Demonology and Devil-lore Part 30

The warrior angels sheathed their swords.

Then the Dragon attacked the just Prince of the G.o.ds.

Strongly they joined in the trial of battle, The King drew his sword, and dealt rapid blows, Then he took his whirling thunderbolt, and looked well behind and before him: And when the Dragon opened her mouth to swallow him, He flung the bolt into her, before she could shut her lips.

The blazing lightning poured into her inside.

He pulled out her heart; her mouth he rent open; He drew his (falchion), and cut open her belly.

He cut into her inside and extracted her heart; He took vengeance on her, and destroyed her life.

When he knew she was dead he boasted over her.

After that the Dragon their leader was slain, Her troops took to flight: her army was scattered abroad, And the angels her allies, who had come to help her, Retreated, grew quiet, and went away.

They fled from thence, fearing for their own lives, And saved themselves, flying to places beyond pursuit.

He followed them, their weapons he broke up.

Broken they lay, and in great heaps they were captured.

A crowd of followers, full of astonishment, Its remains lifted up, and on their shoulders hoisted.

And the eleven tribes pouring in after the battle In great mult.i.tudes, coming to see, Gazed at the monstrous serpent....

In the fragment just quoted we have the 'flaming sword which turned every way' (Gen. iii. 24). The seven distinct forms of evil are but faintly remembered in the seven thunderbolts taken by Bel: they are now all virtually gathered into the one form he combats, and are thus on their way to form the seven-headed dragon of the Apocalypse, where Michael replaces Bel. [56] 'The angels, her allies who had come to help her,' are surely that 'third part of the stars of heaven'

which the apocalyptic dragon's tail drew to the earth in its fall (Rev. xii. 4). Bel's dragon is also called a 'Tempter.'

At length we reach the brief but clear account of the 'Revolt in Heaven' found in a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, and translated by Mr. Fox Talbot: [57]--

The Divine Being spoke three times, the commencement of a psalm.

The G.o.d of holy songs, Lord of religion and worship seated a thousand singers and musicians: and established a choral band who to his hymn were to respond in mult.i.tudes....

With a loud cry of contempt they broke up his holy song spoiling, confusing, confounding his hymn of praise.

The G.o.d of the bright crown with a wish to summon his adherents sounded a trumpet blast which would wake the dead, which to those rebel angels prohibited return he stopped their service, and sent them to the G.o.ds who were his enemies.

In their room he created mankind.

The first who received life, dwelt along with him.

May he give them strength never to neglect his word, following the serpent's voice, whom his hands had made.

And may the G.o.d of divine speech expel from his five thousand that wicked thousand who in the midst of his heavenly song had shouted evil blasphemies!

It will be observed that there were already hostile G.o.ds to whom these riotous angels were sent. It is clear that in both the Egyptian and a.s.syrian cosmogonies the upper G.o.ds had in their employ many ferocious monsters. Thus in the Book of Hades, Horus addresses a terrible serpent: 'My Kheti, great fire, of which this flame in my eye is the emission, and of which my children guard the folds, open thy mouth, draw wide thy jaws, launch thy flame against the enemies of my father, burn their bodies, consume their souls!' [58]

Many such instances could be quoted. In this same book we find a great serpent, Saa-Set, 'Guardian of the Earth.' Each of the twelve pylons of Hades is surmounted by its serpent-guards--except one. What has become of that one? In the last inscription but one, quoted in full, it will be observed (third line from the last) that eleven (angel) tribes came in after Bel's battle to inspect the slain dragon. The twelfth had revolted. These, we may suppose, had listened to 'the serpent's voice' mentioned in the last fragment quoted.

We have thus distributed through these fragments all the elements which, from Egyptian and a.s.syrian sources gathered around the legend of the Serpent in Eden. The Tree of Knowledge and that of Life are not included, and I have given elsewhere my reasons for believing these to be importations from the ancient Aryan legend of the war between the Devas and Asuras for the immortalising Amrita.

In the last fragment quoted we have also a notable statement, that mankind were created to fill the places that had been occupied by the fallen angels. It is probable that this notion supplied the basis of a cla.s.s of legends of which Lilith is type. She whose place Eve was created to fill was a serpent-woman, and the earliest mention of her is in the exorcism already quoted, found at Nineveh. In all probability she is but another form of Gula, the fallen Istar and Queen of Hades; in which case her conspiracy with the serpent Samael would be the Darkness which was upon the face of Bahu, 'the Deep,'

in the second verse of the Bible.

