That this army of saints was originally created to replace the body
of heroes and demi-gods of antiquity cannot be doubted. The compliance
with which the church converted pagan deities into Christian heroes is
perfectly well known, and it is shown in many ways. Ancient statues
were declared to represent newly canonized saints to whom pagan
attributes were unhesitatingly given--often most ridiculously. At
the temple of Sebona, in Nubia, the Christians replaced the figure
of the old god of the temple, which appeared in a fresco, by that of
St. Peter, thus depicting King Rameses the Second as presenting his
offering to the Christian saint! The statue of Jupiter in St. Peter's
at Rome has been declared that of the erstwhile fisherman, and its
original thunderbolts have been replaced by the keys, which the
Christian mythologists have filched from the god Janus to bestow on
their revered patron in accordance with the promise of Matthew xvi,
19. Rome is full of proofs of this conversion of heathen to Christian
deities. The temple formerly sacred to the Bona Dea was dedicated
to the Virgin Mary; the church of Saint Apollinaris stands on the
spot formerly dedicated to Apollo; and the temple of Mars was given
to St. Martina. The very names of some of the saints have an old
familiar sound--as St. Baccho, St. Quirinus, St. Romula, St. Redempta,
St. Concordia, St. Nympha, and St. Mercurius.
The Christian symbolism of its heroes has also a decidedly pagan
flavor. The ancient winged lion of the Egyptian mythology is made to
portray St. Mark; the sacred bull denotes St. Luke; while St. John
is generously supplied with both the eagle of Jove and the hawk's
head of Horus.
The idea of intercession, which is the principal attribute of all the
saints, is also a very ancient religious theory and probably came with
the other dogmas already mentioned from Alexandria, as we find that
the Egyptians believed that some of their gods--and particularly the
four gods of the dead--acted as mediators with the stern judge Osiris
and attempted to turn aside his wrath and the punishment of sins.
Much akin to the saints, though differing from them in form and in
never having been mortal, are the angels. These beings combine the
wings of the Roman victories with the sweet voices of the Teutonic
elves and the classical sirens, and are in many ways similar to
the famous northern valkyries who wore shirts of swan plumage and
hovered over Scandinavian battlefields to receive the souls of
falling heroes. The Hindu apsaras and Moslem houris belong to the
same family. A few years ago a bitter controversy arose in New York
Episcopal circles as to the sex of these unearthly creatures, some
strenuously advocating their masculinity, while others gallantly
asserted that they were essentially feminine, but the earlier idea
was that they were entirely sexless, combining the characteristic
virtues of both sexes.
Apart from both saints and angels stands another figure in the
Christian mythology--one, however, that has no actual counterpart in
the ancient faiths. This is Satan. The classical religious systems
had no such conception, their king of the dead being a gloomy and
austere deity without any of the malicious or mischievous propensities
of the more modern devil, and having no designs upon the welfare of
mankind. The medieval conception of the devil was a grotesque compound
of elements derived from all the pagan mythologies which Christianity
superseded. From the sylvan deity Pan he gets his goat-like body, his
horns and cloven hoofs; his lameness was due to his fall from heaven,
in imitation of the fall of the Roman Vulcan; and his red beard was
taken from the lightning god Thor, as was also his power over the
thunderbolts; while his pitchfork is the converted trident of Neptune.
That much of the absurd fabric of Christianity is built upon a
belief in Satan cannot be denied, for the whole theology is based
upon the necessity of a savior whose death atones for the sins of
mankind, which were consequent upon man's fall from grace through the
machinations of the devil. Had man never fallen, there were no need
of a savior. Had man never been tempted, he would never have fallen,
and in no words was the necessity of a belief in the devil more
plainly set forth than by that most orthodox writer, des Mousseaux,
in his "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," published in 1852. He says:
"The Devil is the chief pillar of Faith. He is one of the grand
personages whose life is closely allied to that of the church, and
without his speech, which issued out so triumphantly from the mouth
of the serpent, the fall of man could never have taken place. Thus,
if it were not for him, the Savior, the Crucified, the Redeemer,
would be but the most ridiculous of supernumeraries and the cross an
insult to good sense!" In his preface to "Les Hauts Phenomènes de la
Magie," des Mousseaux repeats this theory: "If magic and spiritualism
were both but chimeras, we would have to bid an eternal farewell
to all the rebellious angels now troubling the world; for thus we
would have no more demons down here.... And if we lost our demons,
we would lose our Savior likewise; for, from whom did that Savior
save us? And then there would be no more Redeemer; for, from whom
or what could that Redeemer redeem us? Hence, there would be no more
Christianity." He evidently regards Satan as "the prince of this world"
(John xii, 31; xvi, 11); "the god of this world" (Cor. iv, 4); and
"the prince of the power of the air" (Eph. ii, 2).
