Part 3
It is interesting to compare such primitive forms of the myth with those assumed by it amid the advanced phases of Animism. Tithonus, for whom Eos obtained the gift of immortality but not that of perpetual youth, whom divine pity changed into a grasshopper, became the proverbial title of a decrepit old man, and represents the nearest approach to an earthly immortal in Greek mythology. The immortals exist indeed, but in changed forms, or even if the human powers be preserved it must be in Hades, as in the case of Teiresias. The Glaucus-myth, running through several variants, shows the evolution of this class of myths. Surviving all ordeals in Crete--the sea, the cask of honey, the serpent’s bite--he becomes on the Corinthian coast an evil ghost, and in Bœotia a marine deity. In classic ages every hero has his vulnerable point where he is sure to be touched at last.
III.
SOURCES OF THE MYTH.
Although, as we have seen, the myths of the undying ones are found among races so widely separate that they must often be of independent origin, many of them are ethnically related. This is the case with a series of such, now to be considered, which bear upon the fable of the Wandering Jew.
The earliest myth of this character is probably that of the Iranian Yima, King of the Golden Age in Persia. This beautiful myth is found in the Zendavesta, and in the Vendidad which Haug traces, in its earlier parts, to an antiquity not far short of Zoroaster himself, not less than a thousand years before our era. In the Zendavesta it is declared: “During the happy reign of Yima there was neither cold nor heat, neither decay nor death, nor malice produced by the demons; father and son walked forth, each fifteen years old in appearance.” With Yima was Armaiti, the divine woman, genius of the earth, who by promoting culture, recovering wildernesses and converting nomadic tribes to peaceful cultivators, expanded the earth to thrice its original size; and over this paradise Yima reigned nine hundred years. After the evils of winter had come over his country Yima led a select number of his friends to a secluded spot, where they enjoy perfect happiness.[7] Armaiti still, in Parsî faith, remained at her work, upholding the earth in her maternal arms, ever working against the powers of evil; and when she shall have prevailed, Yima is to come back again and lead in the Golden Year.
It is an instance of the unconscious poetry of humanity that this Iranian Yima is one with Yama, the Vedic King of the Dead! The idea may have originally been the declining sun;[8] but there are other characters than darkness about the sunset; there are splendours also, and often the western horizon is painted with radiant islets which to primitive man seemed a part of his planet. It may even have been that the westward course of human migration was guided by this permanent pillar of Fire which every evening lit up the Hesperian Gardens and Isles of the Blest.
This migration on earth and sea corresponds with a mental and spiritual migration. Exploration of the Edens, Gan-Edens, Avalons, Hesperides, Atlantises, turns them to parts of the prosaic world while it raises the ideals that hovered over them to rosy cloud-lands which cannot yet be explored. No Yima found anywhere on earth! And so it begins to be sung of him that he has passed to some region not exactly upon earth. Now it is said, this time in the Rigveda (x. 14, 1, 2): “Yama, the king, the gatherer of the people, has descried a path for many, which leads from the depths to the heights; he first found out a resting-place from which nobody can turn out the occupants; on the way the forefathers have gone, the sons will follow them.” Finally, as Haug remarks: “This happy ruler of the blessed in Paradise has been transformed, in the modern Hindu mythology, into the fearful god of death, the inexorable judge of men’s doings, and the punisher of the wicked.”
For a long time after their constitution as a people, the Jews had no definite faith in the immortality of the soul, and there is no text in the Old Testament which clearly teaches that doctrine. It has been thought by some that their adoption of that doctrine was coincident with their decline from greatness as a nation.[9] Jehovah still walked amid the pleasant shade-trees of Paradise, and there Enoch walked with him. Out of this belief in an earthly immortality grew the earlier form of belief in the life after death, which insisted on corporeal resurrection. As time went on, and the numbers for whom immortality was claimed grew, and as exploration discovered no earthly Eden in which these resided, paradise necessarily ascended to an aerial realm. But its earthly characteristics were preserved. Thence angels passed to earth and back on a ladder, and thence came the chariot and horses which appeared when Elias was borne away by a sufficiently strong whirlwind. That he was ‘carried to the sky’ marks, however, a step away from the earthly abode, in the direction taken by the myth which turned Yima to Yama.
