Part 8

The cult of the serpent in its many branches is the greatest of animal cults, and it is the one in which we see most clearly the process by which man from being an impressionist became a symbolist, and from being a symbolist became a votary. We have only to read the Indian statistics of the number of persons annually killed by snake-bite to be persuaded that fear must have been the original feeling with which man regarded the snake. Fear is a religious feeling in primitive man, but other religious feelings were added to it—admiration, for the snake, as all who have had the good luck to observe it in its wild state must agree, is a beautiful, graceful, and insinuating creature; a sense of mystery, a sense of fascination which comes from those keen eyes fixed fearlessly upon yours, the simple secret, perhaps, of the much discussed power of snakes to fascinate their prey. What wonder if man under the influence of these combined impressions, symbolised in the serpent a divine force which could be made propitious by worship!

In the forming of cults there has always been this unconscious passage from impressions to symbols, from symbols to “manifestations.” But there has been also the conscious use of symbols by the priests and sages of ancient religions, in imparting as much of divine knowledge to the uninitiated as they thought that the uninitiated could bear. The origin of serpent worship has a probable relationship with this conscious use of symbols as well as with their unconscious growth.

Besides the prejudice against reptiles, modern popular superstition has placed several animals under a ban, and especially the harmless bat and the useful barn owl. Traditional reasons exist, no doubt, in every case; but stronger than these are the associations of such creatures with the dark in which the sane man of a certain temperament becomes a partial lunatic; a prey to unreal terrors which the flap of a bat’s wing or the screech of an owl is enough to work up to the point of frenzy. It is a most unfortunate thing for an animal if it be the innocent cause of a _frisson_, a feeling of uncanny dread. The little Italian owl, notwithstanding that it too comes out at dusk, has escaped prejudice. This was the owl of Pallas Athene and of an earlier cult. As in the case of the serpent, its wiles to fascinate its prey were the groundwork of its reputation for wisdom. Of this there cannot be, I think, any doubt, though the droll bobs and curtesies which excite an irresistible and fatal curiosity in small birds, have suggested in the mind of the modern man a thing so exceedingly far from wisdom as _civetteria_, which word is derived from _civetta_—“the owl of Minerva” as Italian class-books say. The descent from the goddess of wisdom to the coquette is the cruellest decadence of all!

VI

THE FAITH OF IRAN

THE Zoroastrian theory of animals cannot be severed from the religious scheme with which it is bound up. It is not a side-issue, but an integral part of the whole. It would be useless to attempt to treat it without recalling the main features in the development of the faith out of which it grew.

In the first place, who were the people, occupying what we call Persia, to whom the Sage, who was not one of them, brought his interpretation of the knowledge of good and evil? The early Iranians must have broken off from the united body of the Aryans at a time when they spoke a common language, which though not Sanscrit, was very like it. The affinities between Sanscrit and the dialect called with irremediable inaccuracy “Zend” are of the strongest. From this we conclude that, on their establishment in their new home, the Iranians differed little from the race of whose customs the Rig-Veda gives—not a full picture—but a faithful outline. Pastoral folk, devoted to their flocks and herds, but not unlearned in the cultivation of the earth and the sowing of grain, they had reached what may be called the highest stage of primitive civilisation. Though milk, butter and cooked corn formed their principal food, on feast days they also ate meat, chiefly the flesh of oxen and buffaloes, which they were careful to cook thoroughly. The progressive Aryans, who called half-raw meat by a term exactly corresponding to the too familiar “rosbif saignant,” denounced the more savage peoples who consumed it as “wild men” or “demons.” They kept horses, asses and mules; horses were sacrificed occasionally; for instance, kings sacrificed a horse to obtain male issue. The wild boar was hunted, if not in the earliest, at least in very early times. The dog was prized for its fidelity as guardian of the house and flocks, but there is no trace of its having been protected by extraordinary regulations such as those which later came into force in Iran. On the other hand, the name of dog had never yet been used in reproach. It seems to have been among Semitic races that the contempt for man’s best friend arose, but it is morally certain that it arose nowhere till dogs became scavengers of cities. It was the homeless pariah cur that gave the dog the bad name from which have sprung so many ugly words registered in modern vocabularies. Even now, when Jew or Moslem uses “dog” in a bad sense, he means “cur”; he knows quite well the other kind of dog—he knows Tobit’s dog, which, bounding on before the young man and the angel, told the glad tidings of his master’s return; Tobit’s dog which was one of the animals admitted by Mohammed into highest heaven. But “pariah dog” became synonymous of pariah, and notwithstanding the present tendency to attribute the opprobrium of the pig to original sanctity (and consequent reservation), I am inclined to think that the pig likewise came to be scorned because he was a scavenger. In some Indian cities herds of wild pigs still enter the gates just before they are closed at dusk, to pass out of them as soon as they are opened in the morning: during the night they do their work excellently, and by day they take a well-earned sleep in the jungle. They deserve gratitude, for they keep the cities free from disease, but, like other public servants, they scarcely get it.

