The Lords of the Ghostland: A History of the Ideal

By Edgar Saltus

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Title: The Lords of the Ghostland
       A History of the Ideal

Author: Edgar Saltus

Release Date: March 12, 2010 [EBook #31608]

Language: English


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Transcriber's Note: Footnotes are placed at the end of the relevant
paragraph. In Chapters I and II, the printed "Mitra" was changed to
"Mithra" to match other occurrences in the text, which predominate.
In Chapter II, the notation [)a] represents the letter a with breve.
Also, an instance in the original text of the word "JHVH" in the
Hebrew alphabet has been changed to the Roman.




THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND

_A History of the Ideal_

By EDGAR SALTUS

  "Errons, les doigts unis, dans
  l'Alhambra du songe."
                    Renée Vivien

  NEW YORK
  MITCHELL KENNERLEY
  MCMVII

  COPYRIGHT, 1907
  BY EDGAR SALTUS

_The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. USA._


_By Mr. Saltus_

  HISTORIA AMORIS
  IMPERIAL PURPLE
  MARY MAGDALEN
  THE POMPS OF SATAN
  THE PERFUME OF EROS
  VANITY SQUARE




THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND


     I Brahma                    7

    II Ormuzd                   39

   III Amon-Râ                  60

    IV Bel-Marduk               81

     V Jehovah                 109

    VI Zeus                    140

   VII Jupiter                 166

  VIII The Nec Plus Ultra      189




THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND




I

BRAHMA


The ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the
world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world
grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language.
Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they
were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream
that they remain.

"Mortal has made the immortal," the _Rig-Veda_ explicitly declares.
The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it
has been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light,
ultimately dissolved. But, meanwhile, it founded religion, which,
revealed in storm and panic, for prophets had ignorance and dread. The
gods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there were
diabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena and
whatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac that
the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there
floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the
unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly
a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of
them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became
concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth
and sky, whose union was imagined--a hymen which the rain
suggested--and from which broader conceptions proceeded and grander
gods emerged.

The most poetic of these are perhaps the Hindu. At the heraldings of
newer gods, the lords of other ghostlands have, after battling
violently, swooned utterly away. But though many a fresher faith has
been brandished at them, apathetically, in serene indifference, the
princes of the Aryan sky endure.

It is their poetry that has preserved them. To their creators poetry
was abundantly dispensed. To no other people have myths been as
frankly transparent. To none other, save only their cousins the
Persians, have fancies more luminous occurred. The Persians so
polished their dreams that they entranced the world that was. Poets
can do no more. The Hindus too were poets. They were children as well.
Their first lisp, the first recorded stammer of Indo-European speech,
is audible still in the _Rig-Veda_, a bundle of hymns tied together,
four thousand years ago, for the greater glory of Fire. The worship of
the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited the antique altars. It
flamed in Persia, lit perhaps the shrine of Vesta, afterward dazzled
the Incas, igniting, meanwhile, not altars merely, but purgatory
itself.

In Persia, where it illuminated the face of Ormuzd, its beneficence is
told in the _Avesta_, a work of such holiness that it was polluted if
seen. In the _Rig-Veda_, there are verses which were subsequently
accounted so sacred that if a soudra overheard them the ignominy of
his caste was effaced.

The verses, the work of shepherds who were singers, are invocations to
the dawn, to the first flushes of the morning, to the skies'
heightening hues, and the vermillion moment when the devouring Asiatic
sun appears. There are other themes, minor melodies, but the chief
inspiration is light.

To primitive shepherds the approach of darkness was the coming of
death. The dawn, which they were never wholly sure would reappear, was
resurrection. They welcomed it with cries which the _Veda_ preserves,
which the _Avesta_ retains and the _Eddas_ repeat. The potent forces
that produced night, the powers potenter still that routed it, they
regarded as beings whose moods genuflexions could affect. In perhaps
the same spirit that Frenchmen assisted at a _lever du roi_, and
Englishmen attend a prince's levee, the Aryan breakfasted on song and
sacrifice. It was an homage to the rising sun.

The sun was _deva_. The Sanskrit root _div_, from which the word is
derived, produced deus, devi, divinities--numberless, accursed,
adored, or forgot. The common term applied to all abstractions that
are and have been worshipped, means _That which shines_ and the name
which, in the early Orient, signified a star, designates the Deity in
the Occident to-day.

Apologetically, Tertullian, a Christian Father, remarked: "Some think
our God is the Sun." There were excuses perhaps for those that did.
Adonai, a Hebrew term for the Almighty, is a plural. It means lords.
But the lords indicated were Baalim who were Lords of the Sun.
Moreover, when the early Christians prayed, they turned to the East.
Their holy day was, as the holy day of Christendom still is, Sunday,
day of the Sun, an expression that comes from the Norse, on whom also
shone the light of the Aryan deva.

To shepherds who, in seeking pasture for their flocks, were seeking
also pasture for their souls, the deva became Indra. They had other
gods. There was Agni, fire; Varuna, the sky; Maruts, the tempest.
There was Mithra, day, and Yama, death. There were still others,
infantile, undulant, fluid, not infrequently ridiculous also. But it
was Indra for whom the dew and honey of the morning hymns were spread.
It was Indra who, emerging from darkness, made the earth after his
image, decorated the sky with constellations and wrapped the universe
in space. It was he who poured indifferently on just and unjust the
triple torrent of splendour, light, and life.

Indra was triple. Triple Indra, the _Veda_ says. In that description
is the preface to a theogony of which Hesiod wrote the final page. It
was the germ of sacred dynasties that ruled the Aryan and the
Occidental skies. From it came the grandiose gods of Greece and Rome.
From it also came the paler deities of the Norse. Meanwhile ages fled.
Life nomad and patriarchal ceased. From forest and plain, temples
arose; from hymns, interpretations; from prayer, metaphysics; for
always man has tried to analyze the divine, always too, at some halt
in life, he has looked back and found it absent.

In meditation it was discerned that Indra was an effect, not the
cause. It was discerned also that that cause was not predicable of the
gods who, in their undulance and fluidity, suggested ceaseless
transformations and consequently something that is transformed.

The idea, patiently elaborated, resulted in a drainage of the fluid
myths and the exteriorisation of a being entirely abstract. Designated
first as Brahmanaspati, Lord of Prayer, afterward more simply as
Brahma, he was assumed to have been asleep in the secret places of the
sky, from which, on awakening, he created what is.

The conception, ideal itself, was not, however, ideal enough. The
labour of creating was construed as a blemish on the splendour of the
Supreme. It was held that the Soul of Things could but loll, majestic
and inert, on a lotos of azure. Then, above Brahma, was lifted Brahm,
a god neuter and indeclinable; neuter as having no part in life,
indeclinable because unique.

There was the apex of the world's most poetic creed, one distinguished
over all others in having no founder, unless a heavenly inspiration be
so regarded. But the apex required a climax. Inspiration provided it.

The forms of matter and of man, the glittering apsaras of the
vermillion dawns, Indra himself, these and all things else were
construed into a bubble that Brahm had blown. The semblance of reality
in which men occur and, with them, the days of their temporal breath,
was attributed not to the actual but to Mâyâ--the magic of a high
god's longing for something other than himself, something that should
contrast with his eternal solitude and fill the voids of his infinite
ennui. From that longing came the bubble, a phantom universe, the
mirage of a god's desire. Earth; sea and sky; all that in them is, all
that has been and shall be, are but the changing convolutions of a
dream.

In that dream there descended a scale of beings, above whom were set
three great lords, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva
the Destroyer, collectively the Tri-murti, the Hindu trinity expressed
in the mystically ineffable syllable Om. Between the trinity and man
came other gods, a whole host, powers of light and powers of darkness,
the divine and the demoniac fused in a hierarchy surprising but not
everlasting. Eventually the dream shall cease, the bubble break, the
universe collapse, the heavens be folded like a tent, the Tri-murti
dissolved, and in space will rest but the Soul of Things, at whose
will atoms shall reassemble and forms unite, dis-unite and reappear,
depart and return, endlessly, in recurring cycles.

That conception, the basis perhaps of the theory of cosmological days,
is perhaps also itself but a dream, yet one that, however defective,
has a beauty which must have been too fair. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva,
originally regarded as emanations of the ideal, became concrete.
Consorts were found for them. From infinity they were lodged in idols.
A worship sensuous when not grotesque ensued, from which the ideal
took flight.

That was the work of the clergy. Brahmanism is also. The archaic
conflict between light and darkness, the triumph of the former over
the latter, diminished, at their hands, into the figurative. That is
only reasonable. It was only reasonable also that they should claim
the triumph as their own. Without them the gods could do nothing. They
would not even be. In the _Rig-Veda_ and the _Vedas_ generally they
are transparent. The subsequent evolution of the Paramâtmâ, the
Tri-murti and the hierarchy, had, for culmination, the apotheosis of a
priesthood that had invented them and who, for the invention, deserved
the apotheosis which they claimed and got. They were priests that were
poets, and poets that were seers. But they were not sorcerers. They
could not provide successors equal to themselves. It was the later
clergy that pulled poetry from the infinite, stuffed it into idols and
prostituted it to nameless shames.

In the _Bhagavad-Gita_ it is written: "Nothing is greater than I. In
scriptures I am prayer. I am perfume in flowers, brilliance in light.
I am life and its source. I am the soul of creation. I am the
beginning and the end. I am the Divine."

That is Brahm. Ormuzd has faded. Zeus has passed. Jupiter has gone.
With them the divinities of Egypt and the lords of the Chaldean sky
have been reabsorbed and forgot. Brahm still is. The cohorts of Cyrus
might pray Ormuzd to peer where he glowed. There, the phalanxes of
Alexander might raise altars to Zeus. Parthians and Tatars might
dispute the land and the god. Muhammadans could bring their Allah and
Christians their creed. Indifferently Brahm has dreamed, knowing that
he has all time as these all have their day.

The conception of that apathy, grandiose in itself and marvellous in
its persistence, was due to unknown poets that had in them the true
_souffle_ of the real ideal. But that also demanded a climax. They
produced it in the theory that the afflictions of this life are due to
transgressions in another.

From afflictions death, they taught, is not a release, for the reason
that there is no death. There is but absorption in Brahm. Yet that
consummation cannot occur until all transgressions, past and present,
have been expiated and the soul, lifted from the eddies of migration,
becomes Brahm himself.

To be absorbed, to be Brahm, to be God, is an ambition, certainly
vertiginous yet as surely divine. But to succeed, consciousness of
success must be lost. A mortal cannot attain divinity until
annihilation is complete. To become God nothing must be left of man.
To loose, then, every bond, to be freed from every tie, to retire from
finite things, to mount to and sink in the immutable, to see Death
die, was and is the Hindu ideal.

Of the elect, that is. Of the higher castes, of the priest, of the
prince. But not of the people. The ideal was not for them, salvation
either. It was idle even to think about it. Set in hell, they had to
return here until in some one of the twenty-four lakhs of birth which
the chain of migrations comports, and which to saint and soudra were
alike dispensed, they arrived here in the purple. Then only was the
opportunity theirs to rescale a sky that was reserved for prelates and
rajahs.

Suddenly, to the pariah, to the hopeless, to those who outcast in hell
were outcast from heaven, an erect and facile ladder to that sky was
brought. The Buddha furnished it. If he did not, a college of
dissidents assumed that he had, and in his name indicated a stairway
which, set among the people, all might mount and at whose summit gods
actually materialized.

To those who believe in the Dalai Lama--there are millions that have
believed, there are millions that do--he is not a vicar of the divine,
he is himself divine, a god in a tenement of flesh who, as such,
though he die, immediately is reincarnated; a god therefore always
present among his people, whose history is a continuous gospel. In
contemporaneous Italy, a peasant may aspire to the papacy. In the
uplands of Asia, men have loftier ambitions. There they may become
Buddha, who perhaps never was, except in legend.

In the _Lalita Vistâra_ the legend unfolds. In the strophes of the
poem one may assist at the Buddha's birth, an event which is said to
have occurred at Kapilavastu. Oriental geography is unacquainted with
the place. With the thing even Occidental philosophy is familiar.
Kapilavastu means the substance of Kapila. The substance is atheism.

History has its hesitancies. Often it stammers uncertainly. But its
earliest pages agree in representing Kapila as the initial religious
rebel. Kapila was the first to declare the divine a human and invalid
conjecture. The announcement, with its prefaces and deductions, is
contained in the _Sankhya Karika_, a system of rationalism, still read
in India, where it is known as the godless tract.

In the Orient, existence is usually a sordid nightmare when it does
not happen to be a golden dream. Kapila taught that it was a prison
from which release could be had only through intellectual development.
That is Kapilavastu, the substance of Kapila, where the Buddha was
born. In the _Lalita Vistâra_ it is fairyland.

There, Gotama the Buddha is the Prince Charming of a sovereign house.
But a prince who developed into a nihilist prior to re-becoming the
god that anteriorly he had been. It was while in heaven that he
selected Mâyâ, a ranee, to be his mother. It was surrounded by the
heavenly that he appeared. The fields foamed with flowers. The skies
flamed with faces. In the air apsaras floated, fanning themselves with
peacocks' tails. The galleries of the palace festooned themselves with
pearls. On the terraces a rain of perfume fell. In the parterres Mâyâ
strolled. A tree bent and bowed to her. Touching a branch with her
hand she looked up and yawned. Painlessly from her immaculate breast
Gotama issued. An immense lotos sprouted to receive him. To cover him
a parasol dropped from above. He, however, already occupied, was
contemplating space, the myriad worlds, the myriad lives, and
announced himself their saviour. At once a deluge of roses descended.
The effulgence of a hundred thousand colours shone. A spasm of delight
pulsated. Sorrow and anger, envy and fear, fled and fainted. From the
zenith came a murmur of voices, the sound of dancing, the kiss of
timbril and of lute.

That is Oriental poetry. Oriental philosophy is less ornate. From the
former the Buddha could not have come. From the latter he probably
did, if not in flesh at least in spirit. To that spirit antiquity was
indebted, as modernity is equally, for the doctrines of a teacher
known variously as Gotama the Enlightened and Sakya the Sage. Whether
or not the teacher himself existed is, therefore, unimportant. The
existence of the Christ has been doubted. But the doctrines of both
survive. They do more, they enchant. Occasionally they seem to
combine. The Gospels have obviously nothing in common with the _Lalita
Vistâra_, which is an apocryphal novel of uncertain date. The
resemblance that is reflected comes from the _Tripitaka_, the Three
Baskets that constitute the evangels of the Buddhist faith.

In an appendix to the _Mahâvaggo_, it is stated that disciples of
Gotama, who knew his sermons and his parables by heart, determined the
canon "after his death." The expression might mean anything. But a
ponderable antiquity is otherwise shown. Asoko, a Hindu emperor, sent
an embassy to Ptolemy Philadelphos. The circumstance was set forth
bilingually on various heights. In another inscription Asoko
recommended the study of the _Tripitaka_ and mentioned titles of the
books. Ptolemy Philadelphos reigned at Alexandria in the early part of
the third century B.C. The _Tripitaka_ must therefore have existed
then. But the thirty-seventh year of Asoko's reign was, in a third
inscription, counted as the two hundred and fifty-seventh from the
Buddha's death, a reckoning which makes them much older. Their
existence, however, as a fourth inscription shows, was oral.
Transmitted for hundreds of years by trained schools of reciters, it
was during a synod that occurred in the first quarter of the first
century before Christ that, finally, they were written.

In them it is recited that Mâyâ, the mother of Gotama, was immaculate.
According to St. Matthew, Maria, the mother of Jesus, was also.
Previously, in each instance, the coming of a Messiah had been
foretold. The infant Jesus was visited by magi. The infant Buddha was
visited by kings. Afterward, neither Jesus or Gotama wrote. But both
preached charity, chastity, poverty, humility, and abnegation of self.
Both fasted in a wilderness. Both were tempted by a devil. Both
announced a second advent. Both were transfigured. Both died in the
open air. At the death of each there was an earthquake. Both healed
the sick. Both were the light of a world which both said would cease
to be.

According to _Luke_, a courtesan visited Jesus and had her sins
remitted. According to the _Mahâvaggo_, Gotama was visited by a harlot
whom he instructed in things divine.[1] In _Matthew_, Jesus is
depicted as a glutton and a wine-bibber. In the _Mahâvaggo_, the
picture of Gotama is the same.[2] In _Matthew_ it is written; "Lay not
up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth consume
and where thieves break through and steal." The _Khuddakapatho_ says:
"Righteousness is a treasure which no man can steal. It is a treasure
that abideth alway."[3] In _Luke_ it is written: "As ye would that men
should do unto you, do ye also unto them." The _Dhammaphada_ say: "Put
yourself in the place of others, do as you would be done by."[4]

[Footnote 1: Luke vii. 37-50. Sacred Books of the East, xi. 30.]

