Demonology and Devil-lore Part 35

In old times, nearly all the sorcerers and witches were women; and it may have been, in some part, because woman had more real courage than man unarmed. Sorcery and witchcraft were but the so-called pagan rites in their last degradation, and women were the last to abandon the declining religion, just as they are the last to leave the superst.i.tion which has followed it. Their sentiment and affection were intertwined with it, and the threats of eternal torture by devils which frightened men from the old faith to the new were less powerful to shake the faith of women. When pagan priests became christians, priestesses remained, to become sorceresses. The new faith had gradually to win the love of the s.e.x too used to martyrdom on earth to fear it much in h.e.l.l. And now, again, when knowledge clears away the old terrors, and many men are growing indifferent to all religion, because no longer frightened by it, we may expect the churches to be increasingly kept up by women alone, simply because they went into them more by attraction of saintly ideals than fear of diabolical menaces.

Thomas Carlyle has selected Luther's boldness in the presence of what he believed the Devil to ill.u.s.trate his valour. 'His defiance of the 'Devils' in Worms,' says Carlyle, 'was not a mere boast, as the like might be if spoken now. It was a faith of Luther's that there were Devils, spiritual denizens of the Pit, continually besetting men. Many times, in his writings, this turns up; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg, where he sat translating the Bible, they still show you a black spot on the wall; the strange memorial of one of these conflicts. Luther sat translating one of the Psalms; he was worn down with long labour, with sickness, abstinence from food; there rose before him some hideous indefinable Image, which he took for the Evil One, to forbid his work; Luther started up with fiend-defiance; flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there; a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition, in a scientific sense; but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against h.e.l.l itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists not on this earth nor under it--fearless enough! 'The Devil is aware,' writes he on one occasion, 'that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable Devils. Duke George,'--of Leipzig, a great enemy of his,--'Duke George is not equal to one Devil,' far short of a Devil! 'If I had business at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, though it rained Duke Georges for nine days running.' What a reservoir of Dukes to ride into!' [98]

Although Luther's courage certainly appears in this, it is plain that his Devil was much humanised as compared with the fearful phantoms of an earlier time. n.o.body would ever have tried an inkstand on the Gorgons, Furies, Lucifers of ancient belief. In Luther's Bible the Devil is pictured as a monk--a lean monk, such as he himself was only too likely to become if he continued his rebellion against the Church (Fig. 17). It was against a Devil liable to resistance by physical force that he hurled his inkstand, and against whom he also hurled the contents of his inkstand in those words which Richter said were half-battles.

Luther's Devil, in fact, represents one of the last phases in the reduction of the Evil Power from a personified phantom with which no man could cope, to that impersonal but all the more real moral obstruction with which every man can cope--if only with an inkstand. The horned monster with cowl, beads, and cross, is a mere transparency, through which every brave heart may recognise the practical power of wrong around him, the established error, disguised as religion, which is able to tempt and threaten him.

The temptations with menace described--those which, coming upon the weak nerves of women, vanquished their reason and heart; that which, in a healthy man, raised valour and power--may be taken as side-lights for a corresponding experience in the life of a great man now living--Carlyle himself. It was at a period of youth when, amid the lonely hills of Scotland, he wandered out of harmony with the world in which he lived. Consecrated by pious parents to the ministry, he had inwardly renounced every dogma of the Church. With genius and culture for high work, the world demanded of him low work. Friendless, alone, poor, he sat eating his heart, probably with little else to eat. Every Scotch parson he met unconsciously propounded to that youth the question whether he could convert his heretical stone into bread, or precipitate himself from the pinnacle of the Scotch Kirk without bruises? Then it was he roamed in his mystical wilderness, until he found himself in the gayest capital of the world, which, however, on him had little to bestow but a further sense of loneliness.

'Now, when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in. The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures; I had practically forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic. In the midst of their crowded streets and a.s.semblages, I walked solitary; and (except as it was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also, as is the tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of a Devil; for a h.e.l.l, as I imagine, without Life, though only diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down--you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable, Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. Oh, the vast gloomy, solitary Golgotha, and Mill of Death! Why was the Living banished thither, companionless, conscious? Why, if there is no Devil; nay, unless the Devil is your G.o.d?' ...

'From suicide a certain afters.h.i.+ne of Christianity withheld me.' ...

