migration. Exploration of the Edens, Gan-Edens, Avalons, Hesperides,
Atlantises, turns them to parts of the prosaic world while it raises
the ideals that hovered over them to rosy cloud-lands which cannot
yet be explored. No Yima found anywhere on earth! And so it begins
to be sung of him that he has passed to some region not exactly upon
earth. Now it is said, this time in the Rigveda (x. 14, 1, 2): “Yama,
the king, the gatherer of the people, has descried a path for many,
which leads from the depths to the heights; he first found out a
resting-place from which nobody can turn out the occupants; on the way
the forefathers have gone, the sons will follow them.” Finally, as
Haug remarks: “This happy ruler of the blessed in Paradise has been
transformed, in the modern Hindu mythology, into the fearful god of
death, the inexorable judge of men’s doings, and the punisher of the
wicked.”
For a long time after their constitution as a people, the Jews had no
definite faith in the immortality of the soul, and there is no text
in the Old Testament which clearly teaches that doctrine. It has been
thought by some that their adoption of that doctrine was coincident
with their decline from greatness as a nation.[9] Jehovah still walked
amid the pleasant shade-trees of Paradise, and there Enoch walked with
him. Out of this belief in an earthly immortality grew the earlier
form of belief in the life after death, which insisted on corporeal
resurrection. As time went on, and the numbers for whom immortality
was claimed grew, and as exploration discovered no earthly Eden in
which these resided, paradise necessarily ascended to an aerial realm.
But its earthly characteristics were preserved. Thence angels passed
to earth and back on a ladder, and thence came the chariot and horses
which appeared when Elias was borne away by a sufficiently strong
whirlwind. That he was ‘carried to the sky’ marks, however, a step away
from the earthly abode, in the direction taken by the myth which turned
Yima to Yama.
But the Jews introduced into their belief in certain undying ones an
important feature, drawn from their imported dualistic philosophy,
which marshalled everything and every being, small or large, on one
side or the other of the great war between Ormuzd and Ahriman. Beside
the hero, too holy to die, is seen the man of sin, to whom the
repose of the grave is forbidden. The books of our Bible were written
after ancient traditions, and gathered together when other ideas were
predominant; and it is rather by intimations there found, and by
references to rabbinical and Arabian folk-lore, that we can get at
these primitive fables.
In the first epoch we find counterparts in Cain and Seth. Even the
Biblical narrative seems to point to a primitive myth, in which these
two were good and evil immortals, which had gone to pieces before the
book of Genesis was compiled.[10] At any rate at an early age the
pieces had been put together by the Semitic imagination. It is said
(Gen. iv. 25) that Eve called this her third son Seth (_scion_ or
_germ_): “for,” she said, “God hath appointed me another seed in place
of Abel, whom Cain slew.” The Talmudic book, _Shene Luchôth_, says that
the soul of Abel (_breath_) passed into Seth, and again into Moses.
Josephus (_Ant._ i. 2) shows that Seth was venerated as one possessed
of great knowledge, which he engraved on two pillars. Suidas says Seth
was the first to hear the name of God. In the fourth century there was
a sect of Sethians, who, according to Epiphanius, identified Seth with
the Messiah (Adv. Hær. i. 3, 39). In the line of Seth were born the
long-lived beings, some of whom lived above nine hundred years, and one
of whom was Enoch, who did not die at all. Many of the names resemble
those in the line of Cain--and were no doubt taken from it--Cain-an,
Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech. It is evident that the
Seth legend was introduced to avoid having the human race descend from
the first murderer and type of evil--Cain.
Cain was the first Wandering Jew. His name, signifying a spear, and
Tubal-Cain, “son of a spear,” first artificer in brass and iron,
suggest the possibility that his doom may have been that of a Semitic
Prometheus. At any rate the curse pronounced upon him (“a fugitive and
a wanderer shalt thou be in the earth”); the mark (token, or perhaps
_weird_) fixed upon him, that none should slay him; the land to which
he wandered, itself meaning flight (Nod)--supplied ample materials for
the mother-myth of eternal Wanderers. Of Cain, however, more will be
said at a further stage of our inquiry.
