LEGENDARY WORLDS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
The legends that were for so many ages prevalent in Europe had their
foundation in the attempt to make the accounts of Scripture and the
ideas and dogmas of the Fathers of the Church fit into the few and
insignificant facts that were known with respect to the earth, and the
system of which it forms a part, and the far more numerous imaginations
that were entertained about it.
We are therefore led on to examine some of these legends, that we may
appreciate how far a knowledge of astronomy will effect the eradication
of errors and fantasies which, under the aspect of truth, have so long
enslaved the people. No doubt the authors of the legendary stories knew
well enough their allegorical nature; but those who received them
supposed that they gave true indications of the nature of the earth and
world, and therefore accepted them as facts.
Some indeed considered that the whole physical constitution of the world
was a scaffold or a model, and that there was a real theological
universe hidden beneath this semblance. No one omitted from his system
the spiritual heaven in which the angels and just men might spend their
existence; but in addition to this there were places whose reality was
believed in, but whose locality is more difficult to settle, and which
therefore were moved from one place to another by various writers, viz.,
the infernal regions, purgatory, and the terrestrial paradise.
We will here recount some of those legends, which wielded sufficient
sway over men's minds as to gain their belief in the veritable existence
of the places described, and in this way to influence their astronomical
and cosmographical ideas.
And for the first we will descend to the infernal regions with Plutarch
and Thespesius.
This Thespesius relates his adventures in the other world. Having fallen
head-first from an elevated place, he found himself unwounded, but was
contused in such a way as to be insensible. He was supposed to be dead,
but, after three days, as they were about to bury him, he came to life
again. In a few days he recovered his former powers of mind and body;
but made a marvellous change for the better in his life.
He said that at the moment that he lost consciousness he found himself
like a sailor at the bottom of the sea; but afterwards, having recovered
himself a little, he was able to breathe perfectly, and seeing only with
the eyes of his soul, he looked round on all that was about him. He saw
no longer the accustomed sights, but stars of prodigious magnitude,
separated from each other by immense distances. They were of dazzling
brightness and splendid colour. His soul, carried like a vessel on the
luminous ocean, sailed along freely and smoothly, and moved everywhere
with rapidity. Passing over in silence a large number of the sights that
met his eye, he stated that the souls of the dead, taking the form of
bubbles of fire, rise through the air, which opens a passage above them;
at last the bubbles, breaking without noise, let out the souls in a
human form and of a smaller size, and moving in different ways. Some,
rising with astonishing lightness, mounted in a straight line; others,
running round like a whipping-top, went up and down by turns with a
confused and irregular motion, making small advance by long and painful
efforts. Among this number he saw one of his parents, whom he recognised
with difficulty, as she had died in his infancy; but she approached him,
and said, "Good day, Thespesius." Surprised to hear himself called by
this name, he told her that he was called Arideus, and not Thespesius.
"That was once your name," she replied, "but in future you will bear
that of Thespesius, for you are not dead, only the intelligent part of
your soul has come here by the particular will of the gods; your other
faculties are still united to your body, which keeps them like an
anchor. The proof I will give you is that the souls of the dead do not
cast any shadow, and they cannot move their eyes."
Further on, in traversing a luminous region, he heard, as he was
passing, the shrill voice of a female speaking in verse, who presided
over the time Thespesius should die. His genius told him that it was the
voice of the Sibyl, who, turning on the orbit of the moon, foretold the
future. Thespesius would willingly have heard more, but, driven off by a
rapid whirlwind, he could make out but little of her predictions. In
another place he remarked several parallel lakes, one filled with melted
and boiling gold, another with lead colder than ice, and a third with
very rough iron. They were kept by genii, who, armed with tongs like
those used in forges, plunged into these lakes, and then withdrew by
turns, the souls of those whom avarice or an insatiable cupidity had led
into crime; after they had been plunged into the lake of gold, where the
fire made them red and transparent, they were thrown into the lake of
lead. Then, frozen by the cold, and made as hard as hail, they were put
into the lake of iron, where they became horribly black. Broken and
bruised on account of their hardness, they changed their form, and
passed once more into the lake of gold, and suffered in these changes
inexpressible pain.
