Western European stream·Isis Unveiled·X. The Inner and Outer Man

Source context

Theme

reincarnation as esoteric doctrine within the context of ancient and modern religion and science

Soul-faculty

Intellectual Soul

Steiner

• GA 95, 1906-08-24Steiner's editors cite Isis Unveiled Chapter X as the locus for Blavatsky's treatment of reincarnation, marking it as a reference point for comparing Theosophical and Anthroposophical positions on rebirth.
• GA 258, 1923-06-11Steiner acknowledges that Isis Unveiled brought genuinely substantive esoteric content — previously held within secret societies — into public circulation, while also characterizing Blavatsky's method as mixing profound wisdom with disordered elements.
• GA 258, 1923-06-12Steiner qualifies the value of Isis Unveiled as not worthless, noting it conveyed knowledge with a certain substantiality that made its esoteric content appear original to readers.

Cross-tradition

• NeoplatonismThe Neoplatonic doctrine of metempsychosis — as elaborated by Plotinus and Iamblichus — provides a cross-tradition congruence with Chapter X's defense of rebirth as a metaphysical necessity grounded in the soul's progressive unfolding.
• Vedanta / Hindu philosophyThe Vedantic concept of samsara and the law of karma presents a cross-tradition congruence with Blavatsky's reincarnation thesis, framing repeated earthly lives as the mechanism of cosmic justice and spiritual development.
• Kabbalah (Gilgul)The Kabbalistic doctrine of gilgul neshamot (soul-cycling) offers a cross-tradition congruence with the chapter's argument that transmigration of souls is attested across diverse esoteric streams.

Chapter X

# p. 336

CHAPTER X.

Τεσ δε γαρ εκ τριαδος παν πνευμα πατερ εκερασε.--TAY.: Lyd. de Mens., 20. * "The more powerful souls perceive truth through themselves, and are of a more inventive nature. Such souls are saved through their own strength, according to the oracle."--PROCLUS in I Alc. "Since the soul perpetually runs and passes through all things in a certain space of time, which being performed, it is presently compelled to run back again through all things, and unfold the same web of generation in the world . . . for as often as the same causes return, the same effects will in like manner be returned."--FICIN. de Im. An., 129, Chaldean Oracles. * "If not to some peculiar end assign'd,

Study's the specious trifling of the mind."--YOUNG. **

F**ROM the moment when the foetal embryo is formed until the old man, gasping his last, drops into the grave, neither the beginning nor the end is understood by scholastic science; all before us is a blank, all after us chaos. For it there is no evidence as to the relations between spirit, soul, and body, either before or after death. The mere life-principle itself presents an unsolvable enigma, upon the study of which materialism has vainly exhausted its intellectual powers. In the presence of a corpse the skeptical physiologist stands dumb when asked by his pupil whence came the former tenant of that empty box, and whither it has gone. The pupil must either, like his master, rest satisfied with the explanation that protoplasm made the man, and force vitalized and will now consume his body, or he must go outside the walls of his college and the books of its library to find an explanation of the mystery.

It is sometimes as interesting as instructive to follow the two great rivals, science and theology, in their frequent skirmishes. Not all of the sons of the Church are as unsuccessful in their attempts at advocacy as the poor Abbe Moigno, of Paris. This respectable, and no doubt well-meaning divine, in his fruitless attempt to refute the free-thinking arguments of Huxley, Tyndall, Du Bois-Raymond, and many others, has met with a sad failure. In his antidotal arguments his success was more than doubtful, and, as a reward for his trouble, the "Congregation of the Index" forbids the circulation of his book among the faithful.

It is a dangerous experiment to engage in a single-handed duel with scientists on topics which are well demonstrated by experimental research. In what they do know they are unassailable, and until the old formula is destroyed by their own hands and replaced by a more newly-discovered one, there is no use fighting against Achilles--unless, indeed, one is for-

# p. 337

tunate enough to catch the swift-footed god by his vulnerable heel. This heel is--what they confess they do not know!

That was a cunning device to which a certain well-known preacher resorted to reach this mortal part. Before we proceed to narrate the extraordinary though well authenticated facts with which we intend to fill this chapter, it will be good policy to show once more how fallible is modern science as to every fact in nature which can be tested neither by retort nor crucible. The following are a few fragments from a series of sermons by F. Felix, of Notre Dame, entitled Mystery and Science. They are worthy to be translated for and quoted in a work which is undertaken in precisely the same spirit as that exhibited by the preacher. For once the Church silenced for a time the arrogance of her traditional enemy, in the face of the learned academicians.

It was known that the great preacher, in response to the general desire of the faithful, and perhaps to the orders of ecclesiastical superiors, had been preparing himself for a great oratorical effort, and the historic cathedral was filled with a monster congregation. Amid a profound silence he began his discourse, of which the following paragraphs are sufficient for our purpose:

"A portentous word has been pronounced against us to confront progress with Christianity--SCIENCE. Such is the formidable evocation with which they try to appall us. To all that we can say to base progress upon Christianity, they have always a ready response: that is not scientific. We say revelation; revelation is not scientific. We say miracle; a miracle is not scientific.

"Thus antichristianism, faithful to its tradition, and now more than ever, pretends to kill us by science. Principle of darkness, it threatens us with light. It proclaims itself the light. . . .

"A hundred times I asked myself, What is, then, that terrible science which is making ready to devour us? . . . Is it mathematical science? . . . but we also have our mathematicians. Is it physics? Astronomy? Physiology? Geology? But we number in Catholicism astronomers, physicists, geologists, * and physiologists, who make somewhat of a figure in the scientific world, who have their place in the Academy and their name in history. It would appear that what is to crush us is neither this nor that science, but science in general.

"And why do they prophesy the overthrow of Christianity by science? Listen: . . . we must perish by science because we teach mysteries, and because the Christian mysteries are in radical antagonism with modern

science. . . . Mystery is the negation of common sense; science repels it; science condemns it; she has spoken--Anathema!

"Ah! you are right; if Christian mystery is what you proclaim it, then in the name of science hurl the anathema at it. Nothing is antipathetic to science like the absurd and contradictory. But, glory be to the truth! such is not the mystery of Christianity. If it were so, it would remain for you to explain the most inexplicable of mysteries: how comes it that, during nearly 2,000 years, so many superior minds and rare geniuses have embraced our mysteries, without thinking to repudiate science or abdicate reason? * Talk as much as you like of your modern science, modern thought, and modern genius, there were scientists before 1789.

"If our mysteries are so manifestly absurd and contradictory, how is it that such mighty geniuses should have accepted them without a single doubt? . . . But God preserve me from insisting upon demonstrating that mystery implies no contradiction with science! . . . Of what use to prove, by metaphysical abstractions, that science can reconcile itself with mystery, when all the realities of creation show unanswerably that mystery everywhere baffles science? You ask that we should show you, beyond doubt, that exact science cannot admit mystery; I answer you decidedly that she cannot escape it. Mystery is the FATALITY of science.

"Shall we choose our proofs? First, then, look around at the purely material world, from the smallest atom to the most majestic sun. There, if you try to embrace in the unity of a single law all these bodies and their movements, if you seek the word which explains, in this vast panorama of the universe, this prodigious harmony, where all seems to obey the empire of a single force, you pronounce a word to express it, and say Attraction! . . . Yes, attraction, this is the sublime epitome of the science of the heavenly bodies. You say that throughout space these bodies recognize and attract each other; you say that they attract in proportion to their mass, and in inverse ratio with the squares of their distances. And, in fact, until the present moment, nothing has happened to give the lie to this assertion, but everything has confirmed a formula which now reigns sovereign in the EMPIRE OF HYPOTHESIS, and therefore it must henceforth enjoy the glory of being an invincible truism.

"Gentlemen, with all my heart I make my scientific obeisances to the sovereignty of attraction. It is not I who would desire to obscure a light in the world of matter which reflects upon the world of spirits. The

# p. 339

empire of attraction, then, is palpable; it is sovereign; it stares us in the face!

"But, what is this attraction? who has seen attraction? who has met attraction? who has touched attraction? How do these mute bodies, intelligent, insensible, exercise upon each other unconsciously this reciprocity of action and reaction which holds them in a common equilibrium and unanimous harmony? Is this force which draws sun to sun, and atom to atom, an invisible mediator which goes from one to another? And, in such case what is this mediator? whence comes to itself this force which mediates, and this power which embraces, from which the sun can no more escape than the atom. But is this force nothing different from the elements themselves which attract each other? . . . Mystery! Mystery!

"Yes, gentlemen, this attraction which shines with such brightness throughout the material world, remains to you at bottom an impenetrable mystery. . . . Well! because of its mystery, will you deny its reality, which touches you, and its domination, which subjugates you? . . . And again, remark if you please, mystery is so much at the foundation of all science that if you should desire to exclude mystery, you would be compelled to suppress science itself. Imagine whatever science you will, follow the magnificent sweep of its deductions . . . when you arrive at its parent source, you come face to face with the unknown. *

"Who has been able to penetrate the secret of the formation of a body, the generation of a single atom? What is there I will not say at the centre of a sun, but at the centre of an atom? who has sounded to the bottom the abyss in a grain of sand? The grain of sand, gentlemen, has been studied four thousand years by science, she has turned and returned it; she divides it and subdivides it; she torments it with her experiments; she vexes it with her questions to snatch from it the final word as to its secret constitution; she asks it, with an insatiable curiosity: 'Shall I divide thee infinitesimally?' Then, suspended over this abyss, science hesitates, she stumbles, she feels dazzled, she becomes dizzy, and, in despair says: I DO NOT KNOW!

"But if you are so fatally ignorant of the genesis and hidden nature of a grain of sand, how should you have an intuition as to the generation of a single living being? Whence in the living being does life come? Where does it commence? What is the life-principle?" **

# p. 340

Can the scientists answer the eloquent monk? Can they escape from his pitiless logic? Mystery certainly does bound them on every side; and the Ultima Thule, whether of Herbert Spencer, Tyndall, or Huxley, has written upon the closed portals the words INCOMPREHENSIBLE, UNKNOWABLE. For the lover of metaphor, science may be likened to a twinkling star shining with resplendent brightness through rifts in a bank of densely-black clouds. If her votaries cannot define that mysterious attraction which draws into concrete masses the material particles which form the smallest pebble on the ocean-beach, how can they define the limits at which the possible stops and the impossible begins?

Why should there be an attraction between the molecules of matter, and none between those of spirit? If, out of the material portion of the ether, by virtue of the inherent restlessness of its particles, the forms of worlds and their species of plants and animals can be evolved, why, out of the spiritual part of the ether, should not successive races of beings, from the stage of monad to that of man, be developed; each lower form unfolding a higher one until the work of evolution is completed on our earth, in the production of immortal man? It will be seen that, for the moment, we entirely put aside the accumulated facts which prove the case, and submit it to the arbitrament of logic.

By whatsoever name the physicists may call the energizing principle in matter is of no account; it is a subtile something apart from the matter itself, and, as it escapes their detection, it must be something besides matter. If the law of attraction is admitted as governing the one, why should it be excluded from influencing the other? Leaving logic to answer, we turn to the common experience of mankind, and there find a mass of testimony corroborative of the immortality of the soul, if we judge but from analogies. But we have more than that--we have the unimpeachable testimony of thousands upon thousands, that there is a regular science of the soul, which, notwithstanding that it is now denied the right of a place among other sciences, is a science. This science, by penetrating the arcana of nature far deeper than our modern philosophy ever dreamed possible, teaches us how to force the invisible to become visible; the existence of elementary spirits; the nature and magical properties of the astral light; the power of living men to bring themselves into communication with the former through the latter. Let them examine the proofs with the lamp of experience, and neither the Academy nor the Church, for which Father Felix so persuasively spoke, can deny them.

Modern science is in a dilemma; it must concede our hypothesis to be correct, or admit the possibility of miracle. To do so, is to say that there can be an infraction of natural law. If this can happen in one case,

# p. 341

what assurance have we that it may not be repeated indefinitely, and so destroy that fixity of law, that perfect balance of forces by which the universe is governed. This is a very ancient and an unanswerable argument. To deny the appearance, in our midst, of supersensual beings, when they have been seen, at various times and in various countries, by not merely thousands, but millions of persons, is unpardonable obstinacy; to say that, in any one instance, the apparition has been produced by a miracle, fatal to the fundamental principle of science. What will they do? What can they do, when they shall have awakened from the benumbing stupor of their pride, but collect the facts, and try to enlarge the boundaries of their field of investigations?

The existence of spirit in the common mediator, the ether, is denied by materialism; while theology makes of it a personal god, the kabalist holds that both are wrong, saving that in ether, the elements represent but matter--the blind cosmic forces of nature; and Spirit, the intelligence which directs them. The Hermetic, Orphic, and Pythagorean cosmogonical doctrines, as well as those of Sanchoniathon and Berosus, are all based upon one irrefutable formula, viz.: that the ether and chaos, or, in the Platonic language, mind and matter, were the two primeval and eternal principles of the universe, utterly independent of anything else. The former was the all-vivifying intellectual principle; the chaos, a shapeless, liquid principle, without "form or sense," from the union of which two, sprang into existence the universe, or rather, the universal world, the first androgynous deity--the chaotic matter becoming its body, and ether the soul. According to the phraseology of a Fragment of Hermias, "chaos, from this union with spirit, obtaining sense, shone with pleasure, and thus was produced the Protogonos (the first-born) light." * This is the universal trinity, based on the metaphysical conceptions of the ancients, who, reasoning by analogy, made of man, who is a compound of intellect and matter, the microcosm of the macrocosm, or great universe.

If we now compare this doctrine with the speculations of science, which comes to a full stop at the Borderland of the unknown, and, while incompetent to solve the mystery, will allow no one else to speculate upon the subject; or, with the great theological dogma, that the world was called into existence by a heavenly trick of prestidigitation; we do not hesitate to believe that, in the absence of better proof, the Hermetic doctrine is by far the more reasonable, highly metaphysical as it may appear. The universe is there, and we know that we exist; but how did it come, and how did we appear in it? Denied an answer by the rep-

# p. 342

resentatives of physical learning, and excommunicated and anathematized for our blasphemous curiosity by the spiritual usurpers, what can we do, but turn for information to the sages who meditated upon the subject ages before the molecules of our philosophers aggregated in ethereal space?

This visible universe of spirit and matter, they say, is but the concrete image of the ideal abstraction; it was built on the model of the first divine IDEA. Thus our universe existed from eternity in a latent state. The soul animating this purely spiritual universe is the central sun, the highest deity itself. It was not himself who built the concrete form of his idea, but his first-begotten; and as it was constructed on the geometrical figure of the dodecahedron, * the first-begotten "was pleased to employ twelve thousand years in its creation." The latter number is expressed in the Tyrrhenian cosmogony, ** which shows man created in the sixth millennium. This agrees with the Egyptian theory of 6,000 "years," *** and with the Hebrew computation. Sanchoniathon, * in his Cosmogony, declares that when the wind (spirit) became enamored of its own principles (the chaos), an intimate union took place, which connection was called pothos, and from this sprang the seed of all. And the chaos knew not its own production, for it was senseless; *but from its embrace with the wind was generated mot, or the ilus (mud). *** From this proceeded the spores of creation and the generation of the universe.

The ancients, who named but four elements, made of aether a fifth one. On account of its essence being made divine by the unseen presence it was considered as a medium between this world and the next. They held that when the directing intelligences retired from any portion of ether, one of the four kingdoms which they are bound to superintend, the space was left in possession of evil. An adept who prepared to converse with the "invisibles," had to know well his ritual, and be perfectly acquainted with the conditions required for the perfect equilibrium of the four elements in the astral light. First of all, he must purify the essence, and within the circle in which he sought to attract the pure spirits, equilibrize the elements, so as to prevent the ingress of the elementaries into their respective spheres. But woe to the imprudent inquirer who ignorantly trespasses upon forbidden ground; danger will beset him at every step. He evokes powers that he cannot control; he arouses sentries which allow only their masters to pass. For, in the words of the immortal Rosicrucian, "Once that thou hast resolved to become a cooperator with the spirit of

# p. 343

the living God, take care not to hinder Him in His work; for, if thy heat exceeds the natural proportion thou hast stirr'd the wrath of the Moyst * natures, and they will stand up against the central fire, and the central fire against them, and there will be a terrible division in the chaos." ** The spirit of harmony and union will depart from the elements, disturbed by the imprudent hand; and the currents of blind forces will become immediately infested by numberless creatures of matter and instinct--the bad daemons of the theurgists, the devils of theology; the gnomes, salamanders, sylphs, and undines will assail the rash performer under multifarious aerial forms. Unable to invent anything, they will search your memory to its very depths; hence the nervous exhaustion and mental oppression of certain sensitive natures at spiritual circles. The elementals will bring to light long-forgotten remembrances of the past; forms, images, sweet mementos, and familiar sentences, long since faded from our own remembrance, but vividly preserved in the inscrutable depths of our memory and on the astral tablets of the imperishable "BOOK OF LIFE."

Every organized thing in this world, visible as well as invisible, has an element appropriate to itself. The fish lives and breathes in the water; the plant consumes carbonic acid, which for animals and men produces death; some beings are fitted for rarefied strata of air, others exist only in the densest. Life, to some, is dependent on sunlight, to others, upon darkness; and so the wise economy of nature adapts to each existing condition some living form. These analogies warrant the conclusion that, not only is there no unoccupied portion of universal nature, but also that for each thing that has life, special conditions are furnished, and, being furnished, they are necessary. Now, assuming

# p. 344

that there is an invisible side to the universe, the fixed habit of nature warrants the conclusion that this half is occupied, like the other half; and that each group of its occupants is supplied with the indispensable conditions of existence. It is as illogical to imagine that identical conditions are furnished to all, as it would be to maintain such a theory respecting the inhabitants of the domain of visible nature. That there are spirits implies that there is a diversity of spirits; for men differ, and human spirits are but disembodied men.

To say that all spirits are alike, or fitted to the same atmosphere, or possessed of like powers, or governed by the same attractions--electric, magnetic, odic, astral, it matters not which--is as absurd as though one should say that all planets have the same nature, or that all animals are amphibious, or all men can be nourished on the same food. It accords with reason to suppose that the grossest natures among the spirits will sink to the lowest depths of the spiritual atmosphere--in other words, be found nearest to the earth. Inversely, the purest would be farthest away. In what, were we to coin a word, we should call the Psychomatics of Occultism, it is as unwarrantable to assume that either of these grades of spirits can occupy the place, or subsist in the conditions, of the other, as in hydraulics it would be to expect that two liquids of different densities could exchange their markings on the scale of Beaume's hydrometer.

Gorres, describing a conversation he had with some Hindus of the Malabar coast, reports that upon asking them whether they had ghosts among them, they replied, "Yes, but we know them to be bad spirits . . . good ones can hardly ever appear at all. They are principally the spirits of suicides and murderers, or of those who die violent deaths. They constantly flutter about and appear as phantoms. Night-time is favorable to them, they seduce the feeble-minded and tempt others in a thousand different ways." *

Porphyry presents to us some hideous facts whose verity is substantiated in the experience of every student of magic. "The soul," ** says he, "having even after death a certain affection for its body, an affinity proportioned to the violence with which their union was broken, we see many spirits hovering in despair about their earthly remains; we even see them eagerly seeking the putrid remains of other bodies, but above all freshly-spilled blood, which seems to impart to them for the moment some of the faculties of life." ***

# p. 345

Let spiritualists who doubt the theurgist, try the effect of about half a pound of freshly-drawn human blood at their next materializing seance!

"The gods and the angels," says Iamblichus, "appear to us among peace and harmony; the bad demons, in tossing everything in confusion. . . . As to the ordinary souls, we can perceive them more rarely, etc." *

"The human soul (the astral body) is a demon that our language may name genius," says Apuleius. ** "She is an immortal god, though in a certain sense she is born at the same time as the man in whom she is. Consequently, we may say that she dies in the same way that she is born."

"The soul is born in this world upon leaving another world (anima mundi), in which her existence precedes the one we all know (on earth). Thus, the gods who consider her proceedings in all the phases of various existences and as a whole, punish her sometimes for sins committed during an anterior life. She dies when she separates herself from a body in which she crossed this life as in a frail bark. And this is, if I mistake not, the secret meaning of the tumulary inscription, so simple for the initiate: "To the gods manes who lived." But this kind of death does not annihilate the soul, it only transforms it into a lemure. Lemures are the manes or ghosts, which we know under the name of lares. When they keep away and show us a beneficient protection, we honor in them the protecting divinities of the family hearth; but, if their crimes sentence them to err, we call them larvae. They become a plague for the wicked, and the vain terror of the good."

This language can hardly be called ambiguous, and yet, the Reincarnationists quote Apuleius in corroboration of their theory that man passes through a succession of physical human births upon this planet, until he is finally purged from the dross of his nature. But Apuleius distinctly says that we come upon this earth from another one, where we had an existence, the recollection of which has faded away. As the watch passes from hand to hand and room to room in a factory, one part being added here and another there, until the delicate machine is perfected, according to the design conceived in the mind of the master before the work was begun; so, according to ancient philosophy, the first divine conception of man takes shape little by little, in the several departments of the universal workshop, and the perfect human being finally appears on our scene.

This philosophy teaches that nature never leaves her work unfinished;

# p. 346

if baffled at the first attempt, she tries again. When she evolves a human embryo, the intention is that a man shall be perfected--physically, intellectually, and spiritually. His body is to grow mature, wear out, and die; his mind unfold, ripen, and be harmoniously balanced; his divine spirit illuminate and blend easily with the inner man. No human being completes its grand cycle, or the "circle of necessity," until all these are accomplished. As the laggards in a race struggle and plod in their first quarter while the victor darts past the goal, so, in the race of immortality, some souls outspeed all the rest and reach the end, while their myriad competitors are toiling under the load of matter, close to the startingpoint. Some unfortunates fall out entirely, and lose all chance of the prize; some retrace their steps and begin again. This is what the Hindu dreads above all things--transmigration and reincarnation; only on other and inferior planets, never on this one. But there is a way to avoid it, and Buddha taught it in his doctrine of poverty, restriction of the senses, perfect indifference to the objects of this earthly vale of tears, freedom from passion, and frequent intercommunication with the Atma--soul-contemplation. The cause of reincarnation is ignorance of our senses, and the idea that there is any reality in the world, anything except abstract existence. From the organs of sense comes the "hallucination" we call contact; "from contact, desire; from desire, sensation (which also is a deception of our body); from sensation, the cleaving to existing bodies; from this cleaving, reproduction; and from reproduction, disease, decay, and death."

Thus, like the revolutions of a wheel, there is a regular succession of death and birth, the moral cause of which is the cleaving to existing objects, while the instrumental cause is karma (the power which controls the universe, prompting it to activity), merit and demerit. "It is, therefore, the great desire of all beings who would be released from the sorrows of successive birth, to seek the destruction of the moral cause, the cleaving to existing objects, or evil desire." They, in whom evil desire is entirely destroyed, are called Arhats. * Freedom from evil desire insures the possession of a miraculous power. At his death, the Arhat is never reincarnated; he invariably attains Nirvana--a word, by the bye, falsely interpreted by the Christian scholars and skeptical commentators. Nirvana is the world of cause, in which all deceptive effects or delusions of our senses disappear. Nirvana is the highest attainable sphere. The pitris (the pre-Adamic spirits) are considered as reincarnated, by the Buddhistic philosopher, though in a degree far superior to that of the man of earth. Do they not die in their turn? Do not their astral bodies

# p. 347

suffer and rejoice, and feel the same curse of illusionary feelings as when embodied?

What Buddha taught in the sixth century, B.C., in India, Pythagoras taught in the fifth, in Greece and Italy. Gibbon shows how deeply the Pharisees were impressed with this belief in the transmigration of souls. * The Egyptian circle of necessity is ineffaceably stamped on the hoary monuments of old. And Jesus, when healing the sick, invariably used the following expression: "Thy sins are forgiven thee." This is a pure Buddhistical doctrine. "The Jews said to the blind man: Thou wast altogether born in sins, and dost thou teach us? The doctrine of the disciples (of Christ) is analogous to the 'Merit and Demerit' of the Buddhists; for the sick recovered, if their sins were forgiven." ** But, this former life believed in by the Buddhists, is not a life on this planet, for, more than any other people, the Buddhistical philosopher appreciated the great doctrine of cycles.

The speculations of Dupuis, Volney, and Godfrey Higgins on the secret meaning of the cycles, or the kalpas and the yugs of the Brahmans and Buddhists, amounted to little, as they did not have the key to the esoteric, spiritual doctrine therein contained. No philosophy ever speculated on God as an abstraction, but considered Him under His various manifestations. The "First Cause" of the Hebrew Bible, the Pythagorean "Monad," the "One Existence" of the Hindu philosopher, and the kabalistic "En-Soph"--the Boundless--are identical. The Hindu Bhagavant does not create; he enters the egg of the world, and emanates from it as Brahm, in the same manner as the Pythagorean Duad evolves from the highest and solitary Monas. *** The Monas of the Samian philo-

sopher is the Hindu Monas (mind), "who has no first cause (apurva, or material cause), nor is liable to destruction." * Brahma, as Prajapati, manifests himself first of all as "twelve bodies," or attributes, which are represented by the twelve gods, symbolizing 1, Fire; 2, the Sun; 3, Soma, which gives omniscience; 4, all living Beings; 5, Vayu, or material Ether; 6, Death, or breath of destruction--Siva; 7, Earth; 8, Heaven; 9, Agni, the Immaterial Fire; 10, Aditya, the immaterial and female invisible Sun; 11, Mind; 12, the great Infinite Cycle, "which is not to be stopped." ** After that, Brahma dissolves himself into the Visible Universe, every atom of which is himself. When this is done, the not-manifested, indivisible, and indefinite Monas retires into the undisturbed and majestic solitude of its unity. The manifested deity, a duad at first, now becomes a triad; its triune quality emanates incessantly spiritual powers, who become immortal gods (souls). Each of these souls must be united in its turn with a human being, and from the moment of its consciousness it commences a series of births and deaths. An Eastern artist has attempted to give pictorial expression to the kabalistic doctrine of the cycles. The picture covers a whole inner wall of a subterranean temple in the neighborhood of a great Buddhistic pagoda, and is strikingly suggestive. Let us attempt to convey some idea of the design, as we recall it.

Imagine a given point in space as the primordial one; then with compasses draw a circle around this point; where the beginning and the end unite together, emanation and reabsorption meet. The circle itself is composed of innumerable smaller circles, like the rings of a bracelet, and each of these minor rings forms the belt of the goddess which represents that sphere. As the curve of the arc approaches the ultimate point of the semi-circle--the nadir of the grand cycle--at which is placed our planet by the mystical painter, the face of each successive goddess becomes more dark and hideous than European imagination is able to conceive. Every belt is covered with the representations of plants, animals, and human beings, belonging to the fauna, flora, and anthropology of that particular sphere. There is a certain distance between each of the spheres, purposely marked; for, after the accomplishment of the circles through

# p. 349

various transmigrations, the soul is allowed a time of temporary nirvana, during which space of time the atma loses all remembrance of past sorrows. The intermediate ethereal space is filled with strange beings. Those between the highest ether and the earth below are the creatures of a "middle nature"; nature-spirits, or, as the kabalists term it sometimes, the elementary.

This picture is either a copy of the one described to posterity by Berosus, the priest of the temple of Belus, at Babylon, or the original. We leave it to the shrewdness of the modern archaeologist to decide. But the wall is covered with precisely such creatures as described by the semi-demon, or half-god, Oannes, the Chaldean man-fish, * " . . . hideous beings, which were produced of a two-fold principle"--the astral light and the grosser matter.

