Chapter 6 — HELLENISM: 331 b.c.–324 a.d.

I. The Marriage of East and West

It has been argued that Greek mythology declined from the status of religion to literature because of the highly critical Greek mind, which was already turned against it in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c. Often implied in this argument is the idea that polytheism is an inferior form of religion, vulnerable to criticism, whereas monotheism is not: consequently, when the Greek mind got to work on it, polytheism was liquidated and the way was cleared for the revealed Christian Truth of the One God in Three Persons, with his pantheon of angels, counter-pantheon of devils, communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, and resurrection of the body, as well as the multiple presence (in every consecrated drop of wine and wafer of the Mass) of the dead and resurrected Son of God — true God and true Man — who was born miraculously of the Virgin Mother Mary. Actually, however, the Olympians never were confused by the Greeks with the ultimate Being of being. Like men, the gods had been born of the Great Mother. Though stronger and of longer life than men, they were their brothers. Moreover, they were but temporary governors of the universe, which they had wrested from an earlier generation of divine children of the goddess, and they would lose it — as Prometheus knew — to a later. Properly, they were the archetypes of the ideals of the Greek city state, and with its passing they passed too.

But in the Hellenistic period, when the brilliant pupil of Aristotle, Alexander the Great, having smashed across the whole Levant into India, had brought together in one world Greece, India, Persia, Egypt, and even the Jews outside of Jerusalem, Greek religion advanced to a new phase: on one hand, of grandiose universalism, and on the other, of personal, inward immediacy. In fact, the beautiful gods, far from dying, sent the inspiration of their breath across all Asia, to waken new religious and aesthetic forms in Maurya India, Han China, and ultimately Japan; while in the West they wakened Rome and in the South brought a new significance to the old, old cults of the goddess Isis and her spouse.

An appreciation of the point of view of the Hellenistic Greeks toward religion can be obtained from the Alexandrian mythographer Maximus of Tyre (fl. second century a.d.):

God Himself, the father and fashioner of all that is, older than the Sun or the Sky, greater than time and eternity and all the flow of being, is unnameable by any lawgiver, unutterable by any voice, not to be seen by any eye. But we, being unable to apprehend His essence, use the help of sounds and names and pictures, of beaten gold and ivory and silver, of plants and rivers, mountain-peaks and torrents, yearning for the knowledge of Him, and in our weakness naming all that is beautiful in this world after His nature — just as happens to earthly lovers. To them the most beautiful sight will be the actual lineaments of the beloved, but for remembrance’ sake they will be happy in the sight of a lyre, a little spear, a chair, perhaps, or a running-ground, or anything in the world that wakens the memory of the beloved. Why should I further examine and pass judgment upon Images? Let men know what is divine (το θεῖον γένος), let them know: that is all. If a Greek is stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, an Egyptian by paying worship to animals, another man by a river, another by fire — I have no anger for their divergences; only let them know, let them love, let them recall.^{Note 1}

In the vast international, intercultural empire of the Persians, though a fine tolerance was practiced toward the gods of conquered peoples, no attempt was ever made, either by the King of Kings or by any priest of the Magian clergy, to further a general system of syncretic universalization. Persian religious tolerance was political and prudent, not an expression of belief. Nor when it suited political ends did the Persians for a minute hesitate to desecrate alien shrines. Alexander, invading Persia in the years 336–330 b.c., gave strict orders that no sacred object whatsoever should be injured; but when the Persians, nearly two centuries before, had sought to overpower Greece, they had destroyed temples, burned the images of gods, and desecrated shrines, with the same sort of righteous zeal as had moved Elijah and Elias, Josiah and Hezekiah — for, after all, they too were Levantine “monotheists,” for whom there was no true god but their own.^{Note 2} The Greeks were both incensed and horrified by such impiety; and Aeschylus, in his patriotic tragedy The Persians, attributed to these godless acts of sacrilege and hubris the obviously miraculous defeat of the mighty Persian fleet in its incredible disaster at Salamis. “Those godless,” he wrote; “those of pride infatuate who made Greece their prey, nor held it shame to rob her gods and give her shrines to flame”:

Altars lie wrecked and images of God

O’erthrown, disbased, and down in rubbish trod.

For which dire sin, dire suffering now is theirs,

And direr yet shall be. …^{Note 3}

Darius I, having made himself master of the world, sent a fleet to subdue Athens in the summer of the year 490 b.c. His army landed on the shore at Marathon — and every schoolboy knows the rest. Aeschylus fought, and his brother died, in the battle: 6400 Persians and 192 Athenians lay dead upon the field; and Darius commenced immediately to prepare a second, larger, much larger, fleet and army for a second try. He died, however; and his son, Xerxes the Great (r. 486–465 b.c.), one decade after Marathon, sent against Athens the largest military force the world had ever seen assembled — about half a million men, drawn from every quarter of his empire, and a fleet of some 3000 ships, with himself in personal command. However, at Thermopylae, Leonidas with 300 Spartans, absolutely brave, held the pass for three full days. They died, enveloped by an army driven on with whips; and about them lay 4000 Persian dead. Whereafter, in the harbor of Salamis — September 23, 480 b.c. — the flower of the Persian fleet, 1200 vessels strong, outmaneuvered and outfought by a Greek fleet of 380, went to ruin before the appalled eyes of the King of the Four Quarters — and the Orient, we may say, had found its bound.^{Note 4}

Alexander was Europe’s answer. And within two generations of his death at the age of thirty-three, he was celebrated in the Orient as a god.

He was at least the creator of a new world. And of the numerous things that might be said of that world, four stand as of particular pertinence to our study of the history of myth.

First, as already remarked, we note not merely respect for the gods of all religions, but an almost scientific effort to recognize analogies; so that specific deities of the various lands began to be identified and worshiped as equivalent to each other: Isis and Demeter, Horus and Apollo, Thot and Hermes, Amun and Zeus. The Greeks in Bactria and in India identified Kṛṣṇa with Heracles, Śiva with Dionysus, and in the West the later Romans saw, not only in the Greek gods but also in the Celtic and Germanic, respectable counterparts of their own. Before the Alexandrian period there had been many regional syncretic movements, as, for instance, that of the great Egyptian priestly syntheses of Re and Amun, Ptah and Osiris, and the masterful joining of Re, Osiris, Seth, Horus, and Thot in a single grandiose mythology. Likewise in India and in China regional syncretisms had abounded, and there was generally, as in Greece, a decent regard for other people’s gods. However, nowhere before the period of Alexander the Great does the idea seem to have emerged — or, at least, to have been put into operation — of a transcultural syncretism, systematically cultivated. We may see in this an extension of the Greek regard for the individual beyond the bounds of Greece itself, as well as an application of the idea of an empire not of tyranny but of free men to the sphere of thought. For in this period the Periclean ideal of the polis expanded to the Alexandrian ideal of cosmopolis: the oecumene, or inhabited world as a whole, as the common possession of civilized mankind.

The second point to be observed for this period is the role of philosophy and science in the higher reading and development of myth. In sixth- and fifth-century Greece, the philosophers had recognized a relationship of the Dionysian-Orphic complex to philosophical thought, and in the cults of the Orient they now discovered analogous possibilities. In Babylonian astronomy and mathematics — from the archaic period of which practically all the high mythologies of both East and West had originated^{Note 5} — they found new inspiration for a deepening of their own cosmological vision; and from the new developments of both these sciences in Alexandrian times entirely fresh ideas concerning the structure of the universe were derived, which remained basic to Occidental mythic thought (as, for example, in Dante’s Divina Commedia) until the century of Copernicus, when the sun displaced the earth at the center of the macrocosmic order.

Point three to be observed, then, is the breakthrough of the Greek inquiring intellect with Alexander into India, where a totally unforeseen species of philosophic inquiry had been developed in the various yogic schools of the Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanic centers. A far deeper understanding of the practical psychological — as opposed to cosmological — relevancy of mythology was represented in those disciplines than anything the West was to achieve until the century of Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung. However, in the meantime a formidable influence of only half-comprehended psychosomatic mystic lore was to come pouring out of India into the hermitages and monasteries, schools and universities of the comparatively callow West — from which a number of colorful gnostic, theosophical, and hermetic cults and movements were derived.

And then, finally, as a fourth point to be remarked in the rich context of the Hellenistic world, we must note that, after about two centuries of European influence upon Asia, the tide began to turn, until presently a powerful surge of reaction developed, which culminated with the victories of Christianity over the gods and philosophies of Classical antiquity and the subsequent collapse — for a spell of seven centuries — of the civilization of the European West.

II. Syncretistic and Ethnic Monotheism

Polytheism we may define as the recognition and worship of a plurality of gods; monalatry as the worship of a single god — one’s own — while recognizing others.^{* *}In recent theological writings the term henotheism has been incorrectly used in this sense. Henotheism was a term invented by Max Müller with reference specifically to Vedic theology, where one god after another is celebrated as supreme. In later Hinduism, likewise, a worshiper may celebrate as supreme first Śiva, then Viṣṇu, and then again the Goddess; in the spirit of the Vedic saying “Truth is one, the sages call it by many names” (Ṛg Veda X. 164.46).Monotheism is the belief that there is finally but one substantial god; and of monotheism two types are to be distinguished: 1. the inclusive, cosmopolitan, open, syncretic type, and 2. the ethnic, closed, and exclusive. Ethnic monotheism is the belief that the only god is the god worshiped by one’s own group, all others being false. Syncretic monotheism, recognizing that all concepts of deity are limited, infers an ultimately inconceivable god above all, to whom all refer; as in the “Universal Prayer” of Alexander Pope (put forth in 1738), of which the following three stanzas — in their mincing minuet — suffice to make the point:

Father of All! in ev’ry Age,

In ev’ry Clime ador’d,

By Saint, by Savage, and by Sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

 

Let not this weak, unknowing hand

Presume thy bolts to throw,

And deal damnation round the land,

On each I judged thy Foe.

 

To thee, whose Temple is all Space,

Whose Altar Earth, Sea, Skies,

One Chorus let all Being raise,

All Nature’s Incense rise!^{Note 6}

The outstanding instance of ethnic monotheism is, of course, the post-exilic monotheism of the Bible, which then passed to Christianity and Islam; while the most richly developed systems of syncretic monotheism have been those of the Hellenized Near East, Rome, Gupta and post-Gupta India, and (in the broadest sense) the humanistic learning of Europe since the Renaissance. Epicureanism, Buddhism, and the higher reaches of Hinduism are exceptional in as much as their final terms are not personified, or in any way anthropomorphized, as “God.” However, in the higher reaches of syncretic monotheism and even, occasionally, of ethnic, where the godhood may be recognized as absolutely unknown (deus absconditus: “god concealed”), a point of contact is afforded for a valid juncture of theology with these trans- or non-theological orders of belief.

In Classical Greece an early prelude to the Hellenistic and Roman, Renaissance and eighteenth-century types of monotheism is to be recognized in the often-cited statement of Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. 536 b.c.), the reputed founder of the Eleatic school from which Plato derived certain mythologically colored strains of his philosophy.