In another place he saw the souls of those who had to return to life and
be violently forced to take the form of all sorts of animals. Among the
number he saw the soul of Nero, which had already suffered many
torments, and was bound with red-hot chains of iron. The workmen were
seizing him to give him the form of a viper, under which he was destined
to live, after having devoured the womb that bore him.
The locality of these infernal regions was never exactly determined. The
ancients were divided upon the point. In the poems of Homer the infernal
regions appear under two different forms: thus, in the _Iliad_, it is a
vast subterranean cavity; while in the _Odyssey_, it is a distant and
mysterious country at the extremity of the earth, beyond the ocean, in
the neighbourhood of the Cimmerians.
The description which Homer gives of the infernal region proves that in
his time the Greeks imagined it to be a copy of the terrestrial world,
but one which had a special character. According to the philosophers it
was equally remote from all parts of the earth. Thus Cicero, in order to
show that it was of no consequence where one died, said, wherever we die
there is just as long a journey to be made to reach the "infernal
regions."
The poets fixed upon certain localities as the entrance to this dismal
empire: such was the river Lethe, on the borders of the Scythians; the
cavern Acherusia in Epirus, the mouth of Pluto, in Laodicoea, the cave
of Zenarus near Lacedaemon.
In the map of the world in the _Polychronicon_ of Ranulphus Uygden, now
in the British Museum, it is stated: "The Island of Sicily was once a
part of Italy. There is Mount Etna, containing the infernal regions and
purgatory, and it has Scylla and Charybdis, two whirlpools."
Ulysses was said to reach the place of the dead by crossing the ocean to
the Cimmerian land, AEneas to have entered it by the Lake of Avernus.
Xenophon says that Hercules went there by the peninsula of Arechusiade.
Much of this, no doubt, depends on the exaggeration and
misinterpretation of the accounts of voyagers; as when the Phoenicians
related that, after passing the Columns of Hercules, to seek tin in
Thule and amber in the Baltic, they came, at the extremity of the world,
to the Fortunate Isles, the abode of eternal spring, and further on to
the Hyperborean regions, where a perpetual night enveloped the
country--the imagination of the people developed from this the Elysian
fields, as the places of delight in the lower regions, having their own
sun, moon, and stars, and Tartarus, a place of shades and desolation.
In every case, however, both among pagans and Christians, the locality
was somewhere in the centre of the earth. The poets and philosophers of
Greece and Rome made very detailed and circumstantial maps of the
subterranean regions. They enumerated its rivers, its lakes, and woods,
and mountains, and the places where the Furies perpetually tormented the
wicked souls who were condemned to eternal punishment. These ideas
passed naturally into the creeds of Christians through the sect of the
Essenes, of whom Josephus writes as follows:--"They thought that the
souls of the just go beyond the ocean to a place of repose and delight,
where they were troubled by no inconvenience, no change of seasons.
Those of the wicked, on the contrary, were relegated to places exposed
to all the inclemencies of the weather, and suffered eternal torments.
The Essenes," adds the same author, "have similar ideas about these
torments to those of the Greeks about Tartarus and the kingdom of Pluto.
The greater part of the Gnostic sects, on the contrary, considered the
lower regions as simply a place of purgatory, where the soul is purified
by fire."