Even remains of architectural relics of the earliest races have been sadly neglected by antiquarians, until now. The caverns of Ajunta, which are but 200 miles from Bombay, in the Chandor range, and the ruins of the ancient city of Aurungabad, whose crumbling palaces and curious tombs have lain in desolate solitude for many centuries, have attracted attention but very recently. Mementos of long by-gone civilization, they were allowed to become the shelter of wild beasts for ages before they were found worthy of a scientific exploration, and it is only recently that the Observer gave an enthusiastic description of these archaic ancestors of Herculaneum and Pompeii. After justly blaming the local government which "has provided a bungalow where the traveller may find shelter and safety, but that is all," it proceeds to narrate the wonders to be seen in this retired spot, in the following words:

"In a deep glen away up the mountain there is a group of cave-temples which are the most wonderful caverns on the earth. It is not known at the present age how many of these exist in the deep recesses of the mountains; but twenty-seven have been explored, surveyed, and, to some extent, cleared of rubbish. There are, doubtless, many others. It is hard to realize with what indefatigable toil these wonderful caves have been hewn from the solid rock of amygdaloid. They are said to have been wholly Buddhist in their origin, and were used for purposes of worship and asceticism. They rank very high as works of art. They extend over 500 feet along a high cliff, and are carved in the most curious manner, exhibiting, in a wonderful degree, the taste, talent, and persevering industry of the Hindu sculptors.

# p. 350

"These cave-temples are beautifully cut and carved on the outside; but inside they were finished most elaborately, and decorated with a vast profusion of sculptures and paintings. These long-deserted temples have suffered from dampness and neglect, and the paintings and frescos are not what they were hundreds of years ago. But the colors are still brilliant, and scenes gay and festive still appear upon the walls. Some of the figures cut in the rock are taken for marriage-processions and scenes in domestic life that are represented as joyful. The female figures are beautiful, delicate, and fair as Europeans. Every one of these representations is artistic, and all of them are unpolluted by any grossness or obscenity generally so prominent in Brahmanical representations of a similar character.

"These caves are visited by a great number of antiquarians, who are striving to decipher the hieroglyphics inscribed on the walls and determine the age of these curious temples.

"The ruins of the ancient city of Aurungabad are not very far from these caves. It was a walled city of great repute, but is now deserted. There are not only broken walls, but crumbling palaces. They were built of immense strength, and some of the walls appear as solid as the everlasting hills.

"There are a great many places in this vicinity where there are Hindu remains, consisting of deep caves and rock-cut temples. Many of these temples are surrounded by a circular enclosure, which is often adorned with statues and columns. The figure of an elephant is very common, placed before or beside the opening of a temple, as a sort of sentinel. Hundreds and thousands of niches are beautifully cut in the solid rock, and when these temples were thronged with worshippers, each niche had a statue or image, usually in the florid style of these Oriental sculptures. It is a sad truth that almost every image here is shamefully defaced and mutilated. It is often said that no Hindu will bow down to an imperfect image, and that the Mahometans, knowing this, purposely mutilated all these images to prevent the Hindus from worshipping them. This is regarded by the Hindus as sacrilegious and blasphemous, awakening the keenest animosities, which every Hindu inherits from his father, and which centuries have not been able to efface.

"Here also are the remains of buried cities--sad ruins--generally without a single inhabitant. In the grand palaces where royalty once gathered and held festivals, wild beasts find their hiding-places. In several places the track of the railway has been constructed over or through these ruins, and the material has been used for the bed of the road. . . . Enormous stones have remained in their places for thousands of years, and probably will for thousands of years to come. These rock-

# p. 351

cut temples, as well as these mutilated statues, show a workmanship that no work now being done by the natives can equal. * It is very evident that hundreds of years since these hills were alive with a vast multitude, where now it is all utter desolation, without cultivation or inhabitants, and given over to wild beasts.

"It is good hunting ground, and, as the English are mighty hunters, they may prefer to have these mountains and ruins remain without change."

We fervently hope they will. Enough vandalism was perpetrated in earlier ages to permit us the hope that at least in this century of exploration and learning, science, in its branches of archaeology and philology, will not be deprived of these most precious records, wrought on imperishable tablets of granite and rock.

We will now present a few fragments of this mysterious doctrine of reincarnation--as distinct from metempsychosis--which we have from an authority. Reincarnation, i.e., the appearance of the same individual, or rather of his astral monad, twice on the same planet, is not a rule in nature; it is an exception, like the teratological phenomenon of a two-headed infant. It is preceded by a violation of the laws of harmony of nature, and happens only when the latter, seeking to restore its disturbed equilibrium, violently throws back into earth-life the astral monad which had been tossed out of the circle of necessity by crime or accident. Thus, in cases of abortion, of infants dying before a certain age, and of congenital and incurable idiocy, nature's original design to produce a perfect human being, has been interrupted. Therefore, while the gross matter of each of these several entities is suffered to disperse itself at death, through the vast realm of being, the immortal spirit and astral monad of the individual--the latter having been set apart to animate a frame and the former to shed its divine light on the corporeal organization--must try a second time to carry out the purpose of the creative intelligence.

If reason has been so far developed as to become active and discriminative, there is no reincarnation on this earth, for the three parts of the triune man have been united together, and he is capable of running the race. But when the new being has not passed beyond the condition of monad, or when, as in the idiot, the trinity has not been completed, the immortal spark which illuminates it, has to reenter on the earthly plane as it was frustrated in its first attempt. Otherwise, the mortal or astral,

# p. 352

and the immortal or divine, souls, could not progress in unison and pass onward to the sphere above. Spirit follows a line parallel with that of matter; and the spiritual evolution goes hand in hand with the physical. As in the case exemplified by Professor Le Conte (vide chap. ix.), "there is no force in nature"--and the rule applies to the spiritual as well as to the physical evolution--"which is capable of raising at once spirit or matter from No. 1 to No. 3, or from 2 to 4, without stopping and receiving an accession of force of a different kind on the intermediate plane." That is to say, the monad which was imprisoned in the elementary being--the rudimentary or lowest astral form of the future man--after having passed through and quitted the highest physical shape of a dumb animal--say an orang-outang, or again an elephant, one of the most intellectual of brutes--that monad, we say, cannot skip over the physical and intellectual sphere of the terrestrial man, and be suddenly ushered into the spiritual sphere above. What reward or punishment can there be in that sphere of disembodied human entities for a foetus or a human embryo which had not even time to breathe on this earth, still less an opportunity to exercise the divine faculties of the spirit? Or, for an irresponsible infant, whose senseless monad remaining dormant within the astral and physical casket, could as little prevent him from burning himself as another person to death? Or for one idiotic from birth, the number of whose cerebral circumvolutions is only from twenty to thirty per cent of those of sane persons; * and who therefore is irresponsible for either his disposition, acts, or the imperfections of his vagrant, half-developed intellect?

No need to remark that if even hypothetical, this theory is no more ridiculous than many others considered as strictly orthodox. We must not forget that either through the inaptness of the specialists or some other reason, physiology itself is the least advanced or understood of sciences, and that some French physicians, with Dr. Fournie, positively despair of ever progressing in it beyond pure hypotheses.

Further, the same occult doctrine recognizes another possibility; albeit so rare and so vague that it is really useless to mention it. Even the modern Occidental occultists deny it, though it is universally accepted in Eastern countries. When, through vice, fearful crimes and animal passions, a disembodied spirit has fallen to the eighth sphere--the allegorical Hades, and the gehenna of the Bible--the nearest to our earth--he can, with the help of that glimpse of reason and consciousness left to him, repent; that is to say, he can, by exercising the remnants of his will-power, strive upward, and like a drowning man, struggle once more to the sur-

# p. 353

face. In the Magical and Philosophical Precepts of Psellus, we find one which, warning mankind, says:

"Stoop not down, for a precipice lies below the earth,

Drawing under a descent of SEVEN steps, beneath which

Is the throne of dire necessity." *

A strong aspiration to retrieve his calamities, a pronounced desire, will draw him once more into the earth's atmosphere. Here he will wander and suffer more or less in dreary solitude. His instincts will make him seek with avidity contact with living persons. . . . These spirits are the invisible but too tangible magnetic vampires; the subjective daemons so well known to mediaeval ecstatics, nuns, and monks, to the "witches" made so famous in the Witch-Hammer; and to certain sensitive clairvoyants, according to their own confessions. They are the blood-daemons of Porphyry, the larvae and lemures of the ancients; the fiendish instruments which sent so many unfortunate and weak victims to the rack and stake. Origen held all the daemons which possessed the demoniacs mentioned in the New Testament to be human "spirits." It is because Moses knew so well what they were, and how terrible were the consequences to weak persons who yielded to their influence, that he enacted the cruel, murderous law against such would-be "witches"; but Jesus, full of justice and divine love to humanity, healed instead of killing them. Subsequently our clergy, the pretended exemplars of Christian principles, followed the law of Moses, and quietly ignored the law of Him whom they call their "one living God," by burning dozens of thousands of such pretended "witches."

Witch! mighty name, which in the past contained the promise of ignominious death; and in the present has but to be pronounced to raise a whirlwind of ridicule, a tornado of sarcasms! How is it then that there have always been men of intellect and learning, who never thought that it would disgrace their reputation for learning, or lower their dignity, to publicly affirm the possibility of such a thing as a "witch," in the correct acceptation of the word. One such fearless champion was Henry More, the learned scholar of Cambridge, of the seventeenth century. It is well worth our while to see how cleverly he handled the question.

It appears that about the year 1678, a certain divine, named John Webster, wrote Criticisms and Interpretations of Scripture, against the existence of witches, and other "superstitions." Finding the work "a weak and impertinent piece," Dr. More criticised it in a letter to Glanvil, the author of Sadducismus Triumphatus, and as an appendix sent a

# p. 354

treatise on witchcraft and explanations of the word witch, itself. This document is very rare, but we possess it in a fragmentary form in an old manuscript, having seen it mentioned besides only in an insignificant work of 1820, on Apparitions, for it appears that the document itself was long since out of print.

The words witch and wizard, according to Dr. More, signify no more than a wise man or a wise woman. In the word wizard, it is plain at the very sight; and "the most plain and least operose deduction of the name witch, is from wit, whose derived adjective might be wittigh or wittich, and by contraction, afterwards witch; as the noun wit is from the verb to weet, which is, to know. So that a witch, thus far, is no more than a knowing woman; which answers exactly to the Latin word saga, according to that of Festus, sagae dictae anus quae multa sciunt."

This definition of the word appears to us the more plausible, as it exactly answers the evident meaning of the Slavonian-Russian names for witches and wizards. The former is called vyedma, and the latter vyedmak, both from the verb to know, vedat or vyedat; the root, moreover, being positively Sanscrit. "Veda," says Max Muller, in his Lecture on the Vedas, "means originally knowing, or knowledge. Veda is the same word which appears in Greek οιδα, I know [the digamma, vau being omitted], and in the English wise, wisdom, to wit." * Furthermore, the Sanscrit word vidma, answering to the German wir wissen, means literally "we know." It is a great pity that the eminent philologist, while giving in his lecture the Sanscrit, Greek, Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and German comparative roots of this word, has neglected the Slavonian.

Another Russian appellation for witch and wizard, the former being purely Slavonian, is znahar and znaharka (feminine) from the same verb znat to know. Thus Dr. More's definition of the word, given in 1678, is perfectly correct, and coincides in every particular with modern philology.

"Use," says this scholar, "questionless had appropriated the word to such a kind of skill and knowledge as was out of the common road or extraordinary. Nor did this peculiarity imply any unlawfulness. But there was after a further restriction, in which alone now-a-days the words witch and wizard are used. And that is, for one that has the knowledge and skill of doing or telling things in an extraordinary way, and that in virtue of either an express or implicit sociation or confederacy with some bad spirits." In the clause of the severe law of Moses, so many names are reckoned up with that of witch, that it is difficult as well as useless to give here the definition of every one of them as found in Dr.

# p. 355

More's able treatise. "There shall not be found among you any one that useth divination, or an observer of time, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer," says the text. We will show, further on, the real object of such severity. For the present, we will remark that Dr. More, after giving a learned definition of every one of such appellations, and showing the value of their real meaning in the days of Moses, proves that there is a vast difference between the "enchanters," "observers of time," etc., and a witch. "So many names are reckoned up in this prohibition of Moses, that, as in our common law, the sense may be more sure, and leave no room to evasion. And that the name of 'witch' is not from any tricks of legerdemain as in common jugglers, that delude the sight of the people at a market or fair, but that it is the name of such as raise magical spectres to deceive men's sight, and so are most certainly witches--women and men who have a bad spirit in them. 'Thou shalt not suffer' מכשפה mecassephah, that is, 'a witch, to live.' Which would be a law of extreme severity, or rather cruelty, against a poor hocus-pocus for his tricks of legerdemain."

Thus, it is but the sixth appellation, that of a consulter with familiar spirits or a witch, that had to incur the greatest penalty of the law of Moses, for it is only a witch which must not be suffered to live, while all the others are simply enumerated as such with whom the people of Israel were forbidden to communicate on account of their idolatry or rather religious views and learning chiefly. This sixth word is שיאל אוב, shoel aub, which our English translation renders, "a consulter with familiar spirits"; but which the Septuagint translates, ενγαστριμυθος, one that has a familiar spirit inside him, one possessed with the spirit of divination, which was considered to be Python by the Greeks, and obh by the Hebrews, the old serpent; in its esoteric meaning the spirit of concupiscence and matter; which, according to the kabalists, is always an elementary human spirit of the eighth sphere.

"Shoel obh, I conceive," says Henry More, "is to be understood of the witch herself who asks counsel of her or his familiar. The reason of the name obh, was taken first from that spirit that was in the body of the party, and swelled it to a protuberancy, the voice always seeming to come out as from a bottle, for which reason they were named ventriloquists. Ob signifies as much as Pytho, which at first took its name from the pythii vates, a spirit that tells hidden things, or things to come. In Acts xvi. 16, πνευμα πυθονος, when "Paul being grieved, turned and said to that spirit, I command thee, in the name of Jesus Christ, to come out of her, and he came out at the same hour." Therefore, the words obsessed or possessed are synonyms of the word witch; nor could this

# p. 356

*

pytho of the eighth sphere come out of her, unless it was a spirit distinct from her. And so it is that we see in Leviticus xx. 27: "A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard (an irresponsible jidegnoni) shall surely be put to death, they shall stone them with stones, their blood shall be *upon them."

A cruel and unjust law beyond doubt, and one which gives the lie to a recent utterance of "Spirits," by the mouth of one of the most popular inspirational mediums of the day, to the effect that modern philological research proves that the Mosaic law never contemplated the killing of the poor "mediums" or witches of the Old Testament, but that the words, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," meant to live by their mediumship, that is, to gain their livelihood! An interpretation no less ingenious than novel. Certainly, nowhere short of the source of such inspiration could we find such philological profundity! *

"Shut the door in the face of the daemon," says the Kabala, "and he will keep running away from you, as if you pursued him," which means, that you must not give a hold on you to such spirits of obsession by attracting them into an atmosphere of congenial sin.

These daemons seek to introduce themselves into the bodies of the simple-minded and idiots, and remain there until dislodged therefrom by a powerful and pure will. Jesus, Apollonius, and some of the apostles, had the power to cast out devils, by purifying the atmosphere within and without the patient, so as to force the unwelcome tenant to flight. Certain volatile salts are particularly obnoxious to them; and the effect of the chemicals used in a saucer, and placed under the bed by Mr. Varley, of London, ** for the purpose of keeping away some disagreeable

physical phenomena at night, are corroborative of this great truth. Pure or even simply inoffensive human spirits fear nothing, for having rid themselves of terrestrial matter, terrestrial compounds can affect them in no wise; such spirits are like a breath. Not so with the earth-bound souls and the nature-spirits.

It is for these carnal terrestrial larvae, degraded human spirits, that the ancient kabalists entertained a hope of reincarnation. But when, or how? At a fitting moment, and if helped by a sincere desire for his amendment and repentance by some strong, sympathizing person, or the will of an adept, or even a desire emanating from the erring spirit himself, provided it is powerful enough to make him throw off the burden of sinful matter. Losing all consciousness, the once bright monad is caught once more into the vortex of our terrestrial evolution, and it repasses the subordinate kingdoms, and again breathes as a living child. To compute the time necessary for the completion of this process would be impossible. Since there is no perception of time in eternity, the attempt would be a mere waste of labor.

As we have said, but few kabalists believe in it, and this doctrine originated with certain astrologers. While casting up the nativities of certain historical personages renowned for some peculiarities of disposition, they found the conjunction of the planets answering perfectly to remarkable oracles and prophesies about other persons born ages later. Observation, and what would now be termed "remarkable coincidences," added to revelation during the "sacred sleep" of the neophyte, disclosed the dreadful truth. So horrible is the thought that even those who ought to be convinced of it prefer ignoring it, or at least avoid speaking on the subject.

This way of obtaining oracles was practiced in the highest antiquity. In India, this sublime lethargy is called "the sacred sleep of * * *" It is an oblivion into which the subject is thrown by certain magical processes, supplemented by draughts of the juice of the soma. The body of the sleeper remains for several days in a condition resembling death, and by the power of the adept is purified of its earthliness and made fit

# p. 358

to become the temporary receptacle of the brightness of the immortal Augoeides. In this state the torpid body is made to reflect the glory of the upper spheres, as a burnished mirror does the rays of the sun. The sleeper takes no note of the lapse of time, but upon awakening, after four or five days of trance, imagines he has slept but a few moments. What his lips utter he will never know; but as it is the spirit which directs them they can pronounce nothing but divine truth. For the time being the poor helpless clod is made the shrine of the sacred presence, and converted into an oracle a thousand times more infallible than the asphyxiated Pythoness of Delphi; and, unlike her mantic frenzy, which was exhibited before the multitude, this holy sleep is witnessed only within the sacred precinct by those few of the adepts who are worthy to stand in the presence of the ADONAI.

The description which Isaiah gives of the purification necessary for a prophet to undergo before he is worthy to be the mouthpiece of heaven, applies to the case in point. In customary metaphor he says: "Then flew one of the seraphim unto me having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar . . . and he laid it upon my mouth and said, Lo! this hath touched thy lips and thine iniquity is taken away."

The invocation of his own Augoeides, by the purified adept, is described in words of unparalleled beauty by Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni, and there he gives us to understand that the slightest touch of mortal passion unfits the hierophant to hold communion with his spotless soul. Not only are there few who can successfully perform the ceremony, but even these rarely resort to it except for the instruction of some neophytes, and to obtain knowledge of the most solemn importance.

And yet how little is the knowledge treasured up by these hierophants understood or appreciated by the general public! "There is another collection of writings and traditions bearing the title of Kabala, attributed to Oriental scholars," says the author of Art-Magic; "but as this remarkable work is of little or no value without a key, which can only be furnished by Oriental fraternities, its transcript would be of no value to the general reader." * And how they are ridiculed by every Houndsditch commercial traveller who wanders through India in pursuit of "orders" and writes to the Times, and misrepresented by every nimble-fingered trickster who pretends to show by legerdemain, to the gaping crowd, the feats of true Oriental magicians!

But, notwithstanding his unfairness in the Algerian affair, Robert Houdin, an authority on the art of prestidigitation, and Moreau-Cinti,

# p. 359

another, gave honest testimony in behalf of the French mediums. They both testified, when cross-examined by the Academicians, that none but the "mediums" could possibly produce the phenomena of table-rapping and levitation without a suitable preparation and furniture adapted for the purpose. They also showed that the so-called "levitations without contact" were feats utterly beyond the power of the professional juggler; that for them, such levitations, unless produced in a room supplied with secret machinery and concave mirrors, was impossible. They added moreover, that the simple apparition of a diaphanous hand, in a place in which confederacy would be rendered impossible, the medium having been previously searched, would be a demonstration that it was the work of no human agency, whatever else that agency might be. The Siecle, and other Parisian newspapers immediately published their suspicions that these two professional and very clever gentlemen had become the confederates of the spiritists!

Professor Pepper, director of the Polytechnic Institute of London, invented a clever apparatus to produce spiritual appearances on the stage, and sold his patent in 1863, in Paris, for the sum of 20,000 francs. The phantoms looked real and were evanescent, being but an effect produced by the reflection of a highly-illuminated object upon the surface of plateglass. They seemed to appear and disappear, to walk about the stage and play their parts to perfection. Sometimes one of the phantoms placed himself on a bench; after which, one of the living actors would begin quarrelling with him, and, seizing a heavy hatchet, would part the head and body of the ghost in two. But, joining his two parts again, the spectre would reappear, a few steps off, to the amazement of the public. The contrivance worked marvellously well, and nightly attracted large crowds. But to produce these ghosts required a stage-apparatus, and more than one confederate. There were nevertheless some reporters who made this exhibition the pretext for ridiculing the spiritists--as though the two classes of phenomena had the slightest connection!

What the Pepper ghosts pretended to do, genuine disembodied human spirits, when their reflection is materialized by the elementals, can actually perform. They will permit themselves to be perforated with bullets or the sword, or to be dismembered, and then instantly form themselves anew. But the case is different with both cosmic and human elementary spirits, for a sword or dagger, or even a pointed stick, will cause them to vanish in terror. This will seem unaccountable to those who do not understand of what a material substance the elementary are composed; but the kabalists understand perfectly. The records of antiquity and of the middle ages, to say nothing of the modern wonders at Cideville, which have been judicially attested for us, corroborate these facts.

# p. 360

Skeptics, and even skeptical spiritualists, have often unjustly accused mediums of fraud, when denied what they considered their inalienable right to test the spirits. But where there is one such case, there are fifty in which spiritualists have permitted themselves to be practiced upon by tricksters, while they neglected to appreciate genuine manifestations procured for them by their mediums. Ignorant of the laws of mediumship, such do not know that when an honest medium is once taken possession of by spirits, whether disembodied or elemental, he is no longer his own master. He cannot control the actions of the spirits, nor even his own. They make him a puppet to dance at their pleasure while they pull the wires behind the scenes. The false medium may seem entranced, and yet be playing tricks all the while; while the real medium may appear to be in full possession of his senses, when in fact he is far away, and his body is animated by his "Indian guide," or "control." Or, he may be entranced in his cabinet, while his astral body (double) or doppelganger, is walking about the room moved by another intelligence.

Among all the phenomena, that of re-percussion, closely allied with those of bi-location and aerial "travelling," is the most astounding. In the middle ages it was included under the head of sorcery. De Gasparin, in his refutations of the miraculous character of the marvels of Cideville, treats of the subject at length; but these pretended explanations were all in their turn exploded by de Mirville and des Mousseaux, who, while failing in their attempt to trace the phenomena back to the Devil, did, nevertheless, prove their spiritual origin.

"The prodigy of re-percussion," says des Mousseaux, "occurs when a blow aimed at the spirit, visible or otherwise, of an absent living person, or at the phantom which represents him, strikes this person himself, at the same time, and in the very place at which the spectre or his double is touched! We must suppose, therefore, that the blow is re-percussed, and that it reaches, as if rebounding, from the image of the living person--his phantasmal * duplicate--the original, wherever he may be, in flesh and blood.

"Thus, for instance, an individual appears before me, or, remaining invisible, declares war, threatens, and causes me to be threatened with obsession. I strike at the place where I perceive his phantom, where I hear him moving, where I feel somebody, something which molests and resists me. I strike; the blood will appear sometimes on this place, and occasionally a scream may be heard; he is wounded--perhaps, dead! It is done, and I have explained the fact." **

# p. 361

"Notwithstanding that, at the moment I struck him, his presence in another place is authentically proved; . . . I saw--yes, I saw plainly the phantom hurt upon the cheek or shoulder, and this same wound is found precisely on the living person, re-percussed upon his cheek or shoulder. Thus, it becomes evident that the facts of re-percussion have an intimate connection with those of bi-location or duplication, either spiritual or corporeal."

The history of the Salem witchcraft, as we find it recorded in the works of Cotton Mather, Calef, Upham, and others, furnishes a curious corroboration of the fact of the double, as it also does of the effects of allowing elementary spirits to have their own way. This tragical chapter of American history has never yet been written in accordance with the truth. A party of four or five young girls had become "developed" as mediums, by sitting with a West Indian negro woman, a practitioner of Obeah. They began to suffer all kinds of physical torture, such as pinching, having pins stuck in them, and the marks of bruises and teeth on different parts of their bodies. They would declare that they were hurt by the spectres of various persons, and we learn from the celebrated Narrative of Deodat Lawson (London, 1704), that "some of them confessed that they did afflict the sufferers (i.e., these young girls), according to the time and manner they were accused thereof; and, being asked what they did to afflict them, some said that they pricked pins into poppets, made with rags, wax, and other materials. One that confessed after the signing of her death-warrant, said she used to afflict them by clutching and pinching her hands together, and wishing in what part and after what manner she would have them afflicted, and it was done."

Mr. Upham * tells us that Abigail Hobbs, one of these girls, acknowledged that she had confederated with the Devil, who "came to her in the shape of a man," and commanded her to afflict the girls, bringing images made of wood in their likeness, with thorns for her to prick into the images, which she did; whereupon, the girls cried out that they were hurt by her."

# p. 362

How perfectly these facts, the validity of which was proven by unimpeachable testimony in court, go to corroborate the doctrine of Paracelsus. It is surpassingly strange that so ripe a scholar as Mr. Upham should have accumulated into the 1,000 pages of his two volumes such a mass of legal evidence, going to show the agency of earth-bound souls and tricksy nature-spirits in these tragedies, without suspecting the truth.

Ages ago, the old Ennius was made by Lucretius to say:

"Bis duo sunt homines, manes, caro, spiritus umbra;

Quatuor ista loci bis duo suscipirent;

Terra tegit carnem;--tumulum circumvolat umbra,

Orcus habet manes."

In this present case, as in every similar one, the scientists, being unable to explain the fact, assert that it cannot exist.

But we will now give a few historical instances going to show that some daimons, or elementary spirits, are afraid of sword, knife, or any thing sharp. We do not pretend to explain the reason. That is the province of physiology and psychology. Unfortunately, physiologists have not yet been able to even establish the relations between speech and thought, and so, have handed it over to the metaphysicians, who, in their turn, according to Fournie, have done nothing. Done nothing, we say, but claimed everything. No fact could be presented to some of them, that was too large for these learned gentlemen to at least try to stuff into their pigeon-holes, labelled with some fancy Greek name, expressive of everything else but the true nature of the phenomenon.

"Alas, alas! my son!" exclaims the wise Muphti, of Aleppo, to his son Ibrahim, who choked himself with the head of a huge fish. "When will you realize that your stomach is smaller than the ocean?" Or, as Mrs. Catherine Crowe remarks in her Night-Side of Nature, when will our scientists admit that "their intellects are no measure of God Almighty's designs?"

We will not ask which of the ancient writers mention facts of seemingly-supernatural nature; but rather which of them does not? In Homer, we find Ulysses evoking the spirit of his friend, the soothsayer Tiresias. Preparing for the ceremony of the "festival of blood," Ulysses draws his sword, and thus frightens away the thousands of phantoms attracted by the sacrifice. The friend himself, the so-long-expected Tiresias, dares not approach him so long as Ulysses holds the dreaded weapon in his hand. * Æneas prepares to descend to the kingdom of the shadows, and as soon as they approach its entrance, the Sibyl who

# p. 363

guides him utters her warning to the Trojan hero, and orders him to draw his sword and clear himself a passage through the dense crowd of flitting forms:

"Tuque invade viam, vaginaque eripe ferrum." *

Glanvil gives a wonderful narrative of the apparition of the "Drummer of Tedworth," which happened in 1661; in which the scin-lecca, or double, of the drummer-sorcerer was evidently very much afraid of the sword. Psellus, in his work, ** gives a long story of his sister-in-law being thrown into a most fearful state by an elementary daimon taking possession of her. She was finally cured by a conjurer, a foreigner named Anaphalangis, who began by threatening the invisible occupant of her body with a naked sword, until he finally dislodged him. Psellus introduces a whole catechism of demonology, which he gives in the following terms, as far as we remember:

"You want to know," asked the conjurer, "whether the bodies of the spirits can be hurt by sword or any other weapon? *** Yes, they can. Any hard substance striking them can make them sensible to pain; and though their bodies be made neither of solid nor firm substance, they feel it the same, for in beings endowed with sensibility it is not their nerves only which possess the faculty of feeling, but likewise also the spirit which resides in them . . . the body of a spirit can be sensible in its whole, as well as in each one of its parts. Without the help of any physical organism the spirit sees, hears, and if you touch him feels your touch. If you divide him in two, he will feel the pain as would any living man, for he is matter still, though so refined as to be generally invisible to our eye. . . . One thing, however, distinguishes him from the living man, viz.: that when a man's limbs are once divided, their parts cannot be reunited very easily. But, cut a demon in two, and you will see him immediately join himself together. As water or air closes in behind a solid body  passing through it, and no trace is left, so does the body of a demon condense itself again, when the penetrative weapon is withdrawn from the wound. But every rent made in it causes him pain nevertheless. That is why daimons dread the point of a sword or any sharp weapon. Let those who want to see them flee try the experiment."

