Phenicia, a tradition parallel to the Biblical account of the Fall ever
assumed a significance as exclusively spiritual as it does in Genesis,
or that it contained the moral lesson also to be found in the story as
given in the Zoroastrian scriptures. The spirit of grossly materialistic
Pantheism in the religion of those lands rendered this impossible.
Nevertheless, we may remark that among the Chaldeans, and their
disciples the Assyrians, at all events from a given epoch, the notion of
the nature of sin and the necessity of repentance was to be found more
precisely formed than amongst the majority of ancient peoples, and
consequently it is difficult to believe that the Chaldean priesthood did
not, in their profound speculations on religious philosophy, seek for
some solution of the problem of the origin of evil and sin.
With the foregoing reservation, it is, indeed, probable that the
Chaldean and Phenician legend of the fruit of the tree of Paradise was
nearly akin in spirit to the cycles of ancient myths common to all the
branches of the Aryan race. To the study of these M. Adalbert Kuhn has
contributed a book of the highest interest.[72] He deals with such as
refer to the invention of fire, and to the beverage of life. These are
to be found in their most ancient form in the Vedas, and they then
passed over, more or less modified by the course of time, to the Greeks,
Romans, Slavs, as well as the Iranians and Indians. The fundamental
conception of these myths, which are only to be found complete in their
oldest forms, is of the universe as an immense tree, whose roots embrace
the earth, and whose branches form the vault of heaven.[73] The fruit of
this tree is fire--indispensable to human existence, and the material
symbol of intelligence; and the leaves distil the Elixir of Life. The
gods had reserved to themselves the possession of fire, which sometimes,
indeed, descends on earth in the form of lightning, but which men were
not themselves to produce. He who--like the Prometheus of the
Greeks--discovers the method of artificially kindling a flame, and
communicates this discovery to other men, is impious, has stolen the
forbidden fruit from the sacred tree, is accursed, and the wrath of the
gods pursues him and his race.
The analogy between these myths and the Bible narrative is striking
indeed. They are, really, one and the same tradition, only bearing a
quite different sense, symbolizing an invention of a material order,
instead of dwelling on the fundamental fact of the moral order, and
disfigured further by the monstrous conception, too frequent in
Paganism, of the Divinity as a formidable and adverse power, jealous of
the happiness and progress of man. The spirit of error among the
Gentiles had distorted the mysterious symbolic memory of the events by
which the fate of humanity was decided. The inspired author of Genesis
took it up under the form that it had evidently retained among the
Hebrews, as among the other nations where it had acquired a material
meaning, but he restored to it its true significance, and made it the
occasion of a solemn lesson.
Some remarks are still needed regarding the animal form assumed by the
tempter in Bible story, that serpent who, as figured monuments have
shown us, played the same part in the legends of Chaldea and Phenicia.
The serpent, or, more correctly speaking, different kinds of serpents,
held a very considerable place in the religious symbolism of the peoples
of antiquity. These creatures figure therein with most opposite
meanings, and it would be contrary to the laws of criticism to group
together confusedly, as some learned scholars were once wont to do, the
contradictory notions linked in old myths with different serpents, so as
to form out of them one vast Ophiological system,[74] referred to a
single source, and brought into relation with the narrative in Genesis.
But by the side of divine serpents, essentially benign in character,
protective, prophetic, linked with gods of health, life, and healing, we
do find in all mythologies a gigantic serpent, who personifies a hostile
and nocturnal power, a wicked principle, material darkness, and moral
evil.
Among the Egyptians we meet with the serpent, Assap, who fights against
the sun and moon, and whom Horus pierces with his weapon. Among the
Chaldeo-Assyrians we find mention made of a great serpent called the
"enemy of the gods," _aiub-ilani_. We need not introduce here the myth
of the great cosmogonic struggle between Tiamat, the personification of
Chaos, and the god Masuduk, related in a portion of the epic fragments,
in cuneiform character, discovered by George Smith. Tiamat assumes the
form of a monster often repeated on monuments, but this form is not that
of the serpent. We are distinctly told that it was from Phenician
mythology that Pherecides of Syros borrowed his account of the Titan
Ophion, the man-serpent precipitated into Tartarus, together with his
companions, by the god Kronos (El), who triumphed over him at the
beginning of things, a story strikingly similar to that of the defeat
of the "old serpent, who is the accuser and Satan," repulsed and
imprisoned in the abyss, which story does not, indeed, occur in the Old
Testament, but existed among the oral traditions of the Hebrews, and
makes its appearance in Chapters xii. and xx. of the Apocalypse of St.