'So had it lasted, as in bitter, protracted Death-agony, through long years. The heart within me, unvisited by any heavenly dewdrop, was smouldering in sulphurous, slow-consuming fire. Almost since earliest memory I had shed no tear; or once only when I, murmuring half-audibly, recited Faust's Deathsong, that wild Selig der den er im Siegesglanze findet (Happy whom he finds in Battle's splendour), and thought that of this last Friend even I was not forsaken, that Destiny itself could not doom me not to die. Having no hope, neither had I any definite fear, were it of Man or of Devil; nay, I often felt as if it might be solacing could the Arch-Devil himself, though in Tartarean terrors, rise to me that I might tell him a little of my mind. And yet, strangely enough, I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what; it seemed as if all things in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath would hurt me; as if the Heavens and the Earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, waited to be devoured.

'Full of such humour, and perhaps the miserablest man in the whole French Capital or Suburbs, was I, one sultry Dogday, after much perambulation, toiling along the dirty little Rue Sainte Thomas de l'Enfer, among civic rubbish enough, in a close atmosphere, and over pavements hot as Nebuchadnezzar's Furnace; whereby doubtless my spirits were little cheered; when all at once there rose a Thought in me, and I asked myself, 'What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou for ever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee? Death? Well, Death; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil or Man may, will, or can do against thee! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee! Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it!' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a G.o.d. Ever from that time the temper of my misery was changed: not Fear or whining Sorrow was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.

'Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native G.o.d-created majesty and with emphasis recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said, 'Behold thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil's);'

to which my whole Me now made answer, 'I am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!'

'It is from this hour that I incline to date my spiritual New Birth, or Baphometic fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man.' [99]

Perhaps he who so uttered his Apage Satana did not recognise amid what haunted Edom he wrestled with his Phantom. Saint Louis, having invited the Carthusian monks to Paris, a.s.signed them a habitation in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques, near the ancient chateau of Vauvert, a manor built by Robert (le Diable), but for a long time then uninhabited, because infested by demons, which had, perhaps, been false coiners. Fearful howls had been heard there, and spectres seen, dragging chains; and, in particular, it was frequented by a fearful green monster, serpent and man in one, with a long white beard, wielding a huge club, with which he threatened all who pa.s.sed that way. This demon, in common belief, pa.s.sed along the road to and from the chateau in a fiery chariot, and twisted the neck of every human being met on his way. He was called the Devil of Vauvert. The Carthusians were not frightened by these stories, but asked Louis to give them the Manor, which he did, with all its dependencies. After that nothing more was heard of the Diable Vauvert or his imps. It was but fair to the Demons who had a.s.sisted the friars in obtaining a valuable property so cheaply that the street should thenceforth bear the name of Rue d'Enfer, as it does. But the formidable genii of the place haunted it still, and, in the course of time, the Carthusians proved that they could use with effect all the terrors which the Devils had left behind them. They represented a great money-coining Christendom with which free-thinking Michaels had to contend, even to the day when, as we have just read, one of the bravest of these there encountered his Vauvert devil and laid him low for ever.

I well remember that wretched street of St. Thomas leading into h.e.l.l Street, as if the Parisian authorities, remembering that Thomas was a doubter, meant to remind the wayfarer that whoso doubteth is d.a.m.ned. Near by is the convent of St. Michael, who makes no war on the neighbouring Rue Dragon. All names--mere idle names! Among the thousands that crowd along them, how many pause to note the quaintness of the names on the street-lamps, remaining there from fossil fears and phantom battles long turned to fairy lore. Yet amid them, on that sultry day, in one heart, was fought and won a battle which summed up all their sense and value. Every h.e.l.l was conquered then and there when Fear was conquered. There, when the lower Self was cast down beneath the poised spear of a Free Mind, St. Michael at last chained his dragon. There Luther's inkstand was not only hurled, but hit its mark; there, 'Get thee behind me,' was said, and obeyed; there Buddha brought the archfiend Mara to kneel at his feet.

And it was by sole might of a Man. Therefore may this be emphasised as the temptation and triumph which have for us to-day the meaning of all others.

