CHAPTER XXIX.

THOUGHTS AND INTERPRETATIONS.

I lately heard the story of a pious negro woman whose faith in hell was sorely tried by a sceptic who asked her how brimstone enough could be found to burn all the wicked people in the world. After taking some days for reflection, the old woman, when next challenged by the sceptic, replied, that she had concluded that 'every man took his own brimstone.' This humble saint was unconscious that her instinct had reached the finest thought of Milton, whose Satan says 'Myself am hell.' Marlowe's Mephistopheles also says, 'Where we are is hell.' And, far back as the year 633, the holy man Fursey, who believed himself to have been guided by an angel near the region of the damned, related a vision much like the view of the African woman. There were four fires--Falsehood, Covetousness, Discord, Injustice--which joined to form one great flame. When this drew near, Fursey, in fear, said, 'Lord, behold the fire draws near me.' The angel answered, 'That which you did not kindle shall not burn you.'

Such association of any principle of justice, even in form so crude, has become rare enough in Christendom to excite applause when it appears, though the applause has about it that infusion of the grotesque which one perceives when gallery-gods cheer the actor who heroically declares that a man ought not to strike a woman. When we go back to the atmosphere of Paganism we find that retribution had among them a real meaning. Nothing can be in more remarkable contrast than the disorderly characterless hell of Christendom, into which the murderer and the man who confuses the Persons of the Godhead alike burn everlastingly in most inappropriate fires, and the Hades of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, where every punishment bears relation to the offence, and is limited in duration to the degree of the offence.

'The Egyptians,' says Herodotus (ii. 123), 'were the first who asserted that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body perishes it enters into some other animal, constantly springing into existence; and when it has passed through the different kinds of terrestrial, marine, and aerial beings, it again enters into the body of a man that is born, and that this revolution is made in three thousand years.' Probably Plato imported from Egypt his fancy of the return of one dead to relate the scenes of heaven and hell, Er the Armenian (Republic, x. 614) suggesting an evolution of Rhampsinitus (Herod. ii. 122), who descended to Hades alive, played dice with Ceres, and brought back gold. The vision of Er represents a terrible hell, indeed, but those punished were chiefly murderers and tyrants. They are punished tenfold for every wrong they had committed. But when this punishment is ended, each soul must return to the earth in such animal form as he or she might select. The animals, too, had their choice. Er saw that the choice was generally determined by the previous earthly life,--many becoming animals because of some spite derived from their experience. 'And not only did men pass into animals, but I must also mention that there were animals tame and wild who changed into one another, and into corresponding human natures, the good into the gentle, the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.' Sly Plato! Such is his estimate of what men's selections of their paradises are worth!

Orpheus chose to be a swan, hating to be born of woman, because women murdered him; Ajax became a lion and Agamemnon an eagle, because they had suffered injustice from men; Atalanta would be an athlete, and the jester Thersites a monkey; and Odysseus went about to find the life of a private gentleman with nothing to do. If Plutarch's friend Thespesius had pondered well this irony of Plato, he would hardly have brought back from his visit to Hades the modification that demons were provided to assign the animal forms in which souls should be born again on earth. They could hardly have done for the wicked anything worse than Plato shows them doing for themselves. But the meaning of Plutarch is the same. Thespesius sees demons preparing the body of a viper for Nero to be born into, since it was said the young of that reptile destroy their mother at birth.

Among the Persians the idea of future rewards and punishments exceeds the exactness of the Koran--'Whoso hath done an atom of justice shall behold it, and whoso hath done an atom of injustice shall behold it.' The Persian Sufis will even subdivide the soul rather than that any good act should go down with the larger gross of wickedness. Sádi tells of a vision where a man was seen in hell, all except one foot, which was twined with flowers. With all his wickedness the man had with that foot shoved a bundle of hay within reach of a weary ox.

But while Persian poets--Sufis, ennobling the old name Sophist--preserved thus a good deal of the universalism of Parsaism, a Mohammedanism hard as the Scythians who brought it turned the heart of the people in that country to stone. In the Dresden Library there is an illuminated Persian MS., thought to be seven hundred years old, which has in it what may be regarded as a portrait of Ahriman and Iblis combined. He is red, has a heavy beard and moustache, and there is a long dragon's crest and mane on his head. He wears a green and blue skirt about his loins. His tongue rolls thirstily between his cruel teeth. He superintends a number of fish-like devils which float in a lake of fire, and swallow the damned. Above this scene are the glorified souls, including the Shah sitting cross-legged on his rug, who look down on the tortures beneath with evident satisfaction. Apparently this is the only amusement which relieves the ennui of their heaven.

If anything could make a rational man believe in a fiend-principle in the universe it would be the suggestion of such pictures, that men have existed who could conceive of happiness enjoyed in view of such tortures as these. This and some similar pictures in the East--for instance, that in the Temple of Horrors at Wuchang, China--are absolutely rayless so far as any touch of humanity is concerned. Are the Shah and his happy fellow-inspectors of tortures really fiends? In the light of our present intelligence they may seem so. Certainly no person of refined feeling could now expect to attain any heaven while others were in hell. But it would be possible, if persons could believe that many of those around them are not men and women at all, but fiends in human shape. These ferocious Hells are referable to a period when all who incurred the sentences of princes or priests were seen as mere masks of devils; they were only ascribed human flesh that they may suffer. The dogma of Hell was doomed from the moment that the damned were supposed to be really human.

Were those who killed the martyrs of heresy, for instance, to return to the world and look upon those whom they pierced, they could never recognise them. Were they to see the statues of Bruno, Huss, Cranmer, Servetus, the names and forms would not recall to them the persons they slew. They would be shocked if told that they had burned great men, and would surely answer, 'Men? We burned no men. The Devil came among us calling himself Huss, and we made short work with him; he reappeared under several aliases--Bruno, Servetus, Spinoza, Voltaire: sometimes we burned him, at other times managed to make him miserable, thank God! But we were not hurting real men, we were saving them.'

Around such ideas grew our yet uncivilised Codes of Law. In England, anno 1878, men are refused as jury-men if they will not say, 'So help me God!' on the ground that an atheist cannot have a conscience. Only let him really be without conscience, and call himself a christian when he is not, and courts receive the selfish liar with respect. The old clause of the death-sentence--'instigated thereto by the Devil'--has been dropped in the case of murderers, however; and that is some gain. Torture by fire of the worst murderer for one day would not be permitted in Christendom. Belief in hell-fire outlasts it for a little among the ignorant. But what shall be said of the educated who profess to believe it?

The Venerable Bede relates that, in the year 696, a Northumbrian gentleman, who had died in the beginning of the night, came to life and health in the morning, and gave an account of what he had seen overnight. He had witnessed the conventional tortures of the damned, but adds--'Being thus on all sides enclosed with enemies and darkness, and looking about on every side for assistance, there appeared to me, on the way that I came, as it were, the brightness of a star shining amidst the darkness, which increased by degrees,'--but we need not go on to the anti-climax of this vision.

This star rising above all such visions belongs to the vault of the human Love, and it is visible through all the Ages of Darkness. It cannot be quenched, and its fiery rays have burnt up mountains of iniquity.

'In the year 1322,' writes Flögel, after the 'Chronicon Sampetrinum Erfurtense,' 'there was a play shown at Eisenach, which had a tragical enough effect. Markgraf Friedrich of Misnia, Landgraf also of Thuringia, having brought his tedious warfare to a conclusion, and the country beginning now to revive under peace, his subjects were busy repaying themselves for the past distresses by all manner of diversions; to which end, apparently by the Sovereign's order, a dramatic representation of the Ten Virgins was schemed, and at Eisenach, in his presence, duly executed. This happened fifteen days after Easter, by indulgence of the Preaching Friars. In the 'Chronicon Sampetrinum' stands recorded that the play was enacted in the Bear Garden (in horto ferarum) by the Clergy and their Scholars. But now, when it came to pass that the Wise Virgins would give the foolish no oil, and these latter were shut out from the Bridegroom, they began to weep bitterly, and called on the Saints to intercede for them; who however, even with Mary at their head, could effect nothing from God; but the Foolish Virgins were all sentenced to damnation. Which things the Landgraf seeing and hearing, he fell into a doubt, and was very angry; and said 'What then is the Christian Faith, if God will not take pity on us for intercession of Mary and all the Saints?' In this anger he continued five days; and the learned men could hardly enlighten him to understand the Gospel. Thereupon he was struck with apoplexy, and became speechless and powerless; in which sad state he continued, bedrid, two years and seven months, and so died, being then fifty-five.'

In telling the story Carlyle remarks that these 'Ten Virgins at Eisenach are more fatal to warlike men than Æschylus' Furies at Athens were to weak women.' Even so, until great-hearted men rose up at Eisenach and elsewhere to begin the work destined to prove fatal alike to heartless Virgins and Furies. That star of a warrior's Compassion, hovering over the foolish Friars and their midnight Gospel, beams far. The story reminds me of an incident related of a mining district in California, where a rude theatre was erected, and a company gave, as their first performance, Othello. When the scene of Desdemona's suffocation approached, a stalwart miner leaped on the stage, and pulling out his six-shooter, said to the Moor, 'You damned nigger! if you touch that woman I'll blow the top of your head off!' A dozen roughs, clambering over the footlights, cried, 'Right Joe! we'll stand by you!' The manager met the emergency by crying, 'Don't shoot, boys! This play was wrote by Bill Shakespear; he's an old Californian, and it's all in fun!' Had this Moor proceeded to roast Desdemona in fire with any verisimilitude, it is doubtful if the manager could have saved him by an argument reminding the miners that such was the divine way with sinners in the region to which most of them were going. The top of that theologic hell's head is not very safe in these days when human nature is unchained with all its six-shooters, each liable to be touched off by fire from that Star revolving in the sphere of Compassion.

Day after day I gazed upon Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment' in the Sistine Chapel. The artist was in his sixtieth year when Pope Clement VII. invited him to cover a wall sixty feet high and nearly as wide with a picture of the Day of Wrath. In seven years he had finished it. Clement was dead. Pope Paul IV. looked at it, and liked it not: all he could see was a vast number of naked figures; so he said it was not fit for the Sistine Chapel, and must be destroyed. One of Michael Angelo's pupils saved it by draping some of the figures. Time went on, and another Pope came who insisted on more drapery,--so the work was disfigured again. However, popular ridicule saved this from going very far, and so there remains the tremendous scene. But Popes and Cardinals always disliked it. The first impression I received from it was that of a complete representation of all the physical powers belonging to organised life; though the forms are human, every animal power is there, leaping, crouching, crawling,--every sinew, joint, muscle, portrayed in completest tension and action. Then the eye wanders from face to face, and every passion that ever crawled or prowled in jungle or swamp is pictured. The most unpleasant expressions seemed to me those of the martyrs. They came up from their graves, each bringing the instrument by which he had suffered, and offering it in witness against the poor wretches who came to be judged; and there was a look of self-righteous satisfaction on their faces as they witnessed the persecution of their persecutors. As for Christ, he was like a fury, with hand uplifted against the doomed, his hair wildly floating. The tortured people below are not in contrast with the blessed above; they who are in heaven look rather more stupid than the others, and rather pleased with the anguish they witness, but not more saintly. But gradually the eye, having wandered over the vast canvas, from the tortured Cardinal at the bottom up to the furious Judge,--alights on a face which, once seen, is never to be forgotten. Beautiful she is, that Mary beside the Judge, and more beautiful for the pain that is on her face. She has drawn her drapery to veil from her sight the anguish below; she has turned her face from the Judge,--does not see her son in him; she looks not upon the blessed,--for she, the gentle mother, is not in heaven; she cannot have joy in sight of misery. In that one face of pure womanly sympathy--that beauty transfigured in its compassionateness--the artist put his soul, his religion. Mary's face quenches all the painted flames. They are at once made impossible. The same universe could not produce both a hell and that horror of it. The furious Jesus is changed to a phantasm; he could never be born of such a mother. If the Popes had only wished to hide the nakedness of their own dogmas they ought to have blotted out Mary's face; for as it now stands the rest of the forms are but shapes to show how all the wild forms and passions of human animalism gather as a frame round that which is their consummate flower,--the spirit of love enshrined in its perfect human expression.

So was it that Michael Angelo could not serve two masters. Popes might employ him, but he could not do the work they liked. 'The passive master lent his hand to the vast soul that o'er him planned.' He could not help it. The lover of beauty could not paint the Day of Wrath without setting above it that face like a star which shines through its unreality, burns up its ugliness, and leaves the picture a magnificent interpretation of the forms of nature and hopes of the world,--a cardinal hypocrite at the bottom, an ideal woman at the top.

Exhausted by the too-much glory of the visions of Paradise which he had seen, Dante came forth to the threshold opening on the world of human life, from which he had parted for a space, and there sank down. As he lay there angels caused lilies to grow beneath and around him, and myrtle to rise and intertwine for a bower over him, and their happy voices, wafted in low-toned hymns, brought soft sleep to his overwrought senses. Long had he slumbered before the light of familiar day stole once more into those deep eyes. The angels had departed. The poet awoke to find himself alone, and with a sigh he said to himself, 'It is, then, all but a dream.' As he arose he saw before him a man of noble mien and shining countenance, habited in an Eastern robe, who returned his gaze with an interest equal to his own. Quickly the eyes of Dante searched the ground beside the stranger to see if he were shadowless: convinced thus that he was true flesh and blood, the Florentine thus addressed him:--

'Pilgrim, for such thou seemest, may we meet in simple human brotherhood? If, as thy garb suggests, thou comest from afar, perchance the friendly greeting, even of one who in his native city is still himself a pilgrim, may not be unwelcome.

'Heart to heart be our kiss, my brother; yet must I journey without delay to those who watch and wait for wondrous tidings that I bear.

'Friend! I hear some meaning deeper than thy words. If 'twere but as satisfying natural curiosity, answer not; but if thou bearest a burden of tidings glad for all human-kind, speak! Who art thou? whence comest, and with what message freighted?

'Arda Viráf is the name I bear; from Persia have I come; but by what strange paths have reached this spot know I not, save that through splendours of worlds invisible to mortal sense I have journeyed, nor encountered human form till I found thee slumbering on this spot.

'Trebly then art thou my brother! I too have but now, as to my confused sense it seems, emerged from that vast journey. Thou clearest from me gathering doubts that those visions were illusive. Yet, as even things we really see are often overlaid by images that lurk in the eye, I pray thee tell me something thou hast seen, so that perchance we may part with mutual confirmation of our vision.