Enoch represents the first personage of Biblical record clearly
corresponding to Yima. “Enoch walked with Elohim and was no more
[seen among men], for Elohim took him.” With regard to the solar
character of the Enoch-myth we cannot concern ourselves here. As his
name indicates Enoch is the Beginner, like Yima, of whom Ahuramazda
says, “with him I conversed first among men” (Vendidad, ii. 2). It is
especially noticeable that Enoch “walks” with Elohim, whom we before
find “walking in the garden” (Gen. iii. 8). A heavenly abode is not yet
imagined. Even the Koran, when it speaks of Enoch (Erdris), hesitates
to affirm his translation to heaven, but says, “We exalted him to a
high place.”
The evil counterpart of Enoch is Lamech, who, although his death at the
age of 777 is recorded in the later Sethite line, identifies himself
as a deathless wanderer with Cain in the lines which, as Ewald thinks,
probably gave rise to the Cain story itself:
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice!
Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech!
For the man I slew for my own wound,
The child I struck dead on account of my own hurt!
Was Cain avenged seven times?
Lamech will be seven and seventy times!
In the third epoch we find Esau a restless evil wanderer, fulfilling
the destiny pronounced by his father, gradually personifying Edom,
the antagonist of Israel. The corresponding immortal is Judah, from
whose hand the sceptre was not to depart till Shiloh come. The death
of neither of these is mentioned; Edom and Judah remained to carry on
their phantasmal war to the last--as Satan and Jahve, as Sammaël and
Michael.
The mysterious account, in Deut. xxxiv., of the death of Moses,
suggests the existence at some period of a popular belief that he did
not die in the ordinary sense. It is said, by one rendering, that he
died “on the mouth of Jahve”; “his eye was not dim nor his natural
strength abated”; Jahve knew him “face to face,” and himself buried him
in a valley, in a place unknown to this day. According to the Talmud,
Enoch, Moses, and Elias, are brought up by Michael to be changed into
angels. (Kalisch, Comm. on O. T., II. p. 307.) This association of
Moses with the two who notoriously had not died is significant. In the
Book of “The Assumption of Moses” the demon who tried to get the body
of Moses, as mentioned in Jude ix., is called Sammaël. This had long
been the name for Esau-Edom; and there is also in this coincidence
the intimation of an early legend which brought Moses slumbering
in his Moabite cave into mythological relation with restless Esau,
ever wandering amid the dark mountains. The presence of Moses at the
transfiguration of Jesus in company with Elias, who never died, would
alone show that belief in his earthly immortality had prevailed. In
addition, there are intimations of such a tradition among the Arabs.
The Moslems make pilgrimages to Neby Musa, near Jericho, as the
sepulchre of Moses, and their legend is as follows: God had promised
to leave Moses in this world until he should voluntarily descend into
a tomb. After Moses had lived 120 years, he was one day walking and
saw four men (angels) excavating a chamber in a rock, as, they said,
a hiding-place for their king’s most precious treasure. The cavern
offered a tempting retreat from the sun’s rays, and Moses reclined in
it. One of the workmen gave him a delicious apple. No sooner had he
inhaled its scent than “he fell asleep.”[11]
An evil counterpart of Moses may be found in the tradition--very
important to the legend of the Wandering Jew, as we shall presently
see--that the maker of the Golden Calf was doomed to a fate much like
that of Cain. There arose a proverb among the Jews that “no punishment
befalleth the Israelites in which there is not an ounce of this calf.”
Although in the Bible the fashioning of this idol is distinctly
ascribed to Aaron, he was not among the three thousand slain on
account of it, but was pardoned. Moses says, “The Lord was very angry
with Aaron to have destroyed him: and I prayed for Aaron at the same
time” (Deut. ix. 20). Semitic Folk-lore has been still more merciful
to Aaron’s reputation, at cost of the Samaritans, and made it out that
the Golden Calf was fashioned by one Samiri, or Al Sâmeri. “The devil,”
says Jonathan, “got into the metal and fashioned it into a calf.” The
Koran says the calf lowed, and in Arabian tradition Al Sâmeri took some
dust from the footsteps of the horse of Gabriel, who rode at the head
of Israel, and threw it in the calf’s mouth, which began to low.
