THOUGHTS AND INTERPRETATIONS.
I lately heard the story of a pious negro woman whose faith in hell
was sorely tried by a sceptic who asked her how brimstone enough could
be found to burn all the wicked people in the world. After taking
some days for reflection, the old woman, when next challenged by the
sceptic, replied, that she had concluded that 'every man took his
own brimstone.' This humble saint was unconscious that her instinct
had reached the finest thought of Milton, whose Satan says 'Myself am
hell.' Marlowe's Mephistopheles also says, 'Where we are is hell.' And,
far back as the year 633, the holy man Fursey, who believed himself to
have been guided by an angel near the region of the damned, related
a vision much like the view of the African woman. There were four
fires--Falsehood, Covetousness, Discord, Injustice--which joined to
form one great flame. When this drew near, Fursey, in fear, said,
'Lord, behold the fire draws near me.' The angel answered, 'That
which you did not kindle shall not burn you.'
Such association of any principle of justice, even in form so crude,
has become rare enough in Christendom to excite applause when it
appears, though the applause has about it that infusion of the
grotesque which one perceives when gallery-gods cheer the actor who
heroically declares that a man ought not to strike a woman. When we
go back to the atmosphere of Paganism we find that retribution had
among them a real meaning. Nothing can be in more remarkable contrast
than the disorderly characterless hell of Christendom, into which the
murderer and the man who confuses the Persons of the Godhead alike
burn everlastingly in most inappropriate fires, and the Hades of Egypt,
Greece, and Rome, where every punishment bears relation to the offence,
and is limited in duration to the degree of the offence.
'The Egyptians,' says Herodotus (ii. 123), 'were the first who asserted
that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body perishes it
enters into some other animal, constantly springing into existence; and
when it has passed through the different kinds of terrestrial, marine,
and aerial beings, it again enters into the body of a man that is born,
and that this revolution is made in three thousand years.' Probably
Plato imported from Egypt his fancy of the return of one dead to
relate the scenes of heaven and hell, Er the Armenian (Republic,
x. 614) suggesting an evolution of Rhampsinitus (Herod. ii. 122),
who descended to Hades alive, played dice with Ceres, and brought
back gold. The vision of Er represents a terrible hell, indeed, but
those punished were chiefly murderers and tyrants. They are punished
tenfold for every wrong they had committed. But when this punishment
is ended, each soul must return to the earth in such animal form
as he or she might select. The animals, too, had their choice. Er
saw that the choice was generally determined by the previous earthly
life,--many becoming animals because of some spite derived from their
experience. 'And not only did men pass into animals, but I must also
mention that there were animals tame and wild who changed into one
another, and into corresponding human natures, the good into the
gentle, the evil into the savage, in all sorts of combinations.' Sly
Plato! Such is his estimate of what men's selections of their paradises
are worth!
Orpheus chose to be a swan, hating to be born of woman, because women
murdered him; Ajax became a lion and Agamemnon an eagle, because
they had suffered injustice from men; Atalanta would be an athlete,
and the jester Thersites a monkey; and Odysseus went about to find
the life of a private gentleman with nothing to do. If Plutarch's
friend Thespesius had pondered well this irony of Plato, he would
hardly have brought back from his visit to Hades the modification
that demons were provided to assign the animal forms in which souls
should be born again on earth. They could hardly have done for the
wicked anything worse than Plato shows them doing for themselves. But
the meaning of Plutarch is the same. Thespesius sees demons preparing
the body of a viper for Nero to be born into, since it was said the
young of that reptile destroy their mother at birth.
Among the Persians the idea of future rewards and punishments exceeds
the exactness of the Koran--'Whoso hath done an atom of justice shall
behold it, and whoso hath done an atom of injustice shall behold
it.' The Persian Sufis will even subdivide the soul rather than that
any good act should go down with the larger gross of wickedness. Sádi
tells of a vision where a man was seen in hell, all except one foot,
which was twined with flowers. With all his wickedness the man had
with that foot shoved a bundle of hay within reach of a weary ox.
But while Persian poets--Sufis, ennobling the old name
Sophist--preserved thus a good deal of the universalism of Parsaism,
a Mohammedanism hard as the Scythians who brought it turned the heart
of the people in that country to stone. In the Dresden Library there
is an illuminated Persian MS., thought to be seven hundred years
old, which has in it what may be regarded as a portrait of Ahriman
and Iblis combined. He is red, has a heavy beard and moustache, and
there is a long dragon's crest and mane on his head. He wears a green
and blue skirt about his loins. His tongue rolls thirstily between
his cruel teeth. He superintends a number of fish-like devils which
float in a lake of fire, and swallow the damned. Above this scene
are the glorified souls, including the Shah sitting cross-legged
on his rug, who look down on the tortures beneath with evident
satisfaction. Apparently this is the only amusement which relieves
the ennui of their heaven.
If anything could make a rational man believe in a fiend-principle
in the universe it would be the suggestion of such pictures,
that men have existed who could conceive of happiness enjoyed in
view of such tortures as these. This and some similar pictures in
the East--for instance, that in the Temple of Horrors at Wuchang,
China--are absolutely rayless so far as any touch of humanity is
concerned. Are the Shah and his happy fellow-inspectors of tortures
really fiends? In the light of our present intelligence they may seem
so. Certainly no person of refined feeling could now expect to attain
any heaven while others were in hell. But it would be possible, if
persons could believe that many of those around them are not men and
women at all, but fiends in human shape. These ferocious Hells are
referable to a period when all who incurred the sentences of princes
or priests were seen as mere masks of devils; they were only ascribed
human flesh that they may suffer. The dogma of Hell was doomed from
the moment that the damned were supposed to be really human.
Were those who killed the martyrs of heresy, for instance, to return
to the world and look upon those whom they pierced, they could never
recognise them. Were they to see the statues of Bruno, Huss, Cranmer,
Servetus, the names and forms would not recall to them the persons
they slew. They would be shocked if told that they had burned great
men, and would surely answer, 'Men? We burned no men. The Devil came
among us calling himself Huss, and we made short work with him; he
reappeared under several aliases--Bruno, Servetus, Spinoza, Voltaire:
sometimes we burned him, at other times managed to make him miserable,
thank God! But we were not hurting real men, we were saving them.'
Around such ideas grew our yet uncivilised Codes of Law. In England,
anno 1878, men are refused as jury-men if they will not say, 'So help
me God!' on the ground that an atheist cannot have a conscience. Only
let him really be without conscience, and call himself a christian when
he is not, and courts receive the selfish liar with respect. The old
clause of the death-sentence--'instigated thereto by the Devil'--has
been dropped in the case of murderers, however; and that is some
gain. Torture by fire of the worst murderer for one day would not
be permitted in Christendom. Belief in hell-fire outlasts it for a
little among the ignorant. But what shall be said of the educated
who profess to believe it?
The Venerable Bede relates that, in the year 696, a Northumbrian
gentleman, who had died in the beginning of the night, came to life
and health in the morning, and gave an account of what he had seen
overnight. He had witnessed the conventional tortures of the damned,
but adds--'Being thus on all sides enclosed with enemies and darkness,
and looking about on every side for assistance, there appeared to me,
on the way that I came, as it were, the brightness of a star shining
amidst the darkness, which increased by degrees,'--but we need not
go on to the anti-climax of this vision.
This star rising above all such visions belongs to the vault of the
human Love, and it is visible through all the Ages of Darkness. It
cannot be quenched, and its fiery rays have burnt up mountains of
iniquity.