A young man of intellectual power, seeing beyond all the conventional errors around him, without means, feeling that ordinary work, however honourable, would for him mean failure of his life--because failure to contribute his larger truth to mankind--he finds the terrible cost of his aim to be hunger, want, a life pa.s.sed amid suspicion and alienation, without sympathy, lonely, unloved--and, alas! with a probability that all these losses may involve loss of just what they are incurred for, the power to make good his truth. After giving up love and joy, he may, after all, be unable to give living service to his truth, but only a broken body and shed blood. Similar trials in outer form have been encountered again and again; not only in the great temptations and triumphs of sacred tradition, but perhaps even more genuinely in the unknown lives of many pious people all over the world, have hunger, want, suffering, been conquered by faith. But rarely amid doubts. Rarely in the way of Saint Thomas, in no fear of h.e.l.l or devil, nor in any hope of reward in heaven, or on earth; rarely indeed without any feeling of a G.o.d taking notice, or belief in angels waiting near, have men or women triumphed utterly over self. All history proves what man can sacrifice on earth for an eternal weight of glory above. We know how cheerfully men and women can sing at the stake, when they feel the fire consuming them to be a chariot bearing them to heaven. We understand the valour of Luther marching against his devils with his hymn, 'Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.' But it is important to know what man's high heart is capable of without any of these encouragements or aids, what man's moral force when he feels himself alone. For this must become an increasingly momentous consideration.

Already the educated youth of our time have followed the wanderer of threescore years ago into that St. Thomas d'Enfer Street, which may be morally translated as the point where man doubts every h.e.l.l he does not feel, and every creed he cannot prove. The old fears and hopes are fading faster from the minds around us than from their professions. There must be very few sane people now who are restrained by fear of h.e.l.l, or promises of future reward. What then controls human pa.s.sion and selfishness? For many, custom; for others, hereditary good nature and good sense; for some, a sense of honour; for mult.i.tudes, the fear of law and penalties. It is very difficult indeed, amid these complex motives, to know how far simple human nature, acting at its best, is capable of heroic endurance for truth, and of pure pa.s.sion for the right. This cannot be seen in those who intellectually reject the creed of the majority, but conform to its standards and pursue its worldly advantages. It must be seen, if at all, in those who are radically severed from the conventional aims of the world,--who seek not its wealth, nor its honours, decline its proudest t.i.tles, defy its authority, share not its prospects for time or eternity. It must be proved by those, the grandeur of whose aims can change the splendours of Paris to a wilderness. These may show what man, as man, is capable of, what may be his new birth, and the religion of his simple manhood. What they think, say, and do is not prescribed either by human or supernatural command; in them you do not see what society thinks, or sects believe, or what the populace applaud. You see the individual man building his moral edifice, as genuinely as birds their nests, by law of his own moral const.i.tution. It is a great thing to know what those edifices are, for so at last every man will have to build if he build at all. And if n.o.ble lives cannot be so lived, we may be sure the career of the human race will be downhill henceforth. For any unbia.s.sed mind may judge whether the tendency of thought and power lies toward or away from the old hopes and fears on which the regime of the past was founded.

A great and wise Teacher of our time, who shared with Carlyle his lonely pilgrimage, has admonished his generation of the temptations brought by talent,--selfish use of it for ambitious ends on the one hand, or withdrawal into fruitless solitude on the other; and I cannot forbear closing this chapter with his admonition to his young countrymen forty years ago. [100]

'Public and private avarice makes the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complacent. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complacent. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our sh.o.r.es, inflated by the mountain winds, s.h.i.+ned upon by all the stars of G.o.d, find the earth below not in unison with these,--but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire and turn drudges, or die of disgust,--some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful, now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience--patience;--with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world--not to be an unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear,--but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, in the thousand of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north or the south? Not so, brothers and friends,--please G.o.d, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.'

CHAPTER XIX.

THE MAN OF SIN.

Hindu myth--Gnostic theories--Ophite scheme of redemption--Rabbinical traditions of primitive man--Pauline Pessimism--Law of death--Satan's owners.h.i.+p of man--Redemption of the elect--Contemporary statements--Baptism--Exorcism--The 'new man's' food--Eucharist--Herbert Spencer's explanation--Primitive ideas--Legends of Adam and Seth--Adamites--A Mormon 'Mystery'

of initiation.

In a Hindu myth, Dhrubo, an infant devotee, pa.s.sed much time in a jungle, surrounded by ferocious beasts, in devotional exercises of such extraordinary merit that Vishnu erected a new heaven for him as the reward of his piety. Vishnu even left his own happy abode to superintend the construction of this special heaven. In Hebrew mythology the favourite son, the chosen people, is called out of Egypt to dwell in a new home, a promised land, not in heaven but on earth. The idea common to the two is that of a contrast between a natural and a celestial environment,--a jungle and beasts, bondage and distress; a new heaven, a land flowing with milk and honey,--and the correspondence with these of the elect child, Dhrubo or Israel.