In Vedic times every home had its watch-dog, whose warning bark was as unwelcome to lovers as it was to robbers. The Rig-Veda preserves the prayer of a young girl who asks that her father, her mother, her grandfather, _and the watch-dog_ may sleep soundly while she meets her expected lover: a charming glimpse of the chaste freedom of early Aryan manners. The newly-wedded wife enters her husband’s house as mistress, not as slave; the elders say to the young couple: “You are master and mistress of this house; though there be father-in-law and mother-in-law, they are placed under you.” If that was not quite what happened, yet the principle was granted, and there is much in that. The bride rode to her new home in a car drawn by four milk-white oxen; when she alighted at the threshold, these golden words were spoken to her: “Make thyself loved for the sake of the children that will come to thee; guard this house, be as one with thy husband; may you grow old here together. Cast no evil looks, hate not thy spouse, be gentle in thought and deed _even_ _to the animals of this home_.” Bride and bridegroom are exhorted to be of one heart, of one mind, “to love each other as a cow loves her calf,” a simple and true metaphor full of the country-side, full of the youth of the world.

If these were the customs and this was the life which the Iranians may be supposed to have taken with them, what was the religion? The early Aryans had a Nature-cult more spiritualised under the form of Varuna and more materialised under the form of Indra. Some students of the Avesta have thought that here could be found the elements of the Dualism which formed the essential doctrine of Mazdaism. But it is almost certain that no real Dualism existed in oldest Iran. The Avesta once contrasts the worshippers of God with the worshippers of Daevas, of those who breed the cow and have the care of it with those who ill-treat it and slaughter it at their sacrifices. But Indra-worship has no connexion with devil-worship, nor does this or similar texts prove that devil-worship, properly so called, ever flourished in Iran. Other religious reformers than Zoroaster have named the devotees of former religions “devil-worshippers.” For the rest, there is reason to think that in the Avesta the term was applied to Turanian raiders, not to true Iranians.

In an Assyrian inscription, Ahura Mazda is said to have created joy for _all_ creatures: a belief which Mazdean Dualism impugns. So far as can be guessed, the earliest Iranian faith was the worship of good spirits—of a Good Spirit. Less pure extra-beliefs may, or rather must, have existed contemporaneously, but they remained in the second rank. The cult of good spirits was the home-cult of shepherd and herdsman offered to the genii of their flocks and herds. While these genii answered the purpose of the lares or little saints everywhere dear to humble hearts, it is probable that in character they already resembled the Fravashis or archetypes that were to play so great a part in Mazdean doctrine. The cult of the Good Spirit, the national and kingly cult, was the worship of one God whose most worthy symbol, before Zoroaster as after, was the sun and whose sacrament with men was fire. The early Iranian had no temple, no altar: he went up into a high place and offered his prayer and sacrifice without priest or pomp. If we wish to trace his faith back to an Indian source, instead of bringing on the scene Varuna and Indra, it will be better to inquire whether there were elements of the same faith underlying the unwieldy fabric of Vedic religion. The answer is, that there were. The grandest text in the Rig-Veda, the one text recognised from farthest antiquity as of incalculable value, is the old Persian religion contained in a formula: “That Sun’s supremacy—God—let us adore Which may well direct.”

“Enable with perpetual light, The dulness of our blinded sight.”

So great a virtue was attributed to the Gayatri that the mind which thought it was supposed to unite with the object of thought: the eyes of the soul looked on Truth, of which all else is but the shadow. This is the spirit in which it is still repeated every day by every Hindu. The sacrosanct words were “Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva,” or, yet more often, they are described as “the mother of the Vedas,” which, if it means anything, means that they are older than the Vedas. The point most to be noticed about the Gayatri is that its importance cannot be set aside by saying that this text is to be explained by Henotheism: the habit of referring to each god immediately addressed as supreme. Nor was the text selected arbitrarily by Western monotheists: for thousands of years before any European knew it, the natives of India had singled it out as the most solemn affirmation of man’s belief in the Unseen.

It is open to argument, though not to proof, that the Gayatri crystallises a creed which the Iranians took with them in their migration. Peoples then moved in clans, not in a motley crowd gathered on an emigrant steamer. The clan or clans to which the Iranians belonged may have clung to a primordial faith, not yet overlaid by myths which materialised symbols and mysteries which made truth a secret.

