The Queen of the Air Part 3

Their faith was, in some respects like Dante's or Milton's: firm in general conception, but not able to vouch for every detail in the forms they gave it; but they went considerably farther, even in that minor sincerity, than subsequent poets; and strove with all their might to be as near the truth as they could. Pindar says, quite simply, "I cannot think so-and-so of the G.o.ds. It must have been this way--it cannot have been that way--that the thing was done." And as late among the Latins as the days of Horace, this sincerity remains. Horace is just as true and simple in his religion as Wordsworth; but all power of understanding any of the honest cla.s.sic poets has been taken away from most English gentlemen by the mechanical drill in verse-writing at school. Throughout the whole of their lives afterwards, they never can get themselves quit of the notion that all verses were written as an exercise, and that Minerva was only a convenient word for the last of a hexameter, and Jupiter for the last but one.

48. It is impossible that any notion can be more fallacious or more misleading in its consequences. All great song, from the first day when human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song. With deliberate didactic purpose the tragedians--with pure and native pa.s.sion the lyrists --fitted their perfect words to their dearest faiths. "Operosa parvus carmina fingo." "I, little thing that I am, weave my laborious songs" as earnestly as the bee among the bells of thyme on the Matin mountains. Yes, and he dedicates his favorite pine to Diana, and he chants his autumnal hymn to the Faun that guards his fields, and he guides the n.o.ble youth and maids of Rome in their choir to Apollo, and he tells the farmer's little girl that the G.o.ds will love her, though she has only a handful of salt and meal to give them--just as earnestly as ever English gentleman taught Christian faith to English youth in England's truest days.

49. Then, lastly, the creed of the philosophers of sages varied according to the character and knowledge of each; their relative acquaintance with the secrets of natural science, their intellectual and sectarian egotism, and their mystic or monastic tendencies, for there is a cla.s.sic as well as a mediaeval monasticism. They end in losing the life of Greece in play upon words; but we owe to their early thought some of the soundest ethics, and the foundation of the best practical laws, yet known to mankind.

50. Such was the general vitality of the heathen creed in its strength.

Of its direct influence on conduct, it is, as I said, impossible for me to speak now; only, remember always, in endeavoring to form a judgment of it, that what of good or right the heathens did, they did looking for no reward. The purest forms of our own religion have always consisted in sacrificing less things to win greater, time to win eternity, the world to win the skies. The order, "Sell that thou hast," is not given without the promise, "Thou shalt have treasure in heaven;" and well for the modern Christian if he accepts the alternative as his Master left it, and does not practically read the command and promise thus: "Sell that thou hast in the best market, and thou shalt have treasure in eternity also."

But the poor Greeks of the great ages expected no reward from heaven but honor, and no reward from earth but rest; though, when, on those conditions, they patiently, and proudly, fulfilled their task of the granted day, an unreasoning instinct of an immortal benediction broke from their lips in song; and they, even they, had sometimes a prophet to tell them of a land "where there is sun alike by day and alike by night, where they shall need no more to trouble the earth by strength of hands for daily bread; but the ocean breezes blow around the blessed islands, and golden flowers burn on their bright trees for evermore."

II.

ATHENA KERAMITIS.*

(Athena in the Earth.)

* "Athena, fit for being made into pottery." I coin the expression as a counterpart of 'ge parthenia', "Clay intact."

STUDY, SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING LECTURE, OF THE SUPPOSED AND ACTUAL RELATIONS OF ATHENA TO THE VITAL FORCE IN MATERIAL ORGANISM

51. It has been easy to decipher approximately the Greek conception of the physical power of Athena in cloud and sky, because we know ourselves what clouds and skies are, and what the force of the wind is in forming them. But it is not at all easy to trace the Greek thoughts about the power of Athena in giving life, because we do not ourselves know clearly what life is, or in what way the air is necessary to it, or what there is, besides the air, shaping the forms that it is put into. And it is comparatively of small consequence to find out what the Greeks thought or meant, until we have determined what we ourselves think, or mean, when we translate the Greek word for "breathing" into the Latin-English word "spirit."

52. But it is of great consequence that you should fix in your minds-- and hold, against the baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and against the fallacies of controversial speculation on the other--the certain and practical sense of this word "spirit;" the sense in which you all know that its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into your shape, and by which you love and hate when you have received that shape.

You need not fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the loving power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers into a metal, or evolved by them into a gas; but on the other hand, take care that you yourself, in trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its truth in a dream, or even in a word. Beware always of contending for words: you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several languages. This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of the most doubtful. In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions, to say "wit" when we say "ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we translate "ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative word "psyche" has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St. Paul's words "pneumatic body" and "psychic body" involve a difference in his mind which no words will explain. But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon and in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity the "spirit of man" truly means his pa.s.sion and virtue, and is stately according to the height of his conception, and stable according to the measure of his endurance.