'That gladly will I do. When the Avesta had been destroyed, and the sages of Iran disagreed as to the true religion, they agreed that one should be chosen by lot to drink the sacred draught of Vishtasp, that he might pass to the invisible world and bring intelligence therefrom. On me the lot fell. Beside the fire that has never gone out, surrounded by holy women who chanted our hymns, I drank the three cups--Well Thought, Well Said, Well Done. Then as I slept there rose before me a high stairway of three steps; on the first was written, Well Thought; on the second, Well Said; on the third, Well Done. By the first step I reached the realm where good thoughts are honoured: there were the thinkers whose starlike radiance ever increased. They offered no prayers, they chanted no liturgies. Above all was the sphere of the liberal. The next step brought me to the circle of great and truthful speakers: these walked in lofty splendour. The third step brought me to the heaven of good actions. I saw the souls of agriculturists surrounded by spirits of water and earth, trees and cattle. The artisans were seated on embellished thrones. Sublime were the seats of teachers, interceders, peace-makers; and the religious walked in light and joy with which none are satiated.

'Sawest thou the fairest of earth-born ladies--Beatrice?

'I saw indeed a lady most fair. In a pleasant grove lay the form of a man who had but then parted from earth. When he had awakened, he walked through the grove and there met him this most beautiful maiden. To her he said, 'Who art thou, so fair beyond all whom I have seen in the land of the living?' To him she replied, 'O youth, I am thy actions.' Can this be thy lady Beatrice?

'But sawest thou no hell? no dire punishments?

'Alas! sad scenes I witnessed, sufferers whose hell was that their darkness was amid the abodes of splendour. Amid all that glow one newly risen from earth walked shivering with cold, and there walked ever by his side a hideous hag. On her he turned and said, 'Who art thou, that ever movest beside me, thou that art monstrous beyond all that I have seen on earth?' To him she replied, 'Man, I am thy actions.'

'But who were those glorious ones thou sawest in Paradise?

'Some of their names I did indeed learn--Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, Buddha, Confucius, Christ.

'What do I hear! knowest thou that none of these save that last holy one--whom methinks thou namest too lightly among men--were baptized? Those have these eyes sorrowfully beheld in pain through the mysterious justice of God.

'Thinkest thou, then, thy own compassion deeper than the mercy of Ormuzd? But, ah! now indeed I do remember. As I conversed with the sages I had named, they related to me this strange event. By guidance of one of their number, Virgil by name, there had come among them from the earth a most powerful magician. He bore the name of Dante. By mighty spells this being had cast them all into a sad circle which he called Limbo, over whose gate he wrote, though with eyes full of tears, 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here!' Thus were they in great sorrow and dismay. But, presently, as this strange Dante was about to pass on, so they related, he looked upon the face of one among them so pure and noble that though he had styled him 'pagan,' he could not bear to abandon him there. This was Cato of Utica. Him this Dante led to the door, and gave him liberty on condition that he would be warder of his unbaptized brethren, and by no means let any of them escape. No sooner, however, was this done than this magician beheld others who moved his reverence,--among them Trajan and Ripheus,--and overcome by an impulse of love, he opened a window in the side of Limbo, bidding them emerge into light. He then waved his christian wand to close up this aperture, and passed away, supposing that he had done so; but the limit of that magician's power had been reached, the window was but veiled, and after he had gone all these unbaptized ones passed out by that way, and reascended to the glory they had enjoyed before this Dante had brought his alien sorceries to bear upon them for a brief space.

'Can this be true? Is it indeed so that all the sages and poets of the world are now in equal rank whether or not they have been sealed as members of Christ?

'Brother, thy brow is overcast. What! can one so pure and high of nature as thou desire that the gentle Christ, whom I saw embracing the sages and prophets of other ages, should turn upon them with hatred and bind them in gloom and pain like this Dante?'

Thereupon, with a flood of tears, Dante fell at the feet of Arda Viráf, and kissed the hem of his skirt. 'Purer is thy vision, O pilgrim, than mine,' he said. 'I fear that I have but borne with me to the invisible world the small prejudices of my little Church, which hath taught me to limit the Love which I now see to be boundless. Thou who hast learned from thy Zoroaster that the meaning of God is the end of all evil, a universe climbing to its flower in joy, deign to take the hand of thy servant and make him worthy to be thy friend,--with thee henceforth to abandon the poor formulas which ignorance substitutes for virtue, and ascend to the beautiful summits thou has visited by the stairway of good thoughts, good words, good deeds.'

In 1745 Swedenborg was a student of Natural Philosophy in London. In the April of that year his 'revelations' began amid the smoke and toil of the great metropolis. 'I was hungry and ate with great appetite. Towards the end of the meal I remarked a kind of mist spread before my eyes, and I saw the floor of my room covered with hideous reptiles, such as serpents, toads, and the like. I was astonished, having all my wits about me, being perfectly conscious. The darkness attained its height and then passed away. I now saw a Man sitting in the corner of the chamber. As I had thought myself alone, I was greatly frightened when he said to me, 'Eat not as much.'

In Swedenborg's Diary the incident is related more particularly. 'In the middle of the day, at dinner, an Angel spoke to me, and told me not to eat too much at table. Whilst he was with me, there plainly appeared to me a kind of vapour steaming from the pores of my body. It was a most visible watery vapour, and fell downwards to the ground upon the carpet, where it collected and turned into divers vermin, which were gathered together under the table, and in a moment went off with a pop or noise. A fiery light appeared within them, and a sound was heard, pronouncing that all the vermin that could possibly be generated by unseemly appetite were thus cast out of my body, and burnt up, and that I was now cleansed from them. Hence we may know what luxury and the like have for their bosom contents.'

Continuing the first account Swedenborg said, 'The following night the same Man appeared to me again. I was this time not at all alarmed. The Man said, 'I am God, the Lord, the Creator, and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold to men the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.' The same night the world of spirits, hell and heaven, were convincingly opened to me, where I found many persons of my acquaintance of all conditions. From that day forth I gave up all worldly learning, and laboured only in spiritual things, according to what the Lord commanded me to write.'

He 'gave up all worldly learning,' shut his intellectual eyes, and sank under all the nightmares which his first vision saw burnt up as vermin. After his fiftieth year, says Emerson, he falls into jealousy of his intellect, makes war on it, and the violence is instantly avenged. But the portrait of the blinded mystic as drawn by the clear seer is too impressive an illustration to be omitted here.

'A vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet and turns with gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest or a mole bore in the ground than this seer of the souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and heard there, for a long continuance, their lamentations; he saw their tormentors, who increase and strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious hells; the hell of the revengful, whose faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel.... The universe, in his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind of the magnetiser.... Swedenborg and Behmon both failed by attaching themselves to the christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in its bosom.... Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic limitation, is this Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can exist, is the extreme proposition of unbelief.... To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed; the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers; and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is good and true.'

But even the Hell of Swedenborg is not free from the soft potency of our star. It is almost painful, indeed, to see its spiritual ray mingling with the fiery fever-shapes which Swedenborg meets on his way through the column of brass,--made, had he known it, not of angels but of savage scriptures. 'I gave up all worldly learning'--he says: but it did not give him up all at once. 'They (the damned) suffer ineffable torments; but it was permitted to relieve or console them with a certain degree of hope, so that they should not entirely despair. For they said they believed the torment would be eternal. They were relieved or consoled by saying that God Messiah is merciful, and that in His Word we read that 'the prisoners will be sent forth from the pit' (Zech. ix. 2). Swedenborg reports that God Messiah appeared to these spirits, and even embraced and kissed one who had been raised from 'the greatest torment.' He says, 'Punishment for the sake of punishment is the punishment of a devil,' and affirms that all punishment is 'to take away evils or to induce a faculty of doing good.' These utterances are in his Diary, and were written before he had got to the bottom of his Calvinistic column; but even in the 'Arcana Celestia' there is a gleam:--'Such is the equilibrium of all things in another life that evil punishes itself, and unless it were removed by punishments the evil spirits must necessarily be kept in some hell to eternity.'

Reductio ad absurdum! And yet Swedenborgians insist upon the dogma of everlasting punishments; to sustain which they appeal from Swedenborg half-sober to Swedenborg mentally drunk.

In the Library at Dresden there is a series of old pictures said to be Mexican, and which I was told had been purchased from a Jew in Vienna, containing devils mainly of serpent characters blended with those of humanity. One was a fantastic serpent with human head, sharp snoutish nose, many eyes, slight wings, and tongue lolling out. Another had a human head and reptilian tail. A third is human except for the double tongue darting out. A fourth has issuing from the back of his head a serpent whose large dragon head is swallowing a human embryo. Whatever tribe it was that originated these pictures must have had very strong impressions of the survival of the serpent in some men.

I was reminded of the picture of the serpent swallowing the human embryo while looking at the wall-pictures in Russian churches representing the conventional serpent with devils nestling at intervals along its body, as represented in our Figure (10). Professor Buslaef gave me the right archæology of this, no doubt, but the devils themselves, as I gazed, seemed to intimate another theory with their fair forms. They might have been winged angels but for their hair of flame and cruel hooks. They seemed to say, 'We were the ancient embryo-gods of the human imagination, but the serpent swallowed us. He swallowed us successively as one after another we availed ourselves of his cunning in our priesthoods; as we brought his cruel coils to crush those who dared to outgrow our cult; as we imitated his fang in the deadliness with which we bit the heel of every advancing thinker; as, when worsted in our struggle against reason, we took to the double tongue, praising with one fork the virtues which we poisoned with the other. Now we are degraded with him for ever, bound to him by these rings, labelled with the sins we have committed.'

It was by a true experience that the ancients so generally took nocturnal animals to be types of diabolism. Corresponding to them are the sleepless activities of morally unawakened men. The animal is a sleeping man. Its passions and instincts are acted out in what to rational man would be dreams. In dreams, especially when influenced by disease, a man may mentally relapse very far, and pass through kennels and styes, which are such even when somewhat decorated by shreds of the familiar human environment. The nocturnal form of intellect is cunning; the obscuration of religion is superstition; the dark shadow that falls on love turns it to lust. These wolves and bats, on which no ideal has dawned, do not prowl or flit through man in their natural forms: in the half-awake consciousness, whose starlight attends man amid his darkness, their misty outlines swell, and in the feverish unenlightened conscience they become phantasms of his animalism--werewolves, vampyres. The awakening of reason in any animal is through all the phases of cerebral and social evolution. A wise man said to his son who was afraid to enter the dark, 'Go on, child; you will never see anything worse than yourself.'

The hare-lip, which we sometimes see in the human face, is there an arrested development. Every lip is at some embryonic period a hare-lip. The development of man's visible part has gone on much longer than his intellectual and moral evolution, and abnormalities in it are rare in comparison with the number of survivals from the animal world in his temper, his faith, and his manners. Criminals are men living out their arrested moral developments. They who regard them as instigated by a devil are those whose arrest is mental. The eye of reason will deal with both all the more effectively, because with as little wrath as a surgeon feels towards the hare-lip he endeavours to humanise.

It is an impressive fact that the great and reverent mind of Spinoza, in pondering the problem of Evil and the theology which ascribed it to a Devil, was unconsciously led to anticipate by more than a century the first (modern) scientific suggestions of the principle of Evolution. In his early treatise, 'De Deo et Homine,' occurs this short but momentous chapter--

'De Diabolis. If the Devil be an Entity contrary in all respects to God, having nothing of God in his nature, there can be nothing in common with God.

'Is he assumed to be a thinking Entity, as some will have it, who never wills and never does any good, and who sets himself in opposition to God on all occasions, he would assuredly be a very wretched being, and, could prayers do anything for him, his amendment were much to be implored.

'But let us ask whether so miserable an object could exist even for an instant; and, the question put, we see at once that it could not; for from the perfection of a thing proceeds its power of continuance: the more of the Essential and Divine a thing possesses, the more enduring it is. But how could the Devil, having no trace of perfection in him, exist at all? Add to this, that the stability or duration of a thinking thing depends entirely on its love of and union with God, and that the opposite of this state in every particular being presumed in the Devil, it is obviously impossible that there can be any such being.

'And then there is indeed no necessity to presume the existence of a Devil; for the causes of hate, envy, anger, and all such passions are readily enough to be discovered; and there is no occasion for resort to fiction to account for the evils they engender.'

In the course of his correspondence with the most learned men of his time, Spinoza was severely questioned concerning his views upon human wickedness, the disobedience of Adam, and so forth. He said--to abridge his answers--If there be any essential or positive evil in men, God is the author and continuer of that evil. But what is called evil in them is their degree of imperfection as compared with those more perfect. Adam, in the abstract, is a man eating an apple. That is not in itself an evil action. Acts condemned in man are often admired in animals,--as the jealousy of doves,--and regarded as evidence of their perfection. Although man must restrain the forces of nature and direct them to his purposes, it is a superstition to suppose that God is angry against such forces. It is an error in man to identify his little inconveniences as obstacles to God. Let him withdraw himself from the consideration and nothing is found evil. Whatever exists, exists by reason of its perfection for its own ends,--which may or may not be those of men.

Spinoza's aphorism, 'From the perfection of a thing proceeds its power of continuance,' is the earliest modern statement of the doctrine now called 'survival of the fittest.' The notion of a Devil involves the solecism of a being surviving through its unfitness for survival.

Spinoza was Copernicus of the moral Cosmos. The great German who discovered to men that their little planet was not the one centre and single care of nature, led the human mind out of a closet and gave it a universe. But dogma still clung to the closet; where indeed each sect still remains, holding its little interest to be the aim of the solar system, and all outside it to be part of a countless host, marshalled by a Prince of Evil, whose eternal war is waged against that formidable pulpiteer whose sermon is sending dismay through pandemonium. But for rational men all that is ended, and its decline began when Spinoza warned men against looking at the moral universe from the pin-hole of their egotism. That closet-creation, whose laws were seen now acting now suspended to suit the affairs of men, disappeared, and man was led to adore the All.

It is a small thing that man can bruise the serpent's head, if its fang still carries its venom so deep in his reason as to blacken all nature with a sense of triumphant malevolence. To the eye of judicial man, instructed to decide every case without bribe of his own interest as a rival animal, the serpent's fang is one of the most perfect adaptations of means to ends in nature. Were a corresponding perfection in every human mind, the world would fulfil the mystical dream of the East, which gave one name to the serpents that bit them in the wilderness and seraphim singing round the eternal throne.

'Cursed be the Hebrew who shall either eat pork, or permit his son to be instructed in the learning of the Greeks.' So says the Talmud, with a voice transmitted from the 'kingdom of priests' (Exod. xix. 6). From the altar of 'unhewn stone' came the curse upon Art, and upon the race that represented culture raising its tool upon the rudeness of nature. That curse of the Talmud recoiled fearfully. The Jewish priesthood had their son in Peter with his vision of clean and unclean animals, and the command, 'Slay and eat!' Uninstructed is this heir of priestly Judaism 'in the learning of the Greeks,' consequently his way of converting Gentiles--the herd of swine, the goyim--is to convert them into christian protoplasm. 'Slay and eat,' became the cry of the elect, and their first victim was the paternal Jew who taught them that pork and Greek learning belonged to the same category.

