the problem of our condition gathers its complications and intricacies,
so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this mystery
is inconceivable to man;" but the truth of the fall and of original sin
is one of those against which human pride has most constantly rebelled,
is, indeed, the one from which it spontaneously seeks to escape. Hence
of all portions of primeval tradition as to the beginnings of humanity
it has been the earliest obliterated. As soon as men felt the sense of
exultation to which the progress of their civilization and their
conquests in the material world gave birth, they repudiated the idea.
Religious philosophers springing up outside the revelation which was
held in trust by the chosen people took no account of the Fall; and,
indeed, how could that doctrine have been made to harmonize with the
dreams of Pantheism and emanation? By rejecting the notion of original
sin, and substituting the doctrine of emanation for that of creation,
most of the peoples of pagan antiquity were led to the melancholy theory
of the four ages, such as we find it in the Sacred Books of India and
the poetry of Hesiod. It was by the law of decadence and continual
deterioration that the ancient world believed itself so heavily laden.
In proportion as time passed and things departed further and further
from their point of emanation, they corrupt themselves and grow ever
worse. This is the effect of an inexorable fate and of the very force of
their development. In this fatal evolution towards decline, there is no
room left for human freedom; the whole revolves in a circle from which
there is no means of escaping. With Hesiod, each age marks a decadence
from the one that preceded it; and, as the poet explicitly declares
regarding the iron age inaugurated by heroes, each of these ages taken
separately follows the same descending scale as does their totality. In
India the conception of the four ages or _Yuga_, by developing itself
and producing its natural consequences, engenders that of the
_Manvantara_. According to this new theory the world, after having
accomplished its four ages of constant degeneration, undergoes
dissolution (_pralaya_), things having reached such a pitch of
corruption as to be no longer capable of subsisting. Then there springs
up a new universe, with a new humanity--doomed to the same cycle of
necessary and fatal evolution, which the four _Yugas_ in turn go
through, till a new dissolution takes place; and so on to infinity. Here
we have, indeed, fatalism under the most cruelly inexorable form, and
also the most destructive of all true morality. For there can be no
responsibility where there is no freedom, nor is there in reality any
good or evil where corruption is the effect of an irresistible law of
evolution.
How far more consolatory is the Biblical statement, hard though it first
appear to human pride, and how incomparable the prospects it opens out
to the mind! It admits that man, almost as soon as created, fell from
his state of original purity and Edenic bliss. In virtue of the law of
heredity everywhere imprinted on Nature, it was the fault committed by
the first ancestors of humanity in the exercise of their moral freedom
which condemned their descendants to punishment, and by bequeathing to
them an original taint predisposed them to sin. But this predisposition
to sin does not condemn man fatally to its committal; he may escape from
it by the exercise of his free will; and in the same way he may by
personal effort raise himself gradually out of the state of material
decline and misery to which the fault of his ancestors has brought him
down. The pagan conception of the four ages unrolls before us a picture
of constant degeneration, whereas the whole order of Biblical history
from its starting-point in the earliest chapters of Genesis affords the
spectacle of the progressive rise of humanity from the period of its
original fall. On one hand, its course is conceived of as a continual
descent; on the other, as a continual ascent. The Old Testament, which
we must here embrace in one general view, occupies itself but little
indeed with this ever-ascending course as regards the development of
material civilization, of which, however, it cursorily points out the
principal stages with a good deal of exactness. It rather traces for us
the picture of moral progress, and of the more and more definite
development of religious truth, the apprehension of which goes on ever
gaining in spirituality, purity, and breadth amongst the chosen people,
by a series of steps marked by the calling of Abraham, the promulgation
of the Mosaic Law, and, lastly, by the mission of the prophets, who in
their turn announce the last and supreme progress. This is to result
from the coming of the Messiah, and the consequences of this last
providential fact will go on continually developing themselves, and
tending towards a perfection, the term of which lies in the Infinite.
This notion of a rise after the fall, the fruit of man's free effort
assisted by divine grace and working within the limit of his powers
towards the accomplishment of the providential plan, is shown to us by
the Old Testament as existing only in one people, the people of Israel;
but the Christian spirit has extended the view to the universal history
of mankind, and thus has arisen that conception of a law of continual
progress unknown to antiquity, to which our modern society is so
invincibly attached, but which is, we should never forget, an idea due
to Christianity.
