Chapter X (2)

The _Book of Job_ is a complete representation of ancient initiation, and the trials which generally precede this grandest of all ceremonies. 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.[954] 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.[955] It is the luminous Self--the Âtman of 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 “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.[956]

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!” 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_;’”[957] 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_!”[958]

Then, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”[959] 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 of Orion?... Canst thou _send lightnings_, that they may go, and say unto thee, ‘Here we are?’”[960]

“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_,”[961] 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.”[962]

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 his celestial house, and is received by Athar and Isis, and stands before _Atum_,[963] 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 mediæval 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.”[964]

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.[965] 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, 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 _Astdians_ and _Pharsi_--invested Ormazd with the secret name of יהוה, 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; part 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 Cybelè, “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 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 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 _Theo_logy 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.”[966] The Maneros of Plutarch was a child of Palestine,[967] 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 Irenæus, 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 Gallæus:

“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.”[968]

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 Semelé (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.”[969]

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:

“Korè-Persephoneia[970] ... 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 Korè’s maiden couch....
Thus, by the alliance with the Dragon of Æther,
The womb of Persephonè became alive with fruit,
Bearing Zagreus,[971] the Horned Child.”[972]

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 Semelé, 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.[973] In their eyes the Serpent was the Logos--Christos, the incarnation of Divine Wisdom, through his Father Ennoïa and Mother Sophia.

“Now my mother, the Holy Spirit (Holy Ghost) took me,” Jesus is made to say in the _Gospel of the Hebrews_,[974] thus entering upon his part of Christos--the Son of Sophia, the Holy Spirit.[975]

“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, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the Æons” (Paul: _Heb._ i.).[976]

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,[977] and Plato’s universal soul.

“I, Wisdom, came out of the mouth of the Most High, and _covered the earth as a cloud_.”[978]

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.[979] 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.[980] 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,”[981] 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_.” 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, coëval 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.”[982] 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 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 reïncarnation 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.

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 Nammadānam-nāraya, 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!”[983]

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[984] (one of the nine planets) _not by a devil_.”[985]

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 _Mahâvansa_, 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;[986] and it is earlier, by all odds, than the _Golden Legend_ which tells the same of Simeon the Stylite and his Dragon.

The Logos triumphs once more over the great Dragon; Michael, the luminous archangel, chief of the Æons, conquers Satan.[987]

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_;[988] 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.”[989]

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.”[990]

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 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 _Apolouôn_--the anti-Christ. Apolouôn 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 Müller 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 “beheld 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,[991] Milton, Byron, Goethe, Lermontoff,[992] 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 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!!”[993]

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 zoölogical 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_?[994] The word _God_ (deity) is derived from the Sanscrit word _Deva_, and Devil from the Persian _daëva_, 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.[995]

The Agathodæmon, the beneficent dæmon,[996] 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.[997]

Azazel is Moloch and Samael, says Movers,[998] and we find Aaron, the brother of the great law-giver Moses, making equal sacrifices to Jehovah and Azazel.

“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,[999] notwithstanding his metamorphoses from Adoni into Eloi, and God of Gods, Lord of Lords.[1000]

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.[1001]

In the Bacchic Mysteries a _consecrated cup_ was handed around after supper, called the cup of the Agathodæmon.[1002] 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.[1003]

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 in good ground.[1004] Whereupon the liquor in the larger vase swells and swells until it runs over the brim.”[1005]

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,[1006] 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[1007] 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.”[1008]

It is the most important addition in the Apostle’s Creed, and dates since the year of Christ 600.[1009] It was not known in the days of Eusebius. Bishop Parsons says that it was not in the ancient creeds or rules of faith.[1010] Irenæus, Origen, and Tertullian exhibit no knowledge of this sentence.[1011] 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.[1012] 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 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 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.”