Knot it with seven knots: do so twice: Sprinkle it with bright wine: Bind it round the head of the sick man: Bind it round his hands and feet, like manacles and fetters.
Sit down on his bed: Sprinkle holy water over him.
He shall hear the voice of Hea, Darkness shall protect him!
And Marduk, eldest son of Heaven, shall find him a happy habitation. [189]
The number seven holds an equally high degree of potency in Singhalese demonolatry, which is mainly occupied with diseases. The Capuas or conjurors of that island enumerate 240,000 magic spells, of which all except one are for evil, which implies a tolerably large preponderance of the emergencies in which their countervailing efforts are required by their neighbours. That of course can be easily appreciated by those who have been taught that all human beings are included under a primal curse. The words of Micah, "Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea," [190] are recalled by the legend of these evil spells of Ceylon. The king of Oude came to marry one of seven princesses, all possessing praeternatural powers, and questioned each as to her art. Each declared her skill in doing harm, except one who a.s.serted her power to heal all ills which the others could inflict. The king having chosen this one as his bride, the rest were angry, and for revenge collected all the charms in the world, enclosed them in a pumpkin--the only thing that can contain spells without being reduced to ashes--and sent this infernal machine to their sister. It would consume everything for sixteen hundred miles round; but the messenger dropped it in the sea. A G.o.d picked it up and presented it to the King of Ceylon, and these, with the healing charm known to his own Queen, make the 240,000 spells known to the Capuas of that island, who have no doubt deified the rescuer of the spells on the same principle that inspires some seaside populations to worship Providence more devoutly on the Sunday after a valuable wreck in their neighbourhood.
The astrological origin of the evils ascribed to the Yakseyo (Demons) of Ceylon, and the horoscope which is a necessary preliminary to any dealing with their influences; the constant recurrence of the number seven, denoting origin with races holding the seven-planet theories of the universe; and the fact that all demons are said, on every Sat.u.r.day evening, to attend an a.s.semblage called Yaksa Sabawa (Witches" Sabbath), are facts that may well engage the attention of Comparative Mythologists. [191] In Dardistan the evil spirits are called Yatsh; they dwell "in the regions of snow," and the overthrow of their reign over the country is celebrated at the new moon of Daykio, the month preceding winter.
The largest proportion of the Disease Demons of Ceylon are descended from its Hunger Demons. The Preta there is much the same phantom as in Siam, only they are not quite so tall. [192] They range from two to four hundred feet in height, and are so numerous that a Pali Buddhist book exhorts people not to throw stones, lest they should harm one of these harmless starveling ghosts, who die many times of hunger, and revive to suffer on in expiation of their sins in a previous existence. They are harmless in one sense, but filthy; and bad smells are personified in them. The great ma.s.s of demons resemble the Pretraya, in that their king (Wessamony) has forbidden them to satisfy themselves directly upon their victims, but by inflicting diseases they are supposed to receive an imaginative satisfaction somewhat like that of eating people.
Reeri is the Demon of Blood-disease. His form is that of a man with face of a monkey; he is fiery red, rides on a red bull, and all hemorrhages and diseases of the blood are attributed to him. Reeri has eighteen different disguises or avatars. One of these recalls his earlier position as a demon of death, before Vishnu revealed to Capuas the means of binding him: he is now supposed to be present at every death-bed in the form of a delighted pigmy, one span and six inches high. On such occasions he bears a c.o.c.k in one hand, a club in the other, and in his mouth a corpse. In the same country Maha Sohon is the "great graveyard demon." He resides in a hill where he is supposed to surround himself with carcases. He is 122 feet high, has four hands and three eyes, and a red skin. He has the head of a bear; the legend being that while quarrelling with another giant his head was knocked off, and the G.o.d Senasura was gracious enough to tear off the head of a bear and clap it on the decapitated giant. His capua threatens him with a repet.i.tion of this catastrophe if he does not spare any threatened victim who has called in his priestly aid. Except for this timidity about his head, Maha is formidable, being chief of 30,000 demons. But curiously enough he is said to choose for his steeds the more innocent animals,--goat, deer, horse, elephant, and hog.
