Part 13

This universal order is either the motion of the heavens, or it is the action of the God of heaven, according as we think of the body or the soul, and view in the heavens the thing or the God. Thus, in the Rig-Veda, to say "everything is _in_ Varuna"--that is, "in the heavens"--and to say "everything is _through_ Varuna"--that is, "through the heaven-God"--are one and the same thing; and in these formulæ of the Veda, so clear in their uncertainty, theism is ever found side by side with unconscious pantheism, of which it is only an expression. "The three heavens and the three earths rest in Varuna," says a poet, and immediately afterwards, giving personality to his God: "It is the skilful king Varuna who makes this golden disc shine in heaven." The wind which whistles in the atmosphere is his breath, and all that exists from one world to the other was created by him. "From the king Varuna come this earth below, and yonder heaven, too, these two worlds with remote limits; the two seas are the belly of Varuna, and he rests also even in the small pool of water."

This pantheistic theism, which makes no clear distinction between the God of heaven and the universe over which he rules, or which is comprised in him, penetrates Jupiter as well as Varuna. The Latin poets offer the equivalent of the vacillating formulæ of Vedism. "The mortals," says Lucretius, explaining the origin of the idea of God, "the mortals saw the regular motions of the heavens and the various seasons of the year succeed each other in a fixed order, without being able to discover the causes. They had, therefore, no other alternative than to attribute all to the gods, who made everything go according to their will, and it was in the sky that they placed the seat and domain of the gods, because it is there that may be seen revolve the night and the noon, the day and the gloomy planets of the night; the nocturnal lights wandering in the sky, and the flying flames, the clouds, the sun, the rain, the snow, the winds, the thunderbolts, the hail, the sudden convulsions, and the great threatening rumblings."[53]

This view of the heavens as the universal centre of the movements of Nature might just as well have led to pantheism as to theism. The line of the poet: "Juppiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris"--"Jupiter is everything that thou seest, everywhere that thou movest"--does not refer only to the Jupiter of the metaphysicians of the Porch; it also expresses one of the aspects of the Jupiter of primitive mythology. It was not by a deviation from his earlier nature that Zeus was confounded with Pan; he was Pan by birth; and if the epopee and the drama show us only a personal Zeus, it is because by their very nature they could and should see him only under this aspect, and had nothing to obtain from the impersonal Zeus, although in this form he was as old as in the other. And the Orphic theologian is not quite unfaithful to the earlier tradition of religion, when he sings of the universal Zeus:--

"Zeus was the first, Zeus is the last, Zeus the thunderer; Zeus is the head, Zeus is the middle; it is by Zeus that all things are made; Zeus is the male, Zeus is the immortal female; Zeus is the base of both the earth and the starry sky; Zeus is the breath of the winds, Zeus is the jet of the unconquerable flame; Zeus is the root of the sea, Zeus is the sun and the moon.... The whole of this universe is stretched out within the great body of Zeus."

In the same manner, although Persia has in general preserved the personality of her Supreme god, yet she suffers him, especially in the sects, to become confounded with the Infinity of matter through which he first revealed himself to the mind of his worshippers. After having invoked the heavens as the body of Ahura Mazda, the most beautiful of bodies, she placed above Ahura himself, and before him, the luminous space, where he manifests himself, what the theologians called "the Infinite light," and then by a new and higher abstraction declared _Space_[54] to have been at the beginning of the world. Between this wholly metaphysical principle and the naturalistic principle of the primitive religion, there is only the distance of two abstractions: Space is only the bare form of the luminous Infinite, and the luminous Infinite, again, is an abstraction from the Infinite and luminous sky, which was identical with Ahura.

Thus, accordingly as the heavens were considered as the seat or as the cause of things, the god of the heavens became the matter of the world or the demiurge of the world. From the period of Aryan unity, he was without doubt the one and the other in turn; but it is probable that the theistic conception was more clearly defined than the other, as it is so in the derived mythologies; it has besides deeper roots in the human heart and human nature, which in every movement and in every phenomenon sees a Living Cause, a Personality.