There is one God, greatest among gods and men, neither in shape nor in thought like unto mortals. … He is all sight, all mind, all ear. … He abides ever in the same place motionless, and it befits him not to wander hither and thither. … Yet men imagine gods to be born, and to have raiment, voice, and body, like themselves. … Even so the gods of the Ethiopians are swarthy and flat-nosed, the gods of the Thracians, fair-haired and blue-eyed. … Even so Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all that is shame and a reproach among men — theft, adultery, deceit, and other lawless acts. … Even so oxen, lions, and horses, if they had hands wherewith to carve images, would fashion gods after their own shapes and make them bodies like to their own.^{Note 7}

And again, we have the words of Antisthenes (born c. 444 b.c.): “God is not like anything; hence one cannot understand him by means of an image.”^{Note 8}

Xenophanes was a contemporary of the Buddha (563–483 b.c.), and, according to Aristotle, “the first to believe in the unity of all things.”^{Note 9} According to Simplicius, on the authority of Theophrastus, Xenophanes conceived the One, the Unity of all Things that was God, as neither limited nor limitless, neither in motion nor at rest^{Note 10} — which is a view close enough to the Indian of brahman or the Void to allow for comparison. Antisthenes was the founder of the Cynic (kynikos, “doglike”) school, and his most celebrated disciple, Diogenes (4127–323 b.c.), suggests comparison with a certain type of Hindu ascetic. Dwelling (significantly) in a large discarded earthen pot outside the temple of the Great Mother, to illustrate the “doggishness” of his back-to-nature philosophy he would shamelessly relieve himself whenever nature moved. Alexander the Great is supposed to have visited him, as the next most celebrated man in the world, and when the young monarch asked if there were any boon the beggar desired, the Cynic replied, “You are between me and the sun, please move aside.” Thus, with considerably more thoroughness than his later counterpart, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Diogenes went all the way in his return to what he took to be man’s state in nature. The conscientious “doggishness” of the later Zen masters of China and Japan was another statement of the same rejection of both the amenities and the ideals of civilization; as, likewise, the Chinese Taoist notion — just about contemporary with Diogenes — of returning to the state of “the uncarved block,” the sage sitting with blank mind.^{Note 11} And we should perhaps also recognize something of the same in Christ’s rejection of the world: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.”^{Note 12}

“If I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes,” the political master of the known world is reported to have said; and the Cynic: “If I were not Diogenes, I would be Alexander.” However, the main line of Greek religiosity never accepted the Cynic notion of man without civilization as properly man. For the Greek, indeed for the European mind, the faculty of reason is to such a degree particular to man that to erase it is not to return to nature but to escape from it — from man’s nature. And if the excellence, arete, of any species must be recognized as rising from a life lived according to its nature, then for man it must be according to reason — neither to ecstatically communicated, so-called “divine revelations,” nor to animalistic or vegetal erasures of the human faculties. Moreover, the faculty of reason develops not in sheer solitude, but in society; for as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius (whom Matthew Arnold has termed “perhaps the most beautiful figure in history”),^{Note 13} wrote in his memoirs of admonition to himself:

If our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do, and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state. For of what other common political community will anyone say that the whole human race are members? And from thence, from this common political community comes also our very intellectual faculty and reasoning faculty and our capacity for law; or whence do they come? For as my earthly part is a portion given to me from certain earth, and that which is watery from another element, and that which is hot and fiery from some peculiar source (for nothing comes out of that which is nothing; as nothing returns to nonexistence), so also the intellectual part comes from some source.^{Note 14}

And he writes again: “The prime principle then in man’s constitution is the social.”^{Note 15} “Men exist for the sake of one another.”^{Note 16}

Furthermore, since there are joy and beauty, as well as excellence, in a life lived according to its nature, therefore excellence — i.e., “virtue,” properly understood — must be and is its own reward. Or, as we read further, in the words of the philosopher king:

One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account as a favor conferred. Another is not ready to do this, but still in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, and seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has caught the game, a bee when it has made its honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not call out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season. Must a man, then, be one of these, who in a manner acts thus without observing it? Yes.^{Note 17}

Somewhat the same idea might at first seem to have been implied in the words of Jesus: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing”; however, the full text of the Christian admonition changes the point of view:

Beware of practicing your piety before men in order to be seen by them; for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give alms, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.^{Note 18}

As Matthew Arnold temperately remarks: “The motives of reward and punishment have come, from the mis-conception of language of this kind, to be strangely overpressed by many Christian moralists, to the deterioration and disfigurement of Christianity.”^{Note 19} And, for contrast, he cites the above quoted passage of the Stoic Caesar.

The view and estimate of virtue that is running through all this is the same, essentially, as that of the Homeric arete. However, a new inwardness, maturity, or adulthood, has appeared. For the comparatively youthful ideal of the buoyant, wonderfully physical earlier centuries, when all had been going well for the battle-ready Greeks, had long since been undermined by the sickening devolution of the late fifth and early fourth centuries b.c. The victories over Persia of the generation of Aeschylus had been followed by a sequence of interior disasters: the Peloponnesian Wars, 431 and 413–404 b.c.; Corinthian War, 395–387; Theban War, 371–362; and finally, 335 b.c., the frightful destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great and the transfer of Greek hegemony to the young and ruthless master from the north.

Professor Gilbert Murray has termed the centuries between the flowering of classical Athens and the growth of the radically different garden of the early Christian era the period of the Failure of Nerve.^{Note 20} It was an age comparable to that of India in the Buddha’s time and of China in the period of Confucius; for in each of these the earlier social structure was in process of dissolution, the centers of higher civilization were crumbling before the sheer power of comparative barbarians, and the central task of philosophy had become, on one hand socio-political, how to restore a dissolving civilization to health, and on the other, moral and psychological, how an individual in the shattering world might retain and develop his own humanity. The Buddha’s sermon is well known:

All life is suffering;

The cause of suffering is ignorant craving;

The suppression of suffering [nirvana] can be achieved;

The Way is the Noble Eightfold Path:

Right Views, Aspiration, Speech, and Conduct;

Right Vocation, Effort, Mindfulness, and Rapture.

The laws of the universe were of no interest in themselves to the Buddhist seeker of the way out. There was no moral law derived from God; for there was no God, and the gods or principles by which the world was held in form were themselves the nets, traps, and obstacles that the yogi must elude. The Buddha’s Eightfold Path was a path entered upon voluntarily, against the order of the universe. And when the victor had thoroughly killed all fear and desire in himself, there supervened, paradoxically, a rapture both of transcendence and of compassion for all self-bounded beings.

Confucius’s sagely teaching, in contrast to this yogic way of individual disengagement, was of social reconstruction through individual integrity; and the noble humanity of this line of thought has suggested to many a comparison with the Greek. However, a difference lies in the conservatism of the Chinese in contrast to the inventive, rational experimentations of the Greek schools, in every field. Both in Confucianism and in Taoism, the Chinese ideal was to place the individual in accord with the order both of his own nature and of the world; and in the Stoic tradition of the West the leading idea was — apparently — the same. Likewise in both East and West, the cosmic order itself was conceived in terms of the old Sumero-Babylonian idea of an eternal round of eons, ever returning, with man, the microcosm, an organ of the whole. As the Taoist teachers of quietism renounced society to place themselves in harmony with nature, so, likewise, the Greek Cynics; and as the Confucians sought to bring the principles of life-in-accord-with-nature (in accord with the Tao) into play in the social nexus, so too the Greek Stoics and, more effectively, the Roman. However, in their approaches to the study of nature as well as in their views of the individual and the state, the Classical and Chinese thinkers were as far as possible apart.

In the first place, whereas the Chinese view of the universe remained archaic, Greek science during the Hellenistic age was in a phase of unexampled transformation. While the Oriental sages were brooding philosophically on the alternating influences of the male (yang) and female (yin) forces in the cosmic harmony of heaven, earth, and man, the Greeks, building forward from Sumero-Babylonian beginnings, were already arguing the problem of a heliocentric astronomy against a geocentric. Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-230 b.c.) proposed the view that the earth and all the planets revolved around the sun in circles, while the sun itself and the stars were stationary. He could not prove his point, however, and so, when Hipparchus of Nicea (c. 146–126 b.c.) appeared to have solved the problem better with a geocentric hypothesis, employing epicycles and eccentric circles to explain the planetary orbits, his system prevailed until Copernicus (1473–1543 a.d.) set the matter straight.^{Note 21} Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275–200 b.c.), meanwhile, had measured to within two hundred miles the circumference of the earth, concluded that one might sail from Spain westward to India, and suggested that the Atlantic might be divided longitudinally by a land mass (America).^{Note 22} While in medicine Herophilus of Chalcedon (third century b.c.) discovered the relationship of the brain and spinal column to the nerves, and Erasistratus of Iulis (also third century b.c.) recognized the difference between the motor and sensory nerves.^{Note 23} In the Greek and Roman Stoic system the nature to which man was called to accord, therefore, was not that of the older mythic world views, even though in the notion of nature as one great organism and of the ever-recurrent cycles of world emergence and dissolution highly significant old Sumerian themes were retained.

Another point of difference, though in many ways the Greek and Chinese sages might seem to have been thinking in much the same terms,^{Note 24} is that whereas Chinese education remained an elegant affair of the elite — owing in part to the recondite nature of the Chinese script — Hellenistic education was general. And correlatively, whereas Chinese government was in theory as well as in practice an expression of archaic mythic notions of a divine appointment of the emperor, who ruled by the mandate of heaven as an organ of the cosmos, the Greek idea and experience of government was of human beings — whether despots or elected — administering conventional human laws, not laws superhumanly ordained.

It was in the writings of the great personalities of the Hellenistic and Roman Stoic school that the most enduring and influential statements of the moral, political, and cosmological implications of Hellenistic syncretic monotheism appeared; and notably in the works of its Greco-Phoenician founder, Zeno (3367–264 b.c.), the Roman author Seneca (4 b.c.-65 a.d.), the crippled Phrygian-Roman slave Epictetus (c. 607–120 a.d.), and the emperor, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121–180 a.d.). Epictetus and Aurelius are of particular interest, since they represent most emphatically the two extremes of social destiny; so that we may know that each speaks out of life. The slave, on one hand, asks:

How can it be that one who has nothing, neither raiment, nor house, nor home, nor bodily tendance, nor servant, nor city, should yet live tranquil and contented? Behold God has sent you a man to show you in act and deed that it may be so. Behold me! I have neither city nor house, possessions nor servants: the ground is my couch; I have no wife, no children, no shelter — nothing but earth and sky, and one poor cloak. Yet, what do I lack? Am I not untouched by sorrow, by fear? Am I not free?^{Note 25}

And from the other pole, the emperor:

How small a part of the boundless and unfathomable time is assigned to every man? for it is very soon swallowed up in the eternal. And how small a part of the whole substance? and how small a part of the universal soul? and on what a small clod of the whole earth you creep? Reflecting on all this consider nothing to be great, except to act as your nature leads you, and to endure what the common nature brings.^{Note 26}

Zeno of Citium in Cyprus, a shy and silent foreigner, in part at least of Phoenician background, first became known to Athens about 300 b.c., as a philosopher talking to those who would listen, in a public colonnade, the Painted Porch. His school became known, therefore, as the Stoa, the Porch. And because the virtue of his life matched that of his teaching, the nobility of his character as well as lore drew to him a following of excellent young men. When he died, the city of Athens gave him the funeral of a hero.^{Note 27}

His two leading disciples, Cleanthes of Assos in the Troad (fl. c. 260 b.c.) and Chrysippus of Soli in Cilicia (d. 206 b.c.), developed the doctrine, the former with a Platonic accent and the latter assimilating the deities, heroes, and mantic cults of the folk; while Posidonius of Alamea in Syria (135?–50? b.c.), who settled in the great Hellenistic seafaring station of Rhodes, produced with immense learning an encyclopedic synthesis of the religious and scientific thinking of his age that was both the culminating Stoic theoretical work and one of the wonders of the ancient world. According to Posidonius, physics and theology are two aspects of one knowledge, since God is immanent throughout nature as well as infinitely transcendent. Science, therefore, deals with the material body of which God is the living spirit.