One of the demons most dreaded in Ceylon is the "Foreign Demon"
Morotoo, said to have come from the coast of Malabar, and from his residence in a tree disseminated diseases which could not be cured until, the queen being afflicted, one capua was found able to master him. Seven-eighths of the charms used in restraining the disease-demons of Ceylon, of which I have mentioned but a few, are in the Tamil tongue. In various parts of India are found very nearly the same systematic demonolatry and "devil-dancing;" for example in Travancore, to whose superst.i.tions of this character the Rev. Samuel Mateer has devoted two chapters in his work "The Land of Charity."
The great demon of diseases in Ceylon is ent.i.tled Maha Cola Sanni Yakseya. His father, a king, ordered his queen to be put to death in the belief that she had been faithless to him. Her body was to be cut in two pieces, one of which was to be hung upon a tree (Ukberiya), the other to be thrown at its foot to the dogs. The queen before her execution said, "If this charge be false, may the child in my womb be born this instant a demon, and may that demon destroy the whole of this city and its unjust king." So soon as the executioners had finished their work, the two severed parts of the queen"s body reunited, a child was born who completely devoured his mother, and then repaired to the graveyard (Sohon), where for a time he fattened on corpses. Then he proceeded to inflict mortal diseases upon the city, and had nearly depopulated it when the G.o.ds Iswara and Sekkra interfered, descending to subdue him in the disguise of mendicants. Possibly the great Maha Sohon mentioned above, and the Sohon (graveyard) from which Sanni dealt out deadliness, may be best understood by the statement of the learned writer from whom these facts are quoted, that, "excepting the Buddhist priests, and the aristocrats of the land, whose bodies were burnt in regular funeral-piles after death, the corpses of the rest of the people were neither burned nor buried, but thrown into a place called Sohona, which was an open piece of ground in the jungle, generally a hollow among the hills, at the distance of three or four miles from any inhabited place, where they were left in the open air to be decomposed or devoured by dogs and wild beasts." [193] There would appear to be even more ground for the dread of the Great Graveyard Demon in many parts of Christendom, where, through desire to preserve corpses for a happy resurrection, they are made to steal through the water-veins of the earth, and find their resurrection as fell diseases. Iswara and Sekkra were probably two reformers who persuaded the citizens to bury the poor deep in the earth; had they been wise enough to place the dead where nature would give them speedy resurrection and life in gra.s.s and flowers, it would not have been further recorded that "they ordered him (the demon) to abstain from eating men, but gave him Wurrun or permission to inflict disease on mankind, and to obtain offerings." This is very much the same as the privilege given our Western funeral agencies and cemeteries also; and when the Modliar adds that Sanni "has eighteen princ.i.p.al attendants," one can hardly help thinking of the mummers, gravediggers, chaplains, all engaged unconsciously in the work of making the earth less habitable.