But there was another Jewish nation not composed of priests. While the priestly kingdom is typified in Jonah announcing the destruction of Nineveh, who, because the great city still goes on, reproaches Jehovah, the nation of the poets has now its Jehovah II. who sees the humiliation of the tribal priesthood as a withered gourd compared with the arts, wealth, and human interests of a Gentile city. 'The Lord repented.' The first Gospel to the Gentiles is in that gentle thought for the uncircumcised Ninevites. But it was reached too late. When it gained expression in Christ welcoming Greeks, and seeing in stones possible 'children of Abraham;' in Paul acknowledging debt to barbarians and taking his texts from Greek altars or poets; the evolution of the ideal element in Hebrew religion had gained much. But historic combinations raised the judaisers to a throne, and all the narrowness of their priesthood was re-enacted as Christianity.

The column of brass in whose hollow centre the fine brain of Swedenborg was imprisoned is a fit similitude of the christian formula. The whole moral attitude of Christianity towards nature is represented in his first vision. The beginning of his spiritual career is announced by the evaporation of his animal nature in the form of vermin. The christian hell is present, and these animal parts are burnt up. Among those burnt-up powers of Swedenborg, one of the serpents must have been his intellect. 'From that day forth I gave up all worldly learning.'

Here we have the ideal christian caught up to his paradise even while his outward shape is visible. But what if we were all to become like that? Suppose all the animal powers and desires were to evaporate out of mankind and to be burnt up! Were that to occur to-day the effect on the morrow would be but faintly told in that which would be caused by sudden evaporations of steam from all the engines of the world. We may imagine a band of philanthropists, sorely disturbed by the number of accidents incidental to steam-locomotion, who should conspire to go at daybreak to all the engine-houses and stations in England, and, just as the engines were about to start for their work, should quench their fires, let off their steam, and break their works. That would be but a brief paralysis of the work of one country; but what would be the result if the animal nature of man and its desires, the works and trades that minister to the 'pomps and vanities,' all worldly aims and joys, should be burnt up in fires of fanaticism!

Yet to that fatal aim Christianity gave itself,--so contrary to that great heart in which was mirrored the beautiful world, its lilies and little children, and where love shed its beams on the just and the unjust! The organising principle of Christianity was that which crucified Jesus and took his tomb for corner-stone of a system modelled after what he hated. Its central purpose was to effect a divorce between the moral and the animal nature of man. One is called flesh and the other spirit; one was the child of God, the other the child of the Devil. It rent asunder that which was really one; its whole history, so long as it was in earnest, was the fanatical effort to keep asunder by violence those two halves ever seeking harmony; its history since its falsity was exposed has been the hypocrisy of professing in word what is impossible in deed.

Beside the christian vision of Swedenborg, in which the judaic priest's curse on swinish Greek learning found apotheosis, let us set the vision of a Jewish seer in whom the humanity that spared Nineveh found expression. The seer is Philo,--name rightly belonging to that pure mind in which the starry ideals of his Semitic race embraced the sensuous beauty which alone could give them life. Philo (Præm. et Poenis, sec. 15-20) describes as the first joy of the redeemed earth the termination of the war between man and animal. That war will end, he says, 'when the wild beasts in the soul have been tamed. Then the most ferocious animals will submit to man; scorpions will lose their stings, and serpents their poison. And, in consequence of the suppression of that older war between man and beast, the war between man and man shall also end.'

Here we emerge from Swedenborg's brass column, we pass beyond Peter's sword called 'Slay-and-eat,' we leave behind the Talmud's curse on swine and learning: we rise to the clear vision of Hebrew prophecy which beheld lion and lamb lying down together, a child leading the wild forces subdued by culture.

'Why not God kill Debbil?' asked Man Friday. It is a question which not even Psychology has answered, why no Theology has yet suggested the death of the Devil in the past, or prophesied more than chains for him in the future. No doubt the need of a 'hangman's whip to haud the wretch in order' may partly account for it; but with this may have combined a cause of which it is pleasanter to think--Devils being animal passions in excess, even the ascetic recoils from their destruction, with an instinct like that which restrains rats from gnawing holes through the ship's bottom.

In Goethe's 'Faust' we read, Doch das Antike find' ich zu lebendig. It is a criticism on the nudity of the Greek forms that appear in the classical Walpurgis Night. But the authority is not good: it is Mephistopheles who is disgusted with sight of the human form, and he says they ought in modern fashion to be plastered over. His sentiments have prevailed at the Vatican, where the antique statues and the great pictures of Michael Angelo bear witness to the prurient prudery of the papal mind. 'Devils are our sins in perspective,' says George Herbert.

Herodotus (ii. 47) says, 'The Egyptians consider the pig to be an impure beast, and therefore if a man, in passing by a pig, should touch him only with his garments, he forthwith goes to the river and plunges in; and, in the next place, swineherds, although native Egyptians, are the only men who are not allowed to enter any of their temples.' The Egyptians, he says, do not sacrifice the goat; 'and, indeed, their painters and sculptors represent Pan with the face and legs of a goat, as the Grecians do; not that they imagine this to be his real form, for they think him like other gods; but why they represent him in this way I had rather not mention.' We need not feel the same prudery. The Egyptians rightly regarded the symbol of sexual desire, on whose healthy exercise the perpetuation of life depended, as a very different kind of animalism from that symbolised in the pig's love of refuse and garbage. Their association of the goat with Pan--the lusty vigour of nature--was the natural preface to the arts of Greece in which the wild forces were taught their first lesson--Temperance. Pan becomes musical. The vigour and vitality of human nature find in the full but not excessive proportions of Apollo, Aphrodite, Artemis, and others of the bright array, the harmony which Pan with his pipe preludes. The Greek statue is soul embodied and body ensouled.

Two men had I the happiness to know in my youth, into whose faces I looked up and saw the throne of Genius illumined by Purity. One of them, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, 'If beauty, softness, and faith in female forms have their own influence, vices even, in a slight degree, are thought to improve the expression.' The other, Arthur Hugh Clough, wrote, 'What we all love is good touched up with evil.' Here are two brave flowers, of which one grew out of the thorny stem of Puritanism, the other from the monastic root of Oxford. The 'vices' which could improve the expression, even for the pure eyes of Emerson, are those which represent the struggle of human nature to exist in truth, albeit in misdirection and reaction, amid pious hypocrisies. The Oxonian scholar had seen enough of the conventionalised characterless 'good' to long for some sign of life and freedom, even though it must come as a touch of 'evil.' To the artist, nature is never seen in petrifaction; it is really as well as literally a becoming. The evil he sees is 'good in the making:' what others call vices are voices in the wilderness preparing the way of the highest.

'God and the Devil make the whole of Religion,' said Nicoli--speaking, perhaps, better than he knew. The culture of the world has shown that the sometime opposed realms of human interest, so personified, are equally essential. It is through this experience that the Devil has gained such ample vindication from the poets--as in Rapisardi's 'Lucifero,' a veritable 'bringer of Light,' and Cranch's 'Satan.' From the latter work ('Satan: A Libretto.' Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874), which should be more widely known, I quote some lines. Satan says--

I symbolise the wild and deep And unregenerated wastes of life, Dark with transmitted tendencies of race And blind mischance; all crude mistakes of will And tendency unbalanced by due weight Of favouring circumstance; all passion blown By wandering winds; all surplusage of force Piled up for use, but slipping from its base Of law and order.

This is the very realm in which the poet and the artist find their pure-veined quarries, whence arise the forms transfigured in their vision.

To evoke Helena, Faust, as we have seen, must repair to the Mothers. But who may these be? They shine from Goethe's page in such opalescent tints one cannot transfix their sense. They seemed to me just now the primal conditions, by fulfilling which anything might be attained, without which, nothing. But now (yet perhaps the difference is not great) I see the Mothers to be the ancient healthy instincts and ideals of our race. These took shape in forms of art, whose evolution had been man's harmony with himself. Christianity, borrowing thunder of one god, hammer of another, shattered them--shattered our Mothers! And now learned travellers go about in many lands saying, 'Saw ye my beloved?' Amid cities ruined and buried we are trying to recover them, fitting limb to limb--so carefully! as if half-conscious that we are piecing together again the fragments of our own humanity.

'The Devil: Does he Exist, and what does he Do?' Such is the title of a recent work by Father Delaporte, Professor of Dogma in the Faculty of Bordeaux. He gives specific directions for exorcism of devils by means of holy water, the sign of the cross, and other charms. 'These measures,' says one of his American critics, 'may answer very well against the French Devil; but our American Beelzebub is a potentate that goeth not forth on any such hints.' Father Delaporte would hardly contend that the use of cross and holy water for a thousand years has been effectual in dislodging the European Beelzebub.

On the whole, I am inclined to prefer the method of the Africans of the Guinea Coast. They believe in a particularly hideous devil, but say that the only defence they require against him is a mirror. If any one will keep a mirror beside him, the Devil must see himself in it, and he at once rushes away in terror of his own ugliness.

No monster ever conjured up by imagination is more hideous than a rational being transformed to a beast. Just that is every human being who has brought his nobler powers down to be slaves of his animal nature. No eye could look upon that fearful sight unmoved. All man needs is a true mirror in which his own animalism may see itself. We cannot borrow for this purpose the arts of Greece, nor the fairy ideals of Germany, nor the emasculated saints of Christendom. These were but fragments of the man who has been created by combination of their powers, and their several ideals are broken bits that cannot reflect the whole being of man in its proportions or disproportions.

The higher nature of man, polished by culture of all his faculties, can alone be the faithful mirror before his lower. The clearness of this mirror in the individual heart depends mainly on the civilisation and knowledge surrounding it. The discovered law turns once plausible theories to falsehoods; a noble literature transmutes once popular books to trash. When Art interprets the realities of nature, when it shows how much beauty and purity our human nature is capable of, it holds a mirror before all deformities. At a theatre in the city of London, I witnessed the performance of an actor who, in the course of his part, struck a child. He was complimented by a hurricane of hisses from the crowded gallery. Had those 'gods' up there never struck children? Possibly. Yet here each had a mirror before him and recoiled from his worst self. A clergyman relates that, while looking at pictures in the Bethnal Green Museum, he overheard a poor woman, who had been gazing on a Madonna, say, 'If I had such a child as that I believe I could be a good woman.' Who can say what even that one glance at her life in the ideal reflector may be worth to that wanderer amid the miseries and temptations of London!

It is not easy for those who have seen what is high and holy to give their hearts to what is base and unholy. It is as natural for human nature to love virtue as to love any other beauty. External beauty is visible to all, and all desire it: the interior beauty is not visible to superficial glances, but the admiration shown even for its counterfeits shows how natural it is to admire virtue. But in order that the charm of this moral beauty may be felt by human nature it must be related to that nature--real. It must not be some childish ideal which answers to no need of the man of to-day; not something imported from a time and place where it had meaning and force to others where it has none.

When dogmas surviving from the primitive world are brought to behold themselves in the mirror held up by Science, they cry out, 'That is not my face! You are caricaturing my beliefs!' This recoil of Superstition from its own ugliness is the victory of Religion. What priests bewail as disbelief is faith fleeing from its deformities. Ignorant devotion proves its need of Science by its terrors of the same, which are like those of the horse at first sight of its best friend, bearer of its burthens--the locomotive.

Religion, like every other high feature of human nature, has its animal counterpart. The animalised religion is superstition. It has various expressions,--the abjectness of one form, the ferocity of another, the cunning of a third. It is unconscious of anything higher than animalism. Its god is a very great animal preying on other animals, which are laid on his altars; or pleased when smaller animals give up their part of the earthly feast by starving their passions and senses. Under the growth of civilisation and intelligence that pious asceticism is revealed in its true form,--intensified animalism. The asceticism of one age becomes the self-indulgence of another. The two-footed animal having discovered that his god does not eat the meat left for him, eats it himself. Learning that he gets as much from his god by a wafer and a prayer, he offers these and retains the gifts, treasures, and pleasures so commuted,--these, however, being withdrawn from the direction of the higher nature by the fact of being obtained through the conditions of the lower, and dependent on their persistence. In process of time the forms and formulas of religion, detached from all reality--such as no conceivable monarch could desire--not only become senseless, but depend upon their senselessness for continuance. They refuse to come at all within the domain of reason or common-sense, and trust to mental torpor of the masses, force of habit in the aggregate, self-interest in the wealthy and powerful, bribes for thinkers and scholars.

Animalism disguised as a religion must render the human religion, able to raise passions into divine attributes of a perfect manhood, impossible so long as it continues. That a human religion can ever come by any process of evolution from a superstition which can only exist by ministry to the baser motives is a delusion. The only hope of society is that its independent minds may gain culture, and so surround this unextinct monster with mirrors that it may perish through shame at its manifold deformities. These are symbolised in the many-headed phantasm which is the subject of this work. Demon, Dragon, and Devil have long paralysed the finest powers of man, peopling nature with horrors, the heart with fears, and causing the religious sentiment itself to make actual in history the worst excesses it professed to combat in its imaginary adversaries. My largest hope is that from the dragon-guarded well where Truth is too much concealed she may emerge far enough to bring her mirror before these phantoms of fear, and with far-darting beams send them back to their caves in Chaos and ancient Night.

The battlements of the cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, are crowned with an array of figures representing virtues and vices, with carved allegories of teaching and learning. Under the Governor's window are the pelican feeding its young from its breast, and the lion, denoting the tenderness and the strength of a Master of youth. There follow the professions--the lawyer embracing his client, the physician with his bottle, the divine as Moses with his tables of the Law. Next are the slayers of Goliath and other mythical enemies. We come to more real, albeit monstrous, enemies; to Gluttony in ecclesiastical dress, with tongue lolling out; and low-browed Luxury without any vesture, with a wide-mouthed animal-eared face on its belly, the same tongue lolling out--as in our figures of Typhon and Kali. Drunkenness has three animal heads--one of a degraded humanity, another a sheep, the third a goose. Cruelty is a werewolf; a frog-faced Lamia represents its mixture with Lust; and other vices are represented by other monsters, chiefly dragons with griffin forms, until the last is reached--the Devil, who is just opposite the Governor's symbols across the quadrangle.

So was represented, some centuries ago, the conflict of Ormuzd and Ahriman, for the young soldiers who enlisted at Oxford for that struggle. A certain amount of fancy has entered into the execution of the figures; but, if this be carefully detached, the history which I have attempted to tell in these volumes may be generally traced in the Magdalen statues. Each represents some phase in the advance of the world, when, under new emergencies, earlier symbols were modified, recombined, and presently replaced by new shapes. It was found inadequate to keep the scholar throwing stones at the mummy of Goliath when by his side was living Gluttony in religious garb. The scriptural symbols are gradually mixed with those of Greek and German mythology, and by such contact with nature are able to generate forms, whose lolling tongues, wide mouths, and other expressions, represent with some realism the physiognomies of brutality let loose through admission to human shape and power.