For all these thinkers, God, the informing spirit of the world, is rational and absolutely good. Nothing, therefore, can occur that is not — in the frame of the totality — absolutely good. The doctrine, essentially, is that satirized by Voltaire in Candide, of the best of all possible worlds. But in strong terms it was reaffirmed by Nietzsche in his rhapsodic Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the word “good” is read not as “comfortable” but as “excellent,” and a call is issued to each to love his fate: amor fati. Oswald Spengler also represents this view in his motto, adopted from Seneca: Ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt: “The fates guide him who will, him who won’t they drag.” It is a view derived rather from courage and joy than from rational demonstration: from a life zeal and affirmation, beyond any kind of pleasure-pain calculation. It leaves the Buddhist sentiment of compassion (karuna) far behind; for compassion contemplates suffering. And Job’s problem also is left behind; for that too rests upon the recognition of suffering. In Seneca’s words: “Not what you bear but how you bear it is what counts.”^{Note 28} And again: “Within the world there can be no exile, for nothing within the world is alien to man.”^{Note 29}

“Great is God,” declared the lame slave Epictetus:

This is the rod of Hermes: touch what you will with it, they say, and it becomes gold. Nay, but bring what you will and I will transmute it into Good. Bring sickness, bring death, bring poverty and reproach, bring trial for life — all these things through the rod of Hermes shall be turned to profit.^{Note 30}

 

Great is God, for that He has given us such instruments to till the ground withal:

Great is God, for that He has given us hands, and the power of swallowing and digesting; of unconsciously growing and breathing while we sleep!

 

Thus should we ever have sung: yea and this, the grandest and divinest hymn of all: —

 

Great is God, for that he has given us a mind to apprehend these things, and duly to use them!^{Note 31}

 

You yourself are a fragment torn from God: you have a portion of Him within yourself.^{Note 32}

The ideal of indifference to pain and pleasure, gain and loss, in the performance of one’s life task, which is of the essence of this Stoic order, suggests the Indian ideal of Karma Yoga described in the Bhagavad Gita. “The calm spirit, indifferent to pain and pleasure, whom neither can disturb: he alone is fit for immortality.”^{Note 33} “Therefore, without attachment, do what has to be done: that is the way the highest state is achieved.”^{Note 34} However, the Indian life task is imposed upon each by his caste statutes, whereas the Greco-Roman task is that recognized and imposed on each by his own reason: for God here is Intelligence, Knowledge, and Right Reason.^{Note 35} Furthermore, the condition of nirvana, disengagement in trance rapture, which is the ultimate goal of Indian yoga, is entirely different from the Greek ideal of ataraxia, the rational mind undisturbed by pleasure and pain. Yet, between the two views there is much to be compared, and particularly their grounding in what Christian scholars like to call “pantheism,” which is fundamental both to the Orient — whether India or the Far East — and to the Classical world: against which the biblical view, whether in Jewish, Christian, or Islamic thought, stands in unrelenting, even belligerent, argument.

Within a world that is itself divine, where God is immanent throughout, in the impulse of the flight of birds, the lightning, the falling rain, the fire of the sun, there is an epiphany of divinity in all sight, all thought, and all deeds, which — for those who recognize it — is a beginning and end in itself. There is for all, and within all, a universal revelation. Whereas within a world that is not itself divine, but whose Creator is apart, the godhead is made known only by special revelation — as on Sinai, or in Christ, or in the words of the Koran; and righteousness then consists in placing oneself in accord, not with nature but with Sinai, with the lesson of Christ or with the Koran; and one lives not simply to play the part well that is in itself the end, like the grapevine producing grapes, but, as Christ has said, “so that the Father may reward.” The goal is not here and now, but somewhere else.

As the conservative Jewish scholar Jacob Hoschander has pointed out, the first unmistakably monotheistic, as distinguished from monalatrous, utterances of the Bible are to be found in Second Isaiah, about 539 b.c., in the period of Cyrus the Great.^{Note 36} Yet the God so universalized was still specifically the God of the house of Jacob, who was supposed to have brought Cyrus to victory so that his people should be restored.^{Note 37} And in the subsequent utterances of Ezra, in the P Text authors by whom the Pentateuch was put together, and in Jewish writings into Roman times there was no break from this fundamental line. In fact, as Professor Klausner has demonstrated, even Philo Judaeus (c. 20 b.c.-54 a.d.), the most Hellenized of the Jewish semi-Platonist philosophers, could not bring himself to think of God as immanent. “The Logos of Philo,” Klausner writes,

is different in a fundamental respect from that of Heraclitus and the Stoics. While for them the universal intelligence or “inspirited matter” (matter into which an animating breath has been blown) and deity are the same thing, and thus they reach pantheism as well as a certain materialism (even “inspirited matter” is matter) — by contrast Philo the Jew sees that for him deity is a separate entity (included in the world). … There is nothing in common except the name between the “Logos” of Philo and “Word” of the Gospel of John (which depends on Philo) on the one hand, and the “Logos” of Heraclitus the Stoic and of Epictetus on the other hand. The Philonic “Logos” is an almost completely, original creation, the fruit of Jewish thought and teaching based on the Scriptures (Midrash).^{Note 38}

“In the world as it is,” as Klausner has said, “there are good and evil; so how could God, who is absolutely good and perfect, form a world which contains evil, the essence of imperfection?”^{Note 39}

To which the lame Phrygian slave, from the other side, has already answered:

When we are invited to a banquet, we take what is set before us; and were one to call upon his host to set fish upon the table or sweet things, he would be deemed absurd. Yet in a word, we ask the gods for what they do not give; and that, although they have given us so many things!^{Note 40}

Epictetus’s magic, to make all things gold, was that of Hermes’ staff.

III. Mystery Cult and Apocalypse

In Japanese the term jiriki, “one’s own strength,” refers to such self-reliant disciplines as Stoicism or, in the Orient, Zen Buddhism, while tariki, “outside strength, another’s strength,” refers to ways that rely on the idea of a savior: in Japan, Amida Buddhism. Through invoking the name of the infinitely radiant Solar Buddha of the Land of Bliss, one is reborn, at death, in his paradise, there to attain nirvana.^{Note 41} During the Hellenistic age Western counterparts of this popular Buddhism were the numerous mystery cults that flourished with increasing influence until, in the late Roman period, first Mithraism, then Christianity, gained imperial support and, thereby, the field.

For not all of us are philosophers. Many require an atmosphere of incense, music, vestments and processions, gongs, bells, dramatic mimes and cries, to be carried beyond themselves. And for such the various styles of religion exist — where, for the most part, however, truth is so enveloped in symbol as to be imperceptible to anyone who is not already a philosopher. Degrees of initiation have been developed, through which the mind is meant to be carried beyond the fields of the symbols to increasingly exalted realization — passing, as it were, through veil beyond veil. But the ultimate realizations differ, according, on one hand, to those cults in which divinity is seen as at once immanent and transcendent, and, on the other, to the orthodox Zoroastrian, Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan liturgies, where the ontological distinction is retained between God and Man, Creator and Creature.

In cults of the former type the two strengths, “outside” and “within,” are finally to be recognized as identical. The savior worshiped as without, though indeed without, is at the same time one’s self. “All things are Buddha things.” Whereas in the great Near Eastern orthodoxies no such identity can be imagined or even credited as conceivable. The aim is not to come to a realization of one’s self, here and now, as of one mystery with the Being of beings, but to know, love, and serve in this world a God who is apart (mythic dissociation)^{Note 42} though close at hand (omnipresence), and to be happy with him when time shall have ceased and eternity been attained. The referent (the “God”) of cults of the first type is never a personage somewhere else, to be known, loved, served, and some day beheld (which, in fact, is the notion to be dispelled), but a state of realization to be attained by way of the initiatory, knowledge-releasing imagery of the “God,” as through a sign. The function of such signs is to effect a psychological change of immediate value in itself, while that of the orthodox mythology is to fix the mind and will upon a state of soul to come.

As an example of the first or pagan-Oriental type, we may take the once powerful cult, derived from Iran, of the Mysteries of Mithra, which came to flower in the Near East during the Hellenistic age as a kind of Zoroastrian heresy, and in the Roman period was the most formidable rival of Christianity both in Asia and in Europe, reaching as far north as to the south of Scotland. In it were offered seven degrees of initiation. In the first, the neophyte was known as “Raven” (corax), and in the rites the celebrants wore masks representing animals of the zodiac: for astronomy was undergoing a new development in this period through an application of Greek thought to the data of the centuries of Sumero-Chaldean observation. In all religions of the age, the zodiac had come to represent the bounding, ever-revolving sphere of time-space-causality, within which the unbounded Spirit operates — unmoved yet moving in all. The orbits of the seven visible spheres — Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn — were conceived as so many envelopes around the earth, through which the soul had descended when coming to be born. The individual had derived from each a specific temporal-spatial quality, which on the one hand contributed to his character, but on the other was a limitation. Hence, the seven stages of initiation were to facilitate passages of the spirit, one by one, beyond the seven limitations, culminating in a realization of the unqualified state.

The Raven, the black bird of death with whom the mystic was identified in the first initiation, carried him symbolically beyond the lunar sphere, which was the sign — here as everywhere — of the waxing and waning of the life-round of birth and death: the nutritive, vital energies of the vegetal aspect of existence. Identified with the Raven, the mystic imagination left the physical body to the work of change and dissolution, flying, as it were, through the lunar gate, to the second sphere: that of Mercury (Greek Hermes; Egyptian Thot; Germanic Woden, Othin), the sphere of occult powers and of magic, and of the wisdom of rebirth.

In a second rite the candidate, known now as “Hidden Master” (cryphius), passed from Mercury to Venus’s sphere of mystically toned delusions of desire, where, again, certain disciplines of initiation were experienced. Assuming the character of “Soldier” (miles), he passed next to the circle of the sun, the realm of intellectual arrogance and power, to be presented with a crown upon a sword, which he thrust back with his hand, so that it fell, declaring that Mithra alone should be his crown. He became here a “Lion” (leo) and participated in a sacramental meal of bread and water mixed with wine, as a rite of supreme graduation, whence he passed through the solar gate to the fifth zone, Mars — of daring and audacity — where he donned the Phrygian cap and loose Iranian garb of the Savior Mithra himself, assuming the title of “Persian” (perses).

Two further transformations remained. First, quenching in his heart the rashness of audacity, he passed to Jupiter, to be known as “Runner of the Sun” (heliodromus); and finally, from Jupiter mounting to Saturn, he was sanctified as “Father” (pater). The trials along the way had served to cultivate the Stoic virtue of indifference to pleasure and pain, while symbolic apparitions had impressed upon the mind certain essential attitudes. The rites were celebrated, normally, in a grotto symbolic of the world cave, in which the old mythological theme of the unity of the macrocosm (the universe), mesocosm (the liturgy), and microcosm (the soul) was illustrated. And in contemplation of the doctrine of the immanence of God, the mystic was led by degrees to an experience, in his final stage, of the transcendent reality of his own being.