The Bible opens with the scene of the G.o.ds conquering the Dragon of Darkness with Light. There is a rabbinical legend, that when Light issued from under the throne of G.o.d, the Prince of Darkness asked the Creator wherefore he had brought Light into existence? G.o.d answered that it was in order that he might be driven back to his abode of darkness. The evil one asked that he might see that; and entering the stream of Light, he saw across time and the world, and beheld the face of the Messiah. Then he fell upon his face and cried, 'This is he who shall lay low in ruin me and all the inhabitants of h.e.l.l!'

What the Prince of Darkness saw was the vision of a race: beginning with the words (Gen. i. 3, 4), 'G.o.d said, Let there be Light; and there was Light; and G.o.d saw the Light that it was good; and G.o.d divided between the Light and the Darkness;' ending with Rev. xx. 1, 2, 'And I saw an angel come down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.'

CHAPTER XI.

WAR ON EARTH.

The Abode of Devils--Ketef--Disorder--Talmudic legends--The restless Spirit--The Fall of Lucifer--Asteria, Hecate, Lilith--The Dragon's triumph--A Gipsy legend--Caedmon's Poem of the Rebellious Angels--Milton's version--The Puritans and Prince Rupert--Bel as ally of the Dragon--A 'Mystery' in Marionettes--European h.e.l.ls.

'Rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them! Woe to the earth and the sea! for the devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.' This pa.s.sage from the Book of Revelations is the refrain of many and much earlier scriptures. The a.s.syrian accounts of the war in heaven, given in the preceding chapter, by no means generally support the story that the archdragon was slain by Bel. Even the one that does describe the chief dragon's death leaves her comrades alive, and the balance of testimony is largely in favour of the theory which prevailed, that the rebellious angels were merely cast out of heaven, and went to swell the ranks of the dark and fearful abode which from the beginning had been peopled by the enemies of the G.o.ds. The nature of this abode is described in various pa.s.sages of the Bible, and in many traditions.

'Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.' So said Jeremiah (i. 14), in pursuance of nearly universal traditions as to the region of s.p.a.ce in which demons and devils had their abode. 'h.e.l.l is naked before him,' says Job (xxvi. 6), 'and destruction hath no covering. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place.' According to the Hebrew mythology this habitation of demons was a realm of perpetual cold and midnight, which Jehovah, in creating the world, purposely left chaotic; so it was prepared for the Devil and his angels at the foundation of the world.

Although this northern h.e.l.l was a region of disorder, so far as the people of Jehovah and the divine domain were concerned, they had among themselves a strong military and aristocratic government. It was disorder perfectly systematised. The anarchical atmosphere of the region is reflected in the abnormal structures ascribed to the many devils with whose traits Jewish and Arabic folklore is familiar, and which are too numerous to be described here. Such a devil, for instance, is Bedargon, 'hand-high,' with fifty heads and fifty-six hearts, who cannot strike any one or be struck, instant death ensuing to either party in such an attack. A more dangerous devil is Ketef, identified as the 'terror from the chambers' alluded to by Jeremiah (x.x.xii. 25), 'Bitter Pestilence.' His name is said to be from kataf, 'cut and split,' because he divides the course of the day; and those who are interested to compare Hebrew and Hindu myths may find it interesting to note the coincidences between Ketef and Ketu, the cut-off tail of Rahu, and source of pestilence. [59] Ketef reigns neither in the dark or day, but between the two; his power over the year is limited to the time between June 17 and July 9, during which it was considered dangerous to flog children or let them go out after four P.M. Ketef is calf-headed, and consists of hide, hair, and eyes; he rolls like a cask; he has a terrible horn, but his chief terror lies in an evil eye fixed in his heart which none can see without instant death. The arch-fiend who reigns over the infernal host has many Court Fools--probably meteors and comets--who lead men astray.

All these devils have their regulations in their own domain, but, as we have said, their laws mean disorder in that part of the universe which belongs to the family of Jehovah. In flying about the world they are limited to places which are still chaotic or waste. They haunt such congenial spots as rocks and ruins, and frequent desert, wilderness, dark mountains, and the ruins of human habitations. They can take possession of a wandering star.

