Chapter 7 — GREAT ROME: 500 b.c.–500 a.d.

I. The Celtic Province

Caesar’s Gallic wars, commencing in 58 b.c., opening Europe to the empire of Rome as Pompey’s wars had opened the Levant, broke the power of the Celts, who for centuries had been harassing the cities of the south. Spain they had entered and occupied in the fifth century b.c., as far as to Cadiz, and their seven-month siege of Rome itself in the year 390 b.c. had been but one of numerous inroads into Italy. Eastward, in 280 b.c., Thessaly was overrun, Greece invaded, Delphi sacked, and the following year the uplands of Asia Minor, which are known to this day as Galatia, became a center out of which war parties ranged even into Syria, until 232 b.c., when King Attalos I of Pergamon subdued the Galatians. The famous Hellenistic victory statue of the “Dying Gaul” depicts one of their handsome fair-haired warriors, wearing a typical Celtic torque or collar of gold.

The earliest matrix of the Celtic culture complex was the Alpine and South German area; and the centuries of its development were those of the early Iron Age in Europe, in two phases: 1. The Hallstatt Culture, c. 900-400 b.c., and 2. the La Tène, c. 550-15 b.c. The first was characterized at the outset by a gradual introduction of iron tools among bronze, fashioned by a class of itinerant smiths, who in later mythic lore appear as dangerous wizards — for instance, in the German legend of Weyland the Smith. The Arthurian theme of the sword drawn from the stone suggests the sense of magic inspired by their art of producing iron from its ore. Professor Mircea Eliade, in a fascinating study of the rites and myths of the Iron Age, has shown that a leading idea of this mythology was of the stone as a mother rock and the iron, the iron weapon, as her child, brought forth by the obstetric art of the forge.^{Note 1} Compare the savior Mithra born from a rock with a sword in his hand.

“Smiths and shamans are from the same nest,” declares a Yakut proverb cited by Eliade.^{Note 2} The allegedly indestructible body of the shaman who can walk on fire is analogous to the quality of a metal brought forth through the operation of fire. And the power of the smith at his fiery forge to produce such immortal “thunderbolt” matter from the crude rock of the earth is a miracle analogous to that of spiritual (viz. Mithraic or Buddhist) initiation, whereby the individual learns to identify himself with his own immortal part. In certain Buddhist temples of Japan there is to be seen the image of a strenuously meditating sage, Fudo, “Immovable” (Sanskrit, Acalanātha, “Lord Immovable”), seated, grim-faced, amidst a roaring blaze, holding a sword upright in his right hand with adamantine stability, like Mithra rising from the rock. And in the biblical idea of the remnant, which appeared first in Isaiah 10:21–22 (c. 740-700 b.c.), we have an application of the idea to the concept of the hero not as a clarified individual but as a purged people, a tried and true consensus, bearing the purpose of Yahweh through all time.

We may surmise, then, that the iron implements found among the earliest Hallstatt remains (c. 900 b.c.) must represent an entry into Europe of the ritual lore of drawing swords from stones, both in the smithy of the soul and in the fires of the forge. Hallstatt itself, the type site, is in Austria, about thirty miles southeast of Salzburg. Pigs, sheep, cattle, dogs, and the horse were the beasts domesticated. Log cabins and corduroy log roads testify to the crude physical circumstances; and the ornamentation of ceramic and metallic wares, weapons, horse and chariot harness, brooches, etcetera, was inelegant as well: lifeless, crudely symmetrical, geometrical, and stiff. The European peasant smock and a kind of pointed skullcap seem to have been the normal dress. And the usual funeral rite was cremation, though burial also was practiced. The earliest locus of the culture was Bohemia and South Germany, but it spread, in its final century, as far as to Spain and Brittany, Scandinavia and the British Isles, to furnish a base upon which the subsequent Celtic flowering of the La Tène period then appeared, c. 550-15 b.c.

The type site of La Tène, the brilliant second Iron Age of Central and Western Europe, is in Switzerland, some five miles from the town of Neuchâtel. Found here were a ten-spoked chariot wheel, three feet in diameter, bound with an iron tire; two yokes, each for a pair of horses; parts of a pack saddle, and numerous smaller equestrian trappings; oval shields, parts of a long bow, 270 spearheads, and 166 swords — several of the latter being in bronze sheaths, gracefully decorated in the typical high Celtic curvilinear style.

It was during this period that Rome was besieged by the Celts and Asia Minor was entered. The tide spread eastward into southern Russia, but the main trend was to the west, where it overflowed the earlier Hallstatt sites. In the late fifth century b.c. the Rhineland and Elbe areas were occupied, and in the early fourth the Channel was crossed, bearing the tribes known as Brythons to what now is England, and the Goidels to Ireland — who then, by invasion, entered Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales. Gaul and Spain also were occupied by tribal groups of the La Tène complex, and until Caesar, in the year 52 b.c., defeated Vercingetorix and the Helvetic confederacy, a vigorous common civilization flourished throughout the European north and west, bearing influences from Etruria, Greece, and the centers of the Near East, but, in the main, of a barbaric brilliance all its own.

“Throughout Gaul,” wrote Julius Caesar in the sixth book of his Gallic War,

there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing nothing of themselves, never taken into counsel. The greater part of them, oppressed as they are by debt, by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongs of the more powerful, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. Of the two classes above mentioned one consists of Druids, the other of Knights. The former are concerned with divine worship, the due performance of sacrifices, public and private, and the interpretation of ritual questions: a great number of young men gather about them for the sake of instruction and hold them in great honor. In fact, it is they who decide in most all disputes, public and private; and if any crime has been committed, or murder done, or there is any dispute about succession or boundaries, they also decide it, determining rewards and penalties: if any person or people does not abide by their decision, they ban such from sacrifice, which is their heaviest penalty. Those that are so banned are reckoned as impious and criminal; all men move out of their path and shun their approach and conversation, for fear they may get some harm from their contact, and no justice is done if they seek it, no distinction falls to their share.

Of all these Druids one is chief, who has the highest authority among them. At his death, either any other that is preeminent in position succeeds, or, if there be several of equal standing, they strive for the primacy by the vote of the Druids, or sometimes even with armed force. These Druids, at a certain time of the year, meet within the borders of the Carnutes,^{* *}The French name Chartres is from the Latin Carnutes. The tribe inhabited the area now covered approximately by Eure et Loire and Loiret. whose territory is reckoned as the center of all Gaul, and sit in conclave in a consecrated spot. Thither assemble from every side all that have disputes, and they obey the decisions and judgments of the Druids. It is believed that their rule of life was discovered in Britain and transferred thence to Gaul; and today those who would study the subject more accurately journey, as a rule, to Britain to learn it.

The Druids usually hold aloof from war, and do not pay war taxes with the rest; they are excused from military service and exempt from all liabilities. Tempted by these great rewards, many young men assemble of their own motion to receive their training; many are sent by parents and relatives. Report says that in the schools of the Druids they learn by heart a great number of verses, and therefore some persons remain twenty years under training. And they do not think it proper to commit these utterances to writing, although in almost all other matters, in their private and public accounts, they make use of Greek letters. I believe that they have adopted the practice for two reasons — that they do not wish the rule to become common property, nor those who learn the rule to rely on writing and so neglect the cultivation of the memory; and, in fact, it does usually happen that the assistance of writing tends to relax the diligence of the action of the memory. The cardinal doctrine which they seek to teach is that souls do not die, but after death pass from one to another; and this belief, as fear of death is thereby cast aside, they hold to be the greatest incentive to valor. Besides this, they have many discussions concerning the stars and their movement, the size of the universe and of the earth, the order of nature, the strength and powers of the immortal gods, and hand down their lore to the young men.

The other class are the Knights. These, when there is occasion, upon the incidence of a war — and before Caesar’s coming this would happen well-nigh every year, in the sense that they would either be making attacks themselves or repelling such — are all engaged therein; and according to the importance of each of them in birth and resources, so is the number of liegemen and dependents that he has about him. This is the one form of influence and power known to them.

The whole nation of the Gauls is greatly devoted to ritual observances, and for that reason those who are smitten with the more grievous maladies and who are engaged in the perils of battle either sacrifice human victims or vow to do so, employing the Druids as ministers for such sacrifices. They believe, in effect, that, unless for a man’s life a man’s life be paid, the majesty of the immortal gods may not be appeased; and in public, as in private, life they observe an ordinance of sacrifices of the same kind. Others use figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is the more pleasing to the immortals; but when the supply of such fails they resort to the execution even of the innocent.

Among the gods, they most worship Mercury.^{* *}Caesar’s naming of these Celtic gods only in terms of their Roman counterparts leaves us a little in the dark. However, their likely Celtic names and characters can be suggested, as will appear. There are numerous images of him; they declare him the inventor of all arts, the guide for every road and journey, and they deem him to have the greatest influence for all money-making and traffic. After him they set Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva. Of these deities they have almost the same idea as all other nations: Apollo drives away diseases, Minerva supplies the first principles of arts and crafts, Jupiter holds die empire of heaven, Mars controls wars. To Mars, when they have determined on a decisive battle, they dedicate as a rule whatever spoil they may take. After a victory they sacrifice such living things as they have taken, and all the other effects they gather into one place. In many states heaps of such objects are to be seen piled up in hallowed spots, and it has not often happened that a man, in defiance of religious scruple, has dared to conceal such spoils in his house or to remove them from their place, and the most grievous punishment, with torture, is ordained for such an offense.

The Gauls affirm that they are all descended from a common father, Dis, and say that this is the tradition of the Druids. For that reason they determine all periods of time by the number, not of days, but of nights [because Dis is the lord of the underworld], and in their observance of birthdays and the beginnings of months and years day follows night. In the other ordinances of life the main difference between them and the rest of mankind is that they do not allow their own sons to approach them openly until they have grown to an age when they can bear the burden of military service, and they count it a disgrace for a son who is still in his boyhood to take his place publicly in the presence of his father.^{Note 3}

There being no Celtic literature from the Hallstatt, La Tfene, or even Roman periods, we have to rely, first, on the accounts of Caesar, Strabo, Pliny, Diodorus Siculus, and a few others;^{Note 4} next, on certain monuments in stone from the Roman period; and finally — but best — an abundance of clues from the late Celtic literatures of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to which the fairy lore of modern Ireland and the basically Celtic wonderland of Arthurian romance are to be added.

There is, for instance, a curious poetic charm supposed to have been recited by the chief poet, Amairgen, of the invading Goidelic Celts, when their ships scraped to beach on the Irish shore:

I am the wind that blows o’er the sea;

I am the wave of the deep;

I am the bull of seven battles;

I am the eagle on the rock;

I am a tear of the sun;

I am the fairest of plants;

I am a boar for courage;

I am a salmon in the water;

I am a lake in the plain;

I am the word of knowledge;

I am the head of the battle-dealing spear;

I am the god who fashions fire [= thought] in the head.

 

Who spreads light in the assembly on the mountain?^{* *}Gloss: “Who clears up each question but I?”

Who foretells the ages of the moon?^{† †}Gloss: “Who but I tell you the ages of the moon?”

Who tells of the place where the sun rests?^{‡ ‡}Gloss: “Unless it be the poet?”

Much has been written around this poem and certain others of its kind, suggesting affinities of Druidic thought with Hinduism, Pythagoreanism, and the later philosophy of the Irish Neoplatonist Scotus Erigena (d.c. 875 a.d.). The text of the charm is from the Irish “Book of Invasions” (Lebor Gabala), which, though preserved only in manuscripts of late medieval date, is a compendium of ancient matters put together no later than the eighth century a.d., and may contain material from as early, indeed, as the first arrivals in Ireland of the Goidels.^{Note 5} Caesar’s observation that the Celts were not afraid to die because they believed that they would live again has seemed to some to support the claim of this poem to antiquity, although others hold it to be a late composition of the high period of the courts of Tara and Cashel, the fourth and early fifth centuries a.d.^{Note 6}

In either case, what the poem renders in the way of a world philosophy is a form rather of pan-wizardism than of developed mystical theology.^{Note 7} As one authority has put it, the comparison to be made is with “the bragging utterances of savage medicine-men”;^{Note 8} and another: “what is claimed for the poet is not so much the memory of past existences as the capacity to assume all shapes at will; this it is which puts him on a level with and enables him to overcome his superhuman adversaries.”^{Note 9} Such ideas are basic to shamanistic practice.^{Note 10} However, they can be readily developed into something higher, as in India, where the shaman became the yogi and the realization was attained of one’s self as the cosmic Self and therewith the essence of all things. Compare, for instance, with Amairgen’s chant the stanza already cited of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad:

You are the dark-blue bird and the green parrot with red eyes.

You have the lightning as your child. You are the seasons and the seas.

Having no beginning, you abide with all-pervadingness,

Wherefrom all beings are born.

It is not possible to separate categorically the shaman from the mystic. Furthermore, from primitive shamanism to the highest orders of archaic and Oriental thought, where the microcosm and macrocosm unite and are transcended, there is not so great a step as from these to the way of thought of the man for whom God is without and apart. In fact, throughout the history of European myth, the tendency of the later mystic modes to unite with, and to find support in, the modes of both Celtic and Germanic myth has been decisive for the development of much that in our literature is of the highest spiritual strain.

The Irish mythological cycles tell of a number of waves of invaders entering Ireland from the Continent, of which the last was that of the people of the poet Amairgen, the so-called Sons of Mil, or Milesians. However, the diligent Christian monks to whose pens we owe the preservation of these texts were at pains to link their characters with the no less mythic figures of the Bible, and so what has come down to us, finally, is a kind of camelopard combined of two lineages of nonsense, which no amount of scholarship has yet been able to relate firmly to any portion of the actual history of mankind.

For example, the first arrivals in Ireland were Banba and two other daughters of Cain, who came by sea with a company of fifty women and three men, but then died there of the plague. Next, three fishermen arrived, who “with hardihood took possession of the island of Banba of Fair Women.” However, having returned home to fetch their wives, they perished in the Deluge.^{Note 11} The granddaughter of Noah, Cessair to wit, arrived with her father, her husband, and a third gentleman, Ladru, “the first dead man of Erin,” again with fifty damsels; but their ship was wrecked, and all but Finntain, her spouse, who survived for centuries, perished in the Deluge.^{Note 12}

Banba, the reader must know, is the name of a goddess after whom Ireland itself is affectionately named; and the meaning of the word is “pig”; so that we are again on familiar ground: the island of a northern Circe. An Irish folktale recounted in Primitive Mythology tells of the daughter of the king of the Land of Youth, who appeared on earth as a maid with the head of a pig — which, however, could be kissed away.^{Note 13} Classical authors have written of islands in the Celtic fastnesses inhabited by priestesses. Strabo describes one near the mouth of the Loire, devoted to orgiastic cults, where no man was allowed to set foot, and another, near Britain, where the sacrifices resembled those to Demeter and Persephone at Samothrace.^{Note 14} The Roman geographer Mela (fl. c. 43 a.d.) tells of nine virgins on the tiny Isle of Sein, off Pont du Raz on the western coast of Brittany, who were possessed of marvelous powers and might be approached by those sailing especially to consult them.^{Note 15} Pigs figured prominently in the myths and rites of Demeter and Persephone, who themselves might appear as pigs.^{Note 16} The pig is linked, furthermore, to cults of the dead. Hence, in discussion of the Celtic isles of women, scholars have remarked that important pre-Celtic cemeteries have been excavated on the small Channel islands Alderney and Herm, as well as on Er Lanic in the Morbihan Gulf. “The graves,” states one authority, “take us back to pre-Celtic peoples and, therefore, encourage the belief that the island-cults represented a deeply rooted faith of the indigenous folk and were not necessarily of Celtic origin. Indeed, if we accept the stories of these communities of women, we can scarcely avoid admitting at the same time that they probably existed in addition to, and not as part of, the druidic religious system, and thus must have continued the observances of a pre-druidic faith.”^{Note 17}

Following the antediluvian series of Banba, the company of fishermen, and the granddaughter of Noah, there came to the Emerald Isle a grotesque race called Fomorians, some of whom were footless; some had only one side, and all were descendants of the biblical Ham. They were giants, yet were defeated by the next arrivals, the race of Partholan from Spain, who were “no wiser one than the other.” All but one of these died of a plague, however — and it was that one, Tuan mac Caraill by name, who, surviving into Christian times, communicated the whole history of ancient Ireland to Saint Finnen.^{Note 18}

Next to arrive were the people of Nemed, further descendants of Noah, who, like the Partholanians, came by way of Spain. They were subdued by the Fomorians, who had recovered from defeat and were governing the land from a tower of glass on Tory Island, off the northwest coast of Donegal. The Nemedians thereafter had to pay every year, on Halloween, two-thirds of the year’s harvest and of children born.

Now came the Firbolgs. A number of scholars have thought that these might represent the actual pre-Celtic population of Ireland and that the Fomorians were their gods. Among the latter were a god of war named Net, his dangerous grandson, Balor of the Evil Eye, and a god of knowledge, Elatha. The Firbolgs came from Greece, by way of Spain, like the builders of the megaliths, and were supposed to have been governed by a queen, Taltiu by name. According to the chronicles, they overcame the Fomorians but were themselves defeated by the race next to arrive, the shining Tuatha De Danann, the People (Tuatha) of the goddess Dana — who, in turn, were overcome by the last of this legendary series: the race of the poet Amairgen, the Milesians, who are thought by some to have been the Celts. Whereupon the conquered Tuatha withdrew from view into fairy hills, invisible as glass, where they dwell throughout Ireland to this day.

A few of the outstanding traits of the colorful mythology of the Tuatha De Danann may be noted here. The first is the prominence of a constellation of goddesses who in many ways are counterparts of both the great and lesser goddesses of Greece. Dana (genitive, Danann), who gives her name to the entire group, is called the mother of the gods and is the counterpart of Gaea. She is the Earth Mother, bestower of fruitfulness and abundance, and may have been one of the deities to whom human sacrifices were presented. Two hills in Kerry are called “the Paps of Anu,” Anu being a variant of her name associated with the verbal root an, “to nourish.”

Brigit or Brig (Irish brig, “power”; Welsh bri, “renown”), the patroness of poetry and knowledge, represents another aspect of the goddess and was the Celtic Minerva named by Caesar. The popular cult of Saint Brigit, which carried her worship into Christian times, was represented in Kildare by a sacred fire that was not to be approached by any male and was watched daily by nineteen vestal nuns in turn and on the twentieth day by the saint herself. Brigit, furthermore, was the giver of civilization. As Professor John A. MacCulloch remarks: “She must have originated in the period when the Celts worshiped goddesses rather than gods, and when knowledge — leechcraft, agriculture, inspiration — were women’s rather than men’s.”^{Note 19}

The great father figure of this pantheon was the underworld god equated by Caesar with Dis, Pluto, or Hades. His Gallic name was Cemunnos, perhaps meaning “horned,” from cerna, “horn,”^{Note 20} and in the Irish epics he is called the Dagda, from dago devos, “the Good God.” In the Gallic monuments he is represented with horns or antlers and wearing a Celtic torque (as in the altar from Reims reproduced in Oriental Mythology, Figure 20), or with three heads, heavily bearded (as in a statue found at Condat, France); and he may carry on his arm a sack of abundance from which a river of grain proceeds.

On the monuments he is a figure of imposing mien. In the Irish epics, on the other hand, he is a kind of clown — and here we touch upon one of the most profound traits of all of the North European mythologies, whether Celtic or Germanic: for even the greatest of their gods and goddesses appear in manifestations that to sober eyes suggest no relation whatsoever to religion.

The Dagda was the father both of Banba and of Brigit and possessed, moreover, a caldron from which “no company ever went unthankful,” whose contents both restored the dead and produced poetic inspiration. Such a caldron suggests, however, derivation from a goddess; and the assignment to a god of the fatherhood of earlier goddesses also betrays the appropriation by a patriarchal deity of matriarchal themes — in the manner of the victories of Zeus, Apollo, and Perseus over the Bronze Age goddesses and priestesses of the Aegean.