The god who was to be the inspiration, and to become in time the incarnate form of the initiate, was the old Aryan deity Mithra — Vedic Mitra — the first known occurrence of whose name was in the treaty, previously mentioned, c. 1400 b.c., between the Hittites and Mitanni. There this god appeared as one of five Vedic Aryan deities summoned to witness and approve the pact, namely: Mitra, Varuna, the monster-slayer Indra, and the twin horsemen, the Ashvins or Nasatya. Both his antiquity and his northern Aryan derivation can therefore be presumed, even though he is not mentioned in the Gathas of Zoroaster. In the Yashts of the later Avesta (about sixth century b.c.) the name recurs in its Persian form, as the greatest of an order of angels known as the Yazatas, as “adored ones.” Called “the lord of wide pastures,” he is there praised by the Creator himself and said to have “a thousand ears, ten thousand eyes,” like the Vedic monster-killer Indra. “I created him,” Ahura Mazda is supposed to have declared to his prophet Zoroaster, “to be as worthy of sacrifice and as worthy of prayer as myself.”^{Note 43}

Figure 23. Mithra Tauroctonus

Mithra seems not to have attained to the status of a paramount symbol, however, until the Hellenistic period, when he appeared in two related but contrasting manifestations. Figure 23 shows an example from the second century a.d. of an image of which literally hundreds of counterparts have been found throughout Europe. The model seems to have been created by a sculptor of the school of Pergamon toward the close of the third century b.c., possibly with the features of Alexander as inspiration.^{Note 44} In loose Iranian garb, and wearing the characteristic Phrygian cap adopted many centuries later (and not at all by accident) by the prophets of the light of reason of the French Revolution, the flashing hero-savior is performing his supreme symbolic act as Tauroctonus, Slayer of the Primeval Bull — which was the role assigned in the orthodox Zoroastrian system to the wicked Angra Mainyu, the Antagonist.

It will be recalled that in the normal Zoroastrian view all evil in the world is attributed to the Demon of the Lie, who, in the end, is to be undone, when the savior Saoshyant appears, and there is a reference of all acts of virtue forward toward the realization of that Messianic day. A historically oriented, progressive, apocalyptic theme underlies the whole tradition. Whereas here, in this Hellenistic representation of the Persian god and savior Mithra, there is expressed a new — or perhaps resurgent, primitive — interpretation of the immemorial mythic symbol of the sacrifice.

Let me refer the reader once again to the brutal rites, described in Primitive Mythology, of the murdered, cut-up, and buried divine being from whose body all food plants grow.^{Note 45} According to the primitive view represented in those rites, the world is to be not improved but affirmed, even in what to the rationalizing moralist appears to be its most horrible, ungodlike sinfulness: for precisely in that resides its creative force, since out of death, decay, violence, and pain comes life. As in the words of William Blake: “The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity, too great for the eye of man.”^{Note 46} The virtue of heroism must lie, therefore — according to a view of this kind — not in the will to reform, but in the courage to affirm, the nature of the universe. And in the mystery cults of the Greco-Persian Hellenistic age it was this mystical, world-loving — not the orthodox world-improving — type of optimistic affirmation that prevailed.

Professor Franz Cumont, to whose researchers we owe most of what we know of Mithraism, has observed that in the finer examples of the image of Mithra Tauroctonus the features of the god bear an expression of dolor and compassion as he drives the knife, and so takes upon himself the guilt — if such it must be termed — of life, which lives upon death.^{Note 47} In the corresponding Christian image of the Sacrifice of the Cross, though the savior there is declared to have taken on his shoulders the sins of mankind, a certain terrible guilt remains attached to the Jews by whom he was condemned, to Judas who betrayed him, and to Pontius Pilate, by whom he was crucified. For the god-man is there the victim, the sacrificial lamb, whereas here, the god-man is the sacrificial priest. Compare the Cretan sacrifice of Figure 18. He is himself performing the brutal deed by which the world is ever, and ever again, renewed. He is the lion-bird, the solar bird, of Figure 16; and though the bull is suffering in our view, he is in fact the same as the cosmic bull of the archaic smile.

We note in Figure 23 that where the knife runs into the bull the blood comes forth as grain — conforming to the old myth already recalled, as well as to the Zoroastrian theme of grain from the marrow of the Ox. A serpent glides beneath, representing, as the serpent always does, the principle of life bound to the cycle of renewal, sloughing death. The dog, who is in Iranian myth the friend and counterpart of man and in the episode of the first couple ate the first bite of meat, here eats the grain (the blood), as the archetype of life nourished by the sacrifice, while the scorpion gripping the bull’s testicles typifies the victory of death as well — since death as well as life is an aspect of the one process of existence.

There is also an astronomical reference to be recognized in the symbols of the bull and scorpion; for in the centuries during which the foundations of all astrological iconography were laid (c. 4300–2150 b.c.), the zodiacal sign of Taurus, the Bull, stood at the vernal equinox, and Scorpio, the Scorpion, at the autumnal. Leo, the Lion, was then the sign of the midsummer sun, when its decline toward winter began, and Aquarius, the Water Carrier, was in the house of the winter solstice, where the sun god, Sol invictus, was annually reborn, on December 25.

In the grottoes of the Hellenistic Mithra cult all these festivals of the solar round were celebrated in masked rites, to which the rites of initiation were attached. And we are informed from numerous sources of an actual bull sacrifice, the taurobolium, which was performed above a pit in which the initiate lay, so that he was baptized in a cascade of hot bull’s gore.^{Note 48} Two attendants, one before and one behind the sacrifice, held flaming torches, one turned up, the other down, to represent respectively the rise of light to the upper and descent to the nether world: sunrise, sunset, the vernal and autumnal equinox, birth, death, and the circulation of the energy of light from the central act of the sacrifice. Or these two so-called Dadophors might carry the heads of a bull and a scorpion, as Taurus and Scorpio. They have been compared to the two thieves crucified with Christ, one of whom was to ascend to heaven and the other descend to hell; likewise, to the medieval Christian motif of the wise and foolish virgins, the former holding lamps burning upward, and the latter, lamps out, turned down.^{Note 49} However, in the usual Christian reading a moral turn is given to such signs, so that their mystic sense disappears; for, with this retained, hell itself would be redeemed, whereas the whole point of the Christian dualism is that sin is absolutely evil, hell eternal, and its souls forever damned.

Amidst the little that we know of the mythic biography of the Persian savior Mithra, a number of parallels appear both to Christian and to Zoroastrian themes. However, just as in the case of the Dadophors, whereas they are on one level analogous, and in fact derive from the same source, they represent a completely different reading of the nature of the universe and of man: a mystical affirmative, as against a moral corrective, and a reassertion of the elder, primitive, and generally pagan designation of the sacrifice.

Mithra, like Gayomart, of whom he is in a certain sense the antithetic counterpart, was born beside a sacred stream beneath a sacred tree. In works of art he is shown emerging as a naked child from the “Generative Rock” (petra genetrix), wearing his Phrygian cap, bearing a torch, and armed with a knife. His birth is said to have been brought about solo aestu libidinis, “by the sole heat of libido (creative heat),”^{Note 50} and, as Dr. Carl G. Jung has pointed out in one of his numerous discussions of this subject, here all the elemental mother symbols of mythology are united, earth (the rock), wood (the tree), and water (the stream).^{Note 51} The earth has given birth — a virgin birth — to the archetypal Man. And so that we may know the birth to be symbolic (not prehistoric, as the claim would be for, say, an Adam or a Gayomart) nearby are shepherds witnessing the birth, coming with their flocks to pay the savior worship, as in Christmas nativity scenes. Christ, the Second Adam, was the renewer of the image of man. In the Persian savior Mithra the two Adams are united; for there was no sin, no Fall, involved in his enactment of the deeds of temporal life. With his knife the child culled the fruit of the tree and fashioned clothing of its leaves: once again like Adam — but without sin. And there is another scene, which shows him shooting arrows at a rock, from which water pours to refresh a kneeling suppliant. We do not possess the myth, but the episode has been compared to that of Moses producing water from the rock in the desert with his rod (Exodus 17:6). However, Moses sinned, for he struck twice, and consequently, was denied entry into the Promised Land — as Adam sinned and was denied paradise. But the savior Mithra both ate the fruit of the mother tree and drew the water of life from his mother rock — without sin.

The primal bull was grazing on a mountainside when the young athletic god, seizing it by its horns, mounted, and the animal, wildly galloping, presently unseated him, but, clinging to its horns, he was dragged until the great beast collapsed. He then seized it by its hind hoofs, which he hoisted to his shoulders, and the so-called transitus, or difficult task of hauling the live bull, head down, along the way of many obstacles to his cave, began. This painful ordeal both of hero and of bull became symbolic both of human suffering in general and of the specific trials of the initiate on his way to illumination — corresponding (though with hardly comparable force) to the Via Crucis of the later Christian cult. When he had reached his cave, a raven sent by the sun brought the savior word that the moment of sacrifice had arrived, and, seizing his victim by the nostrils, he plunged the knife into its flank. (We note the raven of the first initiation here associated with the sacrifice of the bull, the lunar beast: and see again Figure 16.) Wheat sprang from the bull’s spinal cord and from its blood the vine — whence the bread and wine of the sacramental meal. Its seed, gathered and purified by the moon — as in the orthodox Zoroastrian myth — produced the useful animals by which man is served. And, as we have observed already in the pictured scene, the animals of the goddess-mother of death and rebirth arrived to perform their several tasks: the scorpion, dog, and serpent.^{Note 52}

Figure 24. Zervan Akaran

But this myth and ritual of the initiate “washed in the blood of the bull” was only introductory to a deeper, larger mystery symbolized in the second major apparition of the cult: Zervan Akarana, “Boundless Time.” The image of this mystery shown in Figure 24 was found in the ruins of the Mithra temple of the Roman port of Ostia, where it was dedicated in 190 a.d. by a certain C. Valerius and his sons. A nude male body wears the head of a lion. Four wings issue from his back, bearing the symbols of the seasons of the year. In each hand is a key, and in the left a scepter of authority as well. A serpent winding in six turns up the body rests its head (turn 7) above the brow. And the symbol on the man’s chest is of the fiery thunderbolt, which nothing can resist.^{Note 53}

But this symbol of the fiery bolt, in exactly the same form, is the normal attribute of a certain aspect of Buddhahood, known as the Buddha Vajradhara, “Bearing the Bolt,” who stands for that Supreme Illumination of which the Buddhas who appear in time and space are but the visible manifestations. Such a bolt may appear in the Buddha’s hand or engraved upon his chest, where it signifies (to quote the words of Heinrich Zimmer), “the weapon or substance of adamantean truth and reality, compared with which all other substances are fragile.”^{Note 54} The Sanskrit term vajra means both “thunderbolt” and “diamond.” As the diamond cannot be cut by other stones, so do all things fall before the bolt; they belong to the merely phenomenal sphere and can offer no resistance. And in that branch of Buddhism known as the Vajrayana, “Thunderbolt Way” (Shingon in Japan), which is an extremely bold and colorful, magico-mystical form of Tantric Buddhist discipline,^{Note 55} the Buddhist mystic, through meditation, postures, and the pronunciation of spells, may substantialize the vajra power immanent within himself, which then can be applied either to sorcery or to the attainment of ultimate Illumination.^{Note 56}

In Oriental Mythology I have shown that a distinct Iranian influence can be discerned in the popular Chinese and Japanese sects of the Solar Buddha Amitabha-Amitayus (amitābha, “immeasurably radiant”; amitāyus, “forever enduring”; known as Amida in Japan), whose veneration first appeared in northwestern India c. 100 a.d. and spread thence to the Far East.^{Note 57} The cult is of the “outside strength” (tariki) type, and is characterized by the oft-repeated aspiration, Namu Amida Butsu, “Glory to Amida Buddha,” through which the mind and heart are readied for the saving grace of this infinitely compassionate savior. But now it must be noted that in exactly the same centuries the influence of Hellenized Iran was spreading even more strongly toward the West, where the Roman armies stationed throughout Europe were celebrating Mithraic rites. Sanctuaries abound throughout the Danube and Rhine valleys, Italy and the south of France, with extensions into Spain. Many of the Levantine slaves brought into Roman Europe were initiates, as were also a number of the late emperors, from Commodus (r. 180-192 a.d.) to Julian (r. 361–363). The imperial cult of Sol invictus, instituted by Aurelian (r. 270-275 a.d.), was syncretized with that of Mithra. And since syncretism was no less congenial to the native religions of Europe than to those of the Orient, there developed throughout the post-Alexandrian world — from Scotland to North Africa and eastward into India, with extensions even to the Far East — a single, rich, and colorful religious empire with an infinite wealth of forms, joining and harmonizing on many levels all the pantheons of the nations: Celtic, Germanic, Roman, Greek, and Oriental.

