed by them. But there are added factors, intensifying the forces on each side, when alien are brought into rivalry and collision with national deities. In such a contest, besides the moral and spiritual sentiments and the household sanctities, which have become intertwined with the internal deities, national pride is also enlisted, and patriotism. But on the other side is enlisted the charm of novelty, and the consciousness of fault and failure in the home system. Every system imported to a foreign land leaves behind its practical shortcomings, puts its best foot forward--namely, its theoretical foot--and has the advantage of suggesting a way of escape from the existing routine which has become oppressive. Napoleon I. said that no people profoundly attached to the institutions of their country can be conquered; but what people are attached to the priestly system over them? That internal dissatisfaction which, in secular government, gives welcome to a dashing Corsican or a Prince of Orange, has been the means of introducing many an alien religion, and giving to many a prophet the honour denied him in his own country. Buddha was a Hindu, but the triumph of his religion is not in India; Zoroaster was a Persian, but there are no Parsees in Persia; Christianity is hardly a colonist even in the native land of Christ.

These combinations and changes were not effected without fierce controversies, ferocious wars, or persecutions, and the formation of many devils. Nothing is more normal in ancient systems than the belief that the gods of other nations are devils. The slaughter of the priests of Baal corresponds with the development of their god into Beelzebub. In proportion to the success of Olaf in crushing the worshippers of Odin, their deity is steadily transformed to a diabolical Wild Huntsman. But here also the forces of partial recovery, which we have seen operating in the outcome of internal reform, manifest themselves; the vanquished, and for a time outlawed deity, is, in many cases, subsequently conciliated and given an inferior, and, though hateful, a useful office in the new order. Sometimes, indeed, as in the case of the Hindu destroyer Siva, it is found necessary to assign a god, anathematised beyond all power of whitewash, to an equal rank with the most virtuous deity. Political forces and the exigencies of propagandism work many marvels of this kind, which will meet us in the further stages of our investigation.

Every superseded god who survives in subordination to another is pretty sure to be developed into a Devil. Euphemism may tell pleasant fables about him, priestcraft may find it useful to perpetuate belief in his existence, but all the evils of the universe, which it is inconvenient to explain, are gradually laid upon him, and sink him down, until nothing is left of his former glory but a shining name.

III. AHRIMAN: THE DIVINE DEVIL

Mr. Irving's impersonation of Superstition--Revolution against pious privilege--Doctrine of 'merits'--Saintly immorality in India--A Pantheon turned Inferno--Zendavesta on Good and Evil-- Parsî Mythology--The Combat of Ahriman with Ormuzd--Optimism-- Parsî Eschatology--Final Restoration of Ahriman.

Any one who has witnessed Mr. Henry Irving's scholarly and masterly impersonation of the character of Louis XI. has had an opportunity of recognising a phase of superstition which happily it were now difficult to find off the stage. Nothing could exceed the fine realism with which that artist brought before the spectator the perfected type of a pretended religion from which all moral features have been eliminated by such slow processes that the final success is unconsciously reached, and the horrible result appears unchecked by even any affectation of actual virtue. We see the king at sound of a bell pausing in his instructions for a treacherous assassination to mumble his prayers, and then instantly reverting to the villany over whose prospective success he gloats. In the secrecy of his chamber no mask falls, for there is no mask; the face of superstition and vice on which we look is the real face which the ages of fanaticism have transmitted to him.

Such a face has oftener been that of a nation than that of an individual, for the healthy forces of life work amid the homes and hearts of mankind long before their theories are reached and influenced. Such a face it was against which the moral insurrection which bears the name of Zoroaster arose, seeing it as physiognomy of the Evil Mind, naming it Ahriman, and, in the name of the conscience, aiming at it the blow which is still felt across the centuries.

Ingenious theorists have accounted for the Iranian philosophy of a universal war between Ormuzd (Ahuramazda) the Good, and Ahriman (Angromainyus) the Evil, by vast and terrible climatic changes, involving extremes of heat and cold, of which geologists find traces about Old Iran, from which a colony of Aryans migrated to New Iran, or Persia. But although physical conditions of this character may have supplied many of the metaphors in which the conflict between Good and Evil is described in the Avesta, there are other characteristics of that ancient scripture which render it more probable that the early colonisation of Persia was, like that of New England, the result of a religious struggle. Some of the gods most adored in India reappear as execrated demons in the religion of Zoroaster; the Hindu word for god is the Parsî word for devil. These antagonisms are not merely verbal; they are accompanied in the Avesta with the most furious denunciations of theological opponents, whom it is not difficult to identify with the priests and adherents of the Brahman religion.

The spirit of the early scriptures of India leaves no room for doubt as to the point at which this revolution began. It was against pious Privilege. The saintly hierarchy of India were a caste quite irresponsible to moral laws. The ancient gods, vague names for the powers of nature, were strictly limited in their dispensations to those of their priests; [13] and as to these priests the chief necessities were ample offerings, sacrifices, and fulfilment of the ceremonial ordinances in which their authority was organised, these were the performances rewarded by a reciprocal recognition of authority. To the image of this political régime, theology, always facile, accommodated the regulations of the gods. The moral law can only live by being supreme; and as it was not supreme in the Hindu pantheon, it died out of it. The doctrine of 'merits,' invented by priests purely for their own power, included nothing meritorious, humanly considered; the merits consisted of costly sacrifices, rich offerings to temples, tremendous penances for fictitious sins, ingeniously devised to aggrandise the penances which disguised power, and prolonged austerities that might be comfortably commuted by the wealthy. When this doctrine had obtained general adherence, and was represented by a terrestrial government corresponding to it, the gods were necessarily subject to it. That were only to say that the powers of nature were obedient to the 'merits' of privileged saints; and from this it is an obvious inference that they are relieved from moral laws binding on the vulgar.

The legends which represent this phase of priestly dominion are curiously mixed. It would appear that under the doctrine of 'merits' the old gods declined. Such appears to be the intimation of the stories which report the distress of the gods through the power of human saints. The Rajah Ravana acquired such power that he was said to have arrested the sun and moon, and so oppressed the gods that they temporarily transformed themselves to monkeys in order to destroy him. Though Viswámitra murders a saint, his merits are such that the gods are in great alarm lest they become his menials; and the completeness, with which moral considerations are left out of the struggle on both sides is disclosed in the item that the gods commissioned a nymph to seduce the saintly murderer, and so reduce a little the force of his austerities. It will be remembered that the ancient struggle of the Devas and Asuras was not owing to any moral differences, but to an alleged unfair distribution of the ambrosia produced by their joint labours in churning the ocean. The fact that the gods cheated the demons on that occasion was never supposed to affect the supremacy they acquired by the treachery; and it could, therefore, cause no scandal when later legends reported that the demons were occasionally able to take gods captive by the practice of these wonderful 'merits' which were so independent of morals. One Asura is said to have gained such power in this way that he subjugated the gods, and so punished them that Siva, who had originally endowed that demon, called into being Scanda, a war-god, to defend the tortured deities. The most ludicrous part of all is that the gods themselves were gradually reduced to the necessity of competing like others for these tremendous powers; thus the Bhagavat Purana states that Brahma was enabled to create the universe by previously undergoing penance for sixteen thousand years.

The legends just referred to are puranic, and consequently of much later date than the revolution traceable in the Iranian religion; but these later legends are normal growths from vedic roots. These were the principles of ancient theology, and the foundation of priestly government. In view of them we need not wonder that Hindu theology devised no special devil; almost any of its gods might answer the purposes of one. Nor need we be surprised that it had no particular hell; any society organised by the sanctions of religion, but irresponsible to its moral laws, would render it unnecessary to look far for a hell.

From this cosmological chaos the more intelligent Hindus were of course liberated; but the degree to which the fearful training had corrupted the moral tissues of those who had been subjected to it was revealed in the bald principle of their philosophers, that the superstition must continue to be imposed on the vulgar, whilst the learned might turn all the gods into a scientific terminology.

The first clear and truthful eye that touched that system would transform it from a Heaven to an Inferno. So was it changed under the eye of Zoroaster. That ancient pantheon which had become a refuge for all the lies of the known world; whose gods were liars and their supporters liars; was now turned into a realm of organised disorder, of systematised wrong; a vast creation of wickedness, at whose centre sat its creator and inspirer, the immoral god, the divine devil--Ahriman.

It is indeed impossible to ascertain how far the revolt against the old Brahmanic system was political. It is, of course, highly improbable that any merely speculative system would excite a revolution; but at the same time it must be remembered that, in early days, an importance was generally attached to even abstract opinions such as we still find among the superstitious who regard an atheistic sentiment as worse than a theft. However this may have been, the Avesta does not leave us in any doubt as to the main fact,--namely, that at a certain time and place man came to a point where he had to confront antagonism to fundamental moral principles, and that he found the so-called gods against him. In the establishment of those principles priests recognised their own disestablishment. What those moral laws that had become necessary to society were is also made clear. 'We worship the Pure, the Lord of Purity!' 'We honour the good spirit, the good kingdom, the good law,--all that is good.' 'Evil doctrine shall not again destroy the world.' 'Good is the thought, good the word, good the deed, of the pure Zarathustra.' 'In the beginning the two heavenly Ones spoke--the Good to the Evil--thus: Our souls, doctrines, words, works, do not unite together.' These sentences are from the oldest Gâthâs of the Avesta.

The following is a very ancient Gâthâ:--'All your Devas (Hindu 'gods') are only manifold children of the Evil Mind, and the great One who worships the Saoma of lies and deceits; besides the treacherous acts for which you are notorious in the Seven Regions of the earth. You have invented all the evil that men speak and do, which is indeed pleasant to the Devas, and is devoid of all goodness, and therefore perishes before the insight of the truth of the wise. Thus you defraud men of their good minds and of their immortality by your evil minds--as well by those of the Devas as through that of the Evil Spirit--through evil deeds and evil words, whereby the power of liars grows.

'1. Come near, and listen to the wise sayings of the omniscient, the songs in praise of the Living One, and the prayers of the Good Spirit, the glorious truths whose origin is seen in the flames.

'2. Listen, therefore, to the Earth spirit--Look at the flames with reverent mind. Every one, man and woman, is to be distinguished according to his belief. Ye ancient Powers, watch and be with us!

'3. From the beginning there were two Spirits, each active in itself. They are the good and the bad in thought, word, and deed. Choose ye between them: do good, not evil!

'4. And these two Spirits meet and create the first existence, the earthy, that which is and that which is not, and the last, the spiritual. The worst existence is for the liars, the best for the truthful.

'5. Of these two spirits choose ye one, either the lying, the worker of Evil, or the true holiest spirit. Whoso chooses the first chooses the hardest fate; whoso the last, honours Ahuramazda in faith and in truth by his deeds.

'6. Ye cannot serve both of these two. An evil spirit whom we will destroy surprises those who deliberate, saying, Choose the Evil Mind! Then do those spirits gather in troops to attack the two lives of which the prophets prophesy.

'7. And to this earthly life came Armaiti with earthly power to help the truth, and the good disposition: she, the Eternal, created the material world, but the Spirit is with thee, O Wise One! the first of creations in time.

'8. When any evil falls upon the spirit, thou, O Wise One, givest temporal possessions and a good disposition; but him whose promises are lies, and not truth, thou punishest.'

Around the hymns of the Avesta gradually grew a theology and a mythology which were destined to exert a powerful influence on the world. These are contained in the Bundehesch. [14] Anterior to all things and all beings was Zeruane-Akrene ('Boundless Time'), so exalted that he can only be worshipped in silence. From him emanated two Ferouers, spiritual types, which took form in two beings, Ormuzd and Ahriman. These were equally pure; but Ahriman became jealous of his first-born brother, Ormuzd. To punish Ahriman for his evil feeling, the Supreme Being condemned him to 12,000 years' imprisonment in an empire of rayless Darkness. During that period must rage the conflict between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil. As Ormuzd had his pre-existing type or Ferouer, so by a similar power--much the same as the Platonic Logos or Word--he created the pure or spiritual world, by means of which the empire of Ahriman should be overthrown. On the earth (still spiritual) he raised the exceeding high mountain Albordj, Elburz (snow mountain), [15] on whose summit he fixed his throne; whence he stretched the bridge Chinevat, which, passing directly over Duzhak, the abyss of Ahriman (or hell), reaches to the portal of Gorodman, or heaven. All this was but a Ferouer world--a prototype of the material world. In anticipation of its incorporation in a material creation, Ormuzd (by emanations) created in his own image six Amshaspands, or agents, of both sexes, to be models of perfection to lower spirits--and to mankind, when they should be created--and offer up their prayers to himself. The second series of emanations were the Izeds, benevolent genii and guardians of the world, twenty-eight in number, of whom the chief is Mithras, the Mediator. The third series of emanations were the innumerable Ferouers of things and men--for each must have its soul, which shall purify them in the day of resurrection. In antagonism to all these, Ahriman produced an exactly similar host of dark and evil powers. These Devas rise, rank on rank, to their Arch-Devs--each of whom is chained to his planet--and their head is Ash-Mogh, the 'two-footed serpent of lies,' who seems to correspond to Mithras, the divine Mediator.

After a reign of 3000 years Ormuzd entered on the work of realising his spiritual emanations in a material universe. He formed the sun as commander-in-chief, the moon as his lieutenant, the planets as captains of a great host--the stars--who were soldiers in his war against Ahriman. The dog Sirius he set to watch at the bridge Chinevat (the Milky Way), lest thereby Ahriman should scale the heavens. Ormuzd then created earth and water, which Ahriman did not try to prevent, knowing that darkness was inherent in these. But he struck a blow when life was produced. This was in form of a Bull, and Ahriman entered it and it perished; but on its destruction there came out of its left shoulder the seed of all clean and gentle animals, and, out of its right shoulder--Man.

Ahriman had matched every creation thus far; but to make man was beyond his power, and he had no recourse but to destroy him. However, when the original man was destroyed, there sprang from his body a tree which bore the first human pair, whom Ahriman, however, corrupted in the manner elsewhere described.

