Produced by Adam Buchbinder, Chandra Friend and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)
Transcriber's Note: Footnotes are placed at the end of the relevant
paragraph. In Chapters I and II, the printed "Mitra" was changed to
"Mithra" to match other occurrences in the text, which predominate.
In Chapter II, the notation [)a] represents the letter a with breve.
Also, an instance in the original text of the word "JHVH" in the
Hebrew alphabet has been changed to the Roman.
THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND
_A History of the Ideal_
By EDGAR SALTUS
"Errons, les doigts unis, dans
l'Alhambra du songe."
Renee Vivien
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMVII
COPYRIGHT, 1907
BY EDGAR SALTUS
_The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. USA._
_By Mr. Saltus_
HISTORIA AMORIS
IMPERIAL PURPLE
MARY MAGDALEN
THE POMPS OF SATAN
THE PERFUME OF EROS
VANITY SQUARE
THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND
I Brahma 7
II Ormuzd 39
III Amon-Ra 60
IV Bel-Marduk 81
V Jehovah 109
VI Zeus 140
VII Jupiter 166
VIII The Nec Plus Ultra 189
THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND
I
BRAHMA
The ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the
world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world
grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language.
Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they
were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream
that they remain.
"Mortal has made the immortal," the _Rig-Veda_ explicitly declares.
The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it
has been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light,
ultimately dissolved. But, meanwhile, it founded religion, which,
revealed in storm and panic, for prophets had ignorance and dread. The
gods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there were
diabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena and
whatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac that
the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there
floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the
unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly
a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of
them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became
concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth
and sky, whose union was imagined--a hymen which the rain
suggested--and from which broader conceptions proceeded and grander
gods emerged.
The most poetic of these are perhaps the Hindu. At the heraldings of
newer gods, the lords of other ghostlands have, after battling
violently, swooned utterly away. But though many a fresher faith has
been brandished at them, apathetically, in serene indifference, the
princes of the Aryan sky endure.
It is their poetry that has preserved them. To their creators poetry
was abundantly dispensed. To no other people have myths been as
frankly transparent. To none other, save only their cousins the
Persians, have fancies more luminous occurred. The Persians so
polished their dreams that they entranced the world that was. Poets
can do no more. The Hindus too were poets. They were children as well.
Their first lisp, the first recorded stammer of Indo-European speech,
is audible still in the _Rig-Veda_, a bundle of hymns tied together,
four thousand years ago, for the greater glory of Fire. The worship of
the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited the antique altars. It
flamed in Persia, lit perhaps the shrine of Vesta, afterward dazzled
the Incas, igniting, meanwhile, not altars merely, but purgatory
itself.
In Persia, where it illuminated the face of Ormuzd, its beneficence is
told in the _Avesta_, a work of such holiness that it was polluted if
seen. In the _Rig-Veda_, there are verses which were subsequently
accounted so sacred that if a soudra overheard them the ignominy of
his caste was effaced.
The verses, the work of shepherds who were singers, are invocations to
the dawn, to the first flushes of the morning, to the skies'
heightening hues, and the vermillion moment when the devouring Asiatic
sun appears. There are other themes, minor melodies, but the chief
inspiration is light.
To primitive shepherds the approach of darkness was the coming of
death. The dawn, which they were never wholly sure would reappear, was
resurrection. They welcomed it with cries which the _Veda_ preserves,
which the _Avesta_ retains and the _Eddas_ repeat. The potent forces
that produced night, the powers potenter still that routed it, they
regarded as beings whose moods genuflexions could affect. In perhaps
the same spirit that Frenchmen assisted at a _lever du roi_, and
Englishmen attend a prince's levee, the Aryan breakfasted on song and
sacrifice. It was an homage to the rising sun.
The sun was _deva_. The Sanskrit root _div_, from which the word is
derived, produced deus, devi, divinities--numberless, accursed,
adored, or forgot. The common term applied to all abstractions that
are and have been worshipped, means _That which shines_ and the name
which, in the early Orient, signified a star, designates the Deity in
the Occident to-day.
Apologetically, Tertullian, a Christian Father, remarked: "Some think
our God is the Sun." There were excuses perhaps for those that did.
Adonai, a Hebrew term for the Almighty, is a plural. It means lords.
But the lords indicated were Baalim who were Lords of the Sun.
Moreover, when the early Christians prayed, they turned to the East.
Their holy day was, as the holy day of Christendom still is, Sunday,
day of the Sun, an expression that comes from the Norse, on whom also
shone the light of the Aryan deva.
To shepherds who, in seeking pasture for their flocks, were seeking
also pasture for their souls, the deva became Indra. They had other
gods. There was Agni, fire; Varuna, the sky; Maruts, the tempest.
There was Mithra, day, and Yama, death. There were still others,
infantile, undulant, fluid, not infrequently ridiculous also. But it
was Indra for whom the dew and honey of the morning hymns were spread.
It was Indra who, emerging from darkness, made the earth after his
image, decorated the sky with constellations and wrapped the universe
in space. It was he who poured indifferently on just and unjust the
triple torrent of splendour, light, and life.