The first of the attendants of this formidable avenger of his mother"s wrongs is named Bhoota Sanni Yakseya, Demon of Madness. The whole demonolatry and devil-dancing of that island are so insane that one is not surprised that this Bhoota had but little special development. It is amid clear senses we might naturally look for full horror of madness, and there indeed do we find it. One of the most horrible forms of the disease-demon was the personification of madness among the Greeks, as Mania. [194] In the Hercules Furens of Euripides, where Madness, "the unwedded daughter of black Night," and sprung of "the blood of Coelus," is evoked from Tartarus for the express purpose of imbreeding in Hercules "child-slaying disturbances of reason,"
there is a suggestion of the hereditary nature of insanity. Obedient to the vindictive order of Juno, "in her chariot hath gone forth the marble-visaged, all-mournful Madness, the Gorgon of Night, and with the hissing of hundred heads of snakes, she gives the goad to her chariot, on mischief bent." We may plainly see that the religion which embodied such a form was itself ending in madness. Already ancient were the words mantike (prophecy) and manike (madness) when Plato cited their ident.i.ty to prove one kind of madness the special gift of Heaven: [195] the notion lingers in Dryden"s line, "Great wits to madness sure are near allied;" and survive in regions where deference is paid to lunatics and idiots. Other diseases preserve in their names indications of similar a.s.sociation: e.g., Nympholepsy, St. Vitus"s Dance, St. Anthony"s Fire. Wesley attributes still epilepsy to "possession." This was in pursuance of ancient beliefs. Typhus, a name anciently given to every malady accompanied with stupor (typhos), seemed the breath of feverish Typhon. Max Muller connects the word quinsy with Sanskrit amh, "to throttle," and Ahi the throttling serpent, its medium being angina; and this again is kynanche, dog-throttling, the Greek for quinsy. [196]
The genius of William Blake, steeped in Hebraism, never showed greater power than in his picture of Plague. A gigantic hideous form, pale-green, with the slime of stagnant pools, reeking with vegetable decays and gangrene, the face livid with the motley tints of pallor and putrescence, strides onward with extended arms like a sower sowing his seeds, only in this case the germs of his horrible harvest are not cast from the hands, but emanate from the fingers as being of their essence. Such, to the savage mind, was the embodiment of malaria, sultriness, rottenness, the putrid Pretraya, invisible, but smelt and felt. Such, to the ignorant imagination, is the Destroying Angel to which rationalistic artists and poets have tried to add wings and majesty; but which in the popular mind was no doubt pictured more like this form found at Ostia (fig. 16), and now pa.s.sing in the Vatican for a Satan,--probably a demon of the Pontine Marshes, and of the fever that still has victims of its fatal cup (p. 291). In these fearful forms the poor savage believed with such an intensity that he was able to shape the brain of man to his phantasy; bringing about the anomaly that the great reformer, Luther, should affirm, even while fighting superst.i.tion, that a Christian ought to know that he lives in the midst of devils, and that the devil is nearer to him than his coat or his shirt. The devils, he tells us, are all around us, and are at every moment seeking to ensnare our lives, salvation, and happiness. There are many of them in the woods, waters, deserts, and in damp muddy places, for the purpose of doing folk a mischief. They also house in the dense black clouds, and send storms, hail, thunder and lightning, and poison the air with their infernal stench. In one place, Luther tells us that the devil has more vessels and boxes full of poison, with which he kills people, than all the apothecaries in the whole world. He sends all plagues and diseases among men. We may be sure that when any one dies of the pestilence, is drowned, or drops suddenly dead, the devil does it.
Knowing nothing of Zoology, the primitive man easily falls into the belief that his cattle--the means of life--may be the subjects of sorcery. Jesus sending devils into a herd of swine may have become by artificial process a divine benefactor in the eye of Christendom, but the myth makes Him bear an exact resemblance to the dangerous sorcerer that fills the savage mind with dread. It is probable that the covetous eye denounced in the decalogue means the evil eye, which was supposed to blight an object intensely desired but not to be obtained.
Gopolu, already referred to (p. 136) as the Singhalese demon of hydrophobia, bears the general name of the "Cattle Demon." He is said to have been the twin of the demiG.o.d Mangara by a queen on the Coromandel coast. The mother died, and a cow suckled the twins, but afterwards they quarrelled, and Gopolu being slain was transformed into a demon. He repaired to AranG.o.dde, and fixed his abode in a Banyan where there is a large bee-hive, whence proceed many evils. The population around this Banyan for many miles being prostrated by diseases, the demiG.o.d Mangara and Pattini (G.o.ddess of chast.i.ty) admonished the villagers to sacrifice a cow regularly, and thus they were all resuscitated. Gopolu now sends all cattle diseases. India is full of the like superst.i.tions. The people of Travancore especially dread the demon Madan, "he who is like a cow,"
believed to strike oxen with sudden illness,--sometimes men also.
In Russia we find superst.i.tion sometimes modified by common sense. Though the peasant hopes that Zegory (St. George) will defend his cattle, he begins to see the chief foes of his cattle. As in the folk-song--
We have gone around the field, We have called Zegory....