It is a very notable characteristic of this Iranian theology, that although the forces of good and evil are co-extensive and formally balanced, in potency they are not quite equal. The balance of force is just a little on the side of the Good Spirit. And this advantage appears in man. Zoroaster said, 'No earthly man with a hundredfold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength does good;' and this thought reappears in the Parsî belief that the one part of paradisiac purity, which man retained after his fall, balances the ninety-nine parts won by Ahriman, and in the end will redeem him. For this one divine ray preserved enables him to receive and obey the Avesta, and to climb to heaven by the stairway of three vast steps--pure thought, pure word, pure deed. The optimistic essence of the mythology is further shown in the belief that every destructive effort of Ahriman resulted in a larger benefit than Ormuzd had created. The Bull (Life) destroyed, man and animal sprang into being; the man destroyed, man and woman appeared. And so on to the end. In the last quarter of the 12,000 years for which Ahriman was condemned, he rises to greater power even than Ormuzd, and finally he will, by a fiery comet, set the visible universe in conflagration; but while this scheme is waxing to consummation Ormuzd will send his holy Prophet Sosioch, who will convert mankind to the true law, [16] so that when Ahriman's comet consumes the earth he will really be purifying it. Through the vast stream of melted metals and minerals the righteous shall pass, and to them it will be as a bath of warm milk: the wicked in attempting to pass shall be swept into the abyss of Duzhak; having then suffered three days and nights, they shall be raised by Ormuzd refined and purified. Duzhak itself shall be purified by this fire, and last of all Ahriman himself shall ascend to his original purity and happiness. Then from the ashes of the former world shall bloom a paradise that shall remain for ever.

In this system it is notable that we find the monster serpent of vedic mythology, Ahi, transformed into an infernal region, Duzhak. The dragon, being a type of physical suffering, passes away in Iranian as in the later Semitic mythology before the new form, which represents the stings of conscience though it may be beneath external pleasure. In this respect, therefore, Ahriman fulfils the definition of a devil already given. In the Avesta he fulfils also another condition essential to a devil, the love of evil in and for itself. But in the later theology it will be observed that evil in Ahriman is not organic. The war being over and its fury past, the hostile chief is seen not so black as he had been painted; the belief obtains that he does not actually love darkness and evil. He was thrust into them as a punishment for his jealousy, pride, and destructive ambition. And because that dark kingdom was a punishment--therefore not congenial--it was at length (the danger past) held to be disciplinary. Growing faith in the real supremacy of Good discovers the immoral god to be an exaggerated anthropomorphic egoist; this divine devil is a self-centred potentate who had attempted to subordinate moral law and human welfare to his personal ascendancy. His fate having sealed the sentence on all ambitions of that character, humanity is able to pardon the individual offender, and find a hope that Ahriman, having learned that no real satisfaction for a divine nature can be found in mere power detached from rectitude, will join in the harmony of love and loyalty at last.

IV. VISWÁMITRA: THE THEOCRATIC DEVIL

Priestcraft and Pessimism--An Aryan Tetzel and his Luther--Brahman Frogs--Evolution of the sacerdotal Saint--Viswámitra the Accuser of Virtue--The Tamil Passion-play 'Harischandra'--Ordeal of Goblins--The Martyr of Truth--Virtue triumphant over ceremonial 'merits'--Harischandra and Job.

Priestcraft in government means pessimism in the creed and despair in the heart. Under sacerdotal rule in India it seemed paradise enough to leave the world, and the only hell dreaded was a return to it. 'The twice-born man,' says Manu, 'who shall without intermission have passed the time of his studentship, shall ascend after death to the most exalted of regions, and no more spring to birth again in this lower world.' Some clause was necessary to keep the twice-born man from suicide. Buddha invented a plan of suicide-in-life combined with annihilation of the gods, which was driven out of India because it put into the minds of the people the philosophy of the schools. Thought could only be trusted among classes interested to conceal it.

The power and authority of a priesthood can only be maintained on the doctrine that man is 'saved' by the deeds of a ceremonial law; any general belief that morality is more acceptable to gods than ceremonies must be fatal to those occult and fictitious virtues which hedge about every pious impostor. Sacerdotal power in India depended on superstitions carefully fostered concerning the mystical properties of a stimulating juice (soma), litanies, invocations, and benedictions by priests; upon sacrifices to the gods, including their priests, austerities, penances, pilgrimages, and the like; one characteristic running through all the performances--their utter worthlessness to any being in the universe except the priest. An artificial system of this kind has to create its own materials, and evoke forces of evolution from many regions of nature. It is a process requiring much more than the wisdom of the serpent and more than its harmfulness; and there is a bit of nature's irony in the fact that when the Brahman Rishi gained supremacy, the Cobra was also worshipped as belonging to precisely the same caste and sanctity.

There are traces of long and fierce struggles preceding this consummation. Even in the Vedic age--in the very dawn of religious history--Tetzel appears with his indulgences and Luther confronts him. The names they bore in ancient India were Viswámitra and Vasishtha. Both of these were among the seven powerful Rishis who made the hierarchy of India in the earliest age known to us. Both were composers of some of the chief hymns of the Vedas, and their respective hymns bear the stamp of the sacerdotal and the anti-sacerdotal parties which contended before the priestly sway had reached its complete triumph. Viswámitra was champion of the high priestly party and its political pretensions. In the Rig-Veda there are forty hymns ascribed to him and his family, nearly all of which celebrate the divine virtues of Soma-juice and the Soma-sacrifice. As the exaltation of the priestly caste in Israel was connected with a miracle, in which the Jordan stopped flowing till the ark had been carried over, so the rivers Sutledge and Reyah were said to have rested from their course when Viswámitra wished to cross them in seeking the Soma. This Rishi became identified in the Hindu mind for all time with political priestcraft. On the other hand, Vasishtha became equally famous for his hostility to that power, as well as for his profoundly religious character,--the finest hymns of the Vedas, as to moral feeling, being those that bear his name. The anti-sacerdotal spirit of Vasishtha is especially revealed in a strange satirical hymn in which he ridicules the ceremonial Bráhmans under the guise of a panegyric on frogs. In this composition occur such verses as these:--

'Like Bráhmans at the Soma-sacrifice of Atirâtra, sitting round a full pond and talking, you, O frogs, celebrate this day of the year when the rainy season begins.

'These Bráhmans, with their Soma, have had their say, performing the annual rite. These Adhwaryus, sweating while they carry the hot pots, pop out like hermits.

'They have always observed the order of the gods as they are to be worshipped in the twelvemonth; these men do not neglect their season....

'Cow-noise gave, Goat-noise gave, the Brown gave, and the Green gave us treasures. The frogs, who give us hundreds of cows, lengthened our life in the rich autumn.' [17]

Viswámitra and Vasishtha appear to have been powerful rivals in seeking the confidence of King Sudás, and from their varying fortunes came the tremendous feud between them which plays so large a part in the traditions of India. The men were both priests, as are both ritualists and broad-churchmen in the present day. They were borne on the stream of mythologic evolution to representative regions very different from any they could have contemplated. Vasishtha, ennobled by the moral sentiment of ages, appears as the genius of truth and justice, maintaining these as of more 'merit' than any ceremonial perfections. The Bráhmans, whom he once ridiculed, were glad enough in the end to make him their patron saint, though they did not equally honour his principles. On the other hand, Viswámitra became the type of that immoral divinity which received its Iranian anathema in Ahriman. The murder he commits is nothing in a personage whose Soma-celebrations have raised him so high above the trivialities of morality.

It is easy to see what must be the further development of such a type as Viswámitra when he shall have passed from the guarded pages of puranic tradition to the terrible simplicities of folklore. The saint whose majesty is built on 'merits,' which have no relation to what the humble deem virtues, naturally holds such virtues in cynical contempt; naturally also he is indignant if any one dares to suggest that the height he has reached by costly and prolonged observances may be attained by poor and common people through the practice of virtue. The next step is equally necessary. Since it is hard to argue down the facts of human nature, Vasishtha is pretty sure to have a strong, if sometimes silent, support for his heretical theory of a priesthood representing virtue; consequently Viswámitra will be reduced at length to deny the existence of virtue, and will become the Accuser of those to whom virtues are attributed. Finally, from the Accuser to the Tempter the transition is inevitable. The public Accuser must try and make good his case, and if the facts do not support it, he must create other facts which will, or else bear the last brand of his tribe--Slanderer.

Leaving out of sight all historical or probable facts concerning Viswámitra and Vasishtha, but remembering the spirit of them, let us read the great Passion-play of the East, in which their respective parts are performed again as intervening ages have interpreted them. The hero of this drama is an ancient king named Harischandra, who, being childless, and consequently unable to gain immortality, promised the god Varuna to sacrifice to him a son if one were granted him. The son having been born, the father beseeches Varuna for respite, which is granted again and again, but stands firmly by his promise, although it is finally commuted. The repulsive features of the ancient legend are eliminated in the drama, the promise now being for a vast sum of money which the king cannot pay, but which Viswámitra would tempt him to escape by a technical fiction. Sir Mutu Cumára Swámy, whose translation I follow, presents many evidences of the near relation in which this drama stands to the religious faith of the people in Southern India and parts of Ceylon, where its representation never fails to draw vast crowds from every part of the district in which it may occur, the impression made by it being most profound. [18]

We are first introduced to Harischandra, King of Ayòdiah (Oude), in his palace, surrounded by every splendour, and by the devotion of his prosperous people. His first word is an ascription to the 'God of gods.' His ministers come forward and recount the wealth and welfare of the nation. The first Act witnesses the marriage of Harischandra with the beautiful princess Chandravatí, and it closes with the birth of a son.

The second Act brings us into the presence of Indra in the Abode of the Gods. The Chief enters the Audience Hall of his palace, where an assembly of deities and sages has awaited him. These sages are holy men who have acquired supernatural power by their tremendous austerities; and of these the most august is Viswámitra. By the magnitude and extent of his austerities he has gained a power beyond even that of the Triad, and can reduce the worlds to cinders. All the gods court his favour. As the Council proceeds, Indra addresses the sages--'Holy men! as gifted with supernatural attributes, you roam the universe with marvellous speed, there is no place unknown to you. I am curious to learn who, in the present times, is the most virtuous sovereign on the earth below. What chief of mortals is there who has never told a lie--who has never swerved from the course of justice?' Vasishtha, a powerful sage and family-priest of Harischandra, declares that his royal disciple is such a man. But the more powerful Viswámitra denounces Harischandra as cruel and a liar. The quarrel between the two Rishis waxes fierce, until Indra puts a stop to it by deciding that an experiment shall be made on Harischandra. Vasishtha agrees that if his disciple can be shown to have told a lie, or can be made to tell one, the fruit of his life-long austerities, and all the power so gained, shall be added to Viswámitra; while the latter must present his opponent with half of his 'merits' if Harischandra be not made to swerve from the truth. Viswámitra is to employ any means whatever, neither Indra or any other interfering.

Viswámitra sets about his task of trying and tempting Harischandra by informing that king that, in order to perform a sacrifice of special importance, he has need of a mound of gold as high as a missile slung by a man standing on an elephant's back. With the demand of so sacred a being Harischandra has no hesitation in complying, and is about to deliver the gold when Viswámitra requests him to be custodian of the money for a time, but perform the customary ceremony of transfer. Holding Harischandra's written promise to deliver the gold whensoever demanded, Viswámitra retires with compliments. Then wild beasts ravage Harischandra's territory; these being expelled, a demon boar is sent, but is vanquished by the monarch. Viswámitra then sends unchaste dancing-girls to tempt Harischandra; and when he has ordered their removal, Viswámitra returns with them, and, feigning rage, accuses him of slaying innocent beasts and of cruelty to the girls. He declares that unless Harischandra yields to the Pariah damsels, he himself shall be reduced to a Pariah slave. Harischandra offers all his kingdom and possessions if the demand is withdrawn, absolutely refusing to swerve from his virtue. This Viswámitra accepts, is proclaimed sovereign of Ayòdiah, and the king goes forth a beggar with his wife and child. But now, as these are departing, Viswámitra demands that mound of gold which was to be paid when called for. In vain Harischandra pleads that he has already delivered up all he possesses, the gold included; the last concession is declared to have nothing to do with the first. Yet Viswámitra says he will be charitable; if Harischandra will simply declare that he never pledged the gold, or, having done so, does not feel bound to pay it, he will cancel that debt. 'Such a declaration I can never make,' replies Harischandra. 'I owe thee the gold, and pay it I shall. Let a messenger accompany me and leave me not till I have given him thy due.'

From this time the efforts of Viswámitra are directed to induce Harischandra to declare the money not due. Amid his heartbroken people--who cry, 'Where are the gods? Can they tolerate this?'--he who was just now the greatest and happiest monarch in the world goes forth on the highway a wanderer with his Chandravatí and their son Devaráta dressed in coarsest garments. His last royal deed is to set the crown on his tempter's head. The people and officers follow, and beg his permission to slay Viswámitra, but he rebukes them, and counsels submission. Viswámitra orders a messenger, Nakshatra, to accompany the three wretched ones, and inflict the severest sufferings on them until the gold is paid, and amid each ordeal to offer Harischandra all his former wealth and happiness if he will utter a falsehood.

They come to a desert whose sands are so hot that the wife faints. Harischandra bears his son in his arms, but in addition is compelled to bear Nakshatra (the Bráhman and tormentor) on his shoulders. They so pass amid snakes and scorpions, and receive terrible stings; they pass through storm and flood, and yet vainly does Nakshatra suggest the desired falsehood.

Then follows the ordeal of Demons, which gives an interesting insight into Tamil Demonology. One of the company exclaims--'How frightful they look! Who can face them? They come in battalions, young and old, small and great--all welcome us. They disport themselves with a wild dance; flames shoot from their mouths; their feet touch not the earth; they move in the air. Observe you the bleeding corpses of human beings in their hands. They crunch them and feed on the flesh. The place is one mass of gore and filth. Wolves and hyænas bark at them; jackals and dogs follow them. They are near. May Siva protect us!'

Nakshatra. How dreadful! Harischandra, what is this? Look! evil demons stare at me--I tremble for my life. Protect me now, and I ask you no more for the gold.

Harischandra. Have no fear, Nakshatra. Come, place thyself in the midst of us.

Chief of the Goblins. Men! little men! human vermin! intrude ye thus into my presence? Know that, save only the Bráhman standing in the midst of you, you are all my prey to-night.