Indra was triple. Triple Indra, the _Veda_ says. In that description
is the preface to a theogony of which Hesiod wrote the final page. It
was the germ of sacred dynasties that ruled the Aryan and the
Occidental skies. From it came the grandiose gods of Greece and Rome.
From it also came the paler deities of the Norse. Meanwhile ages fled.
Life nomad and patriarchal ceased. From forest and plain, temples
arose; from hymns, interpretations; from prayer, metaphysics; for
always man has tried to analyze the divine, always too, at some halt
in life, he has looked back and found it absent.
In meditation it was discerned that Indra was an effect, not the
cause. It was discerned also that that cause was not predicable of the
gods who, in their undulance and fluidity, suggested ceaseless
transformations and consequently something that is transformed.
The idea, patiently elaborated, resulted in a drainage of the fluid
myths and the exteriorisation of a being entirely abstract. Designated
first as Brahmanaspati, Lord of Prayer, afterward more simply as
Brahma, he was assumed to have been asleep in the secret places of the
sky, from which, on awakening, he created what is.
The conception, ideal itself, was not, however, ideal enough. The
labour of creating was construed as a blemish on the splendour of the
Supreme. It was held that the Soul of Things could but loll, majestic
and inert, on a lotos of azure. Then, above Brahma, was lifted Brahm,
a god neuter and indeclinable; neuter as having no part in life,
indeclinable because unique.
There was the apex of the world's most poetic creed, one distinguished
over all others in having no founder, unless a heavenly inspiration be
so regarded. But the apex required a climax. Inspiration provided it.
The forms of matter and of man, the glittering apsaras of the
vermillion dawns, Indra himself, these and all things else were
construed into a bubble that Brahm had blown. The semblance of reality
in which men occur and, with them, the days of their temporal breath,
was attributed not to the actual but to Maya--the magic of a high
god's longing for something other than himself, something that should
contrast with his eternal solitude and fill the voids of his infinite
ennui. From that longing came the bubble, a phantom universe, the
mirage of a god's desire. Earth; sea and sky; all that in them is, all
that has been and shall be, are but the changing convolutions of a
dream.
In that dream there descended a scale of beings, above whom were set
three great lords, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva
the Destroyer, collectively the Tri-murti, the Hindu trinity expressed
in the mystically ineffable syllable Om. Between the trinity and man
came other gods, a whole host, powers of light and powers of darkness,
the divine and the demoniac fused in a hierarchy surprising but not
everlasting. Eventually the dream shall cease, the bubble break, the
universe collapse, the heavens be folded like a tent, the Tri-murti
dissolved, and in space will rest but the Soul of Things, at whose
will atoms shall reassemble and forms unite, dis-unite and reappear,
depart and return, endlessly, in recurring cycles.
That conception, the basis perhaps of the theory of cosmological days,
is perhaps also itself but a dream, yet one that, however defective,
has a beauty which must have been too fair. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva,
originally regarded as emanations of the ideal, became concrete.
Consorts were found for them. From infinity they were lodged in idols.
A worship sensuous when not grotesque ensued, from which the ideal
took flight.
That was the work of the clergy. Brahmanism is also. The archaic
conflict between light and darkness, the triumph of the former over
the latter, diminished, at their hands, into the figurative. That is
only reasonable. It was only reasonable also that they should claim
the triumph as their own. Without them the gods could do nothing. They
would not even be. In the _Rig-Veda_ and the _Vedas_ generally they
are transparent. The subsequent evolution of the Paramatma, the
Tri-murti and the hierarchy, had, for culmination, the apotheosis of a
priesthood that had invented them and who, for the invention, deserved
the apotheosis which they claimed and got. They were priests that were
poets, and poets that were seers. But they were not sorcerers. They
could not provide successors equal to themselves. It was the later
clergy that pulled poetry from the infinite, stuffed it into idols and
prostituted it to nameless shames.
In the _Bhagavad-Gita_ it is written: "Nothing is greater than I. In
scriptures I am prayer. I am perfume in flowers, brilliance in light.
I am life and its source. I am the soul of creation. I am the
beginning and the end. I am the Divine."
That is Brahm. Ormuzd has faded. Zeus has passed. Jupiter has gone.
With them the divinities of Egypt and the lords of the Chaldean sky
have been reabsorbed and forgot. Brahm still is. The cohorts of Cyrus
might pray Ormuzd to peer where he glowed. There, the phalanxes of
Alexander might raise altars to Zeus. Parthians and Tatars might
dispute the land and the god. Muhammadans could bring their Allah and
Christians their creed. Indifferently Brahm has dreamed, knowing that
he has all time as these all have their day.
The conception of that apathy, grandiose in itself and marvellous in
its persistence, was due to unknown poets that had in them the true
_souffle_ of the real ideal. But that also demanded a climax. They
produced it in the theory that the afflictions of this life are due to
transgressions in another.
From afflictions death, they taught, is not a release, for the reason
that there is no death. There is but absorption in Brahm. Yet that
consummation cannot occur until all transgressions, past and present,
have been expiated and the soul, lifted from the eddies of migration,
becomes Brahm himself.
