THE MAN OF SIN.
Hindu myth--Gnostic theories--Ophite scheme of
redemption--Rabbinical traditions of primitive man--Pauline
Pessimism--Law of death--Satan's ownership of man--Redemption of
the elect--Contemporary statements--Baptism--Exorcism--The 'new
man's' food--Eucharist--Herbert Spencer's explanation--Primitive
ideas--Legends of Adam and Seth--Adamites--A Mormon 'Mystery'
of initiation.
In a Hindu myth, Dhrubo, an infant devotee, passed much time in a
jungle, surrounded by ferocious beasts, in devotional exercises of
such extraordinary merit that Vishnu erected a new heaven for him
as the reward of his piety. Vishnu even left his own happy abode
to superintend the construction of this special heaven. In Hebrew
mythology the favourite son, the chosen people, is called out of
Egypt to dwell in a new home, a promised land, not in heaven but on
earth. The idea common to the two is that of a contrast between a
natural and a celestial environment,--a jungle and beasts, bondage
and distress; a new heaven, a land flowing with milk and honey,--and
the correspondence with these of the elect child, Dhrubo or Israel.
The tendency of Christ's mind appears to have been rather in the Aryan
direction; he pointed his friends to a kingdom not of this world,
and to his Father's many mansions in heaven. But the Hebrew faith in a
messianic reign in this world was too strong for his dream; a new earth
was appended to the new heaven, and became gradually paramount, but
this new earth was represented only by the small society of believers
who made the body of Christ, the members in which his blood flowed.
That great cauldron of confused superstitions and mysticisms which the
Roman Empire became after the overthrow of Jerusalem, formed a thick
scum which has passed under the vague name of Gnosticism. The primitive
notions of all races were contained in it, however, and they gathered
in the second and third centuries a certain consistency in the system
of the Ophites. In the beginning existed Bythos (the Depth); his first
emanation and consort is Ennoia (Thought); their first daughter is
Pneuma (Spirit), their second Sophia (Wisdom). Sophia's emanations are
two--one perfect, Christos; the other imperfect, Sophia-Achamoth,--who
respectively guide all that proceed from God and all that proceed
from Matter. Sophia, unable to act directly upon anything so gross
as Matter or unordered as Chaos, employs her imperfect daughter
Sophia-Achamoth for that purpose. But she, finding delight in imparting
life to inert Matter, became ambitious of creating in the abyss a
world for herself. To this end she produced the Demiurgus Ildabaoth
(otherwise Jehovah) to be creator of the material world. After this
Sophia-Achamoth shook off Matter, in which she had become entangled;
but Ildabaoth ('son of Darkness') proceeded to produce emanations
corresponding to those of Bythos in the upper universe. Among his
creations was Man, but his man was a soulless monster crawling on the
ground. Sophia-Achamoth managed to transfer to Man the small ray of
divine light which Ildabaoth had inherited from her. The 'primitive
Man' became thus a divine being. Ildabaoth, now entirely evil, was
enraged at having produced a being who had become superior to himself,
and his envy took shape in a serpent-formed Satan, Ophiomorphos. He
is the concentration of all that is most base in Matter, conjoined
with a spiritual intelligence. Their anti-Judaism led the Ophites to
identify Ildabaoth as Jehovah, and this serpent-son of his as Michael;
they also called him Samaël. Ildabaoth then also created the animal,
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, with all their evils. Resolving
to confine man within his own lower domain, he forbade him to eat
of the Tree of Knowledge. To defeat his scheme, which had all been
evolved out of her own temporary fall, Sophia-Achamoth sent her own
genius, also in form of a serpent, Ophis, to induce Man to transgress
the tyrant's command. Eve supposing Ophis the same as Ophiomorphos,
regarded the prohibition against the fruit as withdrawn and readily
ate of it. Man thus became capable of understanding heavenly
mysteries, and Ildabaoth made haste to imprison him in the dungeon
of Matter. He also punished Ophis by making him eat dust, and this
heavenly serpent, contaminated by Matter, changed from Man's friend
to his foe. Sophia-Achamoth has always striven against these two
Serpents, who bind man to the body by corrupt desires; she supplied
mankind with divine light, through which they became sensible of
their nakedness--the misery of their condition. Ildabaoth's seductive
agents gained control over all the offspring of Adam except Seth, type
of the Spiritual Man. Sophia-Achamoth moved Bythos to send down her