Amongst all the writings of Christian ages in which matters such as we
are now passing in review are described, there is one that stands out
beyond all others as a masterpiece, and that is the magnificent poem of
Dante, his _Divine Comedy_, wherein he described the infernal regions as
they presented themselves to his lively and fertile imagination. We have
in it a picture of mediaeval ideas, painted for us in indelible lines,
before the remembrance of them was lost in the past. The poem is at once
a tomb and a cradle--the tomb of a world that was passing, the cradle of
the world that was to come: a portico between two temples, that of the
past and that of the future. In it are deposited the traditions, the
ideas, the sciences of the past, as the Egyptians deposited their kings
and symbolic gods in the sepulchres of Thebes and Memphis. The future
brings into it its aspirations and its germs enveloped in the swaddling
clothes of a rising language and a splendid poetry--a mysterious infant
that is nourished by the two teats of sacred tradition and profane
fiction, Moses and St. Paul, Homer and Virgil.
The theology of Dante, strictly orthodox, was that of St. Thomas and the
other doctors of the Church. Natural philosophy, properly so called, was
not yet in existence. In astronomy, Ptolemy reigned supreme, and in the
explanation of celestial phenomena no one dreamt or dared to dream of
departing in any way from the traditionally sacred system.
In those days astronomy was indissolubly linked with a complete series
of philosophical and theological ideas, and included the physics of the
world, the science of life in every being, of their organisation, and
the causes on which depended the aptitudes, inclinations, and even in
part the actions, of men, the destinies of individuals, and the events
of history. In this theological, astronomical, and terrestrial universe
everything emanated from God; He had created everything, and the
creation embraced two orders of beings, the immaterial and the
corporeal.
The pure spirits composed the nine choirs of the celestial hierarchy.
Like so many circles, they were ranged round a fixed point, the Eternal
Being, in an order determined by their relative perfection. First the
seraphim, then the cherubim, and afterwards the simple angels. Those of
the first circle received immediately from the central point the light
and the virtue which they communicated to those of the second; and so
on from circle to circle, like mirrors which reflect, with an
ever-lessening light, the brilliancy of a single luminous point. The
nine choirs, supported by Love, turned without ceasing round their
centre in larger and larger circles according to their distance; and it
was by their means that the motion and the divine inflatus was
communicated to the material creation.
This latter had in the upper part of it the empyreal, or heaven of pure
light. Below that, was the _Primum mobile_, the greatest body in the
heavens, as Dante calls it, because it surrounds all the rest of the
circle, and bounds the material world. Then came the heaven of the fixed
stars; then, continuing to descend, the heavens of Saturn, Jupiter,
Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon, and lastly, the earth, whose
solid and compact nucleus is surrounded by the spheres of water, air,
and fire.
As the choirs of angels turn about a fixed point, so the nine material
circles turn also about another fixed point, and are moved by the pure
spirits.
Let us now descend to the geography of the interior of the earth. Within
the earth is a large cone, whose layers are the frightful abodes of the
condemned, and which ends in the centre, where the divine Justice keeps
bound up to his chest in ice the prince of the rebellious angels, the
emperor of the kingdom of woe. Such are the infernal regions which
Dante describes according to ideas generally admitted in the middle
ages.
The form of the infernal regions was that of a funnel or reversed cone.
All its circles were concentric, and continually diminished; the
principal ones were nine in number. Virgil also admitted nine
divisions--three times three, a number sacred _par excellence_. The
seventh, eighth, and ninth circles were divided into several regions;
and the space between the entrance to the infernal regions and the river
Acheron, where the resting-place of the damned really commenced, was
divided into two parts. Dante, guided by Virgil, traversed all these
circles.
It was in 1300 that the poet, "in the midst of the course of life," at
the age of thirty-five, passed in spirit through the three regions of
the dead. Lost in a lonely, wild, and dismal forest, he reached the base
of a hill, which he attempted to climb. But three animals, a panther, a
lion, and a thin and famished wolf, prevented his passage; so, returning
again where the sun was powerless, into the shades of the depths of the
valley, there met him a shadow of the dead. This human form, whom a long
silence had deprived of speech, was Virgil, who was sent to guide and
succour him by a celestial dame, Beatrice, the object of his love, who
was at the same time a real and a mystically ideal being.