O thou, our brave Zegory, Save our cattle, In the field and beyond the field, In the forest and beyond the forest, Under the bright moon, Under the red sun, From the rapacious wolf, From the cruel bear, From the cunning beast. [197]
Nevertheless when a cattle plague occurs many villages relapse into a normally extinct state of mind. Thus, a few years ago, in a village near Moscow, all the women, having warned the men away, stripped themselves entirely naked and drew a plough so as to make a furrow entirely around the village. At the point of juncture in this circle they buried alive a c.o.c.k, a cat, and a dog. Then they filled the air with lamentations, crying--"Cattle Plague! Cattle Plague! spare our cattle! Behold, we offer thee c.o.c.k, cat, and dog!" The dog is a demonic character in Russia, while the cat is sacred; for once when the devil tried to get into Paradise in the form of a mouse, the dog allowed him to pa.s.s, but the cat pounced on him--the two animals being set on guard at the door. The offering of both seems to represent a desire to conciliate both sides. The nudity of the women may have been to represent to the hungry G.o.ds their utter poverty, and inability to give more; but it was told me in Moscow, where I happened to be staying at the time, that it would be dangerous for any man to draw near during the performance.
In Altmark [198] the demons who bewitch cattle are called "Bihlweisen,"
and are believed to bury certain diabolical charms under thresholds over which the animals are to pa.s.s, causing them to wither away, the milk to cease, etc. The prevention is to wash the cattle with a lotion of sea cabbage boiled with infusion of wine. In the same province it is related that once there appeared in a harvest-field at one time fifteen, at another twelve men (apparently), the latter headless.
They all laboured with scythes, but though the rustling could be heard no grain fell. When questioned they said nothing, and when the people tried to seize them they ran away, cutting fruitlessly as they ran. The priests found in this a presage of the coming cattle plague. The Russian superst.i.tion of the plough, above mentioned, is found in fragmentary survivals in Altmark. Thus, it is said that to plough around a village and then sit under the plough (placed upright), will enable any one to see the witches; and in some villages, some bit of a plough is hung up over a doorway through which cattle pa.s.s, as no devil can then approach them. The demons have a natural horror of honest work, and especially the culture of the earth. Goethe, as we have seen, notes their fear of roses: perhaps he remembered the legend of Aspasia, who, being disfigured by a tumour on the chin, was warned by a dove-maiden to dismiss her physicians and try a rose from the garland of Venus; so she recovered health and beauty.
CHAPTER XII.
DEATH.
The Vendetta of Death--Teoyaomiqui--Demon of Serpents--Death on the Pale Horse--Kali--War-G.o.ds--Satan as Death--Death-beds-- Thanatos--Yama--Yimi--Towers of Silence--Alcestis--Hercules, Christ, and Death--Hel--Salt--Azrael--Death and the Cobbler-- Dance of Death--Death as Foe, and as Friend.
Savage races believe that no man dies except by sorcery. Therefore every death must be avenged. The Actas of the Philippines regard the "Indians" as the cause of the deaths among them; and when one of them loses a relative, he lurks and watches until he has spied an "Indian"
and killed him. [199] It is a progress from this when primitive man advances to the belief that the fatal sorcerer is an invisible man--a demon. When this doctrine is taught in the form of a belief that death entered the world through the machinations of Satan, and was not in the original scheme of creation, it is civilised; but when it is inculcated under a set of African or other non-christian names, it is barbarian.