The tendency of Christ's mind appears to have been rather in the Aryan direction; he pointed his friends to a kingdom not of this world, and to his Father's many mansions in heaven. But the Hebrew faith in a messianic reign in this world was too strong for his dream; a new earth was appended to the new heaven, and became gradually paramount, but this new earth was represented only by the small society of believers who made the body of Christ, the members in which his blood flowed.

That great cauldron of confused superst.i.tions and mysticisms which the Roman Empire became after the overthrow of Jerusalem, formed a thick sc.u.m which has pa.s.sed under the vague name of Gnosticism. The primitive notions of all races were contained in it, however, and they gathered in the second and third centuries a certain consistency in the system of the Ophites. In the beginning existed Bythos (the Depth); his first emanation and consort is Ennoia (Thought); their first daughter is Pneuma (Spirit), their second Sophia (Wisdom). Sophia's emanations are two--one perfect, Christos; the other imperfect, Sophia-Achamoth,--who respectively guide all that proceed from G.o.d and all that proceed from Matter. Sophia, unable to act directly upon anything so gross as Matter or unordered as Chaos, employs her imperfect daughter Sophia-Achamoth for that purpose. But she, finding delight in imparting life to inert Matter, became ambitious of creating in the abyss a world for herself. To this end she produced the Demiurgus Ildabaoth (otherwise Jehovah) to be creator of the material world. After this Sophia-Achamoth shook off Matter, in which she had become entangled; but Ildabaoth ('son of Darkness') proceeded to produce emanations corresponding to those of Bythos in the upper universe. Among his creations was Man, but his man was a soulless monster crawling on the ground. Sophia-Achamoth managed to transfer to Man the small ray of divine light which Ildabaoth had inherited from her. The 'primitive Man' became thus a divine being. Ildabaoth, now entirely evil, was enraged at having produced a being who had become superior to himself, and his envy took shape in a serpent-formed Satan, Ophiomorphos. He is the concentration of all that is most base in Matter, conjoined with a spiritual intelligence. Their anti-Judaism led the Ophites to identify Ildabaoth as Jehovah, and this serpent-son of his as Michael; they also called him Samael. Ildabaoth then also created the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, with all their evils. Resolving to confine man within his own lower domain, he forbade him to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. To defeat his scheme, which had all been evolved out of her own temporary fall, Sophia-Achamoth sent her own genius, also in form of a serpent, Ophis, to induce Man to transgress the tyrant's command. Eve supposing Ophis the same as Ophiomorphos, regarded the prohibition against the fruit as withdrawn and readily ate of it. Man thus became capable of understanding heavenly mysteries, and Ildabaoth made haste to imprison him in the dungeon of Matter. He also punished Ophis by making him eat dust, and this heavenly serpent, contaminated by Matter, changed from Man's friend to his foe. Sophia-Achamoth has always striven against these two Serpents, who bind man to the body by corrupt desires; she supplied mankind with divine light, through which they became sensible of their nakedness--the misery of their condition. Ildabaoth's seductive agents gained control over all the offspring of Adam except Seth, type of the Spiritual Man. Sophia-Achamoth moved Bythos to send down her perfect brother Christos to aid the Spiritual Race of Seth. Christos descended through the seven planetary regions, a.s.suming successively forms related to each, and entered into the man Jesus at the moment of his baptism. Ildabaoth, discovering him, stirred up the Jews to put him to death; but Christos and Sophia, abandoning the material body of Jesus on the cross, gave him one made of ether. Hence his mother and disciples could not recognise him. He ascended to the Middle s.p.a.ce, where he sits by the right hand of Ildabaoth, though unperceived by the latter, and, putting forth efforts for purification of mankind corresponding to those put forth by Ildabaoth for evil, he is collecting all the Spiritual elements of the world into the kingdom which is to overthrow that of the Enemy. [101]

Notwithstanding the animosity shown by the Ophites towards the Jews, most of the elements in their system are plagiarised from the Jews. According to ancient rabbinical traditions, Adam and Eve, by eating the fruit of the lowest region, fell through the six regions to the seventh and lowest; they were there brought under control of the previously fallen Samael, who defiled them with his spittle. Their nakedness consisted in their having lost a natural protection of which only our finger-nails are left; others say they lost a covering of hair. [102] The Jews also from of old contended that Seth was the son of Adam, in whom returned the divine nature with which man was originally endowed. We have, indeed, only to identify Ildabaoth with Elohim instead of Jehovah to perceive that the Ophites were following Jewish precedents in attributing the natural world to a fiend. The link between, the two conceptions may be discovered in the writings of Paul.