To be absorbed, to be Brahm, to be God, is an ambition, certainly
vertiginous yet as surely divine. But to succeed, consciousness of
success must be lost. A mortal cannot attain divinity until
annihilation is complete. To become God nothing must be left of man.
To loose, then, every bond, to be freed from every tie, to retire from
finite things, to mount to and sink in the immutable, to see Death
die, was and is the Hindu ideal.
Of the elect, that is. Of the higher castes, of the priest, of the
prince. But not of the people. The ideal was not for them, salvation
either. It was idle even to think about it. Set in hell, they had to
return here until in some one of the twenty-four lakhs of birth which
the chain of migrations comports, and which to saint and soudra were
alike dispensed, they arrived here in the purple. Then only was the
opportunity theirs to rescale a sky that was reserved for prelates and
rajahs.
Suddenly, to the pariah, to the hopeless, to those who outcast in hell
were outcast from heaven, an erect and facile ladder to that sky was
brought. The Buddha furnished it. If he did not, a college of
dissidents assumed that he had, and in his name indicated a stairway
which, set among the people, all might mount and at whose summit gods
actually materialized.
To those who believe in the Dalai Lama--there are millions that have
believed, there are millions that do--he is not a vicar of the divine,
he is himself divine, a god in a tenement of flesh who, as such,
though he die, immediately is reincarnated; a god therefore always
present among his people, whose history is a continuous gospel. In
contemporaneous Italy, a peasant may aspire to the papacy. In the
uplands of Asia, men have loftier ambitions. There they may become
Buddha, who perhaps never was, except in legend.
In the _Lalita Vistara_ the legend unfolds. In the strophes of the
poem one may assist at the Buddha's birth, an event which is said to
have occurred at Kapilavastu. Oriental geography is unacquainted with
the place. With the thing even Occidental philosophy is familiar.
Kapilavastu means the substance of Kapila. The substance is atheism.
History has its hesitancies. Often it stammers uncertainly. But its
earliest pages agree in representing Kapila as the initial religious
rebel. Kapila was the first to declare the divine a human and invalid
conjecture. The announcement, with its prefaces and deductions, is
contained in the _Sankhya Karika_, a system of rationalism, still read
in India, where it is known as the godless tract.
In the Orient, existence is usually a sordid nightmare when it does
not happen to be a golden dream. Kapila taught that it was a prison
from which release could be had only through intellectual development.
That is Kapilavastu, the substance of Kapila, where the Buddha was
born. In the _Lalita Vistara_ it is fairyland.
There, Gotama the Buddha is the Prince Charming of a sovereign house.
But a prince who developed into a nihilist prior to re-becoming the
god that anteriorly he had been. It was while in heaven that he
selected Maya, a ranee, to be his mother. It was surrounded by the
heavenly that he appeared. The fields foamed with flowers. The skies
flamed with faces. In the air apsaras floated, fanning themselves with
peacocks' tails. The galleries of the palace festooned themselves with
pearls. On the terraces a rain of perfume fell. In the parterres Maya
strolled. A tree bent and bowed to her. Touching a branch with her
hand she looked up and yawned. Painlessly from her immaculate breast
Gotama issued. An immense lotos sprouted to receive him. To cover him
a parasol dropped from above. He, however, already occupied, was
contemplating space, the myriad worlds, the myriad lives, and
announced himself their saviour. At once a deluge of roses descended.
The effulgence of a hundred thousand colours shone. A spasm of delight
pulsated. Sorrow and anger, envy and fear, fled and fainted. From the
zenith came a murmur of voices, the sound of dancing, the kiss of
timbril and of lute.
That is Oriental poetry. Oriental philosophy is less ornate. From the
former the Buddha could not have come. From the latter he probably
did, if not in flesh at least in spirit. To that spirit antiquity was
indebted, as modernity is equally, for the doctrines of a teacher
known variously as Gotama the Enlightened and Sakya the Sage. Whether
or not the teacher himself existed is, therefore, unimportant. The
existence of the Christ has been doubted. But the doctrines of both
survive. They do more, they enchant. Occasionally they seem to
combine. The Gospels have obviously nothing in common with the _Lalita
Vistara_, which is an apocryphal novel of uncertain date. The
resemblance that is reflected comes from the _Tripitaka_, the Three
Baskets that constitute the evangels of the Buddhist faith.
In an appendix to the _Mahavaggo_, it is stated that disciples of
Gotama, who knew his sermons and his parables by heart, determined the
canon "after his death." The expression might mean anything. But a
ponderable antiquity is otherwise shown. Asoko, a Hindu emperor, sent
an embassy to Ptolemy Philadelphos. The circumstance was set forth
bilingually on various heights. In another inscription Asoko
recommended the study of the _Tripitaka_ and mentioned titles of the
books. Ptolemy Philadelphos reigned at Alexandria in the early part of
the third century B.C. The _Tripitaka_ must therefore have existed
then. But the thirty-seventh year of Asoko's reign was, in a third
inscription, counted as the two hundred and fifty-seventh from the
Buddha's death, a reckoning which makes them much older. Their
existence, however, as a fourth inscription shows, was oral.