Virgil and Dante arrived at the gate of the infernal regions; they read
the terrible inscription placed over the gate; they entered and found
first those unhappy souls who had lived without virtue and without vice.
They reached the banks of Acheron and saw Charon, who carried over the
souls in his bark to the other side; and Dante was surprised by a
profound sleep. He woke beyond the river, and he descended into the
Limbo which is the first circle of the infernal regions. He found there
the souls of those who had died without baptism, or who had been
indifferent to religion.
They descended next to the second circle, where Minos, the judge of
those below, is enthroned. Here the luxurious are punished. The poet
here met with Francesca of Rimini and Paul, her friend. He completely
recovered the use of his senses, and passed through the third circle,
where the gourmands are punished. In the fourth he found Plutus, who
guards it. Here are tormented the prodigal and the avaricious. In the
fifth are punished those who yield to anger. Dante and Virgil there saw
a bark approaching, conducted by Phlegias; they entered it, crossed a
river, and arrived thus at the base of the red-hot iron walls of the
infernal town of Dite. The demons that guarded the gates refused them
admittance, but an angel opened them, and the two travellers there saw
the heretics that were enclosed in tombs surrounded by flames.
The travellers then visited the circles of violence, fraud, and usury,
when they came to a river of blood guarded by a troop of centaurs;
suddenly they saw coming to them Geryon, who represents fraud, and
this beast took them behind him to carry them across the rest of the
infernal space.
[Illustration: FIG. 52.--DANTE'S INFERNAL REGIONS.]
The eighth circle was divided into ten valleys, comprising: the
flatterers; the simoniacal; the astrologers; the sorcerers; the false
judges; the hypocrites who walked about clothed with heavy leaden
garments; the thieves, eternally stung by venomous serpents; the
heresiarchs; the charlatans, and the forgers.
At last the poets descended into the ninth circle, divided into four
regions, where are punished four kinds of traitors. Here is recounted
the admirable episode of Count Ugolin. In the last region, called the
region of Judas, LUCIFER is enchained. There is the centre of the earth,
and Dante, hearing the noise of a little brook, reascended to the other
hemisphere, on the surface of which he found, surrounded by the Southern
Ocean, the mountain of Purgatory.
Such was the famous _Inferno_ of Dante.
Not only was the geography of the infernal regions attempted in the
middle ages, but even their size. Dexelius calculated that the number of
the damned was a hundred millions, and that their abode need not measure
more than one German mile in every direction. Cyrano of Bergerac
amusingly said that it was the damned that kept turning the earth, by
hanging on the ceiling like bats, and trying to get away.
In 1757 an English clergyman, Dr. Swinden, published a book entitled,
_Researches on the Nature of the Fire of Hell and the Place where it is
situated_. He places it in the sun. According to him the Christians of
the first century had placed it beneath the earth on account of a false
interpretation of the descent of Jesus into hell after his crucifixion,
and by false ideas of cosmography. He attempted to show, 1st, that the
terrestrial globe is too small to contain even the angels that fell from
heaven after their battle; 2nd, that the fire of hell is real, and that
the closed globe of earth could not support it a sufficiently long
period; 3rd, that the sun alone presents itself as the necessary place,
being a well-sustained fire, and directly opposite in situation to
heaven, since the empyreal is round the outside of the universe, and the
sun in the centre. What a change to the present ideas, even of doctors
of divinity, in a hundred years!
So far, then, for mediaeval ideas on the position and character of hell.
Next as to purgatory.
The voyage to purgatory that has met with most success is certainly the
celebrated Irish legend of St. Patrick, which for several centuries was
admitted as authentic, and the account of which was composed certainly a
century before the poem of Dante.
This purgatory, the entrance to which is drawn in more than one
illuminated manuscript, is situated in Ireland, on one of the islands
of Lough Derg, County Donegal, where there are still two chapels and a
shrine, at which annual ceremonies are performed. A knight, called Owen,
resolved to visit it for penance; and the chronicle gives us an account
of his adventures.