Zoroastrianism was unlike other pagan religions in this, that it could
not fail to admit and preserve the ancient tradition of a first sin.
Rather would it have been forced to construct for itself an analogical
myth, had it not found such in the primitive memories that it bent to
its own doctrines. The tradition squared, indeed, but too well with its
system of a dualism having a spiritual basis, although as yet but
imperfectly freed from confusion between the physical and moral worlds.
It explained quite naturally how man, a creature of the good God, and
consequently originally perfect, should have fallen under the power of
the evil spirit, thus contracting a taint which in the moral order
subjected him to sin, in the material to death, and to all the miseries
that poison earthly existence. Thus the notion of the sin of the first
authors of humanity, the heritage of which weighs constantly on their
descendants, is a fundamental one in Mazdean books. The modification of
legends relative to the first man even resulted in the mythic
conceptions of the later periods of Zoroastrianism, in attaching a
rather singular repetition of this first transgression to several
successive generations in the initial ages of humanity.
Originally--and this is at present one of the points most solidly
established by science--originally in those legends common to Oriental
Aryans before their separation into two branches, the first man was the
personage that the Iranians call Yima, and the Indians Yama. A son of
Heaven and not of man, Yima united the characteristics that Genesis
divides between Adam and Noah, fathers both, the one of antediluvian,
the other of postdiluvian humanity. Later, he appears as merely the
first king of the Iranians, but a king whose existence, as well as that
of his subjects, is passed in the midst of Edenic beatitude in the
paradise of Airyana-Vædja,[53] the dwelling-place of the earliest men.
But after a time when life was pure and spotless, Yima committed the sin
which weighs on his descendants, and in consequence of that sin, lost
his power, was cast out of Paradise, and given up to the dominion of the
serpent, the evil spirit Angromainyus,[54] who finally brought about
Yima's death by horrible torments.[55] It is an echo of the tradition
about the loss of Paradise ensuing upon a transgression prompted by the
Evil Spirit that we find in what is incontestably one of the oldest
portions of the Sacred Scriptures of Zoroastrianism.[56] "I created the
first and the best of dwelling-places. I who am Ahuramazda: the
Airyana-Vædja is of excellent nature. But against it Angromainyus, the
murderer, created a thing inimical, the serpent out of the river and the
winter, the work of the Doevas."[57] And it is this scourge, caused by
the power of the serpent, which occasions the departure for ever from
the paradisiacal region.
Later, Yima appears as no longer the first man, or even the first king.
The period of a thousand years assigned to his existence in Eden[58] is
now divided between several successive generations, occupying the same
space of time, from the moment when Gayomaritan, the type of humanity,
began to find himself struggling against the hostility of the Evil
Spirit up to the death of Yima. This is the system adopted by the
Bundehesh. The history of the sin which made Yima lose his primal
happiness, and subjected him to the power of the adversary, still
remains connected with the name of that hero. But this transgression is
no longer the original sin; and in order to be able to attribute it to
the ancestors whence all humanity springs, its story is again told here
(subserving a double purpose) in connection with the first pair whose
existence was completely terrestrial and similar to that of other human
beings--Masha and Mashyâna. "Man was; the father of the world was.
Heaven was destined to be his on condition of his being humble in heart,
and doing with humility the work of the law, of his being pure in
thought, pure in word, pure in deed, and of his never invoking the
Doevas. Under these conditions man and woman were reciprocally to make
each other's happiness. They drew near and became man and wife. At first
they spoke these words: 'It is Ahuramazda who has given the water, the
earth, the trees, the beasts, and the stars, the moon and the sun, and
all the blessings which spring from a pure root and pure fruit.' Later,
falsehood ran through their thoughts, perverted their disposition, and
said to them: 'It is Angromainyus who has given the water, earth, trees,
beasts, and all above-named things.' Thus, it was that in the beginning
Angromainyus deceived them concerning the Doevas, and to the end this
cruel one has only sought to seduce them. By believing this lie, both
became like unto demons, and their souls will be in Hell until the
renewal of bodies."
"They ate during thirty days; they clothed themselves in black raiment.
After these thirty days they went hunting; a white goat presented
itself; with their mouths they drew milk from her udder, and nourished
themselves with that milk which delighted them....
"The Doeva who told the lie, grew more bold, and presented himself a
second time, _and brought them fruits which they ate, and by so doing of
the hundred advantages they enjoyed there remained to them only one_.