Paul's pessimistic conception of this world and of human nature was radical, and it mainly formed the mould in which dogmatic Christianity subsequently took shape. His general theology is a travesty of the creation of the world and of man. All that work of Elohim was, by implication, natural, that is to say, diabolical. The earth as then created belonged to the Prince of this world, who was the author of sin, and its consequence, death. In Adam all die. The natural man is enmity against G.o.d; he is of the earth earthy; his father is the devil; he cannot know spiritual things. All mankind are born spiritually dead. Christ is a new and diviner Demiurgos, engaged in the work of producing a new creation and a new man. For his purpose the old law, circ.u.mcision or uncirc.u.mcision, are of no avail or importance, but a new creature. His death is the symbol of man's death to the natural world, his resurrection of man's rising into a new world which mere flesh and blood cannot inherit. As G.o.d breathed into Adam's nostrils the breath of life, the Spirit breathes upon the elect of Christ a new mind and new heart.

The 'new creature' must inhale an entirely new physical atmosphere. When Paul speaks of 'the Prince of the Power of the Air,'

it must not be supposed that he is only metaphorical. On this, however, we must dwell for a little.

'The air,' writes Burton in his 'Anatomy of Melancholy,' 'The air is not so full of flies in summer as it is at all times of invisible devils. They counterfeit suns and moons, and sit on s.h.i.+ps' masts. They cause whirlwinds of a sudden, and tempestuous storms, which though our meteorologists generally refer to natural causes, yet I am of Bodine's mind, they are more often caused by those aerial devils in their several quarters. Cardan gives much information concerning them. His father had one of them, an aerial devil, bound to him for eight and twenty years; as Agrippa's dog had a devil tied to his collar. Some think that Paracelsus had one confined in his sword pommel. Others wear them in rings;' and so the old man runs on, speculating about the mysterious cobwebs collected in the ceiling of his brain.

The atmosphere mentally breathed by Burton and his authorities was indeed charged with invisible phantasms; and every one of them was in its origin a genuine intellectual effort to interpret the phenomena of nature. It is not wonderful that the ancients should have ascribed to a diabolical source the subtle deaths that struck at them from the air. A single breath of the invisible poison of the air might lay low the strongest. Even after man had come to understand his visible foes, the deadly animal or plant, he could only cower and pray before the lurking power of miasma and infection, the power of the air. The Tyndalls of a primitive time studied dust and disease, and called the winged seeds of decay and death 'aerial devils,' and prepared the way for Mephistopheles (devil of smells), as he in turn for the bacterial demon of modern science.

There were not wanting theologic explanations why these malignant beings should find their dwelling-place in the air. They had been driven out of heaven. The etherial realm above the air was reserved for the good. Of the demons the Hindus say, 'Their feet touch not the ground.' 'What man of virtue is there,' said t.i.tus to his soldiers, 'who does not know that those souls which are severed from their fleshy bodies in battles by the sword are received by the aether--that purest of elements--and joined to that company which are placed among the stars; that they become G.o.ds, daemons, and propitious heroes, and show themselves as such to their posterity afterwards?' [103]

Malignant spirits were believed to hold a more undisputed sway over the atmosphere than over the earth, although our planet was mainly in their power, and the subjects of the higher empire always a small colony. [104] Moreover, there was a natural tendency of demons, which originally represented earthly evils, when these were conquered by human intelligence, to pa.s.s into the realm least accessible to science or to control by man. The uncharted winds became their refuge.

This belief was general among the Christian Fathers, [105] lasted a very long time even among the educated, and is still the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, as any one may see by reading the authorised work of Mgr. Gaume on 'Holy Water' (p. 305). So long as it was admitted among thinking people that the mind was as competent to build facts upon theory as theories on fact, a great deal might be plausibly said for this atmospheric diabolarchy. In the days when witchcraft was first called in question, Glanvil argued 'that since this little Spot is so thickly peopled in every Atome of it, 'tis weakness to think that all the vast s.p.a.ces Above and hollows under Ground are desert and uninhabited,' and he antic.i.p.ated that, as microscopic science might reveal further populations in places seemingly vacant, it would necessitate the belief that the regions of the upper air are inhabited. [106] Other learned men concluded that the spirits that lodge there are such as are clogged with earthly elements; the baser sort; dwelling in cold air, they would like to inhabit the more sheltered earth. In repayment for broth, and various dietetic horrors proffered them by witches, they enable them to pa.s.s freely through their realm--the air.