First he had his obsequial rites performed, as if he had been dead, and
then he advanced boldly into the deep ravine; he marched on
courageously, and entered into the semi-shadows; he marched on, and even
this funereal twilight abandoned him, and "when he had gone for a long
time in this obscurity, there appeared to him a little light as it were
from a glimmer of day." He arrived at a house, built with much care, an
imposing mansion of grief and hope, a marvellous edifice, but similar
nevertheless to a monkish cloister, where there was no more light than
there is in this world in winter at vesper-time.
The knight was in dreadful suspense. Suddenly he heard a terrible noise,
as if the universe was in a riot; for it seemed certainly to him as if
every kind of beast and every man in the world were together, and each
gave utterance to their own cry, at one time and with one voice, so that
they could not make a more frightful noise.
Then commenced his trials, and discourse with the infernal beings; the
demons yelled with delight or with fury round him. "Miserable wretch,"
said some, "you are come here to suffer." "Fly," said others, "for you
have not behaved well in the time that is passed: if you will take our
advice, and will go back again to the world, we will take it as a great
favour and courtesy."
[Illustration: PLATE XII.--THE LEGEND OF OWEN.]
Owen was thrown on the dark shadowy earth, where the demons creep like
hideous serpents. A mysterious wind, which he scarcely heard, passed
over the mud, and it seemed to the knight as if he had been pierced by a
spear-head. After a while the demons lifted him up; they took him
straight off to the east, where the sun rises, as if they were going to
the place where the universe ends. "Now, after they had journeyed for a
long time here and there over divers countries, they brought him to an
open field, very long and very full of griefs and chastisements; he
could not see the end of the field, it was so long; there were men and
women of various ages, who lay down all naked on the ground with their
bellies downwards, who had hot nails driven into their hands and feet;
and there was a fiery dragon, who sat upon them and drove his teeth into
their flesh, and seemed as if he would eat them; hence they suffered
great agony, and bit the earth in spite of its hardness, and from time
to time they cried most piteously 'Mercy, mercy;' but there was no one
there who had pity or mercy, for the devils ran among them and over
them, and beat them most cruelly."
The devils brought the knight towards a house of punishment, so broad
and long that one could not see the end. This house is the house of
baths, like those of the infernal regions, and the souls that are bathed
in ignominy are there heaped in large vats. "Now so it was, that each of
these vats was filled with some kind of metal, hot and boiling, and
there they plunged and bathed many people of various ages, some of whom
were plunged in over their heads, others up to the eyebrows, others up
to the eyes, and others up to the mouth. Now all in truth of these
people cried out with a loud voice and wept most piteously."
Scarcely had the knight passed this terrible place, and left behind in
his mysterious voyage that column of fire which rose like a lighthouse
in the shades, and which shone so sadly betwixt hope and eternal
despair, than a vast and magnificent spectacle displayed itself in the
subterranean space.
This luminous and odorescent region, where one might see so many
archbishops, bishops, and monks of every order, was the terrestrial
paradise; man does not stay there always; they told the knight that he
could not taste too long its rapid delights; it is a place of transition
between purgatory and the abodes of heaven, just as the dark places
which he had traversed were made by the Creator between the world and
the infernal regions.
"In spite of our joys," said the souls, "we shall pass away from here."
Then they took him to a mountain, and told him to look, and asked of him
what colour the heavens seemed to be there where he was standing, and
he replied it was the colour of burning gold, such as is in the furnace;
and then they said to him, "That which you see is the entrance to heaven
and the gate of paradise."
The attempts at identification of hell and purgatory have not been so
numerous, perhaps because the subjects were not very attractive, except
as the spite of men might think of them in reference to other people;
but when we come to the terrestrial paradise, quite a crowd of attempts
by every kind of writer to fix its position in any and every part of the
globe is met with on every side.