53. Endurance, or patience, that is the central sign of spirit; a constancy against the cold and agony of death; and as, physically, it is by the burning power of the air that the heat of the flesh is sustained, so this Athena, spiritually, is the queen of all glowing virtue, the unconsuming fire and inner lamp of life. And thus, as Hephaestus is lord of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, so Athena of the fire of the heart; and as Hercules wears for his chief armor the skin of the Nemean lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has for his highest name "the Pythian," from his chief enemy, the Python slain; so Athena bears always on her breast the deadly face of her chief enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that turns living men to stone.

54. And so long as you have the fire of the heart within you, and know the reality of it, you need to be under no alarm as to the possibility of its chemical or mechanical a.n.a.lysis. The philosophers are very humorous in their ecstasy of hope about it; but the real interest of their discoveries in this direction is very small to humankind. It is quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates too; but the ditch hears nothing for all that; and my hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery as ever, and the interval between the ditch and me quite as great. If the trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell which began my happiness, and is now of the pa.s.sing-bell which ends it, the difference between those two sounds to me cannot be counted by the number of concussions. There have been some curious speculations lately as to the conveyance of mental consciousness by "brain-waves." What does it matter how it is conveyed? The consciousness itself is not a wave. It may be accompanied here or there by any quant.i.ty of quivers and shakes, up or down, of anything you can find in the universe that is shakable-- what is that to me? My friend is dead, and my--according to modern views --vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or less mysterious, to me, than my old quiet one.

55. Beyond, and entirely unaffected by, any questionings of this kind, there are, therefore, two plain facts which we should all know: first, that there is a power which gives their several shapes to things, or capacities of feeling; and that we can increase or destroy both of these at our will. By care and tenderness, we can extend the range of lovely life in plants and animals; by our neglect and cruelty, we can arrest it, and bring pestilence in its stead. Again, by right discipline we can increase our strength of n.o.ble will and pa.s.sion or destroy both. And whether these two forces are local conditions of the elements in which they appear, or are part of a great force in the universe, out of which they are taken, and to which they must be restored, is not of the slightest importance to us in dealing with them; neither is the manner of their connection with light and air. What precise meaning we ought to attach to expressions such as that of the prophecy to the four winds that the dry bones might be breathed upon, and might live, or why the presence of the vital power should be dependent on the chemical action of air, and its awful pa.s.sing away materially signified by the rendering up of that breath or ghost, we cannot at present know, and need not at any time dispute. What we a.s.suredly know is that the states of life and death are different, and the first more desirable than the other, and by effort attainable, whether we understand being "born of the spirit" to signify having the breath of heaven in our flesh, or its power in our hearts.

56. As to its power on the body, I will endeavor to tell you, having been myself much led into studies involving necessary reference both to natural science and mental phenomena, what, at least, remains to us after science has done its worst; what the myth of Athena, as a formative and decisive power, a spirit of creation and volition, must eternally mean for all of us.

57. It is now (I believe I may use the strong word) "ascertained" that heat and motion are fixed in quant.i.ty, and measurable in the portions that we deal with. We can measure portions of power, as we can measure portions of s.p.a.ce; while yet, as far as we know, s.p.a.ce may be infinite, and force infinite. There may be heat as much greater than the sun's, as the sun's heat is greater than a candle's: and force as much greater than the force by which the world swings, as that is greater than the force by which a cobweb trembles. Now, on hear and force, life is inseparably dependent; and I believe, also, on a form of substance, which the philosophers call "protoplasm." I wish they would use English instead of Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is colored by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if they would only say plainly that a leaf is colored green by a thing which is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.

However, it is a curious fact that life is connected with a cellular structure called protoplasm, or in English, "first stuck together;"

whence, conceivably through deuteroplasms, or second stickings, and tritoplasms, or third stickings,* we reach the highest plastic phase in the human pottery, which differs from common chinaware, primarily, by a measurable degree of heat, developed in breathing, which it borrows from the rest of the universe while it lives, and which it as certainly returns to the rest of the universe, when it dies.

58. Again, with this heat certain a.s.similative powers are connected, which the tendency of recent discovery is to simplify more and more into modes of one force; or finally into mere motion, communicable in various states, but not destructible. We will a.s.sume that science has done its utmost; and that every chemical or animal force is demonstrably resolvable into heat or motion, reciprocally changing into each other.