It may be that, when they were set up, the young Oxonian passed shuddering these terrible forms, dreaded these werewolves and succubæ, and dreamed of going forth to impale dragons. But now the sculptures excite only laughter or curiosity, when they are not passed by without notice. Yet the old conflict between Light and Darkness has not ceased. The ancient forms of it pass away; they become grotesque. Such was necessarily the case where the excessive mythological and fanciful elements introduced at one period fall upon another period when they hide the meaning. Their obscurity, even for antiquarians, marks how far away from those cold battlefields the struggle they symbolised has passed. But it ceases not. Some scholars who listen to the sweet vespers of Magdalen may think the conflict over; if so, even poor brother Moody may enter the true kingdom before them; for, when preaching in Baltimore last September, he said, 'Men are possessed of devils just as much now as they ever were. The devil of rum is as great as any that ever lived. Why cannot this one and all others be cast out? Because there is sin in the christian camp.'

The picture which closes this volume has been made for me by the artist Hennessey, to record an incident which occurred at the door of Nôtre Dame in Paris last summer. I had been examining an ugly devil there treading down human forms into hell; but a dear friend looked higher, and saw a bird brooding over its young on a nest supported by that same horrible head.

So, above the symbols of wrath in nature, Love still interweaves heavenly tints with the mystery of life; beside the horns of pain prepares melodies.

Even so, also, over the animalism which deforms man, rises the animal perfection which shames that; here ascending above the reign of violence by a feather's force, and securing to that little creature a tenderness that could best express the heart of a Christ, when it would gather humanity under his wings.

This same little scene at the cathedral door came before me again as I saw the Oxonian youth, with their morning-faces, passing so heedlessly those ancient sculptures at Magdalen. Over every happy heart the same old love was brooding, in each nestling faculties were trying to gain their wings. To what will they aspire, those students moving so light-hearted amid the dead dragons and satans of an extinct world? Do they think there are no more dragons to be slain? Know they that saying, 'He descended into hell;' and that, from Orpheus and Herakles to Mohammed and Swedenborg, this is the burthen felt by those who would be saviours of men?

It is not only loving birds that build their nests and rear their young over the horns of forgotten fears, but, alas! the Harpies too! These, which Dante saw nestling in still plants--once men who had wronged themselves--rear successors above the aspirations that have ended in 'nothing but leaves.' The sculptures of Magdalen are incomplete. There is a vacant side to the quadrangle, which, it is to be feared, awaits the truer teaching that would fill it up with the real dragons which no youth could heedlessly pass. Who can carve there the wrongs that await their powers of redress? Who can set before them, with all its baseness, the true emblem of pious fraud? When will they see in any stone mirror the real shape of a double-tongued Culture--one fork intoning litanies, another whispering contempt of them? The werewolves of scholarly selfishness, the Lamias of christian casuistry, the subtle intelligence that is fed by sages and heroes, but turns them to dust, nay, to venom, because it dares not be human, still crawls--these are yet to be revealed in all their horrors. Then will the old cry, Sursum Corda, sound over the ancient symbols whereon scholars waste their strength, by which they are conquered; and wings of courage shall bear them with their arrows of light to rescue from Superstition the holy places of Humanity.

NOTES TO VOLUME I

[1] Pausan. v. 14, 2.

[2] Solin. Polyhistor, i.

[3] Pliny, xxix. 6, 34, init.

[4] Ezekiel xiv. 9.

[5] As in the Bembine Tablet in the Bodleian Library.

[6] See Sale's Koran, p. 281.

[7] Pindar, Fragm., 270.

[8] Tylor's 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' p. 358; 'Prim. Cult.,' vol. ii. p. 230.

[9] The Gascons of Labourd call the devil 'Seigneur Voland,' and some revere him as a patron.

[10] 'Myth. of the Aryan Nations,' vol. ii. p. 327.

[11] 'Christian Iconography,' Bohn, p. 158.

[12] 'Videbant faciem egredientis Moysis esse cornutam.'--Vulg. Exod. xxxiv. 35.

[13] 'Myths and Marvels of Astronomy.' By R. A. Proctor. Chatto & Windus, 1878.

[14] 'Scenes and Legends,' &c., p. 73.

[15] 'Any Orientalist will appreciate the wonderful hotchpot of Hindu and Arabic language and religion in the following details, noted down among rude tribes of the Malay Peninsula. We hear of Jin Bumi, the earth-god (Arabic jin = demon, Sanskrit bhümi = earth); incense is burnt to Jewajewa (Sanskrit dewa = god), who intercedes with Pirman, the supreme invisible deity above the sky (Brahma?); the Moslem Allah Táala, with his wife Nabi Mahamad (Prophet Mohammed), appear in the Hinduised characters of creator and destroyer of all things; and while the spirits worshipped in stones are called by the Hindu term of 'dewa' or deity, Moslem conversion has so far influenced the mind of the stone-worshipper that he will give to his sacred boulder the name of Prophet Mohammed.'--Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' vol. ii. p. 230.

[16] Yaçna, 32.

[17] 'The Devil,' &c., from the French of the Rev. A. Réville, p. 5.

[18] Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' vol. ii. p. 299.

[19] 'The Gnostics,' &c., by C. W. King, M.A., p. 153.

[20] Those who wish to examine this matter further will do well to refer to Badger, 'Nestorians and their Rituals,' in which the whole of the 'Eulogy' is translated; and to Layard, 'Ninevah and Babylon,' in which there is a translation of the same by Hormuzd Rassam, the King of Abyssinia's late prisoner.

[21] The significance of the gargoyles on the churches built on the foundations of pagan temples may be especially observed at York, where the forms of various animals well known to Indo-Germanic mythology appear. They are probably copies of earlier designs, surviving from the days when the plan of Gregory for the conversion of temples prevailed. 'The temples of the idols in that nation,' wrote the Pope, A.C. 601, 'ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God.'--Bede, Eccl. Hist. ch. 30.

[22] 'The Land of Charity,' by Rev. Samuel Mateer, p. 214.

[23] London 'Times' Calcutta correspondence.

[24] The Persian poet Sádi uses the phrase, 'The whale swallowed Jonah,' as a familiar expression for sunset; which is in curious coincidence with a Mimac (Nova Scotian) myth that the holy hero Glooscap was carried to the happy Sunset Land in a whale. The story of Jonah has indeed had interesting variants, one of them being that legend of Oannes, the fish-god, emerging from the Red Sea to teach Babylonians the arts (a saga of Dagon); but the phrase in the Book of Jonah--'the belly of Hell'--had a prosaic significance for the christian mind, and, in connection with speculations concerning Behemoth and Leviathan, gave us the mediæval Mouth of Hell.

[25] Tablet K 162 in the British Museum. See 'Records of the Past,' i. 141.

[26] London 'Times,' July 11, 1877.

[27] 'Songs of the Russian People,' p. 409.

[28] 'Primitive Culture.'

[29] Cæsarius D'Heisterbach, Miracul. iii.

[30] Lev. iii. 15.

[31] Du Perron, 'Vie de Zoroastre.'

[32] The principle similia similibus curantur is a very ancient one; but though it may have originated in a euphemistic or propitiatory aim, the homoeopathist may claim that it could hardly have lived unless it had been found to have some practical advantages.

[33] Sonnerat's 'Travels,' ii. 38.

[34] Deutsch, 'Literary Remains,' p. 178.

[35] Isa. lvii. 5; Ezek. xvi. 20; Jer. xix. 5.

[36] The 'Jewish World.'

[37] 'Observations on Popular Antiquities,' &c., by John Brand. With the additions of Sir Henry Ellis. An entirely new and revised edition. Chatto & Windus, 1877. See especially the chapter on 'Summer Solstice,' p. 165.

[38] 'Pyra, a bonefire, wherein men's bodyes were burned.'--Cooper's Thesaurus. Probably from Fr. bon; Wedgewood gives Dan. baun, beacon.

[39] See Chapter i. Compare Numbers xxxi. 23.

[40] Numbers xix. 17.

[41] Ibid. xix. 2, seq.

[42] 'Folklore of China,' p. 121.

[43] In Russia the pigeon, from being anciently consecrated to the thunder god, has become emblem of the Holy Ghost, or celestial fire, and as such the foe of earthly fire. Pigeons are trusted as insurers against fire, and the flight of one through a house is regarded as a kindly warning of conflagration.

[44] Tablet K 162 in Brit. Mus. Tr. by H. F. Talbot in 'Records of the Past.'

[45] The Western Mail, March 12, 1874, contains a remarkable letter by the Arch-Druid, in which he maintains that 'Jesus' is a derivation from Hea or Hu, Light, and the Christian system a corruption of Bardism.

[46] 'L'Enfer,' p. 5.

[47] Dennys' 'Folklore of China,' p. 98.

[48] Procopius, 'De Bello Gothico,' iv. 20.

[49] 'Memorials of the Rev. R. S. Hawkes'.

[50] 'La Magie chez les Chaldéens,' iii.

[51] Lönnrot, 'Abhandlung über die Magische Medicin der Finnen.'

[52] 'Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland.' Nimmo, 1876.

[53] 'Rig-Veda,' ii. 33. Tr. by Professor Evans of Michigan.

[54] 'Rig-Veda,' i. 114.

[55] 'Jour. Ceylon R. A. Soc.,' 1865-66.

[56] Welcker, 'Griechische Götterlehre,' vol. i. p. 661.

[57] Moffat, p. 257.

[58] Livingstone, p. 124.

[59] Pöppig, 'Reise in Chile,' vol. ii. p. 358.

[60] Eyre, vol. ii. p. 362.

[61] Tylor, 'Early Hist.,' p. 359.

[62] So confirming the conjecture of Wachsmuth, in 'Das alte Griechenland im neuen,' p. 23. Elias might also easily be associated with the name Æolus.

[63] 'Rig-Veda,' x. (Muir).

[64] John iii. 8.

[65] 'The Wheel of the Law,' by Henry Alabaster, Trübner & Co.

[66] 'Rig-Veda,' v. 83 (Wilson).

[67] 'Major's Tr.,' ii. 26.

[68] Wierus' 'Pseudomonarchia Dæmon.'

[69] 'Songs of the Russian People,' by W. R. S. Ralston, M.A.

[70] Isa. xxii. 22. It is remarkable that (according to Callimachus) Ceres bore a key on her shoulder. She kept the granary of the earth.

[71] Rev. i. 18.; Matt. xvi. 19.

[72] 'Journal N. C. B. R. A. S.,' 1853.

[73] 'Folklore of China,' p. 124. The drum held by the imp in Fig. 3 shows his relation to the thunder-god. In Japan the thunder-god is represented as having five drums strung together. The wind-god has a large bag of compressed air between his shoulders; and he has steel claws, representing the keen and piercing wind. The Tartars in Siberia believe that a potent demon may be evoked by beating a drum; their sorcerers provide a tame bear, who starts upon the scene, and from whom they pretend to get answers to questions. In Nova Scotian superstition we find demons charmed by drums into quietude. In India the temple-drum preserved such solemn associations even for the new theistic sect, the Brahmo-Somaj, that it is said to be still beaten as accompaniment to the organ sent to their chief church by their English friends.

[74] Although the Koran and other authorities, as already stated, have associated the Jinn with etherial fire, Arabic folklore is nearer the meaning of the word in assigning the name to all demons. The learned Arabic lexicographer of Beirut, P. Bustani, says 'The Jinn is the opposite of mankind, or it is whatever is veiled from the sense, whether angel or devil.'

[75] 'Cuneiform Ins.,' iv. 15.

[76] Ib. ii. 27.

[77] Job xli.

[78] 'Records of the Past,' i.

[79] Lenormant, 'La Magie.'

[80] 'Records of the Past,' iii. 129.

[81] The god of the Euphrates.

[82] The Assyrian has 'of the high places.'

[83] 'Records of the Past,' iii. 129, 130.

[84] 'Henry IV.,' Part 1st, Act 2. 'Heart of Mid-Lothian,' xxv. An interesting paper on this subject by Mr. Alexander Wilder appeared in The Evolution, New York, December 16, 1877.

[85] De Plancy.

[86] An individual by this means saw his wife among the witches, so detecting her unhallowed nature, which gave rise to a saying there that husbands must not be star-gazing on St. Gerard's Eve.

[87] London 'Times,' July 8, 1875.

[88] This Protean type of both demon and devil must accompany us so continually through this volume that but little need be said of it in this chapter.

[89] Canticles ii. 15.

[90] De Gubernatis, II. viii.

[91] 'Our Life in Japan' (Jephson and Elmhirst, 9th Regiment), Chapman & Hall, 1869.

[92] London 'Times,' June 11, 1877.

[93] Rep. 488.

[94] Literally, goat-song. More probably it has an astrological sense.

[95] E.g., the demon Huorco in the 'Pentamerone.'

[96] See De Gubernatis' 'Zoological Mythology,' which contains further curious details on this subject.

[97] 'Myths and Myth-makers.' Boston: Osgood & Co.

[98] 'Zoological Mythology,' p. 64.

[99] Koran, xviii.

[100] Wagner. Behold him stop--upon his belly crawl.... The clever scholar of the students, he!

[101] 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.' London: Chatto & Windus.

[102] 'Spirit of the Beasts of France,' ch. i.

[103] 'Rigv.' i. 105, 18, 42, 2; 'Vendidad,' xix. 108. Quoted by De Gubernatis ('Zoolog. Mythology,' ii. 142), to whose invaluable work I am largely indebted in this chapter.

[104] 'Zoolog. Myth.,' ii. 7. Trübner & Co.

[105] 'Zoolog. Myth.,' ii. 108 seq.

[106] Afanasief, v. 28.

[107] Ibid., v. 27.

[108] ii. 6 (De Gubernatis, ii. 117).

[109] Rather the devil of lust than of cruelty, according to Du Cange: "Occidunt ursum, occiditur diabolus, id est, temptator nostræ carnis."

[110] De Plancy (Dict. Inf.), who also relates an amusing legend of the bear who came to a German choir, as seen by a sleepy chorister as he awoke; the naïve narrator of which adds, that this was the devil sent to hold the singers to their duty! The Lives of the Saints abound with legends of pious bears, such as that commemorated along with St. Sergius in Troitska Lavra, near Moscow; and that which St. Gallus was ungracious enough to banish from Switzerland after it had brought him firewood in proof of its conversion.

[111] Max Müller, 'Science of Language,' i. 275.