John.
Mazdeism is the only religion in whose symbolism the serpent never plays
any but an evil part, for even in that of the Bible it sometimes wears a
benign aspect, as, for instance, in the story of the brazen serpent. The
reason is, that in the dualistic conception of Zoroastrianism the animal
itself belonged to the impure and fatal creation of the evil principle.
Thus, it was under the form of a great serpent that Angromainyus, after
having tried to corrupt Heaven, leaped upon the earth; it was under this
form that Mithra, god of the pure sky, fought with him; and, finally, it
is under this form that he is eventually to be conquered and chained for
3000 years, and at the end of the world burned up with molten
metals.[75]
In these Zoroastrian records, Angromainyus, under the form of a serpent,
is the emblem of evil and personification of the wicked spirit as
definitively as is the serpent of Genesis, and this in an almost equally
spiritual sense. In the Vedas, on the contrary, the same myth of the
conflict with the serpent has a purely naturalistic character, evidently
describing an atmospheric phenomenon. The idea most frequently repeated
in the ancient hymns of the Aryans of India at their primitive epoch, is
that of the struggle between Indra, the god of the bright sky and the
azure, and Ahi, the serpent, or Vritra, the personification of the
storm-cloud that lengthens out crawling in the air. Indra overthrows
Ahi, strikes him with his lightnings, and by tearing him asunder sets
free the fertilizing streams that he contained. Never in the Vedas does
the myth rise above this purely physical reality, never does it pass
from the representation of the warring atmospherical elements to that of
the moral conflict between good and evil, as it does in Mazdeism.
According to a certain school of modern mythologists, of which M.
Adalbert Khun is the most prominent representative in Germany, this
storm-myth is the pivot on which hinges a universal explanation of all
ancient religions whatever. And in particular the fundamental source,
origin, and true significance of the traditions we have been reviewing,
including the Biblical accounts of the Fall, are all, according to him,
to be looked for in this naturalistic fable of the _Vedas_. No doubt the
allegory which served as starting-point to this myth was not unknown to
the Hebrews. We find it distinctly expressed in a verse of the Book of
Job (chap. xxvi. 13), where it is said of God, "By his Spirit he hath
garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." Here,
indeed, by the parallelism of the two clauses of the verse, the former
determines the meaning of the latter. But the Vedic myth is only one of
the applications of a symbolic statement, of which the source does not
lie among the Aryans; but must be sought much further back in the
primitive thought of humanity, anterior to the ethnical separation of
the ancestors of Egyptians, Semites, and Aryans, of the three great
races represented by the three sons of Noah; for it is common to all.
The pastoral tribes, whence sprung the Vedic hymns, only connected it
with an idea exclusively naturalistic, almost childish, and specially
drawn from the phenomena that most interested their simple existence, to
which all advanced civilization, whether material or intellectual, was
still foreign. But among the Egyptians the same metaphor appear with a
far more general and elevated significance. The serpent Assap is no
longer the storm-cloud but the personification of darkness, which the
sun, under the form of Ra or Horus, encounters during his nocturnal
passage through the lower hemisphere, and has to triumph over before he
appears in the east. Thus, the conflict between Horus and Assap is daily
renewed at the seventh hour of the night, a little before the rising of
the sun, and the "Book of the Dead" shows that this strife between light
and darkness was taken by the Egyptians as the emblem of the moral
strife between good and evil. Neither is the serpent the mere
storm-cloud in those paradisiac legends of Chaldea and Phoenicia in
which we have been able to discern a relation in form to the record in
Genesis. The aspect of the cloud lengthening out in the sky may, indeed
(I could not positively deny it without more positive certainty) have
furnished the first germ of the idea of constituting the serpent the
visible image of the adverse power, combining the intimately associated
ideas of darkness and of evil--a notion from which, by a confusion of
the physical and moral orders, no ancient religion, not even Mazdeism,
was entirely able to free itself, unless it were that of the Hebrews.