'In the year 1322,' writes Flögel, after the 'Chronicon Sampetrinum
Erfurtense,' 'there was a play shown at Eisenach, which had a
tragical enough effect. Markgraf Friedrich of Misnia, Landgraf also
of Thuringia, having brought his tedious warfare to a conclusion,
and the country beginning now to revive under peace, his subjects
were busy repaying themselves for the past distresses by all manner
of diversions; to which end, apparently by the Sovereign's order,
a dramatic representation of the Ten Virgins was schemed, and at
Eisenach, in his presence, duly executed. This happened fifteen days
after Easter, by indulgence of the Preaching Friars. In the 'Chronicon
Sampetrinum' stands recorded that the play was enacted in the Bear
Garden (in horto ferarum) by the Clergy and their Scholars. But now,
when it came to pass that the Wise Virgins would give the foolish no
oil, and these latter were shut out from the Bridegroom, they began
to weep bitterly, and called on the Saints to intercede for them;
who however, even with Mary at their head, could effect nothing from
God; but the Foolish Virgins were all sentenced to damnation. Which
things the Landgraf seeing and hearing, he fell into a doubt,
and was very angry; and said 'What then is the Christian Faith,
if God will not take pity on us for intercession of Mary and all
the Saints?' In this anger he continued five days; and the learned
men could hardly enlighten him to understand the Gospel. Thereupon
he was struck with apoplexy, and became speechless and powerless;
in which sad state he continued, bedrid, two years and seven months,
and so died, being then fifty-five.'
In telling the story Carlyle remarks that these 'Ten Virgins at
Eisenach are more fatal to warlike men than Æschylus' Furies at
Athens were to weak women.' Even so, until great-hearted men rose up
at Eisenach and elsewhere to begin the work destined to prove fatal
alike to heartless Virgins and Furies. That star of a warrior's
Compassion, hovering over the foolish Friars and their midnight
Gospel, beams far. The story reminds me of an incident related of
a mining district in California, where a rude theatre was erected,
and a company gave, as their first performance, Othello. When the
scene of Desdemona's suffocation approached, a stalwart miner leaped
on the stage, and pulling out his six-shooter, said to the Moor,
'You damned nigger! if you touch that woman I'll blow the top of your
head off!' A dozen roughs, clambering over the footlights, cried,
'Right Joe! we'll stand by you!' The manager met the emergency by
crying, 'Don't shoot, boys! This play was wrote by Bill Shakespear;
he's an old Californian, and it's all in fun!' Had this Moor proceeded
to roast Desdemona in fire with any verisimilitude, it is doubtful
if the manager could have saved him by an argument reminding the
miners that such was the divine way with sinners in the region to
which most of them were going. The top of that theologic hell's head
is not very safe in these days when human nature is unchained with
all its six-shooters, each liable to be touched off by fire from that
Star revolving in the sphere of Compassion.
Day after day I gazed upon Michael Angelo's 'Last Judgment' in the
Sistine Chapel. The artist was in his sixtieth year when Pope Clement
VII. invited him to cover a wall sixty feet high and nearly as wide
with a picture of the Day of Wrath. In seven years he had finished
it. Clement was dead. Pope Paul IV. looked at it, and liked it not:
all he could see was a vast number of naked figures; so he said it
was not fit for the Sistine Chapel, and must be destroyed. One of
Michael Angelo's pupils saved it by draping some of the figures. Time
went on, and another Pope came who insisted on more drapery,--so the
work was disfigured again. However, popular ridicule saved this from
going very far, and so there remains the tremendous scene. But Popes
and Cardinals always disliked it. The first impression I received
from it was that of a complete representation of all the physical
powers belonging to organised life; though the forms are human, every
animal power is there, leaping, crouching, crawling,--every sinew,
joint, muscle, portrayed in completest tension and action. Then the
eye wanders from face to face, and every passion that ever crawled or
prowled in jungle or swamp is pictured. The most unpleasant expressions
seemed to me those of the martyrs. They came up from their graves,
each bringing the instrument by which he had suffered, and offering
it in witness against the poor wretches who came to be judged; and
there was a look of self-righteous satisfaction on their faces as
they witnessed the persecution of their persecutors. As for Christ,
he was like a fury, with hand uplifted against the doomed, his hair
wildly floating. The tortured people below are not in contrast with
the blessed above; they who are in heaven look rather more stupid
than the others, and rather pleased with the anguish they witness,
but not more saintly. But gradually the eye, having wandered over
the vast canvas, from the tortured Cardinal at the bottom up to the
furious Judge,--alights on a face which, once seen, is never to be
forgotten. Beautiful she is, that Mary beside the Judge, and more
beautiful for the pain that is on her face. She has drawn her drapery
to veil from her sight the anguish below; she has turned her face
from the Judge,--does not see her son in him; she looks not upon the
blessed,--for she, the gentle mother, is not in heaven; she cannot have
joy in sight of misery. In that one face of pure womanly sympathy--that
beauty transfigured in its compassionateness--the artist put his soul,
his religion. Mary's face quenches all the painted flames. They are at
once made impossible. The same universe could not produce both a hell
and that horror of it. The furious Jesus is changed to a phantasm;
he could never be born of such a mother. If the Popes had only wished
to hide the nakedness of their own dogmas they ought to have blotted
out Mary's face; for as it now stands the rest of the forms are but
shapes to show how all the wild forms and passions of human animalism
gather as a frame round that which is their consummate flower,--the
spirit of love enshrined in its perfect human expression.
So was it that Michael Angelo could not serve two masters. Popes might
employ him, but he could not do the work they liked. 'The passive
master lent his hand to the vast soul that o'er him planned.' He
could not help it. The lover of beauty could not paint the Day of
Wrath without setting above it that face like a star which shines
through its unreality, burns up its ugliness, and leaves the picture
a magnificent interpretation of the forms of nature and hopes of the
world,--a cardinal hypocrite at the bottom, an ideal woman at the top.
Exhausted by the too-much glory of the visions of Paradise which he had
seen, Dante came forth to the threshold opening on the world of human
life, from which he had parted for a space, and there sank down. As
he lay there angels caused lilies to grow beneath and around him,
and myrtle to rise and intertwine for a bower over him, and their
happy voices, wafted in low-toned hymns, brought soft sleep to his
overwrought senses. Long had he slumbered before the light of familiar
day stole once more into those deep eyes. The angels had departed. The
poet awoke to find himself alone, and with a sigh he said to himself,
'It is, then, all but a dream.' As he arose he saw before him a man
of noble mien and shining countenance, habited in an Eastern robe,
who returned his gaze with an interest equal to his own. Quickly the
eyes of Dante searched the ground beside the stranger to see if he
were shadowless: convinced thus that he was true flesh and blood,
the Florentine thus addressed him:--
'Pilgrim, for such thou seemest, may we meet in simple human
brotherhood? If, as thy garb suggests, thou comest from afar, perchance
the friendly greeting, even of one who in his native city is still
himself a pilgrim, may not be unwelcome.
'Heart to heart be our kiss, my brother; yet must I journey without
delay to those who watch and wait for wondrous tidings that I bear.
'Friend! I hear some meaning deeper than thy words. If 'twere but as
satisfying natural curiosity, answer not; but if thou bearest a burden
of tidings glad for all human-kind, speak! Who art thou? whence comest,
and with what message freighted?
'Arda Viráf is the name I bear; from Persia have I come; but by what
strange paths have reached this spot know I not, save that through
splendours of worlds invisible to mortal sense I have journeyed,
nor encountered human form till I found thee slumbering on this spot.
'Trebly then art thou my brother! I too have but now, as to my confused
sense it seems, emerged from that vast journey. Thou clearest from
me gathering doubts that those visions were illusive. Yet, as even
things we really see are often overlaid by images that lurk in the
eye, I pray thee tell me something thou hast seen, so that perchance
we may part with mutual confirmation of our vision.
'That gladly will I do. When the Avesta had been destroyed, and the
sages of Iran disagreed as to the true religion, they agreed that
one should be chosen by lot to drink the sacred draught of Vishtasp,
that he might pass to the invisible world and bring intelligence
therefrom. On me the lot fell. Beside the fire that has never gone
out, surrounded by holy women who chanted our hymns, I drank the three
cups--Well Thought, Well Said, Well Done. Then as I slept there rose
before me a high stairway of three steps; on the first was written,
Well Thought; on the second, Well Said; on the third, Well Done. By
the first step I reached the realm where good thoughts are honoured:
there were the thinkers whose starlike radiance ever increased. They
offered no prayers, they chanted no liturgies. Above all was the
sphere of the liberal. The next step brought me to the circle of
great and truthful speakers: these walked in lofty splendour. The
third step brought me to the heaven of good actions. I saw the souls
of agriculturists surrounded by spirits of water and earth, trees and
cattle. The artisans were seated on embellished thrones. Sublime were
the seats of teachers, interceders, peace-makers; and the religious
walked in light and joy with which none are satiated.
