PARADISE AND THE SERPENT.
Herakles and Athena in a holy picture--Human significance of
Eden--The legend in Genesis puzzling--Silence of later books
concerning it--Its Vedic elements--Its explanation--Episode of
the Mahábhárata--Scandinavian variant--The name of Adam--The
story re-read--Rabbinical interpretations.
Montfaucon has among his plates one (XX.) representing an antique
agate which he supposes to represent Zeus and Athena, but which
probably relates to the myth of Herakles and Athena in the garden of
Hesperides. The hero having penetrated this garden, slays the dragon
which guards its immortalising fruit, but when he has gathered this
fruit Athena takes it from him, lest man shall eat it and share the
immortality of the gods. In this design the two stand on either side of
the tree, around which a serpent is twined from root to branches. The
history which Montfaucon gives of the agate is of equal interest
with the design itself. It was found in an old French cathedral,
where it had long been preserved and shown as a holy picture of the
Temptation. It would appear also to have previously deceived some
rabbins, for on the border is written in Hebrew characters, much
more modern than the central figures, 'The woman saw that the tree
was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree
to be desired to make one wise.'
This mystification about a design, concerning whose origin and design
there is now no doubt, is significant. The fable of Paradise and
the Serpent is itself more difficult to trace, so many have been the
races and religions which have framed it with their holy texts and
preserved it in their sacred precincts. In its essence, no doubt,
the story grows from a universal experience; in that aspect it is a
mystical rose that speaks all languages. When man first appears his
counterpart is a garden. The moral nature means order. The wild forces
of nature--the Elohim--build no fence, forbid no fruit. They say to
man as the supreme animal, Subdue the earth; every tree and herb shall
be your meat; every animal your slave; be fruitful and multiply. But
from the conflict the more real man emerges, and his sign is a garden
hedged in from the wilderness, and a separation between good and evil.
The form in which the legend appears in the Book of Genesis presents
one side in which it is simple and natural. This has already been
suggested (vol. i. p. 330). But the legend of man defending his refuge
from wild beasts against the most subtle of them is here overlaid by
a myth in which it plays the least part. The mind which reads it by
such light as may be obtained only from biblical sources can hardly
fail to be newly puzzled at every step. So much, indeed, is confessed
in the endless and diverse theological theories which the story has
elicited. What is the meaning of the curse on the Serpent that it
should for ever crawl thereafter? Had it not crawled previously? Why
was the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil forbidden? Why,
when its fruit was tasted, should the Tree of Life have been for the
first time forbidden and jealously guarded? These riddles are nowhere
solved in the Bible, and have been left to the fanciful inventions
of theologians and the ingenuity of rabbins. Dr. Adam Clarke thought
the Serpent was an ape before his sin, and many rabbins concluded he
was camel-shaped; but the remaining enigmas have been fairly given up.
The ancient Jews, they who wrote and compiled the Old Testament, more
candid than their modern descendants and our omniscient christians,
silently confessed their inability to make anything out of this
snake-story. From the third chapter of Genesis to the last verse of
Malachi the story is not once alluded to! Such a phenomenon would
have been impossible had this legend been indigenous with the Hebrew
race. It was clearly as a boulder among them which had floated from
regions little known to their earlier writers; after lying naked
through many ages, it became overgrown with rabbinical lichen and
moss, and, at the Christian era, while it seemed part of the Hebrew
landscape, it was exceptional enough to receive special reverence as
a holy stone. That it was made the corner-stone of Christian theology
may be to some extent explained by the principle of omne ignotum pro
mirifico. But the boulder itself can only be explained by tracing it
to the mythologic formation from which it crumbled.
How would a Parsi explain the curse on a snake which condemned it to
crawl? He would easily give us evidence that at the time when most
of those Hebrew Scriptures were written, without allusion to such
a Serpent, the ancient Persians believed that Ahriman had tempted
the first man and woman through his evil mediator, his anointed son,
Ash-Mogh, 'the two-footed Serpent.'
But let us pass beyond the Persian legend, carrying that and the
biblical story together, for submission to the criticism of a
Bráhman. He will tell us that this Ash-Mogh of the Parsi is merely
the ancient Aèshma-daéva of the Avesta, which in turn is Ahi, the
great Vedic Serpent-monster whom Indra 'prostrated beneath the feet'
of the stream he had obstructed--every stream having its deity. He
would remind us that the Vedas describe the earliest dragon-slayer,
Indra, as 'crushing the head' of his enemy, and that this figure of
the god with his heel on a Serpent's head has been familiar to his race
from time immemorial. And he would then tell us to read the Rig-Veda,
v. 32, and the Mahábhárata, and we would find all the elements of
the story told in Genesis.