[112] The term is now used very vaguely. Mr. Talboys Wheeler, speaking of the 'Scythic Nagas' (Hist. of India, i. 147), says: 'In process of time these Nagas became identified with serpents, and the result has been a strange confusion between serpents and human beings.' In the 'Padma Purana' we read of 'serpent-like men.' (See my 'Sacred Anthology,' p. 263.)

[113] 'Mahawanso' (Turnour), pp. 3, 6.

[114] Ser. xxxiii. Hardly consistent with De Civ. Dei, xvi. 8.

[115] 'Chips,' ii.

[116] 'Sancti custos Soractis Apollo.'--Æn. xi. 785.

[117] 'Treatise of Spirits,' by John Beaumont, Gent., London, 1705.

[118] London 'Times,' June 11, 1877.

[119] Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' 402. Pliny (iv. 16) says: 'Albion insula sic dicta ab albis rupibus quas mare alluit.' This etymon of Albion from the white cliffs is very questionable; but, since Alb and Elf are generally related, it might have suggested the notion about English demons. Heine identifies the 'White Island,' or Pluto's realm of Continental folklore, as England.

[120] Richardson's 'Borderer's Fable-Book,' vi. 97.

[121] Martin, Appendix to Report on 'Ossian,' p. 310.

[122] 'Scenes and Legends,' p. 13.

[123] Dr. James Browne's 'History of the Highlands,' p. 113.

[124] 'North American Review,' January 1871.

[125] Dennys, p. 81 et seq.

[126] Ezekiel xxxix.

[127] 'Rig-Veda,' iv. 175, 5 (Wilson).

[128] Ibid., i. 133, 6.

[129] 'Rig-Veda,' vi. 14.

[130] 'The Nineteenth Century,' November 1877. Article: 'Sun-Spots and Famines,' by Norman Lockyer and W. W. Hunter.

[131] 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell,' by Tobias Swinden, M.A., late Rector of Cuxton-in-Kent. 1727.

[132] Carlyle, 'Past and Present,' i. 2.

[133] 'Discoveries in Egypt,' &c. (Bentley.) 1852.

[134] 'Legends of Old Testament Characters,' i. p. 83.

[135] OEdip., 1. II. ii. See 'Mankind: their Origin and Destiny,' p. 699.

[136] Compare Kali, Fig. 18.

[137] Soc. of Heb. Literature's Publications. 2d Series. 'Legends from the Midrash,' by Thomas Chenery (Trübner & Co.). The same legend is referred to in the story of the Astrologer in Washington Irving's 'Alhambra.'

[138] Faust, ii. Act 4 (Hayward's Translation).

[139] 'Emerson's Poems. Monadnoc.'

[140] 'Modern Painters,' Part V. 19.

[141] Bel's mountain, 'House of the Beloved,' is called 'high place' in Assyrian, and would be included in these curses ('Records of the Past,' iii. 129).

[142] Jer. xiii. 16.

[143] 'Our Life in Japan.' By Jephson and Elmhirst.

[144] Another derivation of Elf (Alf) is to connect it with Sanskrit Alpa = little; so that the Elves are the Little Folk. Professor Buslaef of Moscow suggests connection with the Greek Alphito, a spectre. See pp. 160n. and 223.

[145] Brinton, p. 85.

[146] Ibid., p. 166.

[147] 'Tales and Legends of the Tyrol.' (Chapman and Hall, 1874.)

[148] Od. xii. 73; 235, &c.

[149] London Daily Telegraph Correspondence.

[150] John Sterling.

[151] 'Rig-Veda,' ii. 15, 5. Wilson. 1854.

[152] 'Du monstre qui m'avait tant ennuyé, il n'était plus question; il était pour jamais réduit au silence. Il n'avait plus forme de géant. Déjà en partie couvert de verdure, de mousse et de clématites qui avaient grimpé sur la partie où j'avais cessé de passer, il n'était plus laid; bientôt on ne le verrait plus du tout. Je me sentais si heureux que je voulus lui pardonner, et, me tournant vers lui:--A present, lui dis-je, tu dormiras tous tes jours et tous tes nuits sans que je te dérange. Le mauvais esprit qui était en toi est vaincu, je lui defends de revenir. Je t'en ai délivré en te forçant à devenir utile à quelque chose; que la foudre t'épargne et que la neige te soit légère! Il me sembla passer, le long de l'escarpement, comme un grand soupir de résignation qui se perdit dans les hauteurs. Ce fut la dernière fois que je l'entendais, et je ne l'ai jamais revu autre qu'il n'est maintenant.'

[153] Von Spix and Von Martin's 'Travels in Brazil,' p. 243.

[154] 'Anatomy of Melancholy.' Fifteenth Edition, p. 124.

[155] 'Les Dieux en Exile.' Heinrich Heine. Revue des Deux Mondes, April, 1853.

[156] 'Book of Songs.' Translated by Charles E. Leland. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1874.

[157] Dennys.

[158] Bleek, 'Hottentot Fables,' p. 58.

[159] Baring-Gould, 'Curious Myths,' &c.

[160] Ibid., ii. 299.

[161] 'Shaski,' vi. 48.

[162] Hugh Miller, 'Scenes and Legends,' p. 293.

[163] 'The Mirror,' April 7, 1832.

[164] 'The Origin of Civilisation,' &c. By Sir John Lubbock.

[165] Hildebrand in Grimm's 'Wörterbuch.'

[166] Wisdom of Solomon, xvii. What this impressive chapter says of the delusions of the guilty are equally true of those of ignorance. 'They sleeping the same sleep that night ... were partly vexed with monstrous apparitions, and partly fainted, their heart failing them ... whosoever there fell down was straitly kept, shut up in a prison without iron bars.... Whether it were a whistling wind, or a melodious noise of birds among the spreading branches, or a pleasing fall of water running violently, or a terrible sound of stones cast down, or a running that could not be seen of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains: these things made them to swoon for fear. The whole world shined with clear light ... over them only was spread a heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterward receive them: but yet were they to themselves more grievous than that darkness.'

[167] Bayard Taylor's 'Faust.' Walpurgis-night.

[168] i. 228.

[169] North American Review. March 1877.

[170] In his very valuable work, 'Northmen in Cumberland and Westmoreland.' Longmans. 1856.

[171] 'Journal of Philology,' vi. No. II. On the Word Glamour and the Legend of Glam, by Professor Cowell.

[172] 2 Chron. xvi. 12; 2 Kings xx.; Mark v. 26; James v. 14; &c., &c. The Catholic Church follows the prescription by St. James of prayer and holy anointing for the sick only after medical aid--of which Asa died when he preferred it to the Lord--has failed; i.e. extreme unction. Castelar remarks that the Conclave which elected Pius IX. sat in the Quirinal rather than the Vatican, 'because, while it hoped for the inspirations of the Holy Spirit in every place, it feared that in the palace par excellence divine inspirations would not sufficiently counteract the effluvias of the fever.' The legal prosecutions of the 'Peculiar People' for obeying the New Testament command in case of sickness supply a notable example of the equal hypocrisy of the protestant age. England has distributed the Bible as a divine revelation in 150 different languages; and in London it punishes a sect for obedience to one of its plainest directions.

[173] London 'Times,' June 11, 1877.

[174] 'Mankind: their Origin and Destiny' (Longmans, 1872), p. 91. See also Voltaire's Dictionary for an account of the sacred dances in the Catholic Churches of Spain.

[175] Deut. xxviii. 60.

[176] 1 Sam. v. 6.

[177] 1 Sam. xvi. 14. In chap. xviii. 10, this evil spirit is said to have proceeded from Elohim, a difference indicating a further step in that evolution of Jehovah into a moral ruler which is fully traced in our chapter on 'Elohim and Jehovah.'

[178] Boundesch, ii. pp. 158, 188. For an exhaustive treatment of the astrological theories and pictures of the planispheres, see 'Mankind: their Origin and Destiny' (Longmans, 1872).

[179] 'Catastrophe Magnatum: or the Fall of Monarchie. A Caveat to Magistrates, deduced from the Eclipse of the Sunne, March 29, 1652. With a probable Conjecture of the Determination of the Effects.' By Nich. Culpeper, Gent., Stud. in Astrol. and Phys. Dan. ii. 21, 22: He changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth Kings, and setteth up Kings: he giveth wisdome to the Wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: he revealeth the deep and secret things, he knoweth what is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth with him. London: Printed for T. Vere and Nath. Brooke, in the Old Baily, and at the Angel in Cornhil, 1652.'

[180] See the Dictionary of Böhtlingk and Roth.

[181] Heb. ii. 14.

[182] 1 Cor. v. 5; xi. 30.

[183] 2 Cor. xii. 7.

[184] 'Records of the Past,' iii. p. 136. Tr. by Mr. Fox Talbot.

[185] Ibid., iii. p. 143. The refrain recalls the lines of Edgar A. Poe:--

They are neither man nor woman, They are neither brute nor human, They are ghouls!

[186] The Pahlavi Text has been prepared by Destur Jamaspji Asa, and translated by Haug and West. Trübner, 1872.

[187] Cf. fig. 9.

[188] Larousse's 'Dict. Universel.'

[189] 'Records,' &c., iii. p. 141. Marduk is the Chaldæan Hercules.

[190] Micah vii. 19.

[191] See the excellent article in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the R.A.S., by Dundris De Silva Gooneratnee Modliar (1865-66). With regard to this sanctity of the number seven it may be remarked that it has spread through the world with Christianity,--seven churches, seven gifts of the Spirit, seven sins and virtues. It is easy therefore to mistake orthodox doctrines for survivals. In the London 'Times' of June 24, 1875, there was reported an inquest at Corsham, Wiltshire, on the body of Miriam Woodham, who died under the prescriptions of William Bigwood, herbalist. It was shown that he used pills made of seven herbs. This was only shown to be a 'pagan survival' when Bigwood stated that the herbs were 'governed by the sun.'

[192] See p. 44.

[193] 'Jour. Ceylon R. A. Soc.,' 1865-66.

[194] This demoness is not to be connected with the Italian Mania, probably of Etruscan origin, with which nurses frightened children. This Mania, from an old word manus signifying 'good,' was, from the relation of her name to Manes, supposed to be mother of the Lares, whose revisitations of the earth were generally of ill omen. According to an oracle which said heads should be offered for the sake of heads, children were sacrificed to this household fiend up to the time of Junius Brutus, who substituted poppy-heads.

[195] Phædrus, i. 549. Cf. Ger. selig and silly.

[196] 'Lect. on Language,' i. 435.

[197] Ralston's 'Songs of the Russian People,' p. 230.

[198] 'Sagen der Altmark.' Von A. Kuhn. Berlin, 1843.

[199] Wake's 'Evolution of Morality,' i. 107.

[200] 'The Aborigines of Australia' (1865), p. 15.

[201] 2 Chron. xxxiii. 6.

[202] Published by Mozley and Smith, 1878.

[203] Max Müller. 'Lectures on Language,' ii. p. 562, et seq.

[204] See the beautifully translated funereal hymn of the Veda in Professor Whitney's 'Oriental and Linguistic Studies,' p. 52, etc.

[205] 'The Avesta.' 'Oriental and Linguistic Studies,' p. 196.

[206] 'Records of the Past,' i. 143.

[207] Sale's 'Koran' (ed. 1836). See pp. 4, 339, 475.

[208] 'Discoveries,' &c., p. 223.

[209] 'Modern Painters,' Part V. xix.

[210] The history of this tree which I use for a parable is told in the Rev. Samuel Mateer's 'Land of Charity.' London: John Snow & Co. 1871.

[211] 'Studies in the History of the Renaissance.' Macmillan & Co. 1873.

[212] Concerning which Mr. Wright says: 'It is taken from an oxybaphon which was brought from the Continent to England, where it passed into the collection of Mr. William Hope.... The Hyperborean Apollo himself appears as a quack-doctor, on his temporary stage, covered by a sort of roof, and approached by wooden steps. On the stage lies Apollo's luggage, consisting of a bag, a bow, and his Scythian cap. Chiron (ChIRÔN) is represented as labouring under the effects of age and blindness, and supporting himself by the aid of a crooked staff, as he repairs to the Delphian quack-doctor for relief. The figure of the centaur is made to ascend by the aid of a companion, both being furnished with the masks and other attributes of the comic performers. Above are the mountains, and on them the nymphs of Parnassus (NYMPhAI), who, like all the other actors in the scene, are disguised with masks, and those of a very gross character.... Even a pun is employed to heighten the drollery of the scene, for instead of PYThIAS, the Pythian, placed over the head of the burlesque Apollo, it seems evident that the artist had written PEIThIAS, the consoler.'--'History of Caricature,' p. 18. But who is the leaf-crowned figure, without mask, on the right hand? Was it some early Offenbach, who found such representation of the gods welcome at Athens where the attempt to produce our modern Offenbach's Belle Helène recently caused a theatrical riot?

[213] Wuttke. 'Volksaberglaube,' 18.

[214] Schleicher, 'Litauische Märchen,' 141-145. Mr. Ralston's translation abridged.

[215] Of this latter kind of hungry werewolf a specimen still occasionally revisits the glimpses of the moonshine which, for too many minds, still replaces daylight. So recently as January 17, 1878, one Kate Bedwell, a 'pedlar, was sentenced in the Marylebone Police Court, London, to three months' hard labour for obtaining various sums of money, amounting to 9s. 10d., by terrorism, from Eliza Rolf, a cook. The pedlar came to the plaintiff's place of work and asked her if she would like to have her fortune told. Eliza replied, 'No, I know it; it is hard work or starving.' The fortune-teller asked her next time if she would have her planet ruled; the other still said no; but her nerves yielded when the 'Drud' told her 'she lived under three stars, one good the others bad, and that she could disfigure her or turn her into something else.' 'Thank God, she did not!' exclaimed the poor woman in court. However, she seemed to have trusted rather in her money than in any other providence for her immunity from an unhappy transformation. But even into this rare depth of ignorance enough light had penetrated to enable Eliza to cope with her werewolf in the civilised way of haling her before a magistrate. When Fenris gets three months with hard labour, he no doubt realises that he has exceeded his mental habitat, and that the invisible cords have bound him at last.

[216] Elf has, indeed, been referred by some to the Sanskrit alpa=little; but the balance of authority is in favour of the derivation given in a former chapter.

[217] Mannhardt, 'Götter,' 287.

[218] Freia-Holda, the Teutonic goddess of Love. 'Cornhill Magazine,' May, 1872.

[219] 'Records of the Past,' vi. 124.

[220] See Cooper's 'Serpent-Myths of Ancient Egypt,' figs. 109 and 112. Serapis as a human-headed serpent is shown in the same essay (from Sharpe), fig. 119.

[221] 'Representative Men,' American edition of 1850, p. 108.

[222] 'L'Oiseau,' par Jules Michelet.