[Footnote 2: Matthew xi, 19. S. B. E. xiii. 92.]

[Footnote 3: Matthew vi. 19. S. B. E. x. 191.]

[Footnote 4: Luke vi. 31. S. B. E. x. 36.]

The miracle of walking on the water, that of the money-bearing fish,
the story of the Woman at the Well, the proclamation of an
unpardonable sin, even the mediæval myth of the Wandering Jew, may
have originated in Buddhist legend.[5]

[Footnote 5: _Cf._ Edmunds: Buddhist and Christian Gospels.]

Pious minds have been disturbed by these similitudes. The resemblance
between Mâyâ and Maria has perplexed. The perhaps uncertain likeness
of Gotama to Jesus has occasioned irreverent doubts. But the
parallelisms may be fortuitous. Probably they are. Even otherwise they
but enhance the sororal beauties of faiths which if cognate are quite
distinct. Then too the penetrating charm of the parables and sermons
of the Buddha fades before the perfection of the sermons and parables
of the Christ. The birth, ministry, transfiguration, and passing of
Gotama are marvels which, however exquisite, the wholly spiritual
apparitions of the Lord efface.

Other similarities, such as they are, may without impropriety,
perhaps, be attributed to the ideals progressus. Hindu and Chaldean
beliefs constitute the two primal inspirational faiths. From the one,
Buddhism and Zoroasterism developed. From the other the creed of
Israel and possibly that of Egypt came. Religions that followed were
afterthoughts of the divine. They were revelations sometimes more
intelligible, in one instance inexpressibly more luminous, yet
invariably reminiscent of an anterior light.

The light of contemporaneous Buddhism is that of Catholicism--heaven
deducted, a heaven, that is, of ceaseless Magnificats. The latter
conception is Christian. But it was Persian first. Otherwise, in
common with the Church, Buddhism has saints, censers, litanies,
tonsures, holy water, fasts, and confession. Barring confession, the
extreme antiquity of which has been attested, the other rites and
ceremonies are, it may be, borrowed, but not the high morality, the
altruism, the renunciation and effacement of self, which Buddhists no
longer very scrupulously observe, perhaps, but which their religion
was the first to instil.

Buddhism originally had neither rites nor ritual. It was merely a
mendicant order in which one tried to do what is right, with, for
reward, the hope of Pratscha-Parâmita, the peace that is beyond all
knowledge and which Nirvana provides. That peace is--or was--the
complete absence of anything, extinction utter and everlasting, a
state of absolute non-existence which no whim of Brahm may disturb.

Buddhism denied Brahm and every tenet of Brahmanism, save only that
which concerned the immedicable misery of life. Of final deliverance
there was in Brahmanism no known mode. None at least that was
exoteric. Brahmanism rolled man ceaselessly through all forms of
existence, from the elementary to the divine, and even from the
latter, even when he was absorbed in Brahm, flung him out and back
into a fresh circle of unavoidable births.

The theory is horrible. In the horrible occasionally is the sublime.
To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the
categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and
demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really
absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized
by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more
peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were
crouching and waiting. Buddhistic atheism had resulted but in the
production of an earlier New Testament. From the depths of the ideal,
swarms of bedecked and bejewelled divinities escorted Brahm back to a
lotos of azure. Coincidentally Gotama, enthroned in the zenith,
contemplated clusters of gods that dangled through twenty-eight abodes
of bliss which other poets created.

In demonstrable triumph the Buddha was then, as he has been since,
even if previously his existence had been omitted. But though he never
were, there nevertheless occurred a social revolution of which he was
the nominal originator and which, had it not been diverted into other
realms, might have resulted in Brahm's entire extinction.

Wolves do not devour each other. Ideals should not either. The
Oriental heavens were wide enough to serve as fastnesses for two sets
of hostile, germane, and ineffably poetic aberrations. There was room
even for more. There always should be. Of the divine one can have
never enough.

The gospel according to Sakya the Eremite is divine. It is divine in
its limitless compassion, and though compassion, when analyzed,
becomes but egotism in an etherialized form, yet the gospel had other
attractions. In demonstrating that life is evil, that rebirth is evil
too, that to be born even a god is evil still,--in demonstrating these
things, while insisting that all else, Buddhism included, is but
vanity, it fractured the charm of error in which man had been
confined.

Sakya saw men born and reborn in hell. He saw them ignorant, as
humanity has always been, unaware of their abjection as men are
to-day, and over the gulfs of existence, through the torrents of
rebirth, he offered to ferry them. But in the ferrying they had to
aid. The aid consisted in the rigorous observance of every virtue that
Christianity afterward professed. Therein is the beauty of Buddhism.
Its profundity resided in a revelation that everything human perishes
except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its
tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews.
Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once
popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism is due to
Cathay.

To the Hindu life was an incident between two eternities, an episode
in the string of deaths and rebirths. To Mongolians it was a unique
experience. They had no knowledge of the supersensible, no suspicion
of the ideal. Among them Buddhism operated a conversion. It stimulated
a thirst for the divine.

The thirst is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could
not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook
parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder,
an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About
him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of
doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became
Elysium, and a religion which began as a heresy culminated in a
superstition. That is the history of creeds.




II

ORMUZD


"The purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of
things."

So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra.

"And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked.

"There was light and the living Word."[6] Long later the statement was
repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in
the course of a conversation that the _Avesta_ reports. In a similar
manner _Exodus_ provides a revelation which Moses received. There
Jehovah said: _'ehyèh '[)a]sher 'ehyèh_. In the _Avesta_ Ormuzd said:
_ahmi yad ahmi_.[7] Word for word the declarations are identical. Each
means _I am that I am_.[8]

[Footnote 6: Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393].

[Footnote 7: Avesta, Hormazd Yasht.]

[Footnote 8: Exodus iii. 14.]

The conformity of the pronouncements may be fortuitous. Their relative
priority uncertain chronology obscures. The date that orthodoxy has
assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zarathrustra
lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Both dates are
perhaps questionable. But a possible hypothesis philology provides.
The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew
Jhvh, now usually written Jahveh and commonly translated: _He who
causes to be._ The original rendering of Ormuzd is Ahura-mazda. Ahura
means _living_ and mazdaô _creator_. The period when _Exodus_ was
written is probably post-exilic. The period when the _Avesta_ was
completed is assumed to be pre-Cyrian. It was at the junction of the
two epochs that Iran and Israel met.

But, however the pronouncements may conform, however also they may
confuse, the one reported in _Exodus_ is alone exact. In subsequent
metamorphoses the name might fade, the deity remained. Whereas, save
to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, once omnipotent throughout the Persian
sky, has gone. A time, though, there was, when from his throne in the
ideal he menaced the apathy of Brahm, the majesty of Zeus, when even
from the death of deaths he might have ejected Buddha and, supreme in
the Orient, ruled also in the West. Salamis prevented that. But one
may wonder whether the conquest had not already been effected, whether
for that matter the results are not apparent still. Brahma, Ormuzd,
Zeus, Jupiter, are but different conceptions of a primal idea. They
are four great gods diversely represented yet originally identical,
and whose attributes Jahveh, in his ascensions, perhaps absorbed.

Ormuzd represented purity and light. For his worship no temple was
necessary, barely a shrine, never an image. In his celestial court
were parikas, the glittering bayaderes of love that a later faith
called peris, but his sole consorts were Prayers. About him and them
gathered amshaspands and izeds, angels and seraphs, the winged host of
loveliness that in Babylon enthralled the Jews who returned from
captivity escorted by them. The allurement of their charm, enchanting
then, enchants the world to-day. There has been little that is more
poetic, except perhaps Ormuzd himself, who symbolized whatever is
blinding in beauty, particularly the sun's effulgence, the radiance of
light.

The light endures, though the god has gone. Yet at the time, aloof in
clear ether and aloft, he resplended in a sovereignty that only
Ahriman disputed.

Ahriman has been more steadfast than Ormuzd. He too captivated the
captive Hebrews. The latter adopted him and called him Satan, as they
also adopted one of his minor legates, Ashmodai--transformed by the
Vulgate into Asmodeus--a little jealous devil who, in the apocryphal
_Tobit_, strangled husbands on their bridal nights. Ahriman, his
master, represented everything that was the opposite of Ormuzd.
Ahriman dwelt in darkness, Ormuzd in light. Ormuzd was primate of
purity; Ahriman, prince of whatever is base. One had angels and
archangels for aids, the other fiends and demons. Between their forces
war was constant. Each strove for the soul of man. But after death,
when, in the balance, the deeds of the defunct were weighed, there
appeared a golden-eyed redeemer, Mithra, who so closely resembled the
Christ that the world hesitated, for a moment, between them.

It was because of these conceptions that Persia dreamed of conquering
the West. At Marathon and at Salamis that illusion was looted. History
tells of the cohorts that descended there. It relates further what
they did. But of what they thought there is no record. It was,
perhaps, too obvious. Ormuzd, god of light and, in the Orient, god of
the day, was, in the darker and duller Occident, menaced there also by
Ahriman. Politically the expedition is not very explicable. Considered
from a religious standpoint the motive is clear. But though the
Persian forces could not uphold their light in Greece, higher forces
projected it far beyond, to the remote north, to a south that was
still remoter.

Originally the light was Vedic. It was identical with that of Agni, of
Indra and of Varuna. But while these, without subsidence, passed,
absorbed by Brahm, the light of Iran, deflecting, persisted, and so
potently that it lit the Teutonic sky, glows still in Christendom,
after refracting perhaps in Inca temples. Its revelation is due to
Zarathrustra.

Zarathrustra, commonly written Zoroaster, is a name translatable into
"star of gold" and also into "keeper of old camels." Probably it was
first employed to designate an imaginary prophet, and then a series of
spiritual though actual successors by whom, in the course of
centuries, the _Avesta_ was evolved. Otherwise Zarathrustra and Gotama
are brothers in Brahmanaspati. Both had virgin mothers. In the lives
of both miracles are common. The advent of Zarathrustra was accounted
the ruin of demons. When he was born he laughed aloud. As a child he
slept in flames. As a man he walked on water. Before prodigies such as
these fiends fell like autumn leaves. Hence, on the part of the devil,
an attempt to seduce him from the divine. Mairya, the demon of death,
offered him, as Mara offered Gotama, as Satan offered Jesus, the
empire of the earth. Zarathrustra rebuked the devil first with stones,
then with pious words. From him, as from the Buddha and the Christ,
abashed the tempter retreated.[9]

[Footnote 9: Darmestetter: Ormazd et Ahriman.]

That victory over evil, the Parsis to-day regard as the capital event
in the history of the world. It was the immediate prelude to the
revelation of the Law which Ormuzd vouchsafed to his prophet.

The revelation occurred on a mountain, in the course of conversations,
during which Zarathrustra questioned and Ormuzd, in the voice of
heaven, replied. So was the Law proclaimed in India. There Mithra and
Varuna sang it through the sky.[10] The expression is notable, for the
song of the sky is thunder and the theophany that of Sinai. There is
another _rapprochement_ in Babylonian lore and a third in the _Eddas_,
where it is related that to Sigurd the secret of the runes was sung.

[Footnote 10: Rig-Veda, i. 151.]

Meanwhile, the revelation completed and proclaimed, Zarathrustra died
as miraculously as he was born, foretelling, as he went, the coming of
a messiah, his own son, Coshyos--the delayed fruit of an immaculate
hymen that is not to be fecund until the end of time--but who, at the
consummation of the ages, will rejuvenate the world, affranchise it
from death, vanquish Ahriman, terminate the struggle between good and
evil, purify hell and fill it full with glory. Then the dead shall
rise and immortality be universal.[11]

[Footnote 11: Zamyad Yasht. xix. 89 _sq._]

Zoroaster is obviously mythical. The Buddha is also. But precisely as
the Buddhist scriptures exist, so also do the Zoroastrian. They do
more. Frequently they enlighten, occasionally they exalt. Written in
gold on perfumed leather, the original edition, limited to two copies,
was so sacred that it was sullied if seen. Burned with the palace of
Persepolis--which Alexander, the Great Sinner, in a drunken orgy,
destroyed--only fragments of the fargards remain. These tell of
creation, effected in six epochs, and of a _pairi-daêza_.

Delitzsch voluminously asked: _Wo lag das Paradies?_ There it is.
There is the primal paradise. In it Ormuzd put Mashya, the first man,
and Mashyana, the first woman, whom Ahriman, in the form of a serpent,
seduced. Thereafter ensued the struggle in which all have or will
participate, one that, extending beyond the limits of the visible
world, arrays seasons and spirits and the senses of man in a conflict
of good and evil that can end only when, from the depths of the dawn,
radiant in the vermillion sky, Coshyos, hero of the resurrection,
triumphantly appears.

The parallel between this romance and subsequent poetry is curious. In
Chaldea, before the fargards were, the story of Creation, of Eden, and
of the fall had been told. In Egypt, before the _Avesta_ was written,
the resurrection and the life were known. Similar legends and
prospects may or may not represent an autonomous development of
Iranian thought. The successors of the problematic Zarathrustra, the
line of magi who wrote and taught in his name, may have gathered the
tales and theories elsewhere. In the creed which they instituted there
is a trinity. India had one, Egypt another, Babylonia a third.
Babylonia had even three of them. But in Mithra, Iran had a redeemer
that no other creed possessed. In Coshyos was a saviour, virgin born,
who nowhere else was imagined. In Mara, Buddhism had a Satan. The
Persian Ahriman is Satan himself. Babylon had angels and cherubs. In
Iran there were guardian angels, there were archangels with flaming
swords, there were fairies, there were goblins, the celestial, the
poetic, the demoniac combined. Zoroasterism may or may not have had a
past, it is perhaps evident that it had a future.

An inscription chiselled in the red granite of Ekbatana describes
Ormuzd as creator of heaven and earth. In the _Veda_ the description
of Indra is identical.[12] It was applied equally to Jahveh in Judea.
But above Jahveh, Kabbalists discerned En Soph. Above Indra
metaphysicians discovered Brahma. Similarly the Persian magi found
that Ormuzd, however perfect, was not perfect enough and, from the
depths of the ideal, they disclosed Zervan Akerene, the Eternal, from
whom all things come and to whom all return.

[Footnote 12: R. V. x. 3. "Indra created heaven and earth."]

That conception is not reached in the _Avesta_. It is in the
_Bundahish_, a work which, while much later, is based on earlier
traditions, memories it may be, of antediluvian legends brought from
the summits of upper Asia by Djemschid, the fabulous Abraham of the
Persians of whom Zarathrustra was the Moses. But in default of the
Eternal, the Avesta contains pictures of enduring charm.

Among these is a highly poetic pastel that displays the soul of man
surprised in the first post-mortem ambuscades. There a figure,
beautiful or revolting, cries at him: "I am thyself, the image of
thine earthly life."

If that life has been beautiful, the soul of man, led by itself, is
conducted to heaven. Otherwise, led still by itself, it descended to
Drûjô-demâna, the House of Destruction, where, fed on insults and
offal, it waited till its sins were destroyed. The waiting might be
long. It was not everlasting. There was Mithra to intercede. Besides,
evil was regarded but as a shadow on the surface of things. In the
seventh epoch of creation, a period yet to be, the age which Coshyos
is to usher, the shadow will fade. The wicked, purified of their
wickedness, will be received among the blessed. Even Ahriman is to be
converted. In that definite triumph of light over darkness is the
resurrection and the life, life in Garô-demâna, literally House of
Hymns, a pre-Christian heaven, yet strictly Christian, where, to the
trumpetings of angels, hosannahs are ceaselessly sung.[13]

[Footnote 13: Yasht. xxviii. 10, xxxiv. 2.]

John--or, more exactly, his homonym--was perhaps acquainted with that
idea, as he may have been with other theories that the _Avesta_
contains. But the possibility is a detail. It is the idea that counts.
Behind it is the unique character of this doctrine which, in
eliminating evil, converted even Satan.

Satan seldom gets his due. He was the first artist and has remained
the greatest. In creating evil he fashioned what is a luxury and a
necessity combined. Evil is the counterpart of excellence. Both have
their roots in nature. One could not be destroyed without the other.
For every form of evil there is a corresponding form of good. Virtue
would be meaningless were it not for vice. Honour would have no
nobility were it not for shame. If ever evil be banished from the
scheme of things, life could have no savour and joy no delight.
Happiness and unhappiness would be synonymous terms.