Harischandra. Goblin! certainly thou art not an evil-doer, for thou hast excepted this holy Bráhman. As for ourselves, we know that the bodies which begin to exist upon earth must also cease to exist on it. What matters it when death comes? If he spares us now he reserves us only for another season. Good, kind demon! destroy us then together; here we await our doom.

Nakshatra. Harischandra! before you thus desert me, make the goblin promise you that he will not hurt me.

Harischandra. Thou hast no cause for alarm; thou art safe.

Chief of the Goblins. Listen! I find that all four of you are very thin; it is not worth my while to kill you. On examining closely, I perceive that the young Bráhman is plump and fat as a wild boar. Give him up to me--I want not the rest.

Nakshatra. O Gods! O Harischandra! you are a great monarch! Have mercy on me! Save me, save me! I will never trouble you for the gold, but treat you considerately hereafter.

Harischandra. Sir, thy life is safe, stand still.

Nakshatra. Allow me, sirs, to come closer to you, and to hold you by the hand (He grasps their hands.)

Harischandra. King of the Goblins! I address thee in all sincerity; thou wilt confer on us a great favour indeed by despatching us speedily to the Judgment Hall of the God of Death. The Bráhman must not be touched; devour us.

The Goblin (grinding his teeth in great fury). What! dare you disobey me? Will you not deliver the Bráhman?

Harischandra. No, we cannot. We alone are thy victims.

[Day breaks, and the goblins disappear.]

Having thus withstood all temptation to harm his enemy, or to break a promise he had given to treat him kindly, Harischandra is again pressed for the gold or the lie, and, still holding out, an ordeal of fire follows. Trusting the God of Fire will cease to afflict if one is sacrificed, Harischandra prepares to enter the conflagration first, and a pathetic contention occurs between him and his wife and son as to which shall be sacrificed. In the end Harischandra rushes in, but does not perish.

Harischandra is hoping to reach the temple of Vis Wanàth [19] at Kasi and invoke his aid to pay the gold. To the temple he comes only to plead in vain, and Nakshatra tortures him with instruments. Finally Harischandra, his wife and child, are sold as slaves to pay the debt. But Viswámitra, invisibly present, only redoubles his persecutions. Harischandra is subjected to the peculiar degradation of having to burn dead bodies in a cemetery. Chandravatí and her son are subjected to cruelties. The boy is one day sent to the forest, is bitten by a snake, and dies. Chandravatí goes out in the night to find the body. She repairs with it to the cemetery. In the darkness she does not recognise her husband, the burner of the bodies, nor he his wife. He has strictly promised his master that every fee shall be paid, and reproaches the woman for coming in the darkness to avoid payment. Chandravatí offers in payment a sacred chain which Siva had thrown round her neck at birth, invisible to all but a perfect man. Harischandra alone has ever seen it, and now recognises his wife. But even now he will not perform the last rites over his dead child unless the fee can be obtained as promised. Chandravatí goes out into the city to beg the money, leaving Harischandra seated beside the dead body of Devaráta. In the street she stumbles over the corpse of another child, and takes it up; it proves to be the infant Prince, who has been murdered. Chandravatí--arrested and dragged before the king--in a state of frenzy declares she has killed the child. She is condemned to death, and her husband must be her executioner. But the last scene must be quoted nearly in full.

Verakvoo (Harischandra's master, leading on Chandravatí). Slave! this woman has been sentenced by our king to be executed without delay. Draw your sword and cut her head off. (Exit.)

Harischandra. I obey, master. (Draws the sword and approaches her.)

Chandravatí (coming to consciousness again). My husband! What! do I see thee again? I applaud thy resolution, my lord. Yes; let me die by thy sword. Be not unnerved, but be prompt, and perform thy duty unflinchingly.

Harischandra. My beloved wife! the days allotted to you in this world are numbered; you have run through the span of your existence. Convicted as you are of this crime, there is no hope for your life; I must presently fulfil my instructions. I can only allow you a few seconds; pray to your tutelary deities, prepare yourself to meet your doom.

Viswámitra (who has suddenly appeared). Harischandra! what, are you going to slaughter this poor woman? Wicked man, spare her! Tell a lie even now and be restored to your former state!

Harischandra. I pray, my lord, attempt not to beguile me from the path of rectitude. Nothing shall shake my resolution; even though thou didst offer to me the throne of Indra I would not tell a lie. Pollute not thy sacred person by entering such unholy grounds. Depart! I dread not thy wrath; I no longer court thy favour. Depart. (Viswámitra disappears.)

My love! lo I am thy executioner; come, lay thy head gently on this block with thy sweet face turned towards the east. Chandravatí, my wife, be firm, be happy! The last moment of our sufferings has at length come; for to sufferings too there is happily an end. Here cease our woes, our griefs, our pleasures. Mark! yet awhile, and thou wilt be as free as the vultures that now soar in the skies.

This keen sabre will do its duty. Thou dead, thy husband dies too--this self-same sword shall pierce my breast. First the child--then the wife--last the husband--all victims of a sage's wrath. I the martyr of Truth--thou and thy son martyrs for me, the martyr of Truth. Yes; let us die cheerfully and bear our ills meekly. Yes; let all men perish, let all gods cease to exist, let the stars that shine above grow dim, let all seas be dried up, let all mountains be levelled to the ground, let wars rage, blood flow in streams, let millions of millions of Harischandras be thus persecuted; yet let Truth be maintained--let Truth ride victorious over all--let Truth be the light--Truth the guide--Truth alone the lasting solace of mortals and immortals. Die, then, O goddess of Chastity! Die, at this the shrine of thy sister goddess of Truth!

[Strikes the neck of Chandravatí with great force; the sword, instead of harming her, is transformed into a string of superb pearls, which winds itself around her: the gods of heaven, all sages, and all kings appear suddenly to the view of Harischandra.]

Siva (the first of the gods). Harischandra, be ever blessed! You have borne your severe trials most heroically, and have proved to all men that virtue is of greater worth than all the vanities of a fleeting world. Be you the model of mortals. Return to your land, resume your authority, and rule your state. Devaráta, victim of Viswámitra's wrath, rise! (He is restored to life.)

Rise you, also, son of the King of Kasi, with whose murder you, Chandravatí, were charged through the machinations of Viswámitra. (He comes to life also.)

Harischandra. All my misfortunes are of little consequence, since thou, O God of gods, hast deigned to favour me with thy divine presence. No longer care I for kingdom, or power, or glory. I value not children, or wives, or relations. To thy service, to thy worship, to the redemption of my erring soul, I devote myself uninterruptedly hereafter. Let me not become the sport of men. The slave of a Pariah cannot become a king; the slave-girl of a Bráhman cannot become a queen. When once the milk has been drawn from the udder of a cow nothing can restore the self-same milk to it. Our degradation, O God, is now beyond redemption.

Viswámitra. I pray, O Siva, that thou wouldst pardon my folly. Anxious to gain the wager laid by me before the gods, I have most mercilessly tormented this virtuous king; yet he has proved himself the most truthful of all earthly sovereigns, triumphing victoriously over me and my efforts to divert him from his constancy. Harischandra, king of kings! I crave your forgiveness.

Verakvoo (throwing off his disguise). King Harischandra, think not that I am a Pariah, for you behold in me even Yáma, the God of Death.

Kalakanda (Chandravatí's cruel master, throwing off his disguise). Queen! rest not in the belief that you were the slave of a Bráhman. He to whom you devoted yourself am even I--the God of Fire, Agni.

Vasishtha. Harischandra, no disgrace attaches to thee nor to the Solar race, of which thou art the incomparable gem. Even this cemetery is in reality no cemetery: see! the illusion lasts not, and thou beholdest here a holy grove the abode of hermits and ascetics. Like the gold which has passed through successive crucibles, devoid of all impurities, thou, O King of Ayòdiah, shinest in greater splendour than even yon god of light now rising to our view on the orient hills. (It is morning.)

Siva. Harischandra, let not the world learn that Virtue is vanquished, and that its enemy, Vice, has become the victor. Go, mount yon throne again--proclaim to all that we, the gods, are the guardians of the good and the true. Indra! chief of the gods, accompany this sovereign with all your retinue, and recrown him emperor of Ayòdiah. May his reign be long--may all bliss await him in the other world!

The plot of this drama has probably done as much and as various duty as any in the world. It has spread like a spiritual banyan, whose branches, taking root, have swelled to such size that it is difficult now to say which is the original trunk. It may even be that the only root they all had in common is an invisible one in the human heart, developed in its necessary struggles amid nature after the pure and perfect life.

But neither in the Book of Job, which we are yet to consider, nor in any other variation of the theme, does it rise so high as in this drama of Harischandra. In Job it represents man loyal to his deity amid the terrible afflictions which that deity permits; but in Harischandra it shows man loyal to a moral principle even against divine orders to the contrary. Despite the hand of the licenser, and the priestly manipulations, visible here and there in it--especially towards the close--sacerdotalism stands confronted by its reaction at last, and receives its sentence in the joy with which the Hindu sees the potent Rishis with all their pretentious 'merits,' and the gods themselves, kneeling at the feet of the man who stands by Truth.

It is amusing to find the wincings of the priests through many centuries embodied in a legend about Harischandra after he went to heaven. It is related that he was induced by Nárada to relate his actions with such unbecoming pride that he was lowered from Svarga (heaven) one stage after each sentence; but having stopped in time, and paid homage to the gods, he was placed with his capital in mid-air, where eyes sacerdotally actinised may still see the aerial city at certain times. The doctrine of 'merits' will no doubt be able for some time yet to charge 'good deeds' with their own sin--pride; but, after all, the priest must follow the people far enough to confess that one must look upward to find the martyr of Truth. In what direction one must look to find his accuser requires no further intimation than the popular legend of Viswámitra.

V. ELOHIM AND JEHOVAH

Deified power--Giants and Jehovah--Jehovah's manifesto--The various Elohim--Two Jehovahs and two Tables--Contradictions--Detachment of the Elohim from Jehovah.

The sacred books of the Hebrews bring us into the presence of the gods (Elohim) supposed to have created all things out of nothing--nature-gods--just as they are in transition to the conception of a single Will and Personality. Though the plural is used ('gods') a singular verb follows: the tendency is already to that concentration which resulted in the enthronement of one supreme sovereign--Jehovah. The long process of evolution which must have preceded this conception is but slightly traceable in the Bible. It is, however, written on the face of the whole world, and the same process is going on now in its every phase. Whether with Gesenius [20] we take the sense of the word Elohim to be 'the revered,' or, with Fürst, [21] 'the mighty,' makes little difference; the fact remains that the word is applied elsewhere to gods in general, including such as were afterwards deemed false gods by the Jews; and it is more important still that the actions ascribed to the Elohim, who created the heavens and the earth, generally reflect the powerful and un-moral forces of nature. The work of creation in Genesis (i. and ii. 1-3) is that of giants without any moral quality whatever. Whether or not we take in their obvious sense the words, 'Elohim created man in his own image, ... male and female created he them,' there can be no question of the meaning of Gen. vi. 1, 2: 'The sons of Elohim saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took to themselves for wives whomsoever they chose.' When good and evil come to be spoken of, the name Jehovah [22] at once appears. The Elohim appear again in the Flood, the wind that assuaged it, the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, the cloud and rainbow; and gradually the germs of a moral government begin to appear in their assigning the violence of mankind as reason for the deluge, and in the covenant with Noah. But even after the name Jehovah had generally blended with, or even superseded, the other, we find Elohim often used where strength and wonder-working are thought of--e.g., 'Thou art the god that doest wonders' (Ps. lxxvii.). 'Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known.'

Against the primitive nature-deities the personality and jealous supremacy of Jehovah was defined. The golden calf built by Aaron was called Elohim (plural, though there was but one calf). Solomon was denounced for building altars to the same; and when Jeroboam built altars to two calves, they are still so called. Other rivals--Dagon (Judges xvi.), Astaroth, Chemosh, Milcom (1 Kings xi.)--are called by the once-honoured name. The English Bible translates Elohim, God; Jehovah, the Lord; Jehovah Elohim, the Lord God; and the critical reader will find much that is significant in the varied use of these names. Thus (Gen. xxii.) it is Elohim that demands the sacrifice of Isaac, Jehovah that interferes to save him. At the same time, in editing the story, it is plainly felt to be inadmissible that Abraham should be supposed loyal to any other god than Jehovah; so Jehovah adopts the sacrifice as meant for himself, and the place where the ram was provided in place of Isaac is called Jehovah-Jireh. However, when we can no longer distinguish the two antagonistic conceptions by different names their actual incongruity is even more salient, and, as we shall see, develops a surprising result.

Jehovah inaugurates his reign by a manifesto against these giants, the Elohim, for whom the special claim--clamorously asserted when Aaron built the Golden Calf, and continued as the plea for the same deity--was that they (Elohim) had brought Israel out of Egypt. 'I,' cries Jehovah, 'am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage: thou shalt have no other gods but me;' and the first four commandments of the law are devoted entirely to a declaration of his majesty, his power (claiming credit for the creation), his jealous determination to punish his opponents and reward his friends, to vindicate the slightest disrespect to his name. The narrative of the Golden Calf was plainly connected with Sinai in order to illustrate the first commandment. The punishment of the believers in another divine emancipator, even though they had not yet received the proclamation, must be signal. Jehovah is so enraged that by his order human victims are offered up to the number of three thousand, and even after that, it is said, Jehovah plagued Israel on account of their Elohim-worship. In the same direction is the command to keep holy the Sabbath day, because on it he rested from the work of creation (Gen. xx.), or because on that day he delivered Israel from Egypt (Deut. v.), the editors do not seem to remember exactly which, but it is well enough to say both, for it is taking the two picked laurels from the brow of Elohim and laying them on that of Jehovah. In all of which it is observable that there is no moral quality whatever. Nero might equally command the Romans to have no other gods before himself, to speak his name with awe, to rest when he stopped working. In the fifth commandment, arbitrarily ascribed to the First Table, we have a transition to the moral code; though even there the honour of parents is jealously associated with Jehovah's greatness ('that thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah Elohim giveth thee'). The nature-gods were equal to that; for the Elohim had begotten the giants who were 'in the earth in those days.'

