THE BURNlkc BUSH AND THE ORIGIN OF JUDAISM. 



By PAUL HAUPT. 

 (Read April 23, 1909.) 



Last autumn four members of our Society were invited by the 

 German Emperor to attend the first performance of Fried rich 

 Delitzsch's Sardanapal at the Royal Opera in BerHn. The cHmax 

 of this historical pantomime, which is based on Lord Byron's 

 tragedy Sardanapalus and a ballet of Paul Taglioni/ is the 

 great pyre in the last scene, on which Sardanapalus burns himself 

 with his queen, his attendants, and his treasures. The whole stage 

 is full of fire ; but, of course, nothing is burnt. The blaze is pro- 

 duced by steam with reflected red light. In the same way you see 

 the stage full of fire in the last scene of Richard Wagner's 

 musical drama Die Walkiire. Wodan passes through the flames, 

 but he is not scorched. 



The black cloud over Mount Vesuvius has a fiery aspect at night, 

 but this is merely the reflex of the fiery lava within the crater. The 

 pillar of smoke over a volcano consists chiefly of steam and ashes. 

 A^olcanic eruptions are often not central, but lateral. The great 

 eruption of Mont Pele in the northern part of the island of 

 Martinique, on May 8, 1902, was a lateral eruption. In the case 

 of Mount Etna, lateral eruptions are more frequent than eriiptions 

 from the central crater. There are several hundred parasitic craters 

 on the flanks of Mount Etna, especially on the southern side, in 

 the zone between an altitude of 1,000 and 2,000 meters. This region 

 is wooded. The volcano is covered with trees up to an altitude of 

 2,200 meters, and shrubs grow up to 2,500 meters. If there should 

 be in this region a cloud of steam over a lateral crater, the shrubs 

 around it might seem to be afire without being consumed. This, I 



^ Compare Sardanapal. Grosse liistorischc Pantomime in $ Akten oder 

 4 Bildern, untcr Anlehnung an das gleichnamigc Ballet Paul TagHoni's 

 neu bearbeitet von Friedrich Delitzsch (Berlin, 1908). 



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