It is for this reason that scoffers have mocked at heaven. Heaven may
be very different from what has been fancied. But the theory of it,
however unphilosophic, which Zoroasterism supplied, carried with it a
creed not of tears but of smiles, a religion of lofty tolerance, one
in which the demonology barely alarmed, for redemption was assured,
and so fully that on earth melancholy was accounted a folly.

Though tolerant, it could be austere. Meanness, thanklessness,
loquaciousness, jealousy, an unbecoming attire, evil thoughts,
whatever is sensual, whatever is coarse, any promenade in mud actual
or metaphorical, severely it condemned. Particularly was avarice
censured. "There are many who do not like to give," Ormuzd, in the
_Vendidad_, confided to Zarathrustra. The high god added: "Ahriman
awaits them."

Ahriman awaited also the harlot who, elsewhere, at that period, was
holy. Yet in lapses, confession and repentance sufficed for remission,
provided that in praying for forgiveness the sinner forgave those that
had sinned against him. If he lacked the time, were he dying, a priest
might yet save him with words whispered in the ear. That was the
extreme unction, hardly administrable, however, in case of wilful
omission of the _darûn_, which was communion.

This sacrament, the most mystic of the Church, was observed by the
Incas, who also confessed, also atoned, who, like the Buddhists, were
baptized, but who, like the Persians, worshipped the sun and, with
perhaps a finer instinct of what the beautiful truly is, worshipped
too the rainbow.[14]

[Footnote 14: Garcilasso: Commentarios reales.]

Huraken, the winged and feathered serpent-god of the Toltecs, was
adored in temples that upheld a cross. The Incas lacked that symbol.
But they had a Satan. They had also the expectation of a saviour,
belief in whom could alone have consoled for the advent of Pizarro.
Over what highways of sea or sky, the living Word, which Ormuzd spoke,
reached them, there has been no somnambulist of history to divine. But
in the splendour that Cuzco was, in the golden temples of the town of
gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred peacocks strolled and girls
more sacred still--vestals whom Pizarro's soldiers raped--in that City
of the Sun, the Word re-echoed. The mystery of it, reported back to
the Holy Office, was declared an artifice of the devil.

Less mysteriously, through the obvious vehicle of cognate speech, it
reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie
sagas. Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite
as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is
almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd.
The æsir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the
izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of
Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garô-demâna, was
more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns.

What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light.
However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north
its rays were lost. The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set
the gods in twilight. It stirred the scalds to runes but not to
inspiration. There is none in the _Eddas_. Nor was there any in the
_Nibelungen_, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the
flaming scores of Wagner.

Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from their secular
slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their Occidental apotheosis,
and, it may be, on steps of song, mounted to the ideal where Zervan
Akerene muses.




III

AMON-RÂ


"I am all that is, has been and shall be. No mortal has lifted my veil."

That pronouncement, graven on the statue of Isis, confounded Egypt,
condemning her mysteriously for some sin, anterior and unknown, to
ignorance of the divine, leaving her, in default of revelation, to
worship what she would, jackals, hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts
and birds. Yet to the people, whose minds were as naked as their
bodies, and who, in addition, were slaves, there must have been
something very superior in the lords of the desert and the air.
Obviously they were wise. Among them were some that knew in advance
the change of the seasons. Others, indifferent to man and independent
of him, migrated over highways known but to them. The senses of all
were keyed to vibrations. They heard the inaudible, saw the invisible,
and, though they had a language of their own, when questioned never
replied. To slaves, clearly they were gods.

Not to the priests, however. They knew better. They but affected
belief in divinities that had perhaps emigrated from the enigmas of
geography and who were polychrome as the skies they had crossed.
Fashioned in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some,
though, were alive. In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls
draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little
gold chains detained. Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its
role of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal. Others were
nearly sublime. Particularly there was Ausar.

Ausar, called commonly Osiris, died for man. In an attempt to preserve
harmony, in a struggle with the real spirit of actual evil which
discord is, Osiris was slain. Being a god he arose from the dead. The
latter thereafter he judged.

The people knew little, if anything, concerning him. They knew little
if anything at all. They had a menagerie and a full consciousness of
their own insignificance. That sufficed. In all of carnal Africa, the
priest alone possessed what then was truth and of which a part is
theology now.

Egypt, in which the evangels began, millennia before they were
written, knew no genesis. Her history, sculptured in hieroglyphics,
was cut on pages of stone. It awoke in the falling of cataracts. It
ended with simoons in sand. The books that tell of it are pyramids,
obelisks, necropoles; constructions colossal and enigmatic; the
granite epitaphs of finite things. To-day, in the shattered temples,
from which all other gods are gone, one divinity still lingers. It is
Silence.

In Iran sorrow was a folly. In Egypt speech was a sin. Apis could
bellow, Anubis bark; man might not even stutter. It was in the
submission of dumb obedience that the palpable eternities of the
pyramids were piled. Yet in that darkness was light, in silence was
the Word. But to behold and to hear was possible only in sanctuaries
reserved to the elect. The gods too had their castes. The lowest only
were fellahin fit to worship. On the lips of the others the priests
held always a finger. Crocodiles were less distant, hyenas more
approachable, and the Egyptian, barred from the divine, found it on
earth. He prayed to scorpions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the
jackal with psalms; with dances he placated the ibis. It was
ridiculous but human. He too would have a part, however insensate, in
the dreams of all mankind.

Yet, had he looked not down but up, he would have lifted at least a
fringe of the Isian veil. The sun, taken as a symbol only, the symbol
of life, death, and resurrection--phases which its rising, setting,
and return suggest--was the deity, the one really existing god.
Nominally, figuratively, even concretely, there were others; a whole
host, a hierarchy vaster than the Aryans knew; a great crowd of
divinities less grandiose than gaudy, that swarmed in space, strolled
through the dawns and dusk, thronged the temples, eyed the quick,
confronted the dead. They were but appearances, mere masks,
expressions, hypostases, eidolons of Râ.

Râ was the celestial pharaoh. But not originally. Originally he was
part of a triad which itself was part of a triple trinity. Râ then was
but one divinity among many gods. These ultimately lost themselves in
him so indistinguishably that there are litanies in which the names of
seventy-five of them are used in addressing him. Regarded as the
unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, he succeeded in achieving
the incomprehensible. He became triune and remained unique. He was
Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus. At once father, mother, and son, he
fecundated, conceived, produced, and was.

From him gods and goddesses emanated in sidereal fireworks that
illuminated the heavens, dazzled the earth, then melted into each
other, faded away or, occasionally, flared afresh in a glare
dispelling and persistent. Among these latter was Amon. Glimmering
primarily in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the thin fire of his
shrine mounted spirally to Râ, fused its flames with his, expanding
and uniting so inseparably with them, that the two became one. Amon
means _hidden_; Amon-Râ, _the hidden light_.

In the infinite, time is not. In heaven there is no chronology. The
date of any god's accession to supremacy there is, consequently, apart
from mortal ken. None the less that of Amon-Râ is known. At the
beginning of the earthly reign of Amonhoteph III., an edict,
scrupulously executed throughout Egypt, determined, on monument and
wall, the substitution of Amon-Râ's name for that of previously
superior gods.

The pharaohnate of Amonhoteph began about 1500 B.C. It is from that
period, therefore, that dates the divinity's accession to the
pharaohnate of the skies. There is, or should be, a reason for all
things. There is one for that. Amonhoteph regarded himself as Amon's
son. It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, as it was also of the
Incas, to believe, or at least to assert, that their fathers,
therefore themselves, were divine. As a consequence of the idea they
prayed to their own images and likened their palaces to inns.

Originally foreigners, invaders from Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs
first conquered, then surprised. It was they that embanked the Nile,
turned morasses into meadows and piled the pyramids. More exactly, it
was by their commands that these miracles were contrived. To the
neolithic people whom they subjugated their divinity was clear. So
elsewhere was that of the kings of Akkad. Like them, like the Incas,
the pharaohs were of the solar race and so remained from the first
dynasty to the Greek conquest, when Alexander, to legitimatize his
sovereignty, had himself acknowledged as Amon's son.

The ceremony had its precedents. An inscription in eulogy of the great
Rameses states that Amon, when possessing the pharaohs august mother,
engendered him as a god. On a wall of the Temple of Luxor an earlier
inscription sets forth that the god of Thebes, incarnating himself in
the person of Thotmes IV., appeared in his divine form to the
pharaoh's queen, who, at sight of his beauty, conceived.

It was therefore not in the beast alone, but in man, that divinity
revealed itself in Egypt. That in Judea a similar revelation should
have been withheld until after the Roman occupation is hardly
explicable on the theory, general among scholars, that Moses is not a
historical character, for an identical revelation had been received in
Babylonia where Israel twice loitered. Moreover, a curious parallelism
exists between post-Mosaic prophecy and Egyptian clairvoyance. In a
papyrus of the Thotmes III. epoch--about 1600 B.C.--it is written:
"The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish
his name forever. They shall be removed from evil and the wicked shall
humble their mouths." In commenting the passage an Egyptologist noted
that the words _son of man_ are a literal translation of the original
_si-n-sa_.[15] But already in Akkad a similar prophecy had been
uttered.[16] It may be, therefore, that it was in Babylon that Israel
first heard it.

[Footnote 15: Sayce: Guifford Lectures.]

[Footnote 16: Jastrow: The Dibbara Epic.]

The doctrine of a trinity, common to almost all antique beliefs, was a
blasphemy to the Jews. The belief in immortality, also prevalent,
though less general, was to them an abomination. The miracle of divine
descent they were perhaps too practical to accept. There was no room
in their creed for the dogma of future rewards and punishments, and
that, together with other articles of the Christian faith, Egypt's
elect professed.

The slaves and mongrels that constituted the bulk of the population
were not instructed in these things and would not have understood them
if they had been. In Babylonia education was compulsory. In Egypt it
was an art, a gift, mysterious in itself, reserved to the few. To the
Egyptian, religion consisted in paraded symbols, in avenues of
sphinxes, in forests of obelisks, in pharaohs seated colossally before
the temple doors, in inscriptions that told indistinguishably of
theomorphic men and anthropomorphic gods, and in a belief in the
divinity of bulls and hawks.

These latter had their uses. In transformations elsewhere effected,
the sacred bull may have become a golden calf, the golden hawk a
sacred dove. In Egypt they were otherwise serviceable. The worship of
them, of other birds and beasts, of insects and vipers as well,
ecclesiastically indorsed, hid the myth of metempsychosis.

Of that the people knew nothing. When they died they ceased to be.
Even mummification, usually supposed to have been general, was not for
them. Down to an epoch relatively late it was a privilege reserved to
priests and princes. When the commonalty were embalmed it was with the
opulent design that, in a future existence, they should serve their
masters as they had in this. Embalming was a preparation for the
Judgment Day. Of that the people knew nothing either. It was even
unlawful that concerning it they should be apprised.

In the Louvre is a statue of Ptah-meh, high priest of Memphis. On it
are the significant words: "Nothing was hidden from him." A passage of
Zosimus states that what was hidden it was illicit to reveal, except,
Jamblicus explained, to those whose discretion a long novitiate had
assured. To such only was disclosed the secret that life is death in a
land of darkness, and death is life in a land of light.

It was because of this that the pharaohs seated themselves colossally
before the temple doors. It was because of it that their palaces were
inns and their tombs were homes. It was because of it that their
sepulchres were built for eternity and the tenements of their souls
placed there embalmed. It was because of this that the triumphs of men
were inscribed in the halls of the gods. Instead of seeking to be
absorbed, it was their own inextinguishable individuality that they
endeavoured to assert. Tombs, tenements, triumphs, these all were
preparations for the Land of Light.

The land was Alu, the asphodel meadows of the celestial Nile that
wound through the Milky Way. To reach it a passport, visé'd by Osiris,
sufficed. The first draft of that passport was held to have been
written on tablets of alabaster, in letters of lapis lazuli, by an
eidolon of Râ, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, elsewhere was Hermes
Thrice the Greatest.

At Memphis, Hermes was regarded as representing the personification of
divine wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the inventive power of the
human mind. A little library of forty-two books--which a patricist
saw, but not being initiate could not read--was attributed to him.[17]
The books contained the entire hieratic belief. Fragments that are
held to have survived in an extant Greek novel are obviously Egyptian,
but as obviously Alexandrine and neo-platonic. In the _editio
princeps_ Pheidias is mentioned. Mention of Michel Angelo would have
been less anachronistic. The original books are gone, all of them,
forever, perhaps, save one, chapters of which are as old as the fourth
dynasty and, it may be, are still older. Pyramid texts of the fifth
dynasty show that there then existed what to-day is termed _The Book
of the Dead_, a copy of which, put in a mummy's arms, was a talisman
for the soul in the Court of Amenti, a passport thence to the Land of
Light.

[Footnote 17: Clemens Alexandrinos: Stromata vi.]

"There is no book like it, man hath not spoken it, earth hath not
heard it"--very truthfully it recites of itself. One copy, known as
the Louvre Papyrus, presents the _Divine Comedy_, as primarily
conceived and illustrated by an archaic Doré. Text and vignettes
display the tribunal where the souls of the dead are judged.

In the foreground is an altar. Adjacent is a figure, half griffon,
half chimera, the Beast of Amenti, perhaps too of the Apocalypse.
Beyond, an ape poises a pair of scales. For balance is an ostrich
feather. Above are the spirits of fate. At the left Osiris is
enthroned. From a balcony his assessors lean. At the right is the
entrance. There the disembodied, ushered by Truth, appears and, in
homages and genuflections, affirms negatively the decalogue;
protesting before the Master of Eternity that there is no evil in him;
praying the dwellers in Amenti that he may cross the dark way;
declaring to each that he has not committed the particular sin over
which they preside.

"O Eater of Spirits gone out of the windows of Alu! O Master of the
Faces!" he variously calls. "O the One who associates the Splendours!
O the Glowing Feet gone out of the Night! I did not lie. I did not
kill. I have not been anxious. I did not talk abundantly. I made no
one weep. No heart have I harmed."

The assessors listen. "I have not been anxious. I made no one weep. No
heart have I harmed." These abstentions, graces now, were virtues
then, and so efficacious that they perhaps sufficed, as rightly they
should, for absolution.

But while the assessors listen and Osiris looks gravely on, no one
accuses. It is conscience in its nakedness, conscience exposed there
where all may see it, where for the first time perhaps it truly sees
itself, and seeing realizes what there is in it of evil and what of
good, it is that which protests.

Still the assessors listen. Orthodoxy on the part of the respondent is
to them a minor thing. What they require is that he shall have been
merciful to his fellow creatures, true to himself. Only when it is
proven that he has done his duty to man, is he permitted to show that
he has done his duty to gods.

The appeal continues: "I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, I gave
water to them that thirsted. O ye that dwell in Amenti! I am
unpolluted, I am pure."

But is it true? The scales decide. The heart of the respondent is
weighed. If heavy, out it is cast to pass with him again through
life's infernal circles. But, if light as the feather in the balance
and therefore equal with truth, it is restored to the body, which then
resurrects and, in the bark of the Sun, sails the celestial Nile to Râ
and the Land of Light.

That singer gone out of Amenti, actually, like Osiris, rose from the
dead. The picture which a papyrus forty centuries old presents, is the
dream of a vision that Michel Angelo displayed, a sketch for a papal
fresco. Such indeed was the conformity between the underlying
conceptions, that, at almost the first monition, Isis, whose veil no
mortal had raised, lifted it from her black breast and suckled there
the infant Jesus. Then, presently, in temples that had teemed, the
silence of the desert brooded. The tide of life retreated, an entire
theogony vanished, exorcised, both of them, by the sign of the cross.

At sight of the unimagined emblem, a priesthood who in secret
sanctuaries had evolved nearly all but that, flung themselves into
crypts beneath, pulled the walls down after them, burying unembalmed
the arcana of a creed whose spirit still is immortal.

In Egypt, then, only tombs and necropoles survived. But it is
legendary that, in the solitudes of the Thebaïd, dispossessed eidolons
of Râ, appearing in the shape of chimeras, terrified anchorites, to
whom, with vengeful eyes, they indicated their ruined altars.




IV

BEL-MARDUK


The inscriptions of Assyrian kings have, many of them, the monotony of
hell. Made of boasts and shrieks, they recite the capture and sack of
cities; the torrents of blood with which, like wool, the streets were
dyed; the flaming pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men impaled;
the cries of ravished women.

The inscriptions are not all infernal. Those that relate to
Assurbanipal--vulgarly, Sandanapallos,--are even ornate. But
Assurbanipal, while probably fiendish and certainly crapulous, was
clearly literary besides. From the spoil of sacked cities this
bibliofilou took libraries, the myths and epics of creation, sacred
texts from Eridu and Ur, volumes in the extinct tongues of Akkad and
Sumer, first editions of the Book of God.