We shall not be surprised to learn, therefore, that on a certain day the Dagda met and lay with the great war goddess Morrigan: the same who in later romance was to become the fateful sister of King Arthur, Fata Morgana, Morgan la Fée. He spied her when she was washing in a river, with one foot at Echumech in the north and the other at Loscuinn in the south. But he, that very day, had been challenged by the Fomorians to drink a certain broth. They had filled the prodigious caldron of their own king, Balor of the Evil Eye, with four times twenty gallons of milk, four times twenty of meal and fat, and had put in goats, sheep, and pigs besides: all of which they had boiled together and then poured into a vast hole in the ground. But the Dagda, a mighty god, took a ladle large enough for a man and woman to lie in the bowl of it, and he went on putting the full of the ladle into his mouth until the entire hole was empty; after which he put his hand down and scraped up all that remained amidst the earth and gravel.

Sleep then overcame the Dagda, and the Fomorians all were laughing; for his belly was the size of the caldron of a great house. But he presently got up, and, heavy as he was, made his way away. And indeed his dress was in no way sightly either; for he wore a cape to the hollow of his elbows and a brown coat, long before but short behind; the brogues on his feet were of horsehide, hair without; and he held in his hand a wheeled fork it would take eight men to carry, so that the track he left behind him was deep enough for the boundary ditch of a province. And it was while he was on the way home in this state that he chanced upon the Morrigan, the old Battle Crow, prodigious at her bath.^{Note 21}

But as already the pillow colloquy of Queen Meave and her Celtic spouse Ailill has let us know, the pre-Celtic goddesses, though subjugated in Ireland, were by no means out of power. The grotesque epic of the war of the Brown Bull of Cooley, precipitated by the brazen action of Meave, when she sent for the bull and offered herself in part payment, is filled with a sense of the force of female powers over the destinies even of war — considerably in contrast to the spirit of the Greek epic, where, though Aphrodite and Helen were the true and deeper fates, the gods and heroes for the most part usurped the scene.

Cuchullin, for example, the Irish Achilles of this curious Irish Iliad, awoke one night to a terrible cry sounding in the north, so suddenly that he fell out of his bed and hit the ground like a sack. He rushed out of the east wing of his house without weapons, gaining the open air; and Emer, his wife, pursued with his armor and his garments. Across the great plain he ran, following the sound, and presently, hearing the rattle of a chariot from the loamy district of Culgaire, he saw before him a car harnessed with a chestnut horse.

The animal had but one leg, and the pole of the chariot passed through its body, so that the peg in front met the halter passing over its forehead, and within the car there sat a woman, eyebrows red, and with a crimson mantle around her. The mantle fell behind, between the wheels, so that it swept along the ground. And a big man walked beside. He too wore a crimson coat, and he carried on his back a forked staff, while he drove before him a cow.

“That cow,” said Cuchullin to the man, “is not pleased to be driven on by you.” To which the woman said: “She does not belong to you; nor to any of your associates or friends.” Cuchullin turned to her. “The cows of Ulster in general belong to me,” he said. She retorted: “You would give a decision, then, about the cow? You are taking too much on yourself, O Cuchullin!” He asked: “Why is it the woman who accosts me, and not the man?” She said: “It was not the man to whom you addressed yourself.” He answered: “Oh yes it was. But it was you who answered in his stead.” “He is Uar-gaeth-sceo Luachair-sceo,” said the woman.

“Well, to be sure,” Cuchullin said, “the length of the name is astonishing. Speak to me then yourself; for the fellow does not talk. What is your own name?”

“The woman to whom you are speaking,” said the man, “is called Faebor beg-beoil cuimdiuir folt scenb-gairit sceo uath.”

Said Cuchullin: “You are making a fool of me.” And he made a leap into the chariot, put his two feet on her shoulders and his spear on the parting of her hair. She warned: “Do not play your sharp weapons upon me.” “Then tell me your true name,” he said. “Go further off me then. I am a female satirist,” she answered. “And he is Daire son of Fiachna of Cuailgne. Moreover, I carry off this cow as reward for a poem that I made.” “Let us hear your poem,” said Cuchullin. “Only move further off,” she told him. “Your shaking over my head is not going to influence me at all.”

Cuchullin stepped away, until he stood between the two wheels, and she sang to him a song of insult. Whereat he prepared to leap again upon her; but horse, woman, chariot, man, and cow, all had disappeared. Then he perceived that she had transformed herself into a black bird, close by, on a branch.

“A dangerous enchanted woman you are!” said Cuchullin.

She answered: “Henceforth this place shall be called, the Enchanted Place.” And so it was, indeed.

Cuchullin said: “If I had only known it was you, we should not have parted thus.”

“Whatever you would have done,” she said, “it would have brought you ill luck.”

“You cannot harm me,” said Cuchullin.

“Certainly I can,” said she. And it was then that the old Battle Crow let him know what she held in store. “Indeed,” she said, “I am guarding now your deathbed, and shall be guarding it henceforth. This cow I have brought out from the Fairy Hill of Cruachan, so that she might breed by the bull of Daire son of Fiachna, which is named the Brown of Cuailgne. So long as her calf is not yet a year old, so long shall your life be. And it is this that is to be the cause of the Cattle Raid of Cuailgne.”

The two exchanged a lively series of threats, touching the battle ahead, in which he was to die, when, as she said, he would be in combat with a man as strong, victorious, dexterous, terrible, untiring, noble, great, and brave as himself, when she would become an eel and throw a noose around his feet in the ford, so that heavy odds would be against him.

“I swear,” said Cuchullin, “by the gods by whom Ultonians swear, that I will bruise you against a green stone of the ford.”

“I will become a gray wolf for you,” she said, “and take the flesh from your right hand as far as to your left arm.”

“I will encounter you with my spear,” he said, “until your left or right eye is forced out.”

“I will become a white red-eared cow,” she said, “and I will go into the pond beside the ford in which you are in combat, with a hundred white red-eared cows behind me. And I and all behind me will rush into the ford, and the Fair Play of Men that day shall be brought to a test, and your head shall be cut off from you.”

“Your right or your left leg,” he said, “I will break with a cast of my sling, and you shall never have any help from me, if you leave me not.”

Thereupon the Morrigan departed into the Fairy Hill of Cruachan in Connacht, and Cuchullin returned to his bed.^{Note 22}

The goddess Morrigan, as an apparition of fate from the Fairy Forts of the Tuatha De Danann, is known as Badb, the crow or crane of battle, and, like the other goddesses of the Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Roman worlds, she appears commonly in triplicate. Figures 27 and 28 are from two sides of a Celtic altar found in Paris at the site of Notre Dame, now preserved in the Cluny Museum. In the first is a figure in woodman’s clothes cutting down a tree, with his name, Esus, above. On the other is a bull beneath an extension of the tree that seems actually to be growing from his body, and with three cranes standing on his back. Above, we read the words, Tarvos Trigaranos, “The Bull with the Three Cranes.”

Figure 27. Esus

Figure 28. The Bull with Three Cranes

The great Celtic scholar of a generation past, H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, associated the bull of this Gaulish altar with the Brown Bull of the Irish epic, Esus with Cuchullin, the cranes with the goddess Morrigan, and the episode depicted with the passage we have just reviewed.^{Note 23} Professor MacCulloch suggests that the Brown Bull’s calf, whose life was to be the measure of the hero’s life, was the animal counterpart of Cuchullin; and since the Gallic Esus seems to have been a god of vegetation, to whom human sacrifices were hung on trees, the myth may have been associated with a bull sacrifice for the furtherance of vegetation.^{Note 24} Analogies with the Mithra mythology are indicated: the bull slain with vegetation springing from his flesh, and the sacrifice as an act performed by the human counterpart of the bull (see above, Figure 23). In the Gallo-Roman period, to which these altar panels belong, such cross-cultural analogies could not possibly have been missed. And so we now must recognize that, in the wildly grotesque hero deeds of this epic of the north, the goddess of the Fairy Hill, who appears variously as earth-mother, culture-giver, muse, and a goddess of fate and war, in human or in animal form, is ultimately analogous with the great goddesses of the nuclear Near East; while the Celtic warrior heroes, with Cuchullin as supreme example, carry in their mythic deeds motifs that have come down from the old Bronze Age serpent-son and consort of the Great Mother, Dumuzi-Tammuz.

II. Etruria

On the fair plain of Tuscany westward of the Apennines, situated between the Celts of the north and the rising power of Rome, were the twelve autonomous cities of the old Etruscan Confederation, symbolically centered around the sacred lake Bolsena. The origins of their culture date from the Villanova period, c. 1100–700 b.c., which overlaps the northern Hallstatt and represents in the south about the same level of development. A great number of curious funerary urns, buried close together in great fields, suggest not only an abiding concern for the dead, but also a certain idea of the purging and transforming power of fire in relation to the future state of the soul. Dr. Otto-Wilhelm von Vacano has interpreted the symbolism of these urns.

“When the bones,” he writes, “were gathered up from the funeral pyre as it ceased to glow, the remains of the ashes were all put into the cavity of the urn, to ensure that even the smallest piece of bone should be included.” Many of the urns were of human form and were even set upon ceramic thrones; others were in the forms of huts.

Underlying all this [von Vacano goes on to explain] is a belief that the dead will be transformed in the grave into beings of new and enhanced power, the idea that they are for the time being helpless as newborn babes, and must therefore in this interim period depend on the care of the survivors, while they are, as it were, germinating in the womb of the earth in order to sprout into a new life. …

Conceptions of this kind swept in waves over Europe at this time, and were also influential in Asia. Possibly their birthplace was the Caucasus or Persia. … In the sphere of influence of these early iron cultures the urn is a sort of hermetic vessel, in which a mysterious process of transformation and creation takes place. …

“One notable special feature in all this,” he then points out in a statement that corroborates very nicely our own observations in relation to the Celtic Iron Age,

is the belief in the purifying and transforming power of fire. Such conceptions have found expression in countless tales and legends of smiths, in the stories of the “little man who was burned till he became young,” the reviving cauldron boiling over the fire, the Medea-Pelias myth. On the other hand it is in the initiation rites of the shamans that we hear of a certain dream process whereby the novice is torn apart and cut to pieces by the spirit of one of his ancestors and his bones cleaned of all blood and flesh. Only his skeleton is preserved and is then clothed in new flesh and blood and thus transformed into a creature that is lord over time and space.^{Note 25}

The high period of the confederation of the cities of Tuscany extended from c. 700 b.c. to the year 88 b.c., which they themselves regarded as their last. Repeatedly harried from the north by the barbaric La Tène Celts, and gradually undone from the south by the growing power and realistic politics of Rome, they remained in their time an enclave of provincial, colonial conservatism, preserving the sense of style and holiness of an age in full decline. Professor von Vacano has pointed out that the number twelve of the cities of their confederation was a holy, symbolic sum, determined by religious, not practical, considerations. “Like constellations round the Pole Star these hallowed places grouped themselves around the grove of the god Voltumna, the site of which has not yet been located but which lay in the territory of Bolsena, called Volsinii by the Romans and Velzna by the Etruscans themselves.”^{Note 26}

Figure 29. The Driving of the Year Nail

The god of this grove, Voltumna, was androgynous — beyond the pairs of opposites. Annually, at a festival celebrated in the grove amid the usual Classical festival events of athletic and artistic competition, the Year Nail was driven into the wall of the temple of the goddess Nortia (Fortuna), symbolizing the inevitability of fate.^{Note 27} Figure 29 is from the back of an Etruscan mirror, dating c. 320 b.c. The winged goddess in the center with a hammer in her right hand is holding the Year Nail in her left. Her name, inscribed above, is Athrpa, related to the Greek Atropos. And we note the boar’s head associated with the hand holding the nail, as well as the posture of the hammer, precisely at the genitals of the young man at the goddess’s right. He is Adonis (Etruscan Atune), who was gored, slain, and emasculated by the boar. The female at his side is Aphrodite, his beloved. And the opposite lovely couple, the writing tells, are Atalanta and Meleager, whose destiny, too, was sealed by a boar.

The old story goes that at the birth of Meleager the Fates appeared to his mother, and the first of them, Clotho, prophesied that he would be a man of noble spirit, the second, Lachesis, that he would be a hero, and the last, Atropos, that he would live as long as the log burning then on the hearth was not consumed. The mother, Althaia, springing from her bed, caught the brand from the fire and hid it in a chest. Meleager grew and became devoted to the hunt. But the goddess Artemis of the Wild Things, who had been offended when his father, King Oineus of Calydon, had failed to honor her with an offering at a great sacrificial feast, released a boar so mighty that no one could destroy it. In the words of the Roman poet Ovid, re-rendered by our own poet Horace Gregory:

Both blood and fire wheeled in his great eyes;

His neck was iron; his bristles rose like spears,

And when he grunted, milk-white foaming spittle

Boiled from his throat and steamed across his shoulders. …

Only an elephant from India

Could match the tusks he wore, and streams of lightning

Poured from wide lips, and when he smiled or sighed

All vines and grasses burnt beneath his breath.^{Note 28}

The troubled King Oineus invited all the heroes of the lands of Greece to compete in the killing of this boar, and all the great names arrived: Castor and Pollux, Idas and Lynceus, Theseus, Admetus, Jason, Peleus, and many more. But of interest beyond all was the beautiful maid Atalanta, whose skill in many arts had already been exhibited when she had slain a pair of centaurs who had tried one day to ravish her, and when, at the funeral games of a certain prince, she had thrown in wrestling Peleus, the father of Achilles.

Many were killed by the boar in the course of that celebrated hunt. The first spear to graze the beast was Atalanta’s; Meleager’s felled him. But the youth had already been more gravely struck by the beauty of the fair huntress (who engaged in all these manly sports stripped naked like a male) than the boar had been by her lance; and when the beast was killed, he bestowed on her its hide.

This act was gravely resented by his uncles, the brothers of his mother, who wished the prize to be kept within the matriarchal family, and a brawl ensued of almost Irish magnitude, in the course of which the uncles tore the prize from the girl, whereupon Meleager slew them. And his mother, in a rage at the murder of her kin (but also, perhaps, rankled by the brazenness of the hoyden who had brought this all about), took the charred brand from its hiding and threw it into the fireplace, and her son died while still carving up the boar.^{Note 29}

Once again the pig emerges focally in the symbolism of death, destiny, the underworld, and immortality! Of the personages represented on the mirror, Adonis, slain by a boar, was a god; Meleager, a prince. Both gods and men, that is to say, are governed by the power of the goddess, symbolized by the boar.

It is amazing, but now undeniable, that the vocabulary of symbol is to such an extent constant through the world that it must be recognized to represent a single pictorial script, through which realizations of a tremendum experienced through life are given statement. Apparent also is the fact that not only in higher cultures, but also among many of the priests and visionaries of the folk cultures, these symbols — or, as we so often say, “gods” — are not thought to be powers in themselves but are signs through which the powers of life and its revelations are recognized and released: powers of the soul as well as of the living world. Furthermore, as in the case of this Etruscan composition, the signs may be arranged to make fresh poetic statements concerning the great themes of ultimate concern; and from such a pictorial poem new waves of realization ripple out through the whole range of the world heritage of myth. So that a polymorphic, cross-cultural discourse can be recognized to have been in progress from perhaps the dawn of human culture, opening realizations of the import inherent both in the symbols themselves and in the mysteries of life and thought to which they bring the mind to accord.

The Disciplina Etrusca continued to a late date the spirit of the old Bronze Age cosmology of the ever-revolving, irreversible cycles; and the image of space also was of the orthodox traditions: four quarters and the points between, each presided over by a deity, with a ninth, supreme Tinia, the lord of heaven, whom the Romans equated with Jupiter. The kings of the separate cities, who were Tinia incarnate, each wore a cloak symbolizing heaven, embroidered with stars. Each colored his face red, bore a scepter topped by an eagle, and rode in a chariot drawn by white steeds. At each quarter of the moon the king displayed himself ceremonially to his people, offering sacrifices to learn the will of destiny; and on the field of battle he rode before his men. As among the Celts, the king may have been sacrificed at the expiration of a term of eight or twelve years. The magnitude of the tumuli of these kings and the luxury of the furnishings bear witness to a royal death cult, while the custom of the grove at Nemi, analyzed by Frazer in The Golden Bough, makes it almost certain that this cult retained to a late date the old rite of the regicide.

With the fall of the city of Veii to Rome in the year 396 b.c., the fate of Etruria was sealed. But though the military might and secular laws of the growing empire prevailed and the people of Etruria, in 88 b.c., were granted Roman citizenship, authority in priestly affairs nevertheless remained with the old Etruscan masters. As late as 408 a.d. Etruscan conjurers offered their advice and aid to the Romans, who were then being threatened by Alaric and his Goths, and there is even a report that Pope Innocent I, who was then bishop of the city, allowed them to give a public demonstration of their skill in the conjuring of lightning.^{Note 30}

“This,” wrote the Roman Stoic Seneca, “is what distinguishes us from the Tuscans, masters in the observation of lightning. We think that lightning arises because clouds bump against each other; they on the other hand hold the belief that the clouds bump only in order that lightning may be caused. For as they connect everything with God they have the notion that lightning is not significant on account of its appearance as such, but only appears at all because it has to give divine signs.”^{Note 31}

And so we pass, at last, from the ancient to the modern world.

III. The Augustan Age

Plutarch relates of Romulus and Remus that they were twins of a young virgin of the royal line of Aeneas, who had been forced by her father Amulius, the brother of King Numitor of Alba, to become a Vestal Virgin. Shortly following her assumption of the vow, she was found to be with child, and would have been buried alive had not her cousin, daughter of the king, pleaded for her life. Confined, she brought forth two boys of more than human size and beauty, whom her father, alarmed, turned over to a servant to be cast away. But the man put them in a small trough, which he carried to the river and left upon the bank; and the river, rising, bore the little boat downstream to a smooth place where a large wild fig tree grew. A she-wolf came and nursed them; a woodpecker brought them food: which two creatures, being esteemed holy to Mars, gave credit — as Plutarch states — to the mother’s claim that Mars, the god, had been their father; whereas some declared the father to have been her own father, Amulius, who had come to her disguised in armor as the god.

Following a period of being cared for by animals, the twins were discovered by Amulius’s swineherd, who brought them up in secret; though, as others tell, with the knowledge and assistance of the king: for it is said they went to school and were instructed well in letters. They were called Romulus and Remus from the word ruma, “dug” — of the wolf. And in their growing they proved brave. To their comrades and inferiors they were dear, but the king’s overseers they despised; and they engaged themselves in study, as well as in running, hunting, repelling thieves, and delivering the oppressed.

A quarrel arose between two cowherds, one of the king, the other of his brother, in the course of which Remus fell into the hands, first of the brother, then of the king. Romulus attacked the city, released his twin, slew the tyrant king and brother; and the twins, then bidding their mother farewell, departed to build a city of their own in the place where they had spent their infancy. A quarrel arose as to where this city should stand, which they agreed to settle by divination. But when Remus saw six vultures and Romulus claimed twelve, they came to blows and Remus was slain.

Plutarch reports that when Romulus set about founding Rome he sent for men of Tuscany to direct the ceremonies according to the Disciplina Etrusca.

First [Plutarch declares] they dug a circular trench around what is now the comitium, or Court of Assembly, and into this they solemnly threw the first fruits of all things sanctioned either by custom as good or by nature as necessary. Then, every man bearing a small portion of the earth of his native land, they all threw these in together. They call this trench, as they do the heavens, Mundus; and taking this as center, they described the city in a circle around it. Whereupon the founder, having fitted to a plow a brazen plowshare, and having yoked to it a bull and a cow, he himself drove a deep line of furrow, circumscribing the bounds, while the task of those that followed him was to see that whatever earth was thrown up should be turned inward, toward the city, and that no clod should lie outside. With this line they laid the course of the wall … and where they proposed to have a gate, they lifted the plow out of the ground and left a space; for which reason they regard the whole wall as holy, except where the gates are: for had they deemed these also sacred, they could not, without offense to religion, have given free entrance and exit to those necessities of life that are of themselves unclean.^{Note 32}

Romulus stocked his city with women through his famous raid and rape of the Sabines, who became thereby first relatives, then citizens, of Rome. Other wars enlarged the realm. And presently he died, or rather disappeared — in a manner of interest to all who might like to think about the mythological air of the Roman Empire in the century of the birth and death, resurrection and disappearance of Christ.