Transmitted for hundreds of years by trained schools of reciters, it
was during a synod that occurred in the first quarter of the first
century before Christ that, finally, they were written.
In them it is recited that Maya, the mother of Gotama, was immaculate.
According to St. Matthew, Maria, the mother of Jesus, was also.
Previously, in each instance, the coming of a Messiah had been
foretold. The infant Jesus was visited by magi. The infant Buddha was
visited by kings. Afterward, neither Jesus or Gotama wrote. But both
preached charity, chastity, poverty, humility, and abnegation of self.
Both fasted in a wilderness. Both were tempted by a devil. Both
announced a second advent. Both were transfigured. Both died in the
open air. At the death of each there was an earthquake. Both healed
the sick. Both were the light of a world which both said would cease
to be.
According to _Luke_, a courtesan visited Jesus and had her sins
remitted. According to the _Mahavaggo_, Gotama was visited by a harlot
whom he instructed in things divine.[1] In _Matthew_, Jesus is
depicted as a glutton and a wine-bibber. In the _Mahavaggo_, the
picture of Gotama is the same.[2] In _Matthew_ it is written; "Lay not
up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth consume
and where thieves break through and steal." The _Khuddakapatho_ says:
"Righteousness is a treasure which no man can steal. It is a treasure
that abideth alway."[3] In _Luke_ it is written: "As ye would that men
should do unto you, do ye also unto them." The _Dhammaphada_ say: "Put
yourself in the place of others, do as you would be done by."[4]
[Footnote 1: Luke vii. 37-50. Sacred Books of the East, xi. 30.]
[Footnote 2: Matthew xi, 19. S. B. E. xiii. 92.]
[Footnote 3: Matthew vi. 19. S. B. E. x. 191.]
[Footnote 4: Luke vi. 31. S. B. E. x. 36.]
The miracle of walking on the water, that of the money-bearing fish,
the story of the Woman at the Well, the proclamation of an
unpardonable sin, even the mediaeval myth of the Wandering Jew, may
have originated in Buddhist legend.[5]
[Footnote 5: _Cf._ Edmunds: Buddhist and Christian Gospels.]
Pious minds have been disturbed by these similitudes. The resemblance
between Maya and Maria has perplexed. The perhaps uncertain likeness
of Gotama to Jesus has occasioned irreverent doubts. But the
parallelisms may be fortuitous. Probably they are. Even otherwise they
but enhance the sororal beauties of faiths which if cognate are quite
distinct. Then too the penetrating charm of the parables and sermons
of the Buddha fades before the perfection of the sermons and parables
of the Christ. The birth, ministry, transfiguration, and passing of
Gotama are marvels which, however exquisite, the wholly spiritual
apparitions of the Lord efface.
Other similarities, such as they are, may without impropriety,
perhaps, be attributed to the ideals progressus. Hindu and Chaldean
beliefs constitute the two primal inspirational faiths. From the one,
Buddhism and Zoroasterism developed. From the other the creed of
Israel and possibly that of Egypt came. Religions that followed were
afterthoughts of the divine. They were revelations sometimes more
intelligible, in one instance inexpressibly more luminous, yet
invariably reminiscent of an anterior light.
The light of contemporaneous Buddhism is that of Catholicism--heaven
deducted, a heaven, that is, of ceaseless Magnificats. The latter
conception is Christian. But it was Persian first. Otherwise, in
common with the Church, Buddhism has saints, censers, litanies,
tonsures, holy water, fasts, and confession. Barring confession, the
extreme antiquity of which has been attested, the other rites and
ceremonies are, it may be, borrowed, but not the high morality, the
altruism, the renunciation and effacement of self, which Buddhists no
longer very scrupulously observe, perhaps, but which their religion
was the first to instil.
Buddhism originally had neither rites nor ritual. It was merely a
mendicant order in which one tried to do what is right, with, for
reward, the hope of Pratscha-Paramita, the peace that is beyond all
knowledge and which Nirvana provides. That peace is--or was--the
complete absence of anything, extinction utter and everlasting, a
state of absolute non-existence which no whim of Brahm may disturb.
Buddhism denied Brahm and every tenet of Brahmanism, save only that
which concerned the immedicable misery of life. Of final deliverance
there was in Brahmanism no known mode. None at least that was
exoteric. Brahmanism rolled man ceaselessly through all forms of
existence, from the elementary to the divine, and even from the
latter, even when he was absorbed in Brahm, flung him out and back
into a fresh circle of unavoidable births.
The theory is horrible. In the horrible occasionally is the sublime.
To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the
categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and
demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really
absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized
by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more
peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were
crouching and waiting. Buddhistic atheism had resulted but in the
production of an earlier New Testament. From the depths of the ideal,
swarms of bedecked and bejewelled divinities escorted Brahm back to a
lotos of azure. Coincidentally Gotama, enthroned in the zenith,
contemplated clusters of gods that dangled through twenty-eight abodes
of bliss which other poets created.