There is a pretty Talmudic legend of a devil having once gone to sleep, when some one, not seeing him of course, set down a cask of wine on his ears. In leaping up the devil broke the cask, and being tried for it, was condemned to repay the damage at a certain period. The period having elapsed before the money was brought, the devil was asked the cause of the delay. He replied that it was very difficult for devils to obtain money, because men were careful to keep it locked or tied up; and 'we have no power,' he said, 'to take from anything bound or sealed up, nor can we take anything that is measured or counted; we are permitted to take only what is free or common.'

According to one legend the devils were specially angered, because Jehovah, when he created man, gave him dominion over things in the sea (Gen. i. 28), that being a realm of unrest and tempest which they claimed as belonging to themselves. They were denied control of the life that is in the sea, though permitted a large degree of power over its waters. Over the winds their rule was supreme, and it was only by reducing certain demons to slavery that Solomon was able to ride in a wind-chariot.

Out of these several realms of order and disorder in nature were evolved the angels and the devils which were supposed to beset man. The first man is said to have been like an angel. From the instant of his creation there attended him two spirits, whom the rabbins found shadowed out in the sentence, 'Jehovah-Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul' (Gen. ii. 7). This 'breath of life'

was a holy spirit, and stood on Adam's right; the 'living soul' was a restless spirit on his left, which continually moved up and down. When Adam had sinned, this restless spirit became a diabolical spirit, and it has ever acted as mediator between man and the realm of anarchy.

It has been mentioned that in the a.s.syrian legends of the Revolt in Heaven we find no adequate intimation of the motive by which the rebels were actuated. It is said they interrupted the heavenly song, that they brought on an eclipse, that they afflicted human beings with disease; but why they did all this is not stated. The motive of the serpent in tempting Eve is not stated in Genesis. The theory which Caedmon and Milton have made so familiar, that the dragons aspired to rival Jehovah, and usurp the throne of Heaven, must, however, have been already popular in the time of Isaiah. In his rhapsody concerning the fall of Babylon, he takes his rhetoric from the story of Bel and the Dragon, and turns a legend, as familiar to every Babylonian as that of St. George and the Dragon now is to Englishmen, into an ill.u.s.tration of their own doom. The invective is directed against the King of Babylon, consequently the s.e.x of the devil is changed; but the most remarkable change is in the ascription to Lucifer of a clear purpose to rival the Most High, and seize the throne of heaven.

'h.e.l.l from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming, it stirreth up the (spirits of) the dead, even all the chief ones (great goats) of the earth: it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations (demon-begotten aliens). All these shall say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy splendour is brought down to the underworld, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen, O Lucifer (Daystar), son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thy heart, I will ascend into (the upper) heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars (archangels) of G.o.d: I will sit (reign) also upon the mount of the congregation (the a.s.sembly of the enemies of G.o.d) in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds (the thunder-throne of Jehovah); I will be like the Most High. Yet shalt thou be brought down to h.e.l.l, to the sides of the pit.' [60]

In this pa.s.sage we mark the arena of the combat shifted from heaven to earth. It is not the throne of heaven but that of the world at which the fiends now aim. Nay, there is confession in every line of the prophecy that the enemy of Jehovah has usurped his throne. h.e.l.l has prevailed, and Lucifer is the Prince of this World. The celestial success has not been maintained on earth. This would be the obvious fact to a humiliated, oppressed, heavily-taxed people, who believed themselves the one family on earth sprung from Jehovah, and their masters the offspring of demons. This situation gave to the vague traditions of a single combat between Bel and the Dragon, about an eclipse or a riot, the significance which it retained ever afterward of a mighty conflict on earth between the realms of Light and Darkness, between which the Elohim had set a boundary-line (Gen. i. 4) in the beginning.

A similar situation returned when the Jews were under the sway of Rome, and then all that had ever been said of Babylon was repeated against Rome under the name of Edom. It recurred in the case of those Jews who acknowledged Jesus as their Messiah: in the pomp and glory of the Caesars they beheld the triumph of the Powers of Darkness, and the burthen of Isaiah against Lucifer was raised again in that of the Apocalypse against the seven-headed Dragon. It is notable how these writers left out of sight the myth of Eden so far as it did not belong to their race. Isaiah does not say anything even of the serpent. The Apocalypse says nothing of the two wonderful trees, and the serpent appears only as a Dragon from whom the woman is escaping, by whom she is not at all tempted. The shape of the Devil, and the Combat with him, have always been determined by dangers and evils that are actual, not such as are archaeological.