One of the most learned scholars of his century, Bodin, the Demonologian,

# p. 364

held the same opinion, that both the human and cosmical elementaries "were sorely afraid of swords and daggers." It is also the opinion of Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Plato. Plutarch mentions it several times. The practicing theurgists knew it well and acted accordingly; and many of the latter assert that "the demons suffer from any rent made in their bodies." Bodin tells us a wonderful story to this effect, in his work On the Daemons, p. 292.

"I remember," says the author, "that in 1557 an elemental demon, one of those who are called thundering, fell down with the lightning, into the house of Poudot, the shoemaker, and immediately began flinging stones all about the room. We picked up so many of them that the landlady filled a large chest full, after having securely closed the windows and doors and locked the chest itself. But it did not prevent the demon in the least from introducing other stones into the room, but without injuring any one for all that. Latomi, who was then Quarter-President, * came to see what was the matter. Immediately upon his entrance, the spirit knocked the cap off his head and made him run away. It had lasted for over six days, when M. Jean Morgnes, Counsellor at the Presidial, came to fetch me to see the mystery. When I entered the house, some one advised the master of it to pray to God with all his heart and to wheel round a sword in the air about the room; he did so. On that following day the landlady told us, that from that very moment they did not hear the least noise in the house; but that during the seven previous days that it lasted they could not get a moment's rest."

The books on the witchcraft of the middle ages are full of such narratives. The very rare and interesting work of Glanvil, called Sadducismus Triumphatus, ranks with that of Bodin, above mentioned, as one of the best. But we must give space now to certain narratives of the more ancient philosophers, who explain at the same time that they describe.

And first in rank for wonders comes Proclus. His list of facts, most of which he supports by the citation of witnesses--sometimes well-known philosophers--is staggering. He records many instances in his time of dead persons who were found to have changed their recumbent positions in the sepulchre, for one of either sitting or standing, which he attributes to their being larvae, and which he says "is related by the ancients of Aristius, Epimenides, and Hermodorus." He gives five such cases from the history of Clearchus, the disciple of Aristotle. 1. Cleonymus, the Athenian. 2. Polykritus, an illustrious man among the AEolians. It is related by the historian Nomachius, that Polykritus died, and returned in the ninth month after his death. "Hiero, the Ephesian, and other

# p. 365

historians," says his translator, Taylor, "testify to the truth of this." 3. In Nicopolis, the same happened to one Eurinus. The latter revived on the fifteenth day after his burial, and lived for some time after that, leading an exemplary life. 4. Rufus, a priest of Thessalonica, restored to life the third day after his death, for the purpose of performing certain sacred ceremonies according to promise; he fulfilled his engagement, and died again to return no more. 5. This is the case of one Philonaea, who lived under the reign of Philip. She was the daughter of Demostratus and Charito of Amphipolos. Married against her wish to one Kroterus, she died soon after. But in the sixth month after her death, she revived, as Proclus says: "through her love of a youth named Machates, who came to her father Demostratus, from Pella." She visited him for many nights successively, but when this was finally discovered, she, or rather the vampire that represented her, died of rage. Previous to this she declared that she acted in this manner according to the will of terrestrial demons. Her dead body was seen at this second death by every one in the town, lying in her father's house. On opening the vault, where her body had been deposited, it was found empty by those of her relatives, who being incredulous upon that point, went to ascertain the truth. The narrative is corroborated by the Epistles of Hipparchus and those of Arridaeus to Philip. *

Says Proclus: "Many other of the ancients have collected a history of those that have apparently died, and afterward revived. Among these is the natural philosopher Demokritus. In his writings concerning Hades, he affirms that [in a certain case under discussion] death was not, as it seemed, an entire desertion of the whole life of the body, but a cessation caused by some blow, or perhaps a wound; but the bonds of the soul yet remained rooted about the marrow, and the heart contained in its profundity the empyreuma of life; and this remaining, it again acquired the life, which had been extinguished, in consequence of being adapted to animation."

He says again, "That it is possible for the soul to depart from and enter into the body, is evident from him, who, according to Clearchus, used a soul-attracting wand on a sleeping boy; and who persuaded Aristotle, as Clearchus relates in his Treatise on Sleep, that the soul may be separated from the body, and that it enters into a body and uses it as a lodging. For, striking the boy with the wand, he drew out, and, as it were, led his soul, for the purpose of evincing that the body was immova-

# p. 366

ble when the soul (astral body) was at a distance from it, and that it was preserved uninjured; but the soul being again led into the body by means of the wand, after its entrance, narrated every particular. From this circumstance, therefore, both the spectators and Aristotle were persuaded that the soul is separate from the body."

It may be considered quite absurd to recall so often the facts of witchcraft, in the full light of the nineteenth century. But the century itself is getting old; and as it gradually approaches the fatal end, it seems as if it were falling into dotage; not only does it refuse to recollect how abundantly the facts of witchcraft were proven, but it refuses to realize what has been going on for the last thirty years, all over the wide world. After a lapse of several thousand years we may doubt the magic powers of the Thessalonian priests and their "sorceries," as mentioned by Pliny; * we may throw discredit upon the information given us by Suidas, who narrates Medea's journey through the air, and thus forget that magic was the highest knowledge of natural philosophy; but how are we to dispose of the frequent occurrence of precisely such journeys "through the air" when they happen before our own eyes, and are corroborated by the testimony of hundreds of apparently sane persons? If the universality of a belief be a proof of its truth, few facts have been better established than that of sorcery. "Every people, from the rudest to the most refined, we may also add in every age, have believed in the kind of supernatural agency, which we understand by this term," says Thomas Wright, the author of Sorcery and Magic, and a skeptical member of the National Institute of France. "It was founded on the equally extensive creed, that, besides our own visible existence, we live in an invisible world of spiritual beings, by which our actions and even our thoughts are often guided, and which have a certain degree of power over the elements and over the ordinary course of organic life." Further, marvelling how this mysterious science flourished everywhere, and noticing several famous schools of magic in different parts of Europe, he explains the time-honored belief, and shows the difference between sorcery and magic as follows: "The magician differed from the witch in this, that, while the latter was an ignorant instrument in the hands of the demons, the former had become their master by the powerful intermediation of Science, which was only within reach of the few, and which these beings were unable to disobey." ** This delineation, established and known since the days of Moses, the author gives as derived from "the most authentic sources."

# p. 367

If from this unbeliever we pass to the authority of an adept in that mysterious science, the anonymous author of Art-Magic, we find him stating the following: "The reader may inquire wherein consists the difference between a medium and a magician? . . . The medium is one through whose astral spirit other spirits can manifest, making their presence known by various kinds of phenomena. Whatever these consist in, the medium is only a passive agent in their hands. He can neither command their presence, nor will their absence; can never compel the performance of any special act, nor direct its nature. The magician, on the contrary, can summon and dismiss spirits at will; can perform many feats of occult power through his own spirit; can compel the presence and assistance of spirits of lower grades of being than himself, and effect transformations in the realm of nature upon animate and inanimate bodies." *

This learned author forgot to point out a marked distinction in mediumship, with which he must have been entirely familiar. Physical phenomena are the result of the manipulation of forces through the physical system of the medium, by the unseen intelligences, of whatever class. In a word, physical mediumship depends on a peculiar organization of the physical system; spiritual mediumship, which is accompanied by a display of subjective, intellectual phenomena, depends upon a like peculiar organization of the spiritual nature of the medium. As the potter from one lump of clay fashions a vessel of dishonor, and from another a vessel of honor, so, among physical mediums, the plastic astral spirit of one may be prepared for a certain class of objective phenomena, and that of another for a different one. Once so prepared, it appears difficult to alter the phase of mediumship, as when a bar of steel is forged into a certain shape, it cannot be used for any other than its original purpose without difficulty. As a rule, mediums who have been developed for one class of phenomena rarely change to another, but repeat the same performance *ad infinitum.

*

Psychography, or the direct writing of messages by spirits, partakes of both forms of mediumship. The writing itself is an objective physical fact, while the sentiments it contains may be of the very noblest character. The latter depend entirely on the moral state of the medium. It does not require that he should be educated, to write philosophical treatises worthy of Aristotle, nor a poet, to write verses that would reflect honor upon a Byron or a Lamartine; but it does require that the soul of the medium shall be pure enough to serve as a channel for spirits who are capable of giving utterance to such lofty sentiments.

# p. 368

In Art-Magic, one of the most delightful pictures presented to us is that of an innocent little child-medium, in whose presence, during the past three years, four volumes of MSS., in the ancient Sanscrit, have been written by the spirits, without pens, pencils, or ink. "It is enough," says the author, "to lay the blank sheets on a tripod, carefully screened from the direct rays of light, but still dimly visible to the eyes of attentive observers. The child sits on the ground and lays her head on the tripod, embracing its supports with her little arms. In this attitude she most commonly sleeps for an hour, during which time the sheets lying on the tripod are filled up with exquisitely formed characters in the ancient Sanscrit." This is so remarkable an instance of psychographic mediumship, and so thoroughly illustrates the principle we have above stated, that we cannot refrain from quoting a few lines from one of the Sanscrit writings, the more so as it embodies that portion of the Hermetic philosophy relating to the antecedent state of man, which elsewhere we have less satisfactorily described.

"Man lives on many earths before he reaches this. Myriads of worlds swarm in space where the soul in rudimental states performs its pilgrimages, ere he reaches the large and shining planet named the Earth, the glorious function of which is to confer self-consciousness. At this point only is he man; at every other stage of his vast, wild journey he is but an embryonic being--a fleeting, temporary shape of matter--a creature in which a part, but only a part, of the high, imprisoned soul shines forth; a rudimental shape, with rudimental functions, ever living, dying, sustaining a flitting spiritual existence as rudimental as the material shape from whence it emerged; a butterfly, springing up from the chrysalitic shell, but ever, as it onward rushes, in new births, new deaths, new incarnations, anon to die and live again, but still stretch upward, still strive onward, still rush on the giddy, dreadful, toilsome, rugged path, until it awakens once more--once more to live and be a material shape, a thing of dust, a creature of flesh and blood, but now--a man." *

We witnessed once in India a trial of psychical skill between a holy gossein ** and a sorcerer, *** which recurs to us in this connection. We had been discussing the relative powers of the fakir's Pitris,--pre-Adamite spirits, and the juggler's invisible allies. A trial of skill was agreed upon, and the writer was chosen as a referee. We were taking our noon-day rest, beside a small lake in Northern India. Upon the surface of the glassy water floated innumerable aquatic flowers, and large shining leaves. Each of the contestants plucked a leaf. The fakir, laying his against his breast, folded his hands across it, and fell into a mo-

# p. 369

mentary trance. He then laid the leaf, with its surface downward, upon the water. The juggler pretended to control the "water-master," the spirit dwelling in the water; and boasted that he would compel the power to prevent the Pitris from manifesting any phenomena upon the fakir's leaf in their element. He took his own leaf and tossed it upon the water, after going through a form of barbarous incantation. It at once exhibited a violent agitation, while the other leaf remained perfectly motionless. After the lapse of a few seconds, both leaves were recovered. Upon that of the fakir were found--much to the indignation of the juggler--something that looked like a symmetrical design traced in milk-white characters, as though the juices of the plant had been used as a corrosive writing fluid. When it became dry, and an opportunity was afforded to examine the lines with care, it proved to be a series of exquisitely-formed Sanscrit characters; the whole composed a sentence embodying a high moral precept. The fakir, let us add, could neither read nor write. Upon the juggler's leaf, instead of writing, was found the tracing of a most hideous, impish face. Each leaf, therefore, bore an impression or allegorical reflection of the character of the contestant, and indicated the quality of spiritual beings with which he was surrounded. But, with deep regret, we must once more leave India, with its blue sky and mysterious past, its religious devotees and its weird sorcerers, and on the enchanted carpet of the historian, transport ourselves back to the musty atmosphere of the French Academy.

To appreciate the timidity, prejudice, and superficiality which have marked the treatment of psychological subjects in the past, we propose to review a book which lies before us. It is the Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes. The work is published by its author, the learned Dr. Figuier, and teems with quotations from the most conspicuous authorities in physiology, psychology, and medicine. Dr. Calmeil, the well-known director-in-chief of Charenton, the famous lunatic asylum of France, is the robust Atlas on whose mighty shoulders rests this world of erudition. As the ripe fruit of the thought of 1860 it must forever keep a place among the most curious of works of art. Moved by the restless demon of science, determined to kill superstition--and, as a consequence, spiritism--at one blow, the author affords us a summary view of the most remarkable instances of mediumistic phenomena during the last two centuries.

The discussion embraces the Prophets of Cevennes, the Camisards, the Jansenists, the Abbe Paris, and other historical epidemics, which, as they have been described during the last twenty years by nearly every writer upon the modern phenomena, we will mention as briefly as possible. It is not facts that we desire to bring again under discussion, but

# p. 370

merely the way in which such facts were regarded and treated by those who, as physicians and recognized authorities, had the greater responsibility in such questions. If this prejudiced author is introduced to our readers at this time, it is only because his work enables us to show what occult facts and manifestations may expect from orthodox science. When the most world-renowned psychological epidemics are so treated, what will induce a materialist to seriously study other phenomena as well authenticated and as interesting, but still less popular? Let it be remembered that the reports made by various committees to their respective academies at that time, as well as the records of the judicial tribunals, are still in existence, and may be consulted for purposes of verification. It is from such unimpeachable sources that Dr. Figuier compiled his extraordinary work. We must give, at least, in substance, the unparalleled arguments with which the author seeks to demolish every form of super-naturalism, together with the commentaries of the demonological des Mousseaux, who, in one of his works, * pounces upon his skeptical victim like a tiger upon his prey.

Between the two champions--the materialist and the bigot--the unbiassed student may glean a good harvest.

We will begin with the Convulsionnaires of Cevennes, the epidemic of whose astounding phenomena occurred during the latter part of 1700. The merciless measures adopted by the French Catholics to extirpate the spirit of prophecy from an entire population, is historical, and needs no repetition here. The fact alone that a mere handful of men, women, and children, not exceeding 2,000 persons in number, could withstand for years king's troops, which, with the militia, amounted to 60,000 men, is a miracle in itself. The marvels are all recorded, and the proces verbaux of the time preserved in the Archives of France until this day. There is in existence an official report among others, which was sent to Rome by the ferocious Abbe Chayla, the prior of Laval, in which he complains that the Evil One is so powerful, that no torture, no amount of inquisitory exorcism, is able to dislodge him from the Cevennois. He adds, that he closed their hands upon burning coals, and they were not even singed; that he had wrapped their whole persons in cotton soaked with oil, and had set them on fire, and in many cases did not find one blister on their skins; that balls were shot at them, and found flattened between the skin and clothes, without injuring them, etc., etc.

Accepting the whole of the above as a solid ground-work for his learned arguments, this is what Dr. Figuier says: "Toward the close of the seventeenth century, an old maid imports into Cevennes the spirit of

# p. 371

prophecy. She communicates it (?) to young boys and girls, who transpire it in their turn, and spread it in the surrounding atmosphere. . . . Women and children become the most sensitive to the infection" (vol. ii., p. 261). "Men, women, and babies speak under inspiration, not in ordinary patois, but in the purest French--a language at that time utterly unknown in the country. Children of twelve months, and even less, as we learn from the proces verbaux, who previously could hardly utter a few short syllables, spoke fluently, and prophesied." "Eight thousand prophets," says Figuier, "were scattered over the country; doctors and eminent physicians were sent for." Half of the medical schools of France, among others, the Faculty of Montpellier, hastened to the spot. Consultations were held, and the physicians declared themselves "delighted, lost in wonder and admiration, upon hearing young girls and boys, ignorant and illiterate, deliver discourses on things they had never learned." * The sentence pronounced by Figuier against these treacherous professional brethren, for being so delighted with the young prophets, is that they "did not understand, themselves, what they saw." ** Many of the prophets forcibly communicated their spirit to those who tried to break the spell. *** A great number of them were between three and twelve years of age; still others were at the breast, and spoke French distinctly and correctly. * These discourses, which often lasted for several hours, would have been impossible to the little orators, were the latter in their natural or normal state. **

"Now," asks the reviewer, "what was the meaning of such a series of prodigies, all of them freely admitted in Figuier's book? No meaning at all! It was nothing," he says, "except the effect of a 'momentary exaltation of the intellectual faculties.' " ** "These phenomena," he adds, "are observable in many of the cerebral affections."

"Momentary exaltation, lasting for many hours in the brains of babies under one year old, not weaned yet, speaking good French before they had learned to say one word in their own patois! Oh, miracle of physiology! Prodigy ought to be thy name!" exclaims des Mousseaux.

"Dr. Calmeil, in his work on insanity," remarks Figuier, "when reporting on the ecstatic theomania of the Calvinists, concludes that the disease must be attributed in the simpler cases to HYSTERIA, and in those of more serious character to epilepsy. . . . We rather incline to the opinion," says Figuier, "that it was a disease sui generis, and in order

# p. 372

to have an appropriate name for such a disease, we must be satisfied with the one of the Trembling Convulsionaires of Cevennes." *

*

Theomania and hysteria, again! The medical corporations must themselves be possessed with an incurable atomomania*; otherwise why should they give out such absurdities for science, and hope for their acceptance?

"Such was the fury for exorcising and roasting," continues Figuier, "that monks saw possessions by demons everywhere when they felt in need of miracles to either throw more light on the omnipotency of the Devil, or keep their dinner-pot boiling at the convent." **

For this sarcasm the pious des Mousseaux expresses a heartfelt gratitude to Figuier; for, as he remarks, "he is in France one of the first writers whom we find, to our surprise, not denying the phenomena which have been made long since undeniable. Moved by a sense of lofty superiority and even disdain for the method used by his predecessors, Dr. Figuier desires his readers to know that he does not follow the same path as they. 'We will not reject,' says he, 'as being unworthy of credit, facts only because they are embarrassing for our system. On the contrary, we will collect all of the facts that the same historical evidence has transmitted to us . . . and which, consequently, are entitled to the same credence, and it is upon the whole mass of such facts that we will base the natural explanation, which we have to offer, in our turn, as a sequel to those of the savants who have preceded us on this subject.' " ***

Thereupon, Dr. Figuier proceeds. ** He takes a few steps, and, placing himself right in the midst of the Convulsionaires of St. Medard, he invites his readers to scrutinize, under his direction, prodigies which are for him but simple effects of nature.

But before we proceed, in our turn, to show Dr. Figuier's opinion, we must refresh the reader's memory as to what the Jansenist miracles comprised, according to historical evidence.

Abbe Paris was a Jansenist, who died in 1727. Immediately after his decease the most surprising phenomena began to occur at his tomb. The churchyard was crowded from morning till night. Jesuits, exasperated at seeing heretics perform wonders in healing, and other works, got from the magistrates an order to close all access to the tomb of the Abbe. But, notwithstanding every opposition, the wonders lasted for over twenty years. Bishop Douglas, who went to Paris for that sole purpose in 1749, visited the place, and he reports that the miracles were still going on among the Convulsionaires. When every endeavor to stop them failed, the Catholic clergy were forced to admit their reality, but screened them-

# p. 373

selves, as usual, behind the Devil. Hume, in his Philosophical Essays, says: "There surely never was so great a number of miracles ascribed to one person as those which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of the Abbe Paris. The curing of the sick, giving hearing to the deaf and sight to the blind, were everywhere talked of as the effects of the holy sepulchre. But, what is more extraordinary, many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world . . . nor were the Jesuits, though a learned body, supported by the civil magistrates, and determined enemies to those opinions in whose favor the miracles were said to have been wrought, ever able distinctly to refute or detect them . . . such is historic evidence." * Dr. Middleton, in his Free Enquiry, a book which be wrote at a period when the manifestations were already decreasing, i.e., about nineteen years after they had first begun, declares that the evidence of these miracles is fully as strong as that of the wonders recorded of the Apostles.

The phenomena so well authenticated by thousands of witnesses before magistrates, and in spite of the Catholic clergy, are among the most wonderful in history. Carre de Montgeron, a member of parliament and a man who became famous for his connection with the Jansenists, enumerates them carefully in his work. It comprises four thick quarto volumes, of which the first is dedicated to the king, under the title: "La Verite des Miracles operes par l'Intercession de M. de Paris, demontree contre l'Archeveque de Sens. Ouvrage dedie au Roi, par M. de Montgeron, Conseiller au Parlement." The author presents a vast amount of personal and official evidence to the truthfulness of every case. For speaking disrespectfully of the Roman clergy, Montgeron was thrown into the Bastille, but his work was accepted.

And now for the views of Dr. Figuier upon these remarkable and unquestionably historical phenomena. "A Convulsionary bends back into an arc, her loins supported by the sharp point of a peg," quotes the learned author, from the proces verbaux. "The pleasure that she begs for is to be pounded by a stone weighing fifty pounds, and suspended by a rope passing over a pulley fixed to the ceiling. The stone, being hoisted to its extreme height, falls with all its weight upon the patient's stomach, her back resting all the while on the sharp point of the peg. Montgeron and numerous other witnesses testified to the fact that neither the flesh nor the skin of the back were ever marked in the least, and that the girl, to show she suffered no pain whatever, kept crying out, 'Strike harder--harder!'

# p. 374

"Jeanne Maulet, a girl of twenty, leaning with her back against a wall, received upon her stomach one hundred blows of a hammer weighing thirty pounds; the blows, administered by a very strong man, were so terrible that they shook the wall. To test the force of the blows, Montgeron tried them on the stone wall against which the girl was leaning. . . . He gets one of the instruments of the Jansenist healing, called the 'GRAND SECOURS.' At the twenty-fifth blow," he writes, "the stone upon which I struck, which had been shaken by the preceding efforts, suddenly became loose and fell on the other side of the wall, making an aperture more than half a foot in size." When the blows are struck with violence upon an iron drill held against the stomach of a Convulsionnaire (who, sometimes, is but a weak woman), "it seems," says Montgeron, "as if it would penetrate through to the spine and rupture all the entrails under the force of the blows" (vol. i., p. 380). "But, so far from that occurring, the Convulsionnaire cries out, with an expression of perfect rapture in her face, 'Oh, how delightful! Oh, that does me good! Courage, brother; strike twice as hard, if you can!' It now remains," continues Dr. Figuier, "to try to explain the strange phenomena which we have described."

"We have said, in the introduction to this work, that at the middle of the nineteenth century one of the most famous epidemics of possession broke out in Germany: that of the Nonnains, who performed all the miracles most admired since the days of St. Medard, and even some greater ones; who turned summersaults, who CLIMBED DEAD WALLS, and spoke FOREIGN LANGUAGES." *

The official report of the wonders, which is more full than that of Figuier, adds such further particulars as that "the affected persons would stand on their heads for hours together, and correctly describe distant events, even such as were happening in the homes of the committee-men; as it was subsequently verified. Men and women were held suspended in the air, by an invisible force, and the combined efforts of the committee were insufficient to pull them down. Old women climbed perpendicular walls thirty feet in height with the agility of wild cats, etc., etc."

Now, one should expect that the learned critic, the eminent physician and psychologist, who not only credits such incredible phenomena but himself describes them minutely, and con amore, so to say, would necessarily startle the reading public with some explanation so extraordinary that his scientific views would cause a real hegira to the unexplored fields of psychology. Well, he does startle us, for to all this he quietly

# p. 375

observes: "Recourse was had to marriage to bring to a stop these disorders of the Convulsionnaires!" *

For once des Mousseaux had the best of his enemy: "Marriage, do you understand this?" he remarks. "Marriage cures them of this faculty of climbing dead-walls like so many flies, and of speaking foreign languages. Oh! the curious properties of marriage in those remarkable days!"

"It should be added," continues Figuier, "that with the fanatics of St. Medard, the blows were never administered except during the convulsive crisis; and that, therefore, as Dr. Calmeil suggests, meteorism of the abdomen, the state of spasm of the uterus of women, of the alimentary canal in all cases, the state of contraction, of erethism, of turgescence of the carneous envelopes of the muscular coats which protect and cover the abdomen, chest, and principal vascular masses and the osseous surfaces, may have singularly contributed toward reducing, and even destroying, the force of the blows!"

"The astounding resistance that the skin, the areolar tissue, the surface of the bodies and limbs of the Convulsionnaires offered to things which seem as if they ought to have torn or crushed them, is of a nature to excite more surprise. Nevertheless, it can be explained. This resisting force, this insensibility, seems to partake of the extreme changes in sensibility which can occur in the animal economy during a time of great exaltation. Anger, fear, in a word, every passion, provided that it be carried to a paroxysmal point, can produce this insensibility." **

"Let us remark, besides," rejoins Dr. Calmeil, quoted by Figuier, "that for striking upon the bodies of the Convulsionnaires use was made either of massive objects with flat or rounded surfaces, or of cylindrical and blunt shapes. *** The action of such physical agents is not to be compared, in respect to the danger which attaches to it, with that of cords, supple or flexible instruments, and those having a sharp edge. In fine, the contact and the shock of the blows produced upon the Convulsionnaires the effect of a salutary shampooing, and reduced the violence of the tortures of HYSTERIA."

The reader will please observe that this is not intended as a joke, but is the sober theory of one of the most eminent of French physicians, hoary with age and experience, the Director-in-Chief of the Government Insane Asylum at Charenton. Really, the above explanation might lead the reader to a strange suspicion. We might imagine, perhaps, that Dr.

# p. 376

Calmeil has kept company with the patients under his care a few more years than was good for the healthy action of his own brain.

Besides, when Figuier talks of massive objects, of cylindrical and blunt shapes, he surely forgets the sharp swords, pointed iron pegs, and the hatchets, of which he himself gave a graphic description on page 409 of his first volume. The brother of Elie Marion is shown by him striking his stomach and abdomen with the sharp point of a knife, with tremendous force, "his body all the while resisting as if it were made of iron."

Arrived at this point, des Mousseaux loses all patience, and indignantly exclaims:

"Was the learned physician quite awake when writing the above sentences? . . . If, perchance, the Drs. Calmeil and Figuier should seriously maintain their assertions and insist on their theory, we are ready to answer them as follows: 'We are perfectly willing to believe you. But before such a superhuman effort of condescension, will you not demonstrate to us the truth of your theory in a more practical manner? Let us, for example, develop in you a violent and terrible passion; anger--rage if you choose. You shall permit us for a single moment to be in your sight irritating, rude, and insulting. Of course, we will be so only at your request and in the interest of science and your cause. Our duty under the contract will consist in humiliating and provoking you to the last extremity. Before a public audience, who shall know nothing of our agreement, but whom you must satisfy as to your assertions, we will insult you; . . . we will tell you that your writings are an ambuscade to truth, an insult to common sense, a disgrace which paper only can bear; but which the public should chastise. We will add that you lie to science, you lie to the ears of the ignorant and stupid fools gathered around you, open-mouthed, like the crowd around a peddling quack. . . . And when, transported beyond yourself, your face ablaze, and anger tumefying, you shall have displaced your fluids; when your fury has reached the point of bursting, we will cause your turgescent muscles to be struck with powerful blows; your friends shall show us the most insensible places; we will let a perfect shower, an avalanche of stones fall upon them . . . for so was treated the flesh of the convulsed women whose appetite for such blows could never be satisfied. But, in order to procure for you the gratification of a salutary shampooing--as you deliciously express it--your limbs shall only be pounded with objects having blunt surfaces and cylindrical shapes, with clubs and sticks devoid of suppleness, and, if you prefer it, neatly turned in a lathe.' "

So liberal is des Mousseaux, so determined to accommodate his antagonists with every possible chance to prove their theory, that he offers them

# p. 377

the choice to substitute for themselves in the experiment their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters, "since," he says, "you have remarked that the weaker sex is the strong and resistant sex in these disconcerting trials."

Useless to remark that des Mousseaux's challenge remained unanswered.

Footnotes

337:* We wonder if Father Felix is prepared to include St. Augustine, Lactantius, and Bede in this category?