These, re-edited in cuneiform and kept conveniently on the second
floor of his palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until recently
recovered, for millennia they lay. Additionally, from shelves set up
in the days of Khammurabi--the Amraphel of Genesis--Nippur has yielded
ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of Babylonian ken.

These, the eldest revelations of the divine, are the last that man has
deciphered. The altars and people that heard them first, the marble
temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust. The
entire civilization from which they came has vanished. Yet, traced
with a wooden reed on squares of clay, are flights of little arrows,
from which, magically, it all returns. Miraculously with these books a
world revives. Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch that in biblical
chronology is anterior to man, they tell of creation, of the serpent,
the fall and the deluge. At the gates of paradise you see man dying,
poisoned by the tree of life. Before Genesis was, already it had been
written.

In the Chaldean Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in
successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home
was a paradise where ten impressive persons--the models, it may be, of
antediluvian patriarchs--reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally
sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them away. From the
flood there escaped one man who separated a mythical from an heroic
age. In the latter epoch, beings descended from demons built Nineveh
and Babylon; organized human existence; invented arithmetic, geometry,
astronomy and the calendar; counted the planets; numbered the days of
the year, divided them into months and weeks; established the Sabbath;
decorated the skies with the signs of the zodiac, instituting, in the
interim, colleges of savants and priests. These speculated on the
origin of things, attributed it to spontaneous generation, the descent
of man to evolution, entertaining the vulgar meanwhile with tales of
gods and ghosts.[18]

[Footnote 18: Lenormant: Les Origines. Schrader: Die Keilenschriften.
Smith: Chaldean Genesis.]

The cosmological texts now available were not written then. They are
drawn from others that were. But there is a vignette that probably is
of that age. It represents a man and a woman stretching their hands to
a tree. Behind the woman writhes a snake. The tree, known as the holy
cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which stimulated desire, is described in
an epic that recites the adventures of Gilgames.

Gilgames was the national hero of Chaldea. The story of his loves with
Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and Delilah myth. Ishtar, described
in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original
Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules. The legend
of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who
ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago.

In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not
to die. In trying he reached a garden, guarded by cherubim, where the
holy cedar was. There he learned that one being only could teach him
to be immortal, and that being, Adra-Khasis, had been translated to
the Land of the Silver Sky. Adra-Khasis, was the Chaldean Noah.
Gilgames sought him and the story of the deluge follows. But with a
difference. On the seventh day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a
dove that returned, finally a raven that did not. Then he looked out,
and looking, shrieked. Every one had perished.

Noah was less emotional, or, if equally compassionate, the fact is not
recited. Apart from that detail and one other, the story of the flood
is common to all folklore. Even the Aztecs knew of it. Probably it
originated in the matrix of nations which the table-land of Asia was.
But only in Chaldean myth, and subsequently in Hebrew legend, was the
flood ascribed to sin.

Gilgames' quest, meanwhile, could not have been wholly vain. In an
archaic inscription it is stated that the city of Erech was built in
olden times by the deified Gilgames.[19]

[Footnote 19: Proc. S. B. A. xvi. 13-15.]

How old the olden times may have been is conjectural. Modern science
has put the advent of man sixty million years ago. Chaldean chronology
is less spacious. But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand
years. The traditions were probably imaginary. Even so, in the morning
of the world, already there were ancient cities. There was Nippur, one
of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where Ea
was lord of man. There was Ur, where Sin was lord of the moon. There
were other divinities. There was Enmesara, lord of the land whence
none return, and Makhir, god of dreams.

There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries
made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an
aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years
ago, combined. Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered. It
would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. What Sargon made,
Khammurabi solidified. Between their colossal figures two millennia
stretch. These giants are distinct. None the less, across the ages
they seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, but into another
person.

Sargon has descended through time clothed in a little of the poetry
which garments nation builders. But the poetry is not a mantle for the
imaginary. In the British Museum is a marble ball that he dedicated to
a god. Paris has the seal of his librarian.[20] Copies of his annals
are extant.[21] In these it is related that, when a child, his mother
put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates.
Presently he was rescued. Afterward he became a leader of men.

[Footnote 20: Collection de Clerq. pl. 5, no. 46.]

[Footnote 21: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. iv. 34.]

Khammurabi was also a leader. He was a legislator as well. Sargon
united principalities, Khammurabi their shrines. From one came the
nation, from the other the god. It is in this way that they fuse. To
the composite, if it be one, history added a heightening touch.

The Khammurabi legislation came from Bel, who, originally, was a local
sun-god of Nippur. There he was regarded as the possessor of the
Chaldean Urim and Thummin, the tablets of destiny with which he cast
the fates of men. In the mythology of Babylonia these tablets were
stolen by the god of storms, who kept them in his thunder fastness.
Among the forked flames of the lightning there they were recovered by
Bel, who revealed the law to Khammurabi.

The theophany is perhaps similar to that of Sinai. But perhaps, too,
it is better attested. A diorite block, found at Susa in 1902, has the
law engraved on it. On the summit, a bas-relief displays the god
disclosing the statutes to the king.

There are other analogies. Sinai was named after Sin, who, though but
a moon-god, was previously held supreme for the reason that, in
primitive Babylonia, the lunar year preceded the solar. The sanctuary
of the moon-god was Ur, of which Abraham was emir. He was more,
perhaps. Sarratu, from which Sarai comes, was the title of the
moon-goddess. In _Genesis_, Sarai is Abraham's wife. Abraham is a
derivative of Aburamu, which was one of the moon's many names.[22]

[Footnote 22: Sayce: Guifford Lectures.]

Among these, one in particular has since been identified with Jahveh.
In addition, a clay tablet of the age of Khammurabi, now in the
British Museum, has on it:

[Illustration]

That flight of arrows, being interpreted, means: _Jave ilu_, Jahveh is
god.[23]

[Footnote 23: Delitzch: Babel und Bibel.]

Other texts show that a title of Bel was Mâsu, a word that letter for
letter is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or Moses.[24]

[Footnote 24: Records of the Past, i. 91.]

It is in this way that Sargon and Khammurabi fuse. Meanwhile the title
Mâsu, or hero, was not confined to Bel. It was given also to Marduk,
the tutelary god of Babylon, from whom local monotheism proceeded.

That monotheism, in appearance relatively modern, actually was
archaic. The Chaldean savants knew of but one really existing god. To
them, all others were his emanations. The deus exsuperantissimus was
represented by a single stroke of the reed, a sign that in its
vagueness left him formless and incommunicable, therefore
unworshipable, hence without a temple, unless Bab-ili, Babylon, the
Gate of God, may be so construed.

The name of the deity, fastidiously concealed from the vulgar, was, in
English, One. Not after, or beneath, or above, but before him, a
trinity swung like a screen. From it, for pendant, another trinity
dangled. From the latter fell a third. Below these glories were the
coruscations of an entire nation of inferior gods. The latter, as well
as the former, all of them, were but the fireworks of One. He alone
was. The rest, like Makhir, were gods of dream. To the savants, that
is; to the magi and seers. To the people the sidereal triads and
planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally
august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave
precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk,
became supreme.

Before Bel, then, the other gods faded as the Elohim did before
Jahveh, with the possible difference that there were more to
fade--sixty-five thousand, Assurnatsipal, in an inscription, declared.
Over that army Bel-Marduk acquired the title, perhaps significant, of
Bel-Kissat, Lord of Hosts. Yet it was less as a usurper than as an
absorber that the ascension was achieved. Bel but mounted above his
former peers and from the superior height drew their attributes to
himself. It was sacrilege none the less. As such it alienated the
clergy and enraged the plebs. Begun under Khammurabi and completed
under Nabonidos, it was the reason why, during the latter's reign,
orthodox Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but a friend.

From the spoliation, meanwhile, no nebulousness resulted. Bel was
distinctly anthropomorphic. His earthly plaisance was the Home of the
Height, a seven-floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow pyramid of
enamelled brick. At the top was a dome. There, in a glittering
chamber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared. Elsewhere, in the
vermillion recesses of a neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls
guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, once a year he also appeared,
and, above the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, sat, or was
supposed to sit, contemplating the tablets of destiny, determining
when men should die.

To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap of the gods. To the
Babylonians the gods alone possessed it, as alone also they possessed
the present and the past. They had all time as all men have their day.
That day was here and it was brief. Death was a descent to Aralû, the
land whence none return, a region of the underworld, called also
Shualû, where the departed were nourished on dust. Dust they were and
to dust they returned.

Extinction was not a punishment or even a reward, it was a law.
Punishment was visited on the transgressor here, as here also the
piety of the righteous was rewarded. When death came, just and unjust
fared alike. The Aryan and Egyptian belief in immortality had no place
in this creed, and consequently it had none either in Israel, where
Sheol was a replica of Shualû. To the Semites of Babylonia and Kanaan,
the gods alone were immortal, and immortal beings would be gods. Man
could not become divine while his deities were still human.

Exceptionally, exceptional beings such as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis
might be translated to the land of the Silver Sky, as Elijah was
translated to heaven, but otherwise the only mortals that could reach
it were kings, for a king, in becoming sovereign, became, _ipso
facto_, celestial. As such, ages later, Alexander had himself
worshipped, and it was in imitation of his apotheosis that the
subsequent Cæsars declared themselves gods. Yet precisely as the
latter were man-made deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were very
similar to human kings.

For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, the flesh of ewe lambs. For
their nostrils was the perfume of prayers and of psalms; for their
passions the virginity of girls. Originally the first born of men were
also given them, but while, with higher culture, that sacrifice was
abolished, the sacred harlotry, over which Ishtar presided, remained.
Judaism omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, which Babylonia
profoundly influenced, it was general and, though reviled by Israel,
was tempting even, and perhaps particularly, to Solomon.[25]

[Footnote 25: 1 Kings xi. 5. "Solomon went after Ashtoreth."]

The latter's temple was similar to Bel's, from which the Hebraic
ritual, terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may have proceeded, as, it
may be, the Sabbath did also. On a tablet recovered from the library
of Assurbanipal it is written: "The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky
day, a sabbatuv"--literally, a day of rest for the heart.[26]

[Footnote 26: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. ii. 32.]

In Aralû that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos
said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to
the Silver Sky. Yet though that was an article of faith, through a
paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in
ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with
the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls
that died pure.

These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must
have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony. Perhaps,
too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks.
Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in
Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilît, the Lilith of the
_Talmud_, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin.
In these also the Babylonians believed, and naïvely they represented
them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed
them away.

From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very
properly held that all diseases came. Medicine consequently was a
branch of religion. The physician was a priest. He asked the patient:
Have you shed your neighbour's blood? Have you approached your
neighbour's wife? Have you stolen your neighbour's garment? Or is it
that you have failed to clothe the naked? According to the responses
he prescribed.[27]

[Footnote 27: IV. R. 50-53. _Cf._ Delitzch: _op. cit._]

But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard. He peeped and
muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which
simples had been dissolved. These devices failing, there was a series
of incantations, the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, in which the
most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name. To that all
things yielded, even the gods.[28] But like the Shem of the Jews, it
was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not
wholly known. In the formulæ of the necromancers it is omitted, though
in practice it may have been pronounced.

[Footnote 28: Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldéens.]

Even that is doubtful. A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to
those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees
ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation. A knowledge of the
Babylonian Shem was as potent. It served not only men but gods.
Ishtar, for purposes of her own, wanted to get into Aralû. In the
recovered epic of her descent, imperiously she demanded entrance:

  Porter, open thy door.
  Open thy door that I may enter.
  If thou dost not open thy door,
  I will attack it, I will break down the bars,
  I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.[29]

[Footnote 29: Records of the Past.]

Ishtar was admitted. But Aralû was the land whence none return. Once
in, she could not get out until, ultimately, the incommunicable name
was uttered. The epic says that, in the interim, there was on earth
neither love nor loving. In possible connection with which
incantations have been found, deprecating "the consecrated harlots
with rebellious hearts that have abandoned the holy places."[30]

[Footnote 30: Lenormant: _op. cit._]

In addition to the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, there was the
_Illumination of Bel_, an encyclopædia of astrology in seventy-two
volumes which the suburban library of Borsippa contained. During the
captivity many Jews must have gone there. In the large light halls
they were free to read whatever they liked, religion, history,
science, the romance of all three. The books, catalogued and numbered,
were ranged on shelves. One had but to ask. The service was gratis.

Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place
on earth. For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars.
But though respectable, it was also equivocal. During a period equally
long--or brief--the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for
Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that
asked. In the service of the goddess their brothers occasionally
feigned that they too were girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a
seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine.

Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden cup that, in the words of Jeremiah,
made the whole world drunk. Seated immensely on the twin banks of the
Euphrates--banks that bridges above and tunnels beneath
interjoined--Babylon more nearly resembled a walled nation than a
fortified town. Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and noble, a
space that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for
Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of
human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged
over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air
lupanar, circled among statues of gods and bulls, poured out of the
hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back
in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands,
passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins,
Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes,
burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms--prostitutes,
pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep--the flux and reflux of the
gigantic city.

In that ocean, the captive Jews, if captive they were, rolled, lost as
a handful of salt spilt in the sea. Yet, from the depths, a few had
swum up and, filtering adroitly, had reached the dignity of high
place. One was pontiff. Others were viceroys. In addition to being
pontiff, Daniel was chancellor of the realm. Ezra was rector of the
university. As pontiff of a college of wizards, Daniel may have known
the future. As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra may have known, what is quite
as difficult, the past. For the moment there was but the present. Over
it ruled Belshazzar.

Yet, ruler though he was, there were powers potenter than his own:
Baalim, outraged at the elevation of a parvenu god; a priesthood
consequently disaffected; and, without, at the gates, the foe.

It would have been interesting to have assisted at the final festival
when, beneath cyclopean arches, in the sunlight of clustered
candelabra, amid the glitter of gold and white teeth, among the fair
sultanas that were strewn like flowers through the throne-room of the
imperial court, Belshazzar lay, smiling, amused rather than annoyed at
the impudent menace of Cyrus.

Babylon was impregnable. He knew it. But the subtle Jews, the
indignant gods, the alienated priests to whom the Persian was a
redeemer, of these he did not think. Daniel had indeed warned him and,
vaguely, he had promised something which he had since forgot.

Beyond, an orchestra was playing. Further yet, columns upheld a
ceiling so lofty that it was lost. On the adjacent wall was a frieze
of curious and chimerical beasts. Belshazzar was looking at them. In
their dumb stupidity was a suggestion of the foe. The suggestion
amused. Smiling still he raised a cup. Abruptly, before it could reach
his lips, it fell with a clatter on the lapis lazuli of the floor
beneath. Before him, on that wall, beneath those beasts, the
necromancy of the priesthood had projected an armless, fluidic hand
that mounted, descended, tracing with a forefinger the three luminous
hierograms of his doom.

The story, a little drama, was, with the tale concerning
Nebuchadnezzar, that of Daniel, and other novels quite as strange,
evolved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem. The fluidic hand
did not appear. Even had it zigzagged there was no Belshazzar to
frighten.

Only the doom was real. Cyrus was clothed with it. To the trumpetings
of heralds and the sheen of angels' wings, triumphantly he came. Then,
presently, by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted and released,
retraced their steps, burdened with spoil; with the lore of two
distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the great square letters of
the Pentateuch, was to become the poetry of all mankind.

Babylon, ultimately, with her goblin gods and harlot goddess, sank
into her own Aralû. Nourished there on dust, Lilît, with the sister
vampires of eternal night, fed on her.




V

JEHOVAH


A camel's-hair tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the
earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but
in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was
about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future
awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, gods and
romance, could enter.

The human came first. Then the gods. Then romance. The divine was
their triple expansion. It was an after growth, in other lands, that
tears had watered. In the desert it was unimagined. Only the gods had
been conceived.

The gods were many and yet but one. Though plural they were singular.
The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the pronoun in such
expressions as: it rains; it thunders. "It" was Elohim. Already among
nomad Semites monotheism had begun. Yet with this distinction. Each
tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged.
Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that
they had in charge humiliated them. It made them angry, therefore
vindictive, consequently unjust. It may be that they were not very
ethical. Perhaps the bedouins were not either. Man fashions his god in
proportion to his intelligence. That of the nomad was slender. He
lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for
mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did
not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so,
it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the
paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from
place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were,
therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism
a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand,
given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been
the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of
art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown
god. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the
practical people that they are. Even then they were shrewd. Their
Elohim might alarm but never delude. Israel was uncheatable even in
dream.