The following sketch, by Mr. Gideon Lang, will show the intensity of this conviction among the natives of New South Wales:--
"While at Nanima I constantly saw one of these, named Jemmy, a remarkably fine man, about twenty-eight years of age, who was the "model Christian" of the missionaries, and who had been over and over again described in their reports as a living proof that, taken in infancy, the natives were as capable of being truly christianised as a people who had had eighteen centuries of civilisation. I confess that I strongly doubted, but still there was no disputing the apparent facts. Jemmy was not only familiar with the Bible, which he could read remarkably well, but he was even better acquainted with the more abstruse tenets of christianity; and so far as the whites could see, his behaviour was in accordance with his religious acquirements. One Sunday morning I walked down to the black fellows" camp, to have a talk with Jemmy, as usual. I found him sitting in his gunyah, overlooking a valley of the Macquarrie, whose waters glanced brightly in the sunshine of the delicious spring morning. He was sitting in a state of nudity, excepting his waistcloth, very earnestly reading the Bible, which indeed was his constant practice; and I could see that he was perusing the Sermon on the Mount. I seated myself, and waited till he concluded the chapter, when he laid down the Bible, folded his hands, and sat with his eyes fixed abstractedly on his fire. I bade him "good morning," which he acknowledged without looking up. I then said, "Jemmy, what is the meaning of your spears being stuck in a circle round you?" He looked me steadily in the eyes, and said solemnly and with suppressed fierceness, "Mother"s dead!" I said that I was very sorry to hear it; "but what had her death to do with the spears being stuck around so?" "Bogan black-fellow killed her!" was the fierce and gloomy reply. "Killed by a Bogan black!" I exclaimed: "why, your mother has been dying a fortnight, and Dr. Curtis did not expect her to outlive last night, which you know as well as I do." His only reply was a dogged repet.i.tion of the words: "A Bogan black-fellow killed her!" I appealed to him as a Christian--to the Sermon on the Mount, that he had just been reading; but he absolutely refused to promise that he would not avenge his mother"s death. In the afternoon of that day we were startled by a yell which can never be mistaken by any person who has once heard the wild war-whoop of the blacks when in battle array. On marching out we saw all the black fellows of the neighbourhood formed into a line, and following Jemmy in an imaginary attack upon an enemy. Jemmy himself disappeared that evening. On the following Wednesday morning I found him sitting complacently in his gunyah, plaiting a rope of human hair, which I at once knew to be that of his victim. Neither of us spoke; I stood for some time watching him as he worked with a look of mocking defiance of the anger he knew I felt. I pointed to a hole in the middle of his fire, and said, "Jemmy, the proper place for your Bible is there." He looked up with his eyes flashing as I turned away, and I never saw him again. I afterwards learned that he had gone to the district of the Bogan tribe, where the first black he met happened to be an old friend and companion of his own. This man had just made the first cut in the bark of a tree, which he was about to climb for an opossum; but on hearing footsteps he leaped down and faced round, as all blacks do, and whites also, when blacks are in question. Seeing that it was only Jemmy, however, he resumed his occupation, but had no sooner set to work than Jemmy sent a spear through his back and nailed him to the tree. [200]
Perhaps if Jemmy could have been cross-examined by the non-missionary mind, he might have replied with some effect to Mr. Lang"s suggestion that he ought to part with his Bible. Surely he must have found in that volume a sufficient number of instances to justify his faith in the power of demons over human health and life. Might he not have pondered the command, "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and imagined that he was impaling another Mana.s.seh, who "used enchantments, and used witchcraft, and dealt with a familiar spirit, and with wizards (and) wrought much evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke Him to anger." [201] Those who hope that the Bible may carry light into the dark places of superst.i.tion and habitations of cruelty might, one would say, reflect upon the long contest which European science had with bibliolators in trying to relieve the popular mind from the terrors of witchcraft, whose genuineness it was (justly) declared contrary to the Scriptures to deny. There are districts in Great Britain and America, and many more on the continent of Europe, where the spells that waste and destroy are still believed in; where effigies of wax or even onions are labelled with some hated name, and stuck over with pins, and set near fires to be melted or dried up, in full belief that some subject of the charm will be consumed by disease along with the object used. Under every roof where such coa.r.s.e superst.i.tions dwell the Bible dwells beside them, and experience proves that the infallibility of all such talismans diminishes pari pa.s.su.