'Sawest thou the fairest of earth-born ladies--Beatrice?
'I saw indeed a lady most fair. In a pleasant grove lay the form
of a man who had but then parted from earth. When he had awakened,
he walked through the grove and there met him this most beautiful
maiden. To her he said, 'Who art thou, so fair beyond all whom I
have seen in the land of the living?' To him she replied, 'O youth,
I am thy actions.' Can this be thy lady Beatrice?
'But sawest thou no hell? no dire punishments?
'Alas! sad scenes I witnessed, sufferers whose hell was that their
darkness was amid the abodes of splendour. Amid all that glow one newly
risen from earth walked shivering with cold, and there walked ever
by his side a hideous hag. On her he turned and said, 'Who art thou,
that ever movest beside me, thou that art monstrous beyond all that
I have seen on earth?' To him she replied, 'Man, I am thy actions.'
'But who were those glorious ones thou sawest in Paradise?
'Some of their names I did indeed learn--Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato,
Buddha, Confucius, Christ.
'What do I hear! knowest thou that none of these save that last
holy one--whom methinks thou namest too lightly among men--were
baptized? Those have these eyes sorrowfully beheld in pain through
the mysterious justice of God.
'Thinkest thou, then, thy own compassion deeper than the mercy of
Ormuzd? But, ah! now indeed I do remember. As I conversed with the
sages I had named, they related to me this strange event. By guidance
of one of their number, Virgil by name, there had come among them
from the earth a most powerful magician. He bore the name of Dante. By
mighty spells this being had cast them all into a sad circle which he
called Limbo, over whose gate he wrote, though with eyes full of tears,
'All hope abandon, ye who enter here!' Thus were they in great sorrow
and dismay. But, presently, as this strange Dante was about to pass
on, so they related, he looked upon the face of one among them so pure
and noble that though he had styled him 'pagan,' he could not bear to
abandon him there. This was Cato of Utica. Him this Dante led to the
door, and gave him liberty on condition that he would be warder of his
unbaptized brethren, and by no means let any of them escape. No sooner,
however, was this done than this magician beheld others who moved
his reverence,--among them Trajan and Ripheus,--and overcome by an
impulse of love, he opened a window in the side of Limbo, bidding them
emerge into light. He then waved his christian wand to close up this
aperture, and passed away, supposing that he had done so; but the limit
of that magician's power had been reached, the window was but veiled,
and after he had gone all these unbaptized ones passed out by that
way, and reascended to the glory they had enjoyed before this Dante
had brought his alien sorceries to bear upon them for a brief space.
'Can this be true? Is it indeed so that all the sages and poets of
the world are now in equal rank whether or not they have been sealed
as members of Christ?
'Brother, thy brow is overcast. What! can one so pure and high of
nature as thou desire that the gentle Christ, whom I saw embracing
the sages and prophets of other ages, should turn upon them with
hatred and bind them in gloom and pain like this Dante?'
Thereupon, with a flood of tears, Dante fell at the feet of Arda Viráf,
and kissed the hem of his skirt. 'Purer is thy vision, O pilgrim,
than mine,' he said. 'I fear that I have but borne with me to the
invisible world the small prejudices of my little Church, which hath
taught me to limit the Love which I now see to be boundless. Thou who
hast learned from thy Zoroaster that the meaning of God is the end of
all evil, a universe climbing to its flower in joy, deign to take the
hand of thy servant and make him worthy to be thy friend,--with thee
henceforth to abandon the poor formulas which ignorance substitutes
for virtue, and ascend to the beautiful summits thou has visited by
the stairway of good thoughts, good words, good deeds.'
In 1745 Swedenborg was a student of Natural Philosophy in London. In
the April of that year his 'revelations' began amid the smoke
and toil of the great metropolis. 'I was hungry and ate with great
appetite. Towards the end of the meal I remarked a kind of mist spread
before my eyes, and I saw the floor of my room covered with hideous
reptiles, such as serpents, toads, and the like. I was astonished,
having all my wits about me, being perfectly conscious. The darkness
attained its height and then passed away. I now saw a Man sitting
in the corner of the chamber. As I had thought myself alone, I was
greatly frightened when he said to me, 'Eat not as much.'
In Swedenborg's Diary the incident is related more particularly. 'In
the middle of the day, at dinner, an Angel spoke to me, and told me
not to eat too much at table. Whilst he was with me, there plainly
appeared to me a kind of vapour steaming from the pores of my body. It
was a most visible watery vapour, and fell downwards to the ground
upon the carpet, where it collected and turned into divers vermin,
which were gathered together under the table, and in a moment went
off with a pop or noise. A fiery light appeared within them, and a
sound was heard, pronouncing that all the vermin that could possibly
be generated by unseemly appetite were thus cast out of my body,
and burnt up, and that I was now cleansed from them. Hence we may
know what luxury and the like have for their bosom contents.'
Continuing the first account Swedenborg said, 'The following
night the same Man appeared to me again. I was this time not at
all alarmed. The Man said, 'I am God, the Lord, the Creator, and
Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold to men the
spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will myself dictate to
thee what thou shalt write.' The same night the world of spirits,
hell and heaven, were convincingly opened to me, where I found many
persons of my acquaintance of all conditions. From that day forth I
gave up all worldly learning, and laboured only in spiritual things,
according to what the Lord commanded me to write.'
He 'gave up all worldly learning,' shut his intellectual eyes,
and sank under all the nightmares which his first vision saw burnt
up as vermin. After his fiftieth year, says Emerson, he falls into
jealousy of his intellect, makes war on it, and the violence is
instantly avenged. But the portrait of the blinded mystic as drawn
by the clear seer is too impressive an illustration to be omitted here.
'A vampyre sits in the seat of the prophet and turns with gloomy
appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily
weave its nest or a mole bore in the ground than this seer of the
souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more abominable than the
last, round every new crew of offenders. He was let down through a
column that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits,
that he might descend safely amongst the unhappy, and witness
the vastation of souls; and heard there, for a long continuance,
their lamentations; he saw their tormentors, who increase and strain
pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the jugglers, the hell of the
assassins, the hell of the lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill
and boil men; the infernal tun of the deceitful; the excrementitious
hells; the hell of the revengful, whose faces resembled a round,
broad cake, and their arms rotate like a wheel.... The universe, in
his poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only reflects the mind
of the magnetiser.... Swedenborg and Behmon both failed by attaching
themselves to the christian symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment,
which carries innumerable christianities, humanities, divinities, in
its bosom.... Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious theologic
limitation, is this Inferno. Swedenborg has devils. Evil, according
to old philosophers, is good in the making. That pure malignity can
exist, is the extreme proposition of unbelief.... To what a painful
perversion had Gothic theology arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no
conversion for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never relaxed;
the carrion in the sun will convert itself to grass and flowers;
and man, though in brothels, or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way
to all that is good and true.'