Originally emigrants from Arabia, the nomads reached Syria, some
directly, others circuitously, by way of Padan-Aram and across the
Euphrates, whence perhaps their name of _Ibrim_ or Hebrews--_Those
from beyond_. In the journey Babel and Ur must have detained. These
cities, with their culture relatively deep and their observatories
equally high, became, in after days, a source of legend, of wonder, of
hatred, perhaps of revelation as well.

At the time the nomads had no cosmogony or theories. The Chaldeans had
both. There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and
of the punishment that overtook them. There was also a story of an
emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead
of his son. The story, like the others, must have impressed. In after
years the old man became Abraham, a great person, who had conversed
with the Elohim and whose descendants they were.

The story of creation also impressed. It was enlightening and
comprehensible. The parallel theory of spontaneous generation and the
progressive evolution of the species which the magi entertained, they
probably never heard. Even otherwise it was too complex for minds as
yet untutored. The fables alone appealed. Mentally compressed into
portable shape, carried along, handed down, their origin afterward
forgotten, they became the traditions of a nation, which, eminently
conservative, preserved what it found, among other things the name,
perhaps inharmonious, of Jhvh.[31]

[Footnote 31: Renan: Histoire du peuple d'Israël. Kuenen: De Godsdienst
van Israël.]

That name, since found on an inscription of Sargon, appears to have
been the title of a local god of Sinai, whom the nomads may have
identified with Elohim, particularly, perhaps, since he presided over
thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in
consequence, inspired the greatest awe. That awe they put into the
name, the pronunciation of which, like the origin of their traditions,
they afterward forgot. In subsequent rabbinical writings it became
Shem, the Name; Shemhammephoresh, the Revealed Name, uttered but once
a year, on the day of Atonement, by the high priest in the Holy of
Holies. Mention of it by anyone else was deemed a capital offence,
though, permissibly, it might be rendered El Shaddai, the Almighty.
That term the Septuagint translated into [Greek: ho Kyrios], a Greek
form, in the singular, of the Aramaic plural Adonai, which means
Baalim, or sun lords.

That form the Vulgate gave as Dominus and posterior theology as God.
The latter term, common to all Teutonic tongues, has no known meaning.
It designates that which, to the limited intelligence of man, has
been, and must be, incomprehensible. But the original term Jhvh,
which, in the seventeenth century, was developed into Jehovah, yet
which, the vowels being wholly conjectural, might have been developed
into anything else, clearly appealed to wayfarers to whom Chaldean
science was a book that remained closed until Nebuchadnezzar blew
their descendants back into the miraculous Babel of their youth.

Meanwhile, apart from the name--now generally written Jahveh--apart
too from the fables and the enduring detestation which the colossal
city inspired, probably but one other thing impressed, and that was
the observance of the Sabbath. To a people whose public works were
executed by forced labour, such a day was a necessity. To vagrants it
was not, and, though the custom interested, it was not adopted by them
until their existence from nomad had become fixed.

At this latter period they were in Kanaan. Whether in the interval a
tribe, the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, is a subject on which
Continental scholarship has its doubts. The early life of the tribe's
leader and legislator is usually associated with Rameses II., a
pharaoh of the XIX. dynasty. But it has been found that incidents
connected with Moses must apparently have occurred, if they occurred
at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which
constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view
of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession
in the _Book of the Dead_; in view also of a practice surgical and
possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by
the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly
Egyptian that were also absorbed, a sojourn in Goshen there may have
been.

The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward
prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly
dismissed. On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least
problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a
pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either
quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious
that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life.
Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the
Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but
tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had
only surmises concerning the time and circumstances in which it
occurred.

Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been. Seen through modern
criticism his figure fades though his name persists. To that name the
Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In their version it is
always [Greek: Môusês], a compound derived from the Egyptian _mô_,
water, and _usês_, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water.[32] Per contra,
the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the
Babylonian Masû, a term which means at once leader and littérateur, in
addition to being the cognomen of a god.[33]

[Footnote 32: Josephus: Antiq. ii. 9.]

[Footnote 33: Sayce: The Religion of the Babylonians.]

Moses is said to have led his people out of bondage. He was the writer
to whom the Pentateuch has been ascribed. But he was also a prophet.
In Babylon, the god of prophecy was Nebo. It was on Mount Nebo that
Jahveh commanded the prophet of Israel to die. Moreover, the divinity
that had Masû for cognomen was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, the
primitive god of the sun at Nippur, but the sun at noon, at the period
of its greatest effulgence, at the hour when it wars with whatever
opposes, when it wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may be assumed
to have warred, since Isaiah represented him as a mighty man, roaring
at his enemies, exciting the fury of the fight, marching personally to
the conflict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law (Numbers), there is
mention of a book entitled: _The Wars of Jahveh_.

Whether, then, Moses is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in
an effort to show a link between a god and a people, is conjectural.
But it is also immaterial. The one instructive fact is that, in a
retrospect, the god, immediately after the exodus, became dictator.

Yet even in the later age, when the retrospect was effected,
conceptions were evidently immature. On one occasion the god met
Moses, tried to kill him, but finally let him go. The picture is that
of a personal struggle.[34] Again, the spectacle of his back which he
vouchsafed to Moses is construable only as an _arrière-pensée_, unless
it be profound philosophy, unless it be taken that the face of God
represents Providence, to see which would be to behold the future,
whereas the back disclosed the past.

[Footnote 34: Exodus iv. 24-26.]

It is, however, hardly probable that that construction occurred to the
editors of the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, represented Jahveh as a
butcher, insatiable, jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, one
that consigned all nations other than Israel to ruin and whom a poet
represented trampling people in anger, making them drunk with his
fury, and defiling his raiment with blood.[35]

[Footnote 35: Isaiah lxiii. 1-6.]

But in the period related in _Exodus_, Jahveh was but the tutelary god
of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial
possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a
vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other gods had temples and altars.
He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew,
each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were
reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. Certainly he was
terrible.

This conception, corrected by later writers, was otherwise revised. In
the interim Jahveh himself was transformed. He became El, the god;
presently El Shaddai, God Almighty. In the ascension former traits
disappeared. He developed into the deity of emphatic right. Morality,
hitherto absent from religion, entered into it. Israel, who perhaps
had been careless, who, like Solomon, had followed Ishtar, became
austere. Thereafter, Judaism, of which Christianity and Muhammadanism
were the after thoughts, was destined to represent almost the sum
total of the human conscience.

But in Kanaan, during the rude beginnings, though Jahveh was jealous,
Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, allured. Conjointly with Baal, the
indigenous term for Bel, circumadjacently she ruled. The propitiatory
rites of these fair gods were debauchery and infanticide, the
loosening of the girdles of girls, the thrusting of children into
fires. It may be that these ceremonies at first amazed the Hebrews.
But conscientiously they adopted them, less perhaps through zeal than
politeness; because, in this curious epoch, on entering a country it
was thought only civil to serve the divinities that were there, in
accordance with the ritual that pleased them.

With the mere mortal inhabitants, Israel was less ceremonious.
Commanded by Jahveh to kill, extermination was but an act of piety. It
was then, perhaps, that the _Wars of Jahveh_ were sung, a pæan that
must have been resonant with cries, with the death-rattle of kingdoms,
with the shouts of the invading host. From the breast-plates of the
chosen, the terror of Sinai gleamed. Men could not see their faces and
live. The moon was their servant. To aid them the sun stood still.
They encroached, they slaughtered, they quelled. In the conquest a
nation was born. From that bloody cradle the God of Humanity came. But
around and about it was vacancy. In emerging from one solitude the
Jews created another. They have never left it. The desert which they
made destined them to be alone on this earth, as their god was to be
solitary in heaven.

Meanwhile there had been no kings in Israel. With the nation royalty
came. David followed Saul. After him was Solomon. It is presumably at
this period that traditions, orally transmitted from a past relatively
remote, were first put in writing. Previously it is conjectural if the
Jews could write. If they could, it is uncertain whether they made any
use of the ability other than in the possible compilation of toledoth,
such as the _Book of the Generations of Adam_ and the _Wars of
Jahveh_, works that, later, may have served as data for the
Pentateuch. Even then, the compositions must have been crude, and such
rolls as existed may have been lost when Nebuchadnezzar overturned
Jerusalem.

Presumably, it was not until the post-exilic period that, under the
editorship perhaps of Ezra, the definitive edition of the Torah was
produced. This supposition existing texts support. In Genesis (xxxvii.
31) it is written: "These are the kings of Edom before there reigned
any king over the children of Israel." The passage shows, if it shows
anything, that there were, or had been, kings in Israel at the time
when the passage itself was written. It is, therefore, at least
post-Davidic. In Genesis another passage (xlix. 10) says: "The sceptre
shall not pass from Judah until Shiloh come." Judah was the tribe that
became pre-eminent in Israel after the captivity. The passage is
therefore post-exilic, consequently so is Genesis, and obviously the
rest of the Pentateuch as well. Or, if not obviously, perhaps
demonstrably. In II Esdras xiv. 22-48 it is stated that the writer, a
candle of understanding in his heart, and aided by five swift scribes,
recomposed the Law, which, previously burned, was known to none.

The burning referred to is what may, perhaps, be termed religious
fiction. Barring toledoth and related data that may have been lost,
the Law had almost certainly not existed before, and this post-exilic
romance concerning it was evolved in a laudable effort to show its
Mosaic source. What is true of the Law is, in a measure, true of the
Prophets. None of them anterior to Cyrus, all are later than
Alexander. Spiritually very near to Christianity, chronologically they
are neighbourly too. If not divinely inspired, they at least disclosed
the ideal.

Previously the ideal had not perhaps been very apparent. Apart from
secessions, rebellions, concussions, convulsions that deified Hatred
until Jahveh, in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, talked Assyrian, and
then, in the person of Cyrus, talked Zend, the god of Israel, even in
Israel, was not unique. He had a home, his first, the Temple, built
gorgeously by Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, perhaps
terribly, beneath the wings of cherubim that rose from the depths of
the Holy of Holies, he dwelled. But the shrine, however ornate, was
not the only one. There were other altars, other gods; the plentiful
sanctuaries of Ashera, of Moloch and of Baal. On the adjacent hilltops
the phallus stood. In the neighbouring groves the kisses of Ishtar
consumed.

The Lady of Girdles was worshipped there not by men and women only,
but by girls with girls; by others too, not in couples, but singly,
girls who in their solitary devotions had instruments for aid.[36]
Religion, as yet, had but the slightest connection with morality, a
circumstance explicable perhaps by the fact that it resumed the
ethnical conscience of a race. Between the altar of El Shaddai and the
shrines of other gods there were many differences, of which geography
was the least. Jahveh, from a tutelary god, had indeed become the
national divinity of a chosen people. But the Moabites were the chosen
people of Chemos; the Ammonites were the chosen people of Rimmon; the
Babylonians were the chosen people of Bel. The title conferred no
distinction. As a consequence, to differentiate Jahveh from all other
gods, and Israel from all other people, to make the one unique and the
other pontiff and shepherd of the nations of the world, became the
dream of anonymous poets, one that prophets, sometimes equally
anonymous, proclaimed. It was the prophets that reviled the false
gods, denounced the abominations of Ishtar, and purified the Israelite
heart. While nothing discernible, or even imaginable, menaced, however
slightly, the great empires of that day, the prophets were the first
to realize that the Orient was dead. When the Christ announced that
the end of the world was at hand, he but reiterated anterior
predictions that presently were fulfilled. A world did end. That of
antiquity ceased to be.

[Footnote 36: _Cf._ Deut. xxiii. 17, where _'alâmôth_ (puellæ) is
rendered in the Sapphist sense. Ezekiel xvi. 17. _Fecisti tibi
imagines masculinas._]

It was the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and,
it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while
madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they
established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from
myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in
Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all.

If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost
themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by
forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the
theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid
that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the
customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still
is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

From Chemos in Moab, from Rimmon among the Ammonites, no such edict
had come. It felled them. Amon-Râ it tore from the celestial Nile, and
Bel-Marduk from the Silver Sky. The Refaïm hid them in shadows as
surely as they buried there the high and potent lords of Greece and
Rome. These interments, completed by others, the prophets began. For
it was they who, in addition to the command, revealed the commandant,
creator of whatever is: the Being Absolute that abhorred evil, loved
righteousness, punished the transgressor and rewarded the just; El
Shaddai, then really Lord of Hosts.

It may be that already in Israel there had been some prescience of
this. But it lacked the authority of inspired text. The omission was
one that only seers could remedy. It was presumably in these
circumstances that an agreement was imagined which, construed as a
condition of a covenant, assumed to have been made with Abraham, was
further assumed to have been renewed to Moses. The resulting poetry
was enveloped in a romance of which Continental scholarship has
discovered two versions, woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a
single tale.

"In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and earth." That abrupt
declaration, presented originally in but one of the versions, had
already been pronounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd. The Hebraic
announcement alone prevailed. It emptied the firmament of its
monsters, dislodged the gods from the skies, and enthroned there a
deity at first multiple but subsequently unique. Afterward seraphs and
saints might replace the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; Satan
might create a world of his own and people it with the damned;
theology might evolve from elder faiths a newer trinity and set it
like a diadem in space; angels and archangels might refill the
devastated heavens of the past; none the less, in the light of that
austere pronouncement, for a moment Israel dwelled in contemplation of
the Ideal.

At the time it is probable that the story of the love of the sons of
Jahveh for the daughters of men, together with the pastel of Eden as
it stands to-day, were not contained in existing accounts of that
ideal. These legends, which regarded as legends are obviously false,
but which, construed as allegories, may be profoundly true, were
probably not diffused until after the captivity, when Israel was not
more subtle, that is not possible, but, by reason of her contact with
Persia, more wise.

The origin of evil these myths related but did not explain. Since
then, from no church has there come an adequate explanation of the
malediction under which man is supposed to labour because of the
natural propensities of beings that never were. That explanation these
myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, though sometimes reluctantly,
accepted, both provide and conceal. They date possibly from the
Ormuzdian revelation: "In the beginning was the living Word."

John, or more exactly his homonym, repeated the pronouncement, adding:
"The word was made flesh." But, save for a mention of the glory which
he had before the world was, he omitted to further follow the thought
of Ormuzd, who, in describing paradise to Zarathrustra, likened it, in
every way, to heaven. There the first beings were, exempt from
physical necessities, pure intelligences, naked as the compilers of
Genesis translated, naked and unashamed, but naked and unashamed
because incorporeal, unincarnate and clothed in light, a vestment
which they exchanged for a garment of flesh, coats of skin as it is in
Genesis, when, descended on earth, their intelligence, previously
luminous, swooned in the senses of man.

In Egypt, the harper going out from Amenti sang: "Life is death in a
land of darkness, death is life in a land of light." There perhaps is
the origin of evil. There too perhaps is its cure. But the view
accepted there too is pre-existence and persistence, a doctrine
blasphemous to the Jew as it was to the Assyrian, to whom the gods
alone were immortal, and to whom, in consequence, immortal beings
would be gods. In the creed of both, man was essentially evanescent.
To the Hebrew, he lived a few, brief days and then went down into
silence, where no remembrance is. There, gathered among the Refaïm to
his fathers, he remained forever, unheeded by God.

The conception, passably rationalistic and not impossibly correct,
veiled the beautiful allegory that was latent in the Eden myth. It had
the further defect, or the additional advantage, of eliminating any
theory of future punishment and reward. In lieu of anything of the
kind, there was a doctrine that evil, in producing evil, automatically
punished itself. The doctrine is incontrovertible. But, for corollary,
went the fallacy that virtue is its own reward. Against that idea Job
protested so energetically that mediæval monks were afraid to read
what he wrote. Yet it was perhaps in demonstration of the real
significance of the allegory that a spiritualistic doctrine--always an
impiety to the orthodox--was insinuated by the Pharisees and instilled
by the Christ.

The basis of it rested perhaps partially in the idealism of the
prophets. The clamour of their voices awoke the dead. It transformed
the skies. It transfigured Jahveh. It divested him of attributes that
were human. It outlined others that were divine. It awoke not merely
the dead, but the consciousness that a god that had a proper name
could not be the true one. Thereafter mention of it was avoided. The
vowels were dropped. It became unpronounceable, therefore
incommunicable. For it was substituted the term vaguer, and therefore
more exact, of Lord, one in whose service were fulfilled the words of
Isaiah: "I am the first and I am the last, and beside me there is no
God."