In the seventeenth century, under Louis XIV., Daniel Huet, Bishop of
Avranches, gave great attention to the question, and collected every
opinion that had been expressed upon it, with a view to arriving at some
definite conclusion for himself. He was astonished at the number of
writings and the diversity of the opinions they expressed.
"Nothing," he says, "could show me better how little is really known
about the situation of the terrestrial paradise than the differences in
the opinions of those who have occupied themselves about the question.
Some have placed it in the third heaven, some in the fourth, in the
heaven of the moon, in the moon itself, on a mountain near the lunar
heaven, in the middle region of the air, out of the earth, upon the
earth, beneath the earth, in a place that is hidden and separated from
man. It has been placed under the North Pole, in Tartary, or in the
place now occupied by the Caspian Sea. Others placed it in the extreme
south, in the land of fire. Others in the Levant, or on the borders of
the Ganges, or in the Island of Ceylon, making the name India to be
derived from Eden, the land where the paradise was situated. It has been
placed in China, or in an inaccessible place beyond the Black Sea; by
others in America, in Africa, beneath the equator, in the East, &c. &c."
Notwithstanding this formidable array, the good bishop was bold enough
to make his choice between them all. His opinion was that the
dwelling-place of the first man was situated between the Tigris and
Euphrates, above the place where they separate before falling into the
Persian Gulf; and, founding this opinion on very extensive reading, he
declared that of all his predecessors, Calvin had come nearest to the
truth.
Among the other authors of greater or less celebrity that have occupied
themselves in this question, we may instance the following:--
Raban Maur (ninth century) believed that the terrestrial paradise was at
the eastern extremity of the earth. He described the tree of life, and
added that there was neither heat nor cold in that garden; that immense
rivers of water nourished all the forest; and that the paradise was
surrounded by a wall of fire, and its four rivers watered the earth.
James of Vitry supposed Pison to come out of the terrestrial paradise.
He describes also the garden of Eden; and, like all the cosmographers of
the middle ages, he placed it in the most easterly portion of the world
in an inaccessible place, and surrounded by a wall of fire, which rose
up to heaven.
Dati placed also the terrestrial paradise in Asia, like the
cosmographers that preceded him, and made the Nile come from the east.
Stenchus, the librarian of St. Siege, who lived in the sixteenth
century, devoted several years to the problem, but discovered nothing.
The celebrated orientalist and missionary Bochart wrote a treatise on
this subject in 1650. Thevenot published also in the seventeenth century
a map representing the country of the Lybians, and adds that "several
great doctors place the terrestrial paradise there."
An Armenian writer who translated and borrowed from St. Epiphanius
(eighth century) produced a _Memorial on the Four Rivers of the
Terrestrial Paradise_. He supposes they rise in the unknown land of the
Amazons, whence also arise the Danube and the Hellespont, and they
deliver their waters into that great sea that is the source of all seas,
and which surrounds the four quarters of the globe. He afterwards says,
following up the same theory, that the rivers of paradise surround the
world and enter again into the sea, which is the universal ocean."
Gervais and Robert of St. Marien d'Auxerre taught that the terrestrial
paradise was on the eastern border of the _square_ which formed the
world. Alain de Lille, who lived in the thirteenth century, maintained
in his _Anticlaudianus_ that the earth is circular, and the garden of
Eden is in the east of Asia. Joinville, the friend of St. Louis, gives
us a curious notion of his geographical ideas, since, with regard to
paradise, he assures us that the four great rivers of the south come out
of it, as do the spices. "Here," he says, referring to the Nile, "it is
advisable to speak of the river which passes by the countries of Egypt,
and comes from the terrestrial paradise. Where this river enters Egypt
there are people very expert and experienced, as thieves are here, at
stealing from the river, who in the evening throw their nets on the
streams and rivers, and in the morning they often find and carry off the
spices which are sold here in Europe as coming from Egypt at a good
rate, and by weight, such as cinnamon, ginger, rhubarb, cloves, lignum,
aloes, and several other good things, and they say that these good
things come _from the terrestrial paradise_, and that the wind blows
them off the trees that are growing there." And he says that near the
end of the world are the peoples of Gog and Magog, who will come at the
end of the world with Antichrist.