Out of such intellectual atmosphere came Paul's sentence (Eph. ii. 2) about 'the Prince of the Power of the Air.' It was a spiritualisation of the existing aerial demonology. When Paul and his companions carried their religious agitation into the centres of learning and wealth, and brought the teachings of a Jew to confront the temples of Greece and Rome, they found themselves unrelated to that great world. It had another habit of mind and feeling, and the idea grew in him that it was the spirits of the Satanic world counteracting the spirit sent on earth from the divine world. This animated its fas.h.i.+ons, philosophy, science, and literature. He warns the Church at Ephesus that they will need the whole armour of G.o.d, because they are wrestling not with mere flesh and blood, but against the rulers of the world's darkness, the evil spirits in high places--that is, in the Air.

As heirs of this new nature and new world, with its new atmosphere, purchased and endowed by Christ, the Pauline theory further presupposes, that the natural man, having died, is buried with Christ in baptism, rises with him, and is then sealed to him by the Holy Ghost. For a little time such must still bear about them their fleshy bodies, but soon Christ shall come, and these vile bodies shall be changed into his likeness; meanwhile they must keep their bodies in subjection, even as Paul did, by beating it black and blue (hypopiazo), and await their deliverance from the body of the dead world they have left, but which so far is permitted to adhere to them. This conception had to work itself out in myths and dogmas of which Paul knew nothing. 'If any man come after me and hate not his father and mother, and his own (natural) life also, he cannot be my disciple.' The new race with which the new creation was in travail was logically discovered to need a new Mother as well as a new Father. Every natural mother was subjected to a stain that it might be affirmed that only one mother was immaculate--she whose conception was supernatural, not of the flesh. Marriage became an indulgence to sin (whose purchase-money survives still in the marriage-fee). The monastery and the nunnery represented this new ascetic kingdom; that perilous word 'worldliness' was transmitted to be the source of insanity and hypocrisy.

Happily, the common sense and sentiment of mankind have so steadily and successfully won back the outlawed interests of life and the world, that it requires some research into ecclesiastical archaeology to comprehend the original significance of the symbols in which it survives. The ancient rabbins limited the number of souls which hang on Adam to 600,000, but the Christian theologians extended the figures to include the human race. Probably even some orthodox people may be scandalised at the idea of the fathers (Irenaeus, for example), that, at the Fall, the human race became Satan's rightful property, did they see it in the picture copied by Buslaef, from an ancient Russian Bible, in possession of Count Uvarof. Adam gives Satan a written contract for himself and his descendants (Fig. 7). And yet, according to a recent statement, the Rev. Mr. Simeon recently preached a sermon in the Church of St. Augustine, Kilburn, London, 'to prove that the ruler of the world is the devil. He stated that the Creator of the world had given the control of the world to one of his chief angels, Lucifer, who, however, had gone to grief, and done his utmost to ruin the world. Since then the Creator and Lucifer had been continually striving to checkmate each other. As Lucifer is still the Prince of this world, it would seem that it is not he who has been beaten yet.' [107] A popular preacher in America, Rev. Dr. Talmage, states the case as follows:--

'I turn to the same old book, and I find out that the Son of Mary, who was the Son of G.o.d, the darling of heaven, the champion of the ages, by some called Lord, by some called Jesus, by others called Christ, but this morning by us called by the three blessed t.i.tles, Lord Jesus Christ, by one magnificent stroke made it possible for us all to be saved. He not only told us that there was a h.e.l.l, but he went into it. He walked down the fiery steeps. He stepped off the bottom rung of the long ladder of despair. He descended into h.e.l.l. He put his bare foot on the hottest coal of the fiercest furnace.

'He explored the darkest den of eternal midnight, and then He came forth lacerated and scarified, and bleeding and mauled by the hands of infernal excruciation, to cry out to all the ages, 'I have paid the price for all those who would make me their subst.i.tute. By my piled-up groans, by my omnipotent agony, I demand the rescue of all those who will give up sin and trust in me,' Mercy! mercy! mercy! But how am I to get it? Cheap. It will not cost you as much as a loaf of bread. Only a penny? No, no. Escape from h.e.l.l, and all the harps, and mansions, and thrones, and sunlit fields of heaven besides in the bargain, 'without money, and without price.''