In the marvel of that miraculous realization were altitudes hitherto
undreamed, peaks from whose summits there was discernible but the
valleys beneath, and another height on which stood the Son of man. Yet
marvellous though the realization was, instead of diminishing, it
increased. It did not pass. It was not forgot. Ceaselessly it
augmented.

In the Scriptures there are many marvels. That perhaps is the
greatest. Amon, originally an obscure provincial god of Thebes, became
the supreme divinity of Egypt. Bel, originally a local god of Nippur,
became in Babylon Lord of Hosts. But Jahveh, originally the tutelary
god of squalid nomads, became the Deity of Christendom. The fact is
one that any scholarship must admit. It is the indisputable miracle of
the Bible.




VI

ZEUS


In Judea, when Jahveh was addressed, he answered, if at all, with a
thunderclap. Since then he has ceased to reply. Zeus was more
complaisant. One might enter with him into the intimacy of the
infinite. The father of the Graces, the Muses, the Hours, it was
natural that he should be debonair. But he had other children. Among
them were Litai, the Prayers. In the _Vedas_, where Zeus was born, the
Prayers upheld the skies. Lame and less lofty in Greece, they could
but listen and intercede.

The detail is taken from Homer. In his Ionian Pentateuch is the
statement that beggars are sent by Zeus, that whoever stretches a hand
is respectable in his eyes, that the mendicant who is repulsed may
perhaps be a god[37]--suggestions which, afterward, were superiorly
resumed in the dictum: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of
these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

[Footnote 37: Odyssey, xviii. 485, v. 447, xiv. 56.]

The Litai were not alone in their offices. There were the oracles of
Delphi, of Trophonios and of Mopsos, where one might converse with any
divinity, even with Pan, who was a very great god. But Olympos was
neighbourly. It was charming too. There was unending spring there,
eternal youth, immortal beauty, the harmonies of divine honey-moons,
the ideal in a golden dream; a stretch of crystal parapets, from
which, leaning and laughing, radiant goddesses and resplendent gods
looked down, and to whom a people, adolescent still, looked up.

In that morning of delight fear was absent, mystery was replaced by
joy. The pageantry of the hours may have been too near to nature to
know of shame, it was yet too close to the divine to know of hate.
Man, then, for the first time, loved what he worshipped and worshipped
what he loved. His brilliant and musical Bible moved his heart without
tormenting it. It conducted but did not constrain. It taught him that
in death all are equal and that in life the noble-minded are serene.

In the Genesis of this Bible there is an account of a golden age and
of a paradise into which evil was introduced by woman. The account is
Hesiod's, to whom the Orient had furnished the details. It may be that
both erred. If ever there were a golden age it must have been in those
days when heaven was on earth and, mingling familiarly with men, were
processions of gods, gods of love, of light, of liberty, thousands of
them, not one of whom had ever heard an atheist's voice. Related to
humanity, of the same blood, sons of the same Aryan mother, they
differed from men only in that the latter died because they were real,
while they were deathless because ideal.

The ideal was too fair. Presently Pallas became the soul of Athens.
But meanwhile from the East there strayed swarms of enigmatic faces;
the harlot handmaids of her Celestial Highness Ishtar, Princess of
Heaven; the mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions
that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer
of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the
circumadjacent beauty, to latrinæ in a garden, ignoble shapes that
violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so
accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved. "In the mind of
Hellas, these things," Renan, with his usual unctuousness, declared,
"awoke but pious thoughts."

Pious at heart Hellas was. Even art, which now is wholly profane, with
her was wholly sacred. The sanctity was due to its perfection. The
perfection was such that imbeciles who fancy that it has been or could
be surpassed show merely that they know nothing about it. At Athens,
where Pheidias created a palpable Olympos, Pallas stood colossally, a
torch in her hand, a lance at her shoulder, a shield at her side, a
plastron of gold on her immaculate breast, a golden robe about her
ivory form, and on her immortal brow a crown of gold, beneath which,
sapphire eyes, that saw and foresaw, glittered. To-day the place where
the marvellous creation stood is vacant. With the gorgeous host Pallas
has departed. But the torch she held still burns. From the emptiness
of her virginal arms, that never were filled, proceeds all
civilization.

Adjacently at Eleusis was Demeter. Pallas was the soul of Greece.
Eleusis was the Jerusalem, Demeter the Madonna.

Demeter--the earth, the universal mother--had, in a mystic hymen with
her brother Zeus, conceived Persephone. The latter, when young and a
maiden, beckoned perhaps by Eros, wandered from Olympos and was
gathering flowers when Pluto, borne by black horses, erupted, raped
her, and tore her away. The cries of the indignant Demeter sterilized
the earth. To assuage her, Zeus undertook to have Persephone
recovered, provided that in Hades, of which Pluto was lord, she had
eaten nothing. But the girl had--a pomegranate grain. It was the
irrevocable. Demeter yielded, as the high gods had to yield, to what
was higher than they, to Destiny. Meanwhile, in the shadows below,
Persephone was transfigured.

  Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh and
      that weep;
  For these give joy and sorrow: but thou, Proserpina, sleep....
  O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth,
  I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth.
  In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night
      where thou art,
  Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from
      the heart, ...
  And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar
  Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star.
  In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
  Let my soul with their souls find place and forget what was done or
      undone.
  Thou art more than the gods that number the days of our temporal breath
  For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.

Like Hesiod, Swinburne erred, though perhaps intentionally, as poets
should, for the greater glory of the Muses. Persephone brought not
death but life. The aisles of despair she filled with hope.
Transfigured herself, Pluto she transformed. She changed what had been
hell into what was to be purgatory. It was not yet Elysium, but it was
no longer Hades. Plato said that those who were in her world had no
wish at all for this.

It is for that reason that Demeter is the Madonna of Greece, as her
ethereal daughter was the saviour. The myth of it all, brought by
Pythagoras from Egypt is very old. Known in Memphis, it was known too
in Babylon, perhaps before Memphis was. But the legend of Isis and
that of Ishtar--both of whom descended into hell--lack the transparent
charm which this idyl unfolds and of which the significance was
revealed only to initiate in epiphanies at Eleusis.

Before these sacraments Greece stood, a finger to her lips. Yet the
whispers from them that have reached us, while furtive perhaps, are
clear. They furnished the poets with notes that are resonant still.
They lifted the drama to heights that astound. Even in the fancy balls
of Aristophanes, where men were ribald and the gods were mocked,
suddenly, in the midst of the orgy, laughter ceased, obscenities were
hushed. Afar a hymn resounded. It was the chorus of the Initiate going
measuredly by.

The original mysteries were Hermetic. Enterable only after a prolonged
novitiate, the adept then beheld an unfolding of the theosophy of the
soul. In visions, possibly ecstatic, he saw the series of its
incarnations, the seven cycles through which it passed, the Ship of a
Million Years on which the migrations are effected and on which, at
last, from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it sails to its primal
home.

That home was colour, its sustenance light. There, in ethereal
evolutions, its incarnations began. At first unsubstantial and wholly
ineffable, these turned for it every object into beauty, every sound
into joy. Without needs, from beatitude to beatitude blissfully it
floated. But, subjected to the double attraction of matter and of sin,
the initiate saw the memories and attributes of its spirituality fade.
He saw it flutter, and fluttering sink. He saw that in sinking it
enveloped itself in garments that grew heavier at each descent.
Through the denser clothing he saw the desires of the flesh pulsate.
He saw them force it lower, still lower, until, fallen into its
earthly tenement, it swooned in the senses of man. From the chains of
that prison he learned that the soul's one escape was in a recovery of
the memory of what it had been when it was other than what it had
become.

That memory the mysteries provided. Those of Eleusis differed from the
Egyptian only in detail. At Eleusis, in lieu of visions, there were
tableaux. Persephone, beckoned by desire, straying then from Olympos,
afterward fainting in the arms of Pluto, but subsequently, while
preparing her own reascension, saving and embellishing all that
approach, was the symbol, in an Hellenic setting, of the fall and
redemption of man.

The human tragedy thus portrayed was the luminous counterpart of the
dark dramas that Athens beheld. There, in the theatre--which itself
was a church with the stage for pulpit--man, blinded by passions, the
Fates pursued and Destiny felled.

The sombre spectacle was inexplicable. At Eleusis was enlightenment.
"Eskato Bebeloï"--_Out from here, the profane_--the heralds shouted as
the mysteries began. "Konx ompax"--_Go in peace_--they called when the
epiphanies were completed.

In peace the initiate went, serenely, it is said, ever after. From
them the load of ignorance was lifted. But what their impressions were
is unrecorded. They were bound to secrecy. No one could learn what
occurred without being initiated, or without dying. For death too is
initiation.

The mysteries were schools of immortality. They plentifully taught
many a lesson that Christianity afterward instilled. But their drapery
was perhaps over ornate. Truth does not need any. Truth always should
be charming. Yet always it should be naked as well. About it the
mysteries hung a raiment that was beautiful, but of which the rich
embroideries obscured. The mysteries could not have been more
fascinating, that is not possible, but, the myths removed, in simple
nudity they would have been more clear. Doubtless it was for that very
reason, in order that they might not be transparent, that the myths
were employed. It is for that very reason, perhaps, that Christianity
also adopted a few. Yet at least from cant they were free. Among the
multiple divinities of Greece, hypocrisy was the unknown god.
Consideration of the others is, to-day, usually effected through the
pages of Ovid. One might as well study Christianity in the works of
Voltaire. Christianity's brightest days were in the dark ages. The
splendid glamour of them that persists is due to many causes, among
which, in minor degree, may be the compelling glare of Greek genius.
That glare, veiled in the mysteries, philosophy reflects.

Philosophy is but the love of wisdom. It began with Socrates. He had
no belief in the gods. The man who has none may be very religious. But
though Socrates did not believe in the gods he did not deny them. He
did what perhaps was worse. He ignored their perfectly poetic
existence. He was put to death for it, though only at the conclusion
of a long promenade during which he delivered Athenian youths of their
intelligence. Facility in the operation may have been inherited.
Socrates was the son of a midwife. His own progeny consisted in a
complete transfiguration of Athenian thought. He told of an
Intelligence, supreme, ethical, just, seeing all, hearing all,
governing all; a creator made not after the image of man but of the
soul, and visible only in the conscience. It was for that he died.
There was no such god on Olympos.

There was an additional indictment. Socrates was accused of perverting
the _jeunesse dorée_. At a period when, everywhere, save only in
Israel, the abnormal was usual, Socrates was almost insultingly
chaste. The perversion of which he was accused was not of that order.
It was that of inciting lads to disobey their parents when the latter
opposed what he taught.

"I am come to set a man against his father," it is written in
_Matthew_. The mission of Socrates was the same. Because of it he
died. He was the first martyr. But his death was overwhelming in its
simplicity. Even in fairyland there has been nothing more calm. By way
of preparation he said to his judges: "Were you to offer to acquit me
on condition that I no longer profess what I believe, I would answer;
'Athenians, I honour and I love you, but a god has commanded me and
that god I will obey, rather than you.'"

In the speech was irony, with which Athens was familiar. But it also
displayed a conception, wholly new, that of maintaining at any cost
the truth. The novelty must have charmed. When Peter and the apostles
were arraigned before the Sanhedrin, their defence consisted in the
very words that Socrates had used: "We should obey God rather than
man."[38]

[Footnote 38: Acts v. 29.]

Socrates wrote nothing. The Buddha did not either. Neither did the
Christ. These had their evangelists. Socrates had also disciples who,
as vehicle for his ideas, employed the nightingale tongue of beauty
into which the Law and the Prophets were translated by the Septuagint
and into which the Gospels were put.

It would be irreverent to suggest that the latter are in any way
indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For,
while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from
the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from
the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very
poor except in ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew not what they
did; a philosopher that drained the cup without even asking that it
pass from him; a mere reformer, though dangerous perhaps as every
reformer worth the name must be; but, otherwise, a mere man like any
other, only a little better, could obviously have had no share. For
reasons not minor but major, Plato could have had none either.

It is related that a Roman invader sank back, stricken with
_deisidaimonia_--the awe that the gods inspired--at the sight of the
Pheidian Zeus. It is with a wonder not cognate certainly, yet in a
measure relative, that one considers what Socrates must have been if
millennia have gone without producing one mind approaching that of his
spiritual heir. It was uranian; but not disassociated from human
things.

Plato, like his master, was but a man in whom the ideal was intuitive,
perhaps the infernal also. In the gardens of the Academe and along the
banks of the Ilissus, he announced a Last Judgment. The announcement,
contained in the _Phædo_, had for supplement a picture that may have
been Persian, of the righteous ascending to heaven and the wicked
descending to hell. In the _Laws_, the picture was annotated with a
statement to the effect that whatever a man may do, there is an eye
that sees him, a memory that registers and retains. In the _Republic_
he declared that afflictions are blessings in disguise. But his
"Republic," a utopian commonwealth, was not, he said, of this world,
adding in the _Phædo_, that few are chosen though many are called.

The mystery of the catholicism of the Incas, reported back to the Holy
Office, was there defined as an artifice of the devil. With finer
circumspection, Christian Fathers attributed the denser mystery of
Greek philosophy to the inspiration of God.

Certainly it is ample. As exemplified by Plato it has, though, its
limitations. There is no charity in it. Plato preached humility, but
there is none in his sermons. His thought is a winged thing, as the
thought of a poet ever should be. But in the expression of it he seems
smiling, disdainful, indifferent as a statue to the poverties of the
heart. That too, perhaps, is as it should be. The high muse wears a
radiant peplum. Anxiety is banished from the minds that she haunts.
Then, also, if, in the nectar of Plato's speech, compassion is not an
ingredient, it may be because, in his violet-crowned city, it was
strewn open-handed through the beautiful streets. There, public
malediction was visited on anyone that omitted to guide a stranger on
his way.

Israel was too strictly monotheistic to raise an altar to Pity, the
rest of antiquity too cruel. In Athens there was one. In addition
there were missions for the needy, asylums for the infirm. If
anywhere, at that period, human sympathy existed, it was in Greece.
The aristocratic silence of Plato may have been due to that fact. He
would not talk of the obvious, though he did of the vile. In one of
his books the then common and abnormal conception of sexuality was, if
not authorized, at least condoned. It is conjectural, however, whether
the conception was more monstrous than that which subsequent mysticity
evolved.

Said Ruysbroeck: "The mystic carries her soul in her hand and gives it
to whomsoever she wishes." Said St. Francis of Sales: "The soul draws
to itself motives of love and delectates in them." What the gift and
what the delectation were, other saints have described.

Marie de la Croix asserted that in the arms of the celestial Spouse
she swam in an ocean of delight. Concerning that Spouse, Marie
Alacoque added: "Like the most passionate of lovers he made me
understand that I should taste what is sweetest in the suavity of
caresses, and indeed, so poignant were they, that I swooned." The
ravishments which St. Theresa experienced she expressed in terms of
abandoned precision. Mme. Guyon wrote so carnally of the divine that
Bossuet exclaimed; "Seigneur, if I dared, I would pray that a seraph
with a flaming sword might come and purify my lips sullied by this
recital."[39]

[Footnote 39: Relation sur le Quiétisme.]

Augustin pleasantly remarked that we are all born for hell. One need
not agree with him. In the presence of the possibly monstrous and the
impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn
away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is
ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced.

At Athens, meanwhile, the religion of State persisted. So also did
philosophy. When, occasionally, the two met, the latter bowed. That
was sufficient. Religion exacted respect, not belief. It was not a
faith, it was a law, one that for its majesty was admired and for its
poetry was beloved. In the deification of whatever is exquisite it was
but an artistic cult. The real Olympos was the Pantheon. The other was
fading away. Deeper and deeper it was sinking back into the golden
dream from which it had sprung. Further and further the crystal
parapets were retreating. Dimmer and more dim the gorgeous host
became. In words of perfect piety Epicurus pictured them in the
felicity of the ideal. There, they had no heed of man, no desire for
worship, no wish for prayer. It was unnecessary even to think of them.
Decorously, with every homage, they were being deposed.

But if Epicurus was decorous, Evemerus was devout. It was his
endeavour, he said, not to undermine but to fortify. The gods he
described as philanthropists whom a grateful world had deified. Zeus
had waged a sacrilegious war against his father. Aphrodite was a
harlot and a procuress. The others were equally commendable. Once they
had all lived. Since then all had died. Evemerus had seen their tombs.

One should not believe him. Their parapets are dimmer, perhaps, but
from them still they lean and laugh. They are immortal as the
hexameters in which their loves unfold. Yet, oddly enough, presently
the oracle of Delphi strangled. In his cavern Trophonios was gagged.
The voice of Mopsos withered.