Now, many of the Samaritans themselves, about the first century of
our era, gathered about one Dositheus as their Messiah (Origen, _De
Princ._ iv. c. 17; Epiphanius, _Hæres._ xiii.). His pretensions brought
upon Dositheus an order for his arrest from the Samaritan high-priest,
from which he escaped and hid in a cave. There, according to some, he
starved to death; but his followers continued to believe that he was
alive and would reappear. It is possible that Al Sâmeri means “the
Samaritan”--_i.e._ Dositheus or Dûsis--and that he thus became the
mythical scapegoat for Aaron’s offence. G. Weil (_The Bible, the Koran,
and the Talmud_) says: “Moses then summoned Samiri, and would have put
him to death instantly, but Allah directed that he should be sent into
banishment. Ever since that time he roams like a wild beast throughout
the world; everyone shuns him and purifies the ground on which his
feet have stood; and he himself, whenever he approaches men, exclaims:
‘Touch me not!’”
In the Koran (Sale, xx.) it is declared that Moses said to Al Sâmeri,
“Get thee gone; for thy punishment in this life shall be that thou
shalt say unto those who shall meet thee, Touch me not!” Al Beidâwi is
quoted by Sale as interpreting this to mean that infection would follow
the touch, but to Al Sâmeri; ultimately, however, the fear was on the
other side. It was believed that Al Sâmeri repaired to an island in
the Red Sea, where his wretched descendants dwell, and whence issue
plagues. Whenever a ship comes near the inhabitants raise the warning
cry, “Touch me not!”
Al Beidâwi also says that Al Sâmeri’s real name was Moses, or Mûsa Ebn
Dhafar, which seems to suggest that he was regarded as the counterpart
of Moses; and also as a source of pestilence he would be the opposite
of Moses, whose medical skill was famous.
Although it may anticipate somewhat the later developments of our myth,
it may be well to suggest here the probability that the traditional
idea, preserved in the romance of Eugene Sue and elsewhere, that the
Wandering Jew carried the plague from city to city, may have been
connected with this legendary Red Sea Island. Its real origin may have
been in the actual diseases bred in the wretched quarters in which Jews
were crowded by a suicidal inhumanity, and from which every Jewish
traveller and trader had to go.
The next undying one is Elias. The idea of Jahve’s earthly abode had
grown dim, at least, and Eden had begun to ascend amid the roseate
clouds when this legend was formed. The terrestrial chariot and horses
are present, but a whirlwind is needed to carry them with the prophet
to heaven. The narrative seems meant to admit of either theory--a
heavenly or an earthly paradise. There Elias remained as a kind of
Æolus, literally as on earth a weather-prophet; and to this day in
Greece, and many parts of the East, when a severe storm with lightning
arises, the peasants say, “Elias goes forth in his chariot!”[12]
In folk-lore Elias unites in himself characteristics both of the
Sleepers and Wanderers. In some regions he is supposed to have employed
his leisure in paradise with writing a book. In Moslem legend he is a
Wanderer. A powerful sheikh, they say, wished to utilise the miraculous
gifts of Elias, and had him chained. The tyrant led him over his lands
because his “footsteps were blessed,” but at the prophet’s every step
the fields withered. The sheikh was about to slay Elias, when the
prophet asked permission to quench his thirst at what is now called
the “sealed fountain,” near Bethlehem. The tyrant held the chain
which, however, elongated itself: the bonds fell off, the rock closed
behind him, and since then Elias “has continued to travel over the
whole world, rendering every place verdant on which he treads.” The
“sealed fountain” of the rains, which only Elias could unseal in the
time of drouth, would appear in this myth to feel its relation with
the Sun. One need not wonder that Dr. Schliemann found a Greek church
consecrated to Elias on the site of a temple of Helios.[13]
The Dualism which in the Semitic Mythology divided the undying ones
into good and evil, is generally found in the corresponding traditions
of other regions. We find good and evil counterparts in Barbarossa and
Wodan; in the Wild Huntsman, and faithful Eckhardt who warns of his
approach; in King Arthur wandering as a raven, contrasted with Merlin,
bound for ever in his prison of air by the spell of Vivien; in the
German Monk Felix (who, like Abbot Cormac, listened for centuries to
the singing bird, W. Grimm, _Altdeutsche Walder_, ii. 70), with King
Herla, who was similarly bewitched by the evil dwarf to whose wedding
he went; in Siegfried, with Van der Decken, who swore his ship should
round the Cape, “despite God or Devil, if it took till judgment,” and
is now the Flying Dutchman; in Tannhäuser, with Lohengrin; in Ogier
among the fairies of Morgana, with the Gros Veneur; in the Seven
Sleepers of Tours, with Hugo wandering beside their grotto.
