II. BOOK fessedly left to men the power of choosing whom they should obey. "Ahura-mazda is holy, true, to be honoured through truth, through holy deeds." "You cannot serve him and his enemy." "In the beginning there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity. These are the Good and the Base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one of these two spirits. Be good, not base." But practically Ahriman took continually a stronger hold on the popular imagination, and the full effects of this process were to be realized elsewhere. The religion of Zoroaster has been regarded as a reform; in M. Bréal's judgment, it was rather a return to a classification which the Hindu had abandoned or had never cared to adopt. "While Brahmanism kept to the old belief only in the letter, Mazdeism preserved its spirit. The Parsee, who sees the universe divided between two forces, everywhere present and each in turn victorious until the final victory of Ormuzd, is nearer to the mythical representations of the first age than the Hindu, who, looking on everything as an illusion of the senses, wraps up the universe and his own personality in the existence of one single Being."1 Its in fluence on With this dualism the Jews were brought into contact during the the Jews. captivity at Babylon. That the Hebrew prophets had reiterated their belief in one God with the most profound conviction, is not to be questioned; but as little can it be doubted that as a people the Jews had exhibited little impulse towards Monotheism, and that from this time we discern a readiness to adopt the Zoroastrian demonology. Thus far Satan had appeared, as in the book of Job, among the ministers of God; but in later books we have a closer approximation to the Iranian creed. In the words of M. Bréal, "Satan assumes, in Zacharias and in the first book of Chronicles, the character of Ahriman, and appears as the author of evil. Still later he becomes the prince of the devils, the source of wicked thoughts, the enemy of the word of God. He tempts the Son of God; he enters into Judas for his ruin. The Apocalypse exhibits Satan with the physical attributes of Ahriman: he is called the dragon, the old serpent, who fights against God and his angels. The Vedic myth, transformed and exaggerated in the Iranian books, finds its way through this channel into Christianity." The idea thus introduced was that of the struggle between Satan and Michael which ended in the overthrow of the former, and the casting forth of all his hosts out of heaven; but it coincided too nearly with a myth spread in countries held by all the Aryan nations to avoid further modification. logy is taken by M. Maury, Croyances, &c., 97. 1 Hercules et Cacus, 129. The same view of the origin of the Dualistic theo ST. MICHAEL AND ST. GEORGE. X. 563 Local traditions substituted St. George or St. Theodore for Jupiter, CHAP. Apollôn, Herakles, or Perseus. "It is under this disguise," adds M. Bréal, "that the Vedic myth has come down to our own times, and has still its festivals and its monuments. Art has consecrated it in a thousand ways. St. Michael, lance in hand, treading on the dragon, is an image as familiar now as, thirty centuries ago, that of Indra treading underfoot the demon Vritra could possibly have been to the Hindu."1 2 Firdusi. That this myth should be Euemerised by Firdusi was natural and The epic of inevitable, when once the poet had made Feridun a king of the first Persian dynasty. He could no longer represent Zohak as a monster with three heads, three tails, six eyes, and a thousand forces; but the power of the old myth gave shape to his statement that, after the embrace of the demon, a snake started up from each of his shoulders, whose head, like that of the Lernaian hydra, grew as fast as it was cut off. Nor has it influenced the modern poet only. Cyrus is as historical as Charlemagne ; but from mythical history we should learn as much of the former as we should know of the latter, if our information came only from the myth of Roland. What Cyrus really did we learn from other sources; but in the legendary story he is simply another Oidipous and Têlephos, compelled for a time to live, like Odysseus and the Boots of German tales, in mean disguise, until his inborn nobleness proclaims him the son of a king. But as in the case of Oidipous, Perseus, Theseus, and many more, the father or the grandsire dreads the birth of the child, for the sun must destroy the darkness to whom he seems to owe his life. This sire of Cyrus must belong therefore to the class of beings who represent the powers of night-in other words, he must be akin to Vritra or to Ahi; and in his name accordingly we find the familiar words. Astyages, the Persian Asdahag, is but another form of the modern Zohak, the Azidahâka, or biting snake, of Vedic and Iranian mythology; and the epithet reappears seemingly in the name of Deiokes, the first king of the Median nation. SECTION VIII.