That is nothing. On the Ionian, the captain of a ship heard some one
calling loudly at him from the sea. The passengers, who were at table,
looked out astounded. Again the loud voice called: "Captain, when you
reach shore announce that the great god Pan is dead."[40]

[Footnote 40: Plutarch: de Oracul. defect. 14.]

It may be that it was true. It may be that after Pan the others
departed. When Paul reached Athens he found a denuded Pantheon, a
vacant Olympos, skies more empty still.




VII

JUPITER


The name of the national deity of Israel is unpronounceable. The name
of the national divinity of Rome is unknown. To all but the
hierophants it was a secret. For uttering it a senator was put to
death. But Tullius Hostilius erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. It
may have been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as
was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a
quantity of little bits of gods. These latter greatly amused the
Christian Fathers. Among them was Alemona, who, in homely English, was
Wet-nurse.

Tertullian, perhaps naïvely, remarked: "Superstition has invented
these deities for whom we have substituted angels." In addition to the
diva mater Alemona was the divus pater Vaticanus, the holy father
Vatican, who assisted at a child's first cry. There was the equally
holy father Fabulin, who attended him in his earliest efforts at
speech. Neither of them had anything else to do.

Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, at a meteor, at moisture on a
wall, at no matter what, at silence even, the descendants of a
she-wolf's nursling quailed. They lived in a panic. In panic the gods
were born. It is but natural, perhaps, that Fright should have been
held supreme. The other gods, mainly divinities of prey and of havoc,
were lustreless as the imaginations that conceived them. Prosaic,
unimaged, without poetry or myth, they dully persisted until pedlars
appeared with Hellenic legends and wares. To their tales Rome
listened. Then eidolons of the Olympians became naturalized there.
Zeus was transformed into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas into
Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and all of them--and with them all the
others--into an irritable police. The Greek gods enchanted, those of
Rome alarmed. Plutarch said that they were indignant if one presumed
to so much as sneeze.

Worship, consequently, was a necessary precaution, an insurance
against divine risks, a matter of business in which the devout
bargained with the divine. Ovid represented Numa trying to elude the
exigencies of Jove. The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head.
"You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human."
"Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a
pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later,
after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion
to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck
terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more
serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the
conquest Fright became Might and the latter an effulgence of Jove's.

Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol he throned so augustly that we
swear by him still. Like Rome he is immortal. But Pavor, that had
faded into him, was never invoked. The reason was not sacerdotal, it
was political. Rome never imposed her gods on the quelled. With
superior tact she lured their gods from them. At any siege, that was
her first device. To it she believed her victories were due. It was to
avoid possible reprisals and to remain invincible, that her own
national divinity she so carefully concealed that the name still is a
secret. With the gods, Rome gathered the creeds of the world, set them
like fountains among her hills, and drank of their sacred waters. Her
early deity is unknown. But the secret of her eternity is in the
religions that she absorbed. It was these that made her immortal.

To that immortality the obscure god of an obscure people contributed
largely, perhaps, but perhaps, too, not uniquely. Jahveh might have
remained unperceived behind the veil of the sanctuary had not his
altar been illuminated by lights from other shrines. In the early days
of the empire, Rome was fully aware of the glamour of Amon, of the
star of Ormuzd, Brahm's cerulean lotos and the rainbow heights of
Bel-Marduk. But in the splendour of Jove all these were opaque.

Jupiter, always imposing, was grandiose then. His thoughts were vast
as the sky. In a direct revelation to Vergil he said of his chosen
people: "I have set no limits to their conquest or its duration. The
empire I have given them shall be without end."[41] Hebrew prophets had
spoken similarly. Vergil must have been more truly inspired. The Roman
empire, nominally holy, figuratively still exists. Yet fulfilment of
the prophecy is due perhaps less to the God of the Gentiles than to
the God of the Jews. Though perhaps also it may be permissible to
discern in the latter a transfiguration of Jove, who originally Zeus,
and primarily not Hellenic but Hindu, ultimately became supreme. After
the terrific struggle which resulted in that final metamorphosis,
Jerusalem, disinherited, saw Rome the spiritual capital of the globe.

[Footnote 41: Æneid i. 278.]

Jerusalem was not a home of logic. Rome was the city of law. That law,
cold, inflexible, passionless as a sword and quite as effective, Rome
brandished at philosophy. It is said that the intellectual gymnastics
of Greece were displeasing to her traditions. It is more probable that
augurs had foreseen or oracles had foretold that philosophy would
divest her of the sword, and with it of her sceptre and her might.
Ideas cannot be decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish them.
Philosophy, mistress of irony, resisted while nations fell. It was
philosophy that first undermined established creeds and then led to
the pursuit of new ones. Yet it may be that a contributing cause was a
curious theory that the world was to end. Foretold in the _Brahmanas_,
in the _Avesta_ and in the _Eddas_, probably it was in the _Sibylline
Books_. If not, the subsequent Church may have so assumed.

  Dies iræ, dies illa,
  Solvet sæclum in favilla,
  Teste David cum Sibylla.

Not alone David and the Sibyl but Etruscan seers had seen in the skies
that the tenth and last astronomical cycle had begun.[42] Plutarch, in
his life of Sylla, testified to the general belief in an approaching
cataclysm. Lucretius announced that at any moment it might occur.[43]
That was in the latter days of the republic. In the early days of the
empire the theory persisting may have induced the hope of a saviour.
Suetonius said that nature in her parturitions was elaborating a
king.[44] Afterward he added that such was Asia's archaic belief.[45]
Recent discoveries have verified the assertion. In the Akkadian Epic
of Dibbara a messiah was foretold.[46] That epic, anterior to a cognate
Egyptian prophecy,[47] anterior also to the _Sibylline Books_, was
anterior too to the Hebrew prophets and necessarily to those of Rome.

[Footnote 42: Censorinus: De die nat. 17.]

[Footnote 43: De rerum nat., v. 105.]

[Footnote 44: In Augusto, 74.]

[Footnote 45: In Vesp. 4.]

[Footnote 46: Jastrow: _op. cit._]

[Footnote 47: See back, Chapter III.]

Among these was Vergil. In the fourth Eclogue he beheld an age of
gold, preceded by the advent on earth of a son of Jove, under whose
auspices the last traces of sin and sorrow were to disappear and a new
race descend from heaven. "The serpent shall die," he declared,
adding: "The time is at hand."

The Eclogue was written 40 B.C., during the consulate of Pallio, whom
the poet wished perhaps to flatter. Then presently Ovid sang the
deathless soul and Tibullus gave rendezvous hereafter. The atmosphere
dripped with wonders. The air became charged with the miraculous. At
stated intervals the doors of temples opened of themselves. Statues
perspired visibly. There was a book that explained the mechanism of
these marvels. It interested nobody. Prodigies were matters of course.

The people had a heaven, also a hell, both of them Greek, a purgatory
that may have been Asiatic, and, pending the advent of the son of
Jove, in Mithra they could have had a redeemer. Had it been desired,
Buddhism could have supplied gospels, India the trinity, Persia the
resurrection, Egypt the life. From Iran could have been obtained an
Intelligence, sovereign, unimaged, and just. That was unnecessary.
Long since Socrates had displayed it. In addition, Epicurus had told
of an ascension of heavens, skies beyond the sky, worlds without
number, the many mansions of a later faith.

Meanwhile, austerity was an appanage of the stoics, in whose faultless
code the dominant note was contempt for whatever is base, respect for
all that is noble. A doctrine of great beauty, purely Greek, as was
everything else in Rome that was beautiful, its heights were too lofty
for the vulgar. It appealed only to the lettered, that is to the few,
to the infrequent disciples of Zeno and of Cicero, his prophet, who,
Erasmus said, was inspired by God.

It may be that Cicero inspired a few of God's preachers. The latter
were not yet in Rome. Christ had not come. At that period, unique in
history, man alone existed. The temples were thronged, but the skies
were bare. Cicero knew that. Elysium and Hades were as chimerical to
him as the Epicurean heavens. "People," he said, "talk of these places
as though they had been there." But that which was superstition to him
he regarded as beneficial for others, who had to have something and
who got it, in temples where a sin was a prayer.

There was once a play of which there has survived but the title: _The
Last Will and Testament of Defunct Jupiter._ It appeared in the days
of Diocletian, but it might have appealed when Cicero taught. Faith
then had fainted. Fright had ceased to build. Worship remained, but
religion had gone. The gods themselves were departing. The epoch
itself was apoplectic. The tramp of legions was continuous. Not alone
the skies but the world was in a ferment. It was not until a diadem,
falling from Cleopatra's golden bed, rolled to the feet of Augustus,
that the gods were stayed and faith revived.

In the interim, prisoners had been deported from Judea. At first they
were slaves. Subsequently manumitted, they formed a colony that in the
high-viced city resembled Esther in the seraglio of Ahasuerus. Rome,
amateur of cults, always curious of foreign faiths, might have been
interested in Judaism. It had many analogies with local beliefs. Its
adherents awaited, as Rome did, a messiah. They awaited too a golden
age. For those who were weary of philosophy, they had a religion in
which there was none. For those to whom the marvellous appealed, they
had a history in which miracles were a string of pearls. For those who
were sceptic concerning the post-mortem, they offered blankness. In
addition, their god, the enemy of all others, was adapted to an empire
that recognized no sovereignty but its own. Readily might Rome have
become Hebrew. But then, with equal ease, she might have become
Egyptian.

For those who were perhaps afraid of going to hell and yet may have
been equally afraid of not going anywhere, Egypt held passports to a
land of light. Then too, the gods of Egypt were friendly and
accessible. They mingled familiarly with those of Rome, complaisantly
with the deified Cæsars, as already they had with the pharaohs, a
condescension, parenthetically, that did not protect them from
Tiberius, who, for reasons with which religion had nothing whatever to
do, persecuted the Egyptians, as he persecuted also the Jews. None the
less, Rome, weary of local fictions, might have become converted to
foreign ideas. In default of Syrian or Copt, she might have become
Persian as already she was Greek.

Augustus had other views. Divinities, made not merely after the image
of man but in symbols of sin, he saluted. With a hand usually small,
but in this instance tolerably large, he re-established them on their
pedestals. A relapse to spiritual infancy resulted. It was what he
sought. He wanted to be a god himself and he became one. His power
and, after him, that of his successors, had no earthly limit, no
restraint human or divine. It was the same omnipotence here that
elsewhere Jupiter wielded.

Jupiter had flamens who told him the time of day. He had others that
read to him. For his amusement there were mimes. For his delectation,
matrons established themselves in the Capitol and affected to be his
loves. But then he was superb. Made of ivory, painted vermillion,
seated colossally on a colossal throne, a sceptre in one hand, a
thunderbolt in the other, a radiating gold crown on his august head,
and, about his limbs, a shawl of Tyrian purple, he looked every inch
the god.

The Cæsars, if less imposing, were more potent. Their hands, in which
there was nothing symbolic, held life and death, absolute dominion
over everything, over every one. Jupiter was but a statue. They alone
were real, alone divine. To them incense ascended. At their feet
libations poured. The nectar fumes confused. Rome, mad as they, built
them temples, raised them shrines, creating for them a worship that
they accepted, as only their due perhaps, but in which their reason
fled. In accounts of the epoch there is much mention of citizens,
senators, patricians. Nominally there were such people. Actually there
were but slaves. The slaves had a succession of masters. Among them
was a lunatic, Caligula, and an imbecile, Claud. There were others.
There was Terror, there was Hatred, there was Crime. These last,
though several, were yet but one. Collectively, they were Nero.

If philosophy ever were needed it was in his monstrous day. To anyone,
at any moment, there might be brought the laconic message: Die. In
republican Rome, philosophy separated man from sin. At that period it
was perhaps a luxury. In the imperial epoch it was a necessity. It
separated man from life. The philosophy of the republic Cicero
expounded. That of the empire Seneca produced.

The neo-stoicism of the latter sustained the weak, consoled the just.
It was a support and a guide. It preached poverty. It condemned
wealth. It deprecated honours and pleasure. It inculcated chastity,
humility, and resignation. It detached man from earth. It inspired, or
attempted to inspire, a desire for the ideal which it represented as
the goal of the sage, who, true child of God,[48] prepared for any
torture, even for the cross,[49] yet, essentially meek,[50] sorrowed for
mankind,[51] happy if he might die for it.[52]

[Footnote 48: De Provid. i.]

[Footnote 49: _Cf._ Lactantius vi. 17.]

[Footnote 50: Epit. cxx. 13.]

[Footnote 51: Lucanus ii. 378.]

[Footnote 52: Ibidem.]

In iambics that caressed the ear like flutes, poets had told of
Jupiter clothed in purple and glory. They had told of his celestial
amours, of his human and of his inhuman vices. Seneca believed in
Jupiter. But not in the Jove of the poets. That god dwelled in ivory
and anapests. Seneca's deity, nowhere visible, was everywhere
present.[53] Creator of heaven and earth,[54] without whom there is
nothing,[55] from whom nothing is hidden,[56] and to whom all
belongs,[57] our Father,[58] whose will shall be done.[59]

[Footnote 53: Nemo novit Deum. Epit. xxxi. Ubique Deus. Epit. xli.]

[Footnote 54: Mundum hujus operis dominum et artificem. Quæst. nat. i.]

[Footnote 55: Sine quo nihil est. Quæst. nat. vii. 31.]

[Footnote 56: Nil Deo Clausam. Ep. lxxxx.]

[Footnote 57: Omnia habentem. Ep. xcv.]

[Footnote 58: Parens noster. Ep. cx.]

[Footnote 59: Placeat homini quidquid Deo placuit. Ep. lxxv.]

"Life," said Seneca, "is a tribulation, death a release. In order not
to fear death," he added, "think of it always. The day on which it
comes judges all others."[60] Meanwhile comfort those that sorrow.[61]
Share your bread with them that hunger.[62] Wherever there is a human
being there is place for a good deed.[63] Sin is an ulcer. Deliverance
from it is the beginning of health--salvation, _salutem_."[64]

[Footnote 60: Ep. xxvi. 4.]

[Footnote 61: De Clem. ii. 6.]

[Footnote 62: Ep. xcv. 51.]

[Footnote 63: De Vita Beata, 14.]

[Footnote 64: Ep. xxviii. 9.]

Words such as these suggest others. They are anterior to those which
they recall. The latter are more beautiful, they are more ample, there
is in them a poetry and a profundity that has rarely been excelled.
Yet, it may be, that a germ of them is in Seneca, or, more exactly, in
theories which, beginning in India, prophets, seers, and stoics
variously interpreted and recalled.

However since they have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was
curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of
these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced
transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the
epileptically obscene. What is more important, they produced
Christianity.

Christianity already existed in Rome, but obscurely, subterraneanly,
among a class of poor people generally detested, particularly by the
Jews. Christianity was not as yet a religion, it was but the belief of
a sect that announced that the world was to be consumed. Presently
Rome was. The conflagration, which was due to Nero, swept everything
sacred away.

Even for a prince that, perhaps, was excessive. Nero may have felt
that he had gone too far. An emperor was omnipotent, he was not
inviolable. Tiberius was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, Claud was
poisoned. Nero, it may be, in feeling that he had gone too far, felt
also that he needed a scapegoat. Christian pyromania suggested itself.
But probably it suggested itself first to the Jews, who, Renan has
intimated, denounced the Christians accordingly. Such may have been
the case. In any event, then it was that Christianity received its
baptism of blood.

All antiquity was cruel, but, barring perhaps the immense Asiatic
butcheries, Nero contrived then to surpass anything that had been
done. Bloated and hideous, his hair done up in a chignon, a concave
emerald for monocle, in the crowded arena he assisted at the rape of
Christian girls. Their lovers, their brothers and fathers were either
eaten alive by beasts or, that night, dressed in tunics that had been
soaked in oil, were fastened to posts and set on fire, in order that,
as human torches, they might illuminate palace gardens, through which,
costumed as a jockey, Nero raced.

The spectacle in the amphitheatre, which fifty thousand people beheld;
the succeeding festival at which all Rome assembled, were two acts in
the birthday of a faith.

Then, to the cradle, presently, Wise Men came with gifts--the gold,
the frankincense, the myrrh, of creeds anterior though less divine.




VIII

THE NEC PLUS ULTRA


It was after fastidious rites, the heart entirely devout and on his
knees, that Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the Christ. The
attitude is emulative. It is with brushes dipped in holy water that
Jesus should be displayed, though more reverent still is the absence
of any delineation.

Reverence of that high character history formerly observed. There is
no mention of the Saviour in the chronicles of those who were blessed
in being his contemporaries. One indiscreet remark of Josephus has
been recognized as the interpolation of a later hand, well-intentioned
perhaps, but misguided. Jesus glows in the Gospels. Yet they that
awaited the day when, in a great aurora borealis, the Son of man
should appear, had passed from earth before one of the evangels was
written.