But even the Hell of Swedenborg is not free from the soft potency
of our star. It is almost painful, indeed, to see its spiritual
ray mingling with the fiery fever-shapes which Swedenborg meets
on his way through the column of brass,--made, had he known it,
not of angels but of savage scriptures. 'I gave up all worldly
learning'--he says: but it did not give him up all at once. 'They
(the damned) suffer ineffable torments; but it was permitted to
relieve or console them with a certain degree of hope, so that they
should not entirely despair. For they said they believed the torment
would be eternal. They were relieved or consoled by saying that God
Messiah is merciful, and that in His Word we read that 'the prisoners
will be sent forth from the pit' (Zech. ix. 2). Swedenborg reports
that God Messiah appeared to these spirits, and even embraced and
kissed one who had been raised from 'the greatest torment.' He says,
'Punishment for the sake of punishment is the punishment of a devil,'
and affirms that all punishment is 'to take away evils or to induce a
faculty of doing good.' These utterances are in his Diary, and were
written before he had got to the bottom of his Calvinistic column;
but even in the 'Arcana Celestia' there is a gleam:--'Such is the
equilibrium of all things in another life that evil punishes itself,
and unless it were removed by punishments the evil spirits must
necessarily be kept in some hell to eternity.'
Reductio ad absurdum! And yet Swedenborgians insist upon the dogma of
everlasting punishments; to sustain which they appeal from Swedenborg
half-sober to Swedenborg mentally drunk.
In the Library at Dresden there is a series of old pictures said to be
Mexican, and which I was told had been purchased from a Jew in Vienna,
containing devils mainly of serpent characters blended with those of
humanity. One was a fantastic serpent with human head, sharp snoutish
nose, many eyes, slight wings, and tongue lolling out. Another had a
human head and reptilian tail. A third is human except for the double
tongue darting out. A fourth has issuing from the back of his head a
serpent whose large dragon head is swallowing a human embryo. Whatever
tribe it was that originated these pictures must have had very strong
impressions of the survival of the serpent in some men.
I was reminded of the picture of the serpent swallowing the human
embryo while looking at the wall-pictures in Russian churches
representing the conventional serpent with devils nestling at intervals
along its body, as represented in our Figure (10). Professor Buslaef
gave me the right archæology of this, no doubt, but the devils
themselves, as I gazed, seemed to intimate another theory with their
fair forms. They might have been winged angels but for their hair
of flame and cruel hooks. They seemed to say, 'We were the ancient
embryo-gods of the human imagination, but the serpent swallowed us. He
swallowed us successively as one after another we availed ourselves
of his cunning in our priesthoods; as we brought his cruel coils to
crush those who dared to outgrow our cult; as we imitated his fang in
the deadliness with which we bit the heel of every advancing thinker;
as, when worsted in our struggle against reason, we took to the double
tongue, praising with one fork the virtues which we poisoned with the
other. Now we are degraded with him for ever, bound to him by these
rings, labelled with the sins we have committed.'
It was by a true experience that the ancients so generally took
nocturnal animals to be types of diabolism. Corresponding to them
are the sleepless activities of morally unawakened men. The animal is
a sleeping man. Its passions and instincts are acted out in what to
rational man would be dreams. In dreams, especially when influenced
by disease, a man may mentally relapse very far, and pass through
kennels and styes, which are such even when somewhat decorated by
shreds of the familiar human environment. The nocturnal form of
intellect is cunning; the obscuration of religion is superstition;
the dark shadow that falls on love turns it to lust. These wolves
and bats, on which no ideal has dawned, do not prowl or flit through
man in their natural forms: in the half-awake consciousness, whose
starlight attends man amid his darkness, their misty outlines swell,
and in the feverish unenlightened conscience they become phantasms of
his animalism--werewolves, vampyres. The awakening of reason in any
animal is through all the phases of cerebral and social evolution. A
wise man said to his son who was afraid to enter the dark, 'Go on,
child; you will never see anything worse than yourself.'
The hare-lip, which we sometimes see in the human face, is there
an arrested development. Every lip is at some embryonic period a
hare-lip. The development of man's visible part has gone on much longer
than his intellectual and moral evolution, and abnormalities in it are
rare in comparison with the number of survivals from the animal world
in his temper, his faith, and his manners. Criminals are men living out
their arrested moral developments. They who regard them as instigated
by a devil are those whose arrest is mental. The eye of reason will
deal with both all the more effectively, because with as little wrath
as a surgeon feels towards the hare-lip he endeavours to humanise.
It is an impressive fact that the great and reverent mind of Spinoza,
in pondering the problem of Evil and the theology which ascribed
it to a Devil, was unconsciously led to anticipate by more than a
century the first (modern) scientific suggestions of the principle
of Evolution. In his early treatise, 'De Deo et Homine,' occurs this
short but momentous chapter--
'De Diabolis. If the Devil be an Entity contrary in all respects to
God, having nothing of God in his nature, there can be nothing in
common with God.
'Is he assumed to be a thinking Entity, as some will have it, who never
wills and never does any good, and who sets himself in opposition to
God on all occasions, he would assuredly be a very wretched being,
and, could prayers do anything for him, his amendment were much to
be implored.
'But let us ask whether so miserable an object could exist even for an
instant; and, the question put, we see at once that it could not; for
from the perfection of a thing proceeds its power of continuance: the
more of the Essential and Divine a thing possesses, the more enduring
it is. But how could the Devil, having no trace of perfection in him,
exist at all? Add to this, that the stability or duration of a thinking
thing depends entirely on its love of and union with God, and that
the opposite of this state in every particular being presumed in the
Devil, it is obviously impossible that there can be any such being.
'And then there is indeed no necessity to presume the existence of a
Devil; for the causes of hate, envy, anger, and all such passions are
readily enough to be discovered; and there is no occasion for resort
to fiction to account for the evils they engender.'
In the course of his correspondence with the most learned men of
his time, Spinoza was severely questioned concerning his views upon
human wickedness, the disobedience of Adam, and so forth. He said--to
abridge his answers--If there be any essential or positive evil in men,
God is the author and continuer of that evil. But what is called evil
in them is their degree of imperfection as compared with those more
perfect. Adam, in the abstract, is a man eating an apple. That is
not in itself an evil action. Acts condemned in man are often admired
in animals,--as the jealousy of doves,--and regarded as evidence of
their perfection. Although man must restrain the forces of nature and
direct them to his purposes, it is a superstition to suppose that God
is angry against such forces. It is an error in man to identify his
little inconveniences as obstacles to God. Let him withdraw himself
from the consideration and nothing is found evil. Whatever exists,
exists by reason of its perfection for its own ends,--which may or
may not be those of men.
Spinoza's aphorism, 'From the perfection of a thing proceeds its power
of continuance,' is the earliest modern statement of the doctrine now
called 'survival of the fittest.' The notion of a Devil involves the
solecism of a being surviving through its unfitness for survival.
Spinoza was Copernicus of the moral Cosmos. The great German who
discovered to men that their little planet was not the one centre and
single care of nature, led the human mind out of a closet and gave
it a universe. But dogma still clung to the closet; where indeed
each sect still remains, holding its little interest to be the aim
of the solar system, and all outside it to be part of a countless
host, marshalled by a Prince of Evil, whose eternal war is waged
against that formidable pulpiteer whose sermon is sending dismay
through pandemonium. But for rational men all that is ended, and its
decline began when Spinoza warned men against looking at the moral
universe from the pin-hole of their egotism. That closet-creation,
whose laws were seen now acting now suspended to suit the affairs of
men, disappeared, and man was led to adore the All.
It is a small thing that man can bruise the serpent's head, if its
fang still carries its venom so deep in his reason as to blacken
all nature with a sense of triumphant malevolence. To the eye of
judicial man, instructed to decide every case without bribe of his
own interest as a rival animal, the serpent's fang is one of the most
perfect adaptations of means to ends in nature. Were a corresponding
perfection in every human mind, the world would fulfil the mystical
dream of the East, which gave one name to the serpents that bit them
in the wilderness and seraphim singing round the eternal throne.
'Cursed be the Hebrew who shall either eat pork, or permit his son to
be instructed in the learning of the Greeks.' So says the Talmud, with
a voice transmitted from the 'kingdom of priests' (Exod. xix. 6). From
the altar of 'unhewn stone' came the curse upon Art, and upon the
race that represented culture raising its tool upon the rudeness
of nature. That curse of the Talmud recoiled fearfully. The Jewish
priesthood had their son in Peter with his vision of clean and unclean
animals, and the command, 'Slay and eat!' Uninstructed is this heir
of priestly Judaism 'in the learning of the Greeks,' consequently
his way of converting Gentiles--the herd of swine, the goyim--is to
convert them into christian protoplasm. 'Slay and eat,' became the
cry of the elect, and their first victim was the paternal Jew who
taught them that pork and Greek learning belonged to the same category.