This god of the heavens, having organized the world, is all wisdom; he is the skilled artisan who has regulated the motion of the worlds. His wisdom is infinite, for of all those mysteries which man tries in vain to fathom he has the key, he is the author. But it is not only as the Creator of the world that he is omniscient: he knows all things, because, being all light, he sees all things. In the naturalistic psychology of the Aryans, to see and to know, light and knowledge, eye and thought, are synonymous terms. With the Hindoos, Varuna is omniscient because he is the Infinite light; because the sun is his eye; because from the height of his palace with its pillars of red brass, his white looks command the world; because under the golden mantle that covers him, his thousands, his myriads of spies, active and untiring agents, sunbeams during the day, stars during the night, search out for him all that which exists from one world to the other, with eyes that never sleep, never blink. And in the same way, if Zeus is the all-seeing, the =panoptês=, it is because his eye is the sun, this universal witness, the infallible spy of both gods and men (= Theôn skopon êde kai andrôn=). The light knows the truth, it is all truth; truth is the great virtue which the god of heaven claims; and lying is the great crime which he punishes. In Homer, the Greek taking an oath, raises his eyes towards the expanse of heaven and calls Zeus and the sun to witness; in Persia, the god of heaven resembles in body the light, and in soul the truth: Aryan morality came down from heaven in a ray of light.

His Destiny.

Thus, the Indo-European religion knew a supreme God, and this God was the God of the heavens. He has organized the world and rules it, because, as he is the heaven, all is in him, and all passes within him, according to his law; he is omniscient and moral, because, being luminous, he sees all things and all hearts.

This God was named by the various names of the sky--Dyaus, Varana, Svar, which, according to the requirements of the thought, described either the object or the person, the heavens or the God. Later on, each language made a choice, and fixed the proper name of the God on one of these words; by which its ancient value as a common noun was lost or rendered doubtful: thus, in Greek _Dyaus_ became the name of the heaven-god (Zeus) and Varana (=Ouranos=) was the name of the heavens, as a thing; in Sanscrit _Dyaus_ or _Svar_ was the material heavens; the heaven-god was Varana (later changed into Varuna); the Slavs fixed on the word Svar, by means of a derivative, Svarogu, the idea of the celestial god; the Romans made the same choice as the Greeks with their _Jup-piter_, and set aside the other names of the heavens; lastly, Persia described the god by one of his abstract epithets, the Lord, Ahura, and obliterated the external traces of his former naturalistic character.

This god, who reigned at the time of the breaking up of the religion of Aryan unity, was carried away, with the various religions which sprang up from it, to the various regions where chance brought the Aryan migrations. Of the five religions over which he ruled, three remained faithful to him to the last, and only forsook him at the moment when they themselves perished;--they are those of the Greeks, of the Romans, and of the Slavs, with whom Zeus, Juppiter, and Svarogu preserved the titles and attributes of the Supreme god of the Aryans, as long as the national religion lasted. They succumbed to Christ; "Heaven-father" gave way to the "Father who is in Heaven."

India, on the contrary, very soon forgot that god for whose origin and formation, however, she accounts much better than any other Aryan religion does; and it was not a foreign god who dethroned him--a god from without--but a native god, a god of his own family, Indra, the hero of the tempest.

In fact, the supreme god of the Aryans was not a god of unity; the Asura, the Lord, was not the Lord in the same sense as Adonai. There were by the side of him, within himself, a number of gods, acting of their own accord, and often of independent origin. The wind, the rain, the thunder; the fire under its three forms--the sun in the heavens, the lightning in the cloud, the terrestrial fire on the altar; the prayer under its two forms--the human prayer, which ascends from the altar to heaven, and the heavenly prayer, which resounds in the din of the storm, on the lips of a divine priest, and descends from the heights with the torrents of libations poured from the cup of heaven, all the forces of nature, both concrete and abstract, appealing at once to the eye and to the imagination of man, were instantly deified. If the god of the heavens, greater in time and space, always present and everywhere present, easily rose to the supreme rank, carried there by his double Infinity, yet others, with a less continuous, but more dramatic action, revealing themselves by sudden, unexpected events, maintained their ancient independence, and religious development might lead to their usurping the power of the king of the heavens. Already during the middle of the Vedic period, Indra, the noisy god of the storm, ascends the summit of the Pantheon, and eclipses his majestic rival by the din of his resounding splendour.