"After thirty days and thirty nights a fat white sheep appeared; they
cut off his left ear. Instructed by the celestial Yazata[59] they
brought fire from the tree Konar, by rubbing it with a piece of wood.
Both set fire to the tree; they blew up the fire with their mouths; they
first burnt the branches of the tree Konar, next of the date-tree, and
the myrtle.... They roasted the sheep, dividing it into three parts.[60]
... Having eaten of the flesh of the dog they covered themselves with
the skin of that animal. Then they gave themselves up to the chase and
made themselves garments of the hair of wild beasts."[61]
We may here observe that in Genesis also, vegetable food is the only one
made use of by the first man in his state of bliss and purity; the only
one promised him by God. Animal food does not become lawful till after
the Flood. It is also after the Fall that Adam and Havah first clothe
themselves with coats of skin made for them by Yahveh himself.
The late lamented George Smith believed that amongst the fragments of
the Chaldean Genesis, discovered by him, one might be interpreted as
relating to the fall of the first man, and that it contained the curse
pronounced upon him by the God Ea, after his transgression.[62] But this
was an illusion, which a more profound study of the cuneiform document
has dispelled. Smith's translation, which was too hasty, immature, and,
moreover, hardly intelligible, turns out erroneous from beginning to
end. Since then Mr. Oppert has given us an entirely different version of
the same text,[63] the first possessing a really scientific character,
in which the general meaning becomes tolerably clear, though there are
still many obscure and uncertain details. One thing at least is now
quite established: the fragment has no kind of reference to original sin
and the curse of man. We must therefore leave it entirely outside the
sphere of our present researches; endeavouring, however, to convey a
warning to such as may be tempted, in dependence on the celebrated
Assyriologist, to make use of it in a Commentary on the Bible.
Thus, then, we have no formal and direct proof that the tradition of the
original transgression, as told in our Holy Scriptures, formed part of
the cycle of the records of Babylon and Chaldea, respecting the origin
of the world and of man. Neither do we find any allusion to the subject
in the fragments of Berosus. But, despite this silence, a similarity
between Chaldean and Hebrew traditions on this point, as upon others,
has so great a probability in its favour as almost to amount to a
certainty. Further on we shall return to certain very valid proofs of
the existence of myths relating to a terrestrial paradise in the sacred
traditions of the lower basin of the Euphrates and Tigris. But it
behoves us to dwell for a few moments on the representations of the
sacred and mysterious plant, guarded by celestial genii, that Assyrian
bas-reliefs so often display. Up to the present time no text has been
found to elucidate the meaning of the symbol, and we have to deplore a
want, that no doubt will one of these days be met by the discovery of
new documents. But the study of these figured monuments alone renders it
impossible to doubt the high importance of this representation of the
sacred plant. Whether it appear alone, or, as sometimes happens,
worshipped by royal figures, or, as I have just said, guarded by genii
in an attitude of adoration, it is incontrovertibly one of the loftiest
of religious emblems; and what places this character beyond doubt is,
that we often see above the plant the symbolic image of the Supreme God,
the winged disc--surmounted or not by a human bust. The cylinders of
Babylonian or Assyrian workmanship present this emblem no less
frequently than the bas-reliefs of Assyrian palaces, and always under
the same conditions, and evidently attributing to it an equal
importance.
It is very difficult to avoid comparing this mysterious plant, in which
everything points out a religious symbol of the first order, with that
famous tree of life and knowledge which plays so prominent a part in the
narrative of the earliest transgression. All paradisiacal traditions
make mention of it; the tradition in Genesis, which sometimes seems to
admit of two trees, one of life and one of knowledge, sometimes of one
tree only combining both attributes, and standing in the midst of the
garden; the Indian tradition, which supposes four plants on the four
counterforts of Mount Méru; and, lastly, that of the Iranians, which
sometimes treats of a single tree springing from the very middle of the
holy spring of water, Ardvî-çûra, in Airyana-Vædja, and sometimes of
two, corresponding exactly to those of the Biblical Eden. This
similarity is so much the more natural, that we find the Sabians or
Mendaites, an almost pagan sect, dwelling in the environs of Bussorah,
who retain a great number of Babylonian religious traditions, to be also
conversant with the tree of life, which they designate in their
Scriptures as _Setarvan_, "that which shades." The most ancient name of
Babylon in the idiom of the Ante-Semitic population, _Tin-tir-kî_,
signifies "the place of the tree of life." Finally, the representation
of the sacred plant which we assimilate with that of the Edenic
traditions, appears as a symbol of life eternal on those curious
sarcophagi, in enamelled clay, belonging to the latest period of
Chaldean civilization, after Alexander the Great, which have been
discovered at Warkah, the ancient Uruk.