IV.
THE LEGENDS GENERALISED.
If we examine well the account in the Zendavesta of the paradise
wherein Yima walked with Ahuramazda, and that in Genesis of Eden where
Enoch walked with Elohim, we can hardly fail to recognise in them
the germ of the Messianic dream. The visions of the renovated earth
described by Philo, and in the Sibylline Oracles, and in the Apocalypse
of Baruch, are but realistic expansions of those happy retreats of
the holy ones who were not supposed to taste corruption.[14] In this
idealised earth were gathered the beauties and joys of many Gulistans.
And, similarly, he who was to reign over the imparadised in this
perfected earth was to be an immortal king returning from his Avalon,
invested with the attributes of all the incorruptible. These had been
gradually raised into an abstract personality--the “Angel-Messiah,” to
which Mr. Ernest de Bunsen has given such patient research with many
interesting results--who, however, was purely a terrestrial being, a
Son of Man.
The phrase “Ancient of Days,” used three times in Daniel vii., and
the snow-white hair there ascribed to that being, who gives dominion
to the Son of Man brought before him, convey the idea of a being that
has lived through all changes, a memory and consciousness in which the
ages broken up to mortal eyes are knit together, and therefore able to
be a providence and a retributive judge. Viceroy of this Ancient of
Days is the immortal man in whose unbroken consciousness all history
is embodied: he is the earthly providence. Before Abraham was, he is.
He abides with the Ancient in his earthly dwelling, but goes forth
at appointed periods for certain purposes. He is the “Son of Man” as
distinguished from the sons of Kings; reigns not by succession but by
election of the Deity manifested in signs and marvels, such as the
carrier dove bringing the divine sanction to emperors who break the
order of legitimacy. No incarnation was imagined; the avatars of this
Son of Man are the Apparitions of one always in the earth, but able
to render himself invisible, or who assumes an humble disguise. This
disguise may be thrown off occasionally in some solitary place, for a
select few who are charged with secresy.
This Messiah gathered up in his person the powers and glories of past
saints and heroes, and it was expected that these would attend him at
the supreme scene of his coronation on earth. Elias was to appear as
his herald. In Seder ’Olam Rabbah it is said, “In the second year of
the reign of Ahaziah, Elias became hidden, [to be] seen no more until
King Messiah shall come, when he will be again seen, and hidden a
second time, and not seen again until Gog and Magog come. And now he
writes down the work of all the generations.” It was asked of John the
Baptist “Art thou Elias?” and next “Art thou that prophet?” Who was
this prophet popularly thus associated with Messianic expectations?
Professor Drummond suggests that it was Jeremiah, and cites the vision
of Judas Maccabæus, in which he saw, beside Onias the high-priest,
“a man with grey hairs and exceeding glorious,” who was declared to
be Jeremiah, “who offers many prayers for the people and the holy
city.” Jeremiah gave Judas a golden sword, and told him to wound the
adversaries.
On the nether side of this Messianic dream we find a pit or
underworld--some region which could not mar the fair face of the
perfect earth--which is an outcome of the wilderness of Dendain,
Cain’s Land, every weird desolation. And the king of this region
sums up in himself the line of eternal evil wanderers--Cain, Lamech,
Esau, Samuel--in a personification of hostility to the Messiah. This
generalised Opposition--called Armillus among the Jews, Al Dajjail by
the Mussulmans--corresponds exactly with Antichrist among the early
Christians. It was said Armillus was to be born out of a marble statue
in a church at Rome (the _ne plus ultra_ of earthly infernalism to
a race detesting graven images and victimised by Rome), and that
Christendom would worship him until the true Messias (Ben David) should
appear, and, as says the Targum (Isa. xi. 4) “By the word of his mouth
the wicked Armillus shall die.”