What the savage is really trying to slay when he goes forth to avenge his relative"s death on the first alien he finds may be seen in the accompanying figure (17), which represents the Mexican G.o.ddess of death--Teoyaomiqui. The image is nine feet high, and is kept in a museum in the city of Mexico. Mr. Edward B. Tylor, from whose excellent book of travels in that country the figure is copied, says of it:--"The stone known as the statue of the war-G.o.ddess is a huge block of basalt covered with sculptures. The antiquaries think that the figures on it stand for different personages, and that it is three G.o.ds--Huitzilopochtli, the G.o.d of war; Teoyaomiqui, his wife; and Mictlanteuctli, the G.o.d of h.e.l.l. It has necklaces of alternate hearts and dead men"s hands, with death"s heads for a central ornament. At the bottom of the block is a strange sprawling figure, which one cannot see now, for it is the base which rests on the ground; but there are two shoulders projecting from the idol, which show plainly that it did not stand on the ground, but was supported aloft on the tops of two pillars. The figure carved upon the bottom represents a monster holding a skull in each hand, while others hang from his knees and elbows. His mouth is a mere oval ring, a common feature of Mexican idols, and four tusks project just above it. The new moon laid down like a bridge forms his forehead, and a star is placed on each side of it. This is thought to have been the conventional representation of Mictlanteuctli (Lord of the Land of the Dead), the G.o.d of h.e.l.l, which was a place of utter and eternal darkness. Probably each victim as he was led to the altar could look up between the two pillars and see the hideous G.o.d of h.e.l.l staring down upon him from above. There is little doubt that this is the famous war-idol which stood on the great teocalli of Mexico, and before which so many thousands of human beings were sacrificed. It lay undisturbed under ground in the great square, close to the very site of the teocalli, until sixty years ago. For many years after that it was kept buried, lest the sight of one of their old deities might be too exciting for the Indians, who, as I have mentioned before, had certainly not forgotten it, and secretly ornamented it with garlands of flowers while it remained above ground."
If my reader will now turn to the (fig. 11) portrait of the Demon of Serpents, he will find a conception fundamentally similar to the Mexican demoness of death or slaughter, but one that is not shut up in a museum of antiquities; it still haunts and terrifies a vast number of the people born in Ceylon. He is the princ.i.p.al demon invoked in Ceylon by the malignant sorcerers in performing the 84,000 different charms that afflict evils (Hooniyan). His general t.i.tle is Oddy c.u.mara Hooniyan Dewatawa; but he has a special name for each of his six several apparitions, the chief of these being Cali Oddisey, or demon of incurable diseases, therefore of death, and Naga Oddisey, demon of serpents--deadliest of animals. Beneath him is the Pale Horse which has had its career so long and far,--even to the White Mare on which, in some regions, Christ is believed to revisit the earth every Christmas; and also the White Mare of Yorkshire Folklore which bore its rider from Whitestone Cliff to h.e.l.l. This Singhalese form also, albeit now a.s.sociated by Capuas with fatal disease, was probably at first, like the Mexican, a war G.o.ddess and G.o.d combined, as is shown by the uplifted sword, and reeking hand uplifted in triumph. Equally a G.o.d of war is our "Death on the Pale Horse," which christian art, following the so-called Apocalypse, has made so familiar. "I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and h.e.l.l followed with him. And power was given to him over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth." This is but a travesty of the Greek Ares, the Roman Mars, or G.o.d of War. In the original Greek-form Ares was not solely the G.o.d of war, but of destruction generally. In the OEdipus Tyrannus of Sophocles we have the popular conception of him as one to whom the deadly plague is ascribed. He is named as the "G.o.d unhonoured among G.o.ds," and it is said:--"The city is wildly tossing, and no more can lift up her head from the waves of death; withering the ripening grain in the husks, withering the kine in their pastures; blighted are the babes through the failing labours of women; the fire-bearing G.o.d, horrid Pestilence, having darted down, ravages the city; by him the house of Cadmus is empty, and dark Hades enriched with groans and lamentations."