[223] A deadly Southern snake, coloured like the soil on which it lurks, had become the current name for politicians who, while professing loyalty to the Union, aided those who sought to overthrow it.

[224] See his learned and valuable treatise, 'The Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt.' Hardwicke, 1873.

[225] 'Time and Faith,' i. 204. Groombridge, 1857.

[226] 'The Epic of the Worm,' by Victor Hugo. Translated by Bayard Taylor from 'La Légende des Siècles.'

[227] Bruce relates of the Abyssinians that a serpent is commonly kept in their houses to consult for an augury of good or evil. Butter and honey are placed before it, of which if it partake, the omen is good; if the serpent refuse to eat, some misfortune is sure to happen. This custom seems to throw a light on the passage--'Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good' (Isa. vii. 15).--Time and Faith, i. 60.

Compare the apocryphal tale of Bel and the Dragon. Bel was a healing god of the Babylonians, and the Dragon whom he slew may have been regarded in later times as his familiar

[228] 'Principles of Greek Etymology,' ii. 63. English translation.

[229] See pp. 8 and 20.

[230] 'Rig-veda,' v. (Wilson).

[231] In a paper on the 'Origin of Serpent-worship,' read before the Anthropological Institute in London, December 17, 1872.

[232] 'Science of Language,' i. 230.

[233] 'Lectures on Language,' i. 435.

[234] Grimm's 'Mythology,' p. 650 ff. Simrock, p. 440.

[235] Roth, in the 'Journal of the German Oriental Society,' vol. ii. p. 216 ff., has elucidated the whole myth.

[236] I have in my possession a specimen of the horned frog of America, and it is sufficiently curious.

[237] Gesta Rom., cap. 68. Grimm's Myth., 650 ff. Simrock, p. 400.

[238] Others derive the name from the ancient Borbetomagus.

[239] Traditions, p. 44.

[240] Loathely.

[241] Pope's 'Homer,' Book xv.

[242] See p. 59.

[243] See p. 154.

[244] Æsch. Prom. 790, &c.

[245] Vol. i. p. 38.

[246] 'North American Review,' January 1871.

[247] 'Records of the Past,' x. 79.

[248] Page 285.

[249] 'Alcestis in England.' Printed by the South Place Society, Finsbury, London. 1877.

[250] Eating meat was the process of incarnation.

[251] 'Results of a Tour in Dardistan, Kashmir,' &c., by Chevalier Dr. G. W. Leitner, Lahore, vol. i. part iii. Trübner & Co.

[252] Page 91.

[253] In the Etruscan Museum at Rome there is a fine representation of this. The old belief was that a dragon could only be attacked successfully inside.

[254] 'The Jewish Messiah,' &c. By James Drummond, B.A. Longmans & Co. (1877). See in this valuable work chapter xxi.

[255] Matt. viii. 30.

[256] Luke xxiii. 3.

[257] Acts i. 25.

NOTES TO VOLUME II

[1] 'Treatise of Spirits.' By John Beaumont, Gent. London, 1705.

[2] Luke x. 19.

[3] Rev. xii.

[4] Rev. xii. cf. verses 4, 9 and 14.

[5] Rev. xii. 12.

[6] 'Zendavesta,' Yaçna xxx.; Max Müller, 'Science of Religion,' p. 238.

[7] Yaçna xliii.

[8] 'Die Christliche Lehre von der Sünde.' Von Julius Müller, Breslau, 1844, i. 193.

[9] 'Ormazd brought help to me; by the grace of Ormazd my troops entirely defeated the rebel army and took Sitratachmes, and brought him before me. Then I cut off his nose and his ears, and I scourged him. He was kept chained at my door. All the kingdom beheld him. Afterwards I crucified him at Arbela.' So says the tablet of Darius Hystaspes. But what could Darius have done 'by the grace of Ahriman'?

[10] Cf. Rev. v. 6 and xii. 15.

[11] 'Prayer and Work.' By Octavius B. Frothingham. New York, 1877.

[12] 'Lucifero, Poema di Mario Rapisardi.' Milano, 1877.

[13] E quanto ebbe e mantiene a l'uom soltanto Il deve, a l'uom che d'oqui sue destino O prospero, o maligno, arbitro e solo.

'Whatever he (God) had, he owed to man alone, to man who, for good or ill, is sole arbiter of his own fate.'--Rapisardi's Lucifero.

[14] The following abridgment mainly follows that of James Freeman Clarke in his 'Ten Great Religions.'

[15] White or Snowy Mountain. Cf. Alp, Elf, &c.

[16] 'Elias shall first come and restore all things.'

[17] That this satirical hymn was admitted into the Rig-Veda shows that these hymns were collected whilst they were still in the hands of the ancient Hindu families as common property, and were not yet the exclusive property of Bráhmans as a caste or association. Further evidence of the same kind is given by a hymn in which the expression occurs--'Do not be as lazy as a Bráhman.'--Mrs. Manning's Ancient and Mediæval India, i. 77. In the same work some particulars are given of the persons mentioned in this chapter. The Frog-satire is translated by Max Müller, A. S. L., p. 494.

[18] 'Arichandra, the Martyr of Truth: A Tamil Drama translated into English by Mutu Coomâra Swâmy, Mudliar, Member of Her Majesty's Legislative Council of Ceylon,' &c. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. 1863. This drama, it must be constantly borne in mind, in nowise represents the Vedic legend, told in the Aitereya-Bráhmana, vii. 13-18; nor the puranic legend, told in the Merkandeya-Purána. I have altered the spelling of the names to the Sanskrit forms, but otherwise follow Sir M. C. S.'s translation.

[19] Siva; the 'lord of the world,' and of wealth. Cf. Pluto, Dis, Dives.

[20] Thes. Heb., p. 94.

[21] Heb. Handw., p. 90.

[22] Or Jahveh. I prefer to use the best known term in a case where the more exact spelling adds no significance.

[23] This, the grandest of all the elohistic names, became the nearest Hebrew word for devils--shedim.

[24] Even his jealous command against rivals, i.e., 'graven images,' had to be taken along with the story of Laban's images (Gen. xxxi.), when, though 'God came to Laban,' the idolatry was not rebuked.

[25] It is not certain, indeed, whether this Brightness may not have been separately personified in the 'Eduth' (translated 'testimony' in the English version, Exod. xvi. 34), before which the pot of manna was laid. The word means 'brightness,' and Dr. Willis supposes it may be connected with Adod, the Phoenician Sun-god (Pentateuch, p. 186).

[26] It is important not to confuse Satan with the Devil, so far as the Bible is concerned. Satan, as will be seen when we come to the special treatment of him required, is by no means invariably diabolical. In the Book of Job, for example, he appears in a character far removed from hostility to Jehovah or goodness.

[27] Name ist Schall und Rauch, Umnebelnd Himmelsgluth.--Goethe.

[28] 'Targum to the Prophets,' Jonathan Ben Uzziel. See Deutsch's 'Literary Remains,' p. 379.

[29] See pp. 46 and 255. The episode is in Mahábhárata, I. 15.

[30] Related to the Slav Kvas, with which, in Russian folklore, the Devil tried to circumvent Noah and his wife, as related in chap. xxvii. part iv.

[31] In Sanskrit Adima means 'the first;' in Hebrew Adam (given almost always with the article) means 'the red,' and it is generally derived from adamah, mould or soil. But Professor Max Müller (Science of Religion, p. 320) says if the name Adima (used, by the way, in India for the first man, as Adam is in England) is the same as Adam, 'we should be driven to admit that Adam was borrowed by the Jews from the Hindus.' But even that mild case of 'driving' is unnecessary, since the word, as Sale reminded the world, is used in the Persian legend. It is probable that the Hebrews imported this word not knowing its meaning, and as it resembled their word for mould, they added the gloss that the first man was made of the dust or mould of the ground. It is not contended that the Hebrews got their word directly from the Hindu or Persian myth. Mr. George Smith discovered that Admi or Adami was the name for the first men in Chaldean fragments. Sir Henry Rawlinson points out that the ancient Babylonians recognised two principle races,--the Adamu, or dark, and the Sarku, or light, race; probably a distinction, remembered in the phrase of Genesis, between the supposed sons of Adam and the sons of God. The dark race was the one that fell. Mr. Herbert Spencer (Principles of Sociology, Appendix) offers an ingenious suggestion that the prohibition of a certain sacred fruit may have been the provision of a light race against a dark one, as in Peru only the Yuca and his relatives were allowed to eat the stimulating cuca. If this be true in the present case, it would still only reflect an earlier tradition that the holy fruit was the rightful possession of the deities who had won in the struggle for it.

Nor is there wanting a survival from Indian tradition in the story of Eve. Adam said, 'This now is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh.' In the Manu Code (ix. 22) it is written: 'The bone of woman is united with the bone of man, and her flesh with his flesh.' The Indian Adam fell in twain, becoming male and female (Yama and Yami). Ewald (Hist. of Israel, i. 1) has put this matter of the relation between Hebrew and Hindu traditions, as it appears to me, beyond doubt. See also Goldziher's Heb. Mythol., p. 326; and Professor King's Gnostics, pp. 9, 10, where the historic conditions under which the importation would naturally have occurred are succinctly set forth. Professor King suggests that Parsî and Pharisee may be the same word.

[32] Gen. vi. 1, 2, 4.

[33] vi.-xi. pp. 3-6. See Drummond's 'Jewish Messiah,' p. 21.

[34] See vol. i. p. 255.

[35] Phil. Trans. Ab. from 1700-1720, Part iv. p. 173.

[36] Gen. xxi. 6, 7. The English version has destroyed the sense by supplying 'him' after 'borne.' Cf. also verses 1, 2. The rabbins were fully aware of the importance of the statement that it was Jehovah who 'opened the womb of Sara,' and supplemented it with various traditions. It was related that when Isaac was born, the kings of the earth refused to believe such a prodigy concerning even a beauty of ninety years; whereupon the breasts of all their wives were miraculously dried up, and they all had to bring their children to Sara to be suckled.

[37] Fortieth Parascha, fol. 37, col. 1. The solar--or more correctly, so far as Sara is concerned, lunar--aspects of the legend of Abraham, Sara, and Isaac, however important, do not affect the human nature with which they are associated; nor is the special service to which they are pressed in Jewish theology altered by the theory (should it prove true) which derives these personages from Aryan mythology. There seems to be some reason for supposing that Sara is a semiticised form of Saranyú. The two stand in somewhat the same typical position. Saranyú, daughter of Tvashtar ('the fashioner'), was mother of the first human pair, Yama and Yami. Sara is the first mother of those born in a new (covenanted) creation. Each is for a time concealed from mortals; each leaves her husband an illegitimate representative. Saranyú gives her lord Savarná ('substitute'), who by him brings forth Manu,--that is 'Man,' but not the original perfect Man. Sara substitutes Hagar ('the fleeting'), and Ishmael is born, but not within the covenant.

[38] Gen. iii. 14. Zerov. Hummor, fol. 8, col. 3. Parascha Bereschith. It is said that, according to Prov. xxv. 21, if thy enemy hunger thou must feed him; and hence dust must be placed for the serpent when its power over man is weakened by circumcision.

[39] Parascha Bereschith, fol. 12, col. 4. Eisenmenger, Entdeckes Judenthum, ii. 409.

[40] Hist. Arabûm.

[41] Entdeckes Judenthum.

[42] This legend may have been in the mind of the writer of the Book of Revelations when (xii. 14) he describes the Woman who received wings that she might escape the Serpent. Lilith's wings bore her to the Serpent.

[43] Inferno, ix. 56-64.

[44] She was a Lybian Queen beloved by Zeus, whose children were victims of Hera's jealousy. She was daughter of Belus, and it is a notable coincidence, if no more, that in Gen. xxxvi. 'Bela' is mentioned as a king of Edom, the domain of Samaël, who married Lilith.

[45] The martial and hunting customs of the German women, as well as their equality with men, may be traced in the vestiges of their decline. Hexe (witch) is from hag (forest): the priestesses who carried the Broom of Thor were called Hagdissen. Before the seventeenth century the Hexe was called Drud or Trud (red folk, related to the Lightning-god). But the famous female hunters and warriors of Wodan, the Valkyries, were so called also; and the preservation of the epithet (Trud) in the noble name Gertrude is a connecting link between the German Amazons and the political power so long maintained by women in the same country. Their office as priestesses probably marks a step downward from their outdoor equality. By this route, as priestesses of diabolised deities, they became witches; but many folk-legends made these witches still great riders, and the Devil was said to transform and ride them as dapplegrey mares. The chief charge against the witches, that of carnal commerce with devils, is also significant. Like Lilith, women became devils' brides whenever they were not content with sitting at home with the distaff and the child.

[46] Mr. W. B. Scott has painted a beautiful picture of Eve gazing up with longing at a sweet babe in the tree, whose serpent coils beneath she does not see.

[47] 'Records of the Past,' iii. p. 83. See also i. p. 135.

[48] 'Chaldean Genesis,' by George Smith, p. 70.

[49] Copied in 'Chald. Gen.,' p. 91. As to the connection of this design with the legend of Eden, see chap. vii. of this volume.

[50] 'Chaldean Genesis,' pp. 62, 63.

[51] Ib., 97.

[52] 'Records of the Past,' ix. 141.

[53] Anu was the ruler of the highest heaven. Meteors and lightnings are similarly considered in Hebrew poetry as the messengers of the Almighty. (Psalm civ. 4, 'Who maketh his ministers a flaming fire,' quoted in Heb. i. 7.)

[54] Im, the god of the sky, sometimes called Rimmon (the Thunderer). He answers to the Jupiter Tonans of the Latins.

[55] The abyss or ocean where the god Hea dwelt.

[56] The late Mr. G. Smith says that the Chaldean dragon was seven-headed. 'Chaldean Genesis,' p. 100.

[57] 'Records of the Past,' vii. 123.

[58] 'Records of the Past,' x. 127.

[59] See i. pp. 46 and 255. Concerning Ketef see Eisenmenger, ii. p. 435.

[60] Isaiah xiv. It may appear as if in this personification of a fallen star we have entered a different mythological region from that represented by the Assyrian tablets; but it is not so. The demoniac forms of Ishtar, Astarte, are fallen stars also. She appears in Greece as Artemis Astrateia, whose worship Pausanias mentions as coming from the East. Her development is through Asteria (Greek form of Ishtar), in whose myth is hidden much valuable Babylonian lore. Asteria was said to have thrown herself into the sea, and been changed into the island called Asteria, from its having fallen like a star from heaven. Her suicide was to escape from the embraces of Zeus, and her escape from him in form of a quail, as well as her fate, may be instructively compared with the story of Lilith, who flew out of Eden on wings to escape from Adam, and made an effort to drown herself in the Red Sea. The diabolisation of Asteria (the fallen star) was through her daughter Hecate. Hecate was the female Titan who was the most potent ally of the gods. Her rule was supreme under Zeus, and all the gifts valued by mortals were believed to proceed from her; but she was severely judicial, and rigidly withheld all blessings from such as did not deserve them. Thus she was, as the searching eye of Zeus, a star-spy upon earth. Such spies, as we have repeatedly had occasion to mention in this work, are normally developed into devils. From professional detectives they become accusers and instigators. Ishtar of the Babylonians, Asteria of the Greeks, and the Day-star of the Hebrews are male and female forms of the same personification: Hecate with her torch (hekatos, 'far-shooting') and Lucifer ('light-bringer' on the deeds of darkness) are the same in their degradation.