Such speculations are guess-work, but that the primitive religion of Persia was essentially monotheistic is an opinion which is likely to survive all attacks upon it. On less sure grounds stands the identification of that primitive religion with Zoroastrianism. The great authorities of a former generation, and amongst them my distinguished old friend, Professor Jules Oppert, believed that Cyrus was a Mazdean. But there is a good deal to support the view that Zoroastrianism did not become the State religion till the time of the Sásánians, who, as a new dynasty, grasped the political importance of having under them a strong and organised priesthood. Before that time the Magians seem to have been rather a sort of Salvation Army or Society of Jesus than the directors of a national Church.

As late as the reign of Darius the Persians frequently buried their dead, a practice utterly repugnant to the Mazdean. Again, from Greek sources we know that the Persian kings sacrificed hecatombs of animals; thousands of oxen, asses, stags, &c., were immolated every day. Darius ordered one hundred bullocks, two hundred rams, four hundred lambs to be given to the Jews on the dedication of the new Temple (as well as twelve he-goats as sin-offerings for the twelve tribes) so that they might offer “sacrifices of sweet savours unto the God of heaven and pray for the life of the king and his sons.” Evidently Darius considered profuse animal sacrifices as a natural part of any great religious ceremony. Can it be supposed that such slaughter would have pleased a strict Zoroastrian? The Mazdeans retained the sacrifice of flesh as food: a small piece of the cooked meat eaten at table was included in the daily offering with bread, grain, fruits and the Homa juice, which was first drunk by the officiating priest, then by the worshippers, and finally thrown on the sacred fire. The small meat-offering was not animal sacrifice or anything at all like it. The Parsis substitute milk even for this small piece of meat, perhaps because the meat was usually beef, which would have caused offence to their Hindu fellow-citizens. I asked a Parsi High Priest who lunched with me at Basle during the second Congress for the History of Religions, what viands were eschewed by his community? He replied that they avoided both beef and the flesh of swine, but only out of respect for their neighbours’ rules: to them oil alone was forbidden—probably because of its virtue as a light-giver. In the Zoroastrian sacrifice it was never lost sight of that the outward act was but one of piety and obedience; the true sacrifice was of the heart: “I offer good thoughts, good words, good deeds.” It is hardly needful to say that the Mithraic taurobolium was in sheer contradiction to Mazdean law. Heretical sects were the bane of Zoroastrianism, and with one of these sprang up the strange practices which the Romans brought into Europe. Possibly its origin should be sought in some infiltration from the West, for it is more suggestive of Orphic rites than of any form of Eastern ceremonies. A Christian writer of the name of Socrates, who lived in the fifth century, said that at Alexandria, in a cavern consecrated to Mithra, human skulls and bones were found, the inference being that human sacrifice was the real rite, symbolised by the slaying of the bull. The source of this information is suspect, but even if not guilty of such excesses, the Mithra-worshippers of Western Persia must have been rank corrupters of the faith. In the Avesta, Mithra is the luminous æther; sometimes he appears as an intercessor; sometimes he dispenses the mercy or wields the vengeance of God. But in reality he is an attribute, about the nature of which members of the faith had less excuse for making mistakes than we have. It is difficult for the Indian or Japanese not to make analogous mistakes concerning some forms of worship in Southern Europe.

In Old Iran the Sacred Fire was kept perpetually alight. Sweet perfumes were spread around the place of prayer, for which a little eminence was chosen, but there were no images and no temples. Archæologists have failed to find traces of a building set apart for religious worship among the splendid ruins of Persepolis: the “forty towers” only tell of the pleasure-palace of an Eastern king. Was it that the profound spirituality of this people shrank not only from carving a graven image of the deity, but also from giving him a house made with hands? What could the maker of the firmament want with human fanes? Some such thought may have caused the Iranians to suppress for so long a time the instinct which impels man to build temples. In any case, it seems as if Cyrus and after him Darius threw themselves into the scheme for rebuilding the Hebrew temple with all the more enthusiasm from the fact that immemorial custom held them back from temple-building at home. The cuneiform inscriptions bear witness that these kings were monotheists: they believed in one sole creator of heaven and earth, by whose will kings reign and govern, and if they invoked the aid of heavenly hierarchs they never confused the creatures, however powerful, with the creator. That Creator they called by the name of Ahura Mazda, but they recognised that he was one, whatever the name might be by which he was called. “Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia: the Lord God of Heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and He hath charged me to build Him a house at Jerusalem, which is Judah.” In the uncanonical Book of Esdras, it is said more significantly that King Cyrus “commanded to have the house of the Lord in Jerusalem built where they should worship with eternal fire.” The recently deciphered Babylonian inscriptions have been brought forward to show that the Jews were mistaken in thinking that Cyrus was a monotheist, because he honoured Merodach in Babylon just as he had honoured Jehovah at Jerusalem. He was, it is said, a “polytheist at heart.” If he was, his honouring Merodach does not prove it. To my mind it proves exactly the reverse. Cyrus understood the monotheism which was at the bottom of the Babylonian religious system and which these very tablets have revealed to modern scholarship. He understood that “however numerous and diversified the nations of the earth may be, the God who reigns over them all can never be more than one.”[2]

Footnote 2:

Words written by a Japanese reformer named Okubo about fifty years ago.