In the hymn referred to we find a graphic account of how, when Ahi
was sleeping on the waters he obstructed, Indra hurled at him his
thunderbolt. It says that when Indra had 'annihilated the weapon of
that mighty beast from him (Ahi), another, more powerful, conceiving
himself one and unmatched, was generated,' This 'wrath-born son,'
'a walker in darkness,' had managed to get hold of the sacred Soma,
the plant monopolised by the gods, and having drunk this juice, he
lay slumbering and 'enveloping the world,' and then 'fierce Indra
seized upon him,' and having previously discovered 'the vital part
of him who thought, himself invulnerable,' struck that incarnation
of many-formed Ahi, and he was 'made the lowest of all creatures'.
But one who has perused the philological biography of Ahi already
given, vol. i. p. 357, will not suppose that this was the end of
him. We must now consider in further detail the great episode
of the Mahábhárata, to which reference has been made in other
connections. [29] During the Deluge the most precious treasure of
the gods, the Amrita, the ambrosia that rendered them immortal, was
lost, and the poem relates how the Devas and Asuras, otherwise gods
and serpents, together churned the ocean for it. There were two great
mountains,--Meru the golden and beautiful, adorned with healing plants,
pleasant streams and trees, unapproachable by the sinful, guarded
by serpents; Mandar, rocky, covered with rank vegetation, infested
by savage beasts. The first is the abode of the gods, the last of
demons. To find the submerged Amrita it was necessary to uproot Mandar
and use it to churn the ocean. This was done by calling on the King
Serpent Ananta, who called in the aid of another great serpent, Vásuki,
the latter being used as a rope coiling and uncoiling to whirl the
mountain. At last the Amrita appeared. But there also streamed forth
from the ocean bed a terrible stench and venom, which was spreading
through the universe when Siva swallowed it to save mankind,--the
drug having stained his throat blue, whence his epithet 'Blue Neck.'
When the Asuras saw the Amrita, they claimed it; but one of the Devas,
Narya, assumed the form of a beautiful woman, and so fascinated them
that they forgot the Amrita for the moment, which the gods drank. One
of the Asuras, however, Ráhu, assumed the form of a god or Deva, and
began to drink. The immortalising nectar had not gone farther than
his throat when the sun and moon saw the deceit and discovered it to
Naraya, who cut off Ráhu's head. The head of Ráhu, being immortal,
bounded to the sky, where its efforts to devour the sun and moon,
which betrayed him, causes their eclipses. The tail (Ketu) also enjoys
immortality in a lower plane, and is the fatal planet which sends
diseases on mankind. A furious war between the gods and the Asuras
has been waged ever since. And since the Devas are the strongest,
it is not wonderful that it should have passed into the folklore
of the whole Aryan world that the evil host are for ever seeking to
recover by cunning the Amrita. The Serpents guarding the paradise of
the Devas have more than once, in a mythologic sense, been induced
to betray their trust and glide into the divine precincts to steal
the coveted draught. This is the Kvásir [30] of the Scandinavian
Mythology, which is the source of that poetic inspiration whose songs
have magical potency. The sacramental symbol of the Amrita in Hindu
Theology is the Soma juice, and this plant Indra is declared in the
Rig-Veda (i. 130) to have discovered "hidden, like the nestlings of
a bird, amidst a pile of rocks enclosed by bushes," where the dragon
Drought had concealed it. Indra, in the shape of a hawk, flew away
with it. In the Prose Edda the Frost Giant Suttung has concealed the
sacred juice, and it is kept by the maid Gunlauth in a cavern overgrown
with bushes. Bragi bored a hole through the rock. Odin in the shape
of a worm crept through the crevice; then resuming his godlike shape,
charmed the maid into permitting him to drink one draught out of the
three jars; and, having left no drop, in form of an eagle flew to
Asgard, and discharged in the jars the wonder-working liquid. Hence
poetry is called Odin's booty, and Odin's gift.