For the life span of Plutarch, our biographer (c. 46–c. 120 a.d.), includes the years both of the mission of Saint Paul (d. c. 67 a.d.) and of the writing of the Gospels (c. 75–c. 120 a.d.); while the contrast of the Roman’s “modern” attitude toward miracles with the “religious” of the saints of the Levant is of relevance both to our present theme and to any general understanding of the scientific/religious schizophrenia of the modern Occidental “church.” Let me quote my author, word for word.

Plutarch has just told of the Roman conquest of Etruria and the fall of its chief city, Veii.

When Romulus [he continues] of his own accord then parted among his soldiers the lands that had been acquired by war and restored to the city of Veii the hostages he had taken, without asking the Roman senate either to consent or to approve, it seemed that he had put upon his senate a great affront. Consequently, on his sudden and strange disappearance a short time later, the senate fell under suspicion and calumny. Romulus disappeared on the Nones of July, as they call the month that was then Quintilis, leaving nothing of certainty to be related of his death except the time, as just mentioned; for on that day many ceremonies are still performed in representation of what happened.

Nor is this uncertainty to be thought strange, seeing that the manner of the death of Scipio Africanus, who died at his own home after supper, has been found capable neither of proof nor of disproof: for some say he died a natural death, being of sickly habit; others, that he poisoned himself; others again, that his enemies, breaking in upon him in the night, stifled him. Yet Scipio’s dead body lay open to be seen of all, and any one, from his own observation, might form his suspicions and conjectures, whereas Romulus, when he vanished, left neither the least part of his body, nor any remnant of his clothes to be seen.

So that some fancied, the senators, having fallen upon him in the temple of Vulcan, cut his body into pieces, and took each a part away in his bosom; others think his disappearance was neither in the temple of Vulcan, nor with the senators only by, but that it came to pass that, as he was haranguing the people without the city, near a place called the Goat’s Marsh, on a sudden strange and unaccountable disorders and alterations took place in the air; the face of the sun was darkened, and the day turned into night, and that, too, no quiet, peaceable night, but with terrible thunderings, and boisterous winds from all quarters; during which the common people dispersed and fled, but the senators kept close together. The tempest being over and the light breaking out, when the people gathered again, they missed and inquired for their king; the senators suffered them not to search, or busy themselves about the matter, but commanded them to honor and worship Romulus as one taken up to the gods, and about to be to them, in the place of a good prince, now a propitious god. The multitude, hearing this, went away believing and rejoicing in hopes of good things from him; but there were some, who, canvassing the matter in a hostile temper, accused and aspersed the patricians, as men that persuaded the people to believe ridiculous tales, when they themselves were the murderers of the king.

Things being in this disorder, one, they say, of the patricians, of noble family and approved good character, and a faithful and familiar friend of Romulus himself, having come with him from Alba, Julius Proculus by name, presented himself in the forum; and, taking a most sacred oath, protested before them all, that, as he was traveling on the road, he had seen Romulus coming to meet him, looking taller and comelier than ever, dressed in shining and flaming armor; and he, being affrighted at the apparition, said, “Why, O King, or for what purpose have you abandoned us to unjust and wicked surmises, and the whole city to bereavement and endless sorrow?” and that he made answer, “It pleased the gods, O Proculus, that we, who came from them, should remain so long a time amongst men as we did; and having built a city to be the greatest in the world for empire and glory, should again return to heaven. But farewell; and tell the Romans, that, by the exercise of temperance and fortitude, they shall attain the height of human power; we will be to you the propitious god Quirinus.” This seemed credible to the Romans, upon the honesty and oath of the relater, and indeed, too, there mingled with it a certain divine passion, some preternatural influence similar to possession by a divinity; nobody contradicted it, but, laying aside all jealousies and detractions, they prayed to Quirinus and saluted him as a god.^{Note 33}

Who, on reading this passage, can have failed to recall that other meeting on the road, recounted in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke?

That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What is this conversation which you are holding with each other as you walk?” And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And he said to them, “What things?” And they said to him, “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since this happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; and they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb, and found it just as the women had said; but him they did not see.” And he said to them, “O foolish men, and slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He appeared to be going further, but they constrained him, saying, “Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent.” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished out of their sight.^{Note 34}

Let us now return to the other.

“This,” wrote the sober Roman, commenting on the apparition of Romulus,

resembles certain Greek fables of Aristeas the Proconnesian, and Cleomedes the Astypalaean; for they say Aristeas died in a fuller’s workshop, and his friends, coming to look for him, found his body vanished; and that some presently after, coming from abroad, said they met him traveling toward Croton. And that Cleomedes, being an extraordinarily strong and gigantic man, but also wild and mad, committed many desperate freaks; and at last, in a school-house, striking a pillar that sustained the roof with his fist, broke it in the middle, so that the house fell and destroyed the children in it; and being pursued, he fled into a great chest, and, shutting the lid to, held it so fast, that many men, with their united strength, could not force it open; afterwards, breaking the chest to pieces, they found no man in it alive or dead; in astonishment at which, they sent to consult the oracle at Delphi; to whom the prophetess made this answer:

“Of all the heroes, Cleomedes is last.”

They say, too, the body of Alcmena, as they were carrying her to her grave, vanished, and a stone was found lying on the bier. And many such improbabilities do your fabulous writers relate, deifying creatures naturally mortal; for though altogether to disown a divine nature in human virtue were impious and base, so again, to mix heaven with earth is ridiculous. Let us believe with Pindar, that

All human bodies yield to Death’s decree,

The soul survives to all eternity.

For that alone is derived from the gods, thence comes, and thither returns; not with the body, but when most disengaged and separated from it, and when most entirely pure and clean and free from flesh: for the most perfect soul, says Heraclitus, is a dry light, which flies out of the body as lightning breaks from a cloud; but that which is clogged and surfeited with body is like gross and humid incense, slow to kindle and ascend. We must not, therefore, contrary to nature, send the bodies, too, of good men to heaven; but we must really believe that, according to their divine nature and law, their virtue and their souls are translated out of men into heroes, out of heroes into demi-gods, after passing, as in the rite of initiation, through a final cleansing and sanctification, and so freeing themselves from all that pertains to mortality and sense, are thus, not by human decree, but really and according to right reason, elevated into gods and admitted thus to the greatest and most blessed perfection. …

It was in the fifty-fourth year of his age and the thirty-eighth of his reign that Romulus, they tell us, left the world.^{Note 35}

The Romans employed two words to designate divine presences or powers, namely deus, which we generally translate “god,” and numen, for which we have no proper term. The root nv-, from which the latter is derived, means (curiously enough) “nod,” whence the connotation “command or will,” and then, “divine will or power, divine sway.”^{Note 36} Anthropologists have found for this Roman term a number of primitive counterparts; for instance, Melanesian mana, Dakotan wakon, Iroquoian orenda, and Algonquian manitu, all of which refer to an immanent magical force infecting certain phenomena. The “nod,” therefore, would have been experienced as coming not from without, but from within the object contemplated. Thus, whereas the Latin word deus, from the root div-, “shine,” is related to the Sanskrit deva, “god,” and suggests a being with defined personality, numen suggests, rather, the impulse of a will or force of no personal definition. We may recall here the Japanese sense of divine presences — kami — discussed in Oriental Mythology, under Shinto.^{Note 37} For, as in Japan, so in early Rome: the living universe was regarded, both in its great and in its lesser aspects, with a sense of wonder before its sheer existence. There is a pertinent passage in one of Seneca’s letters:

When you find yourself within a grove of exceptionally tall, old trees, whose interlocking boughs mysteriously shut out the view of the sky, the great height of the forest and the secrecy of the place together with a sense of awe before the dense impenetrable shades will awaken in you the belief in a god. And when a grotto has been hewn into the hollowed rock of a mountain, not by human hands but by the powers of nature, and to great depth, it pervades your soul with an awesome sense of the religious. We honor the sources of great rivers. Altars are raised where the sudden freshet of a stream breaks from below ground. Hot springs of steaming water inspire veneration. And many a pond has been sanctified because of its hidden situation or immeasurable depth.^{Note 38}

Most important of the Roman numina were those of the home, where the leading celebrant was the pater familias. The family cult was concerned, first, with the mystery of its own continuity in time, as represented in rituals honoring the ancestors (manes) and in festivals of the general dead (parentes). The numina of the household also were revered: those of the larder (penates) and of household effects (lares). The guardian of the hearth, Vesta, was personified as a goddess, and that of the door, Janus, as a god. There was the idea also of a numen of the procreating power of each male, his genius, and of the conceiving and bearing power of the female, her juno. Genius and juno came into being and expired with the individual. They stood beside him in life as protecting spirits and could be represented as serpents. Under Greek influence the power of the juno later became developed into the goddess Juno, as the guardian of childbirth and motherhood, who was identified then with the Greek Hera. A series of numina of the various phases of the agricultural process also were celebrated: Sterculinius, the power effective in the fertilizing of the fields; Vervactor, the first plowing of the soil; Redarator, the second; Imporcitor, the third; Sator, the sowing of the field … and so on, to Messia, the reaping; Convector, the harvest home; Noduterensis, the threshing floor; Conditor, the storing of the grain in the barn; Tutilina, its resting there; and Promitor, its removal to the kitchen.^{Note 39}

Other numina, of more constant presence, acquired more substantial character, as Jupiter, lord of the brilliant heavens and of storm, later identified with Zeus; Mars, the war god, equated with Ares; Neptune, the god of waters, identified with Poseidon; Faunus, the patron of animal life; Silvanus, god of the woods. Comparably, of the female forces, Ceres became identified with Demeter; Tellus Mater, with Gaea; Venus, originally a market goddess, with the Cyprian Aphrodite; and Fortuna with Moira. We hear too of Flora, goddess of flowers; Pomona, goddess of fruits; Carmenta, a goddess of springs and of birth; Mater Matuta, first a goddess of dawn, then of birth.^{Note 40}

In the larger sphere of the cult of the state the counterpart of the pater familias was the king, originally a god-king. His palace was the chief sanctuary; his queen was his goddess spouse. We have remarked that in the home the numen of the hearth was the goddess Vesta. In the larger family of the state, the same holy principle was honored throughout the history of pagan Rome in a circular temple, where a pure flame was attended by six highly revered women. The flame was extinguished at the end of each year and relighted in the primitive way, with firesticks. The dress of the Vestal Virgins resembled the gown of a Roman bride; and on assuming her vow, the dedicated nun was solemnly clasped by the Pontifex Maximus, the chief priest of the city, who said to her: Te, Amata, capio! “My Beloved, I take possession of thee!” The two were symbolically man and wife. And if the Vestal broke her vow of chastity, she was buried alive.

The correspondence of this Vestal Fire context, in every single detail, with the rites of the regicide and relighting of the holy fire described in Primitive Mythology^{Note 41} could hardly be more exact. The mythology of such rites was of the neolithic and Bronze ages. Hence, although no written matter has come down to us from the earliest centuries of the city, it is evident that the same great mythology of the cycling eons, years, and days that shaped every one of the other civilizations of the world, shaped also that of Rome — both spatially, in the city plan itself, as described in the legend of Romulus’s foundation ceremony, and calendrically, in the disciplines of its life.

At an early date, the latter part of the sixth century b.c., an Etruscan royal house, the Tarquins of Tarquinia (now Cometo), governed Rome. They were expelled about 509 b.c., and it was then that the epochal process of the Hellenization of the Roman religion began, which brought its local, archaic customs into accord with the new humanism of the rapidly growing chief centers of civilization. In the decades of Etruscan rule temples had been constructed and cult images fashioned of stucco; but for stone, Rome had to wait for the coming of Greek artisans in the second century b.c., at which time the Sibylline Books also arrived from Cumae in the south: an ancient holy site, some twelve miles west of Naples, founded by the Greeks as early as the eighth century b.c., and celebrated particularly for its oracular cave, where the Sibyl prophesied of whom Virgil wrote in Eclogue IV. The old woman incumbent visited the city with a bundle of nine prophetic books, of which three were purchased and buried for safekeeping in the temple of Jove, where at intervals they were consulted until they perished in the fire of 82 b.c.

As Plutarch tells, their prophecies were of “many mirthless things … many revolutions and transportations of Greek cities, many appearances of barbarian armies and deaths of leading men.”^{Note 42} They seem also to have divided the history of the world into ages to which various metals and deities were assigned.^{Note 43} And, as we may judge from Virgil’s celebrated words, the Sibylline round, declining to its end, was to be followed — as everywhere in such mythic cycles — by a golden age of rebeginning.

Now is come [he wrote] the last age of the Cumaean prophecy: the great cycle of periods is born anew. Now returns the Maid, returns die reign of Saturn: now from high heaven descends a new generation. And O holy goddess of childbirth Lucina, do thou be gracious at that boy’s birth in whom the Iron Race shall begin to cease and the Golden to arise all over the world. …^{Note 44}

This poem, with its wonderful Boy, was taken in the Christian Middle Ages to have been a prophecy of Christ, and Virgil was honored, therefore, as a kind of pagan prophet. His thought of the coming Golden Age somewhat resembles the eschatology of the Jewish Apocalyptic writers, and his dates, 70-19 b.c., fall perfectly within the period of the Essenes of Qumran. However, in the gentle Roman poem there is no tumult of any War of the Last Days. The image is of a return of the Golden Age in the natural course of an ever-revolving cycle, not the epochal passage in a “day of the Messiah” to an everlasting terminal state of the universe. And the Boy in question, finally, was not a Messiah of any kind, but a normal human child, born to a distinguished family of the poet’s acquaintance at a time that Virgil regarded, properly, as the dawn of a universal age of peace (for those willing to enjoy it) under the empire of Rome. Nor is the sense of Virgil’s imagery to be taken literally and concretely, but poetically, as a Classical figure of speech.

About the year 100 b.c. the Roman Pontifex Maximus, Q. Mucius Scaevola, in the spirit of a Stoic sage, proposed a theory of a threefold order of gods: the gods of poets, of philosophers, and of statesmen; of which the first two were unfit for the popular mind and only the second true. However, a fourth and far more potent order of gods than any of those of which he had taken thought was already becoming known to Rome in his day: those, namely, of the Near East, whose appeal was, in the Greek sense, neither poetic nor philosophic, and whose force, furthermore, would ultimately effect not the preservation but the undoing of the moral order of Rome and its civilization.

The first occasion for the introduction of these highly charged alien powers had occurred in the year 204 b.c., when the Carthaginian army of Hannibal was still a threat within Italy. Repeated storms and hail had produced the impression that the gods themselves, for some reason, were at odds with the people of Rome, and the Sibylline Books were consulted. Their reply was that the enemy would be expelled only when the cult of the Great Goddess of the Phrygian city of Pessinus was introduced into Rome. This Magna Mater was Cybele, the mother-bride of the ever-dying, ever-resurrected savior Attis; and these two were simply the local forms of the pair that we have come to know so well: Inanna and Dumuzi, Ishtar and Tammuz. In the high Etruscan age, as Figure 29 shows, the cognate myth of Aphrodite and her dead and restored lover Adonis had been introduced into Italy. Now, on the advice of the Sibylline Books, Cybele Magna Mater, under the aspect of a large black stone, was imported and set up in a temple on the Palatine. We have already commented on the influence of the Mithra cult within the empire. A third religion of this order, derived from Alexandria, was that of the now Hellenized Isis, and her spouse, now called Serapis (from the name Osiris-Apis). All these formerly local cults had in the Hellenistic age been syncretized with the related Greek traditions of the Dionysian, Orphic, and Pythagorean movements — to which a modicum of late Chaldean-Hellenistic astrology had been added, to form a compound of macro-microcosmic lore that was to remain dominant in the Occident, one way or another, until the science of the Renaissance undid the old cosmology of a geocentric universe and opened marvels beyond anything dreamed of by the sages of the ancient mystic ways.

Outstanding figures in this development were the Greek Stoic Posidonius, already mentioned (c. 135–50 b.c.), his eloquent pupil Cicero (106–43 b.c.), Cicero’s friend, Publius Nigidius Figulus (c. 98–45 b.c.), and then Virgil (70-19 b.c.), Ovid (40 b.c.-17 a.d.), Apollonius of Tyana (fl. first century a.d.), Plutarch (c. 46–120 a.d.), Ptolemy (fl. second century a.d.), and Plotinus (c. 205–270 a.d.). In the works of all these there is sounded a certain modern note; for the sciences of their time, like those of our own, were disclosing facts of the natural order that could not be absorbed by the old cosmologies, so that the problem of the day was to retain the substantial spiritual insights of the past even while pressing on to new horizons.

Perhaps the most lucid single instance of the manner in which the ancient lore was being translated into terms congenial to the new is to be seen in Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio Africanus the Younger,” with which he concluded the argument of his Republic. The youth whom he selected to be the subject of this work had lived c. 185–129 b.c. and was supposed to have seen his grandfather in vision, Scipio Africanus the Elder (237–183 b.c.), who many years before had invaded Africa and defeated Hannibal. The Elder is represented as revealing to his grandson, besides something of the future before him, a new spiritual view both of the universe and of man’s place within it.

“I fell into a deeper sleep than usual,” the youth is supposed to have reported; “and I thought that Africanus stood before me, taking the shape that was familiar to me from his bust rather than from his person.”

The psychological inflection is already interesting. The vision is subjectively disposed. We are not asked to believe in it as an actual case of revenance from the dead. The atmosphere is of poetic, not religious myth.

Africanus said: “How long will your thoughts be fixed upon the lowly earth? Do you not see what lofty regions you have entered?” And he pointed to the marvels of a universe of nine celestial spheres. “The outermost, heaven, contains all the rest,” he said, “and is itself the supreme God, holding and embracing within itself all the other spheres. In it are fixed the eternal revolving courses of the stars, and beneath it are seven other spheres, which revolve in the opposite direction to that of heaven.” Africanus named these in order: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. “Below the moon,” he said, “there is nothing but what is mortal and doomed to decay, except the souls given to men by the bounty of the gods, whereas above the moon all is eternal. And the ninth or central sphere, which is the earth, is immovable, lowest of all, and toward it all ponderable bodies are drawn by their own natural tendency downward.”

The cosmology is that of Hellenistic science, which was later systematized by Ptolemy and carried on to Dante. It is derived ultimately from the astrology of the ziggurat, but the earth has become a sphere poised in the midst of a sort of Chinese box of concentric spheres; not the flat disk of yore, surrounded by a cosmic sea.

Said the dreamer: “What is this loud and agreeable sound that fills my ears?” And the vision answered:

That is produced by the onward rush and motion of the spheres themselves; the intervals between them, though unequal, being exactly arranged in a fixed proportion, by an agreeable blending of high and low tones various harmonies are produced. For such mighty motions cannot be carried on so swiftly in silence; and Nature has provided that one extreme shall produce low tones while the other gives forth high. Therefore this uppermost sphere of heaven, which bears the stars, as it revolves more rapidly, produces a high, shrill tone, whereas the lowest revolving sphere, that of the moon, gives forth the lowest tone. For the earthly sphere, the ninth, remains ever motionless and stationary in its position in the center of the universe; but the other eight spheres, two of which move with the same velocity, produce seven different sounds — a number that is the key of almost everything.

Learned men, by imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in song, have gained for themselves a return to this region, as others have obtained the same reward by devoting their brilliant intellects to divine pursuits during their earthly lives. Men’s ears, ever filled with this sound, have become deaf to it; for you have no duller sense than that of hearing. … But this mighty music, produced by the revolution of the whole universe at the highest speed, cannot be perceived by human ears, any more than you can look straight at the sun, your sense of sight being overpowered by its radiance.

The number theory of Pythagoras, in relation to the principle of harmony in the universe, in the arts, and in the soul, is here set forth in terms of the new image of the universe and a modern, secularized mode of life. The archaic order of the hieratic state with its castes, sacrifices, and all, and of the arts as serving largely to illuminate such a state, is of the past. The arts and those other “divine pursuits” of “brilliant intellects” here touched upon are conceived in Hellenized, humanistic terms. Yet nothing has been lost of the essence of the doctrine.

The apparition continued, referring now to the sphere of the earth, its poles, and its torrid and temperate zones.

You will notice [he remarked] that the earth is surrounded and encircled by certain zones, of which the two that are most widely separated, and are supported by the opposite poles of heaven, are held in icy bonds, while the central and broadest zone is scorched by the heat of the sun. Two zones are habitable. Of these, the southern (the footsteps of whose inhabitants are opposite to yours) has no connection with your zone. Examine this northern zone which you inhabit, and you will see what a small portion of it belongs to the Romans. For that whole territory which you hold, being narrow from north to south, and broader from east to west, is really only a small island surrounded by that sea which you on the earth call the Atlantic, the Great Sea, or the Ocean. Now you see how small it is in spite of its proud name!