Mother of the deadliest "Calas" of Singhalese demonolatry, sister of the Scandinavian Hel in name and nature, is Kali. Although the Hindu writers repudiate the idea that there is any devil among their three hundred and thirty millions of deities, it is difficult to deny Kali that distinction. Her wild dance of delight over bodies of the slain would indicate pleasure taken in destruction for its own sake, so fulfilling the definition of a devil; but, on the other hand, there is a Deccan legend that reports her as devouring the dead, and this would make her a hunger-demon. We may give her the benefit of the doubt, and cla.s.s her among the demons--or beings whose evil is not gratuitous--all the more because the mysteriously protruding tongue, as in the figure of Typhon (p. 185), probably suggests thirst. Hindu legend does, indeed, give another interpretation, and say that when she was dancing for joy at having slain a hundred-headed giant demiG.o.d, the shaking of the earth was so formidable that Siva threw himself among the slain, whom she was crushing at every step, hoping to induce her to pause; but when, unheeding, she trod upon the body of her husband, she paused and thrust out her tongue from surprise and shame. The Vedic description of Agni as an ugra (ogre), with "tongue of flame,"
may better interpret Kali"s tongue. It is said Kali is pleased for a hundred years by the blood of a tiger; for a thousand by that of a man; for a hundred thousand by the blood of three men.
How are we to understand this dance of Death, and the further legend of her tossing dead bodies into the air for amus.e.m.e.nt? Such a figure found among a people who shudder at taking life even from the lowest animals is hardly to be explained by the destructiveness of nature personified in her spouse Siva. Her looks and legends alike represent slaughter by human violence. May it not be that Kali represents some period when the abhorrence of taking life among a vegetarian people--a people, too, believing in transmigration--might have become a public danger? When Krishna appeared it was, according to the Bhagavat Gita, as charioteer inciting Arjoon to war. There must have been various periods when a peaceful people must fall victims to more savage neighbours unless they could be stimulated to enter on the work of destruction with a light heart. There may have been periods when the human Kalis of India might stimulate their husbands and sons to war with such songs as the women of Dardistan sing at the Feast of Fire (p. 91). The amour of the Greek G.o.ddess of Beauty with the G.o.d of War, leaving her lawful spouse the Smith, is full of meaning. The a.s.syrian Venus, Istar, appeared in a vision, with wings and halo, bearing a bow and arrow for a.s.surbanipal. The Thug appears to have taken some such view of Kali, regarding her as patroness of their plan for reducing population. They are said to have claimed that Kali left them one of her teeth for a pickaxe, her rib for a knife, her garment"s hem for a noose, and wholesale murder for a religion. The uplifted right hand of the demoness has been interpreted as intimating a divine purpose in the havoc around her, and it is possible that some such euphemism attached to the att.i.tude before the Thug accepted it as his own benediction from this highly decorated personage of human cruelty.
The ancient reverence for Kali has gradually pa.s.sed to her mitigated form--Durga. Around her too are visible the symbols of destruction; but she is supposed to be satisfied with pumpkin-animals, and the weapons in her ten hands are believed to be directed against the enemies of the G.o.ds, especially against the giant king Muheshu. She is mother of the beautiful boy Kartik, and of the elephant-headed inspirer of knowledge Ganesa. She is reverenced now as female energy, the bestower of beauty and fruitfulness on women.
The ident.i.ty of war-G.o.ds and death-demons, in the most frightful conceptions which have haunted the human imagination, is of profound significance. These forms do not represent peaceful and natural death, not death by old age,--of which, alas, those who cowered before them knew but little,--but death amid cruelty and agony, and the cutting down of men in the vigour of life. That indeed was terrible,--even more than these rude images could describe.
But there are other details in these hideous forms. The priest has added to the horse and sword of war the adored serpent, and hideous symbols of the "Land of the Dead." For it is not by terror of death, but of what he can persuade men lies beyond, that the priest has reigned over mankind. When Isabel (in "Measure for Measure") is trying to persuade her brother that the sense of death lies most in apprehension, the sentenced youth still finds death "a fearful thing."
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of these, that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling!--"tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death.