perfect brother Christos to aid the Spiritual Race of Seth. Christos
descended through the seven planetary regions, assuming successively
forms related to each, and entered into the man Jesus at the moment
of his baptism. Ildabaoth, discovering him, stirred up the Jews to
put him to death; but Christos and Sophia, abandoning the material
body of Jesus on the cross, gave him one made of ether. Hence his
mother and disciples could not recognise him. He ascended to the
Middle Space, where he sits by the right hand of Ildabaoth, though
unperceived by the latter, and, putting forth efforts for purification
of mankind corresponding to those put forth by Ildabaoth for evil,
he is collecting all the Spiritual elements of the world into the
kingdom which is to overthrow that of the Enemy. [101]
Notwithstanding the animosity shown by the Ophites towards the
Jews, most of the elements in their system are plagiarised from the
Jews. According to ancient rabbinical traditions, Adam and Eve, by
eating the fruit of the lowest region, fell through the six regions
to the seventh and lowest; they were there brought under control of
the previously fallen Samaël, who defiled them with his spittle. Their
nakedness consisted in their having lost a natural protection of which
only our finger-nails are left; others say they lost a covering of
hair. [102] The Jews also from of old contended that Seth was the
son of Adam, in whom returned the divine nature with which man was
originally endowed. We have, indeed, only to identify Ildabaoth with
Elohim instead of Jehovah to perceive that the Ophites were following
Jewish precedents in attributing the natural world to a fiend. The link
between, the two conceptions may be discovered in the writings of Paul.
Paul's pessimistic conception of this world and of human nature was
radical, and it mainly formed the mould in which dogmatic Christianity
subsequently took shape. His general theology is a travesty of the
creation of the world and of man. All that work of Elohim was, by
implication, natural, that is to say, diabolical. The earth as then
created belonged to the Prince of this world, who was the author of
sin, and its consequence, death. In Adam all die. The natural man is
enmity against God; he is of the earth earthy; his father is the devil;
he cannot know spiritual things. All mankind are born spiritually
dead. Christ is a new and diviner Demiurgos, engaged in the work of
producing a new creation and a new man. For his purpose the old law,
circumcision or uncircumcision, are of no avail or importance, but a
new creature. His death is the symbol of man's death to the natural
world, his resurrection of man's rising into a new world which mere
flesh and blood cannot inherit. As God breathed into Adam's nostrils
the breath of life, the Spirit breathes upon the elect of Christ a
new mind and new heart.
The 'new creature' must inhale an entirely new physical
atmosphere. When Paul speaks of 'the Prince of the Power of the Air,'
it must not be supposed that he is only metaphorical. On this, however,
we must dwell for a little.
'The air,' writes Burton in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' 'The air
is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible
devils. They counterfeit suns and moons, and sit on ships' masts. They
cause whirlwinds of a sudden, and tempestuous storms, which though our
meteorologists generally refer to natural causes, yet I am of Bodine's
mind, they are more often caused by those aerial devils in their
several quarters. Cardan gives much information concerning them. His
father had one of them, an aerial devil, bound to him for eight and
twenty years; as Agrippa's dog had a devil tied to his collar. Some
think that Paracelsus had one confined in his sword pommel. Others
wear them in rings;' and so the old man runs on, speculating about
the mysterious cobwebs collected in the ceiling of his brain.
The atmosphere mentally breathed by Burton and his authorities was
indeed charged with invisible phantasms; and every one of them was in
its origin a genuine intellectual effort to interpret the phenomena
of nature. It is not wonderful that the ancients should have ascribed
to a diabolical source the subtle deaths that struck at them from
the air. A single breath of the invisible poison of the air might
lay low the strongest. Even after man had come to understand his
visible foes, the deadly animal or plant, he could only cower and
pray before the lurking power of miasma and infection, the power of
the air. The Tyndalls of a primitive time studied dust and disease,
and called the winged seeds of decay and death 'aerial devils,' and
prepared the way for Mephistopheles (devil of smells), as he in turn
for the bacterial demon of modern science.