[61] 'Paradise Lost,' i. 40-50.

[62] And foremost rides Prince Rupert, darling of fortune and of war, with his beautiful and thoughtful face of twenty-three, stern and bronzed already, yet beardless and dimpled, his dark and passionate eyes, his long love-locks drooping over costly embroidery, his graceful scarlet cloak, his white-plumed hat, and his tall and stately form. His high-born beauty is preserved to us for ever on the canvas of Vandyck, and as the Italians have named the artist 'Il Pittore Cavalieresco,' so will this subject of his skill remain for ever the ideal of Il Cavaliere Pittoresco. And as he now rides at the head of this brilliant array, his beautiful white dog bounds onward joyously beside him, that quadruped renowned in the pamphlets of the time, whose snowy skin has been stained by many a blood-drop in the desperate forays of his master, but who has thus far escaped so safely that the Puritans believe him a familiar spirit, and try to destroy him 'by poyson and extempore prayer, which yet hurt him no more than the plague plaster did Mr. Pym.' Failing in this, they pronounce the pretty creature to be 'a divell, not a very downright divell, but some Lapland ladye, once by nature a handsome white ladye, now by art a handsome white dogge.'--A Charge with Prince Rupert. Col. Higginson's 'Atlantic Essays.'

[63] Isa. lxiii. 1-6.

[64] Fol. 84, col. 1.

[65] Maarecheth haëlahuth, fol. 257, col. 1.

[66] Gesenius, Heb. Lexic.

[67] Hairiness was a pretty general characteristic of devils; hence, possibly, the epithet 'Old Harry,' i.e., hairy, applied to the Devil. In 'Old Deccan Days,' p. 50, a Rakshasa is described as hairy:--'Her hair hangs around her in a thick black tangle.' But the beard has rarely been accorded to devils.

[68] Buslaef has a beautiful mediæval picture of a devil inciting Cain to hurl stones on his prostrate brother's form.

[69] Forty-one Eastern Tales.

[70] The contest between the agriculturist and the (nomadic) shepherd is expressed in the legend that Cain and Abel divided the world between them, the one taking possession of the movable and the other of the immovable property. Cain said to his brother, 'The earth on which thou standest is mine, then betake thyself to the air;' but Abel replied, 'The garments which thou wearest are mine, take them off.'--Midrash.

[71] Sale's Koran, vii. Al Araf. Iblis, the Mussulman name for the Devil, is probably a corruption of the word diabolus.

[72] Noyes' Translation.

[73] Eisenmenger, Entd. Jud. i. 836.

[74] Job. i. 22, the literal rendering of which is, 'In all this Job sinned not, nor gave God unsalted.' This translation I first heard from Dr. A. P. Peabody, sometime President of Harvard University, from whom I have a note in which he says:--'The word which I have rendered gave is appropriate to a sacrifice. The word I have rendered unsalted means so literally; and is in Job vi. 6 rendered unsavory. It may, and sometimes does, denote folly, by a not unnatural metaphor; but in that sense the word gave--an offertory word--is out of place.' Waltonus (Bib. Polyg.) translates 'nec dedit insulsum Deo;' had he rendered tiphlah by insalsum it would have been exact. The horror with which demons and devils are supposed to regard salt is noticed, i. 288.

[75] Gesenius so understands verse 17 of chap. xiv.

[76] The much misunderstood and mistranslated passage, xix. 25-27 (already quoted), is certainly referable to the wide-spread belief that as against each man there was an Accusing Spirit, so for each there was a Vindicating Spirit. These two stood respectively on the right and left of the balances in which the good and evil actions of each soul were weighed against each other, each trying to make his side as heavy as possible. But as the accusations against him are made by living men, and on earth, Job is not prepared to consider a celestial acquittal beyond the grave as adequate.

[77] 'The Kingdom of Heaven Taken by Prayer.' By William Huntington, S.S. This title is explained to be 'Sinner Saved,' otherwise one might understand the letters to signify a Surviving Syrian.

[78] Num. xxii. 22.

[79] 1 Sam. xxix. 4.

[80] 2 Sam. xix. 22.

[81] 1 Kings ii. 9.

[82] 1 Kings v. 4.

[83] 1 Kings xi. 14.

[84] 1 Kings xi. 25.

[85] Zech. iii.

[86] Cf. Rev. vii. 3.

[87] 'The Sight of Hell,' prepared, as one of a 'Series of Books for Children and Young Persons,' by the Rev. Father Furniss, C.S.S.R., by authority of his Superiors.

[88] M. Anquetil Du Perron's 'Zendavesta et Vie de Zoroastre.'

[89] As given in Mr. Alabaster's 'The Wheel of the Law' (Trübner & Co., 1871). In the Apocryphal Gospels, some of the signs of nature's joy attending the birth of Buddha are reported at the birth of Mary and that of Christ, as the pausing of birds in their flight, &c. Anna is said to have conceived Mary under a tree, as Maia under a tree brought forth Buddha.

[90] 'Mara, or Man (Sanscrit Màra, death, god of love; by some authors translated 'illusion,' as if it came from the Sanscrit Màya), the angels of evil, desire, of love, death, &c. Though King Mara plays the part of our Satan the tempter, he and his host were formerly great givers of alms, which led to their being born in the highest of the Deva heavens, called Paranimit Wasawatti, there to live more than nine thousand million years, surrounded by all the luxuries of sensuality. From this heaven the filthy one, as the Siamese describe him, descends to the earth to tempt and excite to evil.'--Alabaster.

[91] Some say Djemschid, others Guenschesp, a warrior sent to hell for beating the fire.

[92] Leben Jesu, ii. 54. The close resemblance between the trial of Israel in the wilderness and this of Jesus is drawn in his own masterly way.

[93] A passage of the Pesikta (iii. 35) represents a conversation between Jehovah and Satan with reference to Messias which bears a resemblance to the prologue of Job. Satan said: Lord, permit me to tempt Messias and his generation. 'To him the Lord said: You could have no power over him. Satan again said: Permit me because I have the power. God answered: If you persist longer in this, rather would I destroy thee from the world, than that one soul of the generation of Messias should be lost.' Though the rabbin might report the trial declined, the Christian would claim it to have been endured.

[94] In his fresco of the Temptation at the Vatican, Michael Angelo has painted the Devil in the dress of a priest, standing with Jesus on the Temple.

[95] 'Idols and Ideals.' London: Trübner & Co. New York: Henry Holt & Co. In the Essay on Christianity I have given my reasons for this belief.

[96] 'Paradise Regained,' ii.

[97] 'Henry Luria; or, the Little Jewish Convert: being contained in the Memoir of Mrs. S. T. Cohen, relict of the Rev. Dr. A. H. Cohen, late Rabbi of the Synagogue in Richmond, Va.' 1860.

[98] 'Heroes and Hero-worship,' iv.

[99] 'Sartor Resartus.' London: Chapman & Hall, 1869, p. 160.

[100] 'The American Scholar.' An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge (Massachusetts), August 31, 1837. By Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[101] The relations of this system to those of various countries are stated by Professor King in his work 'The Gnostics and their Remains.'

[102] In the Architectural Museum, Westminster, there is an old picture which possibly represents the hairy Adam.

[103] Josephus; 'Wars of the Jews,' vi. 1.

[104] Those who wish to pursue the subject may consult Plutarch, Philo, Josephus, Diog. Laertius; also Eisenmenger, Wetstein, Elsner, Doughtæi, Lightfoot, Sup. Relig., &c.

[105] See 'Supernatural Religion,' vol. i. ch. 4 and 5, for ample references concerning these superstitions among both Jews and Christians.

[106] 'Saducismus,' p. 53.

[107] 'Eastern Morning News,' quoted in the 'National Reformer,' December 17, 1877.

[108] Much curious information is contained in the work already referred to, 'L'Eau Benite au Dix-neuvième Siècle.' Par Monsignor Gaume, Protonotaire Apostolique. Paris, 1866. It is there stated that water escaped the curse; that salt produces fecundity; that devils driven off temporarily by the cross are effectually dismissed by holy water; that St. Vincent, interrupted by a storm while preaching, dispersed it by throwing holy water at it; and he advises the use of holy water against the latest devices of the devil--spirit-rapping. It must not, however, be supposed that these notions are confined to Catholics. Every element in the disquisition of Monsignor Gaume is represented in the region where his church is most hated. Mr. James Napier, in his recent book on Folklore, shows us the Scotch hastening new-born babes to baptism lest they become 'changelings,' and the true meaning of the rite is illustrated in a reminiscence of his own childhood. He was supposed to be pining under an Evil Eye, and the old woman, or 'skilly,' called in, carefully locked the door, now unlocked by her patient, and proceeded as follows:-- 'A sixpence was borrowed from a neighbour, a good fire was kept burning in the grate, the door was locked, and I was placed upon a chair in front of the fire. The operator, an old woman, took a tablespoon and filled it with water. With the sixpence she then lifted as much salt as it would carry, and both were put into the water in the spoon. The water was then stirred with the forefinger till the salt was dissolved. Then the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands were bathed with this solution thrice, and after these bathings I was made to taste the solution three times. The operator then drew her wet forefinger across my brow--called scoring aboon the breath. The remaining contents of the spoon she then cast right over the fire, into the hinder part of the fire, saying as she did so, 'Guid preserve frae a' skaith.' These were the first words permitted to be spoken during the operation. I was then put in bed, and, in attestation of the charm, recovered. To my knowledge this operation has been performed within these forty years, and probably in many outlying country places it is still practised. The origin of this superstition is probably to be found in ancient fire-worship. The great blazing fire was evidently an important element in the transaction; nor was this a solitary instance in which regard was paid to the fire. I remember being taught that it was unlucky to spit into the fire, some evil being likely shortly after to befall those who did so. Crumbs left upon the table after a meal were carefully gathered and put into the fire. The cuttings from the nails and hair were also put into the fire. These freaks certainly look like survivals of fire-worship.' It may be well here to refer the reader to what has been said in vol. i. on Demons of Fire. The Devil's fear of salt and consequently of water confirmed the perhaps earlier apprehension of all fiery phantoms of that which naturally quenches flame.

[109] We here get a clue to the origin of various strange ceremonies by which men bind themselves to one another. Michelet, in his 'Origines du Droit Français,' writes: 'Boire le sang l'un de l'autre, c'etait pour ainsi dire se faire même chair. Ce symbole si expressif se trouve chez un grand nombre de peuples;' and he gives instances from various ancient races. But, as we here see, this practice is not originally adopted as a symbol (no practices begin as symbols), but is prompted by the belief that a community of nature is thus established, and a community of power over one another.

[110] 'Principles of Sociology,' i. ch. xix. Origen says, that a man eats and drinks with demons when he eats flesh and drinks wine offered to idols. (Contra Cels. viii. 31.)

[111] Dr. James Browne's 'History of the Highlands,' ed. 1855, i. 108.

[112] 'Aurea Legenda.' The story, as intertwined with that of the discovery of the true cross by the Empress Helena, was a fruitful theme for artists. It has been painted in various versions by Angiolo Gaddi in S. Croce at Florence, by Pietro della Francesca at Arezzo, and in S. Croce in Ger. at Rome are frescoes celebrating Helena in a chapel named from her, but into which persons of her sex are admitted only once a year.

[113] To the 'Secular Chronicle,' February 11, 1877.

[114] Psalm lv.

[115] Jer. xxv. 38; xlvi. 16; l. 16.

[116] Isaiah xi. 2, 3.

[117] The more fatal aspect of the dove has tended to invest the pigeon, especially wild pigeons, which in Oldenburg, and many other regions, are supposed to bode calamity and death if they fly round a house.

[118] Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's Memoirs.

[119] Matt. xii. 31.

[120] Mark iii. 28.

[121] I have before me an account by a christian mother of the death of her child, whom she had dedicated to the Lord before his birth, in which she says, 'A full breath issued from his mouth like an etherial flame, a slight quiver of the lip, and all was over.'

[122] 'Serpent poison.' It is substantially the same word as the demonic Samaël. The following is from Colonel Campbell's 'Travels,' ii. p. 130:--'It was still the hot season of the year, and we were to travel through that country over which the horrid wind I have before mentioned sweeps its consuming blasts; it is called by the Turks Samiel, is mentioned by the holy Job under the name of the East wind, and extends its ravages all the way from the extreme end of the Gulf of Cambaya up to Mosul; it carries along with it flakes of fire, like threads of silk; instantly strikes dead those that breathe it, and consumes them inwardly to ashes; the flesh soon becoming black as a coal, and dropping off the bones. Philosophers consider it as a kind of electric fire, proceeding from the sulphurous or nitrous exhalations which are kindled by the agitations of the winds. The only possible means of escape from its fatal effects is to fall flat on the ground, and thereby prevent the drawing it in; to do this, however, it is necessary first to see it, which is not always practicable.'

[123] The 'Sacred Anthology,' p. 425. Nizami uses his fable to illustrate the effect of even an innocent flower on one whom conscience has made a coward.

[124] Nothing is more natural than the Triad: the regions which may be most simply distinguished are the Upper, Middle, and Lower.

[125] Bhàgavàt-Gita.

[126] Gulistan.

[127] Acts ii.

[128] Compare Gen. vi. 3. Jehovah said, 'My breath shall not always abide in man.'

[129] Among the many survivals in civilised countries of these notions may be noticed the belief that, in order to be free from a spell it is necessary to draw blood from the witch above the breath, i.e., mouth and nostrils; to 'score aboon the breath' is a Scottish phrase. This probably came by the 'pagan' route; but it meets its christian kith and kin in the following story which I find in a (MS.) Memorial sent to the House of Lords in 1869 by the Rev. Thomas Berney, Rector of Bracon Ash, Diocese of Norwich:--'I was sent for in haste to privately baptize a child thought to be dying, and belonging to parents who lived 'on the Common' at Hockering. It indeed appeared to be very ill, and its eyes were fixed, and remarkably clouded and dull. Having baptized, I felt moved with a longing desire to be enabled to heal the child; and I prayed very earnestly to the Lord God Almighty to give me faith and strength to enable me to do so. And I put my hands on its head and drew them down on to its arms; and then breathed on its head three times, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And as I held its arms and looked on it anxiously, its face became exceedingly red and dark, and as the child gradually assumed a natural colour, the eyes became clear again; and then it gently closed its eyes in sleep. And I told the mother not to touch it any more till it awoke; but to carry it up in the cradle as it was. The next morning I found the child perfectly well. She had not touched it, except at four in the morning to feed it, when it seemed dead asleep, and it did not awake till ten o'clock.' This was written by an English Rector, and dated from the Carlton Club! The italics are in the original MS. now before me. The importance that no earthly hand should profanely touch the body while the spirit was at work in it shows how completely systematised is that insanity which consists of making a human mind an arena for the survival of the unfittest.