But there was another Jewish nation not composed of priests. While
the priestly kingdom is typified in Jonah announcing the destruction
of Nineveh, who, because the great city still goes on, reproaches
Jehovah, the nation of the poets has now its Jehovah II. who sees the
humiliation of the tribal priesthood as a withered gourd compared
with the arts, wealth, and human interests of a Gentile city. 'The
Lord repented.' The first Gospel to the Gentiles is in that gentle
thought for the uncircumcised Ninevites. But it was reached too
late. When it gained expression in Christ welcoming Greeks, and seeing
in stones possible 'children of Abraham;' in Paul acknowledging debt
to barbarians and taking his texts from Greek altars or poets; the
evolution of the ideal element in Hebrew religion had gained much. But
historic combinations raised the judaisers to a throne, and all the
narrowness of their priesthood was re-enacted as Christianity.
The column of brass in whose hollow centre the fine brain of Swedenborg
was imprisoned is a fit similitude of the christian formula. The
whole moral attitude of Christianity towards nature is represented in
his first vision. The beginning of his spiritual career is announced
by the evaporation of his animal nature in the form of vermin. The
christian hell is present, and these animal parts are burnt up. Among
those burnt-up powers of Swedenborg, one of the serpents must have been
his intellect. 'From that day forth I gave up all worldly learning.'
Here we have the ideal christian caught up to his paradise even while
his outward shape is visible. But what if we were all to become like
that? Suppose all the animal powers and desires were to evaporate out
of mankind and to be burnt up! Were that to occur to-day the effect
on the morrow would be but faintly told in that which would be caused
by sudden evaporations of steam from all the engines of the world. We
may imagine a band of philanthropists, sorely disturbed by the number
of accidents incidental to steam-locomotion, who should conspire
to go at daybreak to all the engine-houses and stations in England,
and, just as the engines were about to start for their work, should
quench their fires, let off their steam, and break their works. That
would be but a brief paralysis of the work of one country; but what
would be the result if the animal nature of man and its desires,
the works and trades that minister to the 'pomps and vanities,'
all worldly aims and joys, should be burnt up in fires of fanaticism!
Yet to that fatal aim Christianity gave itself,--so contrary to that
great heart in which was mirrored the beautiful world, its lilies
and little children, and where love shed its beams on the just
and the unjust! The organising principle of Christianity was that
which crucified Jesus and took his tomb for corner-stone of a system
modelled after what he hated. Its central purpose was to effect a
divorce between the moral and the animal nature of man. One is called
flesh and the other spirit; one was the child of God, the other the
child of the Devil. It rent asunder that which was really one; its
whole history, so long as it was in earnest, was the fanatical effort
to keep asunder by violence those two halves ever seeking harmony;
its history since its falsity was exposed has been the hypocrisy of
professing in word what is impossible in deed.
Beside the christian vision of Swedenborg, in which the judaic
priest's curse on swinish Greek learning found apotheosis, let us set
the vision of a Jewish seer in whom the humanity that spared Nineveh
found expression. The seer is Philo,--name rightly belonging to that
pure mind in which the starry ideals of his Semitic race embraced
the sensuous beauty which alone could give them life. Philo (Præm. et
Poenis, sec. 15-20) describes as the first joy of the redeemed earth
the termination of the war between man and animal. That war will end,
he says, 'when the wild beasts in the soul have been tamed. Then
the most ferocious animals will submit to man; scorpions will lose
their stings, and serpents their poison. And, in consequence of the
suppression of that older war between man and beast, the war between
man and man shall also end.'
Here we emerge from Swedenborg's brass column, we pass beyond Peter's
sword called 'Slay-and-eat,' we leave behind the Talmud's curse on
swine and learning: we rise to the clear vision of Hebrew prophecy
which beheld lion and lamb lying down together, a child leading the
wild forces subdued by culture.
'Why not God kill Debbil?' asked Man Friday. It is a question which
not even Psychology has answered, why no Theology has yet suggested
the death of the Devil in the past, or prophesied more than chains
for him in the future. No doubt the need of a 'hangman's whip to
haud the wretch in order' may partly account for it; but with this
may have combined a cause of which it is pleasanter to think--Devils
being animal passions in excess, even the ascetic recoils from their
destruction, with an instinct like that which restrains rats from
gnawing holes through the ship's bottom.
In Goethe's 'Faust' we read, Doch das Antike find' ich zu lebendig. It
is a criticism on the nudity of the Greek forms that appear in the
classical Walpurgis Night. But the authority is not good: it is
Mephistopheles who is disgusted with sight of the human form, and he
says they ought in modern fashion to be plastered over. His sentiments
have prevailed at the Vatican, where the antique statues and the great
pictures of Michael Angelo bear witness to the prurient prudery of the
papal mind. 'Devils are our sins in perspective,' says George Herbert.
Herodotus (ii. 47) says, 'The Egyptians consider the pig to be an
impure beast, and therefore if a man, in passing by a pig, should touch
him only with his garments, he forthwith goes to the river and plunges
in; and, in the next place, swineherds, although native Egyptians, are
the only men who are not allowed to enter any of their temples.' The
Egyptians, he says, do not sacrifice the goat; 'and, indeed, their
painters and sculptors represent Pan with the face and legs of a
goat, as the Grecians do; not that they imagine this to be his real
form, for they think him like other gods; but why they represent
him in this way I had rather not mention.' We need not feel the same
prudery. The Egyptians rightly regarded the symbol of sexual desire,
on whose healthy exercise the perpetuation of life depended, as a very
different kind of animalism from that symbolised in the pig's love of
refuse and garbage. Their association of the goat with Pan--the lusty
vigour of nature--was the natural preface to the arts of Greece in
which the wild forces were taught their first lesson--Temperance. Pan
becomes musical. The vigour and vitality of human nature find in the
full but not excessive proportions of Apollo, Aphrodite, Artemis,
and others of the bright array, the harmony which Pan with his pipe
preludes. The Greek statue is soul embodied and body ensouled.
Two men had I the happiness to know in my youth, into whose faces I
looked up and saw the throne of Genius illumined by Purity. One of
them, Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote, 'If beauty, softness, and faith in
female forms have their own influence, vices even, in a slight degree,
are thought to improve the expression.' The other, Arthur Hugh Clough,
wrote, 'What we all love is good touched up with evil.' Here are two
brave flowers, of which one grew out of the thorny stem of Puritanism,
the other from the monastic root of Oxford. The 'vices' which could
improve the expression, even for the pure eyes of Emerson, are those
which represent the struggle of human nature to exist in truth,
albeit in misdirection and reaction, amid pious hypocrisies. The
Oxonian scholar had seen enough of the conventionalised characterless
'good' to long for some sign of life and freedom, even though it must
come as a touch of 'evil.' To the artist, nature is never seen in
petrifaction; it is really as well as literally a becoming. The evil
he sees is 'good in the making:' what others call vices are voices
in the wilderness preparing the way of the highest.
'God and the Devil make the whole of Religion,' said Nicoli--speaking,
perhaps, better than he knew. The culture of the world has shown
that the sometime opposed realms of human interest, so personified,
are equally essential. It is through this experience that the Devil
has gained such ample vindication from the poets--as in Rapisardi's
'Lucifero,' a veritable 'bringer of Light,' and Cranch's 'Satan.' From
the latter work ('Satan: A Libretto.' Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874),
which should be more widely known, I quote some lines. Satan says--
I symbolise the wild and deep
And unregenerated wastes of life,
Dark with transmitted tendencies of race
And blind mischance; all crude mistakes of will
And tendency unbalanced by due weight
Of favouring circumstance; all passion blown
By wandering winds; all surplusage of force
Piled up for use, but slipping from its base
Of law and order.