These preachers are only stating with creditable candour the original significance of the sacraments and ceremonies which were the physiognomy of that theory of 'a new creature.' Following various ancient traditions, that life was produced out of water, that water escaped the primal curse on nature, that devils hate and fear it because of this and the saltness of so much of it, many religions have used water for purification and exorcism. [108] Baptism is based on the notion that every child is offspring of the Devil, and possessed of his demon; the Fathers agreed that all unbaptized babes, even the still-born, are lost; and up to the year 1550 every infant was subjected at baptism to the exorcism, 'I command thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, that thou come out, and depart from, these infants whom our Lord Jesus Christ has vouchsafed to call to his holy baptism, to be made members of his body and of his holy congregation,' &c.

A clergyman informed me that he knew of a case in which a man, receiving back his child after christening, kissed it, and said, 'I never kissed it before, because I knew it was not a child of G.o.d; but now that it is, I love it dearly.' But why not? Some even now teach that a white angel follows the baptized, a black demon the unbaptized.

The belief was wide-spread that unbaptized children were turned into elves at death. In Iceland it is still told as a bit of folk-lore, that when G.o.d visited Eve, she kept a large number of her children out of sight, 'because they had not been washed,' and these children were turned into elves, and became the progenitors of that uncanny race. The Greek Church made so much of baptism, that there has been developed an Eastern sect which claims John the Baptist as its founder, making little of Christ, who baptized none; and to this day in Russia the peasant regards it as almost essential to a right reception of the benedictions of Sunday to have been under water on the previous day--soap being sagaciously added. The Roman Catholic Church, following the provision of the Council of Carthage, still sets a high value on baptismal exorcism; and Calvin refers to a theological debate at the Sorbonne in Paris, whether it would not be justifiable for a priest to throw a child into a well rather than have it die unbaptized. Luther preserved the Catholic form of exorcism; and, in some districts of Germany, Protestants have still such faith in it, that, when either a child or a domestic animal is suspected of being possessed, they will send for the Romish priest to perform the rite of exorcism.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has described the cla.s.s of superst.i.tions out of which the sacrament of the Eucharist has grown. 'In some cases,' he says, 'parts of the dead are swallowed by the living, who seek thus to inspire themselves with the good qualities of the dead; and we saw (-- 133) that the dead are supposed to be honoured by this act. The implied notion was supposed to be a.s.sociated with the further notion that the nature of another being, inhering in all the fragments of his body, inheres too in the unconsumed part of anything consumed with his body; so that an operation wrought on the remnants of his food becomes an operation wrought on the food swallowed, and therefore on the swallower. Yet another implication is, that between those who swallow different parts of the same food some community of nature is established. Hence such beliefs as that ascribed by Bastian to some negroes, who think that, 'on eating and drinking consecrated food, they eat and drink the G.o.d himself'--such G.o.d being an ancestor, who has taken his share. Various ceremonies among savages are prompted by this conception; as, for instance, the choosing a totem. Among the Mosquito Indians, 'the manner of obtaining this guardian was to proceed to some secluded spot and offer up a sacrifice: with the beast or bird which thereupon appeared, in dream or in reality, a compact for life was made, by drawing blood from various parts of the body.' This blood, supposed to be taken by the chosen animal, connected the two, and the animal's life became so bound up with their own that the death of one involved that of the other.' [109] And now mark that, in these same regions, this idea reappears as a religious observance. Sahagun and Herrera describe a ceremony of the Aztecs called 'eating the G.o.d.' Mendieta, describing this ceremony, says, 'They had also a sort of eucharist.... They made a sort of small idols of seeds, ... and ate them as the body or memory of their G.o.ds.' As the seeds were cemented partly by the blood of sacrificed boys; as their G.o.ds were cannibal G.o.ds; as Huitzilopochtli, whose wors.h.i.+p included this rite, was the G.o.d to whom human sacrifices were most extensive; it is clear that the aim was to establish community with G.o.ds by taking blood in common.' [110]