In demonstrable triumph the Buddha was then, as he has been since,
even if previously his existence had been omitted. But though he never
were, there nevertheless occurred a social revolution of which he was
the nominal originator and which, had it not been diverted into other
realms, might have resulted in Brahm's entire extinction.
Wolves do not devour each other. Ideals should not either. The
Oriental heavens were wide enough to serve as fastnesses for two sets
of hostile, germane, and ineffably poetic aberrations. There was room
even for more. There always should be. Of the divine one can have
never enough.
The gospel according to Sakya the Eremite is divine. It is divine in
its limitless compassion, and though compassion, when analyzed,
becomes but egotism in an etherialized form, yet the gospel had other
attractions. In demonstrating that life is evil, that rebirth is evil
too, that to be born even a god is evil still,--in demonstrating these
things, while insisting that all else, Buddhism included, is but
vanity, it fractured the charm of error in which man had been
confined.
Sakya saw men born and reborn in hell. He saw them ignorant, as
humanity has always been, unaware of their abjection as men are
to-day, and over the gulfs of existence, through the torrents of
rebirth, he offered to ferry them. But in the ferrying they had to
aid. The aid consisted in the rigorous observance of every virtue that
Christianity afterward professed. Therein is the beauty of Buddhism.
Its profundity resided in a revelation that everything human perishes
except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its
tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews.
Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once
popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism is due to
Cathay.
To the Hindu life was an incident between two eternities, an episode
in the string of deaths and rebirths. To Mongolians it was a unique
experience. They had no knowledge of the supersensible, no suspicion
of the ideal. Among them Buddhism operated a conversion. It stimulated
a thirst for the divine.
The thirst is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could
not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook
parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder,
an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About
him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of
doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became
Elysium, and a religion which began as a heresy culminated in a
superstition. That is the history of creeds.
II
ORMUZD
"The purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of
things."
So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra.
"And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked.
"There was light and the living Word."[6] Long later the statement was
repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in
the course of a conversation that the _Avesta_ reports. In a similar
manner _Exodus_ provides a revelation which Moses received. There
Jehovah said: _'ehyeh '[)a]sher 'ehyeh_. In the _Avesta_ Ormuzd said:
_ahmi yad ahmi_.[7] Word for word the declarations are identical. Each
means _I am that I am_.[8]
[Footnote 6: Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393].
[Footnote 7: Avesta, Hormazd Yasht.]
[Footnote 8: Exodus iii. 14.]
The conformity of the pronouncements may be fortuitous. Their relative
priority uncertain chronology obscures. The date that orthodoxy has
assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zarathrustra
lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Both dates are
perhaps questionable. But a possible hypothesis philology provides.
The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew
Jhvh, now usually written Jahveh and commonly translated: _He who
causes to be._ The original rendering of Ormuzd is Ahura-mazda. Ahura
means _living_ and mazdao _creator_. The period when _Exodus_ was
written is probably post-exilic. The period when the _Avesta_ was
completed is assumed to be pre-Cyrian. It was at the junction of the
two epochs that Iran and Israel met.
But, however the pronouncements may conform, however also they may
confuse, the one reported in _Exodus_ is alone exact. In subsequent
metamorphoses the name might fade, the deity remained. Whereas, save
to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, once omnipotent throughout the Persian
sky, has gone. A time, though, there was, when from his throne in the
ideal he menaced the apathy of Brahm, the majesty of Zeus, when even
from the death of deaths he might have ejected Buddha and, supreme in
the Orient, ruled also in the West. Salamis prevented that. But one
may wonder whether the conquest had not already been effected, whether
for that matter the results are not apparent still. Brahma, Ormuzd,
Zeus, Jupiter, are but different conceptions of a primal idea. They
are four great gods diversely represented yet originally identical,
and whose attributes Jahveh, in his ascensions, perhaps absorbed.
Ormuzd represented purity and light. For his worship no temple was
necessary, barely a shrine, never an image. In his celestial court
were parikas, the glittering bayaderes of love that a later faith
called peris, but his sole consorts were Prayers. About him and them
gathered amshaspands and izeds, angels and seraphs, the winged host of
loveliness that in Babylon enthralled the Jews who returned from
captivity escorted by them. The allurement of their charm, enchanting
then, enchants the world to-day. There has been little that is more
poetic, except perhaps Ormuzd himself, who symbolized whatever is
blinding in beauty, particularly the sun's effulgence, the radiance of
light.
The light endures, though the god has gone. Yet at the time, aloof in
clear ether and aloft, he resplended in a sovereignty that only
Ahriman disputed.
Ahriman has been more steadfast than Ormuzd. He too captivated the
captive Hebrews. The latter adopted him and called him Satan, as they
also adopted one of his minor legates, Ashmodai--transformed by the
Vulgate into Asmodeus--a little jealous devil who, in the apocryphal
_Tobit_, strangled husbands on their bridal nights. Ahriman, his
master, represented everything that was the opposite of Ormuzd.