He is the favourite hero of the Vedic Rishis; they do not tire of telling how he strikes with his bolt the serpent of the cloud, which enfolds the light and the waters; how he shatters the cavern of Cambara, how he delivers the captive Auroras and cows, who will shed torrents of light and milk on the earth. It is he who makes the sun come out again; it is he who makes the world, annihilated during the night, reappear; it is he who recreates it, he who creates it. In a whole series of hymns he ascends to the side of Varuna, and shares the empire with him; at last he mounts above him, and becomes the Universal King:--

"He, who, as soon as he was born, a god of thought, has surpassed the gods by the power of his intellect, he whose trembling made the two worlds quake by the power of his strength--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who has firmly established the tottering earth and arrested the quivering mountains; he who has fixed the extent of the wide-stretching atmosphere, and who has propped up the sky,--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who, after slaying the serpent, unpenned the seven rivers; who brought forth the cows from their hiding-place in the cavern; he, who, by the clashing of the two stones, has engendered Agni,--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who made all these great things; he, who struck down the demon race, driving it to concealment; he, who, like a fortunate gamester who wins at play, carries off the wealth of the impious,--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who gives life to both rich and poor, and to the priest his singer who implores him; the god with beautiful lips; the protecting god who brings the stones together to press out the soma,--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who has in his hands the herds of horses and cows, the cities and the chariots of war; he, who has created the Sun and the dawn; he, who rules the waters,--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who is invoked by the two contending armies, by the enemies facing each other, either triumphant or beaten; he, whom, when they meet in the struggle on the same chariot, during the onslaught, they invoke against each other,--O man, it is Indra!

"He, who discovered Çambara in the mountains where he had been hidden forty years; he, who killed the serpent in his full strength, who struck him dead on the body of Dânu,[55]--O man, it is Indra!

"Heaven and earth bow down before him; when he shakes, the mountains tremble; the drinker of soma, look at him! bearing the bolt in his arm, the bolt in his hand,--O man, it is Indra!"

But the usurper does not enjoy his triumph long; in the heat of his victory he is already stung to the heart, mortally wounded by a new and mystic power which is growing at his side, the power of prayer, of sacrifice, of worship, of _Brahma_, whose reign begins to dawn towards the end of the Vedic period, and which is still in existence.

What Indra did in India during an historical period, Perkun and Odin did in a pre-historical period, the one among the Lithuanians, the other among the Germans. Perkun and Odin are the Indras of these two nations, and have each dethroned the god of the heavens. Perkun was the god of the thunder with the Lithuanian pagans, and one can recognize in him a twin brother of the Hindoo _Parjanya_, one of the forms of the god of the storm in Vedic mythology. This king of the Lithuanian Pantheon is a king of recent date; what proves it is that the Slavs, so closely related to the Lithuanians in their beliefs, as well as in their language, and who also knew the god Perkun, have still as their Supreme god the Supreme god of the ancient Aryan religion, the god of the heavens, Svarogu.

The same revolution took place in Germany, but in a more remote period. The god of the heavens has vanished; he is replaced by the god of the stormy atmosphere, Odin, or Wuotan, the Vâta of India, the warrior god who is heard in the din of the tempest, leading his dishevelled bands of warriors, or letting loose on a celestial quarry the howling packs of the wild chase.