This is the very realm in which the poet and the artist find their
pure-veined quarries, whence arise the forms transfigured in their
vision.
To evoke Helena, Faust, as we have seen, must repair to the
Mothers. But who may these be? They shine from Goethe's page in such
opalescent tints one cannot transfix their sense. They seemed to me
just now the primal conditions, by fulfilling which anything might be
attained, without which, nothing. But now (yet perhaps the difference
is not great) I see the Mothers to be the ancient healthy instincts
and ideals of our race. These took shape in forms of art, whose
evolution had been man's harmony with himself. Christianity, borrowing
thunder of one god, hammer of another, shattered them--shattered our
Mothers! And now learned travellers go about in many lands saying,
'Saw ye my beloved?' Amid cities ruined and buried we are trying to
recover them, fitting limb to limb--so carefully! as if half-conscious
that we are piecing together again the fragments of our own humanity.
'The Devil: Does he Exist, and what does he Do?' Such is the title of
a recent work by Father Delaporte, Professor of Dogma in the Faculty
of Bordeaux. He gives specific directions for exorcism of devils by
means of holy water, the sign of the cross, and other charms. 'These
measures,' says one of his American critics, 'may answer very well
against the French Devil; but our American Beelzebub is a potentate
that goeth not forth on any such hints.' Father Delaporte would
hardly contend that the use of cross and holy water for a thousand
years has been effectual in dislodging the European Beelzebub.
On the whole, I am inclined to prefer the method of the Africans of
the Guinea Coast. They believe in a particularly hideous devil, but
say that the only defence they require against him is a mirror. If any
one will keep a mirror beside him, the Devil must see himself in it,
and he at once rushes away in terror of his own ugliness.
No monster ever conjured up by imagination is more hideous than a
rational being transformed to a beast. Just that is every human being
who has brought his nobler powers down to be slaves of his animal
nature. No eye could look upon that fearful sight unmoved. All man
needs is a true mirror in which his own animalism may see itself. We
cannot borrow for this purpose the arts of Greece, nor the fairy
ideals of Germany, nor the emasculated saints of Christendom. These
were but fragments of the man who has been created by combination of
their powers, and their several ideals are broken bits that cannot
reflect the whole being of man in its proportions or disproportions.
The higher nature of man, polished by culture of all his faculties,
can alone be the faithful mirror before his lower. The clearness of
this mirror in the individual heart depends mainly on the civilisation
and knowledge surrounding it. The discovered law turns once plausible
theories to falsehoods; a noble literature transmutes once popular
books to trash. When Art interprets the realities of nature, when
it shows how much beauty and purity our human nature is capable of,
it holds a mirror before all deformities. At a theatre in the city of
London, I witnessed the performance of an actor who, in the course
of his part, struck a child. He was complimented by a hurricane of
hisses from the crowded gallery. Had those 'gods' up there never
struck children? Possibly. Yet here each had a mirror before him and
recoiled from his worst self. A clergyman relates that, while looking
at pictures in the Bethnal Green Museum, he overheard a poor woman,
who had been gazing on a Madonna, say, 'If I had such a child as
that I believe I could be a good woman.' Who can say what even that
one glance at her life in the ideal reflector may be worth to that
wanderer amid the miseries and temptations of London!
It is not easy for those who have seen what is high and holy to give
their hearts to what is base and unholy. It is as natural for human
nature to love virtue as to love any other beauty. External beauty
is visible to all, and all desire it: the interior beauty is not
visible to superficial glances, but the admiration shown even for its
counterfeits shows how natural it is to admire virtue. But in order
that the charm of this moral beauty may be felt by human nature it
must be related to that nature--real. It must not be some childish
ideal which answers to no need of the man of to-day; not something
imported from a time and place where it had meaning and force to
others where it has none.
When dogmas surviving from the primitive world are brought to behold
themselves in the mirror held up by Science, they cry out, 'That is not
my face! You are caricaturing my beliefs!' This recoil of Superstition
from its own ugliness is the victory of Religion. What priests bewail
as disbelief is faith fleeing from its deformities. Ignorant devotion
proves its need of Science by its terrors of the same, which are like
those of the horse at first sight of its best friend, bearer of its
burthens--the locomotive.
Religion, like every other high feature of human nature, has its animal
counterpart. The animalised religion is superstition. It has various
expressions,--the abjectness of one form, the ferocity of another,
the cunning of a third. It is unconscious of anything higher than
animalism. Its god is a very great animal preying on other animals,
which are laid on his altars; or pleased when smaller animals give
up their part of the earthly feast by starving their passions and
senses. Under the growth of civilisation and intelligence that pious
asceticism is revealed in its true form,--intensified animalism. The
asceticism of one age becomes the self-indulgence of another. The
two-footed animal having discovered that his god does not eat the
meat left for him, eats it himself. Learning that he gets as much
from his god by a wafer and a prayer, he offers these and retains
the gifts, treasures, and pleasures so commuted,--these, however,
being withdrawn from the direction of the higher nature by the fact
of being obtained through the conditions of the lower, and dependent
on their persistence. In process of time the forms and formulas of
religion, detached from all reality--such as no conceivable monarch
could desire--not only become senseless, but depend upon their
senselessness for continuance. They refuse to come at all within the
domain of reason or common-sense, and trust to mental torpor of the
masses, force of habit in the aggregate, self-interest in the wealthy
and powerful, bribes for thinkers and scholars.
Animalism disguised as a religion must render the human religion,
able to raise passions into divine attributes of a perfect manhood,
impossible so long as it continues. That a human religion can ever
come by any process of evolution from a superstition which can only
exist by ministry to the baser motives is a delusion. The only hope of
society is that its independent minds may gain culture, and so surround
this unextinct monster with mirrors that it may perish through shame
at its manifold deformities. These are symbolised in the many-headed
phantasm which is the subject of this work. Demon, Dragon, and Devil
have long paralysed the finest powers of man, peopling nature with
horrors, the heart with fears, and causing the religious sentiment
itself to make actual in history the worst excesses it professed to
combat in its imaginary adversaries. My largest hope is that from
the dragon-guarded well where Truth is too much concealed she may
emerge far enough to bring her mirror before these phantoms of fear,
and with far-darting beams send them back to their caves in Chaos
and ancient Night.
The battlements of the cloisters of Magdalen College, Oxford, are
crowned with an array of figures representing virtues and vices,
with carved allegories of teaching and learning. Under the Governor's
window are the pelican feeding its young from its breast, and the lion,
denoting the tenderness and the strength of a Master of youth. There
follow the professions--the lawyer embracing his client, the physician
with his bottle, the divine as Moses with his tables of the Law. Next
are the slayers of Goliath and other mythical enemies. We come to more
real, albeit monstrous, enemies; to Gluttony in ecclesiastical dress,
with tongue lolling out; and low-browed Luxury without any vesture,
with a wide-mouthed animal-eared face on its belly, the same tongue
lolling out--as in our figures of Typhon and Kali. Drunkenness has
three animal heads--one of a degraded humanity, another a sheep, the
third a goose. Cruelty is a werewolf; a frog-faced Lamia represents
its mixture with Lust; and other vices are represented by other
monsters, chiefly dragons with griffin forms, until the last is
reached--the Devil, who is just opposite the Governor's symbols across
the quadrangle.
So was represented, some centuries ago, the conflict of Ormuzd
and Ahriman, for the young soldiers who enlisted at Oxford for that
struggle. A certain amount of fancy has entered into the execution of
the figures; but, if this be carefully detached, the history which
I have attempted to tell in these volumes may be generally traced
in the Magdalen statues. Each represents some phase in the advance
of the world, when, under new emergencies, earlier symbols were
modified, recombined, and presently replaced by new shapes. It was
found inadequate to keep the scholar throwing stones at the mummy of
Goliath when by his side was living Gluttony in religious garb. The
scriptural symbols are gradually mixed with those of Greek and German
mythology, and by such contact with nature are able to generate forms,
whose lolling tongues, wide mouths, and other expressions, represent
with some realism the physiognomies of brutality let loose through
admission to human shape and power.