-THE SEMITIC AND ARYAN DEVIL. tic Satan. Thus far it is only on Iranian soil that we have seen the struggle The Semibetween day and night, the sun and the darkness, represented as a conflict between moral good and evil, the result being a practical, if not a theoretical dualism, in which the unclean spirit is at the least as 2 Ib. 130. 1 Hercule et Cacus, 138. II. BOOK powerful as the righteous being with whom he is at war. This absolute partition of the universe between two contending principles was the very groundwork of Iranian belief; but the idea was one which could not fail to strike root in any congenial soil. To a certain extent it found such a soil in the mind of the Jewish people, who had become familiar, by whatever means, with the notion of a being whose office it was to tempt or try the children of men. The Satan who discharges this duty is, however, one of the sons of God; and in the book of Job there is no indication of any essential antagonism between them. The position of Satan in this narrative is indeed in strict accordance with the Hebrew philosophy which regarded God as the author both of good and evil, as the being who hardened Pharaoh's heart and authorised the lying spirit to go forth and prevail among the prophets of Ahab. But when a portion of the Jewish people was brought into contact with the fully developed system of Persian dualism, the victory of the Iranian theology seemed complete. Henceforth the notion of two hierarchies, the one heavenly, the other diabolical, took possession of their minds; and Satan, who ruled over the powers of darkness and exercised a wide dominion as prince of the air, was confined to a level lower than that of Ahriman, only because he had once stood among the most brilliant angels in the courts of heaven. At this level he remained a fallen creature ruling over hosts of malignant demons who did his will among mankind, plaguing them with sorrow, disease, and madness, until the convictions of the first Christian societies magnified him into proportions if possible more overpowering than those of the Iranian enemy of Ormuzd. The Jew chiefly, if not wholly, from the conviction which led him to regard God as the author both of good and evil, drew no sharp distinction between mind and matter as existing in irreconcilable antagonism; and since as a nation they can scarcely be said to the last to have attained to any definite ideas either of the fact or the conditions of a life continued after death, Satan could with them obviously have no definite dominion beyond the bounds of our present existence. He could torture the bodies, afflict the souls, or darken the minds of men; but of his everlastin reign over countless multitudes ruined by his subtle wiles we find no very definite notion. Effect of But Christianity, while it rested on a distinct assurance of personal teaching. immortality altogether stronger than any to which the most fervent of the Hebrew prophets had ever attained, took root among nations who had filled all the world with gods or demons, each with his own special sphere and office. These deities the Christian teachers dethroned; but far from attempting to destroy them, they were careful to insist DEMONOLOGY. that they had always been, and must for ever continue to be, malignant devils; but unless their horrible fellowship was speedily to come to an end, they must be under the rule of some king, and this king they found in the Semitic Satan. Of the theology which sprung from this root it is enough to say that it endowed the king of the fallen angels with the powers of omnipresence and omniscience, and made him so far a conqueror in his great struggle with the author of his being as to succeed in wresting for ever out of the hands of God all but an insignificant fraction of the whole race of mankind. The victory of the Almighty God could not extend either to the destruction of Satan and his subordinate demons, or to the rescue of the souls whom he had enticed to their ruin; and if power be measured by the multitude of subjects, his defeat by Michael could scarcely be regarded as much impairing his magnificent success. Of the effect of this belief on the moral and social developement of Christendom, it is unnecessary to speak: but it must not be forgotten that this particular developement of the Jewish demonology was the natural outgrowth of passionate convictions animating a scanty