Ahriman dwelt in darkness, Ormuzd in light. Ormuzd was primate of
purity; Ahriman, prince of whatever is base. One had angels and
archangels for aids, the other fiends and demons. Between their forces
war was constant. Each strove for the soul of man. But after death,
when, in the balance, the deeds of the defunct were weighed, there
appeared a golden-eyed redeemer, Mithra, who so closely resembled the
Christ that the world hesitated, for a moment, between them.
It was because of these conceptions that Persia dreamed of conquering
the West. At Marathon and at Salamis that illusion was looted. History
tells of the cohorts that descended there. It relates further what
they did. But of what they thought there is no record. It was,
perhaps, too obvious. Ormuzd, god of light and, in the Orient, god of
the day, was, in the darker and duller Occident, menaced there also by
Ahriman. Politically the expedition is not very explicable. Considered
from a religious standpoint the motive is clear. But though the
Persian forces could not uphold their light in Greece, higher forces
projected it far beyond, to the remote north, to a south that was
still remoter.
Originally the light was Vedic. It was identical with that of Agni, of
Indra and of Varuna. But while these, without subsidence, passed,
absorbed by Brahm, the light of Iran, deflecting, persisted, and so
potently that it lit the Teutonic sky, glows still in Christendom,
after refracting perhaps in Inca temples. Its revelation is due to
Zarathrustra.
Zarathrustra, commonly written Zoroaster, is a name translatable into
"star of gold" and also into "keeper of old camels." Probably it was
first employed to designate an imaginary prophet, and then a series of
spiritual though actual successors by whom, in the course of
centuries, the _Avesta_ was evolved. Otherwise Zarathrustra and Gotama
are brothers in Brahmanaspati. Both had virgin mothers. In the lives
of both miracles are common. The advent of Zarathrustra was accounted
the ruin of demons. When he was born he laughed aloud. As a child he
slept in flames. As a man he walked on water. Before prodigies such as
these fiends fell like autumn leaves. Hence, on the part of the devil,
an attempt to seduce him from the divine. Mairya, the demon of death,
offered him, as Mara offered Gotama, as Satan offered Jesus, the
empire of the earth. Zarathrustra rebuked the devil first with stones,
then with pious words. From him, as from the Buddha and the Christ,
abashed the tempter retreated.[9]
[Footnote 9: Darmestetter: Ormazd et Ahriman.]
That victory over evil, the Parsis to-day regard as the capital event
in the history of the world. It was the immediate prelude to the
revelation of the Law which Ormuzd vouchsafed to his prophet.
The revelation occurred on a mountain, in the course of conversations,
during which Zarathrustra questioned and Ormuzd, in the voice of
heaven, replied. So was the Law proclaimed in India. There Mithra and
Varuna sang it through the sky.[10] The expression is notable, for the
song of the sky is thunder and the theophany that of Sinai. There is
another _rapprochement_ in Babylonian lore and a third in the _Eddas_,
where it is related that to Sigurd the secret of the runes was sung.
[Footnote 10: Rig-Veda, i. 151.]
Meanwhile, the revelation completed and proclaimed, Zarathrustra died
as miraculously as he was born, foretelling, as he went, the coming of
a messiah, his own son, Coshyos--the delayed fruit of an immaculate
hymen that is not to be fecund until the end of time--but who, at the
consummation of the ages, will rejuvenate the world, affranchise it
from death, vanquish Ahriman, terminate the struggle between good and
evil, purify hell and fill it full with glory. Then the dead shall
rise and immortality be universal.[11]
[Footnote 11: Zamyad Yasht. xix. 89 _sq._]
Zoroaster is obviously mythical. The Buddha is also. But precisely as
the Buddhist scriptures exist, so also do the Zoroastrian. They do
more. Frequently they enlighten, occasionally they exalt. Written in
gold on perfumed leather, the original edition, limited to two copies,
was so sacred that it was sullied if seen. Burned with the palace of
Persepolis--which Alexander, the Great Sinner, in a drunken orgy,
destroyed--only fragments of the fargards remain. These tell of
creation, effected in six epochs, and of a _pairi-daeza_.
Delitzsch voluminously asked: _Wo lag das Paradies?_ There it is.
There is the primal paradise. In it Ormuzd put Mashya, the first man,
and Mashyana, the first woman, whom Ahriman, in the form of a serpent,
seduced. Thereafter ensued the struggle in which all have or will
participate, one that, extending beyond the limits of the visible
world, arrays seasons and spirits and the senses of man in a conflict
of good and evil that can end only when, from the depths of the dawn,
radiant in the vermillion sky, Coshyos, hero of the resurrection,
triumphantly appears.
The parallel between this romance and subsequent poetry is curious. In
Chaldea, before the fargards were, the story of Creation, of Eden, and
of the fall had been told. In Egypt, before the _Avesta_ was written,
the resurrection and the life were known. Similar legends and
prospects may or may not represent an autonomous development of
Iranian thought. The successors of the problematic Zarathrustra, the
line of magi who wrote and taught in his name, may have gathered the
tales and theories elsewhere. In the creed which they instituted there
is a trinity. India had one, Egypt another, Babylonia a third.