The universally accepted belief of Christendom in the almost absolute
power of the devil was the cause of the most awful persecution
of innocence that the world has ever seen. While the tortures of
the heretics by the Inquisition had some cause of a political as
well as ecclesiastical nature, the houndings of those accused of
witchcraft and sorcery had no foundation save in superstition and
gross ignorance. During the Christian era millions of persons have
been destroyed for this crime in conformity to the command, "Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Ex. xxii, 18). The Roman church
recognized and punished the crime; Luther approved of the burning of
witches; the Scotch reformers did likewise, and the Puritans of New
England delighted in the persecution.
While all religiously orthodox people accept the narrative of
scriptural miracles with unquestioning faith and never cast a doubt
on the greatest improbabilities so long as they are told of biblical
heroes, these very people assign all the seeming supernatural affairs
of post-scriptural times to the devil. Psychical phenomena which, if
performed two thousand years ago by Jesus (such as the resurrection
of Lazarus and the materialization to the Magdalene), they accept
without hesitation, they brand as trickery or a delusion or Satan,
when placed before them by a professed Spiritualist.
Witches and wizards were condemned to horrible deaths by the medieval
church for performing the very identical acts for which the same church
canonized departed saints and instituted offices for their adoration
and worship; and modern Christians smile and sneer derisively at
fortune tellers, but condemn in holy horror as heretics those who
refuse to believe in the foreseeing powers of the ancient Hebrew
prophets.
This Christian devil-worship, for it can be called little else, crept
into Judaism during the Babylonian captivity, and was originally a
recognition of the dual powers of good and evil, seemingly coequal. By
placing Satan in opposition to God, in giving him eternal life, and
endowing him with miraculous powers, and even allowing him to upset
and vanquish the plans of God, Christians have made Satan equal, if not
superior, to the Deity. A Puritan bigot hanging witches in New England
was admitting in the plainest manner his faith in Satan's power, though
it never occurred to him for an instant that these curious happenings
might be attributed to God. The power of God to perform miracles was
then, as now, a matter of the past. With the Protestant Reformation
came the idea that no longer did God interfere for the benefit of
man. In the seventeenth century God had ceased to work by other than
natural agencies. His miraculous powers, if not lost, were at least
suspended. But not so Satan--that archfiend was as powerful as ever,
if not more so. He could inflict magical tortures on God's divinely
elect and make them writhe in agony. Pious Cotton Mather had ceased
to believe in divine miracles, but he had no doubt of devilish ones,
and it appears to all students of that dark and shameful period of our
history that the belief was rampant among the majority that God was
vanquished and Satan ruled. Never was belief in the dual principles
of good and evil more surely set forth in ancient Persia than it was
in New England by such harsh, cruel, and bigoted priests as Mather
and Parrish.
Today, while all churchmen have grown more liberal, we still find
both in pulpit and pew innumerable believers in the power of Satan
to tempt and force erring humanity into wrong and sinful paths in
miraculous salvation from which by God they have no faith. Today,
instead of earthly and present salvation by the Deity from the
clutches of Satan, the belief seems prevalent that a post-mortem
salvation is more efficacious, and that all that is required for
eternal bliss is belief in the vicarious atonement of the Christ. To
hear our orthodox friends declaim on the powers of Satan almost makes
one ready to believe that God is dead and Satan rules supreme. Such
is the blasphemy of demonic faith.