But the Jews introduced into their belief in certain undying ones an important feature, drawn from their imported dualistic philosophy, which marshalled everything and every being, small or large, on one side or the other of the great war between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Beside the hero, too holy to die, is seen the man of sin, to whom the repose of the grave is forbidden. The books of our Bible were written after ancient traditions, and gathered together when other ideas were predominant; and it is rather by intimations there found, and by references to rabbinical and Arabian folk-lore, that we can get at these primitive fables.
In the first epoch we find counterparts in Cain and Seth. Even the Biblical narrative seems to point to a primitive myth, in which these two were good and evil immortals, which had gone to pieces before the book of Genesis was compiled.[10] At any rate at an early age the pieces had been put together by the Semitic imagination. It is said (Gen. iv. 25) that Eve called this her third son Seth (_scion_ or _germ_): “for,” she said, “God hath appointed me another seed in place of Abel, whom Cain slew.” The Talmudic book, _Shene Luchôth_, says that the soul of Abel (_breath_) passed into Seth, and again into Moses. Josephus (_Ant._ i. 2) shows that Seth was venerated as one possessed of great knowledge, which he engraved on two pillars. Suidas says Seth was the first to hear the name of God. In the fourth century there was a sect of Sethians, who, according to Epiphanius, identified Seth with the Messiah (Adv. Hær. i. 3, 39). In the line of Seth were born the long-lived beings, some of whom lived above nine hundred years, and one of whom was Enoch, who did not die at all. Many of the names resemble those in the line of Cain--and were no doubt taken from it--Cain-an, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech. It is evident that the Seth legend was introduced to avoid having the human race descend from the first murderer and type of evil--Cain.
Cain was the first Wandering Jew. His name, signifying a spear, and Tubal-Cain, “son of a spear,” first artificer in brass and iron, suggest the possibility that his doom may have been that of a Semitic Prometheus. At any rate the curse pronounced upon him (“a fugitive and a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth”); the mark (token, or perhaps _weird_) fixed upon him, that none should slay him; the land to which he wandered, itself meaning flight (Nod)--supplied ample materials for the mother-myth of eternal Wanderers. Of Cain, however, more will be said at a further stage of our inquiry.
Enoch represents the first personage of Biblical record clearly corresponding to Yima. “Enoch walked with Elohim and was no more [seen among men], for Elohim took him.” With regard to the solar character of the Enoch-myth we cannot concern ourselves here. As his name indicates Enoch is the Beginner, like Yima, of whom Ahuramazda says, “with him I conversed first among men” (Vendidad, ii. 2). It is especially noticeable that Enoch “walks” with Elohim, whom we before find “walking in the garden” (Gen. iii. 8). A heavenly abode is not yet imagined. Even the Koran, when it speaks of Enoch (Erdris), hesitates to affirm his translation to heaven, but says, “We exalted him to a high place.”
The evil counterpart of Enoch is Lamech, who, although his death at the age of 777 is recorded in the later Sethite line, identifies himself as a deathless wanderer with Cain in the lines which, as Ewald thinks, probably gave rise to the Cain story itself:
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice! Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech! For the man I slew for my own wound, The child I struck dead on account of my own hurt! Was Cain avenged seven times? Lamech will be seven and seventy times!
In the third epoch we find Esau a restless evil wanderer, fulfilling the destiny pronounced by his father, gradually personifying Edom, the antagonist of Israel. The corresponding immortal is Judah, from whose hand the sceptre was not to depart till Shiloh come. The death of neither of these is mentioned; Edom and Judah remained to carry on their phantasmal war to the last--as Satan and Jahve, as Sammaël and Michael.