Do we not hear, indeed, the echo of Namu Amida Butsu in the aspiration inscribed on the Mithraic shrines of second- and third-century Europe: Nama, nama Sebezio?^{Note 58} The deity here invoked is clearly the Greek Sabazios, who, as Jane Harrison has shown, was a doublet of Dionysus — symbolized by that golden serpent which, in the Orphic rites of initiation, was let glide “through the bosom” in symbolic suggestion of the unity of god and devotee. And do we not recognize our very lion-man in the popular Hindu figure of Viṣṇu as the Man-Lion, Narasiṃha?

Returning to Figure 24, we note in the lower left-hand corner the tongs and hammer of the god Vulcan, of fire and metalcraft: the fire by which the metal is brought from its ore and by which the craftsman creates forms. At the lower right is the cock, announcer of the new sun. Before him lies the pine cone symbolic of the seeds of life produced by the ever self-renewing cosmic tree. And finally, the serpent winding up the body of the lion-man is duplicated in the caduceus, which corresponds not only in form, but also certainly in sense, to that of the cup of King Gudea of Lagash (Figure 1). The single serpent of the main figure has become in the caduceus two — as Adam became Adam and Eve. And these wind up the axial pole (axis mundi,) the spinal line of the lion-man himself, who is the Alpha and Omega of all the productions of time.

In other words, the syncretic mythic lore of this cosmopolitan period was in no sense a mere hotchpotch raked together from every corner of the earth. The symbolism throughout was as consistent as could be, and in accord, furthermore, with a common heritage shared by all from of old. For, as all these religions of the agriculturally based high cultures had been developed, actually, from a few (astonishingly few) insights of the neolithic, Bronze, and Iron ages, locally adapted to landscapes and to manners of somewhat (though not absolutely) differing requirement, so in this age of intercultural exchanges they could be readily brought together again by anyone properly trained in his own tradition. The parallels, in fact, are not difficult to recognize, even today — at least for those scholars who are not so committed to the usual Judeo-Christian notion of transcendence that they cannot spell out the alphabet of immanence even after working at it all their lives.

In the Vedic Aryan tradition, to which the Aryan Persian is akin, the god Mitra (Persian Mithra) always appears in association with Varuna — so intimately, indeed, that these two are generally named in a single dual noun, Mitrāvaruṇau. In the hymns, Varuna is described as the lord of the cosmic rhythm (ṛta) of the cycling starry sky;^{Note 59} while his other half, the god Mitra, brings forth the light of dawn, which at night was covered by Varuna. In the late Vedic ritual literature it is prescribed that Mitra must receive a white and Varuna a dark victim at the sacrificial post. And in the Shatapatha Brahmana the compound person of Mitra-Varuna is analyzed as “the Counsel and the Power.” “These,” it is said, “are his two selves. Mitra is the Counsel, Varuna the Power; Mitra the Priesthood, Varuna Royal Rule; Mitra the Knower, Varuna the Executive.”^{Note 60} Comparing Figure 24, we see that Zervan Akarana is also a dual god: a naked lion-man enveloped by a snake of seven folds. The lion is symbolic of solar light, which is eternal; the serpent, of the rhythmic, circling round of the lunar tides of time, which never cease. Thus the figure is precisely what its name tells: Zervan Akarana, “Boundless Time,” in which eternity and time are one, yet two. But if anyone should suppose that he would ever meet this figure anywhere beyond the bounds of time (which is boundless), he would have missed the point of his initiation, and would have to be sent back, I should think, to his Raven suit.

The serpent is of seven folds: these are the folds of temporality. They were identified in the Hellenistic world with the seven celestial spheres after which our days of the week are named, as Sun-day, Moon-day, Mars (Germanic Tīwes) day, Mercury (Germanic Woden’s) day, Jupiter (Germanic Thor’s) day, Venus (Germanic Frigg) day, and Saturn-day. We have already seen that the progress of the mystic way cut through these seven veiling folds to the adamantean truth. And that truth now has been shown to us in the symbol of the lion-man.

Midway along the path of initiation, as we have seen, the taurobolium was enacted, as a repetition of the savior Mithra’s slaying of the bull. Analogously, in the Indian Vedic mythology, Indra, the warrior king and savior of the gods, slew the all-enveloping Vritra, who, though a serpent, is described also as a bull. He is the negative aspect of the power of Varuna; and Indra, his slayer, is on many counts the analogue of the Persian Mithra Tauroctonus. Both are said to have a thousand eyes. Both are active foreground aspects of the light or solar force at play in time. Both renew the world by their deed. And in rites performed for the benefit of eligible individuals, the priestly re-enactment of their sacrifice endows the beneficiary with the knowledge of eternal life. As we read, for instance, in the Vedic Taittiriya Samhita: “By means of Mitra the priest sacrifices Varuna for him [the beneficiary] … sets him free from Varuna’s noose, so that even if his life be almost gone he verily lives.”^{Note 61} Thus the symbols of the Persian lion-man and slayer of the bull correspond, in a way that is quite precise, to those of the Vedic Mitra-Varuna and slayer of dragon-bull.

Moreover, as the two torchbearers, the Dadophors, attended the deed of the Persian Mithra Tauroctonus, so in the Indian Vedic context we have a matched pair who also represent the principle of syzygy — unity of apparent opposites — namely, the Nasatya, twin horsemen, or Ashvins. These are identified, amongst other associations, with sky and earth (i.e., up and down), eternity and time, priest and king, as the two halves of one spiritual person.^{Note 62} So let me call attention once again, to the names of the five Vedic dieties who were invoked to witness that treaty, c. 1400 b.c., of the Hittite and Mitanni kings. They were, exactly, Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and the Nasatya, the twin horsemen; precisely those five most perfectly matched by Zervan Akarana (= Mitrāvaruṇau), Mithra Tauroctonus, and the Dadophori of the Mithraic cult — which seems to have originated, by the way, in just that part of the Near East where the Hittites and Mitanni had flourished eleven hundred years before.^{Note 63}

There is a lot more to be told; but we have already followed the subject about as far as is appropriate for a work of the present scope. And I would hope to have made it perfectly clear, at least, that if certain scholars of this subject have found it difficult to recognize anything but a hotchpotch of puerilities in the syncretistic mystery cults of the Hellenistic period, the fault lies not altogether in Antiquity. The function of these cults was to bring about, by one means or another, a psychological transformation in the candidate for knowledge, as a result of which his mind should come to rest in the realization that divinity inheres in, as well as transcends, every particle of the universe and all its beings; the realization that duality is secondary; and the realization that man’s goal cannot be to make duality disappear at the end of time, as in the ethical, dualistic teaching of the prophet Zoroaster, since time, being boundless, never ends. Boundless Time, Zervan Akarana, holds everything in its tongs; shapes all things with its hammer; yet yields through its hard initiations knowledge of the adamantean reality, which is here and now, beyond the obscuring veil of duality, the true eternity of us all.

This teaching is the same, essentially, as that of the yogic schools of India; and a particularly striking analogy is the Kundalini Yoga of the Gupta and post-Gupta periods. For there the aim was to bring the “Serpent Power,” the spiritual force of the yogi, from its lowest seat at the base of the spine, up an interior path to the crown of the head, completing seven stages, at each of which the psychological limitations of the lower planes of commitment are surpassed.^{Note 64} As in India, so in these Hellenistic mysteries, the accomplished initiate both realized his own divinity and was honored as a god: for what better sign of godhood could there be than a human being in whom his own godhood had been realized? or what better guide to one’s own perfection? Nor was the impact of the pagan mystery cults of this age felt only by such confused minds as, dear reader, you and I might be warranted to pity or despise. No less a one than Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 b.c.) wrote in his De Legibus of the Greek mysteries of Eleusis:

Among the many excellent and divine institutions that your Athens has developed and contributed to human life, there is none, in my opinion, better than these mysteries, by which we have been brought forth from our rustic and savage mode of existence, cultivated, and refined to a state of civilization: and as the rites are called “initiations,” so, in truth, we have learned from them the first principles of life and have gained the understanding, not only to live happily, but also to die with better hope.^{Note 65}

The rites of Demeter and Persephone of Eleusis, Isis of Alexandria, Mithra of the Persians, and the Great Mother, Cybele, of Asia Minor, mutually influenced and enriched each other in the course of these centuries — all in terms of a common ability to sense and experience the miracle of life itself as divine, and wonderfully so. In contrast to which we find that in the orthodox Zoroastrian church, as well as in Judaism and, later, Christianity and Islam — where the ultimate view was not of boundless time but of a time when time began, as well as of a time when time would end: moreover, where it was supposed that the world and its inhabitants might be judged as, for the most part, evil, yet susceptible of some sort of ontological correction: and finally, where (particularly in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) no immanent divinity was recognized in the material world, but God, though omnipresent and (in the phrase of the Koran) “closer to man than his neck vein,” was absolutely other and apart — the ultimate goal was not, and could not be, the realization of eternal life in this world. Consequently, whereas in pagan mysteries the symbolism of world annihilation always applied, finally, to a psychological, spiritual crisis in the initiate, whereby the shadowplay of phenomenality was annihilated as by a thunderbolt and the adamantean Being of beings realized immediately and forever, in the orthodox, ethically scaled Levantine religions, the same symbolism of world annihilation was applied, rather, historically, as referring to a day to come of terminal doom.

In the earlier Jewish writings of the Day of the Messiah, the underlying notion had been simply of the restoration of the Jewish state under a king of the line of David, and the willing recognition, then, by all nations, of the truly Chosen People of God. However, in the Hellenistic period, notably from c. 200 b.c. to c. 100 a.d., there burst upon certain Jewish minds the highly thrilling idea that their own national Messiah would be, in fact, the cosmic Messiah at the end of time (like Saoshyant) — upon whose appearance there would follow gloriously, amid thunderous phenomena, the resurrection of the dead, liquidation of time, and all the rest. Moreover, that day was at hand. An abundant, imaginative Apocalyptic literature burst into bloom, first among Jews, but then also among Christians: the Book of Enoch, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Apocalypse of Baruch, Assumption of Moses, et cetera; and, above all, in the Christian series, the words attributed to Christ himself, touching the end of days and his own return in glory. It is well worth repeating these here in full; for, in direct contrast to the initiatory symbolism of the mystery cult just studied, they bring out very clearly the typical point of view of an Apocalypse — besides revealing fully the cosmology of bounded time of the early Christian church and (apparently) of Christ himself. For, as we read:

And as he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign when these things are all to be accomplished?” And Jesus began to say to them, “Take heed that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, there will be famines; this is but the beginning of the sufferings.