But with all the highly civilized peoples whose traditions we have
scrutinized, the great serpent symbolizes that dark and evil power in
its widest significance.
But be this as it may, my faith as a Christian finds no difficulty in
admitting that, in order to relate the fall of the first pair, the
inspired compiler of Genesis made use of a narrative which had assumed
an entirely mythical character among neighbouring peoples, and that the
form of a serpent assigned to the tempter may have had for
starting-point an essentially naturalistic symbol. Nothing obliges us to
understand the third chapter of Genesis literally. Without any departure
from orthodoxy we are justified in looking upon it as a figure intended
to convey a fact of a purely moral order. It is not, therefore, the form
of the narrative that signifies here, but rather the dogma that it
expresses, and this dogma of the fall of the human race through the bad
use that its earliest progenitors made of their free will, remains an
eternal truth which is nowhere else brought out with the same precision.
It affords the only solution of the formidable problem which constantly
returns to rear itself before the human mind, and which no religious
philosophy outside of revelation has ever been able to solve.
FRANÇOIS LENORMANT.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] The system is thus expounded in the "Laws of Manu," i. 68-86. For
its ulterior developments see Wilson, Vishnu-Purana, pp. 23-26, and
259-271.
[51] Theopompus, cited by the author of the treatise "On Isis and
Osiris," attributed to Plutarch (c. 47), already pointed out this
doctrine as existing among the Persians.
[52] Ewald calculates the four ages of the world which he believes he
has discerned in the Bible as follows:--1. From the Creation to the
Deluge; 2. from the Deluge to Abraham; 3. from Abraham to Moses; 4. from
the Promulgation of the Mosaic Law. Such epochs have scarcely any
resemblance to the Ages of Hesiod or of the Laws of Manu. And, moreover,
it is well to note that wherever we meet simultaneously, as we do with
Indians, Iranians, and Greeks, with the existence of the four ages and
the tradition of the Deluge, these are completely independent of each
other, have no connection whatever, which indicates a difference of
origin, from sources having nothing in common. Nowhere does the Deluge
coincide with the transition between two of these ages.
Nevertheless, there is a point where a certain approximation may be
established between the theories of India and those of the Bible. The
Laws of Manu say that in the four successive ages of the world the
duration of human life goes on decreasing in the proportion of 4, 3, 2,
1; in the Bible we have the antediluvian patriarchs, with the exception
of Enoch, who was translated to Heaven, living about 900 years.
Subsequently Shem lives 600, and his three first descendants between 430
and 460; to the four succeeding generations there is assigned a life of
between 200 and 240 years; finally, from the time of Abraham the
existence of the patriarchs comes nearer to normal data, and no longer
reaches a maximum of 200 years.
[53] "Vendidâd," ii. It is also related how Yima preserved the germs of
men, animals, and plants from the Deluge. See, too, "Yesht," i. 25-27,
ix. 3-12, xv. 15-17. "Bundehesh," xvii.
[54] "Yesht," xix. 31-38. "Bundehesh," xxiii. and xxxii. "Sad-der," 94.
[55] "Yesht," xix. 46.
[56] "Vendidâd," i. 5-8.
[57] Demons.
[58] It is rather remarkable that the life of Adam, which, according to
Genesis, was one of 930 years, should so nearly approach this duration.
[59] Genii.
[60] In the "Yacna" (xxxii. 8) it is Yima who teaches men to cut meat in
pieces and to eat it. Windeschman has rightly compared this with Genesis
ix. 3.
[61] "Bundehesh," xv.
[62] "Chaldean Account of Genesis," p. 83. The original text is given in
Friedrich Delitzsch's "Assyrische Losestücke," 2nd edition, p. 91.