The mysterious account, in Deut. xxxiv., of the death of Moses, suggests the existence at some period of a popular belief that he did not die in the ordinary sense. It is said, by one rendering, that he died “on the mouth of Jahve”; “his eye was not dim nor his natural strength abated”; Jahve knew him “face to face,” and himself buried him in a valley, in a place unknown to this day. According to the Talmud, Enoch, Moses, and Elias, are brought up by Michael to be changed into angels. (Kalisch, Comm. on O. T., II. p. 307.) This association of Moses with the two who notoriously had not died is significant. In the Book of “The Assumption of Moses” the demon who tried to get the body of Moses, as mentioned in Jude ix., is called Sammaël. This had long been the name for Esau-Edom; and there is also in this coincidence the intimation of an early legend which brought Moses slumbering in his Moabite cave into mythological relation with restless Esau, ever wandering amid the dark mountains. The presence of Moses at the transfiguration of Jesus in company with Elias, who never died, would alone show that belief in his earthly immortality had prevailed. In addition, there are intimations of such a tradition among the Arabs. The Moslems make pilgrimages to Neby Musa, near Jericho, as the sepulchre of Moses, and their legend is as follows: God had promised to leave Moses in this world until he should voluntarily descend into a tomb. After Moses had lived 120 years, he was one day walking and saw four men (angels) excavating a chamber in a rock, as, they said, a hiding-place for their king’s most precious treasure. The cavern offered a tempting retreat from the sun’s rays, and Moses reclined in it. One of the workmen gave him a delicious apple. No sooner had he inhaled its scent than “he fell asleep.”[11]
An evil counterpart of Moses may be found in the tradition--very important to the legend of the Wandering Jew, as we shall presently see--that the maker of the Golden Calf was doomed to a fate much like that of Cain. There arose a proverb among the Jews that “no punishment befalleth the Israelites in which there is not an ounce of this calf.” Although in the Bible the fashioning of this idol is distinctly ascribed to Aaron, he was not among the three thousand slain on account of it, but was pardoned. Moses says, “The Lord was very angry with Aaron to have destroyed him: and I prayed for Aaron at the same time” (Deut. ix. 20). Semitic Folk-lore has been still more merciful to Aaron’s reputation, at cost of the Samaritans, and made it out that the Golden Calf was fashioned by one Samiri, or Al Sâmeri. “The devil,” says Jonathan, “got into the metal and fashioned it into a calf.” The Koran says the calf lowed, and in Arabian tradition Al Sâmeri took some dust from the footsteps of the horse of Gabriel, who rode at the head of Israel, and threw it in the calf’s mouth, which began to low.
Now, many of the Samaritans themselves, about the first century of our era, gathered about one Dositheus as their Messiah (Origen, _De Princ._ iv. c. 17; Epiphanius, _Hæres._ xiii.). His pretensions brought upon Dositheus an order for his arrest from the Samaritan high-priest, from which he escaped and hid in a cave. There, according to some, he starved to death; but his followers continued to believe that he was alive and would reappear. It is possible that Al Sâmeri means “the Samaritan”--_i.e._ Dositheus or Dûsis--and that he thus became the mythical scapegoat for Aaron’s offence. G. Weil (_The Bible, the Koran, and the Talmud_) says: “Moses then summoned Samiri, and would have put him to death instantly, but Allah directed that he should be sent into banishment. Ever since that time he roams like a wild beast throughout the world; everyone shuns him and purifies the ground on which his feet have stood; and he himself, whenever he approaches men, exclaims: ‘Touch me not!’”
In the Koran (Sale, xx.) it is declared that Moses said to Al Sâmeri, “Get thee gone; for thy punishment in this life shall be that thou shalt say unto those who shall meet thee, Touch me not!” Al Beidâwi is quoted by Sale as interpreting this to mean that infection would follow the touch, but to Al Sâmeri; ultimately, however, the fear was on the other side. It was believed that Al Sâmeri repaired to an island in the Red Sea, where his wretched descendants dwell, and whence issue plagues. Whenever a ship comes near the inhabitants raise the warning cry, “Touch me not!”
Al Beidâwi also says that Al Sâmeri’s real name was Moses, or Mûsa Ebn Dhafar, which seems to suggest that he was regarded as the counterpart of Moses; and also as a source of pestilence he would be the opposite of Moses, whose medical skill was famous.