Those who attentively compare these myths with the legend in Genesis
will not have any need to rest upon the doubtful etymology of 'Adam'
[31] to establish the Ayran origin of the latter. The Tree of the
knowledge of Good and Evil which made man 'as one of us' (the Elohim)
is the Soma of India, the Haoma of Persia, the kvásir of Scandinavia,
to which are ascribed the intelligence and powers of the gods, and
the ardent thoughts of their worshippers. The Tree of Immortality is
the Amrita, the only monopoly of the gods. 'The Lord God said, Behold
the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest
he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat,
and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth the garden
of Eden to till the ground whence he had been taken. So he drove out
the man; and he placed on the east of the garden of Eden cherubim,
and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way of the
tree of life.'
This flaming sword turning every way is independent of the cherub,
and takes the place of the serpent which had previously guarded the
Meru paradise, but is now an enemy no longer to be trusted.
If the reader will now re-read the story in Genesis with the old names
restored, he will perceive that there is no puzzle at all in any part
of it:--'Now Ráhu [because he had stolen and tasted Soma] was more
subtle than any beast of the field which the Devas had made, and he
said to Adea Suktee, the first woman, Have the Devas said you shall
not eat of every tree in the garden? And she said unto Ráhu, We may
eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the Soma-plant,
which is in the middle of the garden, the Devas have said we shall
not eat or touch it on pain of death. Then Ráhu said to Adea, You
will not suffer death by tasting Soma [I have done so, and live]:
the Devas know that on the day when you taste it your eyes shall be
opened, and you will be equal to them in knowledge of good and evil
... [and you will be able at once to discover which tree it is that
bears the fruit which renders you immortal--the Amrita].... Adea took
of the Soma and did eat, and gave also unto Adima, her husband, and the
eyes of them both were opened.... And Indra, chief of the Devas, said
to Ráhu, Because you have done this, you are cursed above all cattle
and above every beast of the field; [for they shall transmigrate,
their souls ascend through higher forms to be absorbed in the Creative
principle; but] upon thy belly shalt thou go [remaining transfixed in
the form you have assumed to try and obtain the Amrita]; and [instead
of the ambrosia you aimed at] you shall eat dirt through all your
existence.... And Indra said, Adima and Adea Suktee have [tasted Soma,
and] become as one of us Devas [so far as] to know good and evil;
and now, lest man put forth his hand [on our precious Amrita], and
take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever [giving
us another race of Asuras or Serpent-men to compete with].... Indra
and the Devas drove Adima out of Meru, and placed watch-dogs at the
east of the garden; and [a sinuous darting flame, precisely matched
to the now unchangeable form of Ráhu], a flaming sword which turned
every way, to keep the way of the Amrita from Adima and Asuras.'
While the gods and serpents were churning the ocean for the Amrita,
all woes and troubles for mortals came up first. That ocean shrinks
in one region to the box of Pandora, in another to the fruit eaten by
Eve. How foreign such a notion is to the Hebrew theology is shown by
the fact that even while the curses are falling from the fatal fruit
on the earth and man, they are all said to have proceeded solely from
Jehovah, who is thus made to supplement the serpent's work.
It will be seen that in the above version of the story in Genesis I
have left out various passages. These are in part such as must be more
fully treated in the succeeding chapter, and in part the Semitic mosses
which have grown upon the Aryan boulder. But even after the slight
treatment which is all I have space to devote to the comparative
study of the myth in this aspect, it may be safely affirmed that
the problems which we found insoluble by Hebrew correlatives no
longer exist if an Aryan origin be assumed. We know why the fruit
of knowledge was forbidden: because it endangered the further fruit
of immortality. We know how the Serpent might be condemned to crawl
for ever without absurdity: because he was of a serpent-race, able
to assume higher forms, and capable of transmigration, and of final
absorption. We know why the eating of the fruit brought so many woes:
it was followed by the stream of poison from the churned ocean which
accompanied the Amrita, and which would have destroyed the race of both
gods and men, had not Siva drank it up. If anything were required to
make the Aryan origin of the fable certain, it will be found in the
fact which will appear as we go on,--namely, that the rabbins of our
era, in explaining the legend which their fathers severely ignored,
did so by borrowing conceptions foreign to the original ideas of
their race,--notions about human transformation to animal shapes,
and about the Serpent (which Moses honoured), and mainly of a kind
travestying the Iranian folklore. Such contact with foreign races
for the first time gave the Jews any key to the legend which their
patriarchs and prophets were compelled to pass over in silence.