It may be that, when they were set up, the young Oxonian passed
shuddering these terrible forms, dreaded these werewolves and
succubæ, and dreamed of going forth to impale dragons. But now the
sculptures excite only laughter or curiosity, when they are not
passed by without notice. Yet the old conflict between Light and
Darkness has not ceased. The ancient forms of it pass away; they
become grotesque. Such was necessarily the case where the excessive
mythological and fanciful elements introduced at one period fall upon
another period when they hide the meaning. Their obscurity, even for
antiquarians, marks how far away from those cold battlefields the
struggle they symbolised has passed. But it ceases not. Some scholars
who listen to the sweet vespers of Magdalen may think the conflict
over; if so, even poor brother Moody may enter the true kingdom before
them; for, when preaching in Baltimore last September, he said, 'Men
are possessed of devils just as much now as they ever were. The devil
of rum is as great as any that ever lived. Why cannot this one and
all others be cast out? Because there is sin in the christian camp.'
The picture which closes this volume has been made for me by the artist
Hennessey, to record an incident which occurred at the door of Nôtre
Dame in Paris last summer. I had been examining an ugly devil there
treading down human forms into hell; but a dear friend looked higher,
and saw a bird brooding over its young on a nest supported by that
same horrible head.
So, above the symbols of wrath in nature, Love still interweaves
heavenly tints with the mystery of life; beside the horns of pain
prepares melodies.
Even so, also, over the animalism which deforms man, rises the animal
perfection which shames that; here ascending above the reign of
violence by a feather's force, and securing to that little creature
a tenderness that could best express the heart of a Christ, when it
would gather humanity under his wings.
This same little scene at the cathedral door came before me again
as I saw the Oxonian youth, with their morning-faces, passing so
heedlessly those ancient sculptures at Magdalen. Over every happy
heart the same old love was brooding, in each nestling faculties
were trying to gain their wings. To what will they aspire, those
students moving so light-hearted amid the dead dragons and satans
of an extinct world? Do they think there are no more dragons to be
slain? Know they that saying, 'He descended into hell;' and that,
from Orpheus and Herakles to Mohammed and Swedenborg, this is the
burthen felt by those who would be saviours of men?
It is not only loving birds that build their nests and rear their young
over the horns of forgotten fears, but, alas! the Harpies too! These,
which Dante saw nestling in still plants--once men who had wronged
themselves--rear successors above the aspirations that have ended in
'nothing but leaves.' The sculptures of Magdalen are incomplete. There
is a vacant side to the quadrangle, which, it is to be feared, awaits
the truer teaching that would fill it up with the real dragons which
no youth could heedlessly pass. Who can carve there the wrongs that
await their powers of redress? Who can set before them, with all
its baseness, the true emblem of pious fraud? When will they see in
any stone mirror the real shape of a double-tongued Culture--one fork
intoning litanies, another whispering contempt of them? The werewolves
of scholarly selfishness, the Lamias of christian casuistry, the subtle
intelligence that is fed by sages and heroes, but turns them to dust,
nay, to venom, because it dares not be human, still crawls--these
are yet to be revealed in all their horrors. Then will the old cry,
Sursum Corda, sound over the ancient symbols whereon scholars waste
their strength, by which they are conquered; and wings of courage shall
bear them with their arrows of light to rescue from Superstition the
holy places of Humanity.
NOTES TO VOLUME I
[1] Pausan. v. 14, 2.
[2] Solin. Polyhistor, i.
[3] Pliny, xxix. 6, 34, init.
[4] Ezekiel xiv. 9.
[5] As in the Bembine Tablet in the Bodleian Library.
[6] See Sale's Koran, p. 281.
[7] Pindar, Fragm., 270.
[8] Tylor's 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' p. 358; 'Prim. Cult.,'
vol. ii. p. 230.
[9] The Gascons of Labourd call the devil 'Seigneur Voland,' and some
revere him as a patron.
[10] 'Myth. of the Aryan Nations,' vol. ii. p. 327.
[11] 'Christian Iconography,' Bohn, p. 158.
[12] 'Videbant faciem egredientis Moysis esse
cornutam.'--Vulg. Exod. xxxiv. 35.
[13] 'Myths and Marvels of Astronomy.' By R. A. Proctor. Chatto &
Windus, 1878.
[14] 'Scenes and Legends,' &c., p. 73.
[15] 'Any Orientalist will appreciate the wonderful hotchpot of Hindu
and Arabic language and religion in the following details, noted down
among rude tribes of the Malay Peninsula. We hear of Jin Bumi, the
earth-god (Arabic jin = demon, Sanskrit bhümi = earth); incense is
burnt to Jewajewa (Sanskrit dewa = god), who intercedes with Pirman,
the supreme invisible deity above the sky (Brahma?); the Moslem
Allah Táala, with his wife Nabi Mahamad (Prophet Mohammed), appear in
the Hinduised characters of creator and destroyer of all things; and
while the spirits worshipped in stones are called by the Hindu term of
'dewa' or deity, Moslem conversion has so far influenced the mind of
the stone-worshipper that he will give to his sacred boulder the name
of Prophet Mohammed.'--Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' vol. ii. p. 230.
[16] Yaçna, 32.
[17] 'The Devil,' &c., from the French of the Rev. A. Réville, p. 5.
[18] Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' vol. ii. p. 299.
[19] 'The Gnostics,' &c., by C. W. King, M.A., p. 153.
[20] Those who wish to examine this matter further will do well to
refer to Badger, 'Nestorians and their Rituals,' in which the whole
of the 'Eulogy' is translated; and to Layard, 'Ninevah and Babylon,'
in which there is a translation of the same by Hormuzd Rassam, the
King of Abyssinia's late prisoner.
[21] The significance of the gargoyles on the churches built on the
foundations of pagan temples may be especially observed at York, where
the forms of various animals well known to Indo-Germanic mythology
appear. They are probably copies of earlier designs, surviving from
the days when the plan of Gregory for the conversion of temples
prevailed. 'The temples of the idols in that nation,' wrote the Pope,
A.C. 601, 'ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in
them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said
temples, let altars be erected and relics placed. For if those temples
are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship
of devils to the service of the true God.'--Bede, Eccl. Hist. ch. 30.
[22] 'The Land of Charity,' by Rev. Samuel Mateer, p. 214.
[23] London 'Times' Calcutta correspondence.
[24] The Persian poet Sádi uses the phrase, 'The whale swallowed
Jonah,' as a familiar expression for sunset; which is in curious
coincidence with a Mimac (Nova Scotian) myth that the holy hero
Glooscap was carried to the happy Sunset Land in a whale. The story
of Jonah has indeed had interesting variants, one of them being
that legend of Oannes, the fish-god, emerging from the Red Sea to
teach Babylonians the arts (a saga of Dagon); but the phrase in the
Book of Jonah--'the belly of Hell'--had a prosaic significance for
the christian mind, and, in connection with speculations concerning
Behemoth and Leviathan, gave us the mediæval Mouth of Hell.
[25] Tablet K 162 in the British Museum. See 'Records of the Past,'
i. 141.
[26] London 'Times,' July 11, 1877.
[27] 'Songs of the Russian People,' p. 409.
[28] 'Primitive Culture.'
[29] Cæsarius D'Heisterbach, Miracul. iii.
[30] Lev. iii. 15.
[31] Du Perron, 'Vie de Zoroastre.'
[32] The principle similia similibus curantur is a very ancient one;
but though it may have originated in a euphemistic or propitiatory
aim, the homoeopathist may claim that it could hardly have lived
unless it had been found to have some practical advantages.
[33] Sonnerat's 'Travels,' ii. 38.
[34] Deutsch, 'Literary Remains,' p. 178.
[35] Isa. lvii. 5; Ezek. xvi. 20; Jer. xix. 5.
[36] The 'Jewish World.'