While Satan, as the arch-enemy, is somewhat similar to the Persian
Ahriman, he is not alone in his wickedness. When Christianity came
into power and supplanted paganism as the Roman state religion,
it immediately debased all of the pagan gods, whom it did not
appropriate to itself as saints, to devils and assigned them
subordinate positions in hell, under command of the great Satan. And
thus, all the beautiful water sprites, sylvan nymphs, spirits of the
air, and other lesser deities, became the associates of wickedness,
and, as such, continued, until a very recent date, to hold sway over
the superstitious imaginations of the majority of Europeans.
The mediæval church likewise invented the famous succubæ and incubi,
the former demons impersonating the beautiful nymphs of the old
mythology and attacking the virtue of youths with their seductive
arts, while the latter, in imitation of the ancient satyrs, sought the
virginity of unsuspecting maidens; all of which may readily be learned
of in accounts of the many trials held by "the Holy Inquisition,"
in which such were condemned as had held intercourse with these demons.
In many cases, women swearing to have had intercourse with incubi
were merely suffering from erotic and nymphomaniac hallucinations,
while others may have found it a convenient excuse for explaining
illicit impregnations. Men, falling under the charms of women,
found it a convenient method for disposing of their loves, after the
infatuation had passed, by declaring them succubæ; and monks, who had
contracted venereal diseases, laid their sufferings to these same fair
demons. In the case of the monks, however, the succubæ were often of
purely hallucinary origin, due to excessive asceticism together with
the suppression of natural desires and a too faithful conformity to
the ordinance of celibacy. Nymphomania is also prevalent in convents,
owing to the unnatural sexual lives led by the nuns, who either
remain truly chaste or abandon themselves to all sorts of debauchery
and perverted lubricities. In former times these rages of demented
women were supposed to have been caused by possession of demons,
which tormented them at the orders of magicians, and advantage was
often taken by the unscrupulous to accuse their enemies of the crime
of sorcery, and thus cause their execution.
One of the most famous of these horrible affairs was that of Loudin in
Poitiers, where the nuns of the Ursuline convent, becoming hysterical
and demented, swore themselves afflicted by Urbain Grandier, a priest
of the local church, and despite the attempts of the rational bailiff
and sensible civil lieutenants, some enemies of the curé among the
exorcists managed to secure the arrest, torture, and final burning
of the unfortunate man in 1632. Later, it was discovered that, being
personally attractive, handsome and gallant, Grandier, who never
denied his numerous amours, had incurred the enmity of the Loudin
nuns by entirely ignoring their advances; and hell hath no fury like
a woman scorned! These libidinous women, constantly brooding over
disappointment to their fond hopes, gave such a character of demonic
possession to their neurosis that advantage could be taken of it by
rival priests to rid themselves of an envied enemy. The writhings,
gesticulations, convulsions, etc., of these unfortunate women,
combined with the indecency of their actions on the approach of the
exorcists (caused merely by the approach of a male), were believed by
the vulgar to be demonstrations of demonic possession. Other nuns,
seeing the attention and notoriety thus gained by these sisters,
although themselves free from dementia, could not resist the temptation
to simulate its forms and thus acquire renown for themselves.
Thus arose those horrible demonical scenes which occupied the attention
of all Europe during the seventeenth century and seemed to point to
the possession of all convents by devils. And not convents alone, for
other hysterical women, without the walls, possessed of the same rage
for notoriety, took up the character of demonic possessed and spread
the vulgar superstition until it seems that every woman in Europe who
was so unfortunate as to be in any way afflicted with tendencies to
hysteria, neurosis, idiocy, or dementia of any character whatever,
came to be regarded as in the power of a demon, which in turn was
the slave of some magician. And thus, through the influence of an
ignorant and unscrupulous priesthood, a powerful engine was placed
at its disposal for the removal of enemies. Executions for sorcery
continued until their very number and barbarity palled, and the wearied
people were ready for their abolition, when the Reformation opened and
with the accession of power, Protestantism, in this matter, at least,
swayed the masses to reason once more.
Dr. Figuier, in his "Histoire du Merveilleux," explains these
demonical possessions as entirely due to hypnotism, and, ignoring the
nymphomaniac theory, asserts that the exorcists themselves hypnotized
the nuns for their own glory and for purposes of vengeance. One page
234 of volume I he says: "L'appareil deployé par les exorcistes,
leurs adjurations, leurs gestes imposants et forcenés, tenaient
lieu des manipulations que nos magnetiseurs emploient pour endormir
leurs sujets. Operant sur des jeunes filles nerveuses, malades,
melancoliques, les exorcistes produisaient chez elles une partie des
phenomènes auxquels donné lieu le somnambulisme artificiel."