[63] See E. Ledrain: "Histoire d'Israel," vol. i. p. 416.
[64] See Rawlinson: "The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient World,"
2nd edition, vol. ii. p. 7.
[65] Botta: "Monuments of Nineveh," vol. ii. p. 150.
[66] This image was also employed for the same purpose in the time of
the Sassanides, and we can trace the history of the curious vicissitudes
which led to its being imitated as a mode of ornamentation, having no
particular significance, first among the Arabs, and next in some western
edifices of the Roman Period.
[67] Layard: "Cultus of Mithra," xvi. No. 4. G. Smith: "Chaldean Account
of Genesis." The cylinder is of Babylonish workmanship and great
antiquity.
[68] This head-dress, frequently represented on monuments, is spoken of
as characteristic of the Chaldeans in Ezekiel xxiii. 15.
[69] Panofka inclines to give to this couple the names of Deucalion and
Pyrrha, the son of Prometheus and daughter of Pandora, progenitors of a
postdiluvian human race. We see no objection to this, provided, however,
that it be admitted that the monument shows the introduction of a legend
similar to that of Adam and Havah, attached to those personages. As the
probable theatre of such an introduction, one might be led to think of
Iconia in Asia Minor, when the formation of men by Prometheus was, by
local tradition, assigned to a period immediately succeeding the deluge
of Deucalion, and told with details singularly akin to those given in
the Bible.
[70] Cesnola: "Cyprus: its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples," p. 101.
[71] We must limit ourselves, must not be carried away into exaggerated
developments. We will not, therefore, carry these analogies further. But
they might be pursued in a direction that shall be briefly pointed at.
It is difficult to avoid seeing a similarity between the Tree of
Paradise of Asiatic Cosmogonies, and the tree of golden fruit in the
garden of the Hesperides, guarded by the serpents which figured
monuments invariably represent coiled about its trunk. In that myth of
incontestably Phenician origin, according to which Hercules slays the
guardian serpent and secures the golden apples, we have the revenge of
the luminous or solar god reconquering the tree of life from a dark,
jealous, and inimical power, personified by the serpent, which had taken
possession of it in the world's early days. In the same way we have in
the Indian myth the gods regaining the ambrosia from the Asouras or
demons that had stolen it. We may also observe that Hercules, the
conqueror of the dragon of the Hesperides, is also the liberator of
Prometheus, him who first, despite the divine prohibition, gathered
fire, the fruit of the celestial and cosmic tree.
[72] "Die Herabkunft des Feuers und die Göttertranks." Berlin, 1859.
[73] On the existence among the Babylonians of the idea of the cosmic
tree, see C. W. Mansell, _Gazette Archéologique_, 1878, p. 138.
Among the myths borrowed by the philosopher Pherecides, of Syros, from
the Phenician mysteries, was that of the winged-oak ([Greek: hupopteros
drus]), over which Zeus had spread a magnificent veil representing the
constellations, the earth and ocean. Here we manifestly have the cosmic
tree again.
[74] Mr. Fergusson's work, "Tree and Serpent Worship" (London, 1868), is
not quite free from this defect, the learned author having displayed
more erudition and ingenuity than critical faculty.
[75] "Bundèhesh," xxxi. The serpent's form is also that given to
different secondary personifications of the evil principle, different
mythological beings created by Angromainyus to ravage the earth, and war
with the good, and with the true faith--such as Azhi-Dahâka (the serpent
that bites), conquered by Thraetaina, and the dragon Cruvara, slain by
the hero Kereçaçpa.
POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN GREECE.
ATHENS, _August, 1879_.
If during this latter period of our national existence, which from every
point of view presents one of the most serious crises in our history,
all Europe finds itself agitated by constant commotions, Greece, which
more than any other European nation is interested in the various events
of the Eastern crisis, is truly under the power of a national paroxysm.
The serious modifications which have been accomplished in the state of
affairs in the East were of a nature to exert a great influence on
Greece, threatening each day to swallow up that country in the tempest.
