THE STORIES 21 



Albert Dlirer, wherein waves of glory descend from 

 God the Father, and in the midst of them a micro- 

 scopic babe floats down upon the Virgin. These 

 works of art leave the precise channel of impregnation 

 vague. They embody an opinion which seems to have 

 been common in the fifteenth century, namely, that 

 Our Lord entered already completely formed into the 

 Virgin's womb an opinion which orthodox theo- 

 logians in their perfect acquaintance with the divine 

 arrangements were able summarily to pronounce 

 heretical. A picture by Fra Filippo Lippi, painted 

 for Cosmo de' Medici and now in the National Gallery, 

 exhibits the Virgin seated in a chair with her Book of 

 Hours in her hand. The angel bows before her. 

 Above is a right hand surrounded with clouds. A 

 dove, cast from the hand amid circling floods of glory, 

 is making for the Virgin's navel and is about to enter 

 it ; while she, bending forward, curiously surveys it. 

 So Buddha in the form of a white elephant entered 

 his mother's right side. 1 The parallel is instructive. 

 Mohammedan tradition, it may be added, ascribes the 

 miraculous conception by the Virgin to Gabriel's 

 having opened the bosom of her shift and breathed 

 upon her womb. 2 In like manner one of the variant 

 legends of the birth of the Aztec divinity, Quetzalcoatl, 

 relates that the Lord of Existence, Tonacatecutli 

 appeared to Chimalma and breathed upon her, 



1 Sacred Books, xix. 2 ; Rhys Davids, Birth Stories, 63, trans- 

 lating the Niddna Kathd ; Id. Buddhism, 183. In the earlier 

 accounts the incident appears only as a dream ; later it is soberly 

 related as a fact. A similar story is told in China of Laotzii ; but it 

 is probably borrowed from Buddhist tradition. 



a Sale, Koran, note on ch. xix. citing Arab authors. 