'Elohim spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am Jehovah; and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob by (the name of) God Almighty (El-Shaddai), but by my name Jehovah was I not known to them' (Exod. vi. 2, 3).

The ancient gods--the Elohim--were, in the process of absorption into the one great form, the repository of their several powers, distinguishable; and though, for the most part, they bear names related to the forces of nature, now and then they reflect the tendencies to humanisation. Thus we have 'the most high god' (El-elyon--e.g., Gen. xiv. 18); 'the everlasting-god' (El-elim, Gen. xxi. 33); 'the jealous god' (El-kana, Exod. xx. 5); 'the mighty god, and terrible' (El-gadol and nora, Deut. vii. 21); 'the living god' (El-chi, Josh. iii. 10); 'the god of heaven' (El-shemim, Ps. cxxxvi. 26); the 'god almighty' (El-shaddai, [23] Exod. vi. 2). These Elohim, with each of whose names I have referred to an instance of its characteristic use, became epithets, as the powers they represented were more and more absorbed by the growing personality of Jehovah; but these epithets were also characters, and their historic expressions had also to undergo a process of slow and difficult digestion. The all-devouring grandeur of Jehovah showed what it had fed on. Not only all the honours, but many of the dishonours, of the primitive deities adhered to the sovereign whose rule was no doubt inaugurated by their disgrace and their barbarism. The costliness of the glory of divine absolutism is again illustrated in the evolution of the premature monotheism, which had for its figure-head the dread Jehovah, who, as heir of the nature-gods, became responsible for the monstrosities of a tribal demonolatry, thus being compelled to fill simultaneously the rôles of the demon and the lawgiver. [24]

The two tables of the law--one written by Jehovistic theology, the other by the moral sense of mankind--ascribed to this dual deity, for whom unity was so fiercely insisted on, may be read in their outcome throughout the Bible. They are here briefly, in a few examples, set forth side by side.

TABLE OF JEHOVAH I. TABLE OF JEHOVAH II.

Exod. xxxiii. 27. 'Slay every Exod. xx. 13. 'Thou shalt not man his brother, every man his kill.' companion, and every man his neighbour.'

Num. xv. 32. 'While the children Exod. xx. 14. 'Thou shalt not of Israel were in the wilderness, commit adultery.' they found a man that gathered sticks upon the Sabbath Day.... And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. And the Lord said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.' Neither this nor the similar punishment for blasphemy (Lev. xxiv.), were executions of existing law. For a fearful instance of murder inflicted on the innocent, and accepted as a human sacrifice by Jehovah, see 2 Sam. xxi.; and for the brutal murder of Shimei, who denounced and resented the crime which hung the seven sons of Saul 'before the Lord,' see 1 Kings ii. But the examples are many.

In the story of Abraham, Sarai, and Hagar (Gen. xvi.), Lot and his daughters (xix.), Abraham's presentation of his wife to Abimilech (xx.), the same done by Isaac (xxvi.), Judah, Tamar (xxxviii.), and other cases where the grossest violations of the seventh commandment go unrebuked by Jehovah, while in constant communication with the guilty parties, we see how little the second table was supported by the first.

The extortions, frauds, and Exod. xx. 15. 'Thou shalt not thefts of Jacob (Gen. xxv., steal.' xxvii., xxx.), which brought upon him the unparalleled blessings of Jehovah; the plundering of Nabal's property by David and his fellow-bandits; the smiting of the robbed farmer by Jehovah and the taking of his treacherous wife by David (1 Sam. xxv.), are narratives befitting a Bible of footpads.

Jehovah said, 'Who shall deceive Exod. xx. 16. 'Thou shalt not Ahab?... And there came forth a bear false witness against thy spirit, and stood before Jehovah, neighbour.' and said, I will deceive him. And Jehovah said, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets. And he said, Thou shalt deceive him, and prevail also: go forth and do so. Now, therefore, Jehovah hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and Jehovah hath spoken evil concerning thee' (1 Kings xxii.). See Ezek. xx. 25.

Deut xx. 10-18, is a complete Exod. xx. 17. 'Thou shalt not instruction for invasion, murder, covet they neighbour's wife, rapine, eating the spoil of the thou shalt not covet thy invaded, taking their wives, neighbour's wife, nor his their cattle, &c., all such as man-servant, nor his maid- might have been proclaimed by a servant, nor his ox, nor his Supreme Bashi-Bazouk. ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's.'

Instances of this discrepancy might be largely multiplied. Any one who cares to pursue the subject can trace the building upon the powerful personal Jehovah of a religion of human sacrifices, anathemas, and priestly despotism; while around the moral ruler and judge of the same name, whose personality is more and more dispersed in pantheistic ascriptions, there grows the common law, and then the more moral law of equity, and the corresponding sentiments which gradually evolve the idea of a parental deity.

It is obvious that the more this second idea of the deity prevails, the more he is regarded as 'merciful,' 'long-suffering,' 'a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right,' 'delighting not in sacrifice but mercifulness,' 'good to all,' and whose 'tender mercies are over all his works,' and having 'no pleasure in the death of him that dieth;' the less will it be possible to see in the very same being the 'man of war,' 'god of battles,' the 'jealous,' 'angry,' 'fire-breathing' one, who 'visits the sins of the fathers upon the children,' who laughs at the calamities of men and mocks when their fear cometh. It is a structural necessity of the human mind that these two shall be gradually detached the one from the other. From one of the Jehovahs represented in parallel columns came the 'Father' whom Christ adored: from the other came the Devil he abhorred.

VI. THE CONSUMING FIRE

The Shekinah--Jewish idols--Attributes of the fiery and cruel Elohim compared with those of the Devil--The powers of evil combined under a head--Continuity--The consuming fire spiritualised.

That Abraham was a Fire-worshipper might be suspected from the immemorial efforts of all Semitic authorities to relieve him of traditional connection with that particular idolatry. When the good and evil powers were being distinguished, we find the burning and the bright aspects of Fire severally regarded. The sign of Jehovah's covenant with Abram included both. 'It came to pass that when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between those pieces' (of the sacrifice). In the legend of Moses we have the glory resting on Sinai and the burning bush, the bush which, it is specially remarked, was 'not consumed,' an exceptional circumstance in honour of Moses. To these corresponded the Urim and Thummim, marking the priest as source of light and of judgment. In his favourable and adorable aspect Jehovah was the Brightness of Fire. This was the Shekinah. In the Targum, Jonathan Ben Uzziel to the Prophets, it is said: 'The mountains trembled before the Lord; the mountains Tabor, Hermon, Carmel said one to the other: Upon me the Shekinah will rest, and to me will it come. But the Shekinah rested upon Mount Sinai, weakest and smallest of all the mountains. This Sinai trembled and shook, and its smoke went up as the smoke of an oven, because of the glory of the God of Israel which had manifested itself upon it.' The Brightness [25] passed on to illumine every event associated with the divine presence in Semitic mythology; it was 'the glory of the Lord' shining from the Star of Bethlehem, and the figure of the Transfiguration.

The Consuming Fire also had its development. Among the spiritual it was spiritualised. 'Who among us shall dwell with the Devouring Fire?' cries Isaiah. 'Who among us shall dwell with the Everlasting Burnings? He that walketh righteously and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppressions, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from seeing evil.' It was by a prosaic route that the Devouring Fire became the residence of the wicked.

After Jeroboam (1 Kings xiii.) had built altars to the Elohim, under form of Calves, a prophet came out of Judah to denounce the idolatry. 'And he cried against the altar in the word of Jehovah, and said, O altar, altar! thus saith Jehovah, Behold, a child shall be born unto the house of David, Josiah by name; and upon thee shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burnt upon thee.' It was deemed so important that this prophecy should be fulfilled in the letter, when it could no longer be fulfilled in reality, that some centuries later Josiah dug up the bones of the Elohistic priests and burned them upon their long-ruined altars (2 Kings xxiii.).

The incident is significant, both on account of the prophet's personification of the altar, and the institution of a sort of Gehenna in connection with it. The personification and the Gehenna became much more complete as time went on. The Jews originally had no Devil, as indeed had no races at first; and this for the obvious reason that their so-called gods were quite equal to any moral evils that were to be accounted for, as we have already seen they were adequate to explain all physical evils. But the antagonists of the moral Jehovah were recognised and personified with increasing clearness, and were quite prepared for connection with any General who might be theoretically proposed for their leadership. When the Jews came under the influence of Persian theology the archfiend was elected, and all the Elohim--Moloch, Dagon, Astarte, Chemosh, and the rest--took their place under his rebellious ensign.

The descriptions of the Devil in the Bible are mainly borrowed from the early descriptions of the Elohim, and of Jehovah in his Elohistic character. [26] In the subjoined parallels I follow the received English version.

Gen. xxii. 1. 'God tempted Matt. iv. 1. 'Then was Jesus Abraham.' led up into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil.' See also 1 Cor. vii. 5, 1 Thes. iii. 5, James 1.13.

Exod. v. 3. 'I (Jehovah) will John xiii. 2. 'The devil having harden Pharaoh's heart;' v. 13, now put into the heart Judas 'He hardened Pharaoh's heart.' Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him.'

1 Kings xxii. 23. 'Behold the John viii. 44. 'He (the devil) is Lord hath put a lying spirit in a liar' ('and so is his father,' the mouth of all these thy continues the sentence by right prophets, and the Lord hath of translation). 1 Tim. iii. 2, spoken evil concerning them.' 'slanderers' (diabolous). 2 Tim. Ezek. xiv. 9. 'If the prophet be iii. 3, 'false accusers' deceived when he hath spoken a (diabolo). Also Titus ii. 3, Von thing, I the Lord have deceived Tischendorf translates that prophet, and I will stretch 'calumniators.' out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people.'

Isa. xlv. 7. 'I make peace and Matt. xiii. 38. 'The tares are create evil. I the Lord do all the children of the wickied these things.' Amos iii. 6. one.' 1 John iii. 8. 'He that 'Shall there be evil in a city committeth sin is of the devil; and the Lord hath not done it?' for the devil sinneth from the 1 Sam. xvi. 14. 'An evil spirit beginning.' from the Lord troubled him' (Saul).

Exod. xii. 29. 'At midnight the John viii. 44. 'He (the devil) Lord smote all the firstborn of was a murderer from the Egypt.' Ver. 30. 'There was a beginning.' great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.' Exod. xxxiii. 27. 'Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.'

Exod. vi. 9. 'Take thy rod and Rev. xii. 7, &c. 'There was war cast it before Pharaoh and it in heaven: Michael and his angels shall become a serpent.' Ver. 12. fought against the dragon.... And 'Aaron's rod swallowed up their the great dragon was cast out, rods.' Num. xxi. 6. 'Jehovah sent that old serpent, called the fiery serpents (Seraphim) among Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the people.' Ver. 8. 'And the the whole world.... Woe to the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a inhabiters of the earth and of fiery serpent, and set it upon a the sea! for the devil has come pole: and it shall come to pass, down to you, having great wrath.' that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live.' (This serpent was worshipped until destroyed by Hezekiah, 2 Kings xviii.) Compare Jer. viii. 17, Ps. cxlviii., 'Praise ye the Lord from the earth, ye dragons.'

Gen. xix. 24. 'The Lord rained Matt. xxv. 41. 'Depart from me, upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone ye cursed, into everlasting fire, and fire from the Lord out of prepared for the devil and his heaven.' Deut. iv. 24. 'The Lord angels.' Mark ix. 44. 'Where thy God is a consuming fire.' Ps. their worm dieth not, and the xi. 6. 'Upon the wicked he shall fire is not quenched.' Rev. xx. rain snares, fire and brimstone.' 10. 'And the devil that Ps. xviii. 8. 'There went up a deceiveth them was cast into the smoke out of his nostrils.' Ps. lake of fire and brimstone.' In xcvii. 3. 'A fire goeth before Rev. ix. Abaddon, or Apollyon, is him, and burneth up his enemies represented as the king of the round about.' Ezek. xxxviii. 19, scorpion tormentors; and the &c. 'For in my jealousy, and in diabolical horses, with stinging the fire of my wrath, have I serpent tails, are described as spoken.... I will plead against killing with the smoke and him with pestilence and with brimstone from their mouths. blood, and I will rain upon him ... fire and brimstone.' Isa. xxx. 33. 'Tophet is ordained of old; yea, for the king is it prepared: he hath made it deep and wide; the pile thereof is fire and much wood; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, doth kindle it.'

In addition to the above passages may be cited a notable passage from Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians (ii. 3). 'Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day (of Christ) shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God. Remember ye not that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way: and then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming: even him whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders, and with all the deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.'

This remarkable utterance shows how potent was the survival in the mind of Paul of the old Elohist belief. Although the ancient deity, who deceived prophets to their destruction, and sent forth lying spirits with their strong delusions, was dethroned and outlawed, he was still a powerful claimant of empire, haunting the temple, and setting himself up therein as God. He will be consumed by Christ's breath when the day of triumph comes; but meanwhile he is not only allowed great power in the earth, but utilised by the true God, who even so far cooperates with the false as to send on some men 'strong delusions' ('a working of error,' Von Tischendorf translates), in order that they may believe the lie and be damned. Paul speaks of the 'mystery of iniquity;' but it is not so very mysterious when we consider the antecedents of his idea. The dark problem of the origin of evil, and its continuance in the universe under the rule of a moral governor, still threw its impenetrable shadow across the human mind. It was a terrible reality, visible in the indifference or hostility with which the new gospel was met on the part of the cultured and powerful; and it could only then be explained as a mysterious provisional arrangement connected with some divine purpose far away in the depths of the universe. But the passage quoted from Thessalonians shows plainly that all those early traditions about the divinely deceived prophets and lying spirits, sent forth from Jehovah Elohim, had finally, in Paul's time, become marshalled under a leader, a personal Man of Sin; but this leader, while opposing Christ's kingdom, is in some mysterious way a commissioner of God.

We may remark here the beautiful continuity by which, through all these shadows of terror and vapours of speculation, 'clouding the glow of heaven,' [27] the unquenchable ideal from first to last is steadily ascending.