The manner of representing this sacred plant varies in Assyrian
bas-reliefs and exhibits different degrees of complexity.[64] It is,
however, invariably a plant of moderate size, of pyramidal form, having
a straight stem from which spring numerous branches, and a cluster of
large leaves at its base. In one example only[65] is the plant
represented with sufficient accuracy to enable us to classify it as the
_Asclepias acida_ or _Sarcostemma vinimalis_, the plant known as the
Soma to the Aryans of India, the Haoma to the Iranians, the crushed
branches of which afford the intoxicating liquor offered as a libation
to the gods, and identified with the celestial beverage of life and
immortality. More generally, however, the plant has a conventional and
decorative aspect, not answering exactly to any natural type, and it is
this purely conventional form which the Persians have borrowed from
Assyro-Babylonian art, and which represents the Haoma on gems, cylinders
or cones of Persian workmanship in the era of the Achemenides.[66]
Such an adoption of the most usual shape of the sacred plant of the
Chaldeans and Assyrians by the Persians, in order to represent their own
Haoma--although the conventional bore no similarity to the real
plant--proves that they recognized a certain analogy in the conception
of the two emblems. In point of fact the Persians have shown great
discernment in their borrowing and adapting; and where they took
Chaldeo-Assyrian art for model and for teaching, they only adopted such
of those religious symbols common in the basin of the Euphrates and
Tigris, as might be rendered applicable to their own peculiar doctrines,
and even to a very pure Mazdeism. The adoption of the image of the
divine plant of the Chaldeo-Assyrians in order to represent the Haoma
is, therefore, a conclusive sign that an assimilation of the symbols had
taken place, and we find in it a new proof in support of the close
connection between the plant guarded by genii on Assyrian or Babylonian
monuments and the tree of life of paradisiacal tradition. Indeed, if
Indians vary in opinion as to the nature of the mysterious trees of
their earthly paradise of Mènu, even generally admitting of four
different species, and if the Bundehesh-pehlevi, in bestowing on the
tree of Airyana-Vædja the name of _Khembe_, appears to have had in view
one of the plants placed by Indians on the counterforts of Mèru--_i.e._,
the _Panelea orientalis_, which in Sanscrit is called _Kadamba_; it is
the "white Haoma," the Haoma type that is almost always found in the
sacred books of Mazdeans springing from the middle of the fountain
Ardvî-çûra, and distilling the beverage of immortality. The Aryans of
India connected a similar idea with their Soma, for the fermented liquor
that they produced by pounding its branches in a mortar, and offered as
a libation to their gods, is named by them _Amritam_, "ambrosia draught
that renders immortal." The Haoma and its sacred juice is also called
"that which keeps off death," in the ninth chapter of the _Yaçna_ of the
Zoroastrians. It is for this reason that, both with the Indians and the
Iranians, the personification of the sacred plant and its juice, the god
Soma, or Haoma, prototype of the Greek Dionysius, becomes a lunar
divinity, inasmuch as he is the guardian of the ambrosia stored by the
gods in the moon. And here we have another similarity forced upon us
when we stand before Assyrian bas-reliefs, where the sacred plant is
guarded by winged genii, having heads of eagles or peripterous vultures.
These symbolic beings present, indeed, a singular analogy with the
Garuda, or rather the Garsudas of Indian Aryans, genii, half men, half
eagles. Now, in the Indian myths, more particularly in the beautiful
story of the _Astika-parva_ of the Mahâbhârata, it is Garuda who
reconquers the ambrosia _Amritam_--that is, the sacred juice of the
Soma, used for libations, that had been stolen by demons, and who
restores it to the celestial god, himself remaining its guardian. The
part played by him and by the eagle-headed genii of Assyrian monuments,
with regard to the tree of life, is consequently the same as that which
we find in Genesis assigned to _Kerubin_, armed with flaming swords,
who were placed by God at the gate of Eden, after the expulsion of the
first human pair, to prevent the entrance into Paradise, and to guard
its tree of life.