338:* For instance, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo? For further particulars see the "Index Expurgatorius." Verily, wise are such popular sayings, as that, "Boldness carries off cities at one shout."

339:* This statement, neither Herbert Spencer nor Huxley will be likely to traverse. But Father Felix seems insensible of his own debt to science; if he had said this in February, 1600, he might have shared the fate of poor Bruno.

339:** "Le Mystere et la Science," conferences, P. Felix de Notre Dame; des Mousseaux: "Hauts Phen. Magie."

341: Damascius, in the "Theogony," calls it Dis, *"the disposer of all things." Cory: "Ancient Fragments," p. 314.

342:* Plato: "Timaeus."

342:** Suidas: v. "Tyrrhenia."

342:*** The reader will understand that by "years" is meant "ages," not mere periods of twelve lunar months each.

342:**** See the Greek translation by Philo Byblius.

342:* Cory: "Ancient Fragments."

343:* We give the spelling and words of this Kabalist who lived and published his works in the seventeenth century. Generally he is considered as one of the most famous alchemists among the Hermetic philosophers.

343: The most positive of materialistic philosophers agree that all that exists was evolved from ether; hence, air, water, earth, and fire, the four primordial elements must also proceed from ether and chaos the first Duad; all the imponderables, whether now known or unknown, proceed from the same source. Now, if there is a spiritual essence in matter, and that essence forces it to shape itself into millions of individual forms, why is it illogical to assert that each of these spiritual kingdoms in nature is peopled with beings evolved out of its own material? Chemistry teaches us that in man's body there are air, water, earth, and heat, or fire--air is present in its components; water in the secretions; earth in the inorganic constituents; and fire in the animal heat. The Kabalist knows by experience that an elemental spirit contains only one, and that each one of the four kingdoms has its own peculiar elemental spirits; man being higher than they, the law of evolution finds its illustration in the combination of all four in him.

344:* Gorres: "Mystique," lib. iii., p. 63.

344: The ancients called "the soul" the spirits of bad people; the soul was the larva and lemure. Good human spirits became gods.

344:*** Porphyry: "De Sacrificiis." Chapter on the true Cultus.

345:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians."

345:** Second century, A.D. "Du Dieu de Socrate," Apul. class., pp. 143-145.

346:* "Eastern Monachism," p. 9.

347:* "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," iv. 385.

347:** Hardy: "Manual of Buddhism"; Dunlap: "The World's Religions."

347: Lempriere ("Classical Dictionary," art. "Pythagoras") says that "there is great reason to suspect the truth of the whole narrative of Pythagoras' journey into India," and concludes by saying that this philosopher had never seen either Gymnosophists or their country. If this be so, how account for the doctrine of the metempsychosis of Pythagoras, which is far more that of the Hindu in its details than the Egyptian? But, above all, how account for the fact that the name *MONAS, applied by him to the First Cause, is the identical appellation given to that Being in the Sanscrit tongue? In 1792-7, when Lempriere's "Dictionary" appeared, the Sanscrit was, we may say, utterly unknown; Dr. Haug's translation of the "Aitareya Brahmana" ("Rig-Vedas"), in which this word occurs, was published only about twenty years ago, and until that valuable addition to the literature of archaic ages was completed, and the precise age of the "Aitareya"--now fixed by Haug at 2000-2400 B.C.--was a mystery, it might be suggested, as in the case of Christian symbols, that the Hindus borrowed it from Pythagoras. But now, unless philology can show it to be a "coincidence," and that the word Monas is not the same in its minutest definitions, we have a right to assert that Pythagoras was in India, and that it was the Gymnosophists who instructed him p. 348 in his metaphysical theology. The fact alone that "Sanscrit, as compared with Greek and Latin, is an elder sister," as Max Muller shows, is not sufficient to account for the perfect identity of the Sanscrit and Greek words MONAS, in their most metaphysical, abstruse sense. The Sanscrit word Deva (god) has become the Latin deus, and points to a common source; but we see in the Zoroastrian "Zend-Avesta" the same word, meaning diametrically the opposite, and becoming daeva, or evil spirit, from which comes the word devil.

348:* Haug: "Aitareya Brahmanam."

348:** Ibid.

349:* Berosus: fragment preserved by Alex. Polyhistor; Cory: "Of the Cosmogony and the Deluge."

351:* Some writer has employed a most felicitous expression in describing the majesty of the Hindu archaic monuments, and the exquisite finish of their sculpture. "They built," says he, "like giants, and finished like jewelers."

352:* "Anatomie Cerebrale," Malacarne, Milan.

353:* Psellus, 6, Plet. 2; Cory: "Chaldean Oracles."

354:* See "Lecture on the Vedas."

356: In order to avoid being contradicted by some spiritualists we give verbatim the language in question, as a specimen of the unreliability of the oracular utterances of certain "spirits." Let them be human or elemental, but spirits capable of such effrontery may well be regarded by occultists as anything but safe guides in philosophy, exact science, or ethics. "It will be remembered," says Mrs. Cora V. Tappan, in a public discourse upon the "History of Occultism and its Relations to Spiritualism" (see "Banner of Light," Aug. 26, 1876), "that the ancient word witchcraft, or the exercise of it, was forbidden among the Hebrews. The translation is that no witch should be allowed to live. That has been supposed to be the literal interpretation; and acting upon that, your very pious and devout ancestors put to death, without adequate testimony, numbers of very intelligent, wise, and sincere persons, under the condemnation of witchcraft. It has now turned out that the interpretation or translation should be, that no witches should be allowed to obtain a living by the practice of their art. That is, it should not be made a profession." May we be so bold as to inquire of the celebrated speaker, through whom or according to what authority such a thing has ever turned out*?

356: Mr. Cromwell F. Varley, the well-known electrician of the Atlantic Cable Company, communicates the result of his observations, in the course of a debate at the p. 357 Psychological Society of Great Britain, which is reported in the "Spiritualist" (London, April 14, 1876, pp. 174, 175). He thought that the effect of free nitric acid in the atmosphere was able to drive away what he calls "unpleasant spirits." He thought that those who were troubled by unpleasant spirits at home, would find relief by pouring one ounce of vitriol upon two ounces of finely-powdered nitre in a saucer and putting the mixture under the bed. Here is a scientist, whose reputation extends over two continents, who gives a recipe to drive away bad spirits. And yet the general public mocks as a "superstition" the herbs and incenses employed by Hindus, Chinese, Africans, and other races to accomplish the self-same purpose.

358:* "Art-Magic," p. 97.

360: This phantom is called Scin Lecca. *See Bulwer-Lytton's "Strange Story."

360: In the Strasbourg edition of his works (1603), Paracelsus writes of the wonderful p. 361 magical power of man's spirit. "It is possible," he says, "that my spirit, without the help of the body, and through a fiery will alone, and without a sword, can stab and wound others. It is also possible that I can bring the spirit of my adversary into an image, and then double him up and lame him . . . the exertion of will is a great point in medicine. . . . Every imagination of man comes through the heart, for this is the sun of the microcosm, and out of the microcosm proceeds the imagination into the great world (universal ether) . . . the imagination of man is a seed which is material." (Our atomical modern scientists have proved it; see Babbage and Professor Jevons.) "Fixed thought is also a means to an end. The magical is a great concealed wisdom, and reason is a great public foolishness. No armor protects against magic, for it injures the inward spirit of life."

361:* "Salem Witchcraft; With an Account of Salem Village," by C. W. Upham.

362:* "Odyssey," A. 82.

363:* "Æneid," book vi., 260.

363:** "De Daemon," cap. "Quomodo daem occupent."

363:* Numquid daemonum corpora pulsari possunt? Possunt sane, atque dolere solido quodam percussa corpore.

363:**** Ubi secatur, mox in se iterum recreatur et coalescit . . . dictu velocius daemonicus spiritus in se revertitor.

364:* A magistrate of the district.

365:* This appalling circumstance was authenticated by the Prefect of the city, and the Proconsul of the Province laid the report before the Emperor. The story is modestly related by Mrs. Catherine Crowe (see "Night-Side of Nature," p. 335).

366:* Pliny, xxx., 1.

366: T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A**., etc.: "Sorcery and Magic," vol. iii.

367:* "Art-Magic," pp. 159, 160.

368:* "Art-Magic," p. 28.

368:** Fakir, beggar.

368:*** A juggler so called.

370:* "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."

371:* "Histoire du Merveilleux dans les Temps Modernes," vol. ii., p. 262.

371:** Ibid.

371:*** Ibid., p. 265.

371:**** Ibid., pp. 267, 401, 402.

371:* Ibid., pp. 266, etc., 400.

371:** Ibid., p. 403.

372:* "Histoire du Merveilleux," vol. i., p. 397.

372:** Ibid., pp. 26-27.

372:*** Ibid., p. 238.

372:* Des Mousseaux: "Magie au *XIXme Siecle," p. 452.

373:* Hume: "Philosophical Essays," p. 195.

374:* "Histoire du Merveilleux," p. 401.

375:* Ibid.

375:** Ibid., vol. ii., pp. 410, 411.

375:*** Ibid., p. 407.

Chapter X

# p. 473

CHAPTER X.

"Get thee behind me, SATAN" (Jesus to Peter).--Matt. xvi. 23. "Such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith. I tell you what --

He held me, last night, at least nine hours

In reckoning up the several devils' names."--King Henry IV., Part i., Act iii. "La force terrible et juste qui tue eternellement les avortons a ete nommee par les Egyptiens Typhon, par les Hebreux Samael; par les orientaux Satan; et par les Latins Lucifer. Le Lucifer de la Cabale n'est pas un ange maudit et foudroye; c'est l'ange qui eclaire et qui regenere en tombant."--ELIPHAS LEVI: *Dogme et Rituel. * "Bad as he is, the Devil may be abus'd,

Be falsely charg'd, and causelessly accus'd,

When Men, unwilling to be blam'd alone,

Shift off those Crimes on Him which are their Own."--Defoe, 1726. **

S**EVERAL years ago, a distinguished writer and persecuted kabalist suggested a creed for the Protestant and Roman Catholic bodies, which may be thus formulated:

• Protevangelium.
• "I believe in the Devil, the Father Almighty of Evil, the Destroyer of all things, Perturbator of Heaven and Earth;

And in Anti-Christ, his only Son, our Persecutor,

Who was conceived of the Evil Spirit;

Born of a sacrilegious, foolish Virgin;

Was glorified by mankind, reigned over them,

And ascended to the throne of Almighty God,

From which he crowds Him aside, and from which he insults the living and the dead;

I believe in the Spirit of Evil;

The Synagogue of Satan;

The coalition of the wicked;

The perdition of the body;

And the Death and Hell everlasting. Amen."

Does this offend? Does it seem extravagant, cruel, blasphemous? Listen. In the city of New York, on the ninth day of April, 1877--that is to say, in the last quarter of what is proudly styled the century of discovery and the age of illumination--the following scandalous ideas were broached. We quote from the report in the Sun of the following morning:

"The Baptist preachers met yesterday in the Mariners' Chapel, in

**

# p. 474

**

Oliver Street. Several foreign missionaries were present. The Rev. John W. Sarles, of Brooklyn, read an essay, in which he maintained the proposition that all adult heathen, dying without the knowledge of the Gospel, are damned eternally. Otherwise, the reverend essayist argued, the Gospel is a curse instead of a blessing, the men who crucified Christ served him right, and the whole structure of revealed religion tumbles to the ground.

"Brother Stoddard, a missionary from India, indorsed the views of the Brooklyn pastor. The Hindus were great sinners. One day, after he had preached in the market place, a Brahman got up and said: 'We Hindus beat the world in lying, but this man beats us. How can he say that God loves us? Look at the poisonous serpents, tigers, lions, and all kinds of dangerous animals around us. If God loves us, why doesn't He take them away?'

"The Rev. Mr. Pixley, of Hamilton, N. Y., heartily subscribed to the doctrine of Brother Sarles's essay, and asked for $5,000 to fit out young men for the ministry."

And these men--we will not say teach the doctrine of Jesus, for that would be to insult his memory, but--are paid to teach his doctrine! Can we wonder that intelligent persons prefer annihilation to a faith encumbered by such a monstrous doctrine? We doubt whether any respectable Brahman would have confessed to the vice of lying--an art cultivated only in those portions of British India where the most Christians are found. *

**

# p. 475

**

But we challenge any honest man in the wide world to say whether he thinks the Brahman was far from the truth in saying of the missionary Stoddard, "this man beats us all" in lying. What else would he say, if the latter preached to them the doctrine of eternal damnation, because, indeed, they had passed their lives without reading a Jewish book of which they never heard, or asked salvation of a Christ whose existence they never suspected! But Baptist clergymen who need a few thousand dollars must devise terrifying sensations to fire the congregational heart.

We abstain, as a rule, from giving our own experience when we can call acceptable witnesses, and so, upon reading missionary Stoddard's outrageous remarks, we requested our acquaintance, Mr. William L. D. O'Grady, * to give a fair opinion upon the missionaries. This gentleman's father and grandfather were British army officers, and he himself was born in India, and enjoyed life-long opportunities to learn what the general opinion among the English is of these religious propagandists. Following is his communication in reply to our letter:

"You ask me for my opinion of the Christian missionaries in India. In all the years I spent there, I never spoke to a single missionary. They were not in society, and, from what I heard of their proceedings and could see for myself, I don't wonder at it. Their influence on the natives is bad. Their converts are worthless, and, as a rule, of the lowest class; nor do they improve by conversion. No respectable family will employ Christian servants. They lie, they steal, they are unclean--and dirt is certainly not a Hindu vice; they drink--and no decent native of any other belief ever touches intoxicating liquor; they are outcasts from their own people and utterly despicable. Their new teachers set them a poor example of consistency. While holding forth to the Pariah that God makes no distinction of persons, they boast intolerably over the stray Brahmans, who, very much "off color," occasionally, at long intervals, fall into the clutches of these hypocrites. "The missionaries get very small salaries, as publicly stated in the proceedings of the societies that employ them, but, in some unaccountable way, manage to live as well as officials with ten times their income. When they come home to recover their health, shattered, as they say, by their arduous labors--which they seem to be able to afford to do quite frequently, when supposed richer people cannot--they tell childish stories on platforms, exhibit idols as procured with infinite difficulty, which is quite absurd, and give an account of their imaginary hardships which is perfectly harrowing but untrue from beginning to end. I lived some years in India myself, and nearly all my blood-relations have passed or will pass the best years of their lives there. I know hundreds of British officials, and I never heard from one of them a single word in favor of the missionaries. Natives of any position look on them with the supremest contempt, although suffering chronic exasperation from their arrogant aggressiveness; and the British Government, which continues endowments to Pagodas, granted by the East **

# p. 476

** India Company, and which supports unsectarian education, gives them no countenance whatever. Protected from personal violence, they yelp and bark at natives and Europeans alike, after the fashion of ill-conditioned curs. Often recruited from the poorest specimens of theological fanaticism, they are regarded on all sides as mischievous. Their rabid, reckless, vulgar, and offensive propagandism caused the great Mutiny of 1857. They are noisome humbugs. "WM. L. D. O'GRADY. "NEW YORK, June 12, 1877."

The new creed therefore, with which we opened this chapter, coarse as it may sound, embodies the very essence of the belief of the Church as inculcated by her missionaries. It is regarded as less impious, less infidel, to doubt the personal existence of the Holy Ghost, or the equal Godhead of Jesus, than to question the personality of the Devil. But a summary of Koheleth is well-nigh forgotten. * Who ever quotes the golden words of the prophet Micah, ** or seems to care for the exposition of the Law, as given by Jesus himself? *** The "bull's eye" in the target of Modern Christianity is in the simple phrase to "fear the Devil."

The Catholic clergy and some of the lay champions of the Roman Church fight still more for the existence of Satan and his imps. If Des Mousseaux maintains the objective reality of spiritual phenomena with such an unrelenting ardor, it is because, in his opinion, the latter are the most direct evidence of the Devil at work. The Chevalier is more Catholic than the Pope; and his logic and deductions from never-to-be and non-established premises are unique, and prove once more that the creed offered by us is the one which expresses the Catholic belief most eloquently.

"If magic and spiritualism," he says, "were both but chimeras, we would have to bid an eternal farewell to all the rebellious angels, now troubling the world; for thus, we would have no more demons down here. . . . And if we lost our demons, we would LOSE OUR SAVIOUR likewise. For, from whom did that Saviour come to save us? And then, there would be no more Redeemer; for from whom or what could that Redeemer redeem us? Hence, there would be no more Christianity!!" **** Oh, Holy Father of Evil; Sainted Satan! We pray thee do not abandon such pious Christians as the Chevalier des Mousseaux and some Baptist clergymen!!

**

# p. 477

**

For our part, we would rather remember the wise words of J. C. Colquhoun, * who says that "those persons who, in modern times, adopt the doctrine of the Devil in its strictly literal and personal application, do not appear to be aware that they are in reality polytheists, heathens, idolaters."

Seeking supremacy in everything over the ancient creeds, the Christians claim the discovery of the Devil officially recognized by the Church. Jesus was the first to use the word "legion" when speaking of them; and it is on this ground that M. des Mousseaux thus defends his position in one of his demonological works. "Later," he says, "when the synagogue expired, depositing its inheritance in the hands of Christ, were born into the world and shone, the Fathers of the Church, who have been accused by certain persons of a rare and precious ignorance, of having borrowed their ideas as to the spirits of darkness from the theurgists."

Three deliberate, palpable, and easily-refuted errors--not to use a harsher word--occur in these few lines. In the first place, the synagogue, far from having expired, is flourishing at the present day in nearly every town of Europe, America, and Asia; and of all churches in Christian cities, it is the most firmly established, as well as the best behaved. Further--while no one will deny that many Christian Fathers were born into the world (always, of course, excepting the twelve fictitious Bishops of Rome, who were never born at all), every person who will take the trouble to read the works of the Platonists of the old Academy, who were theurgists before Iamblichus, will recognize therein the origin of Christian Demonology as well as the Angelology, the allegorical meaning of which was completely distorted by the Fathers. Then it could hardly be admitted that the said Fathers ever shone, except, perhaps, in the refulgence of their extreme ignorance. The Reverend Dr. Shuckford, who passed the better part of his life trying to reconcile their contradictions and absurdities, was finally driven to abandon the whole thing in despair. The ignorance of the champions of Plato must indeed appear rare and precious by comparison with the fathomless profundity of Augustine, "the giant of learning and erudition," who scouted the sphericity of the earth, for, if true, it would prevent the antipodes from seeing the Lord Christ when he descended from heaven at the second advent; or, of Lactantius, who rejects with pious horror Pliny's identical theory, on the remarkable ground that it would make the trees at the other side of the earth grow and the men walk with their heads downward; or, again, of Cosmas-Indicopleustes, whose orthodox system of geography is embalmed in his "Christian topography"; or, finally, of

**

# p. 478

**

Bede, who assured the world that the heaven "is tempered with glacial waters, lest it should be set on fire" *--a benign dispensation of Providence, most likely to prevent the radiance of their learning from setting the sky ablaze!

Be this as it may, these resplendent Fathers certainly did borrow their notions of the "spirits of darkness" from the Jewish kabalists and Pagan theurgists, with the difference, however, that they disfigured and outdid in absurdity all that the wildest fancy of the Hindu, Greek, and Roman rabble had ever created. There is not a dev in the Persian Pandaimonion half so preposterous, as a conception, as des Mousseaux's Incubus revamped from Augustine. Typhon, symbolized as an ass, appears a philosopher in comparison with the devil caught by the Normandy peasant in a key-hole; and it is certainly not Ahriman or the Hindu Vritra who would run away in rage and dismay, when addressed as St. Satan, by a native Luther.

The Devil is the patron genius of theological Christianity. So "holy and reverend is his name" in modern conception, that it may not, except occasionally from the pulpit, be uttered in ears polite. In like manner, anciently, it was not lawful to speak the sacred names or repeat the jargon of the Mysteries, except in the sacred cloister. We hardly know the names of the Samothracian gods, but cannot tell precisely the number of the Kabeiri. The Egyptians considered it blasphemous to utter the title of the gods of their secret rites. Even now, the Brahman only pronounces the syllable Om in silent thought, and the Rabbi, the Ineffable Name, . Hence, we who exercise no such veneration, have been led into the blunders of miscalling the names of HISIRIS and YAVA by the mispronunciations, Osiris and Jehovah. A similar glamour bids fair, it will be perceived, to gather round the designation of the dark personage of whom we are treating; and in the familiar handling, we shall be very likely to shock the peculiar sensibilities of many who will consider a free mentioning of the Devil's names as blasphemy--the sin of sins, that "hath never forgiveness." **

Several years ago an acquaintance of the author wrote a newspaper article to demonstrate that the diabolos or Satan of the New Testament denoted the personification of an abstract idea, and not a personal being. He was answered by a clergyman, who concluded the reply with the deprecatory expression, "I fear that he has denied his Saviour." In his rejoinder he pleaded, "Oh, no! we only denied the Devil." But the

**

# p. 479

**

clergyman failed to perceive the difference. In his conception of the matter, the denying of the personal objective existence of the Devil was itself "the sin against the Holy Ghost."

This necessary Evil, dignified by the epithet of "Father of Lies," was, according to the clergy, the founder of all the world-religions of ancient time, and of the heresies, or rather heterodoxies, of later periods, as well as the Deus ex Machina of modern Spiritualism. In the exceptions which we take to this notion, we protest that we do not attack true religion or sincere piety. We are only carrying on a controversy with human dogmas. Perhaps in doing this we resemble Don Quixote, because these things are only windmills. Nevertheless, let it be remembered that they have been the occasion and pretext for the slaughtering of more than fifty millions of human beings since the words were proclaimed: "LOVE YOUR ENEMIES." *

It is a late day for us to expect the Christian clergy to undo and amend their work. They have too much at stake. If the Christian Church should abandon or even modify the dogma of an anthropomorphic devil, it would be like pulling the bottom card from under a castle of cards. The structure would fall. The clergymen to whom we have alluded perceived that upon the relinquishing of Satan as a personal devil, the dogma of Jesus Christ as the second deity in their trinity must go over in the same catastrophe. Incredible, or even horrifying, as it may seem, the Roman Church bases its doctrine of the godhood of Christ entirely upon the satanism of the fallen archangel. We have the testimony of Father Ventura, who proclaims the vital importance of this dogma to the Catholics.

The Reverend Father Ventura, the illustrious ex-general of the Theatins, certifies that the Chevalier des Mousseaux, by his treatise, Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons, has deserved well of mankind, and still more of the most Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. With this voucher, the noble Chevalier, it will be perceived, "speaks as one having authority." He asserts explicitly, that to the Devil and his angels we are absolutely indebted for our Saviour; and that but for them we *would have no Redeemer, no Christianity.

*

Many zealous and earnest souls have revolted at the monstrous dogma of John Calvin, the popekin of Geneva, that sin is the necessary cause of the greatest good. It was bolstered up, nevertheless, by logic like that of des Mousseaux, and illustrated by the same dogmas. The execution of Jesus, the god-man, on the cross, was the most prodigious crime in the universe, yet it was necessary that mankind--those predestinated to ever-

**

# p. 480

**

lasting life--might be saved. D'Aubignee cites the quotation by Martin Luther from the canon, and makes him exclaim, in ecstatic rapture: "O beata culpa, qui talem meruisti redemptorem!" O blessed sin, which didst merit such a Redeemer. We now perceive that the dogma which had appeared so monstrous is, after all, the doctrine of Pope, Calvin, and Luther alike--that the three are one.

Mahomet and his disciples, who held Jesus in great respect as a prophet, remarks Eliphas Levi, used to utter, when speaking of Christians, the following remarkable words: "Jesus of Nazareth was verily a true prophet of Allah and a grand man; but lo! his disciples all went insane one day, and made a god of him."

Max Muller kindly adds: "It was a mistake of the early Fathers to treat the heathen gods as demons or evil spirits, and we must take care not to commit the same error with regard to the Hindu gods." *

But we have Satan presented to us as the prop and mainstay of sacerdotism--an Atlas, holding the Christian heaven and cosmos upon his shoulders. If he falls, then, in their conception, all is lost, and chaos must come again.

This dogma of the Devil and redemption seems to be based upon two passages in the New Testament: "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the Devil." ** "And there was war in heaven; Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon; and the Dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great Dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world." Let us, then, explore the ancient Theogonies, in order to ascertain what was meant by these remarkable expressions.

The first inquiry is whether the term Devil, as here used, actually represents the malignant Deity of the Christians, or an antagonistic, blind force--the dark side of nature. By the latter we are not to understand the manifestation of any evil principle that is malum in se, but only the shadow of the Light, so to say. The theories of the kabalists treat of it as a force which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential to the vitality, evolving, and vigor of the good principle. Plants would perish in their first stage of existence, if they were kept exposed to a constant sunlight; the night alternating with the day is essential to their healthy growth and development. Goodness, likewise, would speedily cease to be such, were it not alternated by its opposite. In human nature, evil denotes the antagonism of matter to the spiritual, and each is accordingly purified thereby. In the cosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved; the

**

# p. 481

**

operation of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, and are necessary to each other. If one is arrested, the action of the other will immediately become destructive.

This personification, denominated Satan, is to be contemplated from three different planes: the Old Testament, the Christian Fathers, and the ancient Gentile altitude. He is supposed to have been represented by the Serpent in the Garden of Eden; nevertheless, the epithet of Satan is nowhere in the Hebrew sacred writings applied to that or any other variety of ophidian. The Brazen Serpent of Moses was worshipped by the Israelites as a god; * being the symbol of Esmun-Asklepius the Phoenician Iao. Indeed, the character of Satan himself is introduced in the 1st book of Chronicles in the act of instigating King David to number the Israelitish people, an act elsewhere declared specifically to have been moved by Jehovah himself. ** The inference is unavoidable that the two, Satan and Jehovah, were regarded as identical.

Another mention of Satan is found in the prophecies of Zechariah. This book was written at a period subsequent to the Jewish colonization of Palestine, and hence, the Asideans may fairly be supposed to have brought the personification thither from the East. It is well-known that this body of sectaries were deeply imbued with the Mazdean notions; and that they represented Ahriman or Anra-manyas by the god-names of Syria. Set or Sat-an, the god of the Hittites and Hyk-sos, and Beel-Zebub the oracle-god, afterward the Grecian Apollo. The prophet began his labors in Judea in the second year of Darius Hystaspes, the restorer of the Mazdean worship. He thus describes the encounter with Satan: "He showed me Joshua the high-priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to be his adversary. And the Lord said unto Satan: 'The Lord rebuke thee, O Satan; even the Lord that hath chosen Jerusalem rebuke thee: is not this a brand plucked out of the fire?' " ***

**

# p. 482

**

We apprehend that this passage which we have quoted is symbolical. There are two allusions in the New Testament that indicate that it was so regarded. The Catholic Epistle of Jude refers to it in this peculiar language: "Yet Michael the archangel, when contending with the Devil, he disputed about the body of Moses, did not venture to utter to him a reviling judgment (Κρισιν επενεγκειν Βλασπηεμιας), but said, 'The Lord rebuke thee.' " * The archangel Michael is thus mentioned as identical with the Lord, or angel of the Lord, of the preceding quotation, and thus is shown that the Hebrew Jehovah had a twofold character, the secret and that manifested as the angel of the Lord, or Michael the archangel. A comparison between these two passages renders it plain that "the body of Moses" over which they contended was Palestine, which as "the land of the Hittites" ** was the peculiar domain of Seth, their tutelar god. *** Michael, as the champion of the Jehovah-worship, contended with the Devil or Adversary, but left judgment to his superior.

Belial is not entitled to the distinction of either god or devil. The term , BELIAL, is defined in the Hebrew lexicons to mean a destroying, waste, uselessness; or the phrase AIS-BELIAL or Belial-man signifies a wasteful, useless man. If Belial must be personified to please our religious friends, we would be obliged to make him perfectly distinct from Satan, and to consider him as a sort of spiritual "Diakka." The demonographers, however, who enumerate nine distinct orders of daimonia, make him chief of the third class--a set of hobgoblins, mischievous and good-for-nothing.

Asmodeus is no Jewish spirit at all, his origin being purely Persian. Breal, the author of Hercule et Cacus, shows that he is the Parsi Eshem-Dev, or Aeshma-dev, the evil spirit of concupiscence, whom Max Muller tells us "is mentioned several times in the Avesta as one of the Devs, **** originally gods, who became evil spirits."