Thus did the Greeks, the Romans, and the Slavs allow their god to be vanquished by a foreign god; the Germans, the Lithuanians, and the Hindoos themselves forsook him for an inferior creation. Only in one single nation he finds worshippers faithful to the last. They are not numerous, but they have not allowed their belief to be encroached upon either by time or by man. We mean the few thousands of Ghebers or Parsis, who, during the great political and religious shipwreck of Persia, fleeing before the victorious sword of the Prophet, kept from Islam the treasure of their old belief, and who to this day, in the year 1879 of the Christian era, in the fire temples in Bombay, offer up sacrifices to the very same god who was sung by the unknown ancestors of the Aryan race at a time which eludes the grasp of history.

JAMES DARMESTETER.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Cf. Max Müller: "Lectures on the Science of Language," and "Lectures on the Science of Religion;" Michel Bréal, "Mélanges de Mythologie et de Linguistique."

[39] Maury, "Histoire des Religions de la Grèce;" Preller, "Griechische Mythologie."

[40] See Muir, "Sanscrit Texts," v. 58; Max Müller, "Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion," p. 284.

[41] "This Lord."

[42] The cloud often compared to a tree branching out in the sky.

[43] The fire (Ignis) which is born in the waters of heaven in the form of lightning.

[44] A sacred plant whose sap is offered to the gods. It is pressed between two stones to extract the sacred liquor.

[45] The sea of the earth and the sea of the clouds.

[46] See J. Darmesteter, "Ormazd et Ahriman," §§ 18-59.

[47] Ormazd is the modern name, contracted from the ancient Ahura Mazda.

[48] Which is the same word as the Sanskrit Asura.

[49] The sun is also the bird of Zeus (Æschylus, the Suppliants).

[50] That is to say "to their Supreme God."

[51] G. Klek, "Einleitung in die Slavische Literatur-Geschichte."

[52] "Ormazd et Ahriman," §§ 62, sq.

[53] Praeterea, coeli rationes ordine certo Et varia annorum cernebant tempora vorti; Nec poterant quibus id fieret cognoscere causis. Ergo perfugium sibi habebant omnia Diveis Tradere, et ollorum nutu facere omnia flecti. In coeloque Deum sedes et templa locarunt, Per coelum volvi quia nox et luna videtur, Luna, dies, et nox et noctis signa severa, Noctivagaeque faces coeli, flammaeque volantes, Nubila, sol, imbres, nix, ventei, fulmina, grando, Et rapidei fremitus, et murmura magna minarum.--v. 1187.

[54] In other systems, having regard to the eternity of the God and no longer to his immensity, boundless Time became the first principle (Zarvan Akarana).

[55] His mother.

LAZARUS APPEALS TO DIVES.

The elaborate schemes which have been propounded in attempts to solve the much-vexed riddle how best and most effectually to ameliorate the condition of the working-classes--such as Owenism, Fourierism, and such like--have had their inception in the minds of philanthropists outside and above our circle. They have been conceived for the most part with a genuine feeling of the immense importance of this, the most burning and momentous question of modern days, and illumined in many cases with deep philosophic insight; yet, as it is almost impossible for any but a born proletarian to understand the needs, the wants and the daily lives of the proletarian, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the absence of this special knowledge may have contributed somewhat to the unworkableness of the various systems proposed. Beyond this, however, it strikes me that most of them contained a fatal flaw, inherent in their constitutions. They were too ambitious, aimed at too much, and were altogether of so revolutionary and subversive a character as to alarm the great majority of those whose goodwill must be obtained before it can be possible to reduce any theory to experiment on a sufficiently extended scale to enable an unprejudiced observer to pronounce decisively on the result accomplished.

Were it not that the accident of my having been thrown by birth and association amongst the very poorest of the poor ("but indifferent honest") community of a large city may enable me to supplement to some extent the ideas enunciated by benevolent theorists belonging to the upper strata of society, I should not have the temerity to seek to pass out of the region of the "eternal silences." Moreover, I do not announce a new and perfect evangel to be ushered in by loud flourish of trumpets. I aim at nothing more ambitious than to be allowed to offer a few hints as to the direction which I conceive future gospels of humanity must take in order to be of practical utility.