I would myself like better, in order of thought, to consider motion as a mode of heat than heat as a mode of motion; still, granting that we have got thus far, we have yet to ask, What is heat? or what is motion? What is this "primo mobile," this transitional power, in which all things live, and move, and have their being? It is by definition something different from matter, and we may call it as we choose, "first cause," or "first light," or "first heat;" but we can show no scientific proof of its not being personal, and coinciding with the ordinary conception of a supporting spirit in all things.

59. Still, it is not advisable to apply the word "spirit" or "breathing"

to it, while it is only enforcing chemical affinities; but, when the chemical affinities are brought under the influence of the air, and of the sun's heat, the formative force enters and entirely different phase.

It does not now merely crystallize indefinite ma.s.ses, but it gives to limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other elements proper to them, and binding those elements into their own peculiar and adopted form.

This force, now properly called life, or breathing, or spirit, is continually creating its own sh.e.l.l of definite shape out of the wreck around it; and this is what I meant by saying, in the "Ethics of the Dust," "you may always stand by form against force." For the mere force of junction is not spirit; but the power that catches out of chaos charcoal, water, lime, or what not, and fastens them down into a given form, is properly called "spirit;" and we shall not diminish, but strengthen our conception of this creative energy by recognizing its presence in lower states of matter than our own; such recognition being enforced upon us by delight we instinctively receive from all the forms of matter which manifest it; and yet more, by the glorifying of those forms, in the parts of them that are most animated, with the colors that are pleasantest to our senses. The most familiar instance of this is the best, and also the most wonderful: the blossoming of plants.

60. The spirit in the plant--that is to say, its power of gathering dead matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen shape--is of course strongest at the moment of its flowering, for it then not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.

And where this life is in at full power, its form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own human pa.s.sions; namely, at first, with the loveliest outlines of shape; and, secondly, with the most brilliant phases of the primary colors, blue, yellow, and red or white, the unison of all; and, to make it all more strange, this time of peculiar and perfect glory is a.s.sociated with relations of the plants or blossoms to each other, correspondent to the joy of love in human creatures, and having the same object in the continuance of the race.

Only, with respect to plants, as animals, we are wrong in speaking as if the object of this strong life were only the bequeathing of itself. The flower is the end or proper object of the seed, not the seed of the flower. The reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of flowers that seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature which the spirit makes; only, in connection with its perfectness is placed the giving birth to its successor.

61. The main fact then, about a flower is that it is part of the plant's form developed at the moment of its intensest life; and this inner rapture is usually marked externally for us by the flush of one or more of the primary colors. What the character of the flower shall be, depends entirely upon the portion of the plant into which this rapture of spirit has been put. Sometimes the life is put into its outer sheath, and then the outer sheath becomes white and pure, and full of strength and grace; sometimes the life is put into the common leaves, just under the blossom, and they become scarlet or purple; sometimes the life is put into the stalks of the flower and they flush blue; sometimes into its outer enclosure or calyx; mostly into its inner cup; but, in all cases, the presence of the strongest life is a.s.serted by characters in which the human sight takes pleasure, and which seem prepared with distinct reference to us, or rather, bear, in being delightful, evidence of having been produced by the power of the same spirit as our own.

62. And we are led to feel this still more strongly because all the distinctions of species,* both in plants and animals, appear to have similar connection with human character. Whatever the origin of species may be, or however those species, once formed, may be influenced by external accident, the groups into which birth or accident reduce them have distinct relation to the spirit of man. It is perfectly possible, and ultimately conceivable, that the crocodile and the lamb may have descended from the same ancestral atom of protoplasm; and that the physical laws of the operation of calcareous slime and of meadow gra.s.s, on that protoplasm, may in time have developed the opposite natures and aspects of the living frames but the practically important fact for us is the existence of a power which creates that calcareous earth itself, --which creates, that separately--and quartz, separately; and gold, separately; and charcoal, separately; and then so directs the relation of these elements as that the gold shall destroy the souls of men by being yellow; and the charcoal destroy their souls by being hard and bright; and the quartz represent to them an ideal purity; and the calcareous earth, soft, shall beget crocodiles, and dry and hard, sheep; and that the aspects and qualities of these two products, crocodiles and lambs, shall be, the one repellant to the spirit of man, the other attractive to it, in a quite inevitable way; representing to him states of moral evil and good; and becoming myths to him of destruction or redemption, and, in the most literal sense, "words" of G.o.d.

* The facts on which I am about to dwell are in nowise antagonistic to the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations are every day rendering more probable. The aesthetic relations of species are independent of their origin. Nevertheless, it has always seemed to me in what little work I have done upon organic forms, as if the species mocked us by their deliberate imitation of each other when they met; yet did not pa.s.s one into another.