In the same fargard of the "Vendidad" the Brahman divinities are involved in the same denunciation with Æshma-daeva: "I combat India, I combat Sauru, I combat p. 483 the Daeva Naonhaiti." The annotator explains them to be the Vedic gods, Indus, Gaurea, or Siva, and the two Aswins. There must be some mistake, however, for Siva, at the time the "Vedas" were completed, was an aboriginal or Æthiopian God, the Bala or Bel of Western Asia. He was not an Aryan or Vedic deity. Perhaps Surya was the divinity intended.}

**

**

Samael is Satan; but Bryan and a good many other authorities show it to be the name of the "Simoun"--the wind of the desert, * and the Simoun is called Atabul-os or Diabolos.

Plutarch remarks that by Typhon was understood anything violent, unruly, and disorderly. The overflowing of the Nile was called by the Egyptians Typhon. Lower Egypt is very flat, and any mounds built along the river to prevent the frequent inundations, were called Typhonian or Taphos; hence, the origin of Typhon. Plutarch, who was a rigid, orthodox Greek, and never known to much compliment the Egyptians, testifies in his Isis and Osiris, to the fact that, far from worshipping the Devil (of which Christians accused them), they despised more than they dreaded Typhon. In his symbol of the opposing, obstinate power of nature, they believed him to be a poor, struggling, half-dead divinity. Thus, even at that remote age, we see the ancients already too enlightened to believe in a personal devil. As Typhon was represented in one of his symbols under the figure of an ass at the festival of the sun's sacrifices, the Egyptian priests exhorted the faithful worshippers not to carry gold ornaments upon their bodies for fear of giving food to the ass! **

Three and a half centuries before Christ, Plato expressed his opinion of evil by saying that "there is in matter a blind, refractory force, which resists the will of the Great Artificer." This blind force, under Christian influx, was made to see and become responsible; it was transformed into Satan!

His identity with Typhon can scarcely be doubted upon reading the account in Job of his appearance with the sons of God, before the Lord. He accuses Job of a readiness to curse the Lord to his face upon sufficient provocation. So Typhon, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, figures as the accuser. The resemblance extends even to the names, for one of Typhon's appellations was Seth, or Seph; as Satan, in Hebrew, means an adversary. In Arabic the word is Shatana--to be adverse, to persecute, and Manetho says he had treacherously murdered Osiris and allied himself with the Shemites (the Israelites). This may possibly have originated the fable told by Plutarch, that, from the fight between Horus and Typhon, Typhon, overcome with fright at the mis-

**

# p. 484

**

chief he had caused, "fled seven days on an ass, and escaping, begat the boys Ierosolumos and Ioudaios (Jerusalem and Judea)."

Referring to an invocation of Typhon-Seth, Professor Reuvens says that the Egyptians worshipped Typhon under the form of an ass; and according to him Seth "appears gradually among the Semites as the background of their religious consciousness." * The name of the ass in Coptic, AO, is a phonetic of IAO, and hence the animal became a pun-symbol. Thus Satan is a later creation, sprung from the overheated fancy of the Fathers of the Church. By some reverse of fortune, to which the gods are subjected in common with mortals, Typhon-Seth tumbled down from the eminence of the deified son of Adam Kadmon, to the degrading position of a subaltern spirit, a mythical demon--ass. Religious schisms are as little free from the frail pettiness and spiteful feelings of humanity as the partisan quarrels of laymen. We find a strong instance of the above in the case of the Zoroastrian reform, when Magianism separated from the old faith of the Brahmans. The bright Devas of the Veda became, under the religious reform of Zoroaster, daevas, or evil spirits, of the Avesta. Even Indra, the luminous god, was thrust far back into the dark shadow ** in order to show off, in a brighter light, Ahura-mazda, the Wise and Supreme Deity.

The strange veneration in which the Ophites held the serpent which represented Christos may become less perplexing if the students would but remember that at all ages the serpent was the symbol of divine wisdom, which kills in order to resurrect, destroys but to rebuild the better. Moses is made a descendant of Levi, a serpent-tribe. Gautama-Buddha is of a serpent-lineage, through the Naga (serpent) race of kings who reigned in Magadha. Hermes, or the god Taaut (Thoth), in his snake-symbol is Tet; and, according to the Ophite legends, Jesus or Christos is born from a snake (divine wisdom, or Holy Ghost), i.e., he became a Son of God through his initiation into the "Serpent Science." Vishnu, identical with the Egyptian Kneph, rests on the heavenly seven-headed serpent.

The red or fiery dragon of the ancient time was the military ensign of the Assyrians. Cyrus adopted it from them when Persia became dominant. The Romans and Byzantines next assumed it; and so the "great red dragon," from being the symbol of Babylon and Nineveh, became that of Rome. ***

The temptation, or probation, **** of Jesus is, however, the most dramatic

**

# p. 485

**

occasion in which Satan appears. As if to prove the designation of Apollo, Æsculapius, and Bacchus, Diobolos, or son of Zeus, he is also styled Diabolos, or accuser. The scene of the probation was the wilderness. In the desert about the Jordan and Dead Sea were the abodes of the "sons of the prophets," and the Essenes. * These ascetics used to subject their neophytes to probations, analogous to the tortures of the Mithraic rites; and the temptation of Jesus was evidently a scene of this character. Hence, in the Gospel according to Luke, it is stated that "the Diabolos, having completed the probation, left him for a specific time, αχρι καιρου, and Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee." But the διαβολος, or Devil, in this instance is evidently no malignant principle, but one exercising discipline. In this sense the terms Devil and Satan are repeatedly employed. ** Thus, when Paul was liable to undue elation by reason of the abundance of revelations or epoptic disclosures, there was given him "a thorn in the flesh, an angel of Satanas," to check him. ***

The story of Satan in the Book of Job is of a similar character. He is introduced among the "Sons of God," presenting themselves before the Lord, as in a Mystic initiation. Micaiah the prophet describes a similar scene, where he "saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of Heaven standing by Him," with whom He took counsel, which resulted in putting "a lying spirit into the mouth of the prophets of Ahab."  The Lord counsels with Satan, and gives him carte blanche to test the fidelity of Job. He is stripped of his wealth and family, and smitten with a loathsome disease. In his extremity, his wife doubts his integrity, and exhorts him to worship God, as he is about to die. His friends all beset him with accusations, and finally the Lord, the chief hierophant Himself, taxes him with the uttering of words in which there is no wisdom, and with contending with the Almighty. To this rebuke Job yielded, making this appeal: "I will demand of thee, and thou shalt declare unto me: wherefore do I abhor myself and mourn in dust and ashes?" Immediately he was vindicated. "The Lord said unto Eliphaz . . . ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath." His integrity had been asserted, and his prediction verified: "I know that my Champion liveth, and that he will stand up for me at a later time on the earth; and though after my skin my body itself be corroded away, yet even then without my flesh shall I see God." The pre-

**

# p. 486

**

diction was accomplished: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee. . . . And the Lord turned the captivity of Job."

In all these scenes there is manifested no such malignant diabolism as is supposed to characterize "the adversary of souls."

It is an opinion of certain writers of merit and learning, that the Satan of the book of Job is a Jewish myth, containing the Mazdean doctrine of the Evil Principle. Dr. Haug remarks that "the Zoroastrian religion exhibits a close affinity, or rather identity with the Mosaic religion and Christianity, such as the personality and attributes of the Devil, and the resurrection of the dead." * The war of the Apocalypse between Michael and the Dragon, can be traced with equal facility to one of the oldest myths of the Aryans. In the Avesta we read of war between Thraetaona and Azhi-Dahaka, the destroying serpent. Burnouf has endeavored to show that the Vedic myth of Ahi, or the serpent, fighting against the gods, has been gradually euhemerized into "the battle of a pious man against the power of evil," in the Mazdean religion. By these interpretations Satan would be made identical with Zohak or Azhi-Dahaka, who is a three-headed serpent, with one of the heads a human one. **

Beel-Zebub is generally distinguished from Satan. He seems, in the Apocryphal New Testament, to be regarded as the potentate of the underworld. The name is usually rendered "Baal of the Flies," which may be a designation of the Scarabaei or sacred beetles. *** More correctly it shall be read, as it is always given in the Greek text of the Gospels, Beelzebul, or lord of the household, as is indeed intimated in *Matthew

**

# p. 487

**

x. 25: "If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more shall they call them of his household." He was also styled the prince or archon of daemons.

Typhon figures in the Book of the Dead, as the Accuser of souls when they appear for judgment, as Satan stood up to accuse Joshua, the high-priest, before the angel, and as the Devil came to Jesus to tempt or test him during his great fast in the wilderness. He was also the deity denominated Baal-Tsephon, or god of the crypt, in the book of Exodus, and Seth, or the pillar. During this period, the ancient or archaic worship was more or less under the ban of the government; in figurative language, Osiris had been treacherously slain and cut in fourteen (twice seven) pieces, and coffined by his brother Typhon, and Isis had gone to Byblos in quest of his body.

We must not forget in this relation that Saba or Sabazios, of Phrygia and Greece, was torn by the Titans into seven pieces, and that he was, like Heptaktis of the Chaldeans, the seven-rayed god. Siva, the Hindu, is represented crowned with seven serpents, and he is the god of war and destruction. The Hebrew Jehovah the Sabaoth is also called the Lord of hosts, Seba or Saba, Bacchus or Dionysus Sabazios; so that all these may easily be proved identical.

Finally the princes of the older regime, the gods who had, on the assault of the giants, taken the forms of animals and hidden in Æthiopia, returned and expelled the shepherds.

According to Josephus, the Hyk-sos were the ancestors of the Israelites. * This is doubtless substantially true. The Hebrew Scriptures, which tell a somewhat different story, were written at a later period, and underwent several revisions, before they were promulgated with any degree of publicity. Typhon became odious in Egypt, and shepherds "an abomination." "In the course of the twentieth dynasty he was suddenly treated as an evil demon, insomuch that his effigies and name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached." ** In all ages the gods have been liable to be euhemerized into men. There are tombs of Zeus, Apollo, Hercules, and Bacchus, which are often mentioned to show that originally they were only mortals. Shem, Ham, and Japhet, are traced in the divinities Shamas of Assyria, Kham of

**

# p. 488

**

Egypt, and Iapetos the Titan. Seth was god of the Hyk-sos, Enoch, or Inachus, of the Argives; and Abraham, Isaac, and Judah have been compared with Brahma, Ikshwaka, and Yadu of the Hindu pantheon. Typhon tumbled down from godhead to devilship, both in his own character as brother of Osiris, and as the Seth, or Satan of Asia. Apollo, the god of day, became, in his older Phoenician garb, no more Baal Zebul, the Oracle-god, but prince of demons, and finally the lord of the underworld. The separation of Mazdeanism from Vedism, transformed the devas or gods into evil potencies. Indra, also, in the Vendidad is set forth as the subaltern of Ahriman, * created by him out of the materials of darkness, ** together with Siva (Surya) and the two Aswins. Even Jahi is the demon of Lust--probably identical with Indra.

The several tribes and nations had their tutelar gods, and vilified those of inimical peoples. The transformation of Typhon, Satan and Beelzebub are of this character. Indeed, Tertullian speaks of Mithra, the god of the Mysteries, as a devil.

In the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse, Michael and his angels overcame the Dragon and his angels: "and the Great Dragon was cast out, that Archaic Ophis, called Diabolos and Satan, that deceiveth the whole world." It is added: "They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb." The Lamb, or Christ, had to descend himself to hell, the world of the dead, and remain there three days before he subjugated the enemy, according to the myth.

Michael was denominated by the kabalists and the Gnostics, "the Saviour," the angel of the Sun, and angel of Light. ( , probably, from to manifest and God.) He was the first of the Æons, and was well-known to antiquarians as the "unknown angel" represented on the Gnostic amulets.

The writer of the Apocalypse, if not a kabalist, must have been a Gnostic. Michael was not a personage originally exhibited to him in his vision (epopteia) but the Saviour and Dragon-slayer. Archaeological explorations have indicated him as identical with Anubis, whose effigy was lately discovered upon an Egyptian monument, with a cuirass and holding a spear, like St. Michael and St. George. He is also represented as slaying a Dragon, that has the head and tail of a serpent. ***

The student of Lepsius, Champollion, and other Egyptologists will

**

# p. 489

**

quickly recognize Isis as the "woman with child," "clothed with the Sun and with the Moon under her feet," whom the "great fiery Dragon" persecuted, and to whom "were given two wings of the Great Eagle that she might fly into the wilderness." Typhon was red-skinned. *

The Two Brothers, the Good and Evil Principles, appear in the Myths of the Bible as well as those of the Gentiles, and Cain and Abel, Typhon and Osiris, Esau and Jacob, Apollo and Python, etc., Esau or Osu, is represented, when born, as "red all over like an hairy garment." He is the Typhon or Satan, opposing his brother.

From the remotest antiquity the serpent was held by every people in the greatest veneration, as the embodiment of Divine wisdom and the symbol of spirit, and we know from Sanchoniathon that it was Hermes or Thoth who was the first to regard the serpent as "the most spirit-like of all the reptiles"; and the Gnostic serpent with the seven vowels over the head is but the copy of Ananta, the seven-headed serpent on which rests the god Vishnu.

We have experienced no little surprise to find upon reading the latest European treatises upon serpent-worship, that the writers confess that the public is "still almost in the dark as to the origin of the superstition in question." Mr. C. Staniland Wake, M.A.I., from whom we now quote, says: "The student of mythology knows that certain ideas were associated by the peoples of antiquity with the serpent, and that it was the favorite symbol of particular deities; but why that animal rather than any other was chosen for the purpose is yet uncertain." **

Mr. James Fergusson, F.R.S., who has gathered together such an abundance of material upon this ancient cult, seems to have no more suspicion of the truth than the rest. ***

Our explanation of the myth may be of little value to students of symbology, and yet we believe that the interpretation of the primitive serpent-worship as given by the initiates is the correct one. In Vol. i., p. 10, we quote from the serpent Mantra, in the Aytareya-Brahmana, a passage which speaks of the earth as the Sarpa Rajni, the Queen of the Serpents, and "the mother of all that moves." These expressions refer to the fact that before our globe had become egg-shaped or round it was a long trail of cosmic dust or fire-mist, moving and writhing like a serpent. This, say the explanations, was the Spirit of God moving on the chaos until its breath had incubated cosmic matter and made it assume the annular shape of a serpent with its tail in its mouth--emblem of eternity

**

# p. 490

**

in its spiritual and of our world in its physical sense. According to the notions of the oldest philosophers, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, the earth, serpent-like, casts off its skin and appears after every minor pralaya in a rejuvenated state, and after the great pralaya resurrects or evolves again from its subjective into objective existence. Like the serpent, it not only "puts off its old age," says Sanchoniathon, "but increases in size and strength." This is why not only Serapis, and later, Jesus, were represented by a great serpent, but even why, in our own century, big snakes are kept with sacred care in Moslem mosques; for instance, in that of Cairo. In Upper Egypt a famous saint is said to appear under the form of a large serpent; and in India in some children's cradles a pair of serpents, male and female, are reared with the infant, and snakes are often kept in houses, as they are thought to bring (a magnetic aura of) wisdom, health, and good luck. They are the progeny of Sarpa Rajni, the earth, and endowed with all her virtues.

In the Hindu mythology Vasaki, the Great Dragon, pours forth upon Durga, from his mouth, a poisonous fluid which overspreads the ground, but her consort Siva caused the earth to open her mouth and swallow it.

Thus the mystic drama of the celestial virgin pursued by the dragon seeking to devour her child, was not only depicted in the constellations of heaven, as has been mentioned, but was represented in the secret worship of the temples. It was the mystery of the god Sol, and inscribed on a black image of Isis. * The Divine Boy was chased by the cruel Typhon. ** In an Egyptian legend the Dragon is said to pursue Thuesis (Isis) while she is endeavoring to protect her son. *** Ovid describes Dione (the consort of the original Pelasgian Zeus, and mother of Venus) as flying from Typhon to the Euphrates, **** thus identifying the myth as belonging to all the countries where the Mysteries were celebrated. Virgil sings the victory:

"Hail, dear child of gods, great son of Jove!

Receive the honors great; the time is at hand;

The Serpent will die!" *

Albertus Magnus, himself an alchemist and student of occult science, as well as a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church, in his enthusiasm for astrology, declared that the zodiacal sign of the celestial virgin rises above the horizon on the twenty-fifth of December, at the moment assigned by the Church for the birth of the Saviour. **

**

# p. 491

**

The sign and myth of the mother and child were known thousands of years before the Christian era. The drama of the Mysteries of Demeter represents Persephoneia, her daughter, as carried away by Pluto or Hades into the world of the dead; and when the mother finally discovers her there, she has been installed as queen of the realm of Darkness. This myth was transcribed by the Church into the legend of St. Anna * going in quest of her daughter Mary, who has been conveyed by Joseph into Egypt. Persephone is depicted with two ears of wheat in her hand; so is Mary in the old pictures; so was the Celestial Virgin of the constellation. Albumazar the Arabian indicates the identity of the several myths as follows:

"In the first decan of the Virgin rises a maid, called in Arabic Aderenosa [Adha-nari?], that is, pure immaculate virgin, ** graceful in person, charming in countenance, modest in habit, with loosened hair, holding in her hands two ears of wheat, sitting upon an embroidered throne, nursing a boy, and rightly feeding him in the place called Hebraea; a boy, I say, named Iessus by certain nations, which signifies Issa, whom they also call Christ in Greek." ***

At this time Grecian, Asiatic, and Egyptian ideas had undergone a remarkable transformation. The Mysteries of Dionysus-Sabazius had been replaced by the rites of Mithras, whose "caves" superseded the crypts of the former god, from Babylon to Britain. Serapis, or Sri-Apa, from Pontus, had usurped the place of Osiris. The king of Eastern Hindustan, Asoka, had embraced the religion of Siddhartha, and sent missionaries clear to Greece, Asia, Syria, and Egypt, to promulgate the evangel of wisdom. The Essenes of Judea and Arabia, the Therapeutists * of Egypt, and the Pythagorists ** of Greece and Magna Graecia, were evidently religionists of the new faith. The legends of Gautama superseded the myths of Horus, Anubis, Adonis, Atys, and Bacchus. These were wrought anew into the Mysteries and Gospels, and to them we owe the

**

# p. 492

**

literature known as the Evangelists and the Apocryphal New Testament. They were kept by the Ebionites, Nazarenes, and other sects as sacred books, which they might "show only to the wise"; and were so preserved till the overshadowing influence of the Roman ecclesiastical polity was able to wrest them from those who kept them.

At the time that the high-priest Hilkiah is said to have found the Book of the Law, the Hindu Puranas (Scriptures) were known to the Assyrians. These last had for many centuries held dominion from the Hellespont to the Indus, and probably crowded the Aryans out of Bactriana into the Punjab. The Book of the Law seems to have been a purana. "The learned Brahmans," says Sir William Jones, "pretend that five conditions are requisite to constitute a real *purana:

• "1. To treat of the creation of matter in general.

"2. To treat of *the creation or production of secondary material and spiritual beings.

*"3. To give a chronological abridgment of the great periods of time.

"4. To give a genealogical abridgment of the principal families that reigned over the country.

"5. Lastly, to give the history of some great man in particular."

It is pretty certain that whoever wrote the Pentateuch had this plan before him, as well as those who wrote the New Testament had become thoroughly well acquainted with Buddhistic ritualistic worship, legends and doctrines, through the Buddhist missionaries who were many in those days in Palestine and Greece.

But "no Devil, no Christ." This is the basic dogma of the Church. We must hunt the two together. There is a mysterious connection between the two, more close than perhaps is suspected, amounting to identity. If we collect together the mythical sons of God, all of whom were regarded as "first-begotten," they will be found dovetailing together and blending in this dual character. Adam Kadmon bifurcates from the spiritual conceptive wisdom into the creative one, which evolves matter. The Adam made from dust is both son of God and Satan; and the latter is also a son of God, * according to Job.

Hercules was likewise "the First-Begotten." He is also Bel, Baal, and Bal, and therefore Siva, the Destroyer. Bacchus was styled by Euripides, "Bacchus, the Son of God." As a child, Bacchus, like the Jesus of the Apocryphal Gospels, was greatly dreaded. He is described as benevolent to mankind; nevertheless he was merciless in punishing whomever failed of respect to his worship. Pentheus, the son of Cadmus

**

# p. 493

**

and Hermione, was, like the son of Rabbi Hannon, destroyed for his want of piety.

The allegory of Job, which has been already cited, if correctly understood, will give the key to this whole matter of the Devil, his nature and office; and will substantiate our declarations. Let no pious individual take exception to this designation of allegory. Myth was the favorite and universal method of teaching in archaic times. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, declared that the entire story of Moses and the Israelites was typical; * and in his Epistle to the Galatians, asserted that the whole story of Abraham, his two wives, and their sons was an allegory. ** Indeed, it is a theory amounting to certitude, that the historical books of the Old Testament were of the same character. We take no extraordinary liberty with the Book of Job when we give it the same designation which Paul gave the stories of Abraham and Moses.

But we ought, perhaps, to explain the ancient use of allegory and symbology. The truth in the former was left to be deduced; the symbol expressed some abstract quality of the Deity, which the laity could easily apprehend. Its higher sense terminated there; and it was employed by the multitude thenceforth as an image to be employed in idolatrous rites. But the allegory was reserved for the inner sanctuary, when only the elect were admitted. Hence the rejoinder of Jesus when his disciples interrogated him because he spoke to the multitude in parables. "To you," said he, "it is given to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to them it is not given. For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." In the minor Mysteries a sow was washed to typify the purification of the neophyte; as her return to the mire indicated the superficial nature of the work that had been accomplished.

"The Mythus is the undisclosed thought of the soul. The characteristic trait of the myth is to convert reflection into history (a historical form). As in the epos, so in the myth, the historical element predominates. Facts (external events) often constitute the basis of the myth, and with these, religious ideas are interwoven."

The whole allegory of Job is an open book to him who understands the picture-language of Egypt as it is recorded in the Book of the Dead. In the Scene of Judgment, Osiris is represented sitting on his throne,

**

# p. 494

**

holding in one hand the symbol of life, "the hook of attraction," and in the other the mystic Bacchic fan. Before him are the sons of God, the forty-two assessors of the dead. An altar is immediately before the throne, covered with gifts and surmounted with the sacred lotus-flower, upon which stand four spirits. By the entrance stands the soul about to be judged, whom Thmei, the genius of Truth, is welcoming to this conclusion of the probation. Thoth holding a reed, makes a record of the proceedings in the Book of Life. Horus and Anubis, standing by the scales, inspect the weight which determines whether the heart of the deceased balances the symbol of truth, or the latter preponderates. On pedestal sits a bitch--the symbol of the Accuser.

Initiation into the Mysteries, as every intelligent person knows, was dramatic representation of scenes in the underworld. Such was the allegory of Job.

Several critics have attributed the authorship of this book to Moses. But it is older than the Pentateuch. Jehovah is not mentioned in the poem itself; and if the name occurs in the prologue, the fact must be attributed to either an error of the translators, or the premeditation exacted by the later necessity to transform polytheism into a monotheistic religion. The plan adopted was the very simple one of attributing the many names of the Elohim (gods) to a single god. So in one of the oldest Hebrew texts of Job (in chapter xii. 9) there stands the name of Jehovah, whereas all other manuscripts have "Adonai." But in the original poem Jehovah is absent. In place of this name we find Al, Aleim, Ale, Shaddai, Adonai, etc. Therefore, we must conclude that either the prologue and epilogue were added at a later period, which is inadmissible for many reasons, or that it has been tampered with like the rest of the manuscripts. Then, we find in this archaic poem no mention whatever of the Sabbatical Institution; but a great many references to the sacred number seven, of which we will speak further, and a direct discussion upon Sabeanism, the worship of the heavenly bodies prevailing in those days in Arabia. Satan is called in it a "Son of God," one of the council which presents itself before God, and he leads him into tempting Job's fidelity. In this poem, clearer and plainer than anywhere else, do we find the meaning of the appellation, Satan. It is a term for the office or character of public accuser. Satan is the Typhon of the Egyptians, barking his accusations in Amenthi; an office quite as respectable as that of the public prosecutor, in our own age; and if, through the ignorance of the first Christians, he became later identical with the Devil, it is through no connivance of his own.

The Book of Job is a complete representation of ancient initiation, and the trials which generally precede this grandest of all ceremonies.

**

# p. 495

**

The neophyte perceives himself deprived of everything he valued, and afflicted with foul disease. His wife appeals to him to adore God and die; there was no more hope for him. Three friends appear on the scene by mutual appointment: Eliphaz, the learned Temanite, full of the knowledge "which wise men have told from their fathers--to whom alone the earth was given"; Bildad, the conservative, taking matters as they come, and judging Job to have done wickedly, because he was afflicted; and Zophar, intelligent and skilful with "generalities" but not interiorly wise. Job boldly responds: "If I have erred, it is a matter with myself. You magnify yourselves and plead against me in my reproach; but it is God who has overthrown me. Why do you persecute me and are not satisfied with my flesh thus wasted away? But I know that my Champion lives, and that at a coming day he will stand for me in the earth; and though, together with my skin, all this beneath it shall be destroyed, yet without my flesh I shall see God. . . . Ye shall say: 'Why do we molest him?' for the root of the matter is found in me!"

This passage, like all others in which the faintest allusions could be found to a "Champion," "Deliverer," or "Vindicator," was interpreted into a direct reference to the Messiah; but apart from the fact that in the Septuagint this verse is translated:

"For I know that He is eternal

Who is about to deliver me on earth,

To restore this skin of mine which endures these things," etc.

In King James's version, as it stands translated, it has no resemblance whatever to the original. * The crafty translators have rendered it, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," etc. And yet Septuagint, Vulgate, and Hebrew original, have all to be considered as an inspired Word of God. Job refers to his own immortal spirit which is eternal, and which, when death comes, will deliver him from his putrid earthly body and clothe him with a new spiritual envelope. In the Mysteries of Eleusinia, in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and all other works treating on matters of initiation, this "eternal being" has a name. With the Neo-platonists it was the Nous, the Augoeides; with the Buddhists it is Aggra; and with the Persians, Ferwer. All of these are called the "Deliverers," the "Champions," the "Metatrons," etc. In the Mithraic sculptures of Persia, the ferwer is represented by a winged figure hovering in the air above its "object" or body. ** It is the luminous Self--the Atman of

**

# p. 496

**

the Hindus, our immortal spirit, who alone can redeem our soul; and will, if we follow him instead of being dragged down by our body. Therefore, in the Chaldean texts, the above reads, "My deliverer, my restorer," i.e., the Spirit who will restore the decayed body of man, and transform it into a clothing of ether. And it is this Nous, Augoeides, Ferwer, Aggra, Spirit of himself, that the triumphant Job shall see without his flesh--i.e., when he has escaped from his bodily prison, and that the translators call "God."

Not only is there not the slightest allusion in the poem of Job to Christ, but it is now well proved that all those versions by different translators, which agree with that of King James, were written on the authority of Jerome, who has taken strange liberties in his Vulgate. He was the first to cram into the text this verse of his own fabrication:

"I know that my Redeemer lives,

And at the last day I shall arise from the earth,

And again shall be surrounded with my skin,

And in my flesh I shall see my God."

All of which might have been a good reason for himself to believe in it since he knew it, but for others who did not, and who moreover found in the text a quite different idea, it only proves that Jerome had decided, by one more interpolation, to enforce the dogma of a resurrection "at the last day," and in the identical skin and bones which we had used on earth. This is an agreeable prospect of "restoration" indeed. Why not the linen also, in which the body happens to die?

And how could the author of the Book of Job know anything of the New Testament, when evidently he was utterly ignorant even of the Old one? There is a total absence of allusion to any of the patriarchs; and so evidently is it the work of an Initiate, that one of the three daughters of Job is even called by a decidedly "Pagan" mythological name. The name of Kerenhappuch is rendered in various ways by the many translators. The Vulgate has "horn of antimony"; and the LXX has the "horn of Amalthea," the nurse of Jupiter, and one of the constellations, emblem of the "horn of plenty." The presence in the Septuagint of this heroine of Pagan fable, shows the ignorance of the transcribers of its meaning as well as the esoteric origin of the *Book of Job.