V.
TRANSFIGURATION.
Though the alleged longevity of the Jewish patriarchs temporarily made
up for the absence of the conception of immortality, this idea arrived.
The representatives of Seth live above an average of nine centuries
each, with one remarkable exception: Enoch, the best of them, lives
less than half the years of the least. Whatever may have been the
original reason for this exception, the explanation was that Enoch
really outstripped even the 969 years of Methuselah, having never died
at all. In paradise he would have access to the Tree of Life. In the
farther development of Israel other “beginners”--as Moses representing
Law, and Elias Prophecy--might eclipse Enoch, and wear “by authority”
his mantle of immortality; but in popular faith and folk-lore Enoch
held his own. He was said to have invented writing, arithmetic, and
astronomy; to have filled 300 volumes with the knowledge acquired by
long residence among the angels; his first being a book predicting the
Deluge, which was preserved by Noah in the Ark. In many respects Enoch
resembles Teiresias, to whom Zeus granted a life on earth of seven
or nine generations, and who even in Hades was said by Homer to have
retained his human perception, while those around him were mere shades
(Plato, Meno, 100).[15] His fame as a soothsayer, both on earth and
in Hades, grew out of the belief in his long experience, and no doubt
this was the case with Enoch also. Most folk-sayings and predictions
were connected with Enoch as forged runes and verses are now attributed
to Mother Shipton. (It will be remembered that the first English book
on this theme was entitled _The Wandering Jew telling fortunes to
Englishmen_, 1640.) It might have been supposed that Enoch would be
present at the Transfiguration of Jesus. Paul had spoken of him with
honour; Jude quoted from him; and it is probable that he was meant as
one of the “two witnesses” alluded to in Rev. xi. 3. In the Gospel of
Nicodemus the “two witnesses” are Enoch and Elias, who welcome those
arriving in Paradise.
That Moses was substituted for Elias at the Transfiguration was
probably due to the strong hold which the “Book of Enoch” had taken
on the Jewish mind. In this work there are indications that among
some Jews Enoch himself had become connected with the Messianic hope.
The writer, personating Enoch and speaking in his name, describes
his journey through heaven and hell; thus, in the second century
B.C. anticipating the journeys and visions of Lucian, Mohammed, Arda
Viráf, Dante, and Swedenborg. He is attended by an angel, and he
is named and appointed the Son of Man. “That angel came to me, and
with his voice greeted me and said, Thou art the Son of Man who is
born to righteousness; and righteousness dwells over thee, and the
righteousness of the Head of Days leaves thee not.” That a claim for
Enoch’s Messiaship is intended appears in the event then described.
Enoch’s body melts away, and his spirit is transformed into a heavenly
body. Enoch had described the glory of the renovated earth; but he
himself, assuming him alive, would be some 2000 years old. No legend
said he had been endowed with perpetual youth; consequently to reign
over a rejuvenated earth he must be rejuvenated himself. Such a
notion could only, at that time, have survived among the ignorant; but
it is to them that new “schools” have to make their appeal, and in
the transfiguration of Enoch the old idea, though spiritualised, is
regarded.
The phrase of the _Book of Enoch_, “Head of Days,” is a remarkable
modification of Daniel’s “Ancient of Days.” It almost looks as
if,--assuming Ewald’s theory that Enoch (Beginner) was a god of the
New Year,--this earliest of the immortals were still invested with
more than patriarchal sanctity. As a Janus or Ganêça (with whom Ewald
compares him) Enoch would himself be the Head of Days, thus as it were
the Ancient of Days dialed on time. The idea of co-eternal existence is
suggested, but also of an Unchangeable and a Changeable.
It must be remembered that we are considering ideas which, however
poetical, are based on fancies of the world’s childhood. The
transformation of Enoch under the angel’s spell belongs to the same
class as the transformations which Yuletide evokes for the delight of
the young from our own German Mythology, in which deforming spells are
broken, handsome princes step forth from bears or dwarfs, decrepit
crones become fair maidens, and Cinderellas rise from their ashes and
rags in shining raiment and beauty.