band in an almost hopeless struggle against a society thoroughly corrupt and impure. It was almost impossible for any whose eyes were opened to its horrors to look upon it as anything but a loathsome mass which could never be cleansed from its defilement. What could they see but a vast gulf separating the few who were the soldiers of Christ from the myriads who thronged together under the standard of his adversary? Hence grew up by a process which cannot much excite our wonder that severe theology, which, known especially as that of Augustine, represented the Christian Church as an ark floating on a raging sea, open only to those who received the sacrament of baptism, and shut both here and hereafter even to infants dying before it could be administered. It was inevitable that under such conditions the image of Satan should more and more fill the theological horizon for the few whose enthusiasm and convictions were sincere. But these conditions were changed with the conversion of tribes, in whom the thought of one malignant spirit marring and undoing the work of God had never been awakened; and although henceforth the teaching of the priesthood might continue to be as severe as that of Augustine or The Christian missionaries were further conscious that their own thaumaturgy might be called into question, if that of the old creed were treated as mere imposture or illusion. "Die neue Lehre konnte leichter keimen und wurzeln wenn sie die alte als gehässig und sündlich, nicht als absolut nichtig 565 CHAP. X. BOOK II. The Teutonic Devil. Fulgentius, it was met by the passive resistance of men whose superstitions were less harsh and oppressive. "The Aryan Nations," says Professor Max Müller, "had no devil. Pluto, though of a sombre character, was a very respectable personage: and Loki, though a mischievous person, was not a fiend. The German goddess, Hel, too-like Proserpine--had seen better days." It was thus no easy task to imbue them with an adequate horror of a being of whose absolute malignity they could form no clear conception. "1 But these tribes had their full share of that large inheritance of phrases which had described originally the covering or strangling snake, Vritra or Ahi, who shuts up the rain-clouds in his prison-house. Probably not one of the phrases which furnished the groundwork of Iranian dualism had been lost or forgotten by any other of the Aryan tribes; but like Vritra or Ahi, like the Sphinx or the Pythôn, like Belleros or Chimaira, or Echidna, the beings to whom the German tribes applied these phrases had already been overcome. The phrases also had varied in character from grave solemnity to comedy or burlesque, from the type of the Herakles whom we see in the apologue of Prodikos to the Herakles who jests with Thanatos (Death) after he has stolen away Alkêstis. To the people at large the latter mode of thinking and speaking on the subject was more congenial; and to it the ideas of the old gods were more readily adapted. Hel had been, like Persephonê, the queen of the unseen land, in the ideas of the northern tribes, a land of bitter cold and icy walls. She now became not the queen of Niflheim; but Niflheim itself, while her abode, though gloomy enough, was not wholly destitute of material comforts. It became the Hell where the old man hews wood for the Christmas fire, and where the Devil in his eagerness to buy the flitch of bacon yields up the marvellous quern which is "good to grind almost anything." It was not so pleasant, indeed, as heaven, or the old Valhalla; but it was better to be there Chips, &c., vol. ii. p. 235. Sir G. Dasent's words are not less explicit. "The notion of an Arch-enemy of God and man, a fallen angel, to whom power was permitted at certain times for an all-wise purpose by the Great Ruler of the universe, was as foreign to the heathendom of our ancestors as his name was outlandish and strange to their tongue. This notion Christianity brought with it from the east; and though it is a plant which has struck deep roots, grown distorted and awry, and borne a bitter crop of superstition, it required all the authority of the Church to prepare the soil for its recep tion."-Popular Tales from the Norse, introduction, p. xcviii. 2 "Why the Sea is Salt." Dasent, Norse Tales, ii. This inexhaustible quern is only another form of the treasures of Helen or Brynhild. But though the snow may veil all the wealth of fruits and vegetables, this wealth is of no use to the chill beings who have laid their grasp upon it. These beings must be therefore so hard pressed for hunger that, like Esau, they may be ready to part with anything or everything for a mess of pottage or a flitch of bacon. |