63. And the force of these facts cannot be escaped from by the thought that there are species innumerable, pa.s.sing into each other by regular gradations, out of which we choose what we must love or dread, and say they were indeed prepared for us. Species are not innumerable; neither are they now connected by consistent gradation. They touch at certain points only; and even then are connected, when we examine them deeply, in a kind of reticulated way, not in chains, but in chequers; also, however connected, it is but by a touch of the extremities, as it were, and the characteristic form of the species is entirely individual. The rose nearly sinks into a gra.s.s in the sanguisorba; but the formative spirit does not the less clearly separate the ear of wheat from the dog-rose, and oscillate with tremulous constancy round the central forms of both, having each their due relation to the mind of man. The great animal kingdoms are connected in the same way. The bird through the penguin drops towards the fish, and the fish in the cetacean reascends to the mammal, yet there is no confusion of thought possible between the perfect forms of an eagle, a trout, and a war-horse, in their relations to the elements, and to man.

64. Now we have two orders of animals to take some note of in connection with Athena, and one vast order of plants, which will ill.u.s.trate this matter very sufficiently for us.

The orders of animals are the serpent and the bird: the serpent, in which the breath or spirit is less than in any other creature, and the earth-power the greatest; the bird, in which the breath or spirit is more full than in any other creature, and the earth-power least.

65. We will take the bird first. It is little more than a drift of the air in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh and glows with air in its flying, like blown flames; it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpa.s.ses it, outraces it,--is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.

Also, in the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air. All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit together in its song. As we may imagine the wild form of the bird's wings, so the wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice; unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all intense pa.s.sion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among the boughs and hedges through heat of day, like little winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of the wild rose.

66. Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put the colors of the air; on these the gold of the cloud, that cannot be gathered by any covetousness; the rubies of the clouds, that are not the price of Athena, but are Athena; the vermillion of the cloud-bar, and the flame of the cloud-crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted blue of the deep wells of the sky,--all these, seized by the creating spirit, and woven by Athena herself into films and threads of plume; with wave on wave following and fading along breast, and throat, and opened wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the sea-sand; even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between the stronger plumes,--seen, but too soft for touch.

And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form; and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help, descending, as the Fire, to speak but as the Dove, to bless.

67. Next, in the serpent we approach the source of a group of myths, world-wide, founded on great and common human instincts, respecting which I must note one or two points which bear intimately on all our subject.

For it seems to me that the scholars who are at present occupied in interpretation of human myths have most of them forgotten that there are any such thing as natural myths, and that the dark sayings of men may be both difficult to read, and not always worth reading. And, indeed, all guidance to the right sense of the human and variable myths will probably depend on our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable ones. The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that; the living hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, it is just as much a hieroglyph as the other; nay, more,--a "sacred or reserved sculpture," a thing with an inner language. The serpent crest of the king's crown, or of the G.o.d's, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery, but the serpent itself, gliding past the pillar's foot, is it less a mystery? Is there, indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that running brook of horror on the ground?

68. Why that horror? We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how disproportioned to the real strength of the creature! There is more poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door, than in the deadliest asp of Nile. Every back yard which you look down into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford, holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and lifted head. There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word, sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever "vanti Libia con sua rena." But that horror is of the myth, not of the creature. There are myriads lower than this, and more loathsome, in the scale of being; the links between dead matter and animation drift everywhere unseen. But it is the strength of the base element that is so dreadful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the earth. That rivulet of smooth silver, how does it flow, think you? It literally rows on the earth, with every scale for an oar; it bites the dust with the ridges of its body. Watch it, when it moves slowly. A wave, but without wind! a current, but with no fall! all the body moving at the same instant, yet some of it to one side, some to another, or some forward, and the rest of the coil backwards, but all with the same calm will and equal way, no contraction, no extension; one soundless, causeless, march of sequent rings, and spectral processions of spotted dust, with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils. Startle it, the winding stream will become a twisted arrow; the wave of poisoned life will lash through the gra.s.s like a cast lance.* It scarcely breathes with its one lung (the other shriveled and abortive); it is pa.s.sive to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone; yet "it can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, outwrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger."** It is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth, of the entire earthly nature. As the bird is the clothed power of the air, so this is the clothed power of the dust; as the bird is the symbol of the spirit of life, so this is the grasp and sting of death.

* I cannot understand this swift forward motion of serpents. The seizure of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple in mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring, and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and continuous motion, without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at the same instant, and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast as I could walk), seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too rapid to be conceived. The motion of the crest and dorsal fin of the hippocampus, which is one of the intermediate types between serpent and fish, perhaps gives some resemblance of it, dimly visible, for the quivering turns the fin into a mere mist. The entrance of the two barbs of a bee's sting by alternate motion, "the teeth of one barb acting as a fulcrum for the other," must be something like the serpent motion on a small scale.