We find, however, more than descriptions--we have representations of
the terrestrial paradise by cartographers of the middle ages, some of
which we have seen in speaking of their general ideas of geography, and
we will now introduce others.
[Illustration: FIG. 53.--PARADISE OF FRA MAURO.]
Fra Mauro, a religious cosmographer of the fifteenth century, gives on
the east side of a map of the world a representation which shows us that
at that epoch the "garden of delights" had become very barren. It is a
vast plain, on which we see Jehovah and the first human couple, with a
circular rampart surrounding it. The four rivers flow out of it by
bifurcating. An angel protects the principal gate, which cannot be
reached but by crossing barren mountains.
The cosmographical map of Gervais, dedicated to the Emperor Otho IV.,
shows the terrestrial paradise in the centre of the earth, which is
square, and is situated in the midst of the seas. Adam and Eve appear in
consultation.
The map of the world prepared by Andreas Bianco, in the fifteenth
century, represents Eden, Adam and Eve, and the tree of life. On the
left, on a peninsula, are seen the reprobated people of Gog and Magog,
who are to accompany Antichrist. Alexander is also represented there,
but without apparent reason. The paradisaical peninsula has a building
on it with this inscription, "Ospitius Macarii."
Formalconi says, on this subject, that a certain Macarius lives near
paradise, who is a witness to all that the author states, and as Bianco
has indicated, his cell was close to the gates of paradise.
This legend has reference to the pilgrims of St. Macarius, a tradition
that was spread on the return of the Crusaders, of three monks who
undertook a voyage to discover the point where the earth and heaven
meet, that is to say, the place of the terrestrial paradise. The map of
Rudimentum, a vast compilation published at Luebeck in 1475 by the
Dominican Brocard, represents the terrestrial paradise surrounded by
walls, but it is less sterile that in the last picture, as may be seen
on the next page.
In the year 1503, when Varthema, the adventurous Bolognian, went to the
Indies by the route of Palestine and Syria, he was shown the
evil-reputed house which Cain dwelt in, which was not far from the
terrestrial paradise. Master Gilius, the learned naturalist who
travelled at the expense of Francis I., had the same satisfaction. The
simple faith of our ancestors had no hesitation in accepting such
archaeology.
[Illustration: FIG. 54.--THE PARADISE OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.]
The most curious and interesting of all attempts to discover the
situation of paradise was that made half unconsciously by Columbus when
he first found the American shore.
In his third voyage, when for the first time he reached the main land,
he was persuaded not only that he had arrived at the extremity of Asia,
but that he could not be far from the position of paradise. The Orinoco
seemed to be one of those four great rivers which, according to
tradition, came out of the garden inhabited by our first parents, and
his hopes were supported by the fragrant breezes that blew from the
beautiful forests on its banks. This, he thought, was but the entrance
to the celestial dwelling-place, and if he had dared--if a religious
fear had not held back him who had risked everything amidst the elements
and amongst men, he would have liked to push forward to where he might
hope to find the celestial boundaries of the world, and, a little
further, to have bathed his eyes, with profound humility, in the light
of the flaming swords which were wielded by two seraphim before the gate
of Eden.