'One or three things,' says the Talmud, 'were before this world--Water, Fire, and Wind. Water begat the Darkness, Fire begat Light, and Wind begat the Spirit of Wisdom.' This had become the rationalistic translation by a crude science of the primitive demons, once believed to have created the heavens and the earth. In the process we find the forces outlawed in their wild action, but becoming the choir of God in their quiet action:--

1 Kings xix. 11-13. 'And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle.'

But man must have a philosophical as well as a moral development: the human mind could not long endure this elemental anarchy. It asked, If the Lord be not in the hurricane, the earthquake, the volcanic flame, who is therein? This is the answer of the Targum: [28]

'And he said, Arise and stand on the mountain before the Lord. And God revealed himself: and before him a host of angels of the wind, cleaving the mountain and breaking the rocks before the Lord; but not in the host of angels was the Shechinah. And after the host of the angels of the wind came a host of angels of commotion; but not in the host of the angels of commotion was the Shechinah of the Lord. And after the angels of commotion came a host of angels of fire; but not in the host of angels of fire was the Shechinah of the Lord. But after the host of the angels of the fire came voices singing in silence. And it was when Elijah heard this he hid his face in his mantle.'

The moral sentiment takes another step in advance with the unknown but artistic writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Moses had described God as a 'consuming fire;' and 'the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel' (Exod. xxiv. 17). When next we meet this phrase it is with this writer, who seeks to supersede what Moses (traditionally) built up. 'Whose voice,' he says, 'then shook the earth; but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, 'yet once more,' signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those which cannot be shaken may remain.... For our God is a consuming fire.'

'Our God also!' cries each great revolution that advances. His consuming wrath is not now directed against man, but the errors which are man's only enemies: the lightnings of the new Sinai, while they enlighten the earth, smite the old heaven of human faith and imagination, shrivelling it like a burnt scroll!

In this nineteenth century, when the old heaven, amid which this fiery pillar glowed, is again shaken, the ancient phrase has still its meaning. The Russian Tourgenieff represents two friends who had studied together in early life, then parted, accidentally meeting once more for a single night. They compare notes as to what the long intervening years have taught them; and one sums his experience in the words--'I have burned what I used to worship, and worship what I used to burn.' The novelist artfully reproduces for this age a sentence associated with a crisis in the religious history of Europe. Clovis, King of the Franks, invoked the God of his wife Clotilda to aid him against the Germans, vowing to become a Christian if successful; and when, after his victory, he was baptized at Rheims, St. Remy said to him--'Bow thy head meekly, Sicambrian; burn what thou hast worshipped, and worship what thou hast burned!' Clovis followed the Bishop's advice in literal fashion, carrying fire and sword amid his old friends the 'Pagans' right zealously. But the era has come in which that which Clovis' sword and St. Remy's theology set up for worship is being consumed in its turn. Tourgenieff's youths are consuming the altar on which their forerunners were consumed. And in this rekindled flame the world now sees shrivelling the heavens once fresh, but now reflecting the aggregate selfishness of mankind, the hells representing their aggregate cowardice, and feeds its nobler faith with this vision of the eternal fire which evermore consumes the false and refines the world.

VII. PARADISE AND THE SERPENT

Herakles and Athena in a holy picture--Human significance of Eden--The legend in Genesis puzzling--Silence of later books concerning it--Its Vedic elements--Its explanation--Episode of the Mahábhárata--Scandinavian variant--The name of Adam--The story re-read--Rabbinical interpretations.

Montfaucon has among his plates one (XX.) representing an antique agate which he supposes to represent Zeus and Athena, but which probably relates to the myth of Herakles and Athena in the garden of Hesperides. The hero having penetrated this garden, slays the dragon which guards its immortalising fruit, but when he has gathered this fruit Athena takes it from him, lest man shall eat it and share the immortality of the gods. In this design the two stand on either side of the tree, around which a serpent is twined from root to branches. The history which Montfaucon gives of the agate is of equal interest with the design itself. It was found in an old French cathedral, where it had long been preserved and shown as a holy picture of the Temptation. It would appear also to have previously deceived some rabbins, for on the border is written in Hebrew characters, much more modern than the central figures, 'The woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise.'

This mystification about a design, concerning whose origin and design there is now no doubt, is significant. The fable of Paradise and the Serpent is itself more difficult to trace, so many have been the races and religions which have framed it with their holy texts and preserved it in their sacred precincts. In its essence, no doubt, the story grows from a universal experience; in that aspect it is a mystical rose that speaks all languages. When man first appears his counterpart is a garden. The moral nature means order. The wild forces of nature--the Elohim--build no fence, forbid no fruit. They say to man as the supreme animal, Subdue the earth; every tree and herb shall be your meat; every animal your slave; be fruitful and multiply. But from the conflict the more real man emerges, and his sign is a garden hedged in from the wilderness, and a separation between good and evil.

The form in which the legend appears in the Book of Genesis presents one side in which it is simple and natural. This has already been suggested (vol. i. p. 330). But the legend of man defending his refuge from wild beasts against the most subtle of them is here overlaid by a myth in which it plays the least part. The mind which reads it by such light as may be obtained only from biblical sources can hardly fail to be newly puzzled at every step. So much, indeed, is confessed in the endless and diverse theological theories which the story has elicited. What is the meaning of the curse on the Serpent that it should for ever crawl thereafter? Had it not crawled previously? Why was the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil forbidden? Why, when its fruit was tasted, should the Tree of Life have been for the first time forbidden and jealously guarded? These riddles are nowhere solved in the Bible, and have been left to the fanciful inventions of theologians and the ingenuity of rabbins. Dr. Adam Clarke thought the Serpent was an ape before his sin, and many rabbins concluded he was camel-shaped; but the remaining enigmas have been fairly given up.

The ancient Jews, they who wrote and compiled the Old Testament, more candid than their modern descendants and our omniscient christians, silently confessed their inability to make anything out of this snake-story. From the third chapter of Genesis to the last verse of Malachi the story is not once alluded to! Such a phenomenon would have been impossible had this legend been indigenous with the Hebrew race. It was clearly as a boulder among them which had floated from regions little known to their earlier writers; after lying naked through many ages, it became overgrown with rabbinical lichen and moss, and, at the Christian era, while it seemed part of the Hebrew landscape, it was exceptional enough to receive special reverence as a holy stone. That it was made the corner-stone of Christian theology may be to some extent explained by the principle of omne ignotum pro mirifico. But the boulder itself can only be explained by tracing it to the mythologic formation from which it crumbled.

How would a Parsi explain the curse on a snake which condemned it to crawl? He would easily give us evidence that at the time when most of those Hebrew Scriptures were written, without allusion to such a Serpent, the ancient Persians believed that Ahriman had tempted the first man and woman through his evil mediator, his anointed son, Ash-Mogh, 'the two-footed Serpent.'

But let us pass beyond the Persian legend, carrying that and the biblical story together, for submission to the criticism of a Bráhman. He will tell us that this Ash-Mogh of the Parsi is merely the ancient Aèshma-daéva of the Avesta, which in turn is Ahi, the great Vedic Serpent-monster whom Indra 'prostrated beneath the feet' of the stream he had obstructed--every stream having its deity. He would remind us that the Vedas describe the earliest dragon-slayer, Indra, as 'crushing the head' of his enemy, and that this figure of the god with his heel on a Serpent's head has been familiar to his race from time immemorial. And he would then tell us to read the Rig-Veda, v. 32, and the Mahábhárata, and we would find all the elements of the story told in Genesis.

In the hymn referred to we find a graphic account of how, when Ahi was sleeping on the waters he obstructed, Indra hurled at him his thunderbolt. It says that when Indra had 'annihilated the weapon of that mighty beast from him (Ahi), another, more powerful, conceiving himself one and unmatched, was generated,' This 'wrath-born son,' 'a walker in darkness,' had managed to get hold of the sacred Soma, the plant monopolised by the gods, and having drunk this juice, he lay slumbering and 'enveloping the world,' and then 'fierce Indra seized upon him,' and having previously discovered 'the vital part of him who thought, himself invulnerable,' struck that incarnation of many-formed Ahi, and he was 'made the lowest of all creatures'.

But one who has perused the philological biography of Ahi already given, vol. i. p. 357, will not suppose that this was the end of him. We must now consider in further detail the great episode of the Mahábhárata, to which reference has been made in other connections. [29] During the Deluge the most precious treasure of the gods, the Amrita, the ambrosia that rendered them immortal, was lost, and the poem relates how the Devas and Asuras, otherwise gods and serpents, together churned the ocean for it. There were two great mountains,--Meru the golden and beautiful, adorned with healing plants, pleasant streams and trees, unapproachable by the sinful, guarded by serpents; Mandar, rocky, covered with rank vegetation, infested by savage beasts. The first is the abode of the gods, the last of demons. To find the submerged Amrita it was necessary to uproot Mandar and use it to churn the ocean. This was done by calling on the King Serpent Ananta, who called in the aid of another great serpent, Vásuki, the latter being used as a rope coiling and uncoiling to whirl the mountain. At last the Amrita appeared. But there also streamed forth from the ocean bed a terrible stench and venom, which was spreading through the universe when Siva swallowed it to save mankind,--the drug having stained his throat blue, whence his epithet 'Blue Neck.'

When the Asuras saw the Amrita, they claimed it; but one of the Devas, Narya, assumed the form of a beautiful woman, and so fascinated them that they forgot the Amrita for the moment, which the gods drank. One of the Asuras, however, Ráhu, assumed the form of a god or Deva, and began to drink. The immortalising nectar had not gone farther than his throat when the sun and moon saw the deceit and discovered it to Naraya, who cut off Ráhu's head. The head of Ráhu, being immortal, bounded to the sky, where its efforts to devour the sun and moon, which betrayed him, causes their eclipses. The tail (Ketu) also enjoys immortality in a lower plane, and is the fatal planet which sends diseases on mankind. A furious war between the gods and the Asuras has been waged ever since. And since the Devas are the strongest, it is not wonderful that it should have passed into the folklore of the whole Aryan world that the evil host are for ever seeking to recover by cunning the Amrita. The Serpents guarding the paradise of the Devas have more than once, in a mythologic sense, been induced to betray their trust and glide into the divine precincts to steal the coveted draught. This is the Kvásir [30] of the Scandinavian Mythology, which is the source of that poetic inspiration whose songs have magical potency. The sacramental symbol of the Amrita in Hindu Theology is the Soma juice, and this plant Indra is declared in the Rig-Veda (i. 130) to have discovered "hidden, like the nestlings of a bird, amidst a pile of rocks enclosed by bushes," where the dragon Drought had concealed it. Indra, in the shape of a hawk, flew away with it. In the Prose Edda the Frost Giant Suttung has concealed the sacred juice, and it is kept by the maid Gunlauth in a cavern overgrown with bushes. Bragi bored a hole through the rock. Odin in the shape of a worm crept through the crevice; then resuming his godlike shape, charmed the maid into permitting him to drink one draught out of the three jars; and, having left no drop, in form of an eagle flew to Asgard, and discharged in the jars the wonder-working liquid. Hence poetry is called Odin's booty, and Odin's gift.

Those who attentively compare these myths with the legend in Genesis will not have any need to rest upon the doubtful etymology of 'Adam' [31] to establish the Ayran origin of the latter. The Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil which made man 'as one of us' (the Elohim) is the Soma of India, the Haoma of Persia, the kvásir of Scandinavia, to which are ascribed the intelligence and powers of the gods, and the ardent thoughts of their worshippers. The Tree of Immortality is the Amrita, the only monopoly of the gods. 'The Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth the garden of Eden to till the ground whence he had been taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed on the east of the garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way of the tree of life.'

This flaming sword turning every way is independent of the cherub, and takes the place of the serpent which had previously guarded the Meru paradise, but is now an enemy no longer to be trusted.

If the reader will now re-read the story in Genesis with the old names restored, he will perceive that there is no puzzle at all in any part of it:--'Now Ráhu [because he had stolen and tasted Soma] was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Devas had made, and he said to Adea Suktee, the first woman, Have the Devas said you shall not eat of every tree in the garden? And she said unto Ráhu, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the Soma-plant, which is in the middle of the garden, the Devas have said we shall not eat or touch it on pain of death. Then Ráhu said to Adea, You will not suffer death by tasting Soma [I have done so, and live]: the Devas know that on the day when you taste it your eyes shall be opened, and you will be equal to them in knowledge of good and evil ... [and you will be able at once to discover which tree it is that bears the fruit which renders you immortal--the Amrita].... Adea took of the Soma and did eat, and gave also unto Adima, her husband, and the eyes of them both were opened.... And Indra, chief of the Devas, said to Ráhu, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field; [for they shall transmigrate, their souls ascend through higher forms to be absorbed in the Creative principle; but] upon thy belly shalt thou go [remaining transfixed in the form you have assumed to try and obtain the Amrita]; and [instead of the ambrosia you aimed at] you shall eat dirt through all your existence.... And Indra said, Adima and Adea Suktee have [tasted Soma, and] become as one of us Devas [so far as] to know good and evil; and now, lest man put forth his hand [on our precious Amrita], and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever [giving us another race of Asuras or Serpent-men to compete with].... Indra and the Devas drove Adima out of Meru, and placed watch-dogs at the east of the garden; and [a sinuous darting flame, precisely matched to the now unchangeable form of Ráhu], a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the Amrita from Adima and Asuras.'

While the gods and serpents were churning the ocean for the Amrita, all woes and troubles for mortals came up first. That ocean shrinks in one region to the box of Pandora, in another to the fruit eaten by Eve. How foreign such a notion is to the Hebrew theology is shown by the fact that even while the curses are falling from the fatal fruit on the earth and man, they are all said to have proceeded solely from Jehovah, who is thus made to supplement the serpent's work.