There were not wanting theologic explanations why these malignant
beings should find their dwelling-place in the air. They had been
driven out of heaven. The etherial realm above the air was reserved
for the good. Of the demons the Hindus say, 'Their feet touch not the
ground.' 'What man of virtue is there,' said Titus to his soldiers,
'who does not know that those souls which are severed from their
fleshy bodies in battles by the sword are received by the æther--that
purest of elements--and joined to that company which are placed among
the stars; that they become gods, dæmons, and propitious heroes,
and show themselves as such to their posterity afterwards?' [103]
Malignant spirits were believed to hold a more undisputed sway over
the atmosphere than over the earth, although our planet was mainly
in their power, and the subjects of the higher empire always a small
colony. [104] Moreover, there was a natural tendency of demons, which
originally represented earthly evils, when these were conquered by
human intelligence, to pass into the realm least accessible to science
or to control by man. The uncharted winds became their refuge.
This belief was general among the Christian Fathers, [105] lasted a
very long time even among the educated, and is still the teaching
of the Roman Catholic Church, as any one may see by reading the
authorised work of Mgr. Gaume on 'Holy Water' (p. 305). So long as
it was admitted among thinking people that the mind was as competent
to build facts upon theory as theories on fact, a great deal might
be plausibly said for this atmospheric diabolarchy. In the days
when witchcraft was first called in question, Glanvil argued 'that
since this little Spot is so thickly peopled in every Atome of it,
'tis weakness to think that all the vast spaces Above and hollows
under Ground are desert and uninhabited,' and he anticipated that,
as microscopic science might reveal further populations in places
seemingly vacant, it would necessitate the belief that the regions of
the upper air are inhabited. [106] Other learned men concluded that
the spirits that lodge there are such as are clogged with earthly
elements; the baser sort; dwelling in cold air, they would like to
inhabit the more sheltered earth. In repayment for broth, and various
dietetic horrors proffered them by witches, they enable them to pass
freely through their realm--the air.
Out of such intellectual atmosphere came Paul's sentence (Eph. ii. 2)
about 'the Prince of the Power of the Air.' It was a spiritualisation
of the existing aerial demonology. When Paul and his companions carried
their religious agitation into the centres of learning and wealth,
and brought the teachings of a Jew to confront the temples of Greece
and Rome, they found themselves unrelated to that great world. It had
another habit of mind and feeling, and the idea grew in him that it
was the spirits of the Satanic world counteracting the spirit sent on
earth from the divine world. This animated its fashions, philosophy,
science, and literature. He warns the Church at Ephesus that they
will need the whole armour of God, because they are wrestling not with
mere flesh and blood, but against the rulers of the world's darkness,
the evil spirits in high places--that is, in the Air.
As heirs of this new nature and new world, with its new atmosphere,
purchased and endowed by Christ, the Pauline theory further
presupposes, that the natural man, having died, is buried with
Christ in baptism, rises with him, and is then sealed to him by the
Holy Ghost. For a little time such must still bear about them their
fleshy bodies, but soon Christ shall come, and these vile bodies
shall be changed into his likeness; meanwhile they must keep their
bodies in subjection, even as Paul did, by beating it black and blue
(hypôpiazô), and await their deliverance from the body of the dead
world they have left, but which so far is permitted to adhere to
them. This conception had to work itself out in myths and dogmas of
which Paul knew nothing. 'If any man come after me and hate not his
father and mother, and his own (natural) life also, he cannot be my
disciple.' The new race with which the new creation was in travail
was logically discovered to need a new Mother as well as a new
Father. Every natural mother was subjected to a stain that it might
be affirmed that only one mother was immaculate--she whose conception
was supernatural, not of the flesh. Marriage became an indulgence to
sin (whose purchase-money survives still in the marriage-fee). The
monastery and the nunnery represented this new ascetic kingdom;
that perilous word 'worldliness' was transmitted to be the source of
insanity and hypocrisy.