Having thus endeavoured to justify myself for rushing in where sometimes "angels fear to tread," I have no intention of apologizing for the crudeness of my ideas, or my lack of grace in literary composition. Taking into consideration the small amount of elementary education drilled into me at a charity school for a brief period of my very juvenile days, and the continued absence of any duly qualified instructor since, "all that goes without saying."

One more egotistical, or egoistical, remark, and I proceed. I am in no sense a _specialist_. I am neither a Good Templar nor a Convivial Toper; neither a disciple of Nihilism, nor any other school of advanced thought (so called), nor a bigoted sectarian. I am a private in neither the ranks of bovine Toryism nor of rabid Radicalism; but I write simply as one of that common ruck of ordinary practical working men, which in reality forms the great staple of our plebiscite, although certain very noisy and turbulent minorities may possibly have led to a contrary inference.

In the erection of my little structure, I, like all other architects, require a good foundation as the basis of operations; and in the present case the foundation required is simply a desire on the part of those bipeds who stand erect on pedestals for an increased knowledge of their fellows who crawl and kneel and lie in a thousand and one contorted postures on the miry clay. Enlarged knowledge will bring enlarged sympathy for each other on the part of high and low alike. As matters now stand, those above us never really see us in undress. When they come across us we are either too slavishly sycophantic or too ruggedly independent,--both being masks donned for the occasion,--and not in any sense our natural selves; and I have a dim kind of suspicion that on the few occasions when gentlemen voluntarily come forward and try to make us believe that they are taking us into their confidence--on the hustings, say, for instance--some disguise of the same kind may be adopted, and that the features we then see are not altogether the real ones. If I am right in this assumption, how is it possible for either class to have anything like a competent knowledge of the other? Indeed, I do not think I should be far wrong in saying that the manners and customs of the Fijian Islanders and other aborigines of distant lands are better known generally to the upper ten thousand than those of the lower native millions; and, of course, the converse holds equally good. Domestic servants, perhaps, may be said to form exceptions to this latter rule, seeing that they often have peeps into the innermost arcana; but as they are for the most part--the male portion of them at all events--more utterly inexplicable beings than their masters, the general fund of information is not much increased through that channel. Flunkeydom is much more insufferable and incomprehensible to the general run of us than swelldom itself.

Granted, however, the desire for a better acquaintance with their humbler brethren on the part of our aristocracy and plutocracy (for this, like all other good things, must _descend_ from above), it will be found that, as a mutual understanding of each other's peculiarities is increased, the rich man (in this paper, as in an Act of Parliament, words denoting persons of the masculine gender shall be construed as including persons of the feminine gender also) will bestow a little less careful thought and attention on--shall I say partridges?--and more on his fellow-man; and the bitter class-prejudice which undoubtedly exists among the needy against the prosperous and well-fed will gradually die out. Then, and then only, will a new and brighter era dawn on "poor humanity;" and, I may say, that I hold optimist views with reference to this consummation. I think I observe a growing acknowledgment of the claims of humble folk in the literature of the day; and as literature is universally regarded as an outcome of the prevalent tone of feeling, I look upon this as a good omen.

Having worked myself into this happy frame of mind, I am emboldened to request that consideration may be given to a few examples of the ideas which, "in the stillness of the night," and otherwise, have intruded themselves upon me--ideas embryonic and unformed, I doubt not, but genuine as far as they go. From the multitude of these shadowy phantoms which have now for a long time past oppressed me, I select those which strike me as having special reference to the improvement of our poor populations in four of the salient matters of life--viz., in health, pocket, mind, and amusements; and these I will deal with _seriatim_.

Health.

This, amongst all sublunary blessings, is undoubtedly the one of paramount importance, and, seeing how things now stand with us, it is imperative that it should be _the_ question to receive earliest attention.