[130] Luke xxii. 31.

[131] Amos ix. 8, 9.

[132] 1 Cor. v. 5.

[133] 2 Cor. xi. 13.

[134] 1 John iv. 2, 3.

[135] Polycarp, Ep. to Philippians, vii.

[136] 2 Thess. ii.

[137] 2 Peter ii. 15.

[138] John xvii. 12.

[139] 'But,' says Professor King (Gnostics, p. 52), 'a dispassionate examiner will discover that these two zealous Fathers somewhat beg the question in assuming that the Mithraic rites were invented as counterfeits of the Christian Sacraments; the former having really been in existence long before the promulgation of Christianity.' Whatever may have been the incidents in the life of Christ connected with such things, it is certainly true, as Professor King says, that these 'were afterwards invested with the mystic and supernatural virtues, in a later age insisted upon as articles of faith, by succeeding and unscrupulous missionaries, eager to outbid the attractions of more ancient ceremonies of a cognate character.' In the porch of the Church Bocca della Verita at Rome, there is, or was, a fresco of Ceres shelling corn and Bacchus pressing grapes, from them falling the elements of the Eucharist to a table below. This was described to me by a friend, but when I went to see it in 1872, it had just been whitewashed over! I called the attention of Signor Rosa to this shameful proceeding, and he had then some hope that this very interesting relic might be recovered.

[140] Op. iv. 511. Col. Agrip. 1616.

[141] For full details of all these superstitions see Eisenmenger (Entd. Jud. li. Armillus); D'Herbelot (Bib. Orient. Daggiel); Buxtorf (Lexicon, Armillus); Calmet, Antichrist; and on the same word, Smith; also a valuable article in M'Clintock and Strong's Cyc. Bib. Lit. (American).

[142] Deutsch, 'Lit. Remains.' Islam.

[143] Weil's 'Biblical Legends.'

[144] Eisenmenger, ii. 60.

[145] See vol. i. pp. 58 and 358.

[146] 'Zoroastrische Studien,' pp. 138-147. With which comp. Spiegel, Transl. of Avesta, III. xlvii.

[147] 'Studies in the Hist. of the Renaissance.' Macmillan.

[148] 'Chald. Genesis,' by George Smith, p. 84.

[149] This text was engraved by Mrs. Rose Mary Crawshay on a tomb she had erected in honour of her humble neighbour, Mr. Norbury, who sought knowledge for its own sake. Few ancient scriptures could have supplied an inscription so appropriate.

[150] Mr. Baring-Gould, quoting this (from Anastasius Sinaita, Hodêgos, ed. Gretser, Ingolst. 1606, p. 269), attributes this shining face of Seth to his previous character as a Sun-god. ('Old Test. Legends,' i. 84.)

[151] King's 'Gnostics,' p. 53, n.

[152] Tertullian's phrase, 'The Devil is God's Ape,' became popular at one time, and the Ape-devil had frequent representation in art--as, for instance, in Holbein's 'Crucifixion' (1477), now at Augsburg, where a Devil with head of an ape, bat-wings, and flaming red legs is carrying off the soul of the impenitent thief. The same subject is found in the same gallery in an Altdorfer, where the Devil's face is that of a gorilla.

[153] S. Cyp. ap. Muratori, Script. it. i. 295, 545. The Magicians used to call their mirrors after the name of this flower-devil--Fiorone. M. Maury, 'La Magie,' 435 n.

[154] This whole subject is treated, and with ample references, in M. Maury's 'Magie,' p. 41, seq.

[155] 'La Sorcière.'

[156] Dasent's 'Norse Tales,' Introd. ciii.

[157] 'Chips,' ii.

[158] 'Chester Plays,' 1600.

[159] 'Declaration of Popish Impostures,' 1603.

[160] So Shakespere, 'The Devil damn thee black.'

[161] In an account, 1568, we find:--'pay'd for iij li of heare ijs vjd.'

[162] The Directions for the 'Castle of Good Perseverance,' say: '& he þt schal pley belyal, loke þt he have guñe powdr breñng in pypysih's hands & i h's ers & i h's ars whãne he gothe to batayle.'

[163] This notion was widespread. I have seen an ancient Russian picture in which the Devil is dancing before a priest who has become drowsy over his prayer-book. There was once a Moslem controversy as to whether it was fair for pilgrims to keep themselves awake for their prayers by chewing coffee-berries.

[164] 'Liber Revelationum de Insidiis et Versutiis Dæmonum adversus Homines.' See Reville's Review of Roskoff, 'The Devil,' p. 38.

[165] See M. Maury's 'Magie,' p. 48.

[166] The history has been well related by a little work by Dr. Albert Réville: 'Apollonius of Tyana, the Pagan Christ.' Chatto & Windus.

[167] Sinistrari names Luther as one of eleven persons whom he enumerates as having been begotten by Incubi, 'Enfin, comme l'ecrit Codens, cité par Maluenda, ce damné Hérésiarque, qui a nom Martin Luther.'--'Démonialité,' 30.

[168] Glanvil's 'Saducismus.'

[169] King Lear, iii. 4. Asmodeus and Mohammed are, no doubt, corrupted in these names, which are given as those of devils in Harsenet's 'Declaration of Popish Impostures.'

[170] 'A Discourse of Witchcraft. As it was acted in the Family of Mr. Edward Fairfax, of Fuystone, in the county of York, in the year 1621. Sibi parat malum, qui alteri parat.'

[171] W. F. Poole, Librarian of Chicago, to whom I am indebted for a copy of Governor Thomas Hutchinson's account of 'The Witchcraft Delusion of 1692,' with his valuable notes on the same.

[172] The delicacy with which these animals are alluded to rather than directly named indicates that they had not lost their formidable character in Elfdale so far as to be spoken of rashly.

[173] Glanvil, 'Saducismus Triumphatus,' p. 170.

[174] Porphyry, ap. Euseb. v. 12. The formula not preserved by Eusebius is supposed by M. Maury ('Magie,' 56) to be that contained in the 'Philosophumena,' attributed to Origen:--'Come, infernal, terrestrial, and celestial Bombo! goddess of highways, of cross-roads, thou who bearest the light, who travellest the night, enemy of the day, friend and companion of darkness; thou rejoicing in the baying of dogs and in shed blood, who wanderest amid shadows and over tombs; thou who desirest blood and bearest terrors to mortals,--Gorgo, Mormo, moon of a thousand forms, aid with a propitious eye our sacrifices!'

[175] 'The Devil,' &c., p. 51.

[176] Scheible's 'Kloster,' 5, 116. Zauberbücher.

[177] Bayard Taylor's 'Faust,' note 45. See also his Appendix I. for an excellent condensation of the Faust legend from the best German sources.

[178] Tertull. ad Marcion, iii. 18. S. Ignatii Episc. et Martyr ad Phil. Ep. viii. 'The Prince of this world rejoices when any one denies the cross, for he knows the confession of the cross to be his ruin.'

[179] See his 'Acta,' by Simeon Metaphrastus.

[180] I have been much struck by the resemblance between the dumpy monkish dwarf, in the old wall-picture of Auerbach's Cellar, meant for Mephistopheles, and the portrait of Asmodeus in the early editions of 'Le Diable Boiteux.' But, as devils went in those days, they are good-looking enough.

[181] Shelley's Translation.

[182] Bayard Taylor's Translation. Scene iv.

[183] See Lavater's Physiognomy, Plates xix. and xx., in which some artist has shown what variations can be made to order on an intellectual and benevolent face.

[184] 'Der deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart.' Von Dr. Adolf Wuttke, Prof. der Theol. in Halle. Berlin: Verlag von Wiegand & Grieben. 1869.

[185] 'Histoire de France et des Choses Mémorables,' &c.

[186] The universal myth of Sleepers,--christianised in the myth of St. John, and of the Seven whose slumber is traceable as far as Tours,--had a direct pagan development in Jami, Barbarossa, Arthur, and their many variants. It is the legend of the Castle of Sewingshields in Northumberland, that King Arthur, his queen and court, remain there in a subterranean hall, entranced, until some one should first blow a bugle-horn near the entrance hall, and then with 'the sword of the stone' cut a garter placed there beside it. But none had ever heard where the entrance to this enchanted hall was, till a farmer, fifty years since, was sitting knitting on the ruins of the castle, and his clew fell and ran downwards through briars into a deep subterranean passage. He cleared the portal of its weeds and rubbish, and entering a vaulted passage, followed the clew. The floor was infested with toads and lizards; and bats flitted fearfully around him. At length his sinking courage was strengthened by a dim, distant light, which, as he advanced, grew gradually brighter, till all at once he entered a vast and vaulted hall, in the centre of which a fire, without fuel, from a broad crevice in the floor, blazed with a high and lambent flame, that showed all the carved walls and fretted roof, and the monarch and his queen and court reposing around in a theatre of thrones and costly couches. On the floor, beyond the fire, lay the faithful and deep-toned pack of thirty couple of hounds; and on a table before it the spell-dissolving horn, sword, and garter. The shepherd firmly grasped the sword, and as he drew it from its rusty scabbard the eyes of the monarch and his courtiers began to open, and they rose till they sat upright. He cut the garter, and as the sword was slowly sheathed the spell assumed its ancient power, and they all gradually sank to rest; but not before the monarch had lifted up his eyes and hands and exclaimed--

O woe betide that evil day On which this witless wight was born, Who drew the sword--the garter cut, But never blew the bugle horn.

Terror brought on loss of memory, and the shepherd was unable to give any correct account of his adventure, or to find again the entrance to the enchanted hall.--Hodgson's 'Northumberland.'

[187] This great discussion between the animals and sages is given in 'The Sacred Anthology' (London: Trübner & Co. New York: Henry Holt & Co.). It is a very ancient story, and was probably written down at the beginning of the christian era.

[188] It is a strange proof of the ignorance concerning Hindu religion that Jugernath, raised in a sense for reprobation of cruelty to man and beast, should have been made by a missionary myth a Western proverb for human sacrifices!

[189] St. Olaf = Stooley = Tooley.

[190] High bloweth Heimdall His horn aloft; Odin consulteth Mimir's head; The old ash yet standing Yggdrasill To its summit is shaken, And loose breaks the giant.--Voluspa.

[191] 'Rigveda,' x. 99.

[192] 'Zoolog. Myth.,' ii. 8, 10, &c.

[193] 'The Mahawanso.' Translated by the Hon. George Turnour, Ceylon, 1836, p. 69.

[194] It was an ancient custom to offer a stag on the high altar of Durham Abbey, the sacrifice being accompanied with winding of horns, on Holy Rood Day, which suggests a form of propitiating the Wild Huntsman in the hunting season. On the Cheviot Hills there is a chasm called Hen Hole, 'in which there is frequently seen a snow egg at Midsummer, and it is related that a party of hunters, while chasing a roe, were beguiled into it by fairies, and could never again find their way out.'--Richardson's 'Borderer's Table-Book,' vi 400. The Bridled Devil of Durham Cathedral may be an allusion to the Wild Huntsman.

[195] In the pre-petrified era of Theology this hope appears to have visited the minds of some, Origen for instance. But by many centuries of utilisation the Devil became so essential to the throne of Christianity that theologians were more ready to spare God from their system than Satan. 'Even the clever Madame de Staël,' said Goethe, 'was greatly scandalised that I kept the Devil in such good-humour. In the presence of God the Father, she insisted upon it, he ought to be more grim and spiteful. What will she say if she sees him promoted a step higher,--nay, perhaps, meets him in heaven?' Though, in another conversation with Falk, Goethe intimates that he had written a passage 'where the Devil himself receives grace and mercy from God,' the artistic theory of his poem could permit no nearer approach to this than those closing lines (Faust, II.) in which Mephistopheles reproaches the 'case-hardened Devil' and himself for their mismanagement. To the isolated, the not yet humanised, intellect sensuality is evil when senseless, and its hell is folly.

[196] 'Demonialite,' 60-62, &c. We may hope that this learned man, during his tenure of office under the Inquisition, had some mercy for the poor devils dragged before that tribunal.

[197] 'Reverberations.' By W. M. W. Call, M.A., Cambridge. Second Edition. Trübner & Co., 1876.

[198] The Holy Grail was believed to have been fashioned from the largest of all diamonds, lost from the crown of Satan as he fell from Heaven. Guarded by angels until used at the Last Supper, it was ultimately secured by Arthur's knight, Percival, and--such is the irony of mythology--indirectly by the aid of Satan's own son, Merlin!

[199] See Mr. J. A. Froude's article in 'Fraser's Magazine,' Feb. 1878, 'Origen and Celsus.'

[200] Mr. W. W. Lloyd's 'Age of Pericles,' vol. ii. p. 202.

[201] Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the R. A. S., 1865-6: Art. on 'Demonology and Witchcraft in Ceylon,' by Dundris de Silva Gooneratne Modliar.

[202] Euripides, 'Medea,' 574.

[203] 'Paradise Lost,' x. 860.

[204] Herodotus, 'Clio,' 7-14, 91.

[205] 'Expression of the Emotions.' By Charles Darwin. London: Murray, 1872. Chapter IV.

[206] The giving of Eve's name to Noah's wife is not the only significant thing about this Russian tradition and its picture. Long-bearded devils are nowhere normal except in the representations by the Eastern Church of the monarch of Hell. By referring to p. 253 of this volume the reader will observe the influences which caused the infernal king to be represented as counterpart of the Deity. As this tradition about Noah's wife is suggestive of a Gnostic origin, it really looks as if the Devil in it were meant to act the part which the Gnostics ascribed to Jehovah himself (vol. ii. p. 207). The Devil is said in rabbinical legends to have seduced the wives of Noah's sons; this legend seems to show that his aim was to populate the post-diluvial world entirely with his own progeny, in this being an Ildabaoth, or degraded edition of Jehovah trying to establish his own family in the earth by the various means related in vol. i. chap. 8.

[207] 'Nischamath Chajim,' fol. 139, col. 2.

End of Project Gutenberg's Demonology and Devil-lore, by Moncure Daniel Conway