Happily, the common sense and sentiment of mankind have so steadily
and successfully won back the outlawed interests of life and the
world, that it requires some research into ecclesiastical archæology
to comprehend the original significance of the symbols in which
it survives. The ancient rabbins limited the number of souls which
hang on Adam to 600,000, but the Christian theologians extended the
figures to include the human race. Probably even some orthodox people
may be scandalised at the idea of the fathers (Irenæus, for example),
that, at the Fall, the human race became Satan's rightful property,
did they see it in the picture copied by Buslaef, from an ancient
Russian Bible, in possession of Count Uvarof. Adam gives Satan
a written contract for himself and his descendants (Fig. 7). And
yet, according to a recent statement, the Rev. Mr. Simeon recently
preached a sermon in the Church of St. Augustine, Kilburn, London,
'to prove that the ruler of the world is the devil. He stated that the
Creator of the world had given the control of the world to one of his
chief angels, Lucifer, who, however, had gone to grief, and done his
utmost to ruin the world. Since then the Creator and Lucifer had been
continually striving to checkmate each other. As Lucifer is still the
Prince of this world, it would seem that it is not he who has been
beaten yet.' [107] A popular preacher in America, Rev. Dr. Talmage,
states the case as follows:--
'I turn to the same old book, and I find out that the Son of Mary,
who was the Son of God, the darling of heaven, the champion of the
ages, by some called Lord, by some called Jesus, by others called
Christ, but this morning by us called by the three blessed titles,
Lord Jesus Christ, by one magnificent stroke made it possible for
us all to be saved. He not only told us that there was a hell, but
he went into it. He walked down the fiery steeps. He stepped off the
bottom rung of the long ladder of despair. He descended into hell. He
put his bare foot on the hottest coal of the fiercest furnace.
'He explored the darkest den of eternal midnight, and then He came
forth lacerated and scarified, and bleeding and mauled by the hands
of infernal excruciation, to cry out to all the ages, 'I have paid
the price for all those who would make me their substitute. By my
piled-up groans, by my omnipotent agony, I demand the rescue of all
those who will give up sin and trust in me,' Mercy! mercy! mercy! But
how am I to get it? Cheap. It will not cost you as much as a loaf of
bread. Only a penny? No, no. Escape from hell, and all the harps,
and mansions, and thrones, and sunlit fields of heaven besides in
the bargain, 'without money, and without price.''
These preachers are only stating with creditable candour the
original significance of the sacraments and ceremonies which were
the physiognomy of that theory of 'a new creature.' Following various
ancient traditions, that life was produced out of water, that water
escaped the primal curse on nature, that devils hate and fear it
because of this and the saltness of so much of it, many religions
have used water for purification and exorcism. [108] Baptism is
based on the notion that every child is offspring of the Devil,
and possessed of his demon; the Fathers agreed that all unbaptized
babes, even the still-born, are lost; and up to the year 1550 every
infant was subjected at baptism to the exorcism, 'I command thee,
unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost, that thou come out, and depart from, these infants whom
our Lord Jesus Christ has vouchsafed to call to his holy baptism,
to be made members of his body and of his holy congregation,' &c.
A clergyman informed me that he knew of a case in which a man,
receiving back his child after christening, kissed it, and said,
'I never kissed it before, because I knew it was not a child of God;
but now that it is, I love it dearly.' But why not? Some even now teach
that a white angel follows the baptized, a black demon the unbaptized.