*

Instead of offering consolations, the three friends of the suffering Job seek to make him believe that his misfortune must have come in punishment of some extraordinary transgressions on his part. Hurling back upon them all their imputations, Job swears that while his breath is in him he will maintain his cause. He takes in view the period of his prosperity "when the secret of God was upon his tabernacles," and he was a judge

**

# p. 497

**

"who sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, or one that comforteth the mourners," and compares with it the present time--when vagrant Bedouins held him in derision, men "viler than the earth," when he was prostrated by misfortune and foul disease. Then he asserts his sympathy for the unfortunate, his chastity, his integrity, his probity, his strict justice, his charities, his moderation, his freedom from the prevalent sun-worship, his tenderness to enemies, his hospitality to strangers, his openness of heart, his boldness for the right, though he encountered the multitude and the contempt of families; and invokes the Almighty to answer him, and his adversary to write down of what he had been guilty.

To this there was not, and could not be, any answer. The three had sought to crush Job by pleadings and general arguments, and he had demanded consideration for his specific acts. Then appeared the fourth; Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram. *

Elihu is the hierophant; he begins with a rebuke, and the sophisms of Job's false friends are swept away like the loose sand before the west wind.

"And Elihu, the son of Barachel, spoke and said: 'Great men are not always wise . . . there is a spirit in man; the spirit within me constraineth me. . . . God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream; in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon man, in slumberings upon the bed; then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction. O Job, hearken unto me; hold thy peace, and I shall teach thee WISDOM.' "

And Job, who to the dogmatic fallacies of his three friends in the bitterness of his heart had exclaimed: "No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. . . . Miserable comforters are ye all. . . . Surely I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to reason with God. But ye are forgers of lies, ye are physicians of no value!" The sore-eaten, visited Job, who in the face of the official clergy--offering for all hope the necessarianism of damnation, had in his despair nearly wavered in his patient faith, answered: "What ye know, the same do I know also; I am not inferior unto you. . . . Man cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not. . . . Man dieth, and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? . . . If a man die shall he live again? . . . When a few years are come then I shall go the way whence I shall not return. . . . O that one might plead for a man with God, as a man pleadeth for his neighbor!"

# p. 498

Job finds one who answers to his cry of agony. He listens to the WISDOM of Elihu, the hierophant, the perfected teacher, the inspired philosopher. From his stern lips comes the just rebuke for his impiety in charging upon the SUPREME Being the evils of humanity. "God," says Elihu, "is excellent in power, and in judgment, and in plenty of justice; HE will not afflict."

So long as the neophyte was satisfied with his own worldly wisdom and irreverent estimate of the Deity and His purposes; so long as he gave ear to the pernicious sophistries of his advisers, the hierophant kept silent. But, when this anxious mind was ready for counsel and instruction, his voice is heard, and he speaks with the authority of the Spirit of God that "constraineth" him: "Surely God will not hear vanity, neither will the Almighty regard it. . . . He respecteth not any that are wise at heart."

What better commentary than this upon the fashionable preacher, who "multiplieth words without knowledge!" This magnificent prophetic satire might have been written to prefigure the spirit that prevails in all the denominations of Christians.

Job hearkens to the words of wisdom, and then the "Lord" answers Job "out of the whirlwind" of nature, God's first visible manifestation: "Stand still, O Job, stand still! and consider the wondrous works of God; for by them alone thou canst know God. 'Behold, God is great, and we know him not,' Him who 'maketh small the drops of water; but they pour down rain according to the vapor thereof' "; * not according to the divine whim, but to the once established and immutable laws. Which law "removeth the mountains and they know not; which shaketh the earth; which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars; . . . which doeth great things past finding out; yea, and wonders without number. . . . Lo, He goeth by me, and I see him not; he passeth on also, but I perceive him not!" **

Then, "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?" *** speaks the voice of God through His mouthpiece--nature. "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? . . . Wast thou present when I said to the seas, 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?' . . . Knowest thou who hath caused it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man. . . . Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands

**

# p. 499

**

of Orion? . . .Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go, and say unto thee, 'Here we are?' " *

"Then Job answered the Lord." He understood His ways, and his eyes were opened for the first time. The Supreme Wisdom descended upon him; and if the reader remain puzzled before this final PETROMA of initiation, at least Job, or the man "afflicted" in his blindness, then realized the impossibility of catching "Leviathan by putting a hook into his nose." The Leviathan is OCCULT SCIENCE, on which one can lay his hand, but "do no more," ** whose power and "comely proportion" God wishes not to conceal.

"Who can discover the face of his garment, or who can come to him with his double bridle? Who can open the doors of his face, 'of him whose scales are his pride, shut up together as with a closed seal?' Through whose 'neesings a light doth Shine,' and whose eyes are like the lids of the morning." Who "maketh a light to shine after him," for those who have the fearlessness to approach him. And then they, like him, will behold "all high things, for he is king only over all the children of pride." ***

Job, now in modest confidence, responded:

"I know that thou canst do everything,

And that no thought of thine can be resisted.

Who is he that maketh a show of arcane wisdom,

Of which he knoweth nothing?

Thus have I uttered what I did not comprehend --

Things far above me, which I did not know.

Hear! I beseech thee, and I will speak;

I will demand of thee, and do thou answer me:

I have heard thee with my ears,

And now I see thee with my eyes,

Wherefore am I loathsome,

And mourn in dust and ashes?"

He recognized his "champion," and was assured that the time for his vindication had come. Immediately the Lord ("the priests and the judges," Deuteronomy xix. 17) saith to his friends: "My wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two friends; for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath." So "the Lord turned the captivity of Job," and "blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning."

Then in the judgment the deceased invokes four spirits who preside over the Lake of Fire, and is purified by them. He then is conducted to

**

# p. 500

**

his celestial house, and is received by Athar and Isis, and stands before Atum, * the essential God. He is now Turu, the essential man, a pure spirit, and henceforth On-ati, the eye of fire, and an associate of the gods.

This grandiose poem of Job was well understood by the kabalists. While many of the mediaeval Hermetists were profoundly religious men, they were, in their innermost hearts--like kabalists of every age--the deadliest enemies of the clergy. How true the words of Paracelsus when worried by fierce persecution and slander, misunderstood by friends and foes, abused by clergy and laity, he exclaimed:

"O ye of Paris, Padua, Montpellier, Salerno, Vienna, and Leipzig! Ye are not teachers of the truth, but confessors of lies. Your philosophy is a lie. Would you know what MAGIC really is, then seek it in St. John's Revelation. . . . As you cannot yourselves prove your teachings from the Bible and the Revelation, then let your farces have an end. The Bible is the true key and interpreter. John, not less than Moses, Elias, Enoch, David, Solomon, Daniel, Jeremiah, and the rest of the prophets, was a magician, kabalist, and diviner. If now, all, or even any of those I have named, were yet living, I do not doubt that you would make an example of them in your miserable slaughter-house, and would annihilate them there on the spot, and if it were possible, the Creator of all things too!"

That Paracelsus had learned some mysterious and useful things out of Revelation and other Bible books, as well as from the Kabala, was proved by him practically; so much so, that he is called by many the "father of magic and founder of the occult physics of the Kabala and magnetism." **

So firm was the popular belief in the supernatural powers of Paracelsus, that to this day the tradition survives among the simple-minded Alsatians that he is not dead, but "sleepeth in his grave" at Strasburg. *** And they often whisper among themselves that the green sod heaves with every respiration of that weary breast, and that deep groans are heard as the great fire-philosopher awakes to the remembrance of the cruel wrongs he suffered at the hands of his cruel slanderers for the sake of the great truth!

It will be perceived from these extended illustrations that the Satan of the Old Testament, the Diabolos or Devil of the Gospels and Apostolic Epistles, were but the antagonistic principle in matter, necessarily incident to it, and not wicked in the moral sense of the term. The Jews,

**

# p. 501

**

coming from the Persian country, brought with them the doctrine of two principles. They could not bring the Avesta, for it was not written. But they--we mean the Asidians and Pharsi--invested Ormazd with the secret name of , and Ahriman with the name of the gods of the land, Satan of the Hittites, and Diabolos, or rather Diobolos, of the Greeks. The early Church, at least the Pauline part of it, the Gnostics and their successors, further refined upon their ideas; and the Catholic Church adopted and adapted them, meanwhile putting their promulgators to the sword.

The Protestant is a reaction from the Roman Catholic Church. It is necessarily not coherent in its parts, but a prodigious host of fragments beating their way round a common centre, attracting and repelling each other. Parts are centripetally impelled towards old Rome, or the system which enabled old Rome to exist; parts still recoil under the centrifugal impulse, and seek to rush into the broad ethereal region beyond Roman, or even Christian influence.

The modern Devil is their principal heritage from the Roman Cybele, "Babylon, the Great Mother of the idolatrous and abominable religions of the earth."

But it may be argued, perhaps, that Hindu theology, both Brahmanical and Buddhistic, is as strongly impregnated with belief in objective devils as Christianity itself. There is a slight difference. This very subtlety of the Hindu mind is a sufficient warrant that the well-educated people, the learned portion, at least, of the Brahman and Buddhist divines, consider the Devil in another light. With them the Devil is a metaphysical abstraction, an allegory of necessary evil; while with Christians the myth has become a historical entity, the fundamental stone on which Christianity, with its dogma of redemption, is built. He is as necessary--as Des Mousseaux has shown--to the Church as the beast of the seventeenth chapter of the Apocalypse was to his rider. The English-speaking Protestants, not finding the Bible explicit enough, have adopted the Diabology of Milton's celebrated poem, Paradise Lost, embellishing it somewhat from Goethe's celebrated drama of Faust. John Milton, first a Puritan and finally a Quietist and Unitarian, never put forth his great production except as a work of fiction, but it thoroughly dovetailed together the different parts of Scripture. The Ilda-Baoth of the Ophites was transformed into an angel of light, and the morning star, and made the Devil in the first act of the Diabolic Drama. Then the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse was brought in for the second act. The great red Dragon was adopted as the same illustrious personage as Lucifer, and the last scene is his fall, like that of Vulcan-Hephaistos, from Heaven into the island of Lemnos; the fugitive hosts and their

**

# p. 502

**

leader "coming to hard bottom" in Pandemonium. The third act is the Garden of Eden. Satan holds a council in a hall erected by him for his new empire, and determines to go forth on an exploring expedition in quest of the new world. The next acts relate to the fall of man, his career on earth, the advent of the Logos, or Son of God, and his redemption of mankind, or the elect portion of them, as the case may be.

This drama of Paradise Lost comprises the unformulated belief of English-speaking "evangelical Protestant Christians." Disbelief of its main features is equivalent, in their view, to "denying Christ" and "blaspheming against the Holy Ghost." If John Milton had supposed that his poem, instead of being regarded as a companion of Dante's Divine Comedy, would have been considered as another Apocalypse to supplement the Bible, and complete its demonology, it is more than probable that he would have borne his poverty more resolutely, and withheld it from the press. A later poet, Robert Pollok, taking his cue from this work, wrote another, The Course of Time, which bade fair for a season to take the rank of a later Scripture; but the nineteenth century has fortunately received a different inspiration, and the Scotch poet is falling into oblivion.

We ought, perhaps, to make a brief notice of the European Devil. He is the genius who deals in sorcery, witchcraft, and other mischief. The Fathers taking the idea from the Jewish Pharisees, made devils of the Pagan gods, Mithras, Serapis, and the others. The Roman Catholic Church followed by denouncing the former worship as commerce with the powers of darkness. The malefecii and witches of the middle ages were thus but the votaries of the proscribed worship. Magic in all ancient times had been considered as divine science, wisdom, and the knowledge of God. The healing art in the temples of Æsculapius, and at the shrines of Egypt and the East, had always been magical. Even Darius Hystaspes, who had exterminated the Median Magi, and even driven out the Chaldean theurgists from Babylon into Asia Minor, had also been instructed by the Brahmans of Upper Asia, and, finally, while establishing the worship of Ormazd, was also himself denominated the instituter of magism. All was now changed. Ignorance was enthroned as the mother of devotion. Learning was denounced, and savants prosecuted the sciences in peril of their lives. They were compelled to employ a jargon to conceal their ideas from all but their own adepts, and to accept opprobrium, calumny, and poverty.

The votaries of the ancient worship were persecuted and put to death on charges of witchcraft. The Albigenses, descendants of the Gnostics, and the Waldenses, precursors of the Protestants, were hunted and massacred under like accusations. Martin Luther himself was accused of

**

# p. 503

**

companionship with Satan in proper person. The whole Protestant world still lies under the same imputation. There is no distinction in the judgments of the Church between dissent, heresy, and witchcraft. And except where civil authority protects, they are alike capital offences. Religious liberty the Church regards as intolerance.

But the reformers were nursed with the milk of their mother. Luther was as bloodthirsty as the Pope; Calvin more intolerant than Leo or Urban. Thirty years of war depopulated whole districts of Germany, Protestants and Catholics cruel alike. The new faith too opened its batteries against witchcraft. The statute books became crimsoned with bloody legislation in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Great Britain, and the North American Commonwealth. Whosoever was more liberal, more intelligent, more free speaking than his fellows was liable to arrest and death. The fires that were extinguished at Smithfield were kindled anew for magicians; it was safer to rebel against a throne than to pursue abstruse knowledge outside the orthodox dead-line.

In the seventeenth century Satan made a sortie in New England, New Jersey, New York, and several of the Southern colonies of North America, and Cotton Mather gives us the principal chronicles of his manifestation. A few years later he visited the Parsonage of Mora, in Sweden, and Life in Dalecarlia was diversified with the burning alive of young children, and the whipping of others at the church-doors on Sabbath-days. The skepticism of modern times has, however, pretty much driven the belief in witchcraft into Coventry; and the Devil in personal anthropomorphic form, with his Bacchus-foot, and his Pan-like goat's horns, holds place only in the Encyclical Letters, and other effusions of the Roman Catholic Church. Protestant respectability does not allow him to be named at all except with bated breath in a pulpit-enclosure.

Having now set forth the biography of the Devil from his first advent in India and Persia, his progress through Jewish, and both early and later Christian Theology down to the latest phases of his manifestation, we now turn back to review certain of the opinions extant in the earlier Christian centuries.

Avatars or incarnations were common to the old religions. India had them reduced to a system. The Persians expected Sosiosh, and the Jewish writers looked for a deliverer. Tacitus and Suetonius relate that the East was full of expectation of the Great Personage about the time of Octavius. "Thus doctrines obvious to Christians were the highest arcana of Paganism." * The Maneros of Plutarch was a child of Pales-

**

# p. 504

**

tine; * his mediator Mithras, the Saviour Osiris is the Messiah. In our present "Canonical Scriptures" are to be traced the vestigia of the ancient worships; and in the rites and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church we find the forms of the Buddhistical worship, its ceremonies and hierarchy. The first Gospels, once as canonical as any of the present four, contain pages taken almost entire from Buddhistical narratives, as we are prepared to show. After the evidence furnished by Burnouf, Asoma, Korosi, Beal, Hardy, Schmidt, and translations from the Tripitaka, it is impossible to doubt that the whole Christian scheme emanated from the other. The "Miraculous Conception" miracles and other incidents are found in full in Hardy's Manual of Buddhism. We can readily realize why the Roman Catholic Church is anxious to keep the common people in utter ignorance of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek literature. Philology and comparative Theology are her deadliest enemies. The deliberate falsifications of Irenaeus, Epiphanius, Eusebius and Tertullian had become a necessity.

The Sibylline Books at that period seem to have been regarded with extraordinary favor. One can easily perceive that they were inspired from the same source as those of the Gentile nations.

Here is a leaf from Gallaeus:

"New Light has arisen:

Coming from Heaven, it assumed a mortal form. . . .

-- Virgin, receive God in thy pure bosom --

And the Word flew into her womb:

Becoming incarnate in Time, and animated by her body,

It was found in a mortal image, and a Boy was created

By a Virgin. . . . The new God-sent Star was adored by the Magi,

The infant swathed was shown in a manger. . . .

And Bethlehem was called "God-called country of the Word." **

This looks at first-sight like a prophecy of Jesus. But could it not mean as well some other creative God? We have like utterances concerning Bacchus and Mithras.

"I, son of Deus, am come to the land of the Thebans--Bacchus, whom formerly Semele (the Virgin), the daughter of Kadmus (the man from the East) brings forth--being delivered by the lightning-bearing flame; and having taken a mortal form instead of God's, I have arrived." ***

The Dionysiacs, written in the fifth century, serve to render this matter very clear, and even to show its close connection with the Christian legend of the birth of Jesus:

**

# p. 505

** Kore-Persephoneia * . . . you were wived as the Dragon's spouse,

When Zeus, very coiled, his form and countenance changed,

A Dragon-Bridegroom, coiled in love-inspiring fold . . .

Glided to dark Kore's maiden couch . . .

Thus, by the alliance with the Dragon of Æther,

The womb of Persephone became alive with fruit,

Bearing Zagreus, ** the Horned Child." ***

Here we have the secret of the Ophite worship, and the origin of the Christian later-revised fable of the immaculate conception. The Gnostics were the earliest Christians with anything like a regular theological system, and it is only too evident that it was Jesus who was made to fit their theology as Christos, and not their theology that was developed out of his sayings and doings. Their ancestors had maintained, before the Christian era, that the Great Serpent--Jupiter, the Dragon of Life, the Father and "Good Divinity," had glided into the couch of Semele, and now, the post-Christian Gnostics, with a very trifling change, applied the same fable to the man Jesus, and asserted that the same "Good Divinity," Saturn (Ilda-Baoth), had, in the shape of the Dragon of Life, glided over the cradle of the infant Mary. **** In their eyes the Serpent was the Logos--Christos, the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, through his Father Ennola and Mother Sophia.

"Now my mother, the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost) took me," Jesus is made to say in the Gospel of the Hebrews, * thus entering upon his part of Christos--the Son of Sophia, the Holy Spirit. ****

"The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the POWER of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore, that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called Son of God," says the angel (Luke i. 35).

"God . . . hath at the last of these days spoken to us by a Son,

**

# p. 506

**

whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the Æons" (Paul: Heb. i.). *

All such expressions are so many Christian quotations from the Nonnus verse " . . . through the Ætherial Draconteum," for Ether is the Holy Ghost or third person of the Trinity--the Hawk-headed Serpent, the Egyptian Kneph, emblem of the Divine Mind ** and Plato's universal soul.

"I, Wisdom, came out of the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth as a cloud." ***

Pimander, the Logos, issues from the Infinite Darkness, and covers the earth with clouds which, serpentine-like, spread all over the earth (See Champollion's Egypte). The Logos is the oldest image of God, and he is the active Logos, says Philo. *** The Father is the Latent Thought.

*

This idea being universal, we find an identical phraseology to express it, among Pagans, Jews, and early Christians. The Chaldeo-Persian Logos is the Only-Begotten of the Father in the Babylonian cosmogony of Eudemus. "Hymn now, ELI, child of Deus," begins a Homeric hymn to the sun. * Sol-Mithra is an "image of the Father," as the kabalistic Seir-Anpin.

That of all the various nations of antiquity, there never was one which believed in a personal devil more than liberal Christians in the nineteenth century, seems hardly credible, and yet such is the sorrowful fact. Neither the Egyptians, whom Porphyry terms "the most learned nation of the world,"  * nor Greece, its faithful copyist, were ever guilty of such a crowning absurdity. We may add at once that none of them, not even the ancient Jews, believed in hell or an eternal damnation any more than in the Devil, although our Christian churches are so liberal in dealing it out to the heathen. Wherever the word "hell" occurs in the translations of the Hebrew sacred texts, it is unfortunate. The Hebrews were ignorant of such an idea; but yet the gospels contain frequent examples of the same misunderstanding. So, when Jesus is made to say (Matthew xvi. 18) ". . . and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it," in the original text it stands "the gates of death*."

**

# p. 507

**

Never is the word "hell"--as applied to the state of damnation, either temporary or eternal--used in any passage of the Old Testament, all hellists to the contrary, notwithstanding. "Tophet," or "the Valley of Hinnom" (Isaiah lxvi. 24) bears no such interpretation. The Greek term "Gehenna" has also quite a different meaning, as it has been proved conclusively by more than one competent writer, that "Gehenna" is identical with the Homeric Tartarus.

In fact, we have Peter himself as authority for it. In his second Epistle (ii. 2) the Apostle, in the original text, is made to say of the sinning angels that God "cast them down into Tartarus." This expression too inconveniently recalling the war of Jupiter and the Titans, was altered, and now it reads, in King James's version: "cast them down to hell."

In the Old Testament the expressions "gates of death," and the "chambers of death," simply allude to the "gates of the grave," which are specifically mentioned in the Psalms and Proverbs. Hell and its sovereign are both inventions of Christianity, coeval with its accession to power and resort to tyranny. They were hallucinations born of the nightmares of the SS. Anthonys in the desert. Before our era the ancient sages knew the "Father of Evil," and treated him no better than an ass, the chosen symbol of Typhon, "the Devil." * Sad degeneration of human brains!

As Typhon was the dark shadow of his brother Osiris, so Python is the evil side of Apollo, the bright god of visions, the seer and the soothsayer. He is killed by Python, but kills him in his turn, thus redeeming humanity from sin. It was in memory of this deed that the priestesses of the sun-god enveloped themselves in the snake-skin, typical of the fabulous monster. Under its exhilarating influence--the serpent's skin being considered magnetic--the priestesses fell into magnetic trances, and "receiving their voice from Apollo," they became prophetic and delivered oracles.

Again Apollo and Python are one and morally androgynous. The sun-god ideas are all dual, without exception. The beneficent warmth of the sun calls the germ into existence, but excessive heat kills the plant. While playing on his seven-stringed planetary lyre, Apollo produces harmony; but, as well as other sun-gods, under his dark aspect he becomes the destroyer, Python.

St. John is known to have travelled in Asia, a country governed by Magi and imbued with Zoroastrian ideas, and in those days full of Buddhist

**

# p. 508

**

missionaries. Had he never visited those places and come in contact with Buddhists, it is doubtful whether the Revelation would have been written. Besides his ideas of the dragon, he gives prophetic narratives entirely unknown to the other apostles, and which, relating to the second advent, make of Christ a faithful copy of Vishnu.

Thus Ophios and Ophiomorphos, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Typhon, Christos and the Serpent, are all convertible terms. They are all Logoi, and one is unintelligible without the other, as day could not be known had we no night. All are regenerators and saviours, one in a spiritual, the other in a physical sense. One insures immortality for the Divine Spirit; the other gives it through regeneration of the seed. The Saviour of mankind has to die, because he unveils to humanity the great secret of the immortal ego; the serpent of Genesis is cursed because he said to matter, "Ye shall not die." In the world of Paganism the counterpart of the "serpent" is the second Hermes, the reincarnation of Hermes Trismegistus.

Hermes is the constant companion and instructor of Osiris and Isis. He is the personified wisdom; so is Cain, the son of the "Lord." Both build cities, civilize and instruct mankind in the arts.

It has been repeatedly stated by the Christian missionaries in Ceylon and India that the people are steeped in demonolatry; that they are devil-worshippers, in the full sense of the word. Without any exaggeration we say that they are no more so than the masses of uneducated Christians. But even were they worshippers of (which is more than believers in) the Devil, yet there is a great difference between the teachings of their clergy on the subject of a personal devil and the dogmas of Catholic preachers and many Protestant ministers also. The Christian priests are bound to teach and impress upon the minds of their flock the existence of the Devil, and the opening pages of the present chapter show the reason why. But not only will the Cingalese Oepasampala, who belong to the highest priesthood, not confess to belief in a personal demon but even the Samenaira, the candidates and novices, would laugh at the idea. Everything in the external worship of the Buddhists is allegorical and is never otherwise accepted or taught by the educated pungis (pundits). The accusation that they allow, and tacitly agree to leave the poor people steeped in the most degrading superstitions, is not without foundation; but that they enforce such superstitions, we most vehemently deny. And in this they appear to advantage beside our Christian clergy, who (at least those who have not allowed their fanaticism to interfere with their brains), without believing a word of it, yet preach the existence of the Devil, as the personal enemy of a personal God, and the evil genius of mankind.

**

# p. 509

**

St. George's Dragon, which figures so promiscuously in the grandest cathedrals of the Christians, is not a whit handsomer than the King of Snakes, the Buddhist Nammadanam-naraya, the great Dragon. If the planetary Demon Rawho, is believed, in the popular superstition of the Cingalese, to endeavor to destroy the moon by swallowing it; and if in China and Tartary the rabble is allowed, without rebuke, to beat gongs and make fearful noises to drive the monster away from its prey during the eclipses, why should the Catholic clergy find fault, or call this superstition? Do not the country clergy in Southern France do the same, occasionally, at the appearance of comets, eclipses, and other celestial phenomena? In 1456, when Halley's comet made its appearance, "so tremendous was its apparition," writes Draper, "that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III., and did not venture back for seventy-five years!" *

We never heard of any Christian clergyman or Pope trying to disabuse ignorant minds of the belief that the Devil had anything to do with eclipses and comets; but we do find a Buddhist chief priest saying to an official who twitted him with this superstition: "Our Cingalese religious books teach that the eclipses of the sun and moon denote an attack of Rahu ** (one of the nine planets) not by a devil." ***

The origin of the "Dragon" myth so prominent in the Apocalypse and Golden Legend, and of the fable about Simeon Stylites converting the Dragon, is undeniably Buddhistic and even pre-Buddhistic. It was Gautama's pure doctrines which reclaimed to Buddhism the Cashmerians whose primitive worship was the Ophite or Serpent worship. Frankincense and flowers replaced the human sacrifices and belief in personal demons. It became the turn of Christianity to inherit the degrading superstition about devils invested with pestilential and murderous powers. The Mahavansa, oldest of the Ceylonese books, relates the story of King Covercapal (cobra-de-capello), the snake-god, who was converted to Buddhism by a holy Rahat; ** and it is earlier, by all odds, than the Golden Legend which tells the same of Simeon the Stylite and his Dragon.

**

# p. 510

**

The Logos triumphs once more over the great Dragon; Michael, the luminous archangel, chief of the Æons, conquers Satan. *

It is a fact worthy of remark, that so long as the initiate kept silent "on what he knew," he was perfectly safe. So was it in days of old, and so it is now. As soon as the Christian God, emanating forth from Silence, manifested himself as the Word or Logos, the latter became the cause of his death. The serpent is the symbol of wisdom and eloquence, but it is likewise the symbol of destruction. "To dare, to know, to will, and be silent," are the cardinal axioms of the kabalist. Like Apollo and other gods, Jesus is killed by his Logos; ** he rises again, kills him in his turn, and becomes his master. Can it be that this old symbol has, like the rest of ancient philosophical conceptions, more than one allegorical and never-suspected meaning? The coincidences are too strange to be results of mere chance.

And now that we have shown this identity between Michael and Satan, and the Saviours and Dragons of other people, what can be more clear than that all these philosophical fables originated in India, that universal hot-bed of metaphysical mysticism? "The world," says Ramatsariar, in his comments upon the Vedas, "commenced with a contest between the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil, and so must end. After the destruction of matter evil can no longer exist, it must return to naught." ***

In the Apologia, Tertullian falsifies most palpably every doctrine and belief of the Pagans as to the oracles and gods. He calls them, indifferently, demons and devils, accusing the latter of taking possession of even the birds of the air! What Christian would now dare doubt such an authority? Did not the Psalmist exclaim: "All the gods of the nations are idols"; and the Angel of the School, Thomas Aquinas, explains, on his own kabalistic authority, the word idols by devils? "They come to men," he says, "and offer themselves to their adoration by operating certain things which seem miraculous." ****

The Fathers were prudent as they were wise in their inventions. To be impartial, after having created a Devil, they set to creating apocryphal saints. We have named several in preceding chapters; but we must not forget Baronius, who having read in a work of Chrysostom about the holy Xenoris, the word meaning a pair, a couple, mistook it for the

**

# p. 511

**

name of a saint, and proceeded forthwith to create of it a martyr of Antioch, and went on to give a most detailed and authentic biography of the "blessed martyr." Other theologians made of Apollyon--or rather Apolouon--the anti-Christ. Apolouon is Plato's "washer," the god who purifies, who washes off, and releases us from sin, but he was thus transformed into him "whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon"--Devil!