When, a little time ago, a New Zealand chief showed his high appreciation of a learned German by eating his eyes to improve his own intellectual vision, the case seemed to some to call for more and better protected missionaries; but the chief might find in the sacramental communion of the missionaries the real principle of his faith. The celebration of the 'Lord's Supper' when a Bishop is ordained has only to be 'scratched,' as the proverb says, to reveal beneath it the Indians choosing their episcopal totem. As Israel observed the Pa.s.sover--eating together of the lamb whose blood sprinkled on their door-posts had marked those to be preserved from the Destroying Angel in Egypt--they who believed that Jesus was Messias tasted the body and blood of their Head, as indicating the elect out of a world otherwise given over to the Destroyer spiritually, and finally to be delivered up to him bodily. 'He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him.' These were to tread on serpents, or handle them unharmed, as it is said Paul did. They were not really to die, but to fall asleep, that they might be changed as a seed to its flower, through literal resurrection from the earth.

We should probably look in vain after any satisfactory vestiges of the migration of the superst.i.tion concerning the mystical potency of food. It is found fully developed in the ancient Hindu myth of the struggle between the G.o.ds and demons for the Amrita, the immortalising nectar, one stolen sip of which gave the monster Rahu the imperishable nature which no other of his order possesses. It is found in corresponding myths concerning the G.o.ds of Asgard and of Olympus. The fall of man in the Iranian legend was through a certain milk given by Ahriman to the first pair, Meschia and Meschiane. In Buddhist mythology, it was eating rice that corrupted the nature of man. It was the process of incarnation in the Gilghit legend (i. 398). The whole story of Persephone turns upon her having eaten the seed of a pomegranate in Hades, by which she was bound to that sphere. There is a myth very similar to that of Persephone in j.a.pan. There is a legend in the Scottish Highlands that a woman was conveyed into the secret recesses of the 'men of peace'--the Daoine s.h.i.+', euphemistic name of uncanny beings, who carry away mortals to their subterranean apartments, where beautiful damsels tempt them to eat of magnificent banquets. This woman on her arrival was recognised by a former acquaintance, who, still retaining some portion of human benevolence, warned her that, if she tasted anything whatsoever for a certain s.p.a.ce of time, she would be doomed to remain in that underworld for ever. The woman having taken this counsel, was ultimately restored to the society of mortals. It was added that, when the period named by her unfortunate friend had elapsed, a disenchantment of this woman's eyes took place, and the viands which had before seemed so tempting she now discovered to consist only of the refuse of the earth. [111]

The difficulty of tracing the ethnical origin of such legends as these is much greater than that of tracing their common natural origin. The effect of certain kinds of food upon the human system is very marked, even apart from the notorious effects of the drinks made from the vegetative world. The effects of mandrake, opium, tobacco, various semi-poisonous fungi, the simplicity with which differences of race might be explained by their vegetarian or carnivorous customs, would be enough to suggest theories of the potency of food over the body and soul of man such as even now have their value in scientific speculation.

The Jewish opinion that Seth was the offspring of the divine part of Adam was the germ of a remarkable christian myth. Adam, when dying, desired Seth to procure the oil of mercy (for his extreme unction) from the angels guarding Paradise. Michael informs Seth that it can only be obtained after the lapse of the ages intervening the Fall and the Atonement. Seth received, however, a small branch of the Tree of Knowledge, and was told that when it should bear fruit, Adam would recover. Returning, Seth found Adam dead, and planted the branch in his grave. It grew to a tree which Solomon had hewn down for building the temple; but the workmen could not adapt it, threw it aside, and it was used as a bridge over a lake. The Queen of Sheba, about to cross this lake, beheld a vision of Christ on the cross, and informed Solomon that when a certain person had been suspended on that tree the fall of the Jewish nation would be near. Solomon in alarm buried the wood deep in the earth, and the spot was covered by the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before the crucifixion the tree floated on that water, and ultimately, as the cross, bore its fruit. [112]

In our old Russian picture (Fig. 8) Seth is shown offering a branch of the Tree of Knowledge to his father Adam. That it should spring up to be the Tree of Life is simply in obedience to Magian and Gnostic theories, which generally turn on some scheme by which the Good turns against the Evil Mind the point of his own weapon. These were the influences which gave to christian doctrines on the subject their perilous precision. The universal tradition was that Adam was the first person liberated by Christ from h.e.l.l; and this corresponded with an equally wide belief that all who were saved by the death of Christ and his descent into h.e.l.l were at once raised into the moral condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall,--to eat the food and breathe the holy air of Paradise.