The universal belief in evil spirits became a powerful engine for the
advancement of the church. By its use all those who were inimical to
the church could be put out of the way as comrades of devils, and,
furthermore, the theory was advanced that only by the exorcisms of
the church could man be protected from malevolent powers. Holy water,
signs of the cross, repetitions of the name of Mary had full power
to annul all the machinations of the demons, but only in the hands
of the true believers was this efficacious. To preserve one from the
dangers of demonic spite, absolute orthodoxy was essential, and thus
a great premium was imposed upon strict adherence to the church. Thus
was gross superstition a most powerful factor in the growth and spread
of Christianity. According to Lecky: "There was scarcely a village or
a church that had not, at some time, been the scene of supernatural
interposition. The powers of light and the powers of darkness were
regarded as visibly struggling for the mastery. Saintly miracles,
supernatural cures, startling judgments, visions, prophecies, and
prodigies of every order, attested the activity of the one, while
witchcraft and magic, with all their attendant horrors, were the
visible manifestations of the other.... Tens of thousands of victims
perished by the most agonizing and protracted torments, without
exciting the slightest compassion.... Nations that were separated
by position, by interests, and by character, on this question were
united." And the germ of all this evil lay in the very foundation of
Christianity--the faith held in supernatural agencies.
The belief in the supernatural agency in the temptation of Eve, the
temptations of Jesus, the possibility of the miraculous conception,
and the miracles of Christ, were but stepping-stones to faith in
innumerable invisible but potent powers. One who can conscientiously
believe in the supernatural as found between the covers of the
Bible can, by but a slight stretch of the imagination, believe any
preposterous tale that is woven about a supernatural agency. If one
can believe a woman can conceive without contact with semen, one
can believe some old woman can dry up his cow. If one can believe
that Jesus actually raised Lazarus from the dead, one can believe
that a man can kill him by sticking pins in a wax effigy. If one
can believe that Elijah ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot, one
can believe that Goody Jones rode a broomstick through the air. If
one can believe that the Christ was actually tempted by the devil,
one can believe in succubæ and incubi. It is all a matter of logical
reasoning. As soon as a Christian's intellectual powers develop to
a point where he can find no place for the miraculous in the world
about him, he begins to doubt that which was in the world before him;
but, regarding theological tales, he either places them in another
category or ignores them, unless faced with them, when he crawls and
calls them "sacred mysteries." That an old woman can sour his milk
or kill his child by the evil eye he does not believe, for reason has
taught him otherwise. And for the same reason he would not believe his
daughter if she told him she was pregnant with a miraculous child. He
did not believe Josephine Woodbury when she made a similar statement
in Boston a few years ago. But he does believe it of Mary, because it
is a "holy mystery," and is in another category. He has inherited his
faith from a long line of orthodox ancestors, and he has never stopped
to consider it by the light of pure reason. It is fortunate for the
dogma of the virgin birth that it took root when people believed such
things, otherwise Mary would have been adorned with the scarlet letter.
Feasts, fasts and elaborate ceremonials were important features of
the most ancient worships, and it is not, therefore, strange to find
somewhat modified adaptations of them in the Christian church. For,
wherever Christianity wandered and found firmly implanted religious
theories and customs, it immediately gave them new significations and
accepted them, until finally the greater part of paganism was gathered
from all parts of the civilized world and amalgamated into one strong
theological organization. Finding in almost every nation a festival
at the winter solstice, in commemoration of the accouchement of the
celestial, virgin queen of heaven, and the birth of the sun-god,
the Christian fathers decided to adopt the 25th of December as the
natal day of their Christ.
Mithras, Osiris, Horus, Bacchus, Adonis and Buddha were all said to
have been born on this day, and it is the date of one of the greatest
religious festivals of India, during which the people decorate their
houses with garlands and make presents to relatives and friends;
a custom adopted by the Christians in much the same manner as was
that of the ancient German yule-log, burned in honor of the sun-god.