He thus expresses himself on this subject in his letter to one of the
monarchs of Spain, dated Hayti, October, 1498. "The Holy Scriptures
attest that the Lord created paradise, and placed in it the tree of
life, and made the four great rivers of the earth to pass out of it, the
Ganges of India, the Tigris, the Euphrates (passing from the mountains
to form Mesopotamia, and ending in Persia), and the Nile, which rises in
Ethiopia and goes to the Sea of Alexander. I cannot, nor have been ever
able to find in the books of the Latins or Greeks anything authentic on
the site of this terrestrial paradise, nor do I see anything more
certain in the maps of the world. Some place it at the source of the
Nile, in Ethiopia; but the travellers who have passed through those
countries have not found either in the mildness of the climate or in the
elevation of the site towards heaven anything that could lead to the
presumption that paradise was there, and that the waters of the Deluge
were unable to reach it or cover it. Several pagans have written for the
purpose of proving it was in the Fortunate Isles, which are the
Canaries. St. Isidore, Bede, and Strabo, St. Ambrosius, Scotus, and all
judicious theologians affirm with one accord that paradise was in the
East. It is from thence only that the enormous quantity of water can
come, seeing that the course of the rivers is extremely long; and these
waters (of paradise) arrive here, where I am, and form a lake. There are
great signs here of the neighbourhood of the terrestrial paradise, for
the site is entirely conformable to the opinion of the saints and
judicious theologians. The climate is of admirable mildness. I believe
that if I passed beneath the equinoctial line, and arrived at the
highest point of which I have spoken, I should find a milder
temperature, and a change in the stars and the waters; not that I
believe that the point where the greatest height is situated is
navigable, or even that there is water there, or that one could reach
it, but I am convinced that _there_ is the terrestrial paradise, where
no one can come except by the will of God."
In the opinion of this illustrious navigator the earth had the form of
a pear, and its surface kept rising towards the east, indicated by the
point of the fruit. It was there that he supposed might be found the
garden where ancient tradition imagined the creation of the first human
couple was accomplished.
We can scarcely think without astonishment of the great amount of
darkness that obscured scientific knowledge, when this great man
appeared on the scene of the world, nor of the rapidity with which the
obscurity and vagueness of ideas were dissipated almost immediately
after his marvellous discoveries. Scarcely had a half century elapsed
after his death, than all the geographical fables of the middle ages did
no more than excite smiles of incredulity, although during his life the
universal opinion was not much advanced upon the times of the famous
knight John of Mandeville, who wrote gravely as follows:--
"No mortal man can go to or approach this paradise. By land no one can
go there on account of savage beasts which are in the deserts, and
because of mountains and rocks that cannot be passed over, and dark
places without number; nor can one go there any better by sea; the water
rushes so wildly, it comes in so great waves, that no vessel dare sail
against them. The water is so rapid, and makes so great a noise and
tempest, that no one can hear however loud he is spoken to, and so when
some great men with good courage have attempted several times to go by
this river to paradise, in large companies, they have never been able
to accomplish their journey. On the contrary, many have died with
fatigue in swimming against the watery waves. Many others have become
blind, others have become deaf by the noise of the water, and others
have been suffocated and lost in the waves, so that no mortal man can
approach it except by the special grace of God."
With one notable exception, no attempts have been made of late years to
solve such a question. That exception is by the noble and indefatigable
Livingstone, who declared his conviction to Sir Roderick Murchison, in a
letter published in the _Athenaeum_, that paradise was situated somewhere
near the sources of the Nile.
Those generally who now seek an answer to the question of the birthplace
of the human race do not call it paradise.
Since man is here, and there was a time quite recent, geologically
speaking, when he was not, there must have been some actual locality on
the earth's surface where he was first a man. Whether we have, or even
can hope to have, enough information to indicate where that locality was
situated, is a matter of doubt. We have not at present. Those who have
attended most to the subject appear to think some island the most
probable locality, but it is quite conjectural.
The name "Paradise" appears to have been derived from the Persian, in
which it means a garden; similarly derived words express the same idea
in other languages; as in the Hebrew _pardes_, in the Arabian
_firdaus_, in the Syriac _pardiso_, and in the Armenian _partes_. It has
been thought that the Persian word itself is derived from the Sanscrit
_pradesa_, or _paradesa_, which means a circle, a country, or strange
region; which, though near enough as to sound, does not quite agree as
to meaning. "Eden" is from a Hebrew root meaning delights.