In surprising contrast to all mythological arguments up to this time, the native land with its local value system and circle of horizon is here diminished, not augmented, in importance. The view is of a reasonable human intellect, aware of the magnitude of the world, and greeting, not resisting, the opening vistas to which the new science, politics, and possibilities of life were inviting it. Statecraft and politics now were to be of a secular, not pseudoreligious stamp; yet, as the following portions of the discourse show, neither statecraft nor the spirit of man was to suffer one whit thereby.

The spirit is the true self [said Africanus], not that bodily form which can be pointed to by the finger. Know, therefore, that you are a god, if a god be that which lives, feels, remembers, and foresees, and which rules, governs, and moves the body over which it is set, just as the supreme God above us rules this universe. And just as the eternal God moves the universe, which is partly mortal, so an immortal spirit moves the frail body. …

For that which is always in motion is eternal; but that which communicates motion to something else, but is itself moved by another force, necessarily ceases to live when this motion ends. Therefore, only that which moves itself never ceases its motion, because it never abandons itself; nay, it is the source and first cause of motion in all other things that are moved. But this first cause has itself no beginning, for everything originates from the first cause, while it can never originate from anything else: for that would not be a first cause which owed its origin to anything else. And since it never had a beginning, it will never have an end. …

Therefore, now that it is clear that what moves of itself is eternal, who can deny that this is the nature of spirits? For whatever is moved by an eternal impulse is spiritless; but whatever possesses a spirit is moved by an inner impulse of its own; for that is the peculiar nature and property of a spirit. And as a spirit is the only force that moves of itself, it surely has no beginning and is immortal. Use it, therefore, in the best pursuits!

We are brought thus to the question of the best pursuits for man, and the answer again is of a man of reason.

“The best pursuits,” said the old soldier statesman, “are those undertaken in defense of your native land. A spirit occupied and trained in such activities will have a swifter flight to this, its proper home and permanent abode. And this flight will be still more rapid if, while still confined in the body, it looks abroad, and, by contemplating what lies outside itself, detaches itself as much as it may from the body.”

The typically Roman accent here, placed on the spiritual value of a dedication to the state, is one that the figure of this elder savior of his native city was well fitted to represent. And it stands in sturdy contrast to the Oriental, world-denying tone of many of the incoming cults, where a dissociation of the temporal and eternal orders was taken to imply that for spiritual realization a total renunciation of the one and dedication to the other was necessary. In the Orphic-Pythagorean movement such a notion was expressed in the soma-sema (“the body, a tomb”) aphorism. Cicero, the good Stoic, now directly confronts that theme.

“I asked Africanus,” he lets the young visionary say, “whether he and my father and the others whom we think of as dead were really alive. And he answered: ‘Surely all those are alive who have escaped, as from a prison, from the bondage of the body; but that life of yours, which men so call, is really death.’ ”

The youth in despair then cried to his father, Paulus: “O best and most blameless of fathers, since that is life, as I learn from Africanus, why should I remain longer on earth?”

And his father, appearing to him, answered:

Not so: for unless that God whose temple is everything that you see has freed you from the prison of the body, you cannot gain entrance to these heavens. For man was given life that he might inhabit that sphere called Earth, which you see in the center of this temple; and he has been given a soul out of those eternal fires that you call stars and planets, which, being round and globular bodies animated by divine intelligences, circle about in their fixed orbits with marvelous speed. Wherefore you, Publius, and all good men, must leave that soul in the custody of the body, and must not abandon human life except at the behest of him by whom it was given you, lest you appear to have shirked the duty imposed upon man by God. …

Love justice and duty, which are indeed strictly due to parents and kinsmen, but most of all to the fatherland. Such a life is the road to the skies, to that gathering of these who have completed their earthly lives and been relieved of the body, and who live in yonder place which you now see and which you on earth call the Milky Way.^{Note 45}

Thus, while recognizing the Orphic soma-sema thesis, Cicero, as a truly Roman spirit, gave all moral stress to the destiny of the human spirit in time.

All those who have preserved, aided, or enlarged their fatherland [he wrote] have a special place prepared for them in the heavens, where they may enjoy an eternal life of happiness. For nothing of all that is done on earth is more pleasing to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the assemblies and gatherings of men associated in justice, which are called states. Their rulers and preservers come from that place, and to that place they return.^{Note 46}

The doctrine hardly differs from that of the Indian karma yoga taught by the kingly sages Ajatashatru and Jaibali in the earliest Upaniṣads.^{Note 47} And like the Indian masters both of themselves and of their states, Cicero, in his noble vision, teaches detachment as well as duty. “The spirits of those who are given over to sensual pleasures and have become, as it were, their slaves,” he declares, “and who violate the laws of gods and men at the instigation of those desires, which are subservient to pleasure, after leaving their bodies fly about close to the earth, and do not return to this heavenly place except after many ages of torture.”^{Note 48}

It would be difficult to invent a closer analogue to the doctrine of reincarnation of the Orient — and yet the whole tone of the Roman is as different from the Indian as is the Roman concept of man’s duties from the Indian. For the Roman citizen’s “divine pursuits” were not determined by caste but by the judgments of his own faculties; nor was their ultimate reference release from the world but intelligent service to human ends while within it. Virgil, in the sixth book of the Aeneid, presented another version of this same mythology, and in doing so became eligible to conduct Dante through a later revelation of this landscape of the soul. Yet between Virgil and Dante too there was a difference, in as much as for the Roman the intelligence in the center of the earth was not Satanic but divine.

 

Christian writers, even of the most liberal sort, have never been able to appreciate the piety of the pagan Romans: for instance, that veneration of the emperor which the patron of Virgil, Augustus, caused to be instituted as a policy of state. Cicero’s two declarations, that the way to heaven is through service to one’s fatherland, and that each is to know himself to be a god, set the mood for the later worship of the emperor, which Virgil supported in a prominent passage of his Aeneid ,^{Note 49} and Ovid too in his Metamorphoses ,^{Note 50} For, after all, where every fish and fly carries divinity within, why should not the master of the state be revered as primus inter pares? No comparison is to be made of such an attitude of respect with the Christian deification of Augustus’s contemporary, Jesus. For in the Christian view the world and its creatures are not suffused with divinity. The deification of Jesus marks a radical designation, far beyond anything possible where all things are in essence numina. And from the Roman point of view the Christian refusal to concede a pinch of incense to an image of the emperor was an act not only of rebellion but also of atheism, vis-à-vis that divinity of the universe which every myth and philosophic view in the known history of mankind (save only that of the up to then completely unknown Bible) had taught as the ultimate Truth of truths.

Augustus, reigning from 27 b.c. to the year 14 a.d., while retaining as far as possible the semblance of the state as a republic, refreshed in imperial grandeur the old religious foundations of the city. His own palace became the focal sanctuary of the state, as in ancient times the palace of the god-king had been. A new temple of the Vestal Virgins was built in association with the palace, and the public honors bestowed on the Vestals were increased. To Apollo, his patron deity, to whom he credited the victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra, a temple was raised on the Palatine, and in a prominent part of the new forum a temple was built to Mars Ultor, “The Avenger,” divine ancestor of the Julian house, to whom the avenging of Caesar’s murder was attributed. The latter then became the sanctuary for all family rites of the dynasty, as well as for the installation of provincial magistrates, conclusion of senatorial decisions on peace and war, preservation of triumphant battle insignia, and ceremonial driving of the Year Nail.

In the year 17 b.c. a stupendous jubilee, the Festival of the Saeculum, was celebrated, to render in impressive form the idea of the World Renewed announced by Virgil in his Fourth Eclogue. Heralds to all quarters announced the required participation of all, slaves alone being excluded. Mourning rites were suspended, court proceedings deferred. From May 26 to 28, fumigants were distributed for the purification of homes. From May 29 to 31, the authorities received from the citizens contributions of grain for distribution to the performers and audiences of the festival games. And on the night preceding the day of June 1, the great three-day celebration began.

Let me tell of these days in the words of the late Professor L. A. Deubner of the University of Freiburg, whose article on Roman Religion in Professor Chantepie de la Saussaye’s standard Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte first opened my own eyes, nearly forty years ago, to the common background in archaic myth of Virgil’s Boy of the Golden Age and the Christian Apocalyptic Messiah.

The opening night, Augustus offered nine sheep and nine goats to the Fates, after which theatrical pieces were performed and one hundred and ten matrons set up religious banquets to Juno and Diana. The day of June 1st, Augustus, and after him his son-in-law Agrippa, offered each an ox to Jupiter, after which, in a wooden theater on the Field of Mars, Latin plays were produced. The next night, Augustus sacrificed nine cows of each of three varieties to the goddess of birth, Ilithyia, and the day of June 2nd Agrippa offered a cow to the Capitoline Juno Regina. Following his prayer for himself and Augustus, Agrippa pronounced another for the hundred and ten matrons, and the plays that day were the same as the day before.

The final night, Augustus offered a pregnant sow to Mother Earth, and the matrons again prepared banquets. During the next, the final day, Augustus and Agrippa offered to Apollo and Diana nine cows of each of the varieties that had been sacrificed the second night. Through all these nights and days the prayers pronounced at the offerings had begged protection for the state and its people in war and peace; victory, health, and blessings for the people and the legions, the person and family of the sacrificing emperor, and the college of the Sibylline priesthood. Terminating the ceremonies of June 3rd, a chorus of 27 boys and 27 girls, all of whose parents were alive, sang the festival song composed by Horace, first on the Palatine, where Apollo and Diana were revered, and then on the Capitoline. … The concluding hours of the day were filled with stage plays, chariot races, and the performances of jugglers. After all of which there were added, finally, a couple of days of various types of performance, during which the excitement of the festival settled down.

When this Augustan Festival of the Saeculum is compared with earlier feasts of the kind [Professor Deubner comments], the idea involved comes unmistakably to light. The earlier had been exclusively night festivals, addressed to the dark deities of the underworld, Pluto and Persephone. Their function had been to rectify evils, wash away sin, appease the powers of darkness, placate the jaws of death, and set bounds between what had been and what was to be. The new festival, on the other hand, joined the night festival to one of day. Thus it proclaimed the triumphant message to all who would hear: From Night to Light. And even in the nightly celebrations the deities called upon were not Pluto and Persephone, but the life-giving powers resident in the darkness of the earth. These were to pour forth from their domain those blessings for the world of light that Rome so fervently required. The Festival of Death of the Old Saeculum had transformed itself into the Resurrection Festival of the New; and the Emperor of the joyous populace appeared in the role of the Savior of the Dawning Era, bathed in the glory of Apollo’s light.^{Note 51}

One cannot fail to recognize in this idea the prelude to the transfer of the Day of God in the Christian tradition from Saturday, the “Day of Saturn” (the god and planet of cold darkness and obstruction), to the New Testament “Day of the Sun,” Sunday: Sol invictus, the sign of light, victory over darkness, and rebirth.

Augustus, after his death, was elevated to the circle of the gods of the Roman state, in which role the murdered Julius Caesar had preceded him, to whom a temple had already been erected in the Forum. Augustus, during his lifetime, had not permitted his person to be directly worshiped in Rome — offerings had been addressed only to his genius; however, in the provinces he had been worshiped as the vehicle of the spirit of the Roman state, and to refuse him reverence in this character had been a political crime punishable by death. After his passing, a special priesthood was founded for the services of his cult — as in future years special priesthoods were to appear for each of the deified emperors, until, as Professor Deubner remarks, “a complete devaluation of the idea of apotheosis supervened.”^{Note 52}

Commodus (r. 180-192 a.d.) was the first to allow himself to be worshiped in Rome as a god while living; Aurelian (r. 270-275) allowed himself to be addressed as “Lord and God” (dominus et deus); and Diocletian (r. 284–305) went all the way, ordering that he should be known as Jovius, “of Jove,” and his viceroy Maximian as Herculius, “of Hercules.” And in those declining days of the empire, when the holy remains of an emperor were placed on a vast pyre of many stages and cremated, it was contrived that at just the right time there should appear flying from the summit of this flaming Cosmic Tower an eagle, bird of the sun, as the soul of the deceased, released from its earthly coil, now winging home.

IV. The Risen Christ

The recurrent mythological event of the death and resurrection of a god, which had been for millenniums the central mystery of all of the great religions of the nuclear Near East, became in Christian thought an event in time, which had occurred but once, and marked the moment of the transfiguration of history. Through Adam’s Fall by the Tree in the Garden, death had come into the world. Through God’s covenant with the Children of Israel a people had been prepared to receive and to clothe in flesh the Living God. Through Mary that divine being had entered the world, not as myth, not as symbol, but in flesh and blood, historically. And on the cross he had offered to the eye and heart a silent sign — which has been variously read from the points of view of the various sects, yet has been for all, however read, of prodigious affective as well as symbolic force.

We do not really know whether, historically, Jesus the Nazarene knew that he was going to die on the cross. It could be argued, I suppose, that in his character as True Man he cannot have known, though as True God he must have known from all eternity. The paradoxology of life, which is both tragic and beyond tragedy, is implicit in his silent sign. But whether known, or in what manner known, to the inspired and inspiring young proclaimer of the Day of God who was crucified under Pontius Pilate (the Roman procurator of Judea from 26 to 36 a.d.), it is a fact that within two decades of his death, his Cross had become for his followers the countervailing symbol of the Tree of the Fall in the Garden.

The earliest Christian documents to come down to us are Paul’s letters, 51 to 64 a.d., written to his converts in the busy Hellenistic market towns to which he had introduced the new faith, and in these the fundamental mythic image of the Fall by the Tree and Redemption by the Cross was already firmly defined. “For as by a man came death,” wrote Paul, ‘‘by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”^{Note 53} And in his epistle to the Philippians, written c. 61–64 a.d., there is a remarkable quotation from an early Christian hymn, the earliest of which we have knowledge, where already Jesus Crucified is hailed as the Messiah, “who,” as we read,

though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.^{Note 54}

This, however, is a very different concept of the Messiah from that of the orthodox Jewish expectation, where there is no idea of the Messiah as God. As Professor Joseph Klausner formulates the expectation, it was — and is — (the italics are Professor Klausner’s) of

a truly pre-eminent man, to the extent that the Jewish imagination could picture him: he was supreme in strength and heroism; he was also supreme in moral qualities. A great personality, which is incomparably higher and stronger than ordinary people, a personality to which all very willingly make themselves subject and which can overcome all things, but for these very reasons feeling a very strong sense of obligation — this is the pre-eminent man of Judaism. Of a preeminent man like this it is possible to say, “Thou hast made him a little lower than God.” For from a pre-eminent man like this to God is but a step. But this step Judaism did not take. It formed within the limits of a humanity which is continually raising itself up, the ideal of flesh and blood, “the idea of the ultimate limit of man” (in the language of Kant), this great personality, only by means of which and by the help of which can redemption and salvation come to humanity — the King-Messiah.^{Note 55}

In contrast, the Christian legend, from an early date (how early, however, is a matter of debate) took to itself a motif already well known both in Greek mythology — as in the myths of Leda and the Swan, Danae and the Shower of Gold — and in the Zoroastrian myth of Saoshyant; namely

THE VIRGIN BIRTH

According to Luke:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is with you! Blessed are you among women!” But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be. And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High; and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there will be no end.” And Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no husband?” And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” … And Mary said, “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the Angel departed from her.^{Note 56}

On the level simply of legend, without regard to the possibility of an actual miracle, the Virgin Birth must be interpreted as a mythic motif from the Persian or Greek, not Hebrew, side of the Christian heritage; and in the two recorded versions of the Nativity scene, more motifs appear from this gentilic side.

THE BABE IN THE MANGER

Again according to Luke:

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. And Joseph went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to be delivered. And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

And in that region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, “Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men of good will!”

When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste, and found Mary and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they saw it they made known the saying which had been told them concerning this child; and all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.^{Note 57}

This scene echoes in the detail of the shepherds a motif familiar from the legend of Mithra’s birth from the mother rock. The angelic host, also, is suggestive rather of a Zoroastrian background, particularly since the glory of the Lord shines around it. Such a radiance — Avestan, Xvarnah, “Light of Glory”^{Note 58} — is the light of Ahura Mazda’s pristine creation symbolized by the halo, which appears first in Persian art and then passes eastward into the Buddhist and westward to the Christian sphere. A totally different version of the Nativity is given in the Gospel according to Matthew — as far as possible from the idyllic atmosphere of Luke’s peaceful pastoral scene.

THE VISIT OF THE MAGI

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East, and have come to worship him.” When Herod the king heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him; and assembling all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Christ was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is written by the prophet: ‘And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel’ [Micah 5:2].” Then Herod summoned the wise men secretly and ascertained from them what time the star appeared; and he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child, and when you have found him bring me word, that I too may come and worship him.” When they had heard the king they went their way; and lo, the star which they had seen in the East went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was. When they saw the star they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh; And being warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they departed to their own country by another way.^{Note 59}

The Feast of the Visit of the Magi is now celebrated January 6, which was the date of the festival in Egyptian Alexandria of the birth of the new Aion (a syncretistic personification of Osiris) from Kore, “the Maiden,” who was there identified with Isis, of whom the bright star Sirius (Sothis) rising on the horizon had been for millenniums the watched-for sign. The rising of the star announced the rising of the flood waters of the Nile, through which the world-renewing grace of the dead and resurrected lord Osiris was to be poured over the land. Writing of the Festival of Kore in her temple in Alexandria, Saint Epiphanius (c. 315–402 a.d.) states that “on the eve of that day it was the custom to spend the night in singing and attending to the images of the gods. At dawn a descent was made to a crypt, and a wooden image was brought up, which had the sign of a cross and a star of gold marked on hands, knees, and head. This was carried round in procession, and then taken back to the crypt; and it was said that this was done because ‘the Maiden’ had given birth to ‘the Aion.’ ”^{Note 60}

The present custom of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 seems not to have been instituted until the year 353 or 354, in Rome, under Pope Liberius, possibly to absorb the festival of the birth of Mithra that day, from the mother rock. For December 25 marked in those centuries the winter solstice: so that Christ, now, like Mithra and the Emperor of Rome, could be recognized as the risen sun.^{Note 61} Thus we have two myths and two dates of the Nativity scene, December 25 and January 6, with associations pointing on one hand to the Persian and on the other to the old Egyptian sphere.

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT AND SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

The Matthew version continues:

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And he rose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, “Out of Egypt have I called my son” [Hosea 11:1].

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old and under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more” [Jeremiah 31:150].

But when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, “Rise, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child’s life are dead.” And he rose and took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus reigned over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. And he went and dwelt in a city called Nazareth, that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, “He shall be called a Nazarene.”^{Note 62}

It is of interest to compare with this account of the malice of the tyrant-king a Jewish legend of the birth of Abraham, drawn from a late Midrash:

Abraham’s birth had been read in the stars by Nimrod; for this impious king was a cunning astrologer, and it was manifest to him that a man would be born in his day who would rise up against him and triumphantly give the lie to his religion. In his terror of the fate foretold him in the stars, he sent for his princes and governors, and asked them to advise him in the matter. They answered, and said: “Our unanimous advice is that thou shouldst build a great house, station a guard at the entrance thereof, and make known in the whole of thy realm that all pregnant women shall repair thither together with their midwives, who are to remain with them when they are delivered. When the days of a woman to be delivered are fulfilled, and the child is born, it shall be the duty of the midwife to kill it, if it be a boy. But if the child be a girl, it shall be kept alive, and the mother shall receive gifts and costly garments, and a herald shall proclaim, ‘Thus is done unto the woman who bears a daughter!’