In one part at least of Chaldea properly so called, to the south of
Babylon, it appears as though it were no longer the type we have just
been considering that was employed to represent the tree of life. It was
the palm, the tree that furnished the majority of the inhabitants of the
district with food, and with fruit from which they distilled a fermented
and intoxicating liquor, a kind of wine; the tree to which they were
wont to attribute in a popular song as many benefits as there are days
in the year--this palm it was that was there considered the sacred, the
paradisiacal tree. We have the proof of this in cylinders that show us
the palm surmounted by the emblem of the Supreme God, and guarded by two
eagle-headed genii. Moreover, the essential character of the tree of
life lies in its fruits affording an intoxicating juice, the beverage of
immortality; and accordingly the books of the Sabians or Mendaites
associate it with the tree Setarvan, "the perfumed vine," Sam Gufro,
above which hovers "the Supreme Life" in the same way as does the
emblematic image of divinity in its highest and most abstract form above
the plant of life in the monumental representations of Babylon and
Assyria.
And, further, the fact that in the cosmogonic traditions of the
Chaldeans and Babylonians respecting the tree of life and paradisiacal
fruit, there was contained a dramatic myth, closely resembling in form
the Biblical narrative of the Temptation, appears to be as positively
established as may be in the absence of written texts, by a cylinder of
hard stone preserved in the British Museum.[67] There we actually see a
man and woman, the former wearing on his head the kind of turban
peculiar to Babylonians,[68] seated opposite each other on either side
of a tree, from whose spreading branches two big fruits hang--one in
front of each of the figures who are stretching out their hands to
gather it. A serpent is rearing himself behind the woman. This
representative might serve as a direct illustration of the narrative in
Genesis, nor as M. Friedrich Delitzsch has observed, can it lend itself
to any other interpretation.
M. Renan has no hesitation in agreeing with ancient commentators in
finding a vestige of the same traditions among the Phenicians in the
fragments of the Book of Sanchoniathon, translated into Greek by Philo
of Byblos. In point of fact it is there told, in connection with the
first human pair, that Aion--which seems a rendering of Havah--"invented
feeding on the fruits of the tree." The learned academician even thinks
he discovers in this passage an echo of some type of Phenician figured
representation, retracing a scene such as that recorded in Genesis, and
visible on the Babylonian cylinder. Certain it is that, at the epoch of
the great influx of Oriental traditions into the classic world, we see a
representation of the kind figure on several Roman sarcophagi, where it
indicates positively the introduction of a legend analogous to the
narrative of Genesis, and associated with the myth of the formation of
man by Prometheus. One famous sarcophagus in the Capitol Museum displays
in the neighbourhood of the Titan, son of Japetos, who is performing his
work as modeller--a pair--man and woman--in the nudity of primeval days,
standing at the foot of a tree, the man's gesture showing that he means
to gather its fruit.[69] We meet with the same group in a bas-relief
built into the wall of the small garden of the Villa Albani in Rome,
only here it is in still closer conformity with the Hebrew tradition, as
a huge serpent is coiled round the trunk of the tree beneath which the
two mortals are standing. It is this plastic type that was imitated and
reproduced by the earliest Christian artists, when they attempted the
representation of the fall of our first parents, which formed so
favourite a subject with them, both in sculpture and painting.
On the sarcophagus of the Capitol the presence in proximity of
Prometheus of one of the Parcæ drawing the horoscope of the man whom the
Titan is forming, leads us to suspect in these sculptured subjects the
influence of the doctrine of those Chaldean astrologists who had spread
themselves, during the later centuries before the Christian era,
throughout the Greco-Roman world, and had acquired an especial amount of
credit in Rome. Nevertheless, the date of these last monuments renders
it possible to look upon the representation of the first pair beside the
tree of Paradise, of which they are about to eat, as directly borrowed
from the Old Testament itself, as well as from the cosmogony of Chaldea
or Phenicia. But the existence of this tradition in the cycle of the
indigenous legends of the Canaanites seems to me placed beyond doubt by
a curious painted vase of Phenician workmanship of the seventh or sixth
century B.C., discovered by General di Cesnola, in one of the most
ancient sepulchres of Idalia, in the Isle of Cyprus.[70]
There we actually see a leafy tree, from the branches of which hang two
large clusters of fruit, while a great serpent is advancing with
undulating movements towards the tree, and rearing itself to seize hold
of the fruit.[71]