The belief was wide-spread that unbaptized children were turned into
elves at death. In Iceland it is still told as a bit of folk-lore,
that when God visited Eve, she kept a large number of her children
out of sight, 'because they had not been washed,' and these children
were turned into elves, and became the progenitors of that uncanny
race. The Greek Church made so much of baptism, that there has been
developed an Eastern sect which claims John the Baptist as its founder,
making little of Christ, who baptized none; and to this day in Russia
the peasant regards it as almost essential to a right reception of
the benedictions of Sunday to have been under water on the previous
day--soap being sagaciously added. The Roman Catholic Church, following
the provision of the Council of Carthage, still sets a high value on
baptismal exorcism; and Calvin refers to a theological debate at the
Sorbonne in Paris, whether it would not be justifiable for a priest to
throw a child into a well rather than have it die unbaptized. Luther
preserved the Catholic form of exorcism; and, in some districts of
Germany, Protestants have still such faith in it, that, when either
a child or a domestic animal is suspected of being possessed, they
will send for the Romish priest to perform the rite of exorcism.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has described the class of superstitions out of
which the sacrament of the Eucharist has grown. 'In some cases,' he
says, 'parts of the dead are swallowed by the living, who seek thus
to inspire themselves with the good qualities of the dead; and we saw
(§ 133) that the dead are supposed to be honoured by this act. The
implied notion was supposed to be associated with the further notion
that the nature of another being, inhering in all the fragments of
his body, inheres too in the unconsumed part of anything consumed
with his body; so that an operation wrought on the remnants of his
food becomes an operation wrought on the food swallowed, and therefore
on the swallower. Yet another implication is, that between those who
swallow different parts of the same food some community of nature is
established. Hence such beliefs as that ascribed by Bastian to some
negroes, who think that, 'on eating and drinking consecrated food,
they eat and drink the god himself'--such god being an ancestor, who
has taken his share. Various ceremonies among savages are prompted
by this conception; as, for instance, the choosing a totem. Among
the Mosquito Indians, 'the manner of obtaining this guardian was
to proceed to some secluded spot and offer up a sacrifice: with
the beast or bird which thereupon appeared, in dream or in reality,
a compact for life was made, by drawing blood from various parts of
the body.' This blood, supposed to be taken by the chosen animal,
connected the two, and the animal's life became so bound up with their
own that the death of one involved that of the other.' [109] And now
mark that, in these same regions, this idea reappears as a religious
observance. Sahagun and Herrera describe a ceremony of the Aztecs
called 'eating the god.' Mendieta, describing this ceremony, says,
'They had also a sort of eucharist.... They made a sort of small idols
of seeds, ... and ate them as the body or memory of their gods.' As
the seeds were cemented partly by the blood of sacrificed boys;
as their gods were cannibal gods; as Huitzilopochtli, whose worship
included this rite, was the god to whom human sacrifices were most
extensive; it is clear that the aim was to establish community with
gods by taking blood in common.' [110]
When, a little time ago, a New Zealand chief showed his high
appreciation of a learned German by eating his eyes to improve his
own intellectual vision, the case seemed to some to call for more
and better protected missionaries; but the chief might find in the
sacramental communion of the missionaries the real principle of his
faith. The celebration of the 'Lord's Supper' when a Bishop is ordained
has only to be 'scratched,' as the proverb says, to reveal beneath
it the Indians choosing their episcopal totem. As Israel observed
the Passover--eating together of the lamb whose blood sprinkled on
their door-posts had marked those to be preserved from the Destroying
Angel in Egypt--they who believed that Jesus was Messias tasted the
body and blood of their Head, as indicating the elect out of a world
otherwise given over to the Destroyer spiritually, and finally to be
delivered up to him bodily. 'He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my
blood dwelleth in me and I in him.' These were to tread on serpents,
or handle them unharmed, as it is said Paul did. They were not really
to die, but to fall asleep, that they might be changed as a seed to
its flower, through literal resurrection from the earth.
We should probably look in vain after any satisfactory vestiges of
the migration of the superstition concerning the mystical potency
of food. It is found fully developed in the ancient Hindu myth
of the struggle between the gods and demons for the Amrita, the
immortalising nectar, one stolen sip of which gave the monster Ráhu
the imperishable nature which no other of his order possesses. It
is found in corresponding myths concerning the gods of Asgard and of
Olympus. The fall of man in the Iranian legend was through a certain
milk given by Ahriman to the first pair, Meschia and Meschiane. In
Buddhist mythology, it was eating rice that corrupted the nature
of man. It was the process of incarnation in the Gilghit legend
(i. 398). The whole story of Persephone turns upon her having
eaten the seed of a pomegranate in Hades, by which she was bound to
that sphere. There is a myth very similar to that of Persephone in
Japan. There is a legend in the Scottish Highlands that a woman was
conveyed into the secret recesses of the 'men of peace'--the Daoine
Shi', euphemistic name of uncanny beings, who carry away mortals to
their subterranean apartments, where beautiful damsels tempt them to
eat of magnificent banquets. This woman on her arrival was recognised
by a former acquaintance, who, still retaining some portion of human
benevolence, warned her that, if she tasted anything whatsoever for a
certain space of time, she would be doomed to remain in that underworld
for ever. The woman having taken this counsel, was ultimately restored
to the society of mortals. It was added that, when the period named by
her unfortunate friend had elapsed, a disenchantment of this woman's
eyes took place, and the viands which had before seemed so tempting
she now discovered to consist only of the refuse of the earth. [111]
The difficulty of tracing the ethnical origin of such legends as
these is much greater than that of tracing their common natural
origin. The effect of certain kinds of food upon the human system is
very marked, even apart from the notorious effects of the drinks made
from the vegetative world. The effects of mandrake, opium, tobacco,
various semi-poisonous fungi, the simplicity with which differences of
race might be explained by their vegetarian or carnivorous customs,
would be enough to suggest theories of the potency of food over the
body and soul of man such as even now have their value in scientific
speculation.