“But take heed to yourselves; for they will deliver you up to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them. And the gospel must first be preached to all nations. And when they bring you to trial and deliver you up, do not be anxious beforehand what you are to say; but say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. And brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.

“But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand),^{* *}This parenthetical aside is taken as evidence by modern scholars that the words here accredited to Jesus were not actually his. then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains; let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, to take anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle. And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! Pray that it may not happen in winter. For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will be. And if the Lord had not shortened the days, no human being would be saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom he chose, he shortened the days. And then if any one says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it. False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect. But take heed; I have told you all things beforehand.

“But in those days, after the tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.

“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

“But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Take heed, watch; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Watch therefore — for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning — lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to you I say to all: Watch.”^{Note 66}

IV. The Watchers of the Dead Sea

If the Battle of Marathon may be said to mark the crucial point of resistance of the European spirit to Asia, the counterpole of Levantine tolerance of the paganism of Europe may be seen registered in the reaction of the true “remnant” to the installation of a Greek altar — the “Abomination of Desolation” — on the Jewish altar in the temple court of Jerusalem. The year was 167 b.c., and the perpetrator of the indignity was the Seleucid emperor of Syria, Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175–164 b.c.).

“In those days,” we read in the First Book of the Maccabees,

Mattathias the son of John, the son of Simeon, arose; a priest of the sons of Joarib, from Jerusalem, and dwelt in Modin. And he had five sons. … And when he saw the blasphemies that were committed in Judah and Jerusalem, he said, “Woe is me! Wherefore was I born to see this misery of my people and of the holy city, and to dwell there when it was delivered into the hand of the enemy, and the sanctuary into the hands of strangers? All her ornaments are taken away; of a free woman she is become a bondslave. And, behold, our sanctuary, even our beauty and our glory, is laid waste, and the gentiles have profaned it. To what end therefore shall we live any longer?” Then Mattathias and his sons rent their clothes, and put on sackcloth, and mourned very sore.

In the meanwhile the king’s officers, such as compelled the people to revolt, came into the city Modin, to make them sacrifice. And when many of Israel came unto them, Mattathias also and his sons came together. Then answered the king’s officers, and said to Mattathias on this wise. “Thou art a ruler, and an honorable and great man in this city, and strengthened with sons and brethren. Now therefore come thou first, and fulfill the king’s commandment, as all the heathen have done, yea, and the men of Judah also, and such as remain at Jerusalem. So shalt thou and thy house be in the number of the king’s friends, and thou and thy children shall be honored with silver, gold, and many rewards.”

And Mattathias answered and spake with a loud voice: “Though all the nations that are under the king’s dominion obey him and fall away every one from the religion of their fathers, and give consent to his commandments, yet will I and my sons and my brethren walk in the covenant of our fathers. God forbid that we should forsake the Law and the Ordinances. We will not hearken to the king’s words, to go from our religion, either on the right hand, or on the left.”

Now when he had left speaking these words, there came one of the Jews in the sight of all to sacrifice on the altar which was at Modin, according to the king’s commandment. Which thing when Mattathias saw, he was inflamed with zeal and his loins trembled, neither could he forbear to show his anger according to judgment. Wherefore he ran, and slew him upon the altar. Also the king’s commissioner, who compelled men to sacrifice, he killed at that time, and the altar he pulled down.

And Mattathias cried throughout the city with a loud voice, saying: “Whosoever is zealous of the Law and maintaineth the Covenant, let him follow me.” So he and his sons fled into the mountains, and left all that ever they had in the city. Then many that sought after justice and judgment went down into the wilderness, to dwell there: both they and their children, their wives and their cattle, because afflictions increased sore upon them.^{Note 67}

And so, we are told, the uprising began that led to the founding of the Jewish state of the Maccabean (also called Hasmonean) priest-kings.

Meanwhile, however, not all the People were of one mind; nor were all, by any means, in Palestine. There were communities in Egypt, Babylon, Syria and Anatolia, in the Greek isles, and in Rome. Moreover, the privilege of judging themselves by their own laws had become in many places a formally granted right. And in many of these widely scattered synagogue communities the services were conducted not in Hebrew but in Greek. In fact, it was for these — and in particular the large Jewish community of Egyptian Alexandria — that the task was undertaken, in the third to first centuries b.c., of translating the Old Testament into Greek: which produced the version called the Septuagint, from the Latin word for “seventy” — since, according to the legend, there were seventy-two translators (six from each of the twelve tribes) and their renditions of the holy text were miraculously identical (For the force of the number 72 in relation to Sumero-biblical astrology, see The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology.).

But with the Greek language and customs came, of course, Greek thought. Some of the communities tolerated mixed marriages; some of their members, joining gymnasiums, exercised naked, like Greeks, and, when dressed, preferred Greek clothes. Some even neglected circumcision. Furthermore, there were proselytes from other faiths who were not required to be circumcised, but only kept the sabbath, worshiped Yahweh, and obeyed the food ordinances. There were even Jews who participated in Hellenistic cults. In Mesopotamia, as Professor W. W. Tarn points out, Jewish women had for centuries joined their neighbors in the annual wailing for Tammuz; and now, in Asia Minor, Yahweh himself had received a Greek name, Theos Hypsistos, God the Highest — a name later used even by Philo. “Sabazios, too,” as Tarn remarks, “was equated with the god of the Jews, from a fancied identity of Lord Sabazios with Lord Sabaoth”; and indeed, in the year 139, a number of Jews were expelled from Rome ostensibly for introducing the cult of Zeus Sabazios.

Zeus — Sabazios — Sabaoth — Yahweh — Hypsistos: “These cults,” suggests Professor Tam, “may conceivably have been sufficiently important to make Antiochus IV think that there would be no insuperable difficulty in introducing even in Judaea, the worship of Zeus.”^{Note 68}

Only a few brief years before the issuing of his offensive order, two contenders for the high priesthood of the temple of Jerusalem had approached him separately and successively for support, Jason of the Oniad family, and Menelaus of the Tobiads. Both were Hellenizers. First Jason won, then Menelaus; and there burst upon the community open civil war — with Syria, Egypt, Arabia, and a criss-cross of all sorts of family and sectarian factions contributing, besides Rome, which now was rising in the West as a growing threat to Antiochus — and Persia, moreover, in the resurgent East.

An idea of the lengths to which those who in the Book of the Maccabees are termed “the wicked men who went out of Israel” (I Maccabees 1:11) actually went in their adoption of Greek ways may be gained from a glance at Figures 25 and 26 — which are by no means even exceptional for the period. As Professor Erwin R. Goodenough has shown (in whose monumental twelve-volume work on Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period these amulets are discussed), already in early Palestinian graves many seals appear bearing Jewish names along with figures of the gods of Egypt, Syria, and Babylon; while in the Second Book of Maccabees there is a passage (II Maccabees 12:32–45) where it is told that when the bodies of several Jews who had died fighting for Yahweh were prepared for burial, there was discovered on each “an amulet of the idols of Jamnia.”^{Note 69}

Figure 25. Iaw

The representations in our figures are of a type known to scholarship as “the Anguipede,” or Snake-footed God. On amulets he is usually labeled Iaw. Noteworthy is the cock’s head. In some examples this becomes a lion’s head, and we seem to be on the way back to the Mithraic Zervan Akarana. Both cock and lion are solar symbols. Other figures show a phallic emphasis, which is appropriate enough in a god whose initiatory rite is circumcision: however, the further association in one of our examples with an eagle wound round by a serpent is rather special. The odd little horned figure at the right of this composition, Goodenough identifies with the old Egyptian god Anubis, bearing a sistrum in his left hand and “a peculiar pronged instrument” in his right.^{Note 70}

Figure 26. Iaw

The Jewish Anguipede is represented normally as a war god, bearing on his right arm a shield and in his left hand the whip of Helios. On his head in one case we see the figure of Ares, the Greek god of war. Still another example shows him as Helios, the sun, standing on a lion, which, in turn, is trampling down a crocodile. The second, smaller human figure in this case is the god Harpocrates — a late Egyptian form of the child Horus — with his left hand to his mouth and a cornucopia on his right arm. In the Hellenistic-Roman age the hand to lips of this child was read as an admonishment to silence; and we learn the sense of this from the following Mithra text.

“When the gods look directly at you and bear down upon you, straightway put your finger to your mouth and say, ‘Silence, Silence, Silence, Symbol of the living indestructible God. Protect me, Silence: nechtheir thanmelou.” After which one is to give a long whistle, a cluck, and pronounce other magical words.^{Note 71}

In the age of the Maccabees the leaders in Jerusalem of the Hellenizing party were the Sadducees, among whom were priestly families claiming descent from the priestly patriarch Zadoc (Zadoc > Sadducee), and these were opposed chiefly by the Pharisees, or “Separatists,” who believed themselves to be of a stricter orthodoxy — though, in fact, they had combined the old Hebrew heritage of a Day of Yahweh to come with the idea of the world end of Zoroastrian eschatology. The Jewish historian Joseph ben Matthias, or, as he preferred to write his name, Flavius Josephus (c. 37–95 a.d.), wrote of these two sects in his De Bello Judaico.

“The Pharisees,” in his words, “are those who are esteemed most skillful in the exact explication of their laws and are regarded as the first sect. They ascribe all to fate and to God, and yet allow that to act as is right, or the contrary, is principally in the power of men: although fate does cooperate in every action. They say that all souls are incorruptible, but that the souls of good men only are removed into other bodies, whereas the souls of bad men are subject to eternal punishment.”^{Note 72}

In other words, though strict enough in their practice of the ceremonial laws, they had added to their beliefs the idea of the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and a future retribution. Besides, they also believed in a Messiah to come in the last days of the world, as well as in a pantheon of angels.

“But the Sadducees,” states Josephus, “are those that compose the second order, and take away fate entirely, and suppose that God is not concerned in our doing or not doing what is evil. And they say that to act what is good or what is evil is at man’s own choice, and each man attaches himself to the one or the other as he will. They also take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul and the punishments and rewards in Hades.”^{Note 73}

Actually, the Sadducees, for all their Hellenizing, were those who in matters of doctrine held to the old law exclusively, rejecting every one of the popular traditions that had been absorbed from the Persians by their challengers. Moreover, in politics they were closer than the Pharisees to the reigning spirit of the Maccabees, who, after all, were still vassals of the Hellenistic Seleucids, though free now to worship as they pleased. The Sadducees were, in short, the aristocratic party: intelligent, conservative, sophisticated snobs. “Whereas,” states Josephus, “the Pharisees are friendly to one another, and are for the exercise of concord and regard for the public, the Sadducees, even toward each other, show a more disagreeable spirit, and in their relations with men of their own kind are as harsh as though they were gentiles.”^{Note 74}

Now it is simply a fact, signally illustrated in the history of the Levant and particularly in Judaism and Islam, that when religion is identified with community (or, as we have expressed the idea, with a consensus), and this community, in turn, is not identified with an actual land-based socio-political organism, but with a transcendental principle embodied in the laws of a church or sect, its effects on the local secular body politic, within which it thrives but with which it does not identify itself, are inevitably and predictably destructive. The Old Testament Book of Kings describes in detail the terrible effects of such intransigence in the history of the monarchy of David, and we are now to watch it once again come into play — with cumulative fury — in the calamitous disintegration from within of the state so bravely fought for by the Maccabees.