It will be seen that in the above version of the story in Genesis I have left out various passages. These are in part such as must be more fully treated in the succeeding chapter, and in part the Semitic mosses which have grown upon the Aryan boulder. But even after the slight treatment which is all I have space to devote to the comparative study of the myth in this aspect, it may be safely affirmed that the problems which we found insoluble by Hebrew correlatives no longer exist if an Aryan origin be assumed. We know why the fruit of knowledge was forbidden: because it endangered the further fruit of immortality. We know how the Serpent might be condemned to crawl for ever without absurdity: because he was of a serpent-race, able to assume higher forms, and capable of transmigration, and of final absorption. We know why the eating of the fruit brought so many woes: it was followed by the stream of poison from the churned ocean which accompanied the Amrita, and which would have destroyed the race of both gods and men, had not Siva drank it up. If anything were required to make the Aryan origin of the fable certain, it will be found in the fact which will appear as we go on,--namely, that the rabbins of our era, in explaining the legend which their fathers severely ignored, did so by borrowing conceptions foreign to the original ideas of their race,--notions about human transformation to animal shapes, and about the Serpent (which Moses honoured), and mainly of a kind travestying the Iranian folklore. Such contact with foreign races for the first time gave the Jews any key to the legend which their patriarchs and prophets were compelled to pass over in silence.

VIII. EVE

The Fall of Man--Fall of gods--Giants--Prajápati and Ráhu--Woman and Star-serpent in Persia--Meschia and Meschiane--Bráhman legends of the creation of Man--The strength of Woman--Elohist and Jehovist creations of Man--The Forbidden Fruit--Eve reappears as Sara--Abraham surrenders his wife to Jehovah--The idea not sensual--Abraham's circumcision--The evil name of Woman--Noah's wife--The temptation of Abraham--Rabbinical legends concerning Eve--Pandora--Sentiment of the Myth of Eve.

The insignificance of the Serpent of Eden in the scheme and teachings of the Hebrew Bible is the more remarkable when it is considered that the pessimistic view of human nature is therein fully represented. In the story of the Temptation itself, there is, indeed, no such generalisation as we find in the modern dogma of the Fall of Man; but the elements of it are present in the early assumption that the thoughts of man's heart run to evil continually,--which must be an obvious fact everywhere while goodness is identified with fictitious merits. There are also expressions suggesting a theory of heredity, of a highly superstitious character,--the inheritance being by force of the ancestral word or act, and without reference to inherent qualities. Outward merits and demerits are transmitted for reward and punishment to the third and fourth generation; but the more common-sense view appears to have gradually superseded this, as expressed in the proverb that the fathers ate sour grapes and the children's teeth were on edge.

In accounting for this condition of human nature, popular traditions among the Jews always pointed rather to a fall of the gods than to any such catastrophe to man. 'The sons of the Elohim (gods) saw the daughters of men that they were beautiful, and they took to themselves for wives whomsoever they chose.' 'There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men, which were of old men of renown.' [32] These giants were to the Semitic mind what the Ahis, Vritras, Sushnas and other monsters were to the Aryan, or Titans to the Greek mind. They were not traced to the Serpent, but to the wild nature-gods, the Elohim, and when Jehovah appears it is to wage war against them. The strength of this belief is illustrated in the ample accounts given in the Old Testament of the Rephaim and their king Og, the Anakim and Goliath, the Emim, the Zamzummim, and others, all of which gained full representation in Hebrew folklore. The existence of these hostile beings was explained by their fall from angelic estate.

The Book of Enoch gives what was no doubt the popular understanding of the fall of the angels and its results. Two hundred angels took wives of the daughters of men, and their offspring were giants three thousand yards in height. These giants having consumed the food of mankind, began to devour men, whose cries were brought to the attention of Jehovah by his angels. One angel was sent to warn Noah of the Flood; another to bind Azazel in a dark place in the desert till the Judgment Day; Gabriel was despatched to set the giants to destroying one another; Michael was sent to bury the fallen angels under the hills for seventy generations, till the Day of Judgment, when they should be sent to the fiery abyss for ever. Then every evil work should come to an end, and the plant of righteousness spring up. [33]

Such exploits and successes on the part of the legal Deity against outlaws, though they may be pitched high in heroic romance, are found beside a theology based upon a reverse situation. Nothing is more fundamental in the ancient Jewish system than the recognition of an outside world given over to idolatry and wickedness, while Jews are a small colony of the children of Israel and chosen of Jehovah. Such a conception in primitive times is so natural, and possibly may have been so essential to the constitution of nations, that it is hardly useful to look for parallels. Though nearly all races see in their traditional dawn an Age of Gold, a Happy Garden, or some corresponding felicity, these are normally defined against anterior chaos or surrounding ferocity. Every Eden has had its guards.

When we come to legends which relate particularly to the way in which the early felicity was lost, many facts offer themselves for comparative study. And with regard to the myths of Eden and Eve, we may remark what appears to have been a curious interchange of legends between the Hebrews and Persians. The ancient doctrines of India and Persia concerning Origins are largely, if not altogether, astronomical. In the Genesis of India we see a golden egg floating on a shoreless ocean; it divides to make the heaven above and earth beneath; from it emerges Prajápati, who also falls in twain to make the mortal and immortal substances; the parts of him again divide to make men and women on earth, sun and moon in the sky. This is but one version out of many, but all the legends about Prajápati converge in making him a figure of Indian astronomy. In the Rig-Veda he is Orion, and for ever lies with the three arrows in his belt which Sirius shot at him because of his love for Aldebaran,--towards which constellation he stretches. Now, in a sort of antithesis to this, the evil Ráhu is also cut in twain, his upper and immortal part pursuing and trying to eclipse the sun and moon, his tail (Ketu) becoming the 9th planet, shedding evil influences on mankind. [34] This tail, Ketu, is quite an independent monster, and we meet with him in the Persian planisphere, where he rules the first of the six mansions of Ahriman, and is the 'crooked serpent' mentioned in the Book of Job. By referring to vol. i. p. 253, the reader will see that this Star-serpent must stand as close to the woman with her child and sheaf as September stands to October. But unquestionably the woman was put there for honour and not disgrace; with her child and sheaf she represented the fruitage of the year.

There is nothing in Persian Mythology going to show that the woman betrayed her mansion of fruitage--the golden year--to the Serpent near her feet. In the Bundehesch we have the original man, Kaiomarts, who is slain by Ahriman as Prajápati (Orion) was by Sirius; from his dead form came Meschia and Meschiane, the first human pair. Ahriman corrupts them by first giving them goats' milk, an evil influence from Capricorn. After they had thus injured themselves he tempted them with a fruit which robbed them of ninety-nine hundredths of their happiness. In all this there is no indication that the woman and man bore different relations to the calamity. But after a time we find a Parsî postscript to this effect: 'The woman was the first to sacrifice to the Devas.' This is the one item in the Parsî Mythology which shows bias against woman, and as it is unsupported by the narratives preceding it, we may suppose that it was derived from some foreign country.

That country could hardly have been India. There is a story in remote districts of India which relates that the first woman was born out of an expanding lotus on the Ganges, and was there received in his paradise by the first man (Adima, or Manu). Having partaken of the Soma, they were expelled, after first being granted their prayer to be allowed a last draught from the Ganges; the effect of the holy water being to prevent entire corruption, and secure immortality to their souls. But nowhere in Indian legend or folklore do we find any special dishonour put upon woman such as is described in the Hebrew story.

Rather we find the reverse. Early in the last century, a traveller, John Marshall, related stories of the creation which he says were told him by the Brahmins, and others 'by the Brahmins of Persia.' [35]

'Once on a time,' the Brahmins said, 'as (God) was set in eternity, it came into his mind to make something, and immediately no sooner had he thought the same, but that the same minute was a perfect beautiful woman present immediately before him, which he called Adea Suktee, that is, the first woman. Then this figure put into his mind the figure of a man; which he had no sooner conceived in his mind, but that he also started up, and represented himself before him; this he called Manapuise, that is, the first man; then, upon a reflection of these things, he resolved further to create several places for them to abide in, and accordingly, assuming a subtil body, he breathed in a minute the whole universe, and everything therein, from the least to the greatest.'

'The Brahmins of Persia tell certain long stories of a great Giant that was led into a most delicate garden, which, upon certain conditions, should be his own for ever. But one evening in a cool shade one of the wicked Devatas, or spirits, came to him, and tempted him with vast sums of gold, and all the most precious jewels that can be imagined; but he courageously withstood that temptation, as not knowing what value or use they were of: but at length this wicked Devata brought to him a fair woman, who so charmed him that for her sake he most willingly broke all his conditions, and thereupon was turned out.'

In the first of these two stories the names given to the man and woman are popular words derived from Sanskrit. In the second the Persian characters are present, as in the use of Devatas to denote wicked powers; but for the rest, this latter legend appears to me certainly borrowed from the Jews so far as the woman is concerned. It was they who first perceived any connection between Virgo in the sixth mansion of Ormuzd, and Python in the seventh, and returned the Persians their planisphere with a new gloss. Having adopted the Dragon's tail (Ketu) for a little preliminary performance, the Hebrew system dismisses that star-snake utterly; for it has already evolved a terrestrial devil from its own inner consciousness.

The name of that devil is--Woman. The diabolisation of woman in their theology and tradition is not to be regarded as any indication that the Hebrews anciently held women in dishonour; rather was it a tribute to her powers of fascination such as the young man wrote to be placed under the pillow of Darius--'Woman is strongest.' As Darius and his council agreed that, next to truth, woman is strongest--stronger than wine or than kings, so do the Hebrew fables testify by interweaving her beauty and genius with every evil of the world.

Between the Elohist and Jahvist accounts of the creation of man, there are two differences of great importance. The Elohim are said to have created man in their own image, male and female,--the word for 'created' being bará, literally meaning to carve out. Jehovah Elohim is said to have formed man,--nothing being said about his own image, or about male and female,--the word formed being yatsar'. The sense of this word yatsar in this place (Gen. ii. 7) must be interpreted by what follows: Jehovah is said to have formed man out of the aphar', which the English version translates dust, but the Septuagint more correctly sperma. The literal meaning is a finely volatilised substance, and in Numbers xxiii. 10, it is used to represent the seed of Jacob. In the Jehovistic creation it means that man was formed out of the seminal principle of the earth combined with the breath of Jehovah; and the legend closely resembles the account of the ancient Satapatha-Bráhmana, which shows the creative power in sexual union with the fluid world to produce the egg from which Prajápati was born, to be divided into man and woman.

These two accounts, therefore,--to wit, that in the first and that in the second chapter of Genesis,--must be regarded as being of different events, and not merely varying myths of the same event. The offspring of Jehovah were 'living souls,' an expression not used in connection with the created images of the giants or Elohim. The Elohist pair roam about the world freely eating all fruits and herbs, possessing nature generally, and, as male and female, encouraged to increase and multiply; but Jehovah carefully separates his two children from general nature, places them in a garden, forbids certain food, and does not say a word about sex even, much less encourage its functions.

Adam was formed simply to be the gardener of Eden; no other motive is assigned. In proposing the creation of a being to be his helper and companion, nothing is said about a new sex,--the word translated 'help-meet' (ézer) is masculine. Adam names the being made 'woman,' (Vulg. Virago) only because she has been made out of man, but sex is not even yet suggested. This is so marked that the compiler has filled up what he considered an omission with (verse 24) a little lecture on duty to wives.

It is plain that the jealously-guarded ambrosia of Aryan gods has here been adapted to signify the sexual relation. That is the fruit in the midst of the garden which is reserved. The eating of it is immediately associated with consciousness of nudity and shame. The curse upon Eve is appropriate. Having taken a human husband, she is to be his slave; she shall bring forth children in sorrow, and many of them (Gen. iii. 16). Adam is to lose his position in Jehovah's garden, and to toil in accursed ground, barren and thorny.

Cast out thus into the wilderness, the human progeny as it increased came in contact with the giant's progeny,--those created by the Elohim (Gen. i.). When these had intermarried, Jehovah said that the fact that the human side in such alliance had been originally vitalised by his breath could not now render it immortal, because 'he (man) also is flesh,' i.e., like the creatures of the nature-gods. After two great struggles with these Titans, drowning most of them, hurling down their tower and scattering them, Jehovah resolved upon a scheme of vast importance, and one which casts a flood of light upon the narrative just given. Jehovah's great aim is shown in the Abrahamic covenant to be to found a family on earth, of which he can say, 'Thou art my son; I have begotten thee.' Eve was meant to be the mother of that family, but by yielding to her passion for the man meant only to be her companion she had thwarted the purpose of Jehovah. But she reappears again under the name of Sara; and from first to last the sense of these records, however overlaid by later beliefs, is the expansion, varying fortunes, and gradual spiritualisation of this aspiration of a deity for a family of his own in the earth.

Celsus said that the story of the Virgin Mary and the Holy Ghost is one in which Christians would find little 'mystery' if the names were Danaë and Jupiter. The same may be said of the story of Sara and Jehovah, of which that concerning Mary is a theological travesty. Sarai (as she was called before her transfer to Jehovah, who then forbade Abraham to call her 'My Princess,' but only 'Princess') was chosen because she was childless. Abraham was paid a large recompense for her surrender, and provision was made that he should have a mistress, and by her a son. This natural son was to be renowned and have great possessions; nominally Abraham was to be represented by Sara's miraculously-conceived son, and to control his fortunes, but the blood of the new race was to be purely divine in its origin, so that every descendant of Isaac might be of Jehovah's family in Abraham's household.

Abraham twice gave over his wife to different kings who were jealously punished by Jehovah for sins they only came near committing unconsciously, while Abraham himself was not even rebuked for the sin he did commit. The forbidden fruit was not eaten this time; and the certificate and proof of the supernatural conception of Isaac were made clear in Sarah's words--'God hath made me to laugh: all that hear will laugh with me: who would have said unto Abraham that Sarah should have given children suck? for I have borne a son in his old age.' [36]

It was the passionate nature and beauty of Woman which had thus far made the difficulty. The forbidden fruit was 'pleasant to the eyes,' and Eve ate it; and it was her 'voice' to which Adam had hearkened rather than to that of Jehovah (Gen. iii. 17). And, again, it was the easy virtue and extreme beauty of Sara (Gen. xii. 11, 14) which endangered the new scheme. The rabbinical traditions are again on this point very emphatic. It is related that when Abram came to the border of Egypt he hid Sara in a chest, and was so taking her into that country. The collector of customs charged that the chest contained raiment, silks, gold, pearls, and Abram paid for all these; but this only increased the official's suspicions, and he compelled Abram to open the chest; when this was done and Sara rose up, the whole land of Egypt was illumined by her splendour. [37]

There is no reason for supposing that the ideas underlying the relation which Jehovah meant to establish with Eve, and succeeded in establishing with Sara, were of a merely sensual description. These myths belong to the mental region of ancestor-worship, and the fundamental conception is that of founding a family to reign over all other families. Jehovah's interest is in Isaac rather than Sara, who, after she has borne that patriarch, lapses out of the story almost as completely as Eve. The idea is not, indeed, so theological as it became in the Judaic-christian legend of the conception of Jesus by Mary as spouse of the Deity; it was probably, however, largely ethnical in the case of Eve, and national in that of Sara.