Doubtless, it was impossible for Greece to remain indifferent at a time
when nations, but till lately unknown, were created by caprice or
interest, without themselves having any sentiment of their national
existence, and which now threaten her national and political future in
the East. The armed protests of Crete, of Epirus, of Thessaly, and of
Macedonia, were but the commencement of a general participation of
Hellenism in the struggle between the Slavs and the Turks, and doubtless
of a more serious complication of the Eastern Question, to the great
dismay of European diplomacy, which can not or will not re-establish the
equilibrium between the different national elements which struggle
fiercely with each other in the Balkan Peninsula. It was only the demand
made on Greece by united European diplomacy, at the commencement of the
war in the East, that she should remain neutral, and the promises made
to her that she should not be forgotten in a Congress of the Powers
relative to the improvement of the state of things in the Ottoman
Empire, which induced her to restrain her national aspirations, and to
await that justice from a European Congress, which she was on the point
of claiming by arms. However, the delay which has occurred up to the
present time in the solution of the question of the delimitation of the
Hellenic frontiers--which is still pending between the Greek Government
and the Sublime Porte--is a sad sign of the blindness of the Turkish
Government, and equally hurtful to both peoples, paralyzing their
progress in civilization. For if this question were once settled, they
would be able to turn their attention to another quarter--that, namely,
where the common interests and dangers of the two peoples meet. For not
only the Sublime Porte, but Europe also, should well understand that a
predominance of the Hellenic element in the East has in nowise for its
object to satisfy the ambitious tendencies of a race. Modern
civilization is in danger of being overrun by the furious waves which
threaten to carry away everything in the Russian Empire. Those
fundamental principles of Russian Society, those ideas (extravagant and
anti-social in all points of view) of a Panslavist Cæsarism, and the
principles of Nihilism, and of other social and religious sects, so
absurd and so contrary to human nature, between which there is just now
raging a combat so keen and so barbarous, are symptoms fatal to
civilization and to the peace of Europe, and the forerunners of a
catastrophe near at hand. Slavism, which is as ancient as the Latin and
German nationalities, has not, up to the present time, personified any
civilizing element in European history. Its proper character is
despotism, and in recent times it is anarchy in its most inauspicious
and frightful aspect. Consequently, Europe must open her eyes to the
danger which threatens her. A nationality which, from the very beginning
of its historical activity, represents principles of society and of
civilization in a state of decadence--at a period when it should be full
of youth and of ideality--ought to be seriously studied by those who
direct the destinies of the West. Not only is the preponderance of
Panslavism in the East a menace and a danger for the future and for the
regeneration of Hellenism, but dangers and complications more grave
threaten all Europe, in consequence of such preponderance. The Cossack
in the East, at Constantinople or near it, signifies nothing else but an
entire and immediate overturning of the European equilibrium and of
modern civilization. A man who well knew Russia and the Russians, the
famous author of the "Soirées de Saint Petersbourg," has written these
words:--"We must know how to set bounds to Russian desire, for by its
nature it is without limits." Deeply significant words of Joseph de
Maistre! The history of Russian policy is a development of this idea.
The public conscience of Europe ought to meditate upon and consider that
peril which the Marquis of Salisbury exposed with so much lucidity and
precision in that famous and memorable circular addressed to the Powers
of Continental Europe--that circular which had made us hope, but in
vain, for the advent of a new era in the history of English diplomacy
and in the progress of international morality. But now we must, alas!
repeat the famous saying of M. de Beust: "There is no longer any
Europe!"
We hoped, in common with the whole of the free and enlightened opinion
of Western Europe, that this circular of the noble Marquis, containing
the exalted traditions of George Canning with respect to the Hellenic
cause, was about to inaugurate a new era in European diplomacy. What,
then, was the motive for the sudden change in British diplomatic policy
during the Berlin Congress? Lord Beaconsfield, on his return from
Berlin, attempted to throw a doubtful light on this mysterious change in
the policy of the Cabinet of St. James's, when he finished his speech
with this vague remark, which has since become so celebrated among us:
"Greece has a future; and if I might be permitted to offer her my
advice, I would say to her, as to every individual who has a future,
Learn to wait."