Babylonia had even three of them. But in Mithra, Iran had a redeemer
that no other creed possessed. In Coshyos was a saviour, virgin born,
who nowhere else was imagined. In Mara, Buddhism had a Satan. The
Persian Ahriman is Satan himself. Babylon had angels and cherubs. In
Iran there were guardian angels, there were archangels with flaming
swords, there were fairies, there were goblins, the celestial, the
poetic, the demoniac combined. Zoroasterism may or may not have had a
past, it is perhaps evident that it had a future.
An inscription chiselled in the red granite of Ekbatana describes
Ormuzd as creator of heaven and earth. In the _Veda_ the description
of Indra is identical.[12] It was applied equally to Jahveh in Judea.
But above Jahveh, Kabbalists discerned En Soph. Above Indra
metaphysicians discovered Brahma. Similarly the Persian magi found
that Ormuzd, however perfect, was not perfect enough and, from the
depths of the ideal, they disclosed Zervan Akerene, the Eternal, from
whom all things come and to whom all return.
[Footnote 12: R. V. x. 3. "Indra created heaven and earth."]
That conception is not reached in the _Avesta_. It is in the
_Bundahish_, a work which, while much later, is based on earlier
traditions, memories it may be, of antediluvian legends brought from
the summits of upper Asia by Djemschid, the fabulous Abraham of the
Persians of whom Zarathrustra was the Moses. But in default of the
Eternal, the Avesta contains pictures of enduring charm.
Among these is a highly poetic pastel that displays the soul of man
surprised in the first post-mortem ambuscades. There a figure,
beautiful or revolting, cries at him: "I am thyself, the image of
thine earthly life."
If that life has been beautiful, the soul of man, led by itself, is
conducted to heaven. Otherwise, led still by itself, it descended to
Drujo-demana, the House of Destruction, where, fed on insults and
offal, it waited till its sins were destroyed. The waiting might be
long. It was not everlasting. There was Mithra to intercede. Besides,
evil was regarded but as a shadow on the surface of things. In the
seventh epoch of creation, a period yet to be, the age which Coshyos
is to usher, the shadow will fade. The wicked, purified of their
wickedness, will be received among the blessed. Even Ahriman is to be
converted. In that definite triumph of light over darkness is the
resurrection and the life, life in Garo-demana, literally House of
Hymns, a pre-Christian heaven, yet strictly Christian, where, to the
trumpetings of angels, hosannahs are ceaselessly sung.[13]
[Footnote 13: Yasht. xxviii. 10, xxxiv. 2.]
John--or, more exactly, his homonym--was perhaps acquainted with that
idea, as he may have been with other theories that the _Avesta_
contains. But the possibility is a detail. It is the idea that counts.
Behind it is the unique character of this doctrine which, in
eliminating evil, converted even Satan.
Satan seldom gets his due. He was the first artist and has remained
the greatest. In creating evil he fashioned what is a luxury and a
necessity combined. Evil is the counterpart of excellence. Both have
their roots in nature. One could not be destroyed without the other.
For every form of evil there is a corresponding form of good. Virtue
would be meaningless were it not for vice. Honour would have no
nobility were it not for shame. If ever evil be banished from the
scheme of things, life could have no savour and joy no delight.
Happiness and unhappiness would be synonymous terms.
It is for this reason that scoffers have mocked at heaven. Heaven may
be very different from what has been fancied. But the theory of it,
however unphilosophic, which Zoroasterism supplied, carried with it a
creed not of tears but of smiles, a religion of lofty tolerance, one
in which the demonology barely alarmed, for redemption was assured,
and so fully that on earth melancholy was accounted a folly.
Though tolerant, it could be austere. Meanness, thanklessness,
loquaciousness, jealousy, an unbecoming attire, evil thoughts,
whatever is sensual, whatever is coarse, any promenade in mud actual
or metaphorical, severely it condemned. Particularly was avarice
censured. "There are many who do not like to give," Ormuzd, in the
_Vendidad_, confided to Zarathrustra. The high god added: "Ahriman
awaits them."
Ahriman awaited also the harlot who, elsewhere, at that period, was
holy. Yet in lapses, confession and repentance sufficed for remission,
provided that in praying for forgiveness the sinner forgave those that
had sinned against him. If he lacked the time, were he dying, a priest
might yet save him with words whispered in the ear. That was the
extreme unction, hardly administrable, however, in case of wilful
omission of the _darun_, which was communion.
This sacrament, the most mystic of the Church, was observed by the
Incas, who also confessed, also atoned, who, like the Buddhists, were
baptized, but who, like the Persians, worshipped the sun and, with
perhaps a finer instinct of what the beautiful truly is, worshipped
too the rainbow.[14]
[Footnote 14: Garcilasso: Commentarios reales.]
Huraken, the winged and feathered serpent-god of the Toltecs, was
adored in temples that upheld a cross. The Incas lacked that symbol.
But they had a Satan. They had also the expectation of a saviour,
belief in whom could alone have consoled for the advent of Pizarro.