Max Muller says that the serpent in Paradise is a conception which might have sprung up among the Jews, and "seems hardly to invite comparison with the much grander conceptions of the terrible power of Vritra and Ahriman in the Veda and Avesta." With the kabalists the Devil was always a myth--God or good reversed. That modern Magus, Eliphas Levi, calls the Devil l'ivresse astrale. It is a blind force like electricity, he says; and, speaking allegorically, as he always did, Jesus remarked that he "bebeld Satan like lightning fall from Heaven."

The clergy insist that God has sent the Devil to tempt mankind; which would be rather a singular way of showing his boundless love to humanity! If the Supreme One is really guilty of such unfatherly treachery, he is worthy, certainly, of the adoration only of a Church capable of singing the Te Deum over a massacre of St. Bartholomew, and of blessing Mussulman swords drawn to slaughter Greek Christians!

This is at once sound logic and good sound law, for is it not a maxim of jurisprudence: "Qui facit per alium, facit per se"?

The great dissimilarity which exists between the various conceptions of the Devil is really often ludicrous. While bigots will invariably endow him with horns, tail, and every conceivable repulsive feature, even including an offensive human smell, * Milton, Byron, Goethe, Lermontoff, ** and a host of French novelists have sung his praise in flowing verse and thrilling prose. Milton's Satan, and even Goethe's Mephistopheles, are certainly far more commanding figures than some of the angels, as represented in the prose of ecstatic bigots. We have

**

# p. 512

**

but to compare two descriptions. Let us first award the floor to the incomparably sensational des Mousseaux. He gives us a thrilling account of an incubus, in the words of the penitent herself: "Once," she tells us, "during the space of a whole half-hour, she saw distinctly near her an individual with a black, dreadful, horrid body, and whose hands, of an enormous size, exhibited clawed fingers strangely hooked. The senses of sight, feeling, and smell were confirmed by that of hearing!!" *

And yet, for the space of several years, the damsel suffered herself to be led astray by such a hero. How far above this odoriferous gallant is the majestic figure of the Miltonic Satan!

Let the reader then fancy, if he can, this superb chimera, this ideal of the rebellious angel become incarnate Pride, crawling into the skin of the most disgusting of all animals! Notwithstanding that the Christian catechism teaches us that Satan in propria persona tempted our first mother, Eve, in a real paradise, and that in the shape of a serpent, which of all animals was the most insinuating and fascinating! God orders him, as a punishment, to crawl eternally on his belly, and bite the dust. "A sentence," remarks Levi, "which resembles in nothing the traditional flames of hell." The more so, that the real zoological serpent, which was created before Adam and Eve, crawled on his belly, and bit the dust likewise, before there was any original sin.

Apart from this, was not Ophion the Daimon, or Devil, like God called Dominus? ** The word God (deity) is derived from the Sanscrit word Deva, and Devil from the Persian daeva, which words are substantially alike. Hercules, son of Jove and Alcmena, one of the highest sun-gods and also Logos manifested, is nevertheless represented under a double nature, as all others. ***

The Agathodaemon, the beneficent daemon, * the same which we find later among the Ophites under the appellation of the Logos, or divine wisdom, was represented by a serpent standing erect on a pole, *in the Bacchanalian Mysteries. The hawk-headed serpent is among the oldest of the Egyptian emblems, and represents the divine mind, says Deane.  Azazel is Moloch and Samael, says Movers, *** and we find Aaron, the brother of the great law-giver Moses, making equal sacrifices to Jehovah and Azazel.

**

# p. 513

**

"And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord (Ihoh in the original) and one lot for the scape-goat" (Azazel).

In the Old Testament Jehovah exhibits all the attributes of old Saturn, * notwithstanding his metamorphoses from Adoni into Eloi, and God of Gods, Lord of Lords. **

Jesus is tempted on the mountain by the Devil, who promises to him kingdoms and glory if he will only fall down and worship him (Matthew iv. 8, 9). Buddha is tempted by the Demon Wasawarthi Mara, who says to him as he is leaving his father's palace: "Be entreated to stay that you may possess the honors that are within your reach; go not, go not! " And upon the refusal of Gautama to accept his offers, gnashes his teeth with rage, and threatens him with vengeance. Like Christ, Buddha triumphs over the Devil. ***

In the Bacchic Mysteries a consecrated cup was handed around after supper, called the cup of the Agathodaemon. * The Ophite rite of the same description is evidently borrowed from these Mysteries. The communion consisting of bread and wine was used in the worship of nearly every important deity. **

In connection with the semi-Mithraic sacrament adopted by the Marcosians, another Gnostic sect, utterly kabalistic and theurgic, there is a strange story given by Epiphanius as an illustration of the cleverness of the Devil. In the celebration of their Eucharist, three large vases of the finest and clearest crystal were brought among the congregation and filled with white wine. While the ceremony was going on, in full view of everybody, this wine was instantaneously changed into a blood-red, a purple, and then into an azure-blue color. "Then the magus," says Epiphanius, "hands one of these vases to a woman in the congregation, and asks her to bless it. When it is done, the magus pours out of it into another vase of much greater capacity with the prayer: "May the grace of God, which is above all, inconceivable, inexplicable, fill thy inner man, and augment the knowledge of Him within thee, sowing the grain of mustard-seed

**

# p. 514

**

in good ground. * Whereupon the liquor in the larger vase swells and swells until it runs over the brim." **

In connection with several of the Pagan deities which are made after death, and before their resurrection to descend into Hell, it will be found useful to compare the pre-Christian with the post-Christian narratives. Orpheus made the journey, *** and Christ was the last of these subterranean travellers. In the Credo of the Apostles, which is divided in twelve sentences or articles, each particular article having been inserted by each particular apostle, according to St. Austin * the sentence "He descended into hell, the third day he rose again from the dead," is assigned to Thomas; perhaps, as an atonement for his unbelief. Be it as it may, the sentence is declared a forgery, and there is no evidence "that this creed was either framed by the apostles, or indeed, that it existed as a creed in their time." **

It is the most important addition in the Apostle's Creed, and dates since the year of Christ 600. ** It was not known in the days of Eusebius. Bishop Parsons says that it was not in the ancient creeds or rules of faith. * Irenaeus, Origen, and Tertullian exhibit no knowledge of this sentence. * It is not mentioned in any of the Councils before the seventh century. Theodoret, Epiphanius, and Socrates are silent about it. It differs from the creed *in St. Augustine. * Ruffinus affirms that in his time it was neither in the Roman nor in the Oriental creeds (Exposit., in Symbol. Apost. § 10). But the problem is solved when we learn that ages ago Hermes spoke thus to Prometheus, chained on the arid rocks of the Caucasian mount:

"To such labors look thou for no termination, UNTIL SOME GOD

**

# p. 515

**

SHALL APPEAR AS A SUBSTITUTE IN THY PANGS, AND SHALL BE WILLING TO GO BOTH TO GLOOMY HADES AND TO THE MURKY DEPTHS AROUND TARTARUS!" (ÆSCHYLUS: Prometheus, 1027, ff.).

This god was Herakles, the "Only-Begotten One," and the Saviour. And it is he who was chosen as a model by the ingenious Fathers. Hercules--called Alexicacos--for he brought round the wicked and converted them to virtue; Soter, or Saviour, also called Neulos Eumelos--the Good Shepherd; Astrochiton, the star-clothed, and the Lord of Fire. "He sought not to subject nations by force but by divine wisdom and persuasion," says Lucian. "Herakles spread cultivation and a mild religion, and destroyed the doctrine of eternal punishment by dragging Kerberus (the Pagan Devil) from the nether world." And, as we see, it was Herakles again who liberated Prometheus (the Adam of the pagans), by putting an end to the torture inflicted on him for his transgressions, by descending to the Hades, and going round the Tartarus. Like Christ he appeared as a substitute for the pangs of humanity, by offering himself in a self-sacrifice on a funereal-burning pile. "His voluntary immolation," says Bart, "betokened the ethereal new birth of men. . . . Through the release of Prometheus, and the erection of altars, we behold in him the mediator between the old and new faiths. . . . He abolished human sacrifice wherever he found it practiced. He descended into the sombre realm of Pluto, as a shade . . . he ascended as a spirit to his father Zeus in Olympus."

So much was antiquity impressed by the Heraklean legend, that even the monotheistic (?) Jews of those days, not to be outdone by their contemporaries, put him to use in their manufacture of original fables. Herakles is accused in his mythobiography of an attempted theft of the Delphian oracle. In Sepher Toldos Jeschu, the Rabbins accuse Jesus of stealing from their Sanctuary the Incommunicable Name!

Therefore it is but natural to find his numerous adventures, worldly and religious, mirrored so faithfully in the Descent into Hell. For extraordinary daring of mendacity, and unblushing plagiarism, the Gospel of Nicodemus, only now proclaimed apocryphal, surpasses anything we have read. Let the reader judge.

At the beginning of chapter xvi., Satan and the "Prince of Hell" are described as peacefully conversing together. All of a sudden, both are startled by "a voice as of thunder" and the rushing of winds, which bids them to lift up their gates for "the King of Glory shall come in." Whereupon the Prince of Hell hearing this "begins quarrelling with Satan for minding his duty so poorly, as not to have taken the necessary precautions against such a visit." The quarrel ends with the prince casting Satan "forth from his hell," ordering, at the same time, his

**

# p. 516

**

impious officers "to shut the brass gates of cruelty, make them fast with iron bars, and fight courageously lest we be taken captives."

But "when all the company of the saints . . . (in Hell?) heard this, they spoke with a loud voice of anger to the Prince of Darkness, 'Open thy gates, that the King of Glory may come in,' " thereby proving that, the prince needed spokesmen.

"And the divine (?) prophet David cried out, saying: 'Did not I, when on earth, truly prophesy?' " After this, another prophet, namely holy Isaiah spake in like manner, "Did not I rightly prophesy?" etc. Then the company of the saints and prophets, after boasting for the length of a chapter, and comparing notes of their prophecies, begin a riot, which makes the Prince of Hell remark that, "the dead never durst before behave themselves so insolently towards us" (the devils, xviii. 6); feigning the while to be ignorant who it was claiming admission. He then innocently asks again: "But who is the King of Glory?" Then David tells him that he knows the voice well, and understands its words, "because," he adds, "I spake them by his Spirit." Perceiving finally that the Prince of Hell would not open the "brass doors of iniquity," notwithstanding the king-psalmist's voucher for the visitor, he, David, concludes to treat the enemy "as a Philistine, and begins shouting: 'And now, thou filthy and stinking prince of hell, open thy gates. . . . I tell thee that the King of Glory comes . . . let him enter in.' "

While he was yet quarrelling the "mighty Lord appeared in the form of a man" (?) upon which "impious Death and her cruel officers are seized with fear." Then they tremblingly begin to address Christ with various flatteries and compliments in the shape of questions, each of which is an article of creed. For instance: "And who art thou, so powerful and so great who dost release the captives that were held in chains by original sin?" asks one devil. "Perhaps, thou art that Jesus," submissively says another, "of whom Satan just now spoke, that by the death of the Cross thou wert about to receive the power over death?" etc. Instead of answering, the King of Glory "tramples upon Death, seizes the Prince of Hell, and deprives him of his power."

Then begins a turmoil in Hell which has been graphically described by Homer, Hesiod, and their interpreter Preller, in his account of the Astronomical Hercules Invictus, and his festivals at Tyre, Tarsus, and Sardis. Having been initiated in the Attic Eleusinia, the Pagan god descends into Hades and "when he entered the nether world he spread such terror among the dead that all of them fled!" * The same words

**

# p. 517

**

are repeated in Nicodemus. Follows a scene of confusion, horror, and lamenting. Perceiving that the battle is lost, the Prince of Hell turns tail and prudently chooses to side with the strongest. He against whom, according to Jude and Peter, even the Archangel Michael "durst not bring a railing accusation before the Lord," is now shamefully treated by his ex-ally and friend, the "Prince of Hell." Poor Satan is abused and reviled for all his crimes both by devils and saints; while the Prince is openly rewarded for his treachery. Addressing him, the King of Glory says thus: "Beelzebub, the Prince of Hell, Satan the Prince shall now be subject to thy dominion forever, in the room of Adam and his righteous sons, who are mine . . . Come to me, all ye my saints, who were created in my image, who were condemned by the tree of the forbidden fruit, and by the Devil and death. Live now by the wood of my cross; the Devil, the prince of this world is overcome (?) and Death is conquered." Then the Lord takes hold of Adam by his right hand, of David by the left, and "ascends from Hell, followed by all the saints," Enoch and Elias, and by the "holy thief." *

The pious author, perhaps through an oversight, omits to complete the cavalcade, by bringing up the rear with the penitent dragon of Simon Stylites and the converted wolf of St. Francis, wagging their tails and shedding tears of joy!

In the Codex of the Nazarenes it is Tobo who is "the liberator of the soul of Adam," to bear it from Orcus (Hades) to the place of LIFE. Tobo is Tob-Adonijah, one of the twelve disciples (Levites) sent by Jehosaphat to preach to the cities of Judah the Book of the Law (2 Chron. xvii.). In the kabalistic books these were "wise men," Magi. They drew down the rays of the sun to enlighten the sheol (Hades) Orcus, and thus show the way out of the Tenebrae, the darkness of ignorance, to the soul of Adam, which represents collectively all the "souls of mankind." Adam (Athamas) is Tamuz or Adonis, and Adonis is the sun Helios. In the Book of the Dead (vi. 231) Osiris is made to say: "I shine like the sun in the star-house at the feast of the sun." Christ is called the "Sun of Righteousness," "Helios of Justice" (Euseb.: Demons. Ev., v. 29), simply a revamping of the old heathen allegories; nevertheless, to have made it serve for such a use is no less blasphemous on the part of men who pretended to be describing a true episode of the earth-pilgrimage of their God!

"Herakles, who *has gone out from the chambers of earth,

*Leaving the nether house of Plouton!" ** **

# p. 518

** "At THEE the Stygian lakes trembled; Thee the janitor of Orcus

Feared. . . . Thee not even Typhon frightened. . . .

Hail true SON of JOVE, GLORY added to the gods!" *

More than four centuries before the birth of Jesus, Aristophanes had written his immortal parody on the Descent into Hell, by Herakles. ** The chorus of the "blessed ones," the initiated, the Elysian Fields, the arrival of Bacchus (who is Iacchos--Iaho--and Sabaoth) with Herakles, their reception with lighted torches, emblems of new life and RESURRECTION from darkness, death unto light, eternal LIFE; nothing that is found in the Gospel of Nicodemus is wanting in this poem: ***

"Wake, burning torches . . . for thou comest

Shaking them in thy hand, Iacche,

Phosphoric star of the nightly rite!" ****

But the Christians accept these post-mortem adventures of their god, concocted from those of his Pagan predecessors, and derided by Aristophanes four centuries before our era, literally! The absurdities of Nicodemus were read in the churches, as well as those of the Shepherd of Hermas. Irenaeus quotes the latter under the name of Scripture, a divinely-inspired "revelation"; Jerome and Eusebius both insist upon its being publicly read in the churches; and Athanasius observes that the Fathers "appointed it to be read in confirmation of faith and piety." But then comes the reverse of this bright medal, to show once more how stable and trustworthy were the opinions of the strongest pillars of an infallible Church. Jerome, who applauds the book in his catalogue of ecclesiastical writers, in his later comments terms it "apocryphal and foolish"! Tertullian, who could not find praise enough for the Shepherd of Hermas when a Catholic, "began abusing it when a Montanist." *

Chapter xiii. begins with the narrative given by the two resuscitated ghosts of Charinus and Lenthius, the sons of that Simeon who, in the Gospel according to Luke (ii. 25-32), takes the infant Jesus in his arms and blesses God, saying: "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace . . . for mine eyes have seen thy salvation" ** These two ghosts

**

# p. 519

**

have arisen from their cold tombs on purpose to declare "the mysteries" which they saw after death in hell. They are enabled to do so only at the importunate prayer of Annas and Caiaphas, Nicodemus (the author), Joseph (of Arimathaea), and Gamaliel, who beseech them to reveal to them the great secrets. Annas and Caiaphas, however, who bring the ghosts to the synagogue at Jerusalem, take the precaution to make the two resuscitated men, who had been dead and buried for years, to swear on the Book of the Law "by God Adonai, and the God of Israel," to tell them only the truth. Therefore, after making the sign of the cross on their tongues, * they ask for some paper to write their confessions (xii. 21-25). They state how, when "in the depth of hell, in the blackness of darkness," they suddenly saw "a substantial, purple-colored light illuminating the place." Adam, with the patriarchs and prophets, began thereupon to rejoice, and Isaiah also immediately boasted that he had predicted all that. While this was going on, Simeon, their father, arrived, declaring that "the infant he took in his arms in the temple was now coming to liberate them."

After Simeon had delivered his message to the distinguished company in hell, "there came forth one like a little hermit (?), who proved to be John the Baptist." The idea is suggestive and shows that even the "Precursor" and "the Prophet of the Most High," had not been exempted from drying up in hell to the most diminutive proportions, and that to the extent of affecting his brains and memory. Forgetting that (Matthew xi.) he had manifested the most evident doubts as to the Messiahship of Jesus, the Baptist also claims his right to be recognized as a prophet. "And I, John," he says, "when I saw Jesus coming to me, being moved by the Holy Ghost, I said: 'Behold the Lamb of God,

**

# p. 520

**

who takes away the sins of the world' . . . And I baptized him . . . and I saw the Holy Ghost descending upon him, and saying, 'This is my Beloved Son,' etc." And to think, that his descendants and followers, like the Mandeans of Basra, utterly reject these words!

Then Adam, who acts as though his own veracity might be questioned in this "impious company," calls his son Seth, and desires him to declare to his sons, the patriarchs and prophets, what the Archangel Michael had told him at the gate of Paradise, when he, Adam, sent Seth "to entreat God that he would anoint" his head when Adam was sick (xiv. 2). And Seth tells them that when he was praying at the gates of Paradise, Michael advised him not to entreat God for "the oil of the tree of mercy wherewith to anoint father Adam for his headache; because thou canst not by any means obtain it till the LAST DAY and times, namely till 5,500 years be past."

This little bit of private gossip between Michael and Seth was evidently introduced in the interests of Patristic Chronology; and for the purpose of connecting Messiahship still closer with Jesus, on the authority of a recognized and divinely-inspired Gospel. The Fathers of the early centuries committed an inextricable mistake in destroying fragile images and mortal Pagans, in preference to the monuments of Egyptian antiquity. These have become the more precious to archaeology and modern science since it is found they prove that King Menes and his architects flourished between four and five thousand years before "Father Adam" and the universe, according to the biblical chronology, were created "out of nothing." *

"While all the saints were rejoicing, behold Satan, the prince and captain of death," says to the Prince of Hell: "Prepare to receive Jesus of Nazareth himself, who boasted that he was the Son of God, and yet was a man afraid of death, and said: 'My soul is sorrowful even to death' " (xv. 1, 2)*.

*

There is a tradition among the Greek ecclesiastical writers that the "Haeretics" (perhaps Celsus) had sorely twitted the Christians on this delicate point. They held that if Jesus were not a simple mortal, who was often forsaken by the Spirit of Christos, he could not have complained in such expressions as are attributed to him; neither would he have cried out with a loud voice: "My god, My god! why hast thou for-

**

# p. 521

**

saken me?" This objection is very cleverly answered in the Gospel of Nicodemus, and it is the "Prince of Hell" who settles the difficulty.

He begins by arguing with Satan like a true metaphysician. "Who is that so powerful prince," he sneeringly inquires, "who is he so powerful, and yet a man who is afraid of death? . . . I affirm to thee that when, therefore, he said he was afraid of death, he designed to ensnare thee, and unhappy it will be to thee for everlasting ages!"

It is quite refreshing to see how closely the author of this Gospel sticks to his New Testament text, and especially to the fourth evangelist. How cleverly he prepares the way for seemingly "innocent" questions and answers, corroborating the most dubious passages of the four gospels, passages more questioned and cross-examined in those days of subtile sophistry of the learned Gnostics than they are now; a weighty reason why the Fathers should have been even more anxious to burn the documents of their antagonists than to destroy their heresy. The following is a good instance. The dialogue is still proceeding between Satan and the metaphysical half-converted Prince of the under world.

"Who, then, is that Jesus of Nazareth," naively inquires the prince, "that by his word hath taken away the dead from me, without prayers to God?" (xv. 16).

"Perhaps," replies Satan, with the innocence of a Jesuit, "it is the same who took away from me LAZARUS, after he had been four days dead, and did both stink and was rotten? . . . It is the very same person, Jesus of Nazareth. . . . I adjure thee, by the powers which belong to thee and me, that thou bring him not to me!" exclaims the prince. "For when I heard of the power of his word, I trembled for fear, and all my impious company were disturbed. And we were not able to detain Lazarus, but he gave himself a shake, and with all the signs of malice, he immediately went away from us; and the very earth, in which the dead body of Lazarus was lodged, presently turned him alive." "Yes," thoughtfully adds the Prince of Hell, "I know now that he is Almighty God, who is mighty in his dominion, and mighty in his human nature, who is the Saviour of mankind. Bring not therefore this person hither, for he will set at liberty all those I held in prison under unbelief, and . . . will conduct them to everlasting life" (xv. 20).

Here ends the post-mortem evidence of the two ghosts. Charinus (ghost No. 1) gives what he wrote to Annas, Caiaphas, and Gamaliel, and Lenthius (ghost No. 2) his to Joseph and Nicodemus, having done which, both change into "exceedingly white forms and were seen no more."

To show furthermore that the "ghosts" had been all the time under the strictest "test conditions," as the modern spiritualists would express it, the author of the Gospel adds: "But what they had wrote was found 

# p. 522

perfectly to agree, the one not containing one letter more or less than the other."

This news spread in all the synagogues, the Gospel goes on to state, that Pilate went to the temple as advised by Nicodemus, and assembled the Jews together. At this historical interview, Caiaphas and Annas are made to declare that their Scriptures testify "that He (Jesus) is the Son of God and the Lord and King of Israel" (!) and close the confession with the following memorable words:

"And so it appears that Jesus, whom we crucified, is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and true and Almighty God. Amen." (!)

Notwithstanding such a crushing confession for themselves, and the recognition of Jesus as the Almighty God himself, the "Lord God of Israel," neither the high priest, nor his father-in-law, nor any of the elders, nor Pilate, who wrote those accounts, nor any of the Jews of Jerusalem, who were at all prominent, became Christians.

Comments are unnecessary. This Gospel closes with the words: "In the name of the Holy Trinity [of which Nicodemus could know nothing yet] thus ends the Acts of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which the emperor Theodosius the Great found at Jerusalem, in the hall of Pontius Pilate among the public records"; and which history purports to have been written in Hebrew by Nicodemus, "the things being acted in the nineteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, emperor of the Romans, and in the seventeenth year of the government of Herod, the son of Herod, king of Galilee, on the eighth before the calends of April, etc., etc." It is the most barefaced imposture that was perpetrated after the era of pious forgeries opened with the first bishop of Rome, whoever he may have been. The clumsy forger seems to have neither known nor heard that the dogma of the Trinity was not propounded until 325 years later than this pretended date. Neither the Old nor the New Testament contains the word Trinity, nor anything that affords the slightest pretext for this doctrine (see page 177 of this volume, "Christ's descent into Hell"). No explanation can palliate the putting forth of this spurious gospel as a divine revelation, for it was known from the first as a premeditated imposture. If the gospel itself has been declared apocryphal, nevertheless every one of the dogmas contained in it was and is still enforced upon the Christian world. And even the fact that itself is now repudiated, is no merit, *for the Church was shamed and forced into it.

*

And so we are perfectly warranted in repeating the amended Credo of Robert Taylor, which is substantially that of the Christians.

I believe in Zeus, the Father Almighty,

And in his son, Iasios Christ our Lord,

Who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, **

# p. 523

** Born of the Virgin Elektra,

Smitten with a thunderbolt,

Dead and buried,

He descended into Hell,

Rose again and ascended up on high,

And will return to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Nous,

In the Holy circle of Great Gods,

In the Community of Divinities,

In the expiation of sins,

The immortality of the Soul

And the Life Everlasting.

The Israelites have been proved to have worshipped Baal, the Syrian Bacchus, offered incense to the Sabazian or Æsculapian serpent, and performed the Dionysian Mysteries. And how could it be otherwise if Typhon was called Typhon Set, * and Seth, the son of Adam, is identical with Satan or Sat-an; and Seth was worshipped by the Hittites? Less than two centuries B.C., we find the Jews either reverencing or simply worshipping the "golden head of an ass" in their temple; according to Apion, Antiochus Epiphanes carried it off with him. And Zacharias is struck dumb by the apparition of the deity under the shape of an ass in the temple!  **

In his able article "Bacchus, the Prophet-God," Professor A. Wilder remarks that "Tacitus was misled into thinking that the Jews worshipped an ass, the symbol of Typhon or Seth, the Hyk-sos God. The Egyptian name of the ass was co, the phonetic of Iao"; and hence, probably, he adds, "a symbol from that mere circumstance." We can hardly agree with this learned archaeologist, for the idea that the Jews reverenced, for some mysterious reason, Typhon under his symbolical representation rests on more proof than one. And for one we find a passage in the "Gospel of Mary," is cited from Epiphanius, which corroborates the fact. It relates to the death of "Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, murdered by Herod," says the Protevangelion. Epiphanius writes that the cause of the death of Zacharias was that upon seeing a vision in the temple he, through surprise, was willing to disclose it, but his mouth was stopped. That which he saw was at the time of his offering incense, and it was a man STANDING IN THE FORM OF AN ASS. When he was gone out, and had a mind to speak thus to the people, Woe unto you, whom do ye worship? he who had appeared unto him in the temple took away the use of his speech. Afterward when he recovered it, and was able to speak, he declared this to the Jews, and they slew him. They (the Gnostics) add in this book, that on this very account the high priest was commanded by the law-giver (Moses) to carry little bells, that whensoever he went into the temple to sacrifice, he whom they worshipped, hearing the noise of the bells, might have time enough to hide himself, and not be caught in that ugly shape and figure" (Epiph.).

**

# p. 524

**

El, the Sun-God of the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Semites, is declared by Pleyte to be no other than Set or Seth, and El is the primeval Saturn--Israel. * Siva is an Æthiopian God, the same as the Chaldean Baal--Bel; thus he is also Saturn. Saturn, El, Seth and Kiyun, or the biblical Chiun of Amos, are all one and the same deity, and may be all regarded in their worst aspect as Typhon the Destroyer. When the religious Pantheon assumed a more definite expression, Typhon was separated from his androgyne--the good deity, and fell into degradation as a brutal unintellectual power.

Such reactions in the religious feelings of a nation were not unfrequent. The Jews had worshipped Baal or Moloch, the Sun-God Hercules, ** in their early days--if they had any days at all earlier than the Persians or Maccabees--and then made their prophets denounce them. On the other hand, the characteristics of the Mosaic Jehovah exhibit more of the moral disposition of Siva than of a benevolent, "long-suffering" God. Besides, to be identified with Siva is no small compliment, for the latter is God of wisdom. Wilkinson depicts him as the most intellectual of the Hindu gods. He is three-eyed, and, like Jehovah, terrible in his resistless revenge and wrath. And, although the Destroyer, "yet he is the re-creator of all things in perfect wisdom." *** He is the type of St. Augustine's God who "prepares hell for pryers into his mysteries," and insists on trying human reason as well as common sense by forcing mankind to view with equal reverence his good and evil acts.

Notwithstanding the numerous proofs that the Israelites worshipped a variety of gods, and even offered human sacrifices until a far later period than their Pagan neighbors, they have contrived to blind posterity in regard to truth. They sacrificed human life as late as 169 B.C., * and the Bible *contains a number of such records. At a time when the Pagans had long abandoned the abominable practice, and had replaced the sacrificial man by the animal, *** Jephthah is represented sacrificing his own daughter to the "Lord" for a burnt-offering.