[37] 'Observations on Popular Antiquities,' &c., by John Brand. With
the additions of Sir Henry Ellis. An entirely new and revised
edition. Chatto & Windus, 1877. See especially the chapter on 'Summer
Solstice,' p. 165.
[38] 'Pyra, a bonefire, wherein men's bodyes were burned.'--Cooper's
Thesaurus. Probably from Fr. bon; Wedgewood gives Dan. baun, beacon.
[39] See Chapter i. Compare Numbers xxxi. 23.
[40] Numbers xix. 17.
[41] Ibid. xix. 2, seq.
[42] 'Folklore of China,' p. 121.
[43] In Russia the pigeon, from being anciently consecrated to the
thunder god, has become emblem of the Holy Ghost, or celestial fire,
and as such the foe of earthly fire. Pigeons are trusted as insurers
against fire, and the flight of one through a house is regarded as
a kindly warning of conflagration.
[44] Tablet K 162 in Brit. Mus. Tr. by H. F. Talbot in 'Records of
the Past.'
[45] The Western Mail, March 12, 1874, contains a remarkable letter by
the Arch-Druid, in which he maintains that 'Jesus' is a derivation from
Hea or Hu, Light, and the Christian system a corruption of Bardism.
[46] 'L'Enfer,' p. 5.
[47] Dennys' 'Folklore of China,' p. 98.
[48] Procopius, 'De Bello Gothico,' iv. 20.
[49] 'Memorials of the Rev. R. S. Hawkes'.
[50] 'La Magie chez les Chaldéens,' iii.
[51] Lönnrot, 'Abhandlung über die Magische Medicin der Finnen.'
[52] 'Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland.' Nimmo, 1876.
[53] 'Rig-Veda,' ii. 33. Tr. by Professor Evans of Michigan.
[54] 'Rig-Veda,' i. 114.
[55] 'Jour. Ceylon R. A. Soc.,' 1865-66.
[56] Welcker, 'Griechische Götterlehre,' vol. i. p. 661.
[57] Moffat, p. 257.
[58] Livingstone, p. 124.
[59] Pöppig, 'Reise in Chile,' vol. ii. p. 358.
[60] Eyre, vol. ii. p. 362.
[61] Tylor, 'Early Hist.,' p. 359.
[62] So confirming the conjecture of Wachsmuth, in 'Das alte
Griechenland im neuen,' p. 23. Elias might also easily be associated
with the name Æolus.
[63] 'Rig-Veda,' x. (Muir).
[64] John iii. 8.
[65] 'The Wheel of the Law,' by Henry Alabaster, Trübner & Co.
[66] 'Rig-Veda,' v. 83 (Wilson).
[67] 'Major's Tr.,' ii. 26.
[68] Wierus' 'Pseudomonarchia Dæmon.'
[69] 'Songs of the Russian People,' by W. R. S. Ralston, M.A.
[70] Isa. xxii. 22. It is remarkable that (according to Callimachus)
Ceres bore a key on her shoulder. She kept the granary of the earth.
[71] Rev. i. 18.; Matt. xvi. 19.
[72] 'Journal N. C. B. R. A. S.,' 1853.
[73] 'Folklore of China,' p. 124. The drum held by the imp in Fig. 3
shows his relation to the thunder-god. In Japan the thunder-god
is represented as having five drums strung together. The wind-god
has a large bag of compressed air between his shoulders; and he has
steel claws, representing the keen and piercing wind. The Tartars in
Siberia believe that a potent demon may be evoked by beating a drum;
their sorcerers provide a tame bear, who starts upon the scene, and
from whom they pretend to get answers to questions. In Nova Scotian
superstition we find demons charmed by drums into quietude. In India
the temple-drum preserved such solemn associations even for the new
theistic sect, the Brahmo-Somaj, that it is said to be still beaten
as accompaniment to the organ sent to their chief church by their
English friends.
[74] Although the Koran and other authorities, as already stated, have
associated the Jinn with etherial fire, Arabic folklore is nearer the
meaning of the word in assigning the name to all demons. The learned
Arabic lexicographer of Beirut, P. Bustani, says 'The Jinn is the
opposite of mankind, or it is whatever is veiled from the sense,
whether angel or devil.'
[75] 'Cuneiform Ins.,' iv. 15.
[76] Ib. ii. 27.
[77] Job xli.
[78] 'Records of the Past,' i.
[79] Lenormant, 'La Magie.'
[80] 'Records of the Past,' iii. 129.
[81] The god of the Euphrates.
[82] The Assyrian has 'of the high places.'
[83] 'Records of the Past,' iii. 129, 130.
[84] 'Henry IV.,' Part 1st, Act 2. 'Heart of Mid-Lothian,' xxv. An
interesting paper on this subject by Mr. Alexander Wilder appeared
in The Evolution, New York, December 16, 1877.
[85] De Plancy.
[86] An individual by this means saw his wife among the witches, so
detecting her unhallowed nature, which gave rise to a saying there
that husbands must not be star-gazing on St. Gerard's Eve.
[87] London 'Times,' July 8, 1875.
[88] This Protean type of both demon and devil must accompany us so
continually through this volume that but little need be said of it
in this chapter.
[89] Canticles ii. 15.
[90] De Gubernatis, II. viii.
[91] 'Our Life in Japan' (Jephson and Elmhirst, 9th Regiment),
Chapman & Hall, 1869.
[92] London 'Times,' June 11, 1877.
[93] Rep. 488.
[94] Literally, goat-song. More probably it has an astrological sense.
[95] E.g., the demon Huorco in the 'Pentamerone.'
[96] See De Gubernatis' 'Zoological Mythology,' which contains further
curious details on this subject.
[97] 'Myths and Myth-makers.' Boston: Osgood & Co.
[98] 'Zoological Mythology,' p. 64.
[99] Koran, xviii.
[100] Wagner. Behold him stop--upon his belly crawl.... The clever
scholar of the students, he!
[101] 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.' London: Chatto & Windus.
[102] 'Spirit of the Beasts of France,' ch. i.
[103] 'Rigv.' i. 105, 18, 42, 2; 'Vendidad,' xix. 108. Quoted by De
Gubernatis ('Zoolog. Mythology,' ii. 142), to whose invaluable work
I am largely indebted in this chapter.
[104] 'Zoolog. Myth.,' ii. 7. Trübner & Co.
[105] 'Zoolog. Myth.,' ii. 108 seq.
[106] Afanasief, v. 28.
[107] Ibid., v. 27.
[108] ii. 6 (De Gubernatis, ii. 117).
[109] Rather the devil of lust than of cruelty, according to Du Cange:
"Occidunt ursum, occiditur diabolus, id est, temptator nostræ carnis."
[110] De Plancy (Dict. Inf.), who also relates an amusing legend of
the bear who came to a German choir, as seen by a sleepy chorister as
he awoke; the naïve narrator of which adds, that this was the devil
sent to hold the singers to their duty! The Lives of the Saints abound
with legends of pious bears, such as that commemorated along with
St. Sergius in Troitska Lavra, near Moscow; and that which St. Gallus
was ungracious enough to banish from Switzerland after it had brought
him firewood in proof of its conversion.
[111] Max Müller, 'Science of Language,' i. 275.
[112] The term is now used very vaguely. Mr. Talboys Wheeler,
speaking of the 'Scythic Nagas' (Hist. of India, i. 147), says:
'In process of time these Nagas became identified with serpents, and
the result has been a strange confusion between serpents and human
beings.' In the 'Padma Purana' we read of 'serpent-like men.' (See my
'Sacred Anthology,' p. 263.)
[113] 'Mahawanso' (Turnour), pp. 3, 6.
[114] Ser. xxxiii. Hardly consistent with De Civ. Dei, xvi. 8.
[115] 'Chips,' ii.
[116] 'Sancti custos Soractis Apollo.'--Æn. xi. 785.
[117] 'Treatise of Spirits,' by John Beaumont, Gent., London, 1705.
[118] London 'Times,' June 11, 1877.