It was a hundred years later before the texts that comprise the New
Testament were complete. It was nearly two hundred before they were
definitive. In the interim many gospels appeared. Attributed
indifferently to each of the Twelve, one was ascribed to Judas. There
was a Gospel to the Hebrews, a Gospel to the Egyptians. There were
evangels of Childhood, of Perfection and of Mary.

These primitive memoirs were based on oral accounts of occurrences
long anterior. Into them entered extraneous beauties, felicities of
phrase and detail, which, with naïf effrontery, were put into the
mouth of one apostle or another, even into that of Jesus. The
ascription was regarded as highly commendable. It was but a way of
glorifying the Lord. Besides, the scenarii of these pious evocations
the prophets had traced in advance.

"Rejoice, daughter of Zion; shout, daughter of Jerusalem, behold thy
King cometh unto thee; he is just and having salvation, lowly and
riding upon an ass."

That king of the poor whom Zachariah had foreseen, the stumbling block
of Israel that Isaiah had foretold, the Son, mentioned by Hosea, whom
Jahveh had called out of Egypt, was the Saviour, ascending in glory as
Elijah had done. A passage incorrectly rendered by the Septuagint
indicated a virginal birth. That also was suggestive.

The little biographies in which these developments appeared were
intended for circulation only among an author's narrow circle of
immediate friends, at most to be read aloud in devout reunions. If,
ultimately, of the entire collection, four only were retained, it is
probably because these best expressed existing convictions. Though,
irrespective of their beauties, Irenæus said that there had to be four
and could be but four, for the reason that there are four seasons,
four winds, four corners of the earth, and the four revelations of
Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus.

It is not on that perhaps arbitrary deduction that their validity
resides, but rather because the parables and miracles which they
recite became the spiritual nourishment of a world. To their title of
eternal verities they have other and stronger claims. They have
consoled and they have ennobled. Elder creeds may have done likewise,
but these lacked that of which Christianity was the unique possessor,
the marvel of a crucified god.

Saviours there had been. Mithra was a redeemer. Zoroaster was born of
a virgin. Persephone descended into hell. Osiris rose from the dead.
Gotama was tempted by the devil. Moses was transfigured. Elijah
ascended into heaven. But in no belief is there a parallel for the
crucifixion, although in Hindu legend, Krishna, a divinity whose
mythical infancy a mythical prototype of Herod troubled, died, nailed
by arrows to a tree.

In Oriental lore Krishna is held to have been the eighth avatar of
Vishnu, of whom Gotama was the ninth. Krishna was therefore anterior
to the Buddha, at least in myth. But it would be a grave impropriety
to infer that with the legend concerning him the narrative of the
crucifixion has any other connection than the possible one of having
suggested it. The _Bhagavad-Purana_, in which the legend occurs, is
relatively modern, though the legend itself may, like the _Tripitaka_,
have existed orally, for centuries, before it was finally committed to
writing.

There can, however, be no impropriety in recalling analogies that
exist between the Saviour and one whom the Orient holds also divine.
These analogies, set forth in the first chapter of the present volume,
are, it may be, wholly fortuitous, though Pliny stated that, centuries
before his day, disciples of Gotama were established on the Dead Sea
and, from a passage in Josephus, it seems probable that the Essenes
were Buddhists, in the same degree perhaps that the Pharisees were
Parsis. But the point is also obscure. It is immaterial as well. The
Gospels were not written in Jerusalem but mainly in Rome, where
crucifixions were common, as they were, for that matter, throughout
the East, but where, too, all religions were acclimated and the
supernatural was at home.

Rome had witnessed the _tours de force_ of Apollonios of Tyana. Those
of Simon the Magician had also been beheld. Rome had seen, or, it may
be, thought she believed she had seen, Vespasian cure the halt and the
blind with a touch. The atmosphere then was charged with the
marvellous. The temples were filled with prodigies, with strange gods,
beckoning chimeras, credulous crowds.

There was something superior. Rome was the depository of the legends
and lore of the world. A haunt of the Muses, the sensual city was a
hermitage of philosophy as well. These things collectively represented
a great literary feast, of which not all the courses have descended to
us, though, as is not impossible, a lost dish or two, transmuted, by
the alchemy of faith, from dross into gold, the Gospels may perhaps
contain.

In that case there is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, assuming
the transmutation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as
indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a
poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those of another.
Inspiration is infectious.

A page of verse, whether Hindu, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, or Latin,
was as useful then. Dante fed on the troubadours. They are lost and
forgot. He divinely stands greater than the tallest of them all. In a
measure the same may be true of those from whom the Gospels came. Yet
with a very notable difference. The _Divina Commedia_ was written for
all time. So too were the Gospels. But not intentionally. They were
written to prepare man for the immediate termination of the world.
With the most perfect propriety, therefore, anything serviceable could
have been utilized and probably was. The devout had but to lift their
eyes. In the words of Isaiah, there, before them, were the treasures
of nations; there were the camels and dromedaries bearing from every
side incense and gold; there were the sons of strangers to build up
their walls.

The sons were many, the treasures as great. Even otherwise there was
the Law, there too were the Prophets. Moses fasted for forty days.
Elisha performed a miracle of the loaves, if he did not that of the
fishes. Job saw the Lord walking upon the sea. Jeremiah said: "Seek
and ye shall find." Isaiah bid those that sorrowed come and be
consoled. In the poem of that poet the servant of the Lord had vinegar
when he thirsted, he was spat upon and for his garments lots were
cast.

In an effort to fill in a picture of which the central figure had
passed from the real to the ideal, these things may have been
suggestive. So also, perhaps, was the _Talmud_. The redaction of that
chaos began in the second century. But the Vedas, the Homeric poems,
the Tripitaka as well, existed in memory long before they were
committed to writing. The same is true of the _Talmud_. Orally it
existed prior to the Christ. Considered as literature, if it may be so
considered, it is the reverse of endearing. But of the many maxims
that it contains there are some of singular charm. Among others is the
Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.[65] The origin of that,
as already indicated, is traceable to the _Tripitaka_, which,
parenthetically, were so well known in Babylon that Gotama was there
regarded as a Chaldean seer. That abridgement of the Law which is
called the Golden Rule is also in the _Talmud_,[66] as also, before the
_Talmud_ was, it was in the _Tripitaka_. The injunction to love one's
enemies is equally in both. So is the very excellent suggestion that
one should consider one's own faults before admonishing a brother
concerning his defects. But the perhaps subtle intimation that the
desire to commit adultery is as reprehensible as the act, and the
rather extravagant statement that it is easier for a camel to pass
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom
of heaven, these, originally, were perhaps uniquely Talmudic.
Currently cited with multiple others they were all so many common
sayings, which, strung together in the Gospels, became a rosary of
most perfect pearls.

[Footnote 65: Talmud Babli: Baba bathra, 11 _a_.]

[Footnote 66: Schabbath, 37 _a_.]

In a passage of Irenæus it is stated that the _Gospel according to St.
Matthew_ was arranged by the Church for the benefit of the Jews who
awaited a Messiah descended from David. A Syro-Chaldaic evangel, known
as the _Gospel to the Hebrews_, had then appeared. So also had the
_Gospel according to St. Mark_. But these offered no evidence that
Jesus was the one they sought. Another was then prepared. Written in
Greek and bearing the authoritative name of Matthew, it traced from
David, Joseph's descent.

The narrative continued: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this
wise. When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came
together, she was found with child by the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her
husband being a just man and not willing to make her a publick
example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on
these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a
dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee
Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy
Ghost."

The genealogy completed, though perhaps inadequately, since Jesus, not
being a son of Joseph, could not have descended from David, the Church
continued: "Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken of the Lord by the prophet saying, Behold a virgin shall be
with child and shall bring forth a son and call his name Emmanuel."

The prophecy mentioned occurs in Isaiah vii, 14. In the King James
version it is as follows: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a
son and shall call his name Immanuel." But the Aramaic reading is:
"Behold an _'almâ_ shall conceive." _'Almâ_ means young woman. The
Septuagint, in translating it, employed the term [Greek: parthenos],
or maiden. In _Matthew_ the term was retained.

Matthew, at the time, had long been dead. Even had he been living it
is improbable that he could write in Greek. Unfortunately there were
others who could not only write Greek but read Hebrew. In particular,
there was a rabbi Aquila who retranslated Isaiah with no other purpose
than the malign object of definitely re-establishing the exact
expression which the old poet had used.[67]

[Footnote 67: Renan: Les Evangiles.]

It was presumably in these circumstances that the _Evangel of Mary_
was advanced. Among other elucidations, the work contained
professional testimony of the immaculacy that was claimed.
Additionally, in reparation of the earlier oversight, the Virgin was
genealogically descended from the royal line.

That, however, is apocryphal, and if, regarding the other genealogy,
exegesis has since obscured the luminousness of the method adapted by
the Church, the latter's intention was none the less irreproachable,
and that alone imports. Before it, before the miracle of the nativity
and the divine episodes of the transfiguration, crucifixion,
resurrection, and ascension, reverently the Occident has knelt. They
are indeed divine. If they did not occur in Judea, they have occurred
ever since. Continuously, in the hearts of the devout, they are
repeated.

Unhappily there were heretics then as now. To the Gnostics, Jesus was
an æon that had never been. To the Docetists, he was a phantasm. There
are always brutes that can believe but in the reality of things. There
are others to whom the symbolic is dumb. In the Gospels there is much
that is figurative, there is more that is ineffable, there are
suggestions sheerly ideal.

"In my Father's house are many mansions," the Saviour declared. In his
own ministry there are as many lights. He was a vagrant and he created
pure sentiment. He was a nihilist and he inspired a new conception of
life. He said he had not come to destroy and he changed the face of
the earth. He remitted the sins of a harlot and condemned both
marriage and love. There are other antitheses, deeper contradictions.
These perhaps are more apparent than real. Behind them there may have
been the co-ordination of a central thought. Of many gospels but few
remain. Among the lost evangels was one that Valentinian said was
imparted only to the more spiritual of the disciples. It may be that
in it a main idea was elucidated and, perhaps, as a consequence, the
meaning of the esoteric proclamation: "Before Abraham was I am."

Yet though now the authoritative explanation be lacking, its
significance seems to run beneath the texts. At the first apparition
of Jesus, the chief preoccupation of those that stood about was what
prophet of the old days had returned in the new. Some thought him
Elijah. Others Jeremiah. Antipas feared that he was the Baptist
revived. Jesus himself asked the disciples whom he was said to be.
Later he assured them that the awaited return of Elijah had been
accomplished in John. That assurance, together with the perplexities
regarding him and the esoteric announcement which he made concerning
himself, can hardly indicate anything else than a belief in
reincarnation.

The belief, common to all antiquity, though not necessarily valid on
that account, is not discernible in Hebrew thought, perhaps for the
reason that it is not perceptible in Babylonian. Yet the myth of Eden
barely conceals it. It is almost obvious in the allegory of Beth-el.
Solomon said: "I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or
ever earth was." If the idea contained in that statement was not a
part of the philosophy attributed to the Christ, it might have been.
The amount of beauty stored in it is more enormous than in any other.

To the materialist the beauty is meaningless. To the mathematician it
has the value of a zero from which the periphery has gone. But at the
Pillars of Hercules early geographers put on their maps: _Hic deficit
orbis_--Here ends the world. They had no suspicion that beyond that
world there stretched another twice as great. Materialists may be
equally naïf. On the other hand, they may not be. The theory of
reincarnation is one that transcends the limits of experience.

Of the many tenets of the belief there are but two with which the
matter-of-fact agrees. One of them concerns the conservation of
energy, the other the negation of death. Theory and practice unite in
admitting that the supply of energy is invariable. Constantly it is
transformed and as constantly transposed, but whether it enter into
fungus or star, into worm or man, the loss of a particle never occurs.
Death consequently is but the constituent of a change. When it comes,
that which was living assumes a state that has in it the potentiality
of another form. A tenement has crumbled and a tenant gone forth.
Though just where is the riddle.

In the thousand and one nights that were less astronomic than our own,
it was thought that the riddle was answered. Poets had erected an
edifice of verse and called it Creation. In the strophes of the epic
the earth was a flat and stationary parallelogram. About the earth,
and uniquely for its benefit, sun, moon and stars paraded. Above was a
deity one or multiple. Below were places of vivid discomfort. To the
latter, or to the former, the soul of man proceeded. There were no
other resorts. Creation had its limits.

Poets younger yet more gray have presented a different conception. In
the glare of a million million of suns they have sent the earth
spinning like a midge. Beyond the uttermost horizon they have strewn
other systems, other worlds; beyond the latter, more. Wherever
imagination in its weariness would set a limit, there is space begun.

There too is energy. Throughout the stretch of universes the same
force pulsates that is recognizable here. A deduction is obvious.
Throughout infinity are sentient beings, perhaps our brothers, perhaps
ourselves.

The obvious, very frequently, is misleading. But the dream of
precipitation into that wonderful tornado of worlds has the merit of
more colourful idealism than that which was formerly displayed. Taken
but as an hypothesis, it holds suggestions ampler than any other
conveys. It intimates that just as the butterfly rises from the
chrysalis, so does the spiritual rise from the flesh. It indicates
that just as the sun cannot set, so is it impossible for death to be.

There are topics about which words hover like enchanted bees. Death is
one of them. Mediævally it was represented by a skeleton to which
prose had given a rictus, poetry a scythe, and philosophy wings. From
its eyries it swooped spectral and sinister. Previously it was more
gracious. In Greece it resembled Eros. Among its attributes was
beauty. It did not alarm. It beckoned and consoled. The child of
Night, the brother of Sleep, it was less funereal than narcotic. The
theory of it generally was beneficent. But not enduring. In the change
of things death lost its charm. It became a sexless nightmare-frame of
bones topped by a grinning skull. That perhaps was excessive. In
epicurean Rome it was a marionette that invited you to wreathe
yourself with roses before they could fade. In the Muslim East it was
represented by Azrael, who was an angel. In Vedic India it was
represented by Yama, who was a god. But mediævally in Europe the
skeleton was preferred. Since then it has changed again. It is no
longer a spectral vampire. It has acquired the serenity of a natural
law. Regarding the operation of that law there are perhaps but three
valid conjectures. Rome entertained all of them. There, there was a
tomb on which was written _Umbra_. Before it was another on which was
engraved _Nihil_. Between the two was a portal behind which the _Nec
plus ultra_ stood revealed.

The portal, fashioned by the philosophy of ages, still is open, wider
than before, on vaster horizons and unsuspected skies. Through it one
may see the explication of things; the reason why men are not born
equal, why some are rich and some are poor, why some are weak and some
are strong, why some are wise and many are not. One may see there too
the reason of joys and sorrows, the cause of tears and smiles. One may
see also how the soul changes its raiment and how it happens to have a
raiment to change. One may see all these things, and others besides,
in the revelation that this life, being the refuse of many deaths, has
acquired merits and demerits in accordance with which are present
punishments and rewards.

In proportion as these are utilized or disregarded, so perhaps is
retrogression induced or progress achieved. But not in Hades or yet in
Elysium. These were the inventions of man for his brother. So also was
the very neighbourly heaven which the early Church devised. But
because that has gone from the sidereal chart, it does not follow that
there is no such place. Because there is nothing alarming under the
earth, it does not follow that hell has ceased to be. On the contrary.
Both are constant, though it be but in the heart.

In the light of reincarnation it is probable that neither can occur
there without anterior cause. But probably too it is the preponderance
of either that creates the mystery of life, as it may also foreshadow
the portent of death.

Death, it may be, is not merely a law but a place, perhaps a garage
which the traveller reaches on a demolished motor, but whence none can
proceed until all old scores are paid. Pending payment, there, perhaps
the soul must wait. But the bill of its past acquitted, it may be that
then it shall be free to pursue on trillions of spheres the
diversified course of endless life--free to pass from world to world,
from beatitude to bliss, from transformation to transfiguration, from
the transitory to the eternal; weaving, meanwhile, a garland of
migrations that stretch from sky to sky, marrying its memoirs with
those of the universe, and, finally, from some ultimate zenith,
reviewing, as it casts them aside, the masks of concluded
incarnations.

The prospect, overwhelming in beauty, is really divine. The divine is
always utopian. But there is the supreme Alhambra of dream. It exceeds
any other, however excessive another may be. It is the _Nec plus
ultra_. Into it all may wander and never weary of the wonders that are
there. It may be unrealizable, but for that very reason it must be
also ideal.


FINIS HISTORIÆ DEORUM





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