The Jewish opinion that Seth was the offspring of the divine part of
Adam was the germ of a remarkable christian myth. Adam, when dying,
desired Seth to procure the oil of mercy (for his extreme unction)
from the angels guarding Paradise. Michael informs Seth that it
can only be obtained after the lapse of the ages intervening the
Fall and the Atonement. Seth received, however, a small branch of
the Tree of Knowledge, and was told that when it should bear fruit,
Adam would recover. Returning, Seth found Adam dead, and planted the
branch in his grave. It grew to a tree which Solomon had hewn down
for building the temple; but the workmen could not adapt it, threw it
aside, and it was used as a bridge over a lake. The Queen of Sheba,
about to cross this lake, beheld a vision of Christ on the cross,
and informed Solomon that when a certain person had been suspended
on that tree the fall of the Jewish nation would be near. Solomon in
alarm buried the wood deep in the earth, and the spot was covered by
the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before the crucifixion the tree floated
on that water, and ultimately, as the cross, bore its fruit. [112]
In our old Russian picture (Fig. 8) Seth is shown offering a branch
of the Tree of Knowledge to his father Adam. That it should spring up
to be the Tree of Life is simply in obedience to Magian and Gnostic
theories, which generally turn on some scheme by which the Good turns
against the Evil Mind the point of his own weapon. These were the
influences which gave to christian doctrines on the subject their
perilous precision. The universal tradition was that Adam was the
first person liberated by Christ from hell; and this corresponded
with an equally wide belief that all who were saved by the death
of Christ and his descent into hell were at once raised into the
moral condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall,--to eat the food
and breathe the holy air of Paradise.
An honest mirror was held up before this theology by the christian
Adamites. Their movement (second and third centuries) was a most
legitimate outcome of the Pauline and Johannine gospel. The author of
this so-called 'heresy,' Prodicus, really anticipated the Methodist
doctrine of 'sanctification,' and he was only consistent in admonishing
his followers that clothing was, in the Bible, the original badge
of carnal guilt and shame, and was no longer necessary for those
whom Christ had redeemed from the Fall and raised to the original
innocence of Adam and Eve. These believers, in the appropriate
climate of Northern Africa, had no difficulty in carrying out their
doctrine practically, and having named their churches 'Paradises,'
assembled in them quite naked. There is still a superstition in
the East that a snake will never attack one who is naked. The same
Adamite doctrine--a prelapsarian perfection symbolised by nudity--was
taught by John Picard in Bohemia, and a flourishing sect of 'Adamites'
arose there in the fifteenth century. The Slavonian Adamites of the
last century--and they are known to carry on their services still in
secret--not only dispense with clothing, but also with sacraments and
ceremonies, which are for the imperfect, not for the perfected. Again
and again has this logical result of the popular theology appeared,
and with increasingly gross circumstances, as the refined and
intelligent abandon except in name the corresponding dogmas. It is
an impressive fact that Paul's central doctrine of 'a new creature'
is now adopted with most realistic orthodoxy by the Mormons of Utah,
whose initiation consists of a dramatic performance on each candidate
of moulding the body out of clay, breathing in the nostrils, the
'deep sleep' presentation of an Eve to each Adam, the temptation,
fall, and redemption. The 'saints' thus made, unfortunately, seem
to have equally realistic ideas that the Gentiles are adherents of
the Prince of this world, and their sacramental bands have shown some
striking imitations of those events of history which, when not labelled
'Christian,' are pronounced barbarous. Now that the old dogmatic system
is being left more and more to the ignorant and vulgar to make over
into their own image and likeness, it may be hoped that elsewhere also
the error that libels and outrages nature will run to seed; for error,
like the aloe, has its period when it shoots up a high stem and--dies.