The king was pleased with this counsel, and he had a proclamation published throughout his whole kingdom, summoning all the architects to build a great house for him, sixty ells high and eighty wide. After it was completed, he issued a second proclamation, summoning all pregnant women thither, and there they were to remain until their confinement. Officers were appointed to take the women to the house, and guards were stationed in it and about it, to prevent the women from escaping thence. He furthermore sent midwives to the house, and commanded them to slay the men children at their mothers’ breasts. But if a woman bore a girl, she was to be arrayed in byssus, silk, and embroidered garments, and led forth from the house of detention among great honors. No less than seventy thousand children were slaughtered thus. Then the angels appeared before God, and spoke, “Seest Thou not what he doth, yon sinner and blasphemer, Nimrod son of Canaan, who slays so many innocent babes that have done no harm?” God answered and said: “Ye holy angels, I know it and I see it, for I neither slumber nor sleep. I behold and I know the secret things and the things that are revealed, and ye shall be witness to what I will do unto this sinner and blasphemer, for I will turn My hand against him to chastise him.”

It was about this time that Terah espoused the mother of Abraham, and she was with child. When her body grew large at the end of three months of pregnancy, and her countenance became pale, Terah said to her, “What ails thee, my wife, that thy countenance is so pale and thy body so swollen?” She answered and said, “Every year I suffer with this malady.” But Terah would not be put off thus. He insisted: “Show me thy body. It seems to me thou art big with child. If that be so, it behooves us not to violate the command of our god Nimrod.” When he passed his hand over her body, there happened a miracle. The child rose until it lay beneath her breasts, and Terah could feel nothing with his hands. He said to his wife, “Thou didst speak truly,” and naught became visible until the day of her delivery.

When her time approached, she left the city in great terror and wandered toward the desert, walking along the edge of a valley, until she happened across a cave. She entered this refuge, and on the next day she was seized with throes and gave birth to a son. The whole cave was filled with the light of the child’s countenance as with the splendor of the sun, and the mother rejoiced exceedingly. The babe she bore was our father Abraham.

His mother lamented, and said to her son: “Alas that I bore thee at a time when Nimrod is king. For thy sake seventy thousand men children were slaughtered, and I am seized with terror on account of thee, that he hear of thy existence, and slay thee. Better thou shouldst perish here in this cave than my eye should behold thee dead at my breast.” She took the garment in which she was clothed, and wrapped it about the boy. Then she abandoned him in the cave, saying, “May the Lord be with thee, may He not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

Thus Abraham was deserted in the cave, without a nurse, and he began to wail. God sent Gabriel down to give him milk to drink, and the angel made it to flow from the little finger of the baby’s right hand, and he sucked at it until he was ten days old. Then he arose and walked about, and he left the cave. …^{Note 63}

In India a like tale is told of the beloved savior Kṛṣṇa, whose terrible uncle, Kansa, was, in that case, the tyrant-king. The savior’s mother, Devaki, was of royal lineage, the tyrant’s niece, and at the time when she was married the wicked monarch heard a voice, mysteriously, which let him know that her eighth child would be his slayer. He therefore confined both her and her husband, the saintly nobleman Vasudeva, in a closely guarded prison, where he murdered their first six infants as they came.

For in those days a number of demons, having seduced the women of the earth by various wiles, had contrived to become born throughout the world as tyrants, of whom Kansa was the greatest. And the weight of their tyranny was such that the goddess Earth, unable to bear the burden of their warring hosts, took the form of a cow and, piteously weeping, went before the gods to beg for aid, on the summit of the cosmic mountain. These then, together with the cow, proceeded to the shore of the Cosmic Ocean, upon the surface of which the Lord of the Universe, reposing on the endless snake Ananta, slept forever, dreaming the dream that is the universe. And at the shore of the Cosmic Sea, the leader of the assembled gods, Brahma the Creator, bowed and prayed to the great form seen far out on the deep. “O Thou, great Viṣṇu, both possessed of form and without form, simultaneously one and multiform; hearing without ears, seeing without eyes, knowing all yet known of none: thou art the common center, protector of all things, in whom all rest. There is nothing but thyself, O Lord, nor will anything else ever be. Glory to thee, largest of the great, smallest of the least, pervader of all. Behold this goddess Earth, who comes to thee now terribly oppressed!”

The prayer being ended, there was heard a voice, deep, vast, yet gentle and auspicious, like the roll of distant thunder, bidding all to be at peace, while the radiant slumbering form, of the hue of a blue lotus, reposing on the milk-white serpent coils of the multiheaded Ananta, plucked from itself two hairs, a milk-white and a blue-black, which it then released into the air.

The white hair, white as Ananta, was born as the seventh child of Devaki, the savior Balarama, and the black hair as the eighth, black Kṛṣṇa. But now the good lady’s spouse, Vasudeva, had seven wives, of whom one had been sent across the river Jumna, to a district known as Cow Land; and when the child Balarama was conceived, he was by a miracle transferred to the womb across the river, and a report went to the tyrant king that Devaki had miscarried. The eighth child, however, was allowed to mature where it was, and while she carried him, the mother was invested with such light that no one could gaze upon her. And the gods, invisible to mortals, praised her continually from the time that Viṣṇu, as the incarnation Kṛṣṇa, entered into her person.

The four quarters were alight with joy on the day of the birth. All the virtuous, that day, experienced new delight; violent winds were hushed; and the rivers glided tranquilly. The seas, murmuring, made a music to which the nymphs of heaven danced. And at midnight the clouds, emitting a low, pleasing sound, poured a rain of flowers to greet the birth.

But when Vasudeva beheld the babe, who was of a luminous, dark blue complexion with four arms and on his breast a curl of white hair, “Thou art born!” said the father, terrified. “But, O sovereign God of Gods, bearer of the conch, discus, and mace, in mercy withhold this thy celestial form!” And Devaki, the mother, also prayed. And the god, by his maya, took the form of an ordinary new-born babe.

Vasudeva then picked him up and hurried forth into a night of rain; for the guards, charmed by the power of Viṣṇu, were asleep. The many-headed cosmic serpent closely followed, spreading his broad milk-white hoods above the heads of the father and child. And when Vasudeva, wading the river, crossed to the farther shore the waters became calm, so that he passed easily to Cow Land. There again he found the world asleep. And a good woman there, Yashoda by name, with whom his second wife was staying, had just given birth to a girl. Vasudeva exchanged his son for that child, placing him at the sleeping mother’s side; so that when she woke she found, to her delight, that she had been delivered of a boy. And bearing off the other, he crossed the river again, to his own wife’s side, unobserved, and the gates of the city, as well as of the prison, closed of themselves.

Whereupon the cry of the newborn babe awoke the guards and, starting up, they alarmed the tyrant, who rushed immediately to the chamber, tore the infant from the mother’s breast and flung her against a rock. The intended victim rose into the air, however, and expanded into the figure of a huge goddess with eight arms, each wielding a formidable weapon: a bow, a trident, arrows and a shield, a sword, a conch, a discus, and a mace. And laughing terrifically, this vision cried at him: “O Kansa, of what avail is it to you now to have hurled me to the ground? The one who is to kill you is already born.” For she was the goddess Mahamaya, “The Great Illusion.” She was the world-supporting dream-power of Viṣṇu himself; and when he had entered the womb of Devaki, she had entered that of Yashoda, precisely for this stroke. Clad in glorious raiment and with many gorgeous garlands, ornaments, and jewels, hymned by the spirits of air and earth, she filled the heavens — and dissolved into the sky.^{Note 64}

If miracles are required, India wins, every time. The text that I have abridged here is from the Bhagavatā Puraṇa, a popular work of the tenth century a.d. — from which I drew, in Oriental Mythology, one of the versions there compared to the moonlight dance of Kṛṣṇa and the Gopis.^{Note 65} But the worship of Kṛṣṇa is mentioned much earlier, by the Greek envoy Megasthenes at the court of Candragupta Maurya (300 b.c.), who compares the Indian hero-god to Heracles. The earliest documents of his deeds are the epic Mahabharata (c. 400 b.c.–400 a.d.) and its appendix, the Harivamsa (sixth century a.d.). Thus the period of the growth of the Kṛṣṇa legend about parallels that of the post-exilic Hebrew development, with Persia, the Greeks, and finally Rome contributing to the intercultural traffic.

There can be no doubt that the mythologies bear close relationships to each other, with, however, important contrasts of implication as well as of style. The Levantine legends gave stress to a sociological argument, celebrating their own cults to the defamation of whatever others happened to be known, whereas the Indian developed an essentially psychological symbology, where the tyrant-demon signified not an alien religion, but the orientation of a mind locked to ego and the fear of death, while the savior was a manifestation of that spirit, beyond life and death, which is the inherent reality of us all. The passage to the yonder shore, to Cow Land (compare the shepherds and their flocks), denotes a transfer of accent from the orientation of ego, the world of the tyrant-king, to that of the reality manifest throughout nature, the world of the great goddess Earth, personified from early neolithic times in the aspect of a cow (Compare Egyptian Hathor, Sumerian Ninhursag, etc. The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, and The Consort of the Bull.). The myths are very much the same; but it would not be appropriate to elucidate one according to the meaning of another. They are a hair’s breadth, and yet universes, apart.

Moreover, they are all considerably later than the Greek legend of the birth of Zeus recounted in Hesiod’s Theogony, c. 750 b.c.

Rheia [we there read] submissive in love to Kronos [her brother-spouse], bore glorious children — Histia and Demeter, Hera of the golden sandals, and strong Hades, who under ground lives in his palace and has a heart without pity; the deep-thunderous Earthshaker, and Zeus of the counsel, who is the father of gods and of mortals, and underneath whose thunder the whole earth shudders. But as each of these children came from the womb of its mother to her knees, great Kronos swallowed it down, with the intention that no other of the proud children of the line of Ouranos should ever hold the king’s position among the immortals. For he had heard, from Gaia and from starry Ouranos, that it had been ordained for him, for all his great strength, to be beaten by his son, and through the designs of great Zeus. Therefore he kept watch, and did not sleep, but waited for his children and swallowed them, and Rheia’s sorrow was beyond forgetting.

But when she was about to bear Zeus, the father of mortals and gods, then Rheia went and entreated her own dear parents, and these were Gaia and starry Ouranos, to think of some plan by which, when she gave birth to her dear son, the thing might not be known, and the fury of revenge be on devious-devising Kronos the great, for his father, and his own children whom he had swallowed. They listened gladly to their beloved daughter, and consented, and explained to her all that had been appointed to happen concerning Kronos, who was King, and his son, of the powerful spirit, and sent her to Lyktos, in the fertile countryside of Crete at that time when she was to bring forth the youngest of her children, great Zeus; and the earth, gigantic Gaia, took him inside her in wide Crete, there to keep him alive and raise him. There Earth arrived through the running black night, carrying him, and came first to Lyktos, and holding him in her arms, hid him in a cave, deep in under the secret places of earth, in Mount Aigaion which is covered with forest. She wrapped a great stone in baby-clothes, and this she presented to the high lord Kronos, son of Ouranos who once ruled the immortals, and he took it then in his hands and crammed it down into his belly, hard wretch, nor saw in his own mind how there had been left him instead of the stone a son, invincible and unshakable for the days to come, who soon by force and his hands defeating him must drive him from his title, and then be lord over the immortals.

And presently after this the shining limbs and the power of the lord, Zeus, grew great, and with the years circling on great Kronos, the devious-devising fooled by the resourceful promptings of Gaia, once again brought up his progeny. First he vomited up the stone, which last he had swallowed, and this Zeus took and planted in place, on earth of the wide ways, at holy Pytho, in the hollow ravines under Parnassos, to be a portent and a wonder to mortal men thereafter. Then he set free from their dismal bonds the brothers of his father, the sons of Ouranos, whom his father in his wild temper had enchained, and they remembered, and knew gratitude for the good he had done them, and they gave him the thunder, and the smoky bolt, and the flash of the lightning, which Gaia the gigantic had hidden till then. With these to support him, he is lord over immortals and mortals.^{Note 66}

The myth goes back to the millennium of Crete and, beyond that, to the neolithic earth-goddess and her son. We recall from later Greece the birth of Perseus, and from the legend of Zoroaster the complaint of the soul of the cow. We recall, in fact, a multitude innumerable of such tales and episodes, and in view of them all have to conclude, in sum, that a rich environment of mythic lore was diffused with the neolithic arts of agriculture and settled village life across the whole face of the earth, from which elements have been drawn everywhere for the fashioning of hero myths, whether in Mexico of Quetzalcoatl, in Egypt of Osiris, in India of Kṛṣṇa and the Buddha, in the Near East of Abraham or of Christ. Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Christ seem to have been historical characters. Some of the others may not have been. But whether fictional or historical, the names and figures of the great and little heroes of the world act irresistibly as magnets to those floating filaments of myth that are everywhere in the air. Professor Charles Guignebert of the Sorbonne, treating of the history of the Gospels, states that in the course of development of the Christian legend, “Jesus the Nazarene disappeared and gave place to the glorified Christ.”^{Note 67} It could not have been otherwise. In the Buddhist sphere, the biography of Gautama was turned into a supernatural life through a constellation of many of the same motifs. Through such a process history is lost; but history also is made. For the function of such myth-building is to interpret the sense, not to chronicle the facts, of a life, and to offer the artwork of the legend, then, as an activating symbol for the inspiration and shaping of lives, and even civilizations, to come.

Let us regard a few more significant episodes from this legend of the Man who was God.

THE BAPTISM IN THE JORDAN

Much has been made throughout the centuries of the fact that in the Gospel according to Mark there is no account either of the Virgin Birth or of the infancy of the Savior. The text begins with his baptism, and the descent, then, of the Spirit as a dove. It is as brief and simple a statement as could be:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”^{Note 68}

The baptism is the first event of the biography to appear in all three synoptic gospels, and the version according to Mark being the earliest of the series, c. 75 a.d., it supplied the matter from which the other two were derived. Nevertheless, in one authoritative text of the Gospel according to Luke the voice from heaven declares, not “Thou art my beloved Son,” but “This day have I begotten thee.”^{Note 69}

Now the controversy over the dignity of Mary hinges on the question as to whether Jesus was the very son of God from conception or became endowed with his divine mission only at the moment of his baptism by John. Apparently the historicity of John the Baptist cannot be denied. The almost contemporary Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37–95 a.d.) states that “he was a good man and commanded the Jews to exercise virtue through justice toward one another and piety toward God, and by so doing to arrive at immersion; for immersion would be acceptable to God only if practiced not to expiate sins but for purification of the body after the soul had first been thoroughly purified by righteousness.” And further: “Because many affected by his words flocked to him, Herod (I.e., Herod Antipas, who ruled over Galilee and Peraea from 4 b.c. to 39 a.d.) feared that John’s great influence over the people might lead to revolt (for the people seemed likely to do whatever he counseled). He therefore thought it best to slay him in order to prevent any mischief he might engender, and to avoid possible future troubles by not sparing a man who might make him repent of his leniency when too late. Accordingly, because of Herod’s suspicious nature, John was imprisoned in the fortress Machaerus, and there put to death.”^{Note 70}

The Gospel according to Mark tells of the beheading of John the Baptist in its famous tale of Salome’s dance.^{Note 71} And of John’s teaching and baptizing the same gospel relates, further, that he

appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And there went out to him all the country of Judea, and all the people of Jerusalem; and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Now John [the text continues] was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”^{Note 72}

The site of John’s activity, as already remarked, was within ten miles of the Essene community of Qumran, where a white-clothed army of the Lord was waiting, watching, and preparing for exactly such a one as he foretold. The air of the desert in those days, in fact, was filled with the expectation of a Messiah and the Messianic Age. John, however, was no Essene, as we know both from his garb and from his diet. He was in the line, rather, of Elijah, who is described in the Book of Kings as a man who wore “a garment of haircloth, with a girdle of leather about his loins.”^{Note 73} And the rite of baptism that he preached, whatever its meaning at that time may have been, was an ancient rite coming down from the old Sumerian temple city Eridu, of the water god Ea, “God of the House of Water,” whose symbol is the tenth sign of the zodiac, Capricorn (a composite beast with the foreparts of a goat and body of a fish), which is the sign into which the sun enters at the winter solstice for rebirth. In the Hellenistic period, Ea was called Oannes, which is in Greek Ioannes, Latin Johannes, Hebrew Yoḥanan,English John. Several scholars have suggested, therefore, that there was never either John or Jesus, but only a water-god and a sun-god. The chronicle of Josephus seems to guarantee John, however;^{Note 74} and I shall leave it to the reader to imagine how he came both by the god’s name and by his rite.

The episode of the baptism, then, whether taken as a mythological motif or as a biographical event, stands for the irrevocable passage of a threshold. The counterpart in the Buddha legend is the long series of visits to hermitages and ascetics, terminating with the five fasting mendicants on the bank of the river Nairanjana, after his stay with whom the Future Buddha bathed in the waters of the stream and departed alone to the Tree of Illumination.^{Note 75} Analogously, John the Baptist and his company represent the ultimate horizon of saintly realization antecedent to the victory of the Savior: the last outpost, beyond which his lonesome, individual adventure now was to proceed. And as the future Buddha, having tested all the sages of his time, bathed in the river Nairanjana and departed to his tree alone, so likewise Jesus, half a millennium later, leaving behind the wisdom of the Law and teaching of the Pharisees, came to the ultimate teacher of his time — and passed beyond.

In the Gospel according to Mark, as we have said, this event is the first recounted of the Savior: there is no notice in that text of the Virgin Birth. But there is no mention of it either in Paul or in John — or even in Matthew and Luke beyond the two passages above noted, which may be late interpolations. Moreover, in Matthew and Luke two quite different genealogies appear, both of which, however, trace the line of the house of David down to Jesus by way of Joseph.^{Note 76} It is reasonably certain that in the earliest, strictly Jewish stage of the development of this legend, the completely un-Jewish idea of the begetting of a hero by a god can have played no role, and that the episode of the initiatory baptism in Jordan must have marked the opening of the Messianic career.

THE TEMPTATION IN THE DESERT

After the words, “Thou art my beloved Son,” the Mark gospel goes on: “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.”^{Note 77}

Matthew and Luke amplify this narrative. The following is from Luke:

And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit for forty days in the wilderness, tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days; and when they were ended, he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone’ [Deuteronomy 8:3].”^{* *}Matthew’s account is about the same, but adds: “… but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”

And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory; for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it shall all be yours.” And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’ [Deuteronomy 6:13].”

And he took him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you, to guard you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone’ [Psalm 91:11–12].” And Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God’ [Deuteronomy 6:16].”^{† †}Matthew reverses the order of temptations two and three. And when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.^{‡ ‡}Luke 4:1–13. Matthew ends: ‘Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him” (Matthew 4:1–11).

It is to be remarked that the Puritan Milton’s epic poem Paradise Regained is devoted to this episode of the conquest of the devil in the desert of the mind; whereas a Gothic author, on the other hand, or a Catholic today, would have expected that a work bearing such a title should deal with the world-redeeming sacrifice of the Cross.

To be remarked also is the resemblance — though with contrast — of this temptation of the World Savior by a devil into whose hands the glory and authority of the kingdoms of the world had been delivered, to that of the Buddha — the earlier World Savior — by the lord of the world illusion whose name is “Desire and Death.” Having considered all the teachings of the sages and practices of ascetics, and having bathed in the stream Nairanjana, the Future Buddha came forth and sat upon the bank. A herdsman’s daughter, moved and guided by the gods, brought him a rich bowl of milk, on which he restored his emaciated body; whereafter, he proceeded alone to the Tree of Enlightenment, beneath which he placed himself — and there appeared to him then the creator of the world illusion.

I have given the tale in Oriental Mythology^{Note 78} and need not repeat it here, beyond suggesting its relationship to the desert scene of Christ. The first temptation of the Buddha was of desire (kama ), the second, of fear, the fear of death (mara), which two correspond to the two mainsprings of delusion recognized in modern psychiatric schools: desire and aggression, eros and thanatos.^{Note 79} They are the chief motivations of life, and by transcending them the Buddha rose to a sphere of knowledge that the world delusion occludes — after attaining which, he taught for some fifty years.