** Richard Owen.

69. Hence the continual change in the interpretation put upon it in various religions. As the worm of corruption, it is the mightiest of all adversaries of the G.o.ds--the special adversary of their light and creative power--Python against Apollo. As the power of the earth against the air, the giants are serpent-bodied in the Gigantomachia; but as the power of the earth upon the seed--consuming it into new life ("that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die")--serpents sustain the chariot of the spirit of agriculture.

70. Yet on the other hand, there is a power in the earth to take away corruption, and to purify (hence the very fact of burial, and many uses of earth, only lately known): and in this sense the serpent is a healing spirit,--the representative of aesculapius, and of Hygieia; and is a sacred earth-type in the temple of the native earth of Athens; so that its departure from the temple was a sign to the Athenians that they were to leave their homes. And then, lastly, as there is a strength and healing in the earth, no less than the strength of air, so there is conceived to be a wisdom of earth no less than a wisdom of the spirit; and when its deadly power is killed, its guiding power becomes true; so that the Python serpent is killed at Delphi, where yet the oracle is from the breath of the earth.

71. You must remember, however, that in this, as in every other instance, I take the myth at its central time. This is only the meaning of the serpent to the Greek mind which could conceive an Athena. Its first meaning to the nascent eyes of men, and its continued influence over degraded races, are subjects of the most fearful mystery. Mr.

Fergusson has just collected the princ.i.p.al evidence bearing on the matter in a work of very great value, and if you read his opening chapters, they will put you in possession of the circ.u.mstances needing chiefly to be considered. I cannot touch upon any of them here, except only to point out that, though the doctrine of the so-called "corruption of human nature," a.s.serting that there is nothing but evil in humanity, is just as blasphemous and false as a doctrine of the corruption of physical nature would be, a.s.serting there was nothing but evil in the earth,-- there is yet the clearest evidence of a disease, plague, or cretinous imperfection of development, hitherto allowed to prevail against the greater part of the races of men; and this in monstrous ways, more full of mystery than the serpent-being itself. I have gathered for you tonight only instances of what is beautiful in Greek religion; but even in its best time there were deep corruptions in other phases of it, and degraded forms of many of its deities, all originating in a misunderstood worship of lower races, little less than these corrupted forms of devotion can be found, all having a strange and dreadful consistency with each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods, with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception, pa.s.sing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality.

In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of its letters are twisted snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent's coil; and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated writing in the world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,-- nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of baccha.n.a.lian G.o.ds.

And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope, in which the nations of the world have lived since first they could bear record of themselves--it seems to me, I say, as if the race itself were still half-serpent, not extricated yet from its clay; a lacertine breed of bitterness--the glory of it emaciate with cruel hunger, and blotted on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand a useless furrow.

72. There are no myths, therefore, by which the moral state and fineness of intelligence of different races can be so deeply tried or measured, as by those of the serpent and the bird; both of them having an especial relation to the kind of remorse for sin, or for the grief in fate, of which the national minds that spoke by them had been capable. The serpent and vulture are alike emblems of immortality and purification among races which desired to be immortal and pure; and as they recognize their own misery, the serpent becomes to them the scourge of the Furies, and the vulture finds its eternal prey in their breast. The bird long contests among the Egyptians with the still received serpent symbol of power. But the Draconian image of evil is established in the serpent Apap; while the bird's wings, with the globe, become part of a better symbol of deity, and the entire form of the vulture, as an emblem of purification, is a.s.sociated with the earliest conception of Athena. In the type of the dove with the olive branch, the conception of the spirit of Athena in renewed life prevailing over ruin is embodied for the whole of futurity; while the Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and higher life than that of Egypt, the vulture symbol of cleansing became unintelligible, took the eagle instead for their hieroglyph of supreme spiritual energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on the human imagination, till it is established among Christian myths as the expression of the most exalted form of evangelistic teaching. The special relation of Athena to her favorite bird we will trace presently; the peac.o.c.k of Hera, and dove of Aphrodite, are comparatively unimportant myths; but the bird power is soon made entirely human by the Greeks in their flying angel of victory (partially human, with modified meaning of evil, in the Harpy and Siren); and thenceforward it a.s.sociates itself with the Hebrew cherubim, and has had the most singular influence on the Christian religion by giving its wings to render the conception of angels mysterious and untenable, and check rational endeavor to determine the nature of subordinate spiritual agency; while yet it has given to that agency a vague poetical influence of the highest value in its own imaginative way.