Although it may anticipate somewhat the later developments of our myth, it may be well to suggest here the probability that the traditional idea, preserved in the romance of Eugene Sue and elsewhere, that the Wandering Jew carried the plague from city to city, may have been connected with this legendary Red Sea Island. Its real origin may have been in the actual diseases bred in the wretched quarters in which Jews were crowded by a suicidal inhumanity, and from which every Jewish traveller and trader had to go.
The next undying one is Elias. The idea of Jahve’s earthly abode had grown dim, at least, and Eden had begun to ascend amid the roseate clouds when this legend was formed. The terrestrial chariot and horses are present, but a whirlwind is needed to carry them with the prophet to heaven. The narrative seems meant to admit of either theory--a heavenly or an earthly paradise. There Elias remained as a kind of Æolus, literally as on earth a weather-prophet; and to this day in Greece, and many parts of the East, when a severe storm with lightning arises, the peasants say, “Elias goes forth in his chariot!”[12]
In folk-lore Elias unites in himself characteristics both of the Sleepers and Wanderers. In some regions he is supposed to have employed his leisure in paradise with writing a book. In Moslem legend he is a Wanderer. A powerful sheikh, they say, wished to utilise the miraculous gifts of Elias, and had him chained. The tyrant led him over his lands because his “footsteps were blessed,” but at the prophet’s every step the fields withered. The sheikh was about to slay Elias, when the prophet asked permission to quench his thirst at what is now called the “sealed fountain,” near Bethlehem. The tyrant held the chain which, however, elongated itself: the bonds fell off, the rock closed behind him, and since then Elias “has continued to travel over the whole world, rendering every place verdant on which he treads.” The “sealed fountain” of the rains, which only Elias could unseal in the time of drouth, would appear in this myth to feel its relation with the Sun. One need not wonder that Dr. Schliemann found a Greek church consecrated to Elias on the site of a temple of Helios.[13]
The Dualism which in the Semitic Mythology divided the undying ones into good and evil, is generally found in the corresponding traditions of other regions. We find good and evil counterparts in Barbarossa and Wodan; in the Wild Huntsman, and faithful Eckhardt who warns of his approach; in King Arthur wandering as a raven, contrasted with Merlin, bound for ever in his prison of air by the spell of Vivien; in the German Monk Felix (who, like Abbot Cormac, listened for centuries to the singing bird, W. Grimm, _Altdeutsche Walder_, ii. 70), with King Herla, who was similarly bewitched by the evil dwarf to whose wedding he went; in Siegfried, with Van der Decken, who swore his ship should round the Cape, “despite God or Devil, if it took till judgment,” and is now the Flying Dutchman; in Tannhäuser, with Lohengrin; in Ogier among the fairies of Morgana, with the Gros Veneur; in the Seven Sleepers of Tours, with Hugo wandering beside their grotto.
IV.
THE LEGENDS GENERALISED.
If we examine well the account in the Zendavesta of the paradise wherein Yima walked with Ahuramazda, and that in Genesis of Eden where Enoch walked with Elohim, we can hardly fail to recognise in them the germ of the Messianic dream. The visions of the renovated earth described by Philo, and in the Sibylline Oracles, and in the Apocalypse of Baruch, are but realistic expansions of those happy retreats of the holy ones who were not supposed to taste corruption.[14] In this idealised earth were gathered the beauties and joys of many Gulistans.
And, similarly, he who was to reign over the imparadised in this perfected earth was to be an immortal king returning from his Avalon, invested with the attributes of all the incorruptible. These had been gradually raised into an abstract personality--the “Angel-Messiah,” to which Mr. Ernest de Bunsen has given such patient research with many interesting results--who, however, was purely a terrestrial being, a Son of Man.