In the Christian scene, the first temptation was economic: First eat, seek the spirit later — which is the philosophy of Nietzsche’s “flies of the market place”: security, the marketing orientation, economic determinism; while the second temptation (according to Luke, third according to Matthew) was political: Rule the world (in the name, of course, of God, as always in the Levant) — which was the plane of concern of the Old Testament Messianic hope. For, to quote once again Professor Klausner (with his usual italics):

The definition of belief in the Messiah is: The prophetic hope for the end of this age, in which a strong redeemer, by his power and his spirit, will bring complete redemption, political and spiritual, to the people of Israel, and along with this, earthly bliss and moral perfection to the entire human race. … In the belief in the Messiah of the people of Israel, the political part goes arm in arm with the ethical part, and the nationalistic with the universalistic. It is Christianity which has attempted to remove the political and nationalistic part which is there, and leave only the ethical and spiritual part.^{Note 80}

In the Christian temptation scene we have, exactly, the counterpart in symbolic terms of this authoritative verbal definition of the change from Old to New Testament thought. And so it appears that even in the earliest Christian reading of the Messianic Age, the political-economic orientation had been rejected and a plane of universalism attained that was neither national nor racial. Whether Christ himself was responsible for this, no one can surely say; but in any case, it is fundamental to the Gospels and is, in fact, the basis for the classification of Christianity, like Buddhism, as a World (not Ethnic, Tribal, Racial, or National) Religion.

However, the danger of what Dr. Jung has termed “inflation” is the next temptation, the elevation of the mystic mind when it believes it has surpassed the earth (Compare the Aeolus episode of the Odyssey discussed in Gods and Heroes of the European West.). Transported by Satan to the pinnacle of the temple, the Son of God who has just overcome the two material claims of what Schopenhauer termed the “vegetal” and “animal” orders of existence now is to suppose himself to be an angel, without taint of earth, without weight. But Christ, True Man as well as True God, is (to use another Jungian term) a “uniting” or “transcendent” symbol, showing the way between antitheses, in this case earth and sky. And so the next we learn is that, instead of passing away in ecstasy, this Son of Man, as well as of God, has returned to his community, to teach.

THE WORLD TEACHER

Again according to Mark:

Now after John [the Baptist] was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” And passing along by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net in the sea; for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending their nets. And immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and followed him. And they went into Capernaum; and immediately on the sabbath he entered the synagogue and taught. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.

And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit; and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching! With authority he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him!” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.^{Note 81}

Viewed from a distance, the wandering sage of Galilee with his cluster of disciples, teaching, performing miracles, and challenging the established readers of the law, resembles many others, both before and since: the Buddha, the numerous World Teachers of the Jains, Elijah and Elisha, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Apollonius of Tyana. And the miracles, in particular, suggest the archetypal figure of the Oriental wonder-worker. Indeed, a number of such characters are named in the New Testament itself: Simon Magus of Samaria (Acts 8:9–24), Bar-Jesus and Elymas the Magician (Acts 13:6–12); at Ephesus, seven sons of the Jewish high priest Sceva (Acts 19:13–20), and at Caesarea, Agabus the Prophet (Acts 21:10-11). The Church has made a great deal of Christ’s miracles: however, one can only wonder why such occult signs should ever have been supposed by men of intelligence to constitute the proof, or even desirability, of an elevated religion; for, as Professor Guignebert has observed:

All the religions that have so desired have had their miracles, the same miracles, and, on the other hand, all have shown themselves equally incapable of producing certain other miracles. The unprejudiced scholar is not surprised at this, because he knows that the same causes everywhere produce the same effects. But what is strange is that the believer is not surprised at it either. He merely insists that … his miracles are the only genuine ones; others are mere empty appearances, fabrications, frauds, uncomprehended facts, or witchcraft.^{Note 82}

Viewed more closely, on the other hand, in the context of his heritage, the gospel of the Nazarene represents two profound innovations. The first had to be reinterpreted when its promise failed of fulfillment, yet supports to this day the basic mythological expectation of the faithful; while the second has given the Christian world its ethical and spiritual, as distinct from clerical and sacramental, ground.

For already in the first recorded cry of the Good News, the conviction was announced that the kingdom of God was at hand; and throughout the first century of the Church this proclamation was interpreted literally, in apocalyptic, historical terms: as, for instance, in Paul’s epistle to the Romans. “You know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand.”^{Note 83} The Day of the Messiah foreseen by the Essenes had arrived.

Yet the Messiah himself, in contrast to the waiting and watching Essenes, in contrast also to the Baptist, was neither a moralist nor an ascetic in the usual sense of these terms. He deliberately, on occasion, broke the statutes of the Mosaic Law, declaring, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath”;^{Note 84} and again: “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost; but new wine is for fresh skins.”^{Note 85} And when it was complained that he sat and ate with sinners, he replied: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”^{Note 86} Moreover, in what represents the most vivid line of contrast of the Christian to the Essene view of purity of heart, whereas the white-clothed brotherhood of Qumran had taught love for those of their own brotherhood of light but hatred for all sons of darkness, we have the words of Jesus: “Love your enemies.”^{Note 87} And when asked by one of the scribes, “Which commandment is the first of all?” he replied: “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength’ [Deuteronomy 6:4]. The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’ [Leviticus 19:18]. There is no other commandment greater than these.”^{Note 88}

THE POWER OF THE KEYS

“Now,” as we read in the gospel according to Matthew,

when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ.

From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.”^{Note 89}

In the life and legend of the Buddha there is a comparably ambivalent relation between the World Teacher and his beloved body servant Ananda, who, like Peter, never got spiritual things quite right, yet was made the head of the church. We note that in later Christian legend Peter is not placed within the heavenly sanctuary but as porter stands at the gate; and it might be supposed accordingly, that the flock in his keep, the good folk of the church of which he is the bedrock, also must be just outside. Certainly in the Buddhist fold, where the ministrations of the clergy represent simply a preparatory herding of the good sheep toward an experience that each in the silence of his heart must ultimately come to on his own, such is the meaning of the tenderly represented, cumbersome humanity of Ananda; and one cannot but suspect that in the writings of the Evangelists, too, there may have been some such implication in their representation of Peter as a good — indeed, a very good — loyal, honorable, and doting devotee of his master, just a little short of the insight that would have brought him through the gate to realization.

THE LAST DAY

And when it was evening [the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the passover lamb] Jesus came with the twelve; and as they were at table eating, Jesus said: “Truly I say to you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” They began to be sorrowful, and to say to him one after another, “Is it I?” He said to them, “It is one of the twelve, one who is dipping bread in the same dish with me. For the Son of man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.” And as they were eating, he took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. And Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away; for it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’ [Zechariah 13:7]. But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” Peter said to him, “Even though they all fall away, I will not.” And Jesus said to him, “Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” But he said vehemently, “If I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And they all said the same.

And they went to a place which was called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, “Sit here, while I pray.” And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed and troubled. And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch.” And going a little farther, he fell on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” And he came and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not watch one hour? Watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to answer him. And he came a third time, and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? It is enough; the hour has come; the Son of man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.”

And immediately, while he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the scribes and the elders. Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, “The one I shall kiss is the man; seize him and lead him away safely.” And when he came, he went up to him at once, and said, “Master!” And he kissed him. And they laid hands on him and seized him. But one of those who stood by drew his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear. And Jesus said to them, “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs to capture me? Day after day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me. But let the scriptures be fulfilled.” And they all forsook him, and fled.

And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.

And they led Jesus to the high priest; and all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes were assembled. And Peter had followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest; and he was sitting with the guards, and warming himself at the fire. Now the chief priests and the whole council sought testimony against Jesus to put him to death; but they found none. For many bore false witness against him, and their witness did not agree. And some stood up and bore false witness against him, saying, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’ ” Yet not even so did their testimony agree. And the high priest stood up in the midst, and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?” But he was silent and made no answer. Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” And Jesus said, “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” And the high priest tore his mantle, and said, “Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?” And they all condemned him as deserving death. And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to strike him, saying to him, “Prophesy!” And the guards received him with blows.

And as Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the maids of the high priest came; and seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him and said, “You also were with the Nazarene, Jesus.” But he denied it, saying, “I neither know nor understand what you mean.” And he went out into the gateway and the cock crowed. And the maid saw him, and began again to say to the bystanders, “This man is one of them.” But again he denied it. And after a little while again the bystanders said to Peter, “Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean.” But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, “I do not know this man of whom you speak.” And immediately the cock crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, “Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” And he broke down and wept.

And as soon as it was morning the chief priests, with the elders and scribes, and the whole council held a consultation; and they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him to Pilate. And Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” And he answered him, “You have said so.” And the chief priests accused him of many things. And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.” But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate wondered. Now at the feast he used to release for them any one prisoner whom they asked. And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas. And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he was wont to do for them. And he answered them, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release for them Barabbas instead. And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man whom you call the King of the Jews?” And they cried out again, “Crucify him.” And Pilate said to them, “Why, what evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas; and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.

And the soldiers led him away inside the palace (that is, the praetorium); and they called together the whole battalion. And they clothed him in a purple cloak, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on him. And they began to salute him, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck his head with a reed, and spat upon him. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak, and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him. And they compelled a passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross. And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means the place of the skull). And they offered him wine mingled with myrrh; but he did not take it. And they crucified him, and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take. And it was the third hour, when they crucified him. And the inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” And with him they crucified two robbers, one on his right and one on his left. And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads, and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” So also the chief priests mocked him to one another and the scribes, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him.

And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole earth until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold, he is calling Elijah.” And one ran and filled a sponge full of vinegar, put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.” And Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last.

And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that he thus breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was a son of God!”

There were also women looking on from afar, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses and Salome, who, when he was in Galilee, followed him, and ministered to him; and also many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem. And when evening had come, since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate, and asked for the body of Jesus. And Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead. And when he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. And he bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud, and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of the rock; and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid.

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?” And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; for it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.^{Note 90}

V. The Illusory Christ

It is clear that, whether accurate or not as to biographical detail, the moving legend of the Crucified and Risen Christ was fit to bring a new warmth, immediacy, and humanity, to the old motifs of the beloved Tammuz, Adonis, and Osiris cycles. Indeed, it was those early myths, filling the atmosphere of the whole eastern Mediterranean, that had furnished the ambient of readiness within which the Christian legend so rapidly grew and spread. But the pagan mythologies and their cults were, at that time, themselves in a phase of burgeoning transformation. The Hellenistic concept of “humanity” as a totality, transcending all racial, national, tribal, and sectarian forms, was operating everywhere to effect a cross-fertilization of cults. And a massive shift in social emphasis from rural to cosmopolitan populations had, centuries before, converted the old, beloved field divinities into intimately personal, psychologically effective spiritual guides, appearing in elite as well as in popular rites of initiation. Moreover, a general association of mystical and philosophical thought with the symbols of religion made it possible, everywhere, to pass from one mode of communication to the other, from new verbal definitions to new iconographic combinations, and vice versa. Certain influences from India, dating from the Buddhist missions of Ashoka (268–232 b.c.) (See Hellenism: 331 b.c.–324 b.c., and The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology), also were at work. The multiplication of cults was, consequently, great, as was also the multiplication of myths. And in such an atmosphere it was inevitable that the savior image of the Christians should be in danger not only of contamination from the pagans, but also of absorption, one way or another, into related pagan cults.

Already in one of the later letters of Paul, sent from Rome, c. 61–64 a.d., to his newly founded community in Colossae in Asia Minor, there is mention of a growing Gnostic heresy among the membership of that young congregation. “See to it,” he warned his distant flock,

that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. … He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. … Let no one disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, taking his stand on visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God. … Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you once walked, when you lived in them. But now put them all away.^{Note 91}

Until recently it was not known what the actual teachings had been of those Gnostic Christian sects that in the first centuries flourished throughout the Roman Empire; for with the victory of the Orthodox Church in the fourth and fifth centuries a.d., the banned writings, teachings, and teachers disappeared. Our reports of them came only from their enemies, the Church Fathers; notably, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus (second century), Clement of Alexandria (late second and early third centuries), Hippolytus (d.c. 230 a.d.), and Epiphanius (c. 315–402 a.d.). Hence, it was an event no less important than that of the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls when a large jar was unearthed near Nag-Hamadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, containing forty-eight Coptic Gnostic works, totaling over seven hundred pages. Most of these are now in the Coptic museum, Cairo. One arrived in 1952 at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Editions and translations are in progress, much remains to appear, and scholars of the next decade will possess a far greater knowledge of Gnosticism than is possible today. However, certain leading principles and themes of the movement have already been ascertained.

In 1896, when the Berlin Museum acquired a papyrus codex of about the date of these Hamadi texts, three important Gnostic works came to light: “The Sophia of Jesus Christ,” “The Apocryphon of John,” and “The Gospel of Mary.” A 1785 acquisition of the British Museum, now known as Pistis Sophia, of which translations began to appear in the middle 1850s, also has provided information. And, finally, an often-cited work of mixed Gnostic and orthodox strains, known as the “Acts of John,” ascribed to the supposed author of the Fourth Gospel, was read aloud, in part, at the Council of Nicaea, 325 a.d., and formally condemned. When we review these in the light of what we now have come to know, both from the great Nag-Hamadi trove and from our understanding, recently gained, of the Docetic doctrines of Mahāyāna Buddhism (the growth and flowering of which exactly coincided with the high period of the Gnostic movement), the implications of their imagery can be judged with enlarged appreciation.

For example, in the Acts of John we find the following astonishing rendition of the scene of Christ’s summoning of his apostles at the Sea of Galilee. The Messiah has just come from his desert fast of forty days and his victory there over Satan. John and James are in their boat, fishing. Christ appears on the shore. And John is supposed to be telling, now, of the occasion:

For when he had chosen Peter and Andrew, who were brothers, he came to me and James my brother, saying: “I have need of you, come unto me.” And my brother, hearing that, said to me: “John, what does that child want who is on the shore there and called to us?” And I said: “What child?” And he said again, “The one beckoning to us.” And I answered: “Because of the long watch we have kept at sea, you are not seeing right, my brother James. But do you not see the man who is standing there, comely, fair, and of cheerful countenance?” But he answered: “Him, brother, I do not see. But let us go, and we shall see what he wants.”

And so, when we had brought our boat to land, we saw him, also, helping us to settle it; and when we left, thinking to follow him, he appeared to me to be rather bald, but with a beard thick and flowing, but to James he seemed a youth whose beard had newly come. We were therefore, both of us, perplexed as to what we had seen should mean. And as we followed him, continuing, we both were, little by little, even more perplexed as we considered the matter. For in my case there appeared this still more wonderful thing: I would try to watch him secretly, and I never at any time saw his eyes blinking, but only open. And often he would appear to me to be a little man, uncomely, but then again as one reaching up to heaven. Moreover, there was in him another marvel: when we sat to eat he would clasp me to his breast, and sometimes the breast felt to me to be smooth and tender, but sometimes hard, like stone. …^{Note 92}

Another glory, also, would I tell to you, my brethren: namely, that sometimes when I would take hold of him, I would meet with a material and solid body, but again, at other times, when I touched him, the substance was immaterial and as if it existed not at all. And if at any time he were invited by some Pharisee and accepted the invitation, we accompanied him; and there was set before each of us a loaf by those who entertained; and with us, he too received one. But his own he would bless and apportion among us. And of that little, every one was filled, and our own loaves were saved whole, so that those who had invited him were amazed. And often when I walked with him, I desired to see the print of his foot, whether it appeared on the earth; for I saw him, as it were, sustaining himself above the earth: and I never saw it.

And these things I tell you, my brethren, for the encouragement of your faith in him; for we must, at present, keep silence concerning his mighty and wonderful works, in as much as they are unspeakable and, it may be, cannot at all either be uttered or be heard.^{Note 93}

The term “docetism” (from the Greek dokein, “to appear”) denotes such a view of the Savior, which holds that Christ’s body, as seen by men, was a mere appearance, the reality being celestial or divine; and its appearance furthermore, a function of the mentality of the seer, not of the reality of the seen: a mere mask, that might change but not be removed. We must remark, moreover, that in India, in just these first centuries a.d., the Mahāyāna was developing, where the appearance of the Buddha was interpreted exactly this way. The Buddha of the Mahāyāna is not a mere man who achieved Illumination, but the manifestation of Illumination itself, which appeared in the form of a teacher, expressly to illuminate those entangled in the coils of their own masking delusions, delusions derived from the universal thirst for life and fear of death. In the Mahāyāna Buddhist view, the entire world, as seen, was equally delusory, its substance, in fact, being the Buddha.

Stars, darkness, a lamp, a phantom, dew, a bubble;

A dream, a flash of lightning, and a cloud:

Thus should we look upon the world.^{Note 94}

Or, in Shakespeare’s wonderful language:

… . We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.^{Note 95}

But with this we are in the realm again, properly of myth, not pseudo-history. For here God does not become Man; but man, the world itself, is known as divine, a field of inexhaustible spiritual depth. And the problem of creation is the problem of the origin of delusion, which, as in Buddhism, is treated psychologically. The problem of redemption, therefore, is, according to this view, psychological too.

In a late Greek-Egyptian body of pagan Gnostic teaching known as the Corpus Hermeticum, put forth as a revelation of the syncretic god Hermes-Thot, the guide of souls, there is a perfectly glorious passage, to this point, as follows:

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grow to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time, and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and every science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights, and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God. But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be”; then, what have you to do with God? Your thought can grasp nothing beautiful and good, if you cleave to the body, and are evil.

For it is the height of evil not to know God; but to be capable of knowing God, and to wish and hope to know him, is the road which leads straight to the Good; and it is an easy road to travel. Everywhere God will come to meet you, everywhere he will appear to you, at places and times at which you look not for it, in your waking hours and in your sleep, when you are journeying by water and by land, in the nighttime and in the daytime, when you are speaking and when you are silent; for there is nothing which is not God. And do you say “God is invisible”? Speak not so. Who is more manifest than God? For this very purpose has he made all things. Nothing is invisible, not even an incorporeal thing; mind is seen in its liking, and God in his working.

So far, thrice-greatest one, I have shown you the truth. Think out all else in like manner for yourself, and you will not be misled.^{Note 96}

In one of the recently discovered Gnostic codices of the jar of Nag-Hamadi we find the following, attributed to Jesus:

I am the Light that is above them all,

I am the All.

The All came forth from Me and the All attained to Me.

Cleave a piece of wood, I am there:

Lift up the stone, you will find me there.^{Note 97}

It has been determined that the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament were derived from a common stock of “sayings” (logia), preserved and passed about, at first orally, among the communities of the faithful, which then became fixed in various ways in various writings. The editors of the Gospels according to Mark, Matthew, and Luke (in that order, between c. 75 and 90 a.d.), drew from these in the fashioning of their separate, mutually contradictory accounts. Matthew and Luke drew independently from Mark, but also from another text, now lost, known to scholarship as “Q” (from the German Quelle, “Source”), which is believed to have been a collection merely of “Sayings.” Mark also may have drawn from “Q”; but Matthew and Luke certainly did. And each set the “Sayings” in his own way, like pearls in settings of his own invention.

But now, suddenly, from Nag-Hamadi there has come a collection of such sheer “Sayings” in which a Gnostic turn has been given to words long known to us in quite another sense from the orthodox Gospels. For example:

Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds, he will be troubled, and when he has been troubled, he will marvel and he will reign over the All.

His disciples said to him, “When will the Kingdom come?” And Jesus said: “It will not come by expectation; they will not say, ‘See here,’ or ‘See there.’ But the Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”

If those who lead you say to you: “See, the Kingdom is in heaven,” then the birds of the heaven will precede you. If they say to you: “It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. But the Kingdom is within you and is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty and you are poverty.^{Note 98}

Luke apparently drew from a saying related to the last of these when he attributed to Jesus, in a discourse to the Pharisees, the following, much argued, words:

“The Kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you — ἐντὸς ὑμῶν ἐστὶν — or, as others have read the Greek phrase, “is within you.”^{Note 99}

The trouble with the latter reading, when applied to a canonical, not Gnostic, Christian passage, however, is that it implies a theology of immanence, which is exactly what the Church, following the footsteps of the prophets, has been condemning as heresy and purging with fire and sword these many centuries. In the words of Charles Guignebert, written long before the finding of the Nag-Hamadi jar:

Linguistic arguments seem to justify the translation of ἐντὸς as within: but probability is definitely against it. Jesus could hardly tell the Pharisees, without appearing absurd, that the Kingdom of God was within them, in their hearts. And ignoring the Pharisees, none of his disciples, who were all authentic Jews, could have understood such a strange utterance, which is unsupported by any teaching in the Gospels. If this logion is the focal point of the whole teaching of Jesus concerning the Kingdom, its isolation is incredible. These objections raise, and to all appearances dispose of, the problem of its authenticity.