A gipsy near Edinburgh gave me his version of the combat between G.o.d and Satan as follows. 'When G.o.d created the universe and all things in it, Satan tried to create a rival universe. He managed to match everything pretty well except man. There he failed; and G.o.d to punish his pride cast him down to the earth and bound him with a chain. But this chain was so long that Satan was able to move over the whole face of the earth!' There had got into this wanderer's head some bit of the Babylonian story, and it was mingled with Gnostic traditions about Ildabaoth; but there was also a quaint suggestion in Satan's long chain of the migration of this mythical combat not only round the world, but through the ages.

The early followers of Christ came before the glories of Paganism with the legend that the lowly should inherit the earth. And though they speedily surrendered to the rulers of the world in Rome, and made themselves into a christian aristocracy, when they came into Northern Europe the christians were again brought to confront with an humble system the religion of thrones and warriors. St. Gatien celebrating ma.s.s in a cavern beside the Loire, meant as much weakness in presence of Paganism as the Huguenots felt twelve centuries later hiding in the like caverns from St. Gatien's priestly successors.

The burthen of Isaiah is heard again, and with realistic intensity, in the seventh century, and in the north, with our patriarchial poet Caedmon.

The All-powerful had Angel-tribes, Through might of hand, The holy Lord, Ten established, In whom he trusted well That they his service Would follow, Work his will; Therefore gave he them wit, And shaped them with his hands, The holy Lord.

He had placed them so happily, One he had made so powerful, So mighty in his mind's thought, He let him sway over so much, Highest after himself in heaven's kingdom.

He had made him so fair, So beauteous was his form in heaven, That came to him from the Lord of hosts, He was like to the light stars.

It was his to work the praise of the Lord, It was his to hold dear his joys in heaven, And to thank his Lord For the reward that he had bestowed on him in that light; Then had he let him long possess it; But he turned it for himself to a worse thing, Began to raise war upon him, Against the highest Ruler of heaven, Who sitteth in the holy seat.

Dear was he to our Lord, But it might not be hidden from him That his angel began To be presumptuous, Raised himself against his Master, Sought speech of hate, Words of pride towards him, Would not serve G.o.d, Said that his body was Light and beauteous, Fair and bright of hue: He might not find in his mind That he would G.o.d In subjection, His Lord, serve: Seemed to himself That he a power and force Had greater Than the holy G.o.d Could have Of adherents.

Many words spake The angel of presumption: Thought, through his own power, How he for himself a stronger Seat might make, Higher in heaven: Said that him his mind impelled, That he west and north Would begin to work, Would prepare structures: Said it to him seemed doubtful That he to G.o.d would Be a va.s.sal.

'Why shall I toil?' said he; 'To me it is no whit needful.

To have a superior; I can with my hands as many Wonders work; I have great power To form A diviner throne, A higher in heaven.

Why shall I for his favour serve, Bend to him in such va.s.salage?

I may be a G.o.d as he Stand by me strong a.s.sociates, Who will not fail me in the strife, Heroes stern of mood, They have chosen me for chief, Renowned warriors!

With such may one devise counsel, With such capture his adherents; They are my zealous friends, Faithful in their thoughts; I may be their chieftain, Sway in this realm: Thus to me it seemeth not right That I in aught Need cringe To G.o.d for any good; I will no longer be his va.s.sal.'

When the All-powerful it All had heard, That his angel devised Great presumption To raise up against his Master, And spake proud words Foolishly against his Lord, Then must he expiate the deed, Share the work of war, And for his punishment must have Of all deadly ills the greatest.

So doth every man Who against his Lord Deviseth to war, With crime against the great Ruler.

Then was the Mighty angry; The highest Ruler of heaven Hurled him from the lofty seat; Hate had he gained at his Lord, His favour he had lost, Incensed with him was the Good in his mind, Therefore must he seek the gulf Of hard h.e.l.l-torment, For that he had warred with heaven's Ruler, He rejected him then from his favour, And cast him into h.e.l.l, Into the deep parts, Where he became a devil: The fiend with all his comrades Fell then from heaven above, Through as long as three nights and days, The angels from heaven into h.e.l.l; And them all the Lord transformed to devils, Because they his deed and word Would not revere; Therefore them in a worse light, Under the earth beneath, Almighty G.o.d Had placed triumphless In the swart h.e.l.l; There they have at even, Immeasurably long, Each of all the fiends, A renewal of fire; Then cometh ere dawn The eastern wind, Frost bitter-cold, Ever fire or dart; Some hard torment They must have, It was wrought for them in punishment, Their world was changed: For their sinful course He filled h.e.l.l With the apostates.