For when the bold Mattathias and his sons — we are told — had made good their cause against the Greek altars, they and their friends went round about, “and what children soever they found within the coast of Israel uncircumcised, those they circumcised valiantly. They pursued also after the proud men and the work prospered in their hand. So they recovered the law out of the hand of the gentiles and out of the hand of kings, and neither suffered the sinner to triumph.”^{Note 75}

Mattathias was followed by his eldest son, Judas Maccabeus, who, “in his acts was like a lion, and like a lion’s whelp roaring for his prey, for he pursued the wicked and sought them out, and burnt up those that vexed his people.” Indeed, he succeeded even in slaying Antiochus’s agent, Apollonius, who, as we read, “gathered the gentiles together, and a great host out of Samaria, to fight against Israel. Which thing when Judas perceived, he went forth to meet him, and so he smote him, and slew him: many also fell down slain, but the rest fled. Wherefore Judas took their spoils, and Apollonius’ sword also, and therewith he fought all his life long.”^{Note 76} Judas made league with the rising power of Rome. But he was slain in battle when he went against a Syrian army that had been treacherously summoned against him by the Hellenizing high priest of Jerusalem, Alcimus.

Judas was succeeded by his younger brother Jonathan (r. 160–143); however, as the tale now turns: “the wicked began to put forth their heads in all the coasts of Israel and there rose up all such as wrought iniquity.”^{Note 77} Alcimus, the Hellenizing high priest, now was in actual command of the city and, in keeping with his program to integrate Jewish and contemporary life, he relaxed the observance of the Mosaic code and even removed the walls of the inner court of the temple. Intrigues, on one side with Rome, while on the other simultaneously with Syria, miracles of supernatural intervention, famines and executions followed throughout Israel in bewildering succession. Jonathan took refuge in a desert city, which he fortified, and in 152 b.c., some years after Alcimus had died, Jonathan, with Syrian help, returned victoriously to Jerusalem, restored the wall, and resanctified the city.^{Note 78}

There was now, however, no consecrated high priest. Besides, the late tenant of the office, Alcimus, had been of the upstart Tobiad, not authentic Oniad, family; and to compound the impropriety of the situation, Jonathan the Maccabee now contrived to have himself installed in that sacred office at the Feast of Tabernacles of the year of his victory. He died nine years later, and the office passed to his brother Simon, who was confirmed by “the priests and people and the heads of the nation and the elders of the country,” as well as by the Seleucid emperor of Syria; and this outrage was commemorated by a bronze plaque in which it was stated that Simon should be “their governor and high priest forever, until a prophet should arise, and that, furthermore, he should be obeyed by all and that all documents in the country should be written in his name, and that he be clothed in purple and wear gold.”^{Note 79}

Simon reigned but eight years (142–134); for while he was on a tour of inspection, in Jericho, his son-in-law, at a great banquet given ostensibly in his honor, got him drunk and had him slain. His wife and two of his sons were imprisoned — later cruelly murdered^{Note 80} — but his third son, John Hyrcanus, managing to escape, assumed immediately the high priesthood and reigned thereafter for thirty-one fairly prosperous years (135–104), waging war on every hand with considerable success. However, as Josephus states, “these successes made him envied, and occasioned a sedition in the land; and many there were who got together and would not be at rest till they broke out into open war — in which war they were beaten.”^{Note 81}

Now those who had thus risen and been beaten were the Pharisees, whom, in the first years of his reign, John Hyrcanus had favored but subsequently betrayed. He had invited a number of their leaders to a feast and, when the dinner was over, asked for approval of the godliness of his rule. Whereupon, one old Pharisee present, whose name was Eleazar, let him hear that if he truly wished to be righteous he should lay aside the priesthood, to which his family properly had no claim. After that, Hyrcanus not only turned his favor to the Sadducees but formally forbade the observance of Pharisaic rites. And it was apparently in the course of this reign, c. 110 b.c., that the recently discovered Dead Sea Scroll retreat was built, far eastward in the desert, about ten miles from the Jordan site where John the Baptist later was to baptize.

For in the city of Jerusalem the battle of the two contending sects continuously increased, and to such a point that many thought the prophesied war at the end of days, the apocalyptic moment, had arrived. John Hyrcanus died in 104 b.c., bequeathing the government to his wife and the high priesthood to his son Aristobulus. The son, however, threw his mother into prison, where he let her die of starvation,^{Note 82} and, as Josephus states, “changed the government into a kingdom, and was the first to put a diadem on his head.”^{Note 83} This added sacrilege to sacrilege; for if the family had no right to the high priesthood of Zadoc, it had no more to the kingship of David; and besides, the act of assuming to himself both anointments amounted practically to an assumption of the ultimate apocalyptic Messiahhood.

Aristobulus was not to live long to enjoy his blasphemous act. For he caused his brother Antigonus to be slain by an assassin, and when he himself then coughed up blood and it was being carried away by a servant, by chance the servant stumbled and the blood spilled on the very spot stained by his brother’s blood. Asking the meaning of the shocked cry without, he was told, and immediately expired, having reigned but one miserable year (104–103).^{Note 84}

Aristobulus’s widow, Alexandra, let his surviving brothers out of the jail in which he had kept them and married the eldest, who seemed to her to be the most moderate and responsible in temper, Alexander Jannaeus (r. 103–76 b.c.) — who, however, embarked straightway on a series of wars, to the north, south, east, and west, suppressing meanwhile with his foreign troops all Jewish insurrections. The Pharisees were heating up. “He slew,” according to Josephus, “not fewer than fifty thousand Jews in the interval of six years. Yet he had no reason to rejoice in these victories, since he was only consuming his own kingdom; till at length he left off fighting and endeavored to come to a composition with them by talking with his subjects. But this mutability and irregularity of his conduct made them hate him the more. And when he asked them why they so hated him and how he might appease them, they said, by dying.”^{Note 85}

In the course of all this the Pharisees invited the Syrian Seleucid, Demetrius, to assist them, and he came, of course. He came against Jerusalem with an army of both Jews and Syrians, which defeated Alexander Jannaeus’s force; but after the victory six thousand of his Jews deserted to Jannaeus, and the Syrian king withdrew.^{Note 86} Whereafter the king and high priest of Jerusalem took revenge upon the Pharisees. “His rage,” states Josephus, “became so extravagant that his barbarity proceeded to impiety, and when he had ordered eight hundred crucified in the middle of the city, he had the throats of their wives and children cut before their eyes. And he watched these executions while he was drinking, lying down with his concubines. Upon which so deep a terror seized on the people, that eight thousand of his opposers fled away the very next night, out of all Judea, whose flight was only terminated by Alexander’s death.”^{Note 87}

And with that death, 76 b.c., the Pharisees came to power, and the internecine tide only ran the other way. New purges, fratricides, betrayals, liquidations, and miracles kept the kingdom in uproar until, after a decade of such madness, the Roman legion of Pompey was invited by one of two brothers who were then contending for the crown to assist him in his holy cause; and it was in this way that the city of God, Jerusalem, passed in the year 63 b.c. into the sphere of Rome.

The recently unearthed desert retreat of the Dead Sea Scroll community, near the preaching place of John the Baptist, belongs precisely to this time; and it surely is no wonder (since all believing Jews supposed in that period that the history of their own people was the destiny of creation) that the idea should have gained currency that the end of the world was at hand; indeed, that the final war and upheaval of “the birth-throes of the Messiah,” terrible Armageddon, was already in full course. Mythology had become history, and prophets were recognizing on every side radiant miracles both of promise and of doom. The Sadducees and Pharisees, along with the mighty Maccabees (who were now being called Hasmoneans, after a supposed ancestor of Mattathias) had turned their own Promised Land into a veritable hell on wheels — while a fourth and very different sect withdrew in deep solemnity to the desert and the Dead Sea, with intent there to prepare themselves for the day of days, at hand.

These were the sect called the Essenes, who supposed themselves to be members of the final generation of the world, and they were in training for that ultimate moment of the Lord when the Messiah would appear. The war was to terminate in victory, as a result largely of their own participation on the side of the principle of light, and the earth then would be renewed. As they had read in the words of the prophet Habakkuk: “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14). The dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls now is fixed between c. 200 b.c. and the time of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome, 66–70 a.d. They are the oldest Hebrew manuscripts now known. And their contents are of two kinds:

1. 1. Fragments of Bible text from the period of the Septuagint; hence, older by as much as three centuries than the orthodox Masoretic version of the Old Testament, and by more than a thousand years than the earliest formerly known Hebrew manuscript of the Bible (Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus, 916 a.d.); and
2. 2. Writings original to the Essene sect, of which the chief examples are the following:

a) THE SCROLL OF THE WAR OF THE SONS OF LIGHT WITH THE SONS OF DARKNESS

 

This is a nearly perfect scroll of leather, more than nine feet long, six inches wide, wrapped in a covering of parchment.^{Note 88} In it is projected, in detail, a forty-year war plan, by which the Essenes were to conquer the world for God in three military campaigns. The first two campaigns were to be against Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and the other immediate neighbors, which together would last six years, after which there was to follow a sabbatical year of rest. Then the last campaign was to be undertaken against the more distant peoples of the world, and would require twenty-nine years, with four interpolated sabbaticals (which the enemy too apparently were to honor). The title of this scroll suggests the Zoroastrian influence, which is apparent throughout, mingled with echoes of the early Hebrew prophets, here interpreted, however, as referring to an age of which those earlier jeremiads had no idea. And although everything was foreknown, even to the length of each campaign, mankind (or, at least, those elect of mankind who were the members of this sect) would have to participate with all vigor in the action.

Some idea of the spirit of this war plan may be gained from the following instruction:

On the trumpets of the assembly of the congregation they shall write “The Called of God”; on the assembly of the commanders they shall write “The Princes of God”; on the trumpets of the connections they shall write “The Order of God”; on the trumpets of the men of renown they shall write “The Chiefs of the Fathers of the Congregation.” When they are gathered together to the house of meeting they shall write “The Testimonies of God for the Holy Council.” On the trumpets of the camps they shall write “The Peace of God in His Holy Camps”; on their trumpets of breaking camp they shall write “The Powers of God for Scattering the Enemy and Putting to Flight Those Who Hate Righteousness and Turning Back Kindness against Those Who Hate God.” On the trumpets of the ranks of battle they shall write “The Ranks of the Banners of God for the Vengeance of His Anger against All the Sons of Darkness.” On the trumpets of assembly of the champions, when the war gates are opened to go forth to the array of the enemy, they shall write “Memorial of Vengeance in the Assembly of God”; on the trumpets of the slain they shall write “The Mighty Hand of God in Battle to Cast Down all the Faithless Slain”; on the trumpets of ambush they shall write “The Mysteries of God for the Destruction of Wickedness”; on the trumpets of pursuit they shall write “God’s Smiting All the Sons of Darkness — His Anger Will Not Turn Back until They Are Destroyed.” …

When they go to the battle they shall write on their standards “The Truth of God,” “The Righteousness of God,” “The Glory of God,” “The Justice of God,” and after these the whole order of the explanation of their names. When they draw near to the battle they shall write on their standards “The Right Hand of God,” “The Assembly of God,” “The Panic of God,” “The Slain of God,” and after these the whole explanation of their names. When they return from the battle they shall write on their standards “The Extolling of God,” “The Greatness of God,” “The Praises of God,” “The Glory of God,” with the whole explanation of their names.^{Note 89}

b) THE MANUAL OF DISCIPLINE

 

A manuscript of leather in two rolls, nine and one-half inches wide and perhaps originally, when sewn together, some six or seven feet long.^{Note 90} The matter of the text is of two sorts: one, a manifesto of the Doctrine of Two Spirits; the other, a statement of the regulations by which the sect was organized and prepared for its historic work.