Nor is this all. If we read the verse in its context with ἐντὸς as within, a contradiction results. Luke makes this utterance a kind of introduction to a teaching on the coming of the Kingdom (17:22 ff.).^{* *}The substance of this also occurs in Matthew 24; Luke joins it up with the apocalyptic discourse of Mark 13. Q doubtless provides the basis for this. [Guignebert’s note.] But the coming of the Son of Man is there referred to as destined to be sudden: 17:24, “For as the lightning that lighteneth shines from one end of heaven to the other, so shall also the Son of Man be in his day.” In the view of all his disciples the only object of his coming was the inauguration of the Kingdom. He could therefore hardly say in the same breath, that the Kingdom was in the hearts of his hearers, and that he would come to establish it suddenly, in a day when he was not expected.

The obvious conclusion then is that ἐντὸς ὑμῶν means in the midst of you, which seems equally to imply the actual presence of the Kingdom. But then there arises the question whether the verb ἐστὶν is the real present tense or a prophetic present, that is to say, the future. This would change everything, even if ἐντὸς be taken to mean within. The probable meaning of the whole passage is: “When the Kingdom comes no one will have any difficulty in recognizing it, or will need to ask where it is. It will suddenly be in your midst, or in your hearts: that is, those who have suitably prepared themselves in accordance with the teaching of Jesus himself will enter into it.”

… Jesus taught, in conformity with current Jewish belief, that the Kingdom would come as a gift of God. But he perhaps believed, or at least his disciples after him believed, that, his own mission being to announce the imminent approach of this manifestation, his teaching, or from another angle, the belief in his vocation, was the outer chamber through which men had to pass to reach the Kingdom. … The Kingdom is primarily and essentially the material transformation of this present evil world.^{Note 100}

It is a fine, but important, point; for on it hangs the whole contrast between the way of the Church of Peter and Paul and the ways, numerous as the varieties of inward experience, of the Gnostics.

The “Gospel According to Thomas,” which is the text from which I have been quoting, contains 114 logia. Its Coptic manuscript is of c. 500 a.d., but the Greek text of which it was the translation belonged to c. 140 a.d., which is well within the period of the shaping of the Gospels, all four of which continued to be touched and retouched until the canon finally was fixed in Rome, toward the opening, only, of the fourth century a.d.

The high flowering time of the Gnostic movement was the middle of the second century, notably that period of the Antonines — Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161) and Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180) — which Edward Gibbon marked as the apogee of the glory of the Roman Empire: the world system, as he wrote, that at that time “comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind,” and when the various modes of worship that prevailed in the known world “were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful,” so that “toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious accord. Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.”^{Note 101}

 

Let me conclude this glimpse of the mysteries of the anathematized Gnostic heritage with a second passage from the Acts of John: the passage that was read and condemned at the Council of Nicaea. It is the most illuminating statement remaining to us of the Docetic — or, as one could as properly say, Mahāyāna — view of the silent sign of the crucifix. For, as it is written:

Now before he was taken by the lawless Jews, who had their law from the lawless serpent,^{* *}Compare the serpent Nehushtan of II Kings 18:4, which was worshiped in Solomon’s temple. See also, Figure 25, Figure 26, and Figure 30. According to the Gnostic view, if the world is evil, its creator was evil: its creator was exactly Satan, who appeared to Christ in the desert and is the Yahweh of the Old Testament. The Buddhist counterpart is the tempter of the Buddha, Kāma-Māra, who is represented in the Upaniṣads as the Self, out of whose Desire and Fear the world came into being. See The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology. he gathered all of us together and said: “Before I give myself up to them, let us praise the Father in a hymn of praise, and so go forth to meet what is to come.” Then he bade us make a circle, holding each other’s hands, and he was in the middle. And he said: “Answer me with Amen.” After which he began to sing a hymn of praise:

“Glory be to thee, Father!”

 

And we all, going around in a ring, answered, “Amen.”

 

“Glory be to thee, Word!

Glory be to thee, Grace!” — “Amen.”

 

“Glory be to thee, Divine Spirit!

Glory be to thee, Holy One!

Glory be to thee, Transfiguration!” — “Amen.”

 

“We praise thee, Father!

We give thanks to thee, O Light,

Wherein there is no darkness!” — “Amen.”

 

“And wherefore we give thanks, that will I tell:

“I will be saved, and I will save!” — “Amen.”

 

“I will be freed, and I will free!” — “Amen.”

“I will be wounded, and I will wound!” — “Amen.”

“I will be begotten, and I will beget!” — “Amen.”

 

“I will be consumed, and I will consume!” — “Amen.”

“I will hear, and I will be heard!” — “Amen.”

“I will be known, who am all spirit!” — “Amen.”

“I will be washed, and I will wash!” — “Amen.”

 

“Grace paces the round.

I will blow the pipe.

Dance the round, all!” — “Amen.”

 

“I will mourn: mourn all!” — “Amen.”

 

“The Pantheon of Eight [the Ogdoad] sings praise with us!” — “Amen.”

“The Number Twelve paces the round aloft!” — “Amen.”

“To each and all it is given to share in the dance!” — “Amen.”

“He who joins not in the dance mistakes the event!” — “Amen.”

 

“I will flee and I will stay.” — “Amen.”

“I will adorn and I will be adorned.” — “Amen.”

“I will be understood and I will understand.” — “Amen.”

 

“A mansion I have not, and mansions I have.” — “Amen.” “A torch am I to you who perceive me.” — “Amen.”

“A mirror am I to you who discern me.” — “Amen.”

“A door am I to you who knock at me.” — “Amen.”

“A way am I to you who pass.”

“So as you respond to my dancing, behold yourself in me, the speaker. And when you see what I do, keep silent concerning my mysteries. You that dance, ponder what I do, for yours is this passion of humanity that I am about to suffer. For you could not at all have understood your suffering, had I not been sent to you as the Word of the Father. When you saw my suffering, you saw me as the sufferer; and seeing it, you stood not fast, but were all shaken. In your drive toward wisdom, you have me for a bed: rest upon me. You will know who I am when I depart. What now I am seen to be, that I am not. You shall see when you arrive. — Had you known how to suffer, you would have been able not to suffer. See through suffering, and you will have non-suffering. What you know not, I myself will teach you. I am your God, not the betrayer’s God. I will bring the souls of the saints into harmony with myself. In me know the Word of Wisdom. — Say with me again:

“Glory to thee, Father!

“Glory to thee, Word!

“Glory to thee, Holy Spirit!”

“And if you would understand what I am, know this: all that I have said I have uttered playfully, and I was by no means ashamed thereby. I danced; but as for you, consider the whole, and having considered it, say:

“Glory be to thee, Father! — Amen!”^{Note 102}

The narrator, John, is now about to proceed to a view of the crucifixion itself from the standpoint of this Docetic understanding of the mystery. The Father receiving praise in these ejaculations cannot be identified either with the God of the Old Testament or with the Father of the New. The best analogy is with Ahura Mazda of the Persian myth. Yahweh or Elohijn is then approximately the counterpart of Angra Mainyu, the creator of the world of the Lie, in which we live and from which the savior is to set us free. Moreover, this savior, like Zoroaster, descends from the sphere of Light; but, unlike Zoroaster, partakes only apparently of the nature of the world.

And thus, my beloved, having danced with us, the Lord went forth. And like men gone astray or dazed with sleep, we fled this way and that. And I, then, when I saw him suffering, did not abide his suffering, but fled to the Mount of Olives, weeping for what had come to pass. And when he was hung upon that thorn of a cross, darkness fell at the sixth hour on the whole earth.

And lo, my Lord was standing in the middle of the cave, and illumined it, and spoke: “John, for the multitude below in Jerusalem I am being crucified and pierced with lances and staves; vinegar and gall are given me to drink. But to you I speak, and to what I speak, give ear. Secretly, I caused you to ascend this mountain, so that you should learn what a disciple must learn from his master, and man from God.”

With these words he showed me an implanted cross of light and about the cross a great multitude that had not one uniform shape. And in that cross of light there was one form and one appearance. And upon the cross I saw the Lord himself, and he had no shape, but only a voice: and a voice not such as was familiar to us, but one sweet and kind and truly of God, saying to me: “John, it is needful that there be one who hears these things from me, for I have need of one that will hear. This cross of light is sometimes called the Word by me for your sakes, sometimes Mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ, sometimes Door, sometimes Way, sometimes Bread, sometimes Seed, sometimes Resurrection, sometimes Son, sometimes Father, sometimes Spirit, sometimes Life, sometimes Truth, sometimes Faith, sometimes Grace. So it is for men. But what it is in truth, as conceived in itself, as spoken between us, it is the marking off of all things, and the firm uplifting of things fixed out of things unstable, and the harmony of wisdom — of the wisdom that is harmony.

“But there are forces of the right and forces of the left, potencies, angelic powers and demons, efficacies, threats, upsurges of wrath, devils, Satan, and the lower root from which the nature of Becoming issued. And so it is this cross which spiritually bound the All together, and which marked off the realm of change and the lower realm, and which caused all things to rise up.

“It is not that cross, the wooden cross that you will see when you go down from here; nor am I whom you now cannot see but whose voice alone you hear he that is on the cross. I was thought to be what I am not, not being what I was to those many others: what they will say of me is wretched and unworthy of me. Those who neither see nor name the place of stillness will much less see the Lord.

“The multitude not of one aspect that throngs around the cross is the lower nature. And if those whom you see by the cross have as yet no single form, then all the parts of him who descended have not been gathered together. But when the nature of mankind has been taken up and a generation of men moved by my voice comes close to me, you, who hear me now, shall be united therewith, and what now is shall no longer be. But you will then stand above those, as I now do. For until you call yourself mine own, I shall not be what I am. When you hear me, however, you will be a hearer like myself. For this you are through me.

“Therefore have no concern for the many and despise the profane. Know that I am wholly with the Father and the Father wholly with me. Nothing of what they will relate of me have I suffered. Even the passion that I revealed to you and the others in the round dance, I would that it were called a mystery. For what you are, that you see, and I have shown it to you: but what I am, I alone know, and no man else. Suffer me then to keep what is mine, but what is yours, behold through me; and see me in mine essence, not as I have said I was, but as you, being akin to me, know me.

“You heard that I suffered, but I suffered not.

An unsuffering one was I, yet suffered.

One pierced was I, yet I was not abused.

One hanged I was, and yet not hanged.

Blood flowed from me, yet did not flow.

“In brief, what they say of me, that have I not suffered; but what they do not say, that have I suffered. What it is, that I intimate in a riddle; for I know you will understand. Know me, then, as the praise of the Word, the transfixing of the Word, the blood of the Word, the wound of the Word, the hanging up of the Word, the suffering of the Word, the nailing of the Word, the death of the Word. And thus in my discourse have I distinguished the man from myself.

“First, therefore, know the Word, the inwardness, the meaning. Then you will know the Lord, and thirdly, the man and what he has suffered.”

When he had spoken thus to me and still more, which I know not how to say as he would have me, he was caught up and none of the multitude saw him. And when I went down, I laughed at them all, for he had told me what they have said concerning him; holding fast this one thing in myself: that the Lord carried out everything symbolically, for the conversion and salvation of men.^{Note 103}

VI. The Mission of Paul

During the first centuries of the Christian era, three main views of the mission of Jesus were in play. The earliest was that of the Jewish Christians of Palestine, of whom we read in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that when they had come together and the risen Christ appeared to them, they asked, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”^{Note 104} For these there can have been no mythology of the Virgin Birth. Their teacher was the Messiah, the Anointed of the Lord, as prophesied for Israel from of old, and the new thing was simply that the Day of Yahweh now had come, actually and historically: the day when Israel should be glorified and justified before the world. This we may call the primary apocalyptic view. Isaiah had prophesied of that day: “Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise.”^{Note 105} Christ had risen: that was the clarion call (Isaiah 27:13). The day had dawned of which Yahweh had declared through his prophet: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. … I will rejoice in Jerusalem.”^{Note 106}

The second view was that of the Gnostics. This, we have seen, was in its theology older than Christianity and alien to the Jews, and during the first century was linked only loosely to the Christian movement. However, in the course of the second century, when the grandiose promise of the early Christian apocalyptic vision failed to come to pass, so that the expectation had somehow to be spiritualized, the seeds of Christian Gnosticism took root and gained in force. Moreover, a still more dangerous threat to the authority of the Pauline Church arose in the vigorous heresiarch Marcion (fl. c. 150 a.d.), of whom Justin Martyr wrote that “by the help of devils he has caused many of every nation to speak blasphemies, and to deny that God is the maker of the universe and to assert that some other being greater than He has done greater works.”^{Note 107}

For Marcion stressed the contrast between the Old and New Testament views of God and proposed a Christian canon completely independent of the Old, based largely on Paul and Luke. His own doctrine was that the God of the Old Testament had indeed been the creator of the world we know as evil. He had created man from matter and imposed on him a strict law that none could keep, and so the whole race had fallen under his curse. He was not the highest God, however, though he thought himself to be so. Above him was another power, of which he had no conception, who, in love and pity for the world in torment, sent his son, Christ, as a redeemer. Clothed in a visionary body, in the likeness of a man of thirty years, the Son made his appearance in the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius (r. 14–37 a.d.), preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. The Jews mistook him for their national Messiah, and even his apostles failed to understand. Moreover, the Old Testament deity himself had no idea of the dignity of this teacher, but in fear caused him to be crucified, and by that act accomplished his own doom. Christ, according to Marcion, appeared after his crucifixion to Paul, who, alone of all, understood the gospel and, opposing the Jewish Christians, founded properly Christian churches among the gentiles — which, however, were now being corrupted by Judaizing tendencies, against which Marcion had been appointed by the true God to preach.

In contrast to the Gnostic way, Marcion placed his emphasis not on knowledge, but on faith, which had, of course, the more popular appeal, and his doctrine, consequently, was a real threat to the early Church. It was, in fact, so real a threat that the Fathers were stirred to shape their own version of a New Testament largely to refute the earlier canon of the Marcionites; and for one entire century — 150-250 a.d. — it actually appeared that the independent Testament of the heresiarch might gain the field.

The book that won, however, was that according to which the New Law was interpreted as a fulfillment of the Old, but on a plane rather of spiritual than of socio-political ideals: even though it continued to be hoped that in the end the doomsday prophesied would come to pass — largely in Zoroastrian terms, with Christ in the role of Saoshyant at the right hand of the Father, to judge the living and the dead — which then would be the literal end of the world. For some reason, Christian writers like to interpret this belief and hope as a positive, world-affirmative doctrine, and place it in contrast to the Gnostic, which they term negative. Also, they commonly tell of the great “danger” of Gnosticism, since it fostered — and would foster still — a diversity and multiplication of cults; whereas, with the victory of the one true Church in the fourth century a.d., there prevailed a “universal” religion, which (to quote one distinguished authority) “did not view itself as a coterie of the spiritually elite,”^{Note 108} and (to quote another) “stood for an entirely new concept of religion,” which “could not develop, according to the law of its own nature, unless it broke loose from the insidious forces which would have anchored it to a bygone world.”^{Note 109}

Actually, in Gnosticism, as in Buddhism to this day, there was diversity because (as the Church was to find out in due time) individuals have differing spiritual capacities and requirements, so that, as already told in that sensible episode in the Acts of John, of Jesus on the shore, no one can safely pretend to have grasped Truth once and for all: least of all a committee (whether of cardinals or of presbyters) legislating in the name of the great majority of a popular, so-called universal religion, for whom metaphysical speculation, experience, and symbolization must remain on a fairly elementary level. There is an old Roman proverb: Senatus bestia est; senatores, boni viri; which neither time nor tithe has rendered out of date.

Moreover, the paramount concern of a popular religion cannot be, and never has been, “Truth,” but the maintenance of a certain type of society, the inculcation in the young and refreshment in the old of an approved “system of sentiments” upon which the local institutions and government depend. And, as the documentation of our subject shows, the history of society itself has been marked over the millenniums by a gradual — ever so gradual — enlargement of group horizons: from the tribe or the village to the race or the nation, and beyond that, finally, with Buddhism and Hellenism, to the all-embracing concept of humanity — which is, however, not a governable but a spiritual unit of individuals. And in such a unit there have to be many mansions, as there were in Gnosticism. Nor is it proper to denigrate such separated orders (each minding its own business) by calling them coteries. They are rather schools for those of like disposition, for mutual instruction: more like, for example, Alcoholics Anonymous than, say, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which latter would teach us all to abstain from spirits too strong for some to imbibe.

We have to recall of Paul that he commenced his career as a persecutor of the early Jewish Christians in the name of his Pharisaic heritage. He was present, as we learn from the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, at the stoning to death of Saint Stephen. “The witnesses,” it is written, “laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. … And Saul was consenting to his death. And on that day a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem. … Saul laid waste the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”^{Note 110}

It could be said that in turning from Pharisee to Christian, Paul simply transferred his temperament to the other side of the line and that the Christian Church that he founded thus inherited and carried into Europe the stamp of his Levantine regard for the monolithic consensus. The first principle of his doctrine was that in Christ the Law had been abrogated. Indeed, like Marcion, he held that the Law had been a curse upon man; for, as he wrote: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law … that we might receive the promise of the spirit through faith.”^{Note 111} And again: “The law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian. … There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”^{Note 112} Those are burning, wonderful words. But in the very next letter we read that a new enforcement was in operation, of which Paul could cite the book:

I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. … I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men. … not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber — not even to eat with such a one. … Drive out the wicked person from among you. …^{Note 113}

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. … For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body — Jews or Greeks, slaves or free — and all were made to drink of one Spirit. … Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators, speakers in various kinds of tongues. …^{Note 114}

I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. Any man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled dishonors her head — it is the same as if her head were shaven. For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her wear a veil. For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.) That is why a woman ought to have a veil on her head, because of the angels.^{Note 115}

“Be imitators of me,” wrote Paul to his sheep, “as I am of Christ.”^{Note 116} Which is to say: let no one conceive or follow his own image of Christ, as in the Acts of John, but only that of Paul and his community. And so it was that in the name of this community, as its own image of Christ gradually matured, the history of the West for the next two thousand years was to be carved and trimmed.

 

The first epochal event in the history of this new consensus had been the stoning of Stephen. “On that day,” as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, “a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem; and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles.”^{Note 117}

The frightened scattering led to a dissemination of the doctrine beyond Jerusalem and Galilee, which then Paul continued, even preaching outside the Jewish fold to the gentiles — specifically, of those racially and culturally mixed trading towns where Jew and Greek (to use Paul’s recurrent phrase) were thrown together. In the purely Greek city of Athens he had almost no success, and in purely Jewish Jerusalem he escaped barely with his life.

“At Athens,” we are told, “his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols.” The idols, of course, were those luminous works of art of the Acropolis which stand, to this hour, among the crowning glories of the human spirit. And to those who had gathered about him in the middle of the Areopagus (for, as we read: “all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new”), he declaimed: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”

Which, from the pagan point of view, was, of course, an elementary mistake; for the Ineffable is not named or by anyone proclaimed, but is manifest in all things, and to claim knowledge of it uniquely is to have missed the point entirely. Besides, the altar in question had not been erected to the Ineffable, but to whatever significant god or gods unknown might have been omitted from the local cult. And in this character the god proclaimed by Paul might easily have been welcomed; however, the preacher was not proclaiming his god in that character.

“The God who made the world and everything in it,” Paul announced to the city in which Xenophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno had taught,

does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”: as even some of your poets have said, “For we are indeed his offspring.”

Being then God’s offspring [Paul continued], we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead.

Some mocked, we are told, but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” A few joined Paul and believed. But his harvest was disappointing. So he shook the dust of Athens from his feet and went to the trading city of Corinth,^{Note 118} where he lived and taught among both Greeks and Jews for eighteen months.

In Jerusalem, to which holy city Paul presently returned, he fared even worse than he had fared in Athens — almost as badly, indeed, as Stephen had fared before his own eyes, many years before. For there, as it is chronicled,

All the city was aroused, and the people ran together; they seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple, and at once the gates were shut. And as they were trying to kill him, word came to the [Roman] tribune of the cohort that all Jerusalem was in confusion. He at once took soldiers and centurions, and ran down to them; and when they saw the tribune and the soldiers, they stopped beating Paul. Then the tribune came up and arrested him, and ordered him to be bound with two chains. He inquired who he was and what he had done. Some in the crowd shouted one thing, some another; and as he could not learn the facts because of the uproar, he ordered him to be brought into the barracks. And when he came to the steps, he was actually carried by the soldiers because of the violence of the crowd; for the mob of the people followed, crying, “Away with him!”^{Note 119}

Paul, indeed, was between two worlds. But time was on his side. For both the religion of the polis and the religion of the tribal god had been left behind by the interplay of peoples throughout the empire of great Rome. And Rome itself, furthermore, would presently pass high noon.