It being considered of the utmost importance that all who claimed the advantages in the Jewish commonwealth accruing only to the legal, though nominal, 'children of Abraham,' should really be of divine lineage, security must be had against Isaac having any full brother. It might be that in after time some natural son of Sara might claim to be the one born of divine parentage, might carry on the Jewish commonwealth, slay the children of Jehovah by Sara, and so end the divine lineage with the authority it carried. Careful precautions having been taken that Ishmael should be an 'irreconcilable,' there is reason to suspect that the position of Isaac as Jehovah's 'only-begotten son' was secured by means obscurely hinted in the circumcision first undergone by Abraham, and made the sign of the covenant. That circumcision, wheresoever it has survived, is the relic of a more horrible practice of barbarian asceticism, is hardly doubtful; that the original rite was believed to have been that by which Abraham fulfilled his contract with Jehovah, appears to me intimated in various passages of the narrative which have survived editorial arrangement in accordance with another view. For instance, the vast inducements offered Abraham, and the great horror that fell on the patriarch, appear hardly explicable on the theory that nothing was conceded on Abraham's side beyond the surrender of a wife whom he had freely consigned to earthly monarchs.

Though the suspicion just expressed as to the nature of Abraham's circumcision may be doubted, it is not questionable that the rite of circumcision bears a significance in rabbinical traditions and Jewish usages which renders its initiation by Abraham at least a symbol of marital renunciation. Thus, the custom of placing in a room where the rite of circumcision was performed a pot of dust, was explained by the rabbins to have reference to the dust which Jehovah declared should be the serpent's food. [38] That circumcision should have been traditionally associated with the temptation of Eve is a confirmation of the interpretation which regards her (Eve) as the prototype of Sara and the serpent as sexual desire.

Although, if the original sense of Abraham's circumcision were what has been suggested, it had been overlaid, when the Book of Genesis in its present form was compiled, by different traditions, and that patriarch is described as having married again and had other children, the superior sanctity of Sara's son was preserved. Indeed, there would seem to have continued for a long time a tradition that the Abrahamic line and covenant were to be carried out by 'the seed of the woman' alone, and the paternity of Jehovah. Like Sara, Rebekah is sterile, and after her Rachel; the birth of Jacob and Esau from one, and of Joseph and Benjamin from the other, being through the intervention of Jehovah.

The great power of woman for good or evil, and the fact that it has often been exercised with subtlety--the natural weapon of the weak in dealing with the strong--are remarkably illustrated in the legends of these female figures which appear in connection with the divine schemes in the Book of Genesis. But even more the perils of woman's beauty are illustrated, especially in Eve and Sara. There were particular and obvious reasons why these representative women could not be degraded or diabolised in their own names or history, even where their fascinations tended to countervail the plans of Jehovah. The readiness with which Sara promoted her husband's prostitution and consented to her own, the treachery of Rebekah to her son Esau, could yet not induce Jewish orthodoxy to give evil names to the Madonnas of their race; but the inference made was expressed under other forms and names. It became a settled superstition that wherever evil was going on, Woman was at the bottom of it. Potiphar's wife, Jezebel, Vashti, and Delilah, were among the many she-scape-goats on whom were laid the offences of their august official predecessors who 'could do no wrong.' Even after Satan has come upon the scene, and is engaged in tempting Job, it seems to have been thought essential to the task that he should have an agent beside the troubled man in the wife who bade him 'curse God and die.'

It is impossible to say at just what period the rabbins made their ingenious discovery that the devil and Woman entered the world at the same time,--he coming out of the hole left by removal of the rib from Adam before it was closed. This they found disclosed in the fact that it is in Genesis iii. 21, describing the creation of Woman, that there appears for the first time Samech--the serpent-letter S (in Vajisgor). [39] But there were among them many legends of a similar kind that leave one no wonder concerning the existence of a thanksgiving taught boys that they have not been created women, however much one may be scandalised at its continuance in the present day. It was only in pursuance of this theory of Woman that there was developed at a later day a female assistant of the Devil in another design to foil the plans of Jehovah, from the Scriptual narrative of which the female rôle is omitted. In the Scriptural legend of Noah his wife is barely mentioned, and her name is not given, but from an early period vague rumours to her discredit floated about, and these gathered consistency in the Gnostic legend that it was through her that Satan managed to get on board the Ark, as is elsewhere related (Part IV. chap. xxvii.), and was so enabled to resuscitate antediluvial violence in the drunken curses of Noah. Satan did this by working upon both the curiosity and jealousy of Noraita, the name assigned Noah's wife.

It has been necessary to give at length the comparative view of the myth of Eden in order that the reader may estimate the grounds upon which rests a theory which has been submitted after much hesitation concerning its sense. The 'phallic' theory by which it has become the fashion to interpret so many of these old fables, appears to me to have been done to death; yet I cannot come to any other conclusion concerning the legend of Eve than that she represents that passional nature of Woman which, before it was brought under such rigid restraint, might easily be regarded as a weakness to any tribe desirous of keeping itself separate from other tribes. The oath exacted by Abraham of his servant that he should seek out a wife from among his own people, and not among Canaanitish women, is one example among many of this feeling, which, indeed, survives among Jews at the present day. Such a sentiment might underlie the stories of Eve and Sara--the one mingling the blood of the family of Jehovah with mere human flesh, the other nearly confusing it with aliens. As the idea of tribal sanctity and separateness became strengthened by the further development of theocratic government, such myths would take on forms representing Jehovah's jealousy in defending his family line against the evil powers which sought to confuse or destroy it. One such attempt appears to underlie the story of the proposed sacrifice of Isaac. Although the account we have of that proceeding in the Bible was written at a time when the Elohist and Jahvist parties had compromised their rivalries to some extent, and suggests the idea that Jehovah himself ordered the sacrifice in order to try the faith of Abraham, enough of the primitive tradition lingers in the narrative to make it probable that its original intent was to relate how one of the superseded Elohim endeavoured to tempt Abraham to sacrifice Sara's only son, and so subvert the aim of Jehovah to perpetuate his seed. The God who 'tempted Abraham' is throughout sharply distinguished from the Jehovah who sent his angel to prevent the sacrifice and substitute an animal victim for Isaac.

Although, as we have seen, Sara was spared degradation into a she-devil in subsequent myths, because her body was preserved intact despite her laxity of mind, such was not the case with Eve. The silence concerning her preserved throughout the Bible after her fall is told was broken by the ancient rabbins, and there arose multitudinous legends in which her intimacies with devils are circumstantially reported. Her first child, Cain, was generally believed to be the son of one of the devils (Samaël) that consorted with her, and the world was said to be peopled with gnomes and demons which she brought forth during that 130 years at the end of which it is stated that Adam begot a son in his own image and likeness, and called his name Seth (Gen. v. 3). The previous children were supposed to be not in purely human form, and not to have been of Adam's paternity. Adam had during that time refused to have any children, knowing that he would only rear inmates of hell.

The legend of Eden has gone round the world doing various duty, but nearly always associated with the introduction of moral evil into the world. In the Lateran Museum at Rome there is a remarkable bas-relief representing a nude man and woman offering sacrifice before a serpent coiled around a tree, while an angel overthrows the altar with his foot. This was probably designed as a fling at the Ophites, and is very interesting as a survival from the ancient Aryan meaning of the Serpent. But since the adaptation of the myth by the Semitic race, it has generally emphasised the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, instead of the Tree of Immortality (Amrita), which is the chief point of interest in the Aryan myth. There are indeed traces of a conflict with knowledge and scepticism in it which we shall have to consider hereafter. The main popular association with it, the introduction into the world of all the ills that flesh is heir to, is perfectly consistent with the sense which has been attributed to its early Hebrew form; for this includes the longing for maternity, its temptations and its pains, and the sorrows and sins which are obviously traceable to it.

Some years ago, when the spectacular drama of 'Paradise' was performed in Paris, the Temptation was effected by means of a mirror. Satan glided behind the tree as a serpent, and then came forth as a handsome man, and after uttering compliments that she could not understand, presented Eve with a small oval mirror which explained them all. Mlle. Abingdon as Eve displayed consummate art in her expression of awakening self-admiration, of the longing for admiration from the man before her, and the various stages of self-consciousness by which she is brought under the Tempter's power. This idea of the mirror was no doubt borrowed from the corresponding fable of Pandora. On a vase (Etruscan) in the Hamilton Collection there is an admirable representation of Pandora opening her box, from which all evils are escaping. She is seated beneath a tree, around which a serpent is coiled. Among the things which have come out of the box is this same small oval mirror. In this variant, Hope, coming out last corresponds with the prophecy that the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head. The ancient Etruscan and the modern Parisian version are both by the mirror finely connected with the sexual sense of the legend.

The theological interpretation of the beautiful myth of Eden represents a sort of spiritual vivisection; yet even as a dogma the story preserves high testimony: when woman falls the human race falls with her; when man rises above his inward or outward degradations and recovers his Paradise, it is because his nature is refined by the purity of woman, and his home sweetened by her heart. There is a widespread superstition that every Serpent will single out a woman from any number of people for its attack. In such dim way is felt her gentle bruising of man's reptilian self. No wonder that woman is excluded from those regions of life where man's policy is still to crawl, eat dust, and bite the heel.

It is, I suppose, the old Mystery of the Creation which left Coventry its legend of a Good Eve (Godiva, whose name is written 'good Eve' in a Conventry verse, 1494), whose nakedness should bring benefit to man, as that of the first Eve brought him evil. The fig-leaf of Eve, gathered no doubt from the tree whose forbidden fruit she had eaten, has gradually grown so large as to cloak her mind and spirit as well as her form. Her work must still be chiefly that of a spirit veiled and ashamed. Her passions suppressed, her genius disbelieved, her influence forced to seek hidden and often illegitimate channels, Woman now outwardly represents a creation of man to suit his own convenience. But the Serpent has also changed a great deal since the days of Eve, and now, as Intelligence, has found out man in his fool's-paradise, where he stolidly maintains that, with few exceptions, it is good for man to be alone. But good women are remembering Godiva; and realising that, the charms which have sometimes lowered man or cost him dear may be made his salvation. It shall be so when Woman can face with clear-eyed purity all the facts of nature, can cast away the mental and moral swathing-clothes transmitted from Eden, and put forth all her powers for the welfare of mankind,--a Good Eva, whom Coventry Toms may call naked, but who is 'not ashamed' of the garb of Innocence and Truth.

IX. LILITH

Madonnas--Adam's first wife--Her flight and doom--Creation of devils--Lilith marries Samaël--Tree of Life--Lilith's part in the Temptation--Her locks--Lamia--Bodeima--Meschia and Meschiane--Amazons--Maternity--Rib-theory of Woman--Káli and Durga--Captivity of Woman.

The attempt of the compilers of the Book of Genesis to amalgamate the Elohist and Jehovist legends, ignoring the moral abyss that yawns between them, led to some sufficiently curious results. One of these it may be well enough to examine here, since, though later in form than some other legends which remain to be considered, it is closely connected in spirit with the ancient myth of Eden and illustrative of it.

The differences between the two creations of man and woman critically examined in the previous chapter were fully recognised by the ancient rabbins, and their speculations on the subject laid the basis for the further legend that the woman created (Gen. i.) at the same time with Adam, and therefore not possibly the woman formed from his rib, was a first wife who turned out badly.

To this first wife of Adam it was but natural to assign the name of one of the many ancient goddesses who had been degraded into demonesses. For the history of Mariolatry in the North of Europe has been many times anticipated: the mother's tenderness and self-devotion, the first smile of love upon social chaos, availed to give every race its Madonna, whose popularity drew around her the fatal favours of priestcraft, weighing her down at last to be a type of corruption. Even the Semitic tribes, with their hard masculine deities, seem to have once worshipped Alilat, whose name survives in Elohim and Allah. Among these degraded Madonnas was Lilith, whose name has been found in a Chaldean inscription, which says, when a country is at peace 'Lilith (Lilatu) is not before them.' The name is from Assyr. lay'lâ, Hebrew Lil (night), which already in Accadian meant 'sorcery.' It probably personified, at first, the darkness that soothed children to slumber; and though the word Lullaby has, with more ingenuity than accuracy, been derived from Lilith Abi, the theory may suggest the path by which the soft Southern night came to mean a nocturnal spectre.

The only place where the name of Lilith occurs in the Bible is Isa. xxxiv. 14, where the English version renders it 'screech-owl.' In the Vulgate it is translated 'Lamia,' and in Luther's Bible, 'Kobold;' Gesenius explains it as 'nocturna, night-spectre, ghost.'

The rabbinical myths concerning Lilith, often passed over as puerile fancies, appear to me pregnant with significance and beauty. Thus Abraham Ecchelensis, giving a poor Arabic version of the legend, says, 'This fable has been transmitted to the Arabs from Jewish sources by some converts of Mahomet from Cabbalism and Rabbinism, who have transferred all the Jewish fooleries to the Arabs.' [40] But the rabbinical legend grew very slowly, and relates to principles and facts of social evolution whose force and meaning are not yet exhausted.

Premising that the legend is here pieced together mainly from Eisenmenger, [41] who at each mention of the subject gives ample references to rabbinical authorities, I will relate it without further references of my own.