God created man to have dominion over the world, and made for him two spirits, that he might walk by them until the appointed time of his visitation; they are the spirits of Truth and of Error. In the abode of light are the origins of Truth, and from the source of darkness are the origins of error. In the hand of the Prince of Lights is dominion over all the sons of righteousness; in the ways of light they walk. And in the hand of the Angel of Darkness is all dominion over the sons of error; and in the ways of darkness they walk. … But the God of Israel and his angel of truth have helped all the sons of light. For he created the spirits of light and darkness, and upon them he founded every work and upon their ways every service. One of the spirits God loves for all the ages of eternity, and with all its deeds he is pleased forever; as for the other, he abhors its company, and all its ways he hates forever. …

But God in the mysteries of his understanding and in his glorious wisdom has ordained a period for the ruin of error, and in the appointed time of punishment he will destroy it forever. And then shall come out forever the truth of the world, for it has wallowed in the ways of wickedness in the dominion of error until the appointed time of judgment which has been decreed. And then God will refine in his truth all the deeds of man, and will purify for himself the frame of man, consuming every spirit of error hidden in his flesh, and cleansing him with a holy spirit from all wicked deeds. And he will sprinkle upon him a spirit of truth, like water for impurity, from all abominations of falsehood and wallowing in a spirit of impurity, to make the upright perceive the knowledge of the Most High and the wisdom of the Sons of Heaven, to instruct those whose conduct is blameless. For God has chosen them for an eternal covenant, and theirs is all the glory of man; and there shall be no error, to the shame of all works of deceit. …

For in equal measure God has established the two spirits until the period which has been decreed and the making new; and he knows the performance of their works for all the periods of eternity. And he causes the sons of men to inherit them, that they may know good and evil, making the lots fall for every man according to his spirit in the world until the time of visitation.^{Note 91}

“And this,” we next read, “is the order for the men of the community who have offered themselves to turn from all evil and to lay hold of all that he commanded according to his will, to become a community in law and in wealth…

Most notable in the strictly ordered manner of communal, puritanical, pseudo-military barracks life that the Essenes thought to be necessary for the accomplishment of their end are the vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, the years and stages of novitiate, the semi-sacred communal meals, and the emphasis on a kind of ritual bathing. Almost certainly the mother house of the sect was the large building complex recently unearthed in the Wady Qumran, at the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. In its neighborhood there is an extensive cemetery containing mostly males; and it was round about, in various hidings — caves and rock crannies of the desert — that the precious texts were hurriedly stowed for safekeeping at the time of the Jewish Revolt. The dates of occupancy of the site are now reckoned as from c. 110 b.c. to 67/70 a.d., with a lapse of vacancy during the period of the reign of Herod, 31–4 b.c., for which no explanation has been found.

It is believed that around the mother house there was a camp and that there were also in the cities of the land cells or meeting groups of Essenes. Josephus noted the resemblance of the Essene to the Orphic movement of the Greeks, both in mythology and in custom; and connections now may be suggested as well with the Buddhist-Hindu ideal of monastery life. For we have sufficient evidence of the entry of Indian influence into the Hellenistic-Levantine sphere at this time. A recently found rock-wall inscription of the Buddhist king Ashoka (r. 268–232 b.c.), near Kandahar, South Afghanistan, bears a text in both Greek and Aramaic.^{Note 92} And another Ashokan text declares that the Buddhist king sent missionaries to Antiochus II of Syria, Ptolemy II of Egypt, Magas of Cyrene, Antigonas Gonatas of Macedonia, and Alexander II of Epirus^{Note 93} — all influential monarchs in major centers of the Hellenistic world.

The archaeological dating of the ruins, the paleographic dating of the scrolls, our knowledge of the history of the Maccabees, and the passage of Josephus on the Essenes perfectly combine to place us in the general socio-historic field from which the Qumran sect emerged; and as a further contribution to our knowledge of their thought, there is, in addition:

c) THE HABAKKUK COMMENTARY

This is a badly damaged fragment, only five feet long and about five and a half inches wide, decayed along the edges, with a loss, apparently, of about two inches.^{Note 94} Here appear passages from the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, sixth century b.c., reread as referring to the Maccabean age, the rationalization being that the prophet was referring to the wars of the “last days,” which, indeed, were these.

For, lo, I am rousing the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation (Habakkuk 1:6). This means [states the Commentary] the Kittim [the Romans], who are swift and men of valor in battle, overthrowing rulers and subduing them in the domination of the Kittim. They take possession of many lands and do not believe in the statutes of God. … Over smooth ground they go, smiting and plundering the cities of the earth^{Note 95}

At the opening of this text two characters are named, who, in the first flush of excitement following the publication of the document, seemed to some to suggest that the whole mythology of the life, crucifixion, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus the Messiah had been anticipated in the founder of the Essene community of Qumran. As we read:

So the law is slacked (Habakkuk 1:4). This means that they [the leaders of the Jews] rejected the law of God. And justice never goes forth, for the wicked man encompasses the righteous man. This means that the wicked man is the Wicked Priest, and the righteous man is the Teacher of Righteousness.^{Note 96}

It is now practically certain that the person referred to as the Wicked Priest was one or another of the reigning high priests of Jerusalem. A number of scholars hold that he was Jonathan Maccabeus (r. 160-142 b.c.), who, as we have just seen, was the first of his line to assume the sacred office.^{Note 97} Others give the role to Simon (r. 142–134 b.c.), who was confirmed formally in the role by a decree inscribed in bronze.^{Note 98} A third suggestion has been John Hyrcanus (r. 134–104 b.c.), who assumed the anointment not only of high priest, but also of king — in which case the bold challenger Eleazar may have been the Teacher of Righteousness, and a retreat to the desert of the Pharisees (or perhaps of an extreme wing of the Pharisaic party) may then have been the occasion for the founding of the center at Qumran, c. 110 b.c., which is within the span of years of this reign.^{Note 99}

In the language of the Scrolls, the Wicked Priest is termed the Preacher of the Lie, the Man of the Lie, the One who Preached with Lies, the Man of Falsehood, and the Man of Scoffing, all of which epithets suggest the Zoroastrian concept of the Lie as the Lord of Darkness, and Truth as the quality of Light.

Another text of the Dead Sea complex, a mere fragment of a commentary on the Old Testament Book of Nahum, speaks of “the Lion of Wrath … who hangs men alive,” who is to be identified, in all likelihood, as Alexander Jannaeus (r. 104–78 b.c.), who, as we have seen, crucified eight hundred Jews of Jerusalem in one night, and slew their wives before their eyes, while himself enjoyed his concubines.^{Note 100} And, as Josephus tells, many Jews thereafter fled for refuge to the desert. “It was a night,” writes the Reverend Duncan Howlett, “such as the world has seldom seen. Need we look further for the Wicked Priest of the Dead Sea Scrolls!”^{Note 101}

For the Wicked Priest we thus find at least four qualified candidates, whereas for the Teacher of Righteousness, whom the Wicked Priest is declared to have persecuted, the only name that has been suggested — and this without great conviction — is the brave old Pharisee Eleazar. Were the Essenes, then, a splinter group from the Pharisees? The question is open. Was the Teacher of Righteousness the founder of the sect? Was he crucified by the Wicked Priest? Did he rise again from the dead? And will he come again in the character of Messiah? Let me quote Professor Millar Burrows to these points.

“The teacher may have been crucified. … He may have been stoned or put to death in some other way. On the other hand, he may have died a natural death. … Neither the Habakkuk Commentary nor any other Qumran text published thus far says or clearly implies that the teacher was put to death.” Furthermore: “There is certainly no evidence that he was believed to have risen already.” And finally, according to Burrows, it is “quite uncertain” as to whether the Teacher himself was identified with the prophet or Messiah at the end of days.^{Note 102} We know from another text of the movement, the so-called Damascus Document (discovered in 1895, and formerly thought to be a Pharisaic text), that there were expected still to come “a teacher of righteousness, an interpreter of the law, a prophet, and two Messiahs,” but, as Professor Burrows concludes, “What connection, if any, the teacher of righteousness who had already come was thought to have had with any of these coming persons is quite uncertain.”^{Note 103}

What is certain, on the other hand, is that we have found in the Dead Sea Scrolls the Sitz in Leben (to use Professor F. M. Cross’s term)^{Note 104} of the Jewish apocalyptic movement of the late Hellenistic age, and that it was from the general neighborhood of this movement that the Christian mission sprang. To quote Professor Cross: “Like the primitive Church, the Essene community was distinguished from the Pharisaic associations and other movements within Judaism precisely in its consciousness ‘of being already the called and chosen Congregation of the end of days.’ ”^{Note 105} However, a distinction is to be remarked. For, whereas the Essene, in his view of “the end of days” in which he lived, looked forward to the Messiah, for the early Christian the Messiah had already come. He stood, so to say, on later ground.^{Note 106} The leading theme of the Dead Sea community was that Yahweh, as of yore, had brought the armies of the gentiles down upon his people as a punishment for their sins; and in this sense the Essenes stood directly on the line of the old prophets. However, whereas Amos, Hosea, Jeremiah, and the rest had conceived of the Hebrew calamity in historical terms, the ideology now was shot through with Zoroastrian eschatological thought. According to the earlier view, the people were being punished, but a remnant would survive to restore the world power of the messianic House of David. The idea now, on the contrary, was that the day at hand was to mark the end of historic time itself, the end of the cosmic struggle of the two Spirits of Light and Darkness; moreover, that in the tumult of that day of God, which now was in full career, the remnant passing on into the perfect age to come would not be the members of any other Jewish sect but this, sternly training for its high destiny in its monastery of the desert by the Dead Sea.

Much the same was the early Christian view. But, as a number of scholars have observed, the Old Testament legalism and exclusivism, which still are to be recognized in every passage of the Dead Sea Scrolls, had been left behind by the Christians, standing as they were, on the “later ground.” The cosmic crisis of the War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness had been passed, and the old ethic of Judgment therefore could yield to Love. We read in the Dead Sea Manual of Discipline that the candidate for admission to the order of the Community of God was “to seek God; … to love all that he has chosen and to hate all that he has rejected; … to love all the Sons of Light, each according to his lot in the counsel of God, and to hate all the Sons of Darkness, each according to his guilt in vengeance of God.”^{Note 107} Whereas in the messianic sphere itself the words to be heard were, rather:

You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.^{Note 108}

Which is to say, in Zoroastrian terms, you must go beyond Good and Evil, the intertwining serpents, to the posture of the lion-man. Compare the previously discussed mystery of Tiresias, and, in biblical terms, the state of man before the Fall.

So far, then, it would seem that the origins of Christian mythology might be interpreted as a development out of Old Testament thought, under Persian influence, with nothing as yet particularly Greek — unless the emphasis on love and (possibly) a conception of Mankind instead of specifically Jewish Man. However, in relation to the term Messiah something more has to be told; and for this we turn our eyes to Rome.