VII. The Fall of Rome

In the year 167 a.d., the sixth in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, Germanic hordes from the north broke through the Roman wall between the upper Rhine and Danube, swarming into northern Italy; and since they could not be repulsed, they were allowed to settle as farmers on assigned lands within the frontier. Marcus Aurelius died in the year 180; his dissolute son Commodus succeeded; and revolts erupted in Germany, Gaul, Britain, Northwest Africa, and Judaea. A conspiracy in Rome itself was suppressed in 183, but nine years later the emperor was slain. His successor, Pertinax, was overthrown the following year by a mutiny of the guard, and the great catastrophe of the empire began.

The army in Rome elevated M. Didius Julianus to the throne; but the army in Syria supported C. Pescennius Niger; that in Britain, D. Clodius Albinus; and that on the Danube border, L. Septimius Severus, who ultimately won, after some four years of furious internecine war. Severus reigned sternly amidst wars until 211 a.d., to be followed by his son Caracalla, who in the year 213 repulsed a German invasion into Gaul, the following year subdued Armenia, and the next a revolt in Egypt. In 216 he turned against Parthia but was assassinated by his own guard — and so it went, from one amazement to the next. The Goths along the northern shore of the Black Sea took to piracy and, passing to the Mediterranean, raided everywhere as they went. Other German tribes pressed into Italy; still others into Gaul and Spain; a few crossed to Africa: and Roman cities, villages, and farms throughout the realm were going up in flame.

The Germans were an Aryan folk dwelling northeastward of the Celts, beyond the Elbe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Fairhaired, blue-eyed, and of towering stature, they were — like the Celts — courageous warriors; and the Roman legions, no longer what they had been in Caesar’s time, were finding them more than a match. However, these semi-nomadic fighting herdsmen, threatening with ever increasing force the northern defenses, represented only one of three great pressures to which the civilization of Rome was at that time being subjected, to its doom. The second lay beyond the Tigris, in the ill-protected East, in the form of the new Persian dynasty of the Sassanids, by whom the Parthians had been overthrown 226 a.d. And whereas the northern, German danger was mainly physical, representing in a sense a barbarization and rejuvenation of the European spirit itself, the new Persian threat was rather a danger to that very spirit.

Diocletian (r. 284–305 a.d.) moved his Roman court to Asia Minor to meet the new military power, which he matched with considerably more success than the powers to the north; but he was no match at all for the seduction of the Oriental mythology of his foe. The Sassanids were Zoroastrians. The Bundahish and other sacred texts were edited, interpreted, and amplified in their period; and a state church came to flower under a powerful Magian clergy. The openness of the West to Persian religious ideas can be judged from the rapid spread of Mithraism throughout the Roman Empire from the reign of Vespasian (69–79 a.d.); but in Persia itself the Zoroastrian revival, far from generating any sense of intercultural coexistence, was in true Levantine style antipathetic to the gentile world, particularly the West, or more specifically, Hellenism and syncretism, which the preceding Parthian dynasty had favored.

Diocletian, having set up his Asian court in Nicomedia, in Asia Minor, assumed the garb and pose of an Asian despot: the symbolic heavenly robe, embroidered with the pearls and precious stones of the bounding constellations of the universe. And, as the sun shines in the midst of all, as the golden door to eternity, so the kingly head with its diadem rose gloriously above the robe. The footstool of the world was at his feet, before which all had to bow. And as a further result of the force of the archaic Asian ideal, the Roman Empire itself was transformed into an Oriental machine state. Taxation had greatly increased in the century since Aurelius, and it now had become the custom to assign responsibility for the levy of each district to the wealthy men of the region: what they could not extract from the people they had to render from their own wealth; and so the middle class had collapsed. The peasant class had long since been devastated by the wars. Everywhere indigence, beggary, robbery, and violence were increasing; and Diocletian, to correct the trend, produced laws forbidding men to quit or change their occupation. Guild and union membership was made obligatory and could not be changed; so that a veritable caste system resulted, and with all working for the state. Wages and prices were determined by the state. The emperor’s ears and eyes, his spies, were everywhere observing, to make sure that all the rules were being obeyed. Professor James Breasted many years ago summarized the situation, in a paragraph that has lingered in my mind ever since my student years, as the prophecy of a time to come in our own fair land of the free:

Staggering under his crushing burden of taxes, in a State which was practically bankrupt, the citizen of every class had now become a mere cog in the vast machinery of the government. He had no other function than to toil for the State, which exacted so much of the fruit of his labor that he was fortunate if it proved barely possible for him to survive on what was left. As a mere toiler for the State, he was finally where the peasant on the Nile had been for thousands of years. The emperor had become a Pharaoh, and the Roman Empire a colossal Egypt of ancient days. The century of revolution which ended in the despotic reorganization by Diocletian completely destroyed the creative ability of ancient men in art and literature, as it likewise crushed all progress in business and affairs. In so far as the ancient world was one of progress in civilization, its history was ended with the accession of Diocletian.^{Note 120}

The Germans on one hand, the Orient on the other, had brought into being this Rome, into which Christianity now was to enter as a third transforming force. Diocletian dealt harshly with the Christians, recognizing them as enemies of the state, but Galerius, his successor (r. 304–311), issued an edict of toleration on the good old pagan principle that every god is entitled to the worship of its own people; and in the course of the complicated interludes of murder, palace intrigue, open wars, and massacre that bridged the years between Galerius’s death and Constantine’s accession (i.e. 311–324 a.d.), the issue of the Christian cause hung precariously in the balance, until — as the famous legend goes, on the word of Constantine himself to his biographer Eusebius — in the course of his preparation for the crucial battle with Maxentius, his chief rival for the crown, who was inimical to the Christians, the still pagan Constantine beheld in the sky a shining cross bearing the words Hoc vince, and his army saw it too. In a dream the following night, Christ appeared and bade him adopt that sign for his standard, which he did and, victory won, his loyalty thereafter was to the cross.^{Note 121}

The place of Constantine the Great in relation to the history of Christianity can be compared to that of Ashoka in the Buddhist cause. Each arose three centuries after the lifetime of his savior, and each converted what had been a religion indifferent to politics and even to the current social order into the secular religion of an empire. The comparable dates are these:

Jesus Christ c. 3 b.c.–30 a.d.	Gautama Buddha 563–483 b.c.
Constantine the Great r. 324–337 a.d.	Ashoka the Great r. 268–232 a.d.

Whereas, however, Ashoka preached and practiced non-violence and religious tolerance,^{Note 122} Constantine set to work, as soon as he had won his throne, to extirpate two heresies. The first was that of the Donatists of North Africa. These maintained that the efficacy of a sacrament depends on the spiritual state of the priest: anyone betraying the faith, they declared, is in possession not of the faith, but of guilt (qui fidem a perfido sumserit, non fidem per tip it sed reatum). The orthodox answer to this heresy was that the sacraments are sacred in themselves, not by virtue of men (sacramenta per se esse sancta, non per homines). And the danger of the controversy was that, if the Donatists were right, the entire ceremonial edifice of the Church would be dependent on the moral character of the clergy and no one could ever be sure that a given rite had been supernaturally effective; whereas, if the Donatists were wrong, a sacrament might be effectively administered even by a heretic or heathen.

The second controversy faced by Constantine was even more essential. It was that of the followers of Arius, who maintained that Christ was neither True God nor True Man. God, they averred, is absolutely unknowable and alone. Christ, though pre-existent to his incarnation, is a created being and therefore not truly God, though worshipful as the creator of all other creatures. In his incarnation as Jesus, the Son had assumed a human body but not a human soul. Hence, he was neither True God nor True Man.^{Note 123}

Perhaps in contrasting the attitudes of Ashoka and Constantine toward differences in belief, one should take into account the fact that the Indian had already gained his empire when the terrible spectacle of the carnage and calamity wrought by his armies struck him to the soul with an arrow of remorse, and he was converted to the Buddhist ethic of non-injury and compassion; whereas Constantine saw a vision of future victory and was converted thereby to something that has since been called Christianity — though it is difficult to construe its relationship to the lesson of Christ’s temptation in the desert. The next observation would have to be, however, that whereas the Buddhist empire of Ashoka collapsed only half a century after his death, the Christian empire of Constantine endured until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, eleven hundred and twenty-nine years after his gaining of his throne. And the crucial remark for the general theory of our subject, then, would perhaps have to be that in East and West the contrary destinies of the two great secular religions of salvation were established by the contrary characters of their first great kingly converts, not by the prophets to whose names they are referred.

For Ashoka’s recognition of suffering had been of the order (though not the intensity) of that of the Buddha himself when he stated, as the First of his Four Noble Truths, “All life is sorrowful.” Hence, in the royal edicts the essence of the teaching was honestly retained, and non-violence and compassion were sincerely fostered. But in the Occident, the religion of Christ became with Constantine the handmaid (or, better, fairy godmother) of politics, and authority for the dominance of a certain social order was alleged to have been derived from one who was supposed to have said: “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight.”^{Note 124} Hence, to the world-dividing question, “Are you interested in society or in Truth?” the Occidental monarch, answering honestly, would have had to have said, “In the former,” whereas the Indian could have said, “In Truth.”

And yet, ironically, whereas in the West the religion of the Savior has suffered throughout its history the degradation of an identification with politics, our Western political practices have been mollified to a significant degree through its influence, whereas, in contrast, Oriental political thought has remained governed to this day by the elementary political law of nature; which is, simply and forever, the Law of the Fishes (Sanskrit, matsya nyāya): The big ones eat the little ones, and the little ones have to be smart.

Constantine the Great was born in Dacia (now Rumania) c. 274 a.d. His mother, Helena, was a woman of low degree from Bithynia (in Northwest Asia Minor) and the concubine of Constantius, who put her aside, however, in the year 293, to marry the stepdaughter of Maximian, Theodora. Constantius then became Caesar of Rome and the young Constantine was removed to the Asian court of the Emperor Diocletian — with whom he marched to Egypt, where he met Eusebius, the future bishop of Caesarea and, later, his biographer. The young prince took as concubine a young woman named Minervina and begot on her his son Crispus — though he had been betrothed as early as 293 to the infant daughter of Maximian, Fausta. Affairs turning against him at court, he escaped to Gaul, where, when his father died quelling a rebellion in Britain, he assumed and presently won command of the empire of the West. We read of his wars in Gaul, from 306 to 312, that “even heathen feeling was shocked when he gave barbarian kings to the beasts, along with their followers by thousands at a time.”^{Note 125} And we know, too, that almost immediately after summoning and presiding over the Council of Nicaea, where the will and nature of God were proclaimed and defined for all mankind, he slew — for some unknown reason — both his son Crispus and his wife Fausta. Some kind of Phaedra tragedy has been suggested. But whatever the occasion may have been, it is clear that Constantine was a man of sterner stuff than Ashoka.

Having gained for himself the whole empire by 324 a.d., Constantine the Great set about welding it into one spiritual block, and to this end summoned, in 325 a.d., the Council of Nicaea. Over three hundred bishops attended, from every province of the realm, and after a sermon from the emperor on the necessity for unity, these set to work, first to fix a date for Easter and then to anathematize the Arians. The creed finally accepted (composed by the young deacon Athanasius of Alexandria) ran as follows:

We believe in one God, the Father all-Sovereign, maker of all things, both visible and invisible:

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, an only-begotten;

that is, from the essence (οὐσία) of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God — begotten, not made — being of one essence (ὁμοούσιον) with the Father;

by whom all things were made, both things in heaven and things on earth;

who for us men and for our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made man, suffered, and rose again the third day, ascended into heaven, cometh to judge the quick and the dead:

And in the Holy Spirit.

But those who say that “there was once when he was not,” and “before he was begotten he was not,” and “he was made of things that were not,” or maintain that the Son of God is of a different essence (ἐξ ἑτέρος οὐσίας ἠ ὑποστάσεως), or created or subject to moral change or alteration — these doth the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematize.^{Note 126}

In the reign of Constantine Christianity was accorded equal status with the pagan religions of the empire, but half a century later, in the reign of Theodosius the Great (r. 379–395), it was declared to be the only religion allowed; and with that the period was inaugurated by imperial decree that has since been known as the Dark Ages. Edward Gibbon tells of its onset; and I can think of no more appropriate way to ring down the curtain on the Age of the Great Classics than with a passage of his classic prose.

“In Syria,” he states, after reviewing scenes in various other of the Roman provinces,

the divine and excellent Marcellus, as he is styled by Theodoret, a bishop animated with apostolic fervor, resolved to level with the ground the stately temples within the diocese of Apamea. His attack was resisted by the skill and solidity with which the temples of Jupiter had been constructed. The building was seated on an eminence: on each of the four sides the lofty roof was supported by fifteen massy columns, sixteen feet in circumference; and the large stones of which they were composed were firmly cemented with lead and iron. The force of the strongest and sharpest tools had been tried without effect. It was found necessary to undermine the foundations of the columns, which fell down as soon as the temporary wooden props had been consumed with fire; and the difficulties of the enterprise are described under the allegory of a black daemon, who retarded, though he could not defeat, the operations of the Christian engineers. Elated with victory, Marcellus took the field in person against the powers of darkness; a numerous troop of soldiers and gladiators marched under the episcopal banner, and he successively attacked the villages and country temples of the diocese of Apamea. Whenever any resistance or danger was apprehended, the champion of the faith, whose lameness would not allow him either to fight or fly, placed himself at a convenient distance, beyond the reach of darts. But this prudence was the occasion of his death; he was surprised and slain by a body of exasperated rustics; and the synod of the province pronounced, without hesitation, that the holy Marcellus had sacrificed his life in the cause of God. In support of this cause, the monks, who rushed with tumultuous fury from the desert, distinguished themselves by their zeal and diligence. They deserved the enmity of the Pagans; and some of them might deserve the reproaches of avarice and intemperance, which they indulged at the expense of the people, who foolishly admired their tattered garments, loud psalmody, and artificial paleness. A small number of temples was protected by the fears, the venality, the taste, or the prudence of the civil and ecclesiastical governors. The temple of the Celestial Venus at Carthage, whose sacred precincts formed a circumference of two miles, was judiciously converted into a Christian church; and a similar consecration has preserved inviolate the majestic dome of the Pantheon at Rome. But in almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians who alone had time and inclination to execute such laborious destruction. …

The temples of the Roman empire were deserted or destroyed; but the ingenious superstition of the Pagans still attempted to elude the laws of Theodosius, by which all sacrifices had been severely prohibited. The inhabitants of the country, whose conduct was less exposed to the eye of malicious curiosity, disguised their religious under the appearance of convivial meetings. On the days of solemn festivals they assembled in great numbers under the spreading shade of some consecrated trees; sheep and oxen were slaughtered and roasted; and this rural entertainment was sanctified by the use of incense and by the hymns which were sung in honour of the gods. But it was alleged that, as no part of the animal was made a burnt-offering, as no altar was provided to receive the blood, and as the previous oblation of salt cakes and the concluding ceremony of oblations were carefully omitted, these festal meetings did not involve the guests in guilt or penalty of an illegal sacrifice. Whatever might be the truth of the facts or the merit of the distinction, these vain pretences were swept away by the last edict of Theodosius, which inflicted a deadly wound on the superstition of the Pagans. This prohibitory law is expressed in the most absolute and comprehensive terms. “It is our will and pleasure,” says the emperor, “that none of our subjects, whether magistrates or private citizens, however exalted or however humble may be their rank and condition, shall presume in any city or in any place to worship an inanimate idol by the sacrifice of a guiltless victim.” The act of sacrificing and the practice of divination by the entrails of the victim are declared (without any regard to the object of the inquiry) a crime of high treason against the state, which can be expiated only by the death of the guilty. The rites of Pagan superstition which might seem less bloody and atrocious are abolished as highly injurious to the truth and honour of religion; luminaries, garlands, frankincense, and libations of wine are specially enumerated and condemned; and the harmless claims of the domestic genius, of the household gods, are included in this rigorous proscription. The use of any of these profane and illegal ceremonies subjects the offender to the forfeiture of the house or estate where they have been performed; and if he has artfully chosen the property of another for the scene of his impiety, he is compelled to discharge, without delay, a heavy fine of twenty-five pounds of gold, or more than one thousand pounds sterling. A fine not less considerable is imposed on the connivance of the secret enemies of religion who shall neglect the duty of their respective stations, either to reveal or to punish the guilt of idolatry. Such was the persecuting spirit of the laws of Theodosius, which were repeatedly enforced by his sons and grandsons, with the loud and unanimous applause of the Christian world. …

The ruin of the Pagan religion is described by the sophists as a dreadful and amazing prodigy, which covered the earth with darkness and restored the ancient dominion of chaos and night. They relate in solemn and pathetic strains that the temples were converted into sepulchres, and that the holy places, which had been adorned by the statues of the gods, were basely polluted by the relics of Christian martyrs. “The monks” (a race of filthy animals, to whom Eunapius is tempted to refuse the name of men) “are the authors of the new worship, which, in the place of those deities who are conceived by the understanding, has substituted the meanest and most contemptible slaves. The heads, salted and pickled, of those infamous malefactors, who for the multitude of their crimes have suffered a just and ignominious death; their bodies, still marked by the impression of the lash and the scars of those tortures which were inflicted by the sentence of the magistrate; such” (continues Eunapius) “are the gods which the earth produces in our days; such are the martyrs, the supreme arbitrators of our prayers and petitions to the Deity, whose tombs are now consecrated as the objects of the veneration of the people.”

… The satisfactory experience [Gibbon concludes] that the relics of saints were more valuable than gold or precious stones stimulated the clergy to multiply the treasures of the church. Without much regard for truth or probability, they invented names for skeletons, and actions for names. The fame of the apostles, and of the holy men who had imitated their virtues, was darkened by religious fiction. To the invincible band of genuine and primitive martyrs they added myriads of

imaginary heroes, who had never existed, except in the fancy of crafty or credulous legendaries; and there is reason to suspect that Tours might not be the only diocese in which the bones of a malefactor were adored instead of those of a saint.^{Note 127}

Theodosius the Great died in 395 a.d., and exactly fifteen years later the Visigoths, under Alaric, ravaged Rome. Saint Augustine (354–430 a.d.) wrote his great work The City of God to answer the argument that though the city had flourished for a millennium under its own gods, when it turned to Christ it perished. The City of Man, of sin, of damnation, had fallen, the good bishop conceded, but in its stead the City of God, the Church, the Living Body of Christ, would endure to all eternity. “And in that blessed city,” he wrote, as one who could be depended upon to know,

there shall be this great blessing, that no inferior shall envy any superior, as now the archangels are not envied by the angels, because no one will wish to be what he has not received, though bound in strictest concord with him who has received; as in the body the finger does not seek to be the eye, though both members are harmoniously included in the complete structure of the body. And thus, along with his gift, greater or less, each shall receive this further gift of contentment to desire no more than he has.^{Note 128}

All very well! But meanwhile throughout Europe there ranged, without impediment, the barbarians not of Europe alone, but of Asia as well. For Attila the Hun, with his horde of battle-riders, entering Europe from the Russian steppes, set up a capital of barbaric splendor in the neighborhood of present Budapest and harried half the continent until his death in 453. The Vandals poured through Spain to Africa, followed by the Visigoths, who in Spain set up a Visigothic kingdom. Britain, abandoned by the Romans, was invaded and settled by Germanic Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, while the Franks settled in Gaul, to which they gave their name as France. Rome itself came in charge largely of Christianized Germanic officers, who made and unmade a terminal series of pitiful puppet emperors until September 476, when the tall and fair Odoacer took the government to himself and there would be no emperor more in the West for the next 324 years — until another German, Charlemagne, should set the solar crown upon his own head, Christmas Day, 800 a.d., in Saint Peter’s Church in Rome, having received that radiant symbol of Ahura Mazda from the hands of Pope Leo III.