The phrase “Ancient of Days,” used three times in Daniel vii., and the snow-white hair there ascribed to that being, who gives dominion to the Son of Man brought before him, convey the idea of a being that has lived through all changes, a memory and consciousness in which the ages broken up to mortal eyes are knit together, and therefore able to be a providence and a retributive judge. Viceroy of this Ancient of Days is the immortal man in whose unbroken consciousness all history is embodied: he is the earthly providence. Before Abraham was, he is. He abides with the Ancient in his earthly dwelling, but goes forth at appointed periods for certain purposes. He is the “Son of Man” as distinguished from the sons of Kings; reigns not by succession but by election of the Deity manifested in signs and marvels, such as the carrier dove bringing the divine sanction to emperors who break the order of legitimacy. No incarnation was imagined; the avatars of this Son of Man are the Apparitions of one always in the earth, but able to render himself invisible, or who assumes an humble disguise. This disguise may be thrown off occasionally in some solitary place, for a select few who are charged with secresy.
This Messiah gathered up in his person the powers and glories of past saints and heroes, and it was expected that these would attend him at the supreme scene of his coronation on earth. Elias was to appear as his herald. In Seder ’Olam Rabbah it is said, “In the second year of the reign of Ahaziah, Elias became hidden, [to be] seen no more until King Messiah shall come, when he will be again seen, and hidden a second time, and not seen again until Gog and Magog come. And now he writes down the work of all the generations.” It was asked of John the Baptist “Art thou Elias?” and next “Art thou that prophet?” Who was this prophet popularly thus associated with Messianic expectations? Professor Drummond suggests that it was Jeremiah, and cites the vision of Judas Maccabæus, in which he saw, beside Onias the high-priest, “a man with grey hairs and exceeding glorious,” who was declared to be Jeremiah, “who offers many prayers for the people and the holy city.” Jeremiah gave Judas a golden sword, and told him to wound the adversaries.
On the nether side of this Messianic dream we find a pit or underworld--some region which could not mar the fair face of the perfect earth--which is an outcome of the wilderness of Dendain, Cain’s Land, every weird desolation. And the king of this region sums up in himself the line of eternal evil wanderers--Cain, Lamech, Esau, Samuel--in a personification of hostility to the Messiah. This generalised Opposition--called Armillus among the Jews, Al Dajjail by the Mussulmans--corresponds exactly with Antichrist among the early Christians. It was said Armillus was to be born out of a marble statue in a church at Rome (the _ne plus ultra_ of earthly infernalism to a race detesting graven images and victimised by Rome), and that Christendom would worship him until the true Messias (Ben David) should appear, and, as says the Targum (Isa. xi. 4) “By the word of his mouth the wicked Armillus shall die.”
V.
TRANSFIGURATION.
Though the alleged longevity of the Jewish patriarchs temporarily made up for the absence of the conception of immortality, this idea arrived. The representatives of Seth live above an average of nine centuries each, with one remarkable exception: Enoch, the best of them, lives less than half the years of the least. Whatever may have been the original reason for this exception, the explanation was that Enoch really outstripped even the 969 years of Methuselah, having never died at all. In paradise he would have access to the Tree of Life. In the farther development of Israel other “beginners”--as Moses representing Law, and Elias Prophecy--might eclipse Enoch, and wear “by authority” his mantle of immortality; but in popular faith and folk-lore Enoch held his own. He was said to have invented writing, arithmetic, and astronomy; to have filled 300 volumes with the knowledge acquired by long residence among the angels; his first being a book predicting the Deluge, which was preserved by Noah in the Ark. In many respects Enoch resembles Teiresias, to whom Zeus granted a life on earth of seven or nine generations, and who even in Hades was said by Homer to have retained his human perception, while those around him were mere shades (Plato, Meno, 100).[15] His fame as a soothsayer, both on earth and in Hades, grew out of the belief in his long experience, and no doubt this was the case with Enoch also. Most folk-sayings and predictions were connected with Enoch as forged runes and verses are now attributed to Mother Shipton. (It will be remembered that the first English book on this theme was entitled _The Wandering Jew telling fortunes to Englishmen_, 1640.) It might have been supposed that Enoch would be present at the Transfiguration of Jesus. Paul had spoken of him with honour; Jude quoted from him; and it is probable that he was meant as one of the “two witnesses” alluded to in Rev. xi. 3. In the Gospel of Nicodemus the “two witnesses” are Enoch and Elias, who welcome those arriving in Paradise.