Lilith was said to have been created at the same time and in the same way as Adam; and when the two met they instantly quarrelled about the headship which both claimed. Adam began the first conversation by asserting that he was to be her master. Lilith replied that she had equal right to be chief. Adam insisting, Lilith uttered a certain spell called Schem-hammphorasch--afterwards confided by a fallen angel to one of 'the daughters of men' with whom he had an intrigue, and of famous potency in Jewish folklore--the result of which was that she obtained wings. Lilith then flew out of Eden and out of sight. [42] Adam then cried in distress--'Master of the world, the woman whom thou didst give me has flown away.' The Creator then sent three angels to find Lilith and persuade her to return to the garden; but she declared that it could be no paradise to her if she was to be the servant of man. She remained hovering over the Red Sea, where the angels had found her, while these returned with her inflexible resolution. And she would not yield even after the angels had been sent again to convey to her, as the alternative of not returning, the doom that she should bear many children but these should all die in infancy.

This penalty was so awful that Lilith was about to commit suicide by drowning herself in the sea, when the three angels, moved by her anguish, agreed that she should have the compensation of possessing full power over all children after birth up to their eighth day; on which she promised that she would never disturb any babes who were under their (the angels') protection. Hence the charm (Camea) against Lilith hung round the necks of Jewish children bore the names of these three angels--Senói, Sansenói, and Sammangelóf. Lilith has special power over all children born out of wedlock for whom she watches, dressed in finest raiment; and she has especial power on the first day of the month, and on the Sabbath evening. When a little child laughs in its sleep it was believed that Lilith was with it, and the babe must be struck on the nose three times, the words being thrice repeated--'Away, cursed Lilith! thou hast no place here!'

The divorce between Lilith and Adam being complete, the second Eve (i.e., Mother) was now formed, and this time out of Adam's rib in order that there might be no question of her dependence, and that the embarrassing question of woman's rights might never be raised again.

But about this time the Devils were also created. These beings were the last of the six days' creation, but they were made so late in the day that there was no daylight by which to fashion bodies for them. The Creator was just putting them off with a promise that he would make them bodies next day, when lo! the Sabbath--which was for a long time personified--came and sat before him, to represent the many evils which might result from the precedent he would set by working even a little on the day whose sanctity had already been promulgated. Under these circumstances the Creator told the Devils that they must disperse and try to get bodies as they could find them. On this account they have been compelled ever since to seek carnal enjoyments by nestling in the hearts of human beings and availing themselves of human senses and passions.

These Devils as created were ethereal spirits; they had certain atmospheric forms, but felt that they had been badly treated in not having been provided with flesh and blood, and they were envious of the carnal pleasures which human beings could enjoy. So long as man and woman remained pure, the Devils could not take possession of their bodies and enjoy such pleasures, and it was therefore of great importance to them that the first human pair should be corrupted. At the head of these Devils stood now a fallen angel--Samaël. Of this archfiend more is said elsewhere; at this point it need only be said that he had been an ideal flaming Serpent, leader of the Seraphim. He was already burning with lust and envy, as he witnessed the pleasures of Adam and Eve in Eden, when he found beautiful Lilith lamenting her wrongs in loneliness.

She became his wife. The name of Samaël by one interpretation signifies 'the Left'; and we may suppose that Lilith found him radical on the question of female equality which she had raised in Eden. He gave her a splendid kingdom where she was attended by 480 troops; but all this could not compensate her for the loss of Eden,--she seems never to have regretted parting with Adam,--and for the loss of her children. She remained the Lady of Sorrow. Her great enemy was Machalath who presided over 478 troops, and who was for ever dancing, as Lilith was for ever sighing and weeping. It was long believed that at certain times the voice of Lilith's grief could be heard in the air.

Samaël found in Lilith a willing conspirator against Jehovah in his plans for man and woman. The corruption of these two meant, to the troops of Samaël, bringing their bodies down into a plane where they might be entered by themselves (the Devils), not to mention at present the manifold other motives by which they were actuated. It may be remarked also that in the rabbinical traditions, after their Aryan impregnation, there are traces of a desire of the Devils to reach the Tree of Life.

Truly a wondrous Tree! Around it, in its place at the east of Eden, sang six hundred thousand lovely angels with happy hymns, and it glorified the vast garden. It possessed five hundred thousand different flavours and odours, which were wafted to the four sides of the world by zephyrs from seven lustrous clouds that made its canopy. Beneath it sat the disciples of Wisdom on resplendent seats, screened from the blaze of sun, moon, and cloud-veiled from potency of the stars (there was no night); and within were the joys referred to in the verse (Prov. viii. 21), 'That I may cause those that love me to inherit substance; and I will fill their treasures.'

Had there been an order of female rabbins the story of Lilith might have borne obvious modifications, and she might have appeared as a heroine anxious to rescue her sex from slavery to man. As it is the immemorial prerogative of man to lay all blame upon woman, that being part of the hereditary following of Adam, it is not wonderful that Lilith was in due time made responsible for the temptation of Eve. She was supposed to have beguiled the Serpent on guard at the gate of Eden to lend her his form for a time, after which theory the curse on the serpent might mean the binding of Lilith for ever in that form. This would appear to have originated the notion mentioned in Comestor (Hist. Schol., 12th cent.), that while the serpent was yet erect it had a virgin's head. The accompanying example is from a very early missal in the possession of Sir Joseph Hooker, of which I could not discover the date or history, but the theory is traceable in the eighth century. In this picture we have an early example of those which have since become familiar in old Bibles. Pietro d'Orvieto painted this serpent-woman in his finest fresco, at Pisa. Perhaps in no other picture has the genius of Michæl Angelo been more felicitous than in that on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, in which Lilith is portrayed. In this picture (Fig. 2) the marvellous beauty of his first wife appears to have awakened the enthusiasm of Adam; and, indeed, it is quite in harmony with the earlier myth that Lilith should be of greater beauty than Eve.

An artist and poet of our own time (Rossetti) has by both of his arts celebrated the fatal beauty of Lilith. His Lilith, bringing 'soft sleep,' antedates, as I think, the fair devil of the Rabbins, but is also the mediæval witch against whose beautiful locks Mephistopheles warns Faust when she appears at the Walpurgis-night orgie.

The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare? Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent, And round his heart one strangling golden hair.

The potency of Lilith's tresses has probably its origin in the hairy nature ascribed by the Rabbins to all demons (shedim), and found fully represented in Esau. Perhaps the serpent-locks of Medusa had a similar origin. Nay, there is a suggestion in Dante that these tresses of Medusa may have once represented fascinating rather than horrible serpents. As she approaches, Virgil is alarmed for his brother-poet:

'Turn thyself back, and keep thy vision hid; For, if the Gorgon show, and then behold, 'Twould all be o'er with e'er returning up.' So did the master say; and he himself Turned me, and to my own hands trusted not, But that with his too he should cover me. O you that have a sane intelligence, Look ye unto the doctrine which herein Conceals itself 'neath the strange verses' veil. [43]

If this means that the security against evil is to veil the eyes from it, Virgil's warning would be against a beautiful seducer, similar to the warning given by Mephistopheles to Faust against the fatal charms of Lilith. Since, however, even in the time of Homer, the Gorgon was a popular symbol of terrors, the possibility of a survival in Dante's mind of any more primitive association with Medusa is questionable. The Pauline doctrine, that the glory of a woman is her hair, no doubt had important antecedents: such glory might easily be degraded, and every hair turn to a fatal 'binder,' like the one golden thread of Lilith round the heart of her victim; or it might ensnare its owner. In Treves Cathedral there is a curious old picture of a woman carried to hell by her beautiful hair; one devil draws her by it, another is seated on her back and drives her by locks of it as a bridle.

In the later developments of the myth of Lilith she was, among the Arabs, transformed to a Ghoul, but in rabbinical legend she appears to have been influenced by the story of Lamia, whose name is substituted for Lilith in the Vulgate. Like Lilith, Lamia was robbed of her children, and was driven by despair to avenge herself on all children. [44] The name of Lamia was long used to frighten Italian children, as that of Lilith was by Hebrew nurses.

It is possible that the part assigned to Lilith in the temptation of Eve may have been suggested by ancient Egyptian sculptures, which represent the Tree of Life in Amenti (Paradise) guarded by the Serpent-goddess Nu. One of these in the British Museum represents the Osirian on his journey to heaven, and his soul in form of a human-headed bird, drinking the water of Life as poured out to them from a jar by the goddess who coils around the sacred sycamore, her woman's bust and face appearing amid the branches much like Lilith in our old pictures.

The Singhalese also have a kind of Lilith or Lamia whom they call Bodrima, though she is not so much dreaded for the sake of children as for her vindictive feelings towards men. She is the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth and in great agony. She may be heard wailing in the night, it is said, and if she meets any man will choke him to death. When her wailing is heard men are careful to stay within doors, but the women go forth with brooms in their hands and abuse Bodrima with epithets. She fears women, especially when they carry brooms. But the women have also some compassion for this poor ghost, and often leave a lamp and some betel leaves where she may get some warmth and comfort from them. If Bodrima be fired at, there may be found, perhaps, a dead lizard near the spot in the morning.

As protomartyr of female independence, Lilith suffered a fate not unlike that of her sisters and successors in our own time who have appealed from the legendary decision made in Eden: she became the prototype of the 'strong-minded' and 'cold-hearted' woman, and personification of the fatal fascination of the passionless. Her special relation to children was gradually expanded, and she was regarded as the perilous seducer of young men, each of her victims perishing of unrequited passion. She was ever young, and always dressed with great beauty. It would seem that the curse upon her for forsaking Adam--that her children should die in infancy--was escaped in the case of the children she had by Samaël. She was almost as prolific as Echidna. Through all the latter rabbinical lore it is repeated, 'Samaël is the fiery serpent, Lilith the crooked serpent,' and from their union came Leviathan, Asmodeus, and indeed most of the famous devils.

There is an ancient Persian legend of the first man and woman, Meschia and Meschiane, that they for a long time lived happily together: they hunted together, and discovered fire, and made an axe, and with it built them a hut. But no sooner had they thus set up housekeeping than they fought terribly, and, after wounding each other, parted. It is not said which remained ruler of the hut, but we learn that after fifty years of divorce they were reunited.

These legends show the question of equality of the sexes to have been a very serious one in early times. The story of Meschia and Meschiane fairly represents primitive man living by the hunt; that of Eden shows man entering on the work of agriculture. In neither of these occupations would there be any reason why woman should be so unequal as to set in motion the forces which have diminished her physical stature and degraded her position. Women can still hunt and fish, and they are quite man's equal in tilling the soil. [45]

In all sex-mythology there are intimations that women were taken captive. The proclamation of female subordination is made not only in the legend of Eve's creation out of the man's rib, but in the emphasis with which her name is declared to have been given her because she was the Mother of all living. In the variously significant legends of the Amazons they are said to have burned away their breasts that they might use the bow: in the history of contemporary Amazons--such as the female Areoi of Polynesia--the legend is interpreted in the systematic slaughter of their children. In the hunt, Meschia might be aided by Meschiane in many ways; in dressing the garden Adam might find Lilith or Eve a 'help meet' for the work; but in the brutal régime of war the child disables woman, and the affections of maternity render her man's inferior in the work of butchery. Herakles wins great glory by slaying Hyppolite; but the legends of her later reappearances--as Libussa at Prague, &c.,--follow the less mythological story of the Amazons given by Herodotus (IV. 112), who represents the Scythians as gradually disarming them by sending out their youths to meet them with dalliance instead of with weapons. The youths went off with their captured captors, and from their union sprang the Sauromatæ, among whom the men and women dressed alike, and fought and hunted together. But of the real outcome of that truce and union Tennyson can tell us more than Herodotus: in his Princess we see the woman whom maternity and war have combined to produce, her independence betrayed by the tenderness of her nature. The surrender, once secured, was made permanent for ages by the sentiments and sympathies born of the child's appeal for compassion.

In primitive ages the child must in many cases have been a burthen even to man in the struggle for existence; the population question could hardly have failed to press its importance upon men, as it does even upon certain animals; and it would be an especial interest to a man not to have his hut overrun with offspring not his own,--turning his fair labour into drudgery for their support, and so cursing the earth for him. Thus, while Polyandry was giving rise to the obvious complications under which it must ultimately disappear, it would be natural that devils of lust should be invented to restrain the maternal instinct. But as time went on the daughters of Eve would have taken the story of her fall and hardships too much to heart. The pangs and perils of childbirth were ever-present monitors whose warnings might be followed too closely. The early Jewish laws bear distinct traces of the necessity which had arrived for insisting on the command to increase and multiply. Under these changed circumstances it would be natural that the story of a recusant and passionless Eve should arise and suffer the penalties undergone by Lilith,--the necessity of bearing, as captive, a vast progeny against her will only to lose them again, and to long for human children she did not bring forth and could not cherish. The too passionate and the passionless woman are successively warned in the origin and outcome of the myth. [46]

It is a suggestive fact that the descendants of Adam should trace their fall not to the independent Lilith, who asserted her equality at cost of becoming the Devil's bride, but to the apparently submissive Eve who stayed inside the garden. The serpent found out the guarded and restrained woman as well as the free and defiant, and with much more formidable results. For craft is the only weapon of the weak against the strong. The submissiveness of the captive woman must have been for a long time outward only. When Adam found himself among thorns and briars he might have questioned whether much had been gained by calling Eve his rib, when after all she really was a woman, and prepared to take her intellectual rights from the Serpent if denied her in legitimate ways. The question is, indeed, hardly out of date yet when the genius of woman is compelled to act with subtlety and reduced to exert its influence too often by intrigue.

It is remarkable that we find something like a similar development to the two wives of Adam in Hindu mythology also. Káli and Dúrga have the same origin: the former is represented dancing on the prostrate form of her 'lord and master,' and she becomes the demoness of violence, the mother of the diabolical 'Calas' of Singhalese demonolatry. Dúrga sacrificed herself for her husband's honour, and is now adored. The counterpart of Dúrga-worship is the Zenana system. In countries where the Zenana system has not survived, but some freedom has been gained for woman, it is probable that Káli will presently not be thought of as necessarily trampling on man, and Lilith not be regarded as the Devil's wife because she will not submit to be the slave of man. When man can make him a home and garden which shall not be a prison, and in which knowledge is unforbidden fruit, Lilith will not have to seek her liberty by revolution against his society, nor Eve hers by intrigue; unfitness for co-operation with the ferocities of nature will leave her a help meet for the rearing of children, and for the recovery and culture of every garden, whether within or without the man who now asserts over woman a lordship unnatural and unjust.