In all these apprehensions of Claudio there is no thought of annihilation. What if he had seen death as an eternal sleep? Let Hamlet answer:--
To die,--to sleep;-- No more;--and, by a sleep, to say we end The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to,--"tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.
The greater part of the human race still belong to religions which, in their origin, promised eternal repose as the supreme final bliss. Had death in itself possessed horrors for the human mind, the priest need not have conjured up beyond it those tortures that haunted Hamlet with the dreams of possible evils beyond which make even the wretched rather bear the ills they have than fly to others they know not of. It would have been sufficient sanction to promise immortality only to the pious. But as in Claudio"s shuddering lines every h.e.l.l is reflected--whether of ice, fire, or brutalisation--so are the same mixed with the very blood and brain of mankind, even where literally outgrown. Christianity superadded to the horrors by importing the idea that death came by human sin, and so by gradual development ascribing to Satan the power of death; thereby forming a new devil who bore in him the power to make death a punishment. How the matter stood in the mediaeval belief may be seen in figure 19, copied from a Russian Bible of the (early) seventeenth century. Lazarus smiles to see the nondescript soul of Dives torn from him by a devil with a hook, while another drowns the groans with a drum. Satan squirts an infernal baptism on the departing soul, and the earnest co-operation of the archangel justifies the satisfaction of Lazarus and Abraham. This degraded belief is still found in the almost gleeful pulpit-picturings of physical agonies as especially attending the death-beds of "infidels,"--as Voltaire and Paine,--and its fearful result is found in the degree to which priesthoods are still able to paralyse the common sense and heart of the ma.s.ses by the barbaric ceremonials with which they are permitted to surround death, and the arrogant line drawn between unorthodox goats and credulous sheep by "consecrated" ground.
Mr. Keary, in his interesting volume on "The Dawn of History," [202]
says that it has been suggested that the youthful winged figure on the drum of a column from the temple of Diana at Ephesus to the British Museum, may be a representation of Thanatos, Death. It would be agreeable to believe that the only important representation of Death left by Greek art is that exquisite figure, whose high tribute is that it was at first thought to be Love! The figure is somewhat like the tender Eros of preraphaelite art, and with the same look of gentle melancholy. Such a sweet and simple form of Death would be worthy of the race which, amid all the fiery or cold rivers of the underworld which had gathered about their religion, still saw running there the soft-flowing stream of forgetfulness. Let one study this Ephesian Thanatos reverently--no engraving or photograph can do it even partial justice--and then in its light read those myths of Death which seem to bear us back beyond the savagery of war and the artifices of priests to the simpler conceptions of humanity. In its serene light we may especially read both Vedic and Iranian hymns and legends of Yama.
The first man to die became the powerful Yama of the Hindus, the monarch of the dead; and he became invested with metaphors of the sun that had set. [203] In a solemn and pathetic hymn of the Vedas he is said to have crossed the rapid waters, to have shown the way to many, to have first known the path on which our fathers crossed over. [204]
But in the splendours of sunset human hope found its prophetic pictures of a heaven beyond. The Vedic Yama is ever the friend. It is one of the most picturesque facts of mythology that, after Yama had become in India another name for Death, the same name reappeared in Persia, and in the Avesta, as a type at once of the Golden Age in the past and of paradise in the future.
Such was the Iranian Yima. He was that "flos regum" whose reign represented "the ideal of human happiness, when there was neither illness nor death, neither heat nor cold," and who has never died. "According to the earlier traditions of the Avesta," says Spiegel, "Jima does not die, but when evil and misery began to prevail on earth, retires to a smaller s.p.a.ce, a kind of garden or Eden, where he continues his happy life with those who remained true to him." Such have been the antecedents of our many beautiful myths which ascribe even an earthly immortality to the great,--to Barbarossa, Arthur, and even to the heroes of humbler races as Hiawatha and Glooscap of North American tribes,--who are or were long believed to have "sailed into the fiery sunset," or sought some fair island, or to slumber in a hidden grotto, until the world shall have grown up to their stature and requires their return.