The denunciations of their own prophets are the best proofs against them. Their worship in high places is the same as that of the "idolaters." Their prophetesses are counterparts of the Pythiae and Bacchantes. Pausanias speaks of women-colleges which superintend the worship of

**

# p. 525

**

Bacchus, and of the sixteen matrons of Elis. * The Bible says that "Deborah, a prophetess . . . judged Israel at that time"; ** and speaks of Huldah, another prophetess, who "dwelt in Jerusalem, in the college"; * and 2 Samuel mentions "wise women" several times,  notwithstanding the injunction of Moses not to use either divination or augury. As to the final and conclusive identification of the "Lord God" of Israel with Moloch, we find a very suspicious evidence of the case in the last chapter of Leviticus, concerning things devoted not to be redeemed. . . . A man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath, both of man and beast. . . . None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed, but shall surely be put to death . . . for it is most holy unto the Lord.*" **

The duality, if not the plurality of the gods of Israel may be inferred from the very fact of such bitter denunciations. Their prophets never approved of sacrificial worship. Samuel denied that the Lord had any delight in burnt-offerings and sacrifices (1 Samuel, xv. 22). Jeremiah asserted, unequivocally, that the Lord, Yava Sabaoth Elohe Israel, never commanded anything of the sort, but contrariwise (vii. 21-24).

But these prophets who opposed themselves to human sacrifices were all nazars and initiates. These prophets led a party in the nation against the priests, as later the Gnostics contended against the Christian Fathers. Hence, when the monarchy was divided, we find the priests at Jerusalem and the prophets in the country of Israel. Even Ahab and his sons, who introduced the Tyrian worship of Baal-Hercules and the Syrian goddess into Israel, were aided and encouraged by Elijah and Elisha. Few prophets appeared in Judea till Isaiah, after the northern monarchy had been overthrown. Elisha anointed Jehu on purpose that he should destroy the royal families of both countries, and so unite the people into one civil polity. For the Temple of Solomon, desecrated by the priests, no Hebrew prophet or initiate cared a straw. Elijah never went to it, nor Elisha, Jonah, Nahum, Amos, or any other Israelite. While the initiates were holding to the "secret doctrine" of Moses, the people, led by their priests, were steeped in idolatry exactly the same as that of the Pagans. It is the popular views and interpretations of Jehovah that the Christians have adopted.

The question is likely to be asked: "In the view of so much evidence to show that Christian theology is only a pot-pourri of Pagan mythologies, how can it be connected with the religion of Moses?" The early Christians, Paul and his disciples, the Gnostics and their successors generally, regarded Christianity and Judaism as essentially distinct. The

**

# p. 526

**

latter, in their view, was an antagonistic system, and from a lower origin. "Ye received the law," said Stephen, "from the ministration of angels," or aeons, and not from the Most High Himself. The Gnostics, as we have seen, taught that Jehovah, the Deity of the Jews, was Ilda-Baoth, the son of the ancient Bohu, or Chaos, the adversary of Divine Wisdom.

The question may be more than easily answered. The law of Moses, and the so-called monotheism of the Jews, can hardly be said to have been more than two or three centuries older than Christianity. The Pentateuch itself, we are able to show, was written and revised upon this "new departure," at a period subsequent to the colonization of Judea under the authority of the kings of Persia. The Christian Fathers, in their eagerness to make their new system dovetail with Judaism, and so avoid Paganism, unconsciously shunned Scylla only to be caught in the whirlpool of Charybdis. Under the monotheistic stucco of Judaism was unearthed the same familiar mythology of Paganism. But we should not regard the Israelites with less favor for having had a Moloch and being like the natives. Nor should we compel the Jews to do penance for their fathers. They had their prophets and their law, and were satisfied with them. How faithfully and nobly they have stood by their ancestral faith under the most diabolical persecutions, the present remains of a once-glorious people bear witness. The Christian world has been in a state of convulsion from the first to the present century; it has been cleft into thousands of sects; but the Jews remain substantially united. Even their differences of opinion do not destroy their unity.

The Christian virtues inculcated by Jesus in the sermon on the mount are nowhere exemplified in the Christian world. The Buddhist ascetics and Indian fakirs seem almost the only ones that inculcate and practice them. Meanwhile the vices which coarse-mouthed slanderers have attributed to Paganism, are current everywhere among Christian Fathers and Christian Churches.

The boasted wide gap between Christianity and Judaism, that is claimed on the authority of Paul, exists but in the imagination of the pious. We are nought but the inheritors of the intolerant Israelites of ancient days; not the Hebrews of the time of Herod and the Roman dominion, who, with all their faults, kept strictly orthodox and monotheistic, but the Jews who, under the name of Jehovah-Nissi, worshipped Bacchus-Osiris, Dio-Nysos, the multiform Jove of Nyssa, the Sinai of Moses. The kabalistic demons--allegories of the profoundest meaning--were adopted as objective entities, and a Satanic hierarchy carefully drawn by the orthodox demonologists.

The Rosicrucian motto, "Igne natura renovatur integra," which the alchemists interpret as nature renovated by fire, or matter by spirit, is

**

# p. 527

**

made to be accepted to this day as Iesus Nazarenus rex Iudaeorum. The mocking satire of Pilate is accepted literally, and the Jews made to unwittingly confess thereby the royalty of Christ; whereas, if the inscription is not a forgery of the Constantinian period, it yet is the action of Pilate, against which the Jews were first to violently protest. I. H. S. is interpreted Iesus Hominum Salvator, and In hoc signo, whereas ΙΕΣ is one of the most ancient names of Bacchus. And more than ever do we begin to find out, by the bright light of comparative theology, that the great object of Jesus, the initiate of the inner sanctuary, was to open the eyes of the fanatical multitude to the difference between the highest Divinity--the mysterious and never-mentioned IAO of the ancient Chaldean and later Neo-platonic initiates--and the Hebrew Yahuh, or Yaho (Jehovah). The modern Rosicrucians, so violently denounced by the Catholics, now find brought against them, as the most important charge, the fact that they accuse Christ of having destroyed the worship of Jehovah. Would to Heaven he could have been allowed the time to do so, for the world would not have found itself still bewildered, after nineteen centuries of mutual massacres, among 300 quarrelling sects, and with a personal Devil reigning over a terrorized Christendom!

True to the exclamation of David, paraphrased in King James' Version as "all the gods of the nations are idols," i.e., devils, Bacchus or the "first-born" or the Orphic theogony, the Monogenes, or "only-begotten" of Father Zeus and Kore, was transformed, with the rest of the ancient myths, into a devil. By such a degradation, the Fathers, whose pious zeal could only be surpassed by their ignorance, have unwittingly furnished evidence against themselves. They have, with their own hands, paved the way for many a future solution, and greatly helped modern students of the science of religions.

It was in the Bacchus-myth that lay concealed for long and dreary centuries both the future vindication of the reviled "gods of the nations," and the last clew to the enigma of Jehovah. The strange duality of Divine and mortal characteristics, so conspicuous in the Sinaitic Deity, begins to yield its mystery before the untiring inquiry of the age. One of the latest contributions we find in a short but highly-important paper in the Evolution, a periodical of New York, the closing paragraph of which throws a flood of light on Bacchus, the Jove of Nysa, who was worshipped by the Israelites as Jehovah of Sinai.

"Such was the Jove of Nysa to his worshippers," concludes the author. "He represented to them alike the world of nature and the world of thought. He was the 'Sun of righteousness, with healing on his wings,' and he not only brought joy to mortals, but opened to them hope beyond mortality of immortal life. Born of a human mother, he raised her from

**

# p. 528

**

the world of death to the supernal air, to be revered and worshipped. At once lord of all worlds, he was in them all alike the Saviour.

"Such was Bacchus, the prophet-god. A change of cultus, decreed by the Murderer-Imperial, the Emperor Theodosius, at the instance of Ghostly-Father Ambrosius, of Milan, has changed his title to Father of Lies. His worship, before universal, was denominated Pagan or local, and his rites stigmatized as witchcraft. His orgies received the name of Witches' Sabbath, and his favorite symbolical form with the bovine foot became the modern representative of the Devil with the cloven hoof. The master of the house having been called Beelzebub, they of his household were alike denounced as having commerce with the powers of darkness. Crusades were undertaken; whole peoples massacred. Knowledge and the higher learning were denounced as magic and sorcery. Ignorance became the mother of devotion--such as was then cherished. Galileo languished long years in prison for teaching that the sun was in the centre of the solar universe. Bruno was burned alive at Rome in 1600 for reviving the ancient philosophy; yet, queerly enough, the Liberalia have become a festival of the Church, * Bacchus is a saint in the calendar four times repeated, and at many a shrine he may be seen reposing in the arms of his deified mother. The names are changed; the ideas remain as before." **

And now that we have shown that we must indeed "bid an eternal farewell to all the rebellious angels," we naturally pass to an examination of the God Jesus, who was manufactured out of the man Jesus to redeem us from these very mythical devils, as Father Ventura shows us. This labor will of course necessitate once more a comparative inquiry into the history of Gautama-Buddha, his doctrines and his "miracles," and those of Jesus and the predecessor of both--Christna.

Footnotes

474: So firmly established seems to have been the reputation of the Brahmans and Buddhists for the highest morality, and that since time immemorial, that we find Colonel Henry Yule, in his admirable edition of "Marco Polo," giving the following testimony: "The high virtues ascribed to the Brahman and Indian merchants were, perhaps, in part, matter of tradition . . . but the eulogy is so constant among mediaeval travellers that it must have had a solid foundation. In fact, it would not be difficult to trace a chain of similar testimony from ancient times down to our own. Arrian says no Indian was ever accused of falsehood. Hwen T'sang ascribes to the people of India eminent uprightness, honesty, and disinterestedness. Friar Jordanus (circa 1330) says the people of Lesser India (Sindh and Western India) were true in speech and eminent in justice; and we may also refer to the high character given to the Hindus by Abul Fazl. But after 150 years of European trade, indeed, we find a sad deterioration. . *. . Yet Pallas, in the last century, noticing the Bamyan colony at Astrakhan, says its members were notable for an upright dealing that made them greatly preferable to Armenians. And that wise and admirable public servant, the late Sir William Sleeman, in our own time, has said that he knew no class of men in the world more strictly honorable than the mercantile classes of India."  1

The sad examples of the rapid demoralization of savage American Indians, as soon as they are made to live in a close proximity with Christian officials and missionaries, are familiar in our modern days.

474:1 The "Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian," translated by Colonel Henry Yule, vol. ii., p. 354.

475: At the present moment Mr. O'Grady is Editor of the "American Builder," of New York, and is well known for his interesting letters, "Indian Sketches--Life in the East," which he contributed under the pseudonym of Hadji Nicka Bauker Khan, *to the Boston "Commercial Bulletin."

476:* Ecclesiastes xii. 13; see Tayler Lewis's "Metrical Translation."

"The great conclusion here;

Fear God and His commandments keep, for this is all of man."

476:** See Micah vi., 6-8, "Noyes's Translation."

476:*** Matthew xvii. 37-40.

476:**** "Les Hauts Phenomenes de la Magie," p. 12, preface.

477:* "History of Magic, Witchcraft, and Animal Magnetism."

478:* See Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science."

478:** Gospel according to Mark, iii. 29: "He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation" (αμαρτεματος, error).

479:* Gospel according to Matthew, v. 44.

480:* "Comparative Mythology," April, 1856.

480:** 1st Epistle of John, iii. 8.

481: 2 Kings, xviii. 4. It is probable that the fiery serpents or Seraphim mentioned in the twenty-first chapter of the book of Numbers were the same as the Levites, or Ophite tribe. Compare Exodus xxxii. 26-29 with Numbers xxi. 5-9. The names Heva, , Hivi *or Hivite, , and Levi , all signify a serpent; and it is a curious fact that the Hivites, or serpent-tribe of Palestine, like the Levites or Ophites of Israel, were ministers to the temples. The Gibeonites, whom Joshua assigned to the service of the sanctuary, were Hivites.

481:** 1 Chronicles, xxi. 1: "And Satan stood up against Israel and moved David to number Israel." 2d Samuel, xxiv. 1: "And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say: 'Go, number Israel and Judah.' "

481:*** Zechariah iii. 1, 2. A pun or play on words is noticeable; "adversary" is associated with "Satan," as if from , to oppose.

482:* Jude 9.

482:** In the "Assyrian Tablets," Palestine is called "the land of the Hittites"; and the Egyptian Papyri, declaring the same thing, also make Seth, the "pillar-god," their tutelar deity.

482:** Seth, Suteh, or Sat-an, was the god of the aboriginal nations of Syria. Plutarch makes him the same as Typhon. Hence he was god of Goshen and Palestine, the countries occupied by the Israelites.

482:**** "Vendidad," fargard x., 23: "I combat the daeva Æshma, the very evil." "The Yacnas," x. 18, speaks likewise of Æshma-Daeva, or Khasm: "All other sciences depend upon Æshma, the cunning." "Serv.," lvi. 12: "To smite the wicked Auramanyas (Ahriman, the evil power), to smite Æshma with the terrible weapon, to smite the Mazanian daevas, to smite all devas."

483:* Jacob Bryant: "Analysis of Ancient Mythology."

483:** Plutarch: "de Iside," xxx., xxxi.

484:* Wilkinson's "Ancient Egyptians," p. 434.

484:** See "Vendidad," fargard x.

484:*** Salverte: "Des Sciences Occultes," appendix, note A.

484:**** The term τειρασμος signifies a trial, or probation.

485: 2 Samuel, ii. 5, 15; *vi. 1-4. Pliny.

485:** See 1 Corinthians, v. 5; 2 Corinthians, xi. 14; 1 Timothy, i. 20.

485:*** 2d Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, xii. In Numbers xxii, 22 the angel of the Lord is described as acting the part of a Satan to Balaam.

485:**** 1 Kings, xxii. 19-23.

486: Haug: "Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsees."

486: The "Avesta" describes the serpent Dahaka, as of the region of Bauri or Babylonia. In the Median history are two kings of the name Deiokes or Dahaka, and Astyages or Az-dahaka. There were children of Zohak seated on various Eastern thrones, after Feridun. It is apparent, therefore, that by Zohak is meant the Assyrian dynasty, whose symbol was the purpureum signum draconis--the purple sign of the Dragon. From a very remote antiquity (Genesis xiv.) this dynasty ruled Asia, Armenia, Syria, Arabia, Babylonia, Media, Persia, Bactria, and Afghanistan. It was finally overthrown by Cyrus and Darius Hystaspes, after "1,000 years" rule. Yima and Thraetaona, or Jemshid and Feridun, are doubtless personifications. Zohak probably imposed the Assyrian or Magian worship of fire upon the Persians. Darius was the vicegerent of Ahura-Mazda.

486: The name in the Gospels is βεελζεβουλ, or Baal of the Dwelling. It is pretty certain that Apollo, the Delphian God, was not Hellenian originally, but Phoenician. He was the Paian or physician, as well as the god of oracles. It is no great stretch of imagination to identify him with Baal-Zebul, the god of Ekron, or Acheron, doubtless changed to Zebub, *or flies, by the Jews in derision.

487:* "Against Apion," i. 25. "The Egyptians took many occasions to hate and envy us: in the first place because our ancestors (the Hyk-sos, or shepherds) had had the dominion over their country, and when they were delivered from them and gone to their own country, they lived there in prosperity."

487: Bunsen. The name Seth with the syllable an from the Chaldean ana or Heaven, makes the term Satan. The punners seem now to have pounced upon it, as was their wont, and so made it Satan from the verb Sitan, to oppose.

488: "Vendidad," fargard x. The name Vendidad is a contraction of Vidaeva-data, *ordinances against the Daevas.

488:* Bundahest, "Ahriman created out of the materials of darkness Akuman and Ander, then Sauru and Nakit."

488:*** See Lenoir's "Du Dragon de Metz," in "Memoires de l'Academie Celtique," i., 11, 12.

489:* Plutarch: "Isis and Osiris."

489: "The Origin of Serpent Worship," by C. Staniland Wake, M.A.I**. New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877.

489:*** "Tree and Serpent Worship," etc.

490:* Godfrey Higgins: "Anacalypsis"; Dupuis: "Origines des Cultes," iii., 51.

490:** Martianus Capella: "Hymn to the Sun," i., ii.; Movers: "Phiniza," 266.

490:*** Plutarch: "Isis and Osiris."

490:**** Virgil: "Eclogues," iv.

490:* Ovid: "Fasti," ii., 451.

490:** Knorring: "Terra et Coelum," 53.

491: Anna is an Oriental designation from the Chaldean ana, or heaven, whence Anaitis and Anaitres. Durga, the consort of Siva, is also named Anna purna, and was doubtless the original St. Anna. The mother of the prophet Samuel was named Anna; the father of his counterpart, Samson, was Manu*.

491: The virgins of ancient time, as will be seen, were not maids, but simply almas, or nubile women.

491:*** Kircher: "Œdipus Ægyptiacus," iii., 5.

491:**** From θεραπευο, to serve, to worship, to heal.

491:* E. Pococke derives the name Pythagoras from Buddha, and guru, a spiritual teacher. Higgins makes it Celtic, and says that it means an observer of the stars. See "Celtic Druids." If, however, we derive the word Pytho from , petah, the name would signify an expounder of oracles, and Buddha-guru a teacher of the doctrines of Buddha.

492: In the Secret Museum of Naples, there is a marble bas-relief representing the Fall of Man, in which God the Father plays the part of the Beguiling Serpent*.

493: First Epistle to the Corinthians, x. 11.: "All these things happened unto them for types.*"

493:** Epistle to the Galatians, iv. 24: "It is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond-maid, the other by a freewoman . . . which things are an allegory."

495:* See "Job," by various translators, and compare the different texts.

495:** See Kerr Porter's "Persia," vol. i., plates 17, 41.

497:* The expression "of the kindred of Ram" denotes that he was an Aramaean or Syrian from Mesopotamia. Buz was a son of Nahor. "Elihu son of Barachel" is susceptible of two translations. Eli-Hu--God is, or Hoa is God; and Barach-Al--the worshipper of God, or Bar-Rachel, the son of Rachel, or son of the ewe.

498:* xxxvi. 24-27.

498:** ix. 5-11.

498:* xxxviii. 1, et passim.

499:* Job xxxviii. 35.

499:** Ibid., xli. 8.

499:*** Ibid., xli. 34.

500: Atum*, or At-ma, is the Concealed God, at once Phtha and Amon, Father and Son, Creator and thing created, Thought and Appearance, Father and Mother.

500:** Molitor, Ennemoser, Henman, Pfaff, etc.

500:*** Schopheim: "Traditions," p. 32.

503:* W. Williams: "Primitive History"; Dunlap: "Spirit History of Man."

504:* Plutarch: "Isis and Osiris," p. 17.

504:** "Sibylline Oracles," 760-788.

504:*** Euripides: "Bacchae."

505: We doubt the propriety of rendering κορε, virgin. Demeter and Persephoneia were substantially the same divinity, as were Apollo and Esculapius. The scene of this adventure is laid in Krete or Koureteia, where Zeus was chief god. It was, doubtless, Keres or Demeter that is intended. She was also named κουρα, which is the same as κορε. *As she was the goddess of the Mysteries, she was fittest for the place as consort of the Serpent-God and mother of Zagreus.

505: Pococke considers Zeus a grand lama, or chief Jaina, and Kore-Persephone, or Kuru-Parasu-pani. Zagreus, is Chakras, the wheel, or circle, the earth, the ruler of the world. He was killed by the Titans, or Teith-ans (Daityas). The Horns or crescent was a badge of Lamaic sovereignty.

505:*** Nonnus: "Dionysiacs."

505:**** See Deane's "Serpent Worship," pp. 89, 90.

505:* Creuzer: "Symbol.," vol. i., p. 341.

505:* The Dragon is the sun, *the generative principle--Jupiter-Zeus; and Jupiter is called the "Holy Spirit" by the Egyptians, says Plutarch, "De Iside," xxxvi.

506: In the original it stands Æons (emanations). In the translation it stands worlds. *It was not to be expected that, after anathematizing the doctrine of emanations, the Church would refrain from erasing the original word, which clashed diametrically with her newly-enforced dogma of the Trinity.

506:** See Dean's "Serpent Worship," p. 145.

506:*** Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 3.

506:**** See Dunlap's "Spirit History of Man," the chapter on "the Logos, the Only Begotten and the King."

506:* Translated by Buckley.

506:** "Select Works on Sacrifice."

507: Typhon is called by Plutarch and Sanchoniathon, "Tuphon, the red*-skinned." Plutarch: "Isis and Osiris," xxi.-xxvi.

509:* "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 269.

509:** Rahu and Kehetty are the two fixed stars which form the head and tail of the constellation of the Dragon.

509:*** E. Upham: "The Mahavansi, etc.," p. 54, for the answer given by the chief-priest of Mulgirs Galle Vihari, named Sue Bandare Metankere Samanere Samavahanse, to a Dutch Governor in 1766.

509:** We leave it to the learned archaeologists and philologists to decide how the Naga or Serpent worship could travel from Kashmir to Mexico and become the Nargal worship, which is also a Serpent worship, and a doctrine of lycanthropy.

510:* Michael, the chief of the Æons, is also "Gabriel, the messenger of Life," of the Nazarenes, and the Hindu Indra, the chief of the good Spirits, who vanquished Vasouki, the Demon who rebelled against Brahma.

510: See the Gnostic amulet called the "Chnuphis-Serpent," in the act of raising its head crowned with the seven vowels, which is the kabalistic symbol for signifying the "gift of speech to man," or Logos.

510:*** "Tamas, the Vedas."

510:**** Thomas Aquinas: "Summa," ii., 94 Art.

511: See des Mousseaux; see various other Demonographers; the different "Trials of Witches," the depositions of the latter exacted by torture, etc. In our humble opinion, the Devil must have contracted this disagreeable smell and his habits of uncleanliness in company with mediaeval monks. Many of these saints boasted of having never washed themselves! "To strip one's self for the sake of vain* cleanliness, is to sin in the eyes of God," says Sprenger, in the "Witches' Hammer." Hermits and monks "dreaded all cleansing as so much defilement. There was no bathing for a thousand years!" exclaims Michelet in his "Sorciere." Why such an outcry against Hindu fakirs in such a case? These, if they keep dirty, besmear themselves only after washing, for their religion commands them to wash every morning, and sometimes several times a day.

511:** Lermontoff, the great Russian poet, author of the "Demon."

512:* "Les Hauts Phenomenes de la Magie," p. 379.

512:** "Movers," p. 109.

512:*** Hercules is of Hindu origin.

512:** The same as the Egyptian Kneph, and the Gnostic Ophis.

512:* "Serpent Worship," p. 145.

512:** "Movers," p. 397. Azazel and Samael are identical.

513: Saturn is Bel-Moloch and even Hercules and Siva. Both of the latter are Harakala, or gods of the war, of the battle, or the "Lords of Hosts." Jehovah is called "a man of war" in Exodus xv. 3. "The Lord of Hosts is his name" (Isaiah li. 15), and David blesses him for teaching his "hands to war and his fingers to fight" (Psalms cxliv. 1). Saturn is also the Sun, and Movers says that Kronos Saturn was called by the Phoenicians Israel* (130). Philo says the same (in Euseb., p. 44).

513: "Blessed be Iahoh, Alahim, Alahi, Israel" (Psalm lxii.).

513:*** Hardy's "Manual of Buddhism," p. 60.

513:**** Cousin: "Lect. on Mod. Phil.," vol. i., p. 404.

513:* Movers, Duncker, Higgins, and others.

514:* "Haeres," xxxiv; "Gnostics," p. 53.

514: Wine was first made sacred in the mysteries of Bacchus. Payne Knight believes--erroneously we think--that wine was taken with the view to produce a false ecstasy through intoxication. It was held sacred, however, and the Christian Eucharist is certainly an imitation of the Pagan rite. Whether Mr. Knight was right or wrong, we regret to say that a Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Joseph Blanchard, of New York, was found drunk in one of the public squares on the night of Sunday, August 5, 1877, and lodged in prison. The published report says: "The prisoner said that he had been to church and taken a little too much of the communion wine!"

514:*** The initiatory rite typified a descent into the underworld. Bacchus, Herakles, Orpheus, and Asklepius all descended into hell and ascended thence the third day.

514:**** King's "Hist. Apost. Creed," 8vo, p. 26.

514:* Justice Bailey's "Common Prayer," 1813, p. 9.

514:** "Apostle's Creed"; "Apocryphal New Testament."

514:* "On the Creed," fol. 1676, p. 225.

514:** Lib. 1, c. 2; "Lib. de Princ," in "Procoem. Advers. Praxeam," c. ii.

514:*** "De Fide et Symbol."

516:* "Preller": ii., p. 154.

517:* Nicodemus: "Apocryphal Gospel," translated from the Gospel published by Grynaeus, "Orthodoxographa," vol. i., tom. ii., p. 643.

517:** Euripides: "Herakles," 807.

518:* "Æneid," viii., 274, ff.

518:** "Frogs"; see fragments given in "Sod, the Mystery of Adonis."

518:*** See pages 180-187, 327.

518:**** Aristophanes: "Frogs."

518:* See Preface to "Hermas" in the Apocryphal New Testament.

518:** In the "Life of Buddha," of Bkah Hgyur (Thibetan text), we find the original of the episode given in the Gospel according to Luke. An old and holy ascetic, Rishi Asita, comes from afar to see the infant Buddha, instructed as he is of his birth and mission by supernatural visions. Having worshipped the little Gautama, the old saint bursts into p. 519 tears, and upon being questioned upon the cause of his grief, answers: "After becoming Buddha, he will help hundreds of thousands of millions of creatures to pass to the other shore of the ocean of life, and will lead them on forever to immortality. And I--I shall not behold this pearl of Buddhas! Cured of my illness, I shall not be freed by him from human passion! Great King! I am too old--that is why I weep, and why, in my sadness, I heave long sighs!"

It does not prevent the holy man, however, from delivering prophecies about the young Buddha, which, with a very slight difference, are of the same substance as those of Simeon about Jesus. While the latter calls the young Jesus "a light for the revelation of the Gentiles and the glory of the people of Israel," the Buddhist prophet promises that the young prince will find himself clothed with the perfect and complete enlightenment or "light" of Buddha, and will turn the wheel of law as no one ever did before him. "Rgya Tcher Rol Pa"; translated from the Thibetan text and revised on the original Sanscrit, Lalitavistara, by P. E. Foncaux. 1847. Vol. ii., pp. 106, 107.

519:* The sign of the cross--only a few days after the resurrection, and before the cross was ever thought of as a symbol!

520:* Payne Knight shows that "from the time of the first King Menes, under whom all the country below Lake Moeris was a bog (Herod., ii., 4), to that of the Persian invasion, when it was the garden of the world"--between 11,000 and 12,000 years must have elapsed. (See "Ancient Art and Mythology"; cli., R. Payne Knight, p. 108. Edit. by A. Wilder.)

523:* Seth or Sutech, "Rawlinson's History of Herodotus," book ii., appendix. viii., 23.

523:** The fact is vouchsafed for by Epiphanius. See Hone: "Apocryphal New Testament"; "The Gospel of the Birth of Mary."

524:* "Phallism in Ancient Religions," by Staniland Wake and Westropp, p. 74.

524:** Hercules is also a god-fighter as well as Jacob-Israel.

524:*** "Phallism in Ancient Religions," p. 75.

524:**** Antiochus Epiphanius found in 169 B.C. in the Jewish temple, a man kept there to be sacrificed. Apion: "Joseph. contra Apion," ii., 8.

524:* The ox of Dionysus was sacrificed at the Bacchic Mysteries. See "Anthon," p. 365.

525:* "Paus.," 5, 16.

525:** Judges iv. 4.

525:*** 2 Kings, xxii. 14.

525:**** xiv. 2; xx. 16, 17.

525:* xxvii. 28, 29.

528:* The festival denominated Liberalia occurred on the seventeenth of March, now St. Patrick's Day. Thus Bacchus was also the patron saint of the Irish.

528:** Prof. A. Wilder: "Bacchus, the Prophet-God," in the June number (1877) of the "Evolution, a Review of Polities, Religion, Science, Literature, and Art."

JSON: /api/sources/isis-unveiled/10-chapter-x.json