388 



KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[June iO, 1883. 



So there was a monotheistic — or, as Prof. Max Miiller 

 terms it, a henothcistic — elcinont in tlio Vedic religion 

 which in the Iranian religion, and this mainly through the 

 teaching of the great thinker and reformer, Zaratliushtra 

 (Zoroaster), was largely dill'iised. In his endeavour to 

 solve the old prolileni of reconciling sin and misery with 

 Omnipotent goodness, he supposes " two primeval causes," 

 one of which produced the "reality," or good mind ; the 

 other the " non-realit}'," or evil mind. Behind these was 

 developed belief in a philosophical abstraction, " uncreate 

 time," of which each was the product ; but such doctrines 

 were too subtle for the popular grasp, and, wrapped in the 

 old mythological garb, they appeared in concrete form as 

 dualism. Vritra survived in Ahriman, who, like him, is 

 represented as a serpent ; and in Ormuzd we have the 

 phonetic descendant of Ahura-mazdas. 



Now, it was with this dualism, this transformed survival 

 of the sun and cloud myth, that the Jews came into asso- 

 ciation during their memorable CKile in Baljylon. Prior to 

 that time, their theology, as hinted above, had no devil in 

 it But in that belief in spirits which they held in common 

 with all semi-civilised races, as a heritage from barbarous 

 ancestors, there were the elements out of which such a 

 personality might be readily evolved. Their satan, or 

 " accuser," as that word means, is no prince of the demons, 

 like the Beelzebub of later times ; no dragon, or old serpent, 

 as of the Apocalypse, defying Omnipotence and deceiving 

 the whole world ; but a kind of detective who, by direction 

 of Yahweh, has his eye on suspects, and who is sent to 

 test their fidelity. In all his missions he acts as the 

 intelligent and loyal servant of Yahweh. But although 

 therefore not regarded as bad himself, the character and 

 functions with which he was credited made easy the 

 transition from such theories about him to theories of him 

 as inherently evil, as the enemy of goodness, and, therefore, 

 of God. He who, like Vritra, was an object of dread, 

 came to be regarded as the incarnation of evil, the author 

 and abettor of things harmful to man. Persian dualism 

 gave concrete form to this conception, and from the time 

 of the Exile we find Satan as the Jewish Ahriman, the 

 antagonist of God. Not he alone, for " the angels that 

 kept not their first estate " were the creatures of his evil 

 designs, creatures so numerous that " every one has 10,000 

 at his right hand and 1,000 at his left hand, and because 

 they rule chiefly at night no man should greet another 

 lest he should salute a demon. They haunt lonely spots, 

 often assume the shape of beasts, and it is their presence 

 in the bodies of men and women which is the cause of 

 madness and other diseases." * 



From the period when the Apocryphal books, especially 

 those having traces of Persian influence, were written,! 

 this doctrine of an archfiend with his army of demons 

 received increasing impetus. It passed on without check 

 into the Christian religion, and wherever this spread the 

 heathen gods, like the devai of Brahminism among the 

 Iranians, were degraded into demons, and swelled the vast 

 crowd of evil spirits let loose to torment and ruin mankind. 



This doctrine of demonology, it should be remembered, 

 was but the elaborated form of that ancestral belief in 

 spirits referred to above. In the Christian system it was 

 associated with that belief in magic which has its roots in 

 fetishism, and from the two arose belief in witchcraft. The 

 universal belief in demons in early and medi;eval times 

 supplied an easy explanation of disasters and diseases ; the 



• Vide my "Jesus of Nazareth," p. 144.. 



t Notably " Tobit " and " Baruch," and of. " Book ofWisdom," 

 IT- 2-t; for earliest indications of the belief. Tlio Asmodeus of 

 Tobit iii. 8 and 17, appears to bo tho Acshm6 dtlrv6 of the Zend- 

 Avesta. 



sorcerers and charm-workers, the wizards and enchanters, 

 had passed into the service of the devil. For jjower 

 to work their spite and malevolence, they had bartered 

 their souls to him, and sealed the bargain with their blood. 

 It was enough for the ignorant and frightened sufferers to 

 accuse some poor, mis-shapen, squinting old woman of 

 casting on them the evil eye, or of appearing in the form 

 of a cat, to secure her trial by torture and her condemna- 

 tion to an unpitied death. The spread of popular terror 

 led to the issue of Papal bulls and to the passing of 

 statutes in England and in other countries against witch- 

 craft, and it was not until late in the eighteenth century 

 that the laws against that imaginary crime were repealed. 



There is no sadder chapter in the annals of this tearful 

 world, than this ghastly story of witch-finding and witch- 

 liurning. Sprenger computes that during the Christian 

 epoch no less than nine millions of persons, mostly women 

 of the poorer classes, were burned ; victims of the sur\-ival 

 into relatively civilised times of an illusion which had its 

 source in primitive thought. It was an illusion which had 

 the authority of Scripture on its side ; * the Church had no 

 hesitation concerning it, such men as Luther, Sir Thomas 

 Browne, and Wesley never doubted it, the evidence of the 

 bewitched was supported by honest witnesses, and judges 

 disposed to mercy and humanity had no qualms in passing 

 the dread sentence of the law on the condemned.t 



And although it exists not to-day, save in bye-places 

 where gross darkness lurks, it was not destroyed by argu- 

 ment, by disproof, by direct assault, but only through the 

 growth of the scientific spirit, before which, like the 

 miasma of the Campagna or the planting of the Eucalyptus, 

 it has dispersed. It could not live in an atmosphere thus 

 purified, an atmosphere charged with belief in unchanging 

 causation, and in a definite order unbroken by caprice or 

 fitfulness, whether in the sweep of a planet or the pulsa- 

 tions of a human heart. 



Of course the antecedents of the arch-fiend himself could 

 not fail to be the subject of curious enquiry in the time 

 when his existence was no matter of doubt. The old 

 theologians scraped together enough material about him 

 from the sacred books of the Jews and Christians to con- 

 struct an elaborate biography of him ; but in this they 

 would seem to have explained too much in certain directions 

 and not enough in others, thus provoking a reaction which 

 ultimately discredited their painful research. Their 

 genealogy of him was carried further back than they 

 intended or desired, for the popular notions credited 

 him with both a mother and grandmother. Their 

 theory of his fall from Heaven gave rise to the 

 droll conception of his lameness and to the legends of 

 which the " devil on two sticks " is a type. Their infusion 

 of foreign element into his nature aided his pictorial pre- 

 sentment in motley form and garb. To Vedic descriptions 

 of Vritra's darkness may perchance be traced his murkiness 

 and blackness ; Greek satyr and German forest-sprite his 

 goat-like body, his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail ; to 

 Thor his red lieard and trident, %-ulgarised into a pitchfork ; 

 to dwarfs and goblins his red cloak and nodding plume ; 

 to theories of transformation of men and spirits into 

 animals his manifold metamorphoses, as black cat, wolf, 

 hellhound, and the like. 



But his description was his doom ; it was by a natural 

 sequence that the legends of mediasval times present him, 

 not, with the Scotch theologians, as a scholar and a swindler, 

 disguising himself as a parson, but as gullible and stupid. 



* Exodus xxii. 18. 



t For details of witch trials in this island, cf. Mrs. Lynn Linton's 

 " Witch Stories," passim. 