He was governed by expediency in his respect for the faiths of his subject peoples, but he was governed also by something higher than expediency. That Darius Hystaspis, who is allowed to have been a monotheist, continued his policy, shows that it was not thought to involve disloyalty to Ahura Mazda since of such disloyalty Darius would have been incapable.

If we grant that the Iranians were, in the main, monotheistic at a date when not more than a part of the population professed Zoroastrianism, the question follows, of what was the difference between the reformed and the unreformed religion? To answer this satisfactorily, we must remember that the paramount object of Zoroaster was less change than conservation. Like Moses whom an attractive if not well-founded theory makes his contemporary, he saw around a world full of idolatry, and he feared lest the purer faith of Iran should be swamped by the encroachments of polytheism and atheism (for, strangely enough, the Avesta abounds in references to sheer negation). The aim of every doctrine or practice which he introduced was to revivify, to render more comprehensible, more consistent, the old monotheistic faith.

With regard to practice, the most remarkable innovation was that which concerned the disposal of the dead. It cannot be explained as a relic of barbarism: it was introduced with deliberation and with the knowledge that it would shock human sensibility then, just as much as it does now. The avowed reason for giving the dead to vultures or animals is that burial defiles the earth. It was recognised that this argument was open to the objection that birds or beasts were likely to drop portions of dead bodies on the earth. The objection was met with scholastic resourcefulness not to say casuistry: it was declared that “accidents” do not count. Though so strongly insisted on in the Avesta, the practice only became general at a late period: even after Mazdeism had made headway, bodies were often enveloped in wax to avoid defilement of the earth while evading the prescribed rite. Cremation, the natural alternative to burial, would have polluted the sacred fire. It was observed, no doubt, that the consumption of the dead by living animals was the means employed by Nature for disposing of the dead. Why do we so rarely see a dead bird or hare or rabbit or squirrel? The fact is not mysterious when we come to look into it. It may have been thought that what Nature does must be well done. The Parsis themselves seem to suppose that this and other prescriptions of their religious law were inspired by sanitary considerations, and they attribute to them their comparative immunity from plague during the recent epidemics at Bombay. Defilement of water by throwing any impurity into rivers is as severely forbidden as the defilement of the earth. Possibly another reason against burial was the desire to prevent anything like the material cult of the dead and the association of the fortunes of the immortal soul with those of the mortal body, such as prevailed among the Egyptians, whose practices doubtless were known to the Magi by whom, rather than by any one man, the Mazdean law was framed. Finally, the last rites provided a recurrent object-lesson conducive to the mental habit of separating the pure from the impure. They reminded the Mazdean that life is pure because given by Ormuzd; death impure because inflicted by Ahriman. The rule of every religion is designed largely, if not chiefly, as a moral discipline.[3]

Footnote 3:

Among the Buddhists of Thibet the dead are given to dogs and birds of prey as a last act of charity—to feed the hungry.

The true originality of Zoroastrianism as a religious system lies in the dualistic conception of creation which is the nexus that connects all its parts. This was seen at once, when the Avesta became known in Europe, but the idea was so entirely misunderstood and even travestied, that Zoroaster was represented as a believer in two gods whose power was equal, if, indeed, the power of the evil one were not the greater. Recently among the manuscripts of Leopardi were found these opening lines of an unfinished “Hymn to Ahriman”:—

“Re delle cose, autor del mondo, arcana Malvagità, sommo potere e somma Intelligenza, eterno Dator de’ mali e regitor del moto....”

They are fine lines, but if Anro-Mainyus might fitly be called “arcana malvagità” and “dator de’ mali,” nothing could be farther removed from the Zoroastrian idea than the rest of the description. Ahriman possessed neither supreme power nor supreme intelligence, nor was he author of the world, but only of a small portion of it. To this day, however, it has pleased pessimists to claim Zoroaster, the most optimist of prophets, as one of their fraternity.

The real Ahriman gains in tremendous force from the vagueness of his personality. Sometimes he _acts_ as a person: as in the Temptation of Zoroaster when he offers him the kingdoms of the world if he will but serve him. But no artist would have dared to give him human form. And surely no one in Iran would have alluded to him by mild or good-humoured euphemisms. He shares this, however, with the mediæval devil, that he works at an eternally pre-destined disadvantage. He is fore-doomed to failure. Good is stronger than Evil, and Good is lasting, Evil is passing. In the end, Evil must cease to be.