Over what highways of sea or sky, the living Word, which Ormuzd spoke,
reached them, there has been no somnambulist of history to divine. But
in the splendour that Cuzco was, in the golden temples of the town of
gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred peacocks strolled and girls
more sacred still--vestals whom Pizarro's soldiers raped--in that City
of the Sun, the Word re-echoed. The mystery of it, reported back to
the Holy Office, was declared an artifice of the devil.
Less mysteriously, through the obvious vehicle of cognate speech, it
reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie
sagas. Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite
as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is
almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd.
The aesir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the
izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of
Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garo-demana, was
more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns.
What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light.
However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north
its rays were lost. The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set
the gods in twilight. It stirred the scalds to runes but not to
inspiration. There is none in the _Eddas_. Nor was there any in the
_Nibelungen_, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the
flaming scores of Wagner.
Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from their secular
slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their Occidental apotheosis,
and, it may be, on steps of song, mounted to the ideal where Zervan
Akerene muses.
III
AMON-RA
"I am all that is, has been and shall be. No mortal has lifted my veil."
That pronouncement, graven on the statue of Isis, confounded Egypt,
condemning her mysteriously for some sin, anterior and unknown, to
ignorance of the divine, leaving her, in default of revelation, to
worship what she would, jackals, hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts
and birds. Yet to the people, whose minds were as naked as their
bodies, and who, in addition, were slaves, there must have been
something very superior in the lords of the desert and the air.
Obviously they were wise. Among them were some that knew in advance
the change of the seasons. Others, indifferent to man and independent
of him, migrated over highways known but to them. The senses of all
were keyed to vibrations. They heard the inaudible, saw the invisible,
and, though they had a language of their own, when questioned never
replied. To slaves, clearly they were gods.
Not to the priests, however. They knew better. They but affected
belief in divinities that had perhaps emigrated from the enigmas of
geography and who were polychrome as the skies they had crossed.
Fashioned in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some,
though, were alive. In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls
draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little
gold chains detained. Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its
role of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal. Others were
nearly sublime. Particularly there was Ausar.
Ausar, called commonly Osiris, died for man. In an attempt to preserve
harmony, in a struggle with the real spirit of actual evil which
discord is, Osiris was slain. Being a god he arose from the dead. The
latter thereafter he judged.
The people knew little, if anything, concerning him. They knew little
if anything at all. They had a menagerie and a full consciousness of
their own insignificance. That sufficed. In all of carnal Africa, the
priest alone possessed what then was truth and of which a part is
theology now.
Egypt, in which the evangels began, millennia before they were
written, knew no genesis. Her history, sculptured in hieroglyphics,
was cut on pages of stone. It awoke in the falling of cataracts. It
ended with simoons in sand. The books that tell of it are pyramids,
obelisks, necropoles; constructions colossal and enigmatic; the
granite epitaphs of finite things. To-day, in the shattered temples,
from which all other gods are gone, one divinity still lingers. It is
Silence.
In Iran sorrow was a folly. In Egypt speech was a sin. Apis could
bellow, Anubis bark; man might not even stutter. It was in the
submission of dumb obedience that the palpable eternities of the
pyramids were piled. Yet in that darkness was light, in silence was
the Word. But to behold and to hear was possible only in sanctuaries
reserved to the elect. The gods too had their castes. The lowest only
were fellahin fit to worship. On the lips of the others the priests
held always a finger. Crocodiles were less distant, hyenas more
approachable, and the Egyptian, barred from the divine, found it on
earth. He prayed to scorpions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the
jackal with psalms; with dances he placated the ibis. It was
ridiculous but human. He too would have a part, however insensate, in
the dreams of all mankind.
Yet, had he looked not down but up, he would have lifted at least a
fringe of the Isian veil. The sun, taken as a symbol only, the symbol
of life, death, and resurrection--phases which its rising, setting,
and return suggest--was the deity, the one really existing god.
Nominally, figuratively, even concretely, there were others; a whole
host, a hierarchy vaster than the Aryans knew; a great crowd of
divinities less grandiose than gaudy, that swarmed in space, strolled
through the dawns and dusk, thronged the temples, eyed the quick,
confronted the dead. They were but appearances, mere masks,
expressions, hypostases, eidolons of Ra.
Ra was the celestial pharaoh. But not originally. Originally he was
part of a triad which itself was part of a triple trinity. Ra then was
but one divinity among many gods. These ultimately lost themselves in
him so indistinguishably that there are litanies in which the names of
seventy-five of them are used in addressing him. Regarded as the
unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, he succeeded in achieving
the incomprehensible. He became triune and remained unique. He was
Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus. At once father, mother, and son, he
fecundated, conceived, produced, and was.
From him gods and goddesses emanated in sidereal fireworks that
illuminated the heavens, dazzled the earth, then melted into each
other, faded away or, occasionally, flared afresh in a glare
dispelling and persistent. Among these latter was Amon. Glimmering
primarily in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the thin fire of his
shrine mounted spirally to Ra, fused its flames with his, expanding
and uniting so inseparably with them, that the two became one. Amon
means _hidden_; Amon-Ra, _the hidden light_.