ORMUZD. Verethragna, transparent in its meaning to the worshippers of Indra, so thoroughly lost its original sense that it came to denote mere strength or power; and as from a metaphysical point of view the power opposed to the righteous God must be a moral one, a series of synonyms were employed which imparted to the representative of Vritra more and more of a spiritual character. The Devas of the Veda are the bright gods who fight on the side of Indra; in the Avesta the word has come to mean an evil spirit, and the Zoroastrian was bound to declare that he ceased to be a worshipper of the daevâs.2 Thus Verethra and all kindred deities were placed in this class of malignant beings, and branded with the epithet Drukhs, deceitful.3 But the special distinction of the being known to us under the familiar name of Ahriman, was the title of Angrô-Mainyus, or spirit of darkness.* This name was simply an offset to that of his righteous adversary, Spento-Mainyus, or the spirit of light. But SpentoMainyus was only another name for the Supreme Being, whose name Ahuro-mazdâo we repeat in the shortened form of Ormuzd. In this Being the devout Zoroastrian trusted 1 As such, M. Bréal remarks that it became an adjective, and is sometimes used in the superlative degree, a hymn being spoken of as Verethrazançtema. Hercule et Cacus, 129. 2 Max Müller, Chips, i. 25. The word is probably found in the Greek d-Tpek-hs, not deceitful = trustworthy, sure. M. Maury, regarding the name Ahriman as identical with the Vedic Aryaman, sees in the Iranian demon a degradation of the Hindu sun-god, an inverse change to that which invested the Trojan Paris with the attributes of solar heroes. 'Mitra a un autre parédre que Varouna, c'est Aryaman. Ĉette divinité nous offre à l'origine une nouvelle personnification du soleil dans son action fortifiante et salutaire: a ce titre il est souvent associé à Bhaya, l'Aditya qui dispense des bienfaits et qui bénit les hommes Mais, plustard, Aryaman devint l'Aditya de la mort, le soleil destructeur; car, sous le climat brûlant de l'Inde, on sait combien est dangereuse l'insolation Voilà comment Aryaman fournit à la religion de Zoroastre le type du dieu mauvais, l'idée d'une divinité adversaire 5 Like Thraêtana and Verethragna, 355 CHAP. X. BOOK II. Iranian dualism. Its in the Jews. with all the strength of spiritual conviction: but the idea of his enemy was as closely linked with that of the righteous God as the idea of Vritra with that of Indra; and the exaltation of Ormuzd carried the greatness of Ahriman to a pitch which made him the creator and the sovereign of an evil universe at war with the Kosmos of the spirit of light. Such was the origin of Iranian dualism, a dualism which divided the world between two opposing self-existent deities, while it professedly left to men the power of choosing whom they should obey. Ahura-mazda is holy, true, to be honoured through truth, through holy deeds.' 'You cannot serve him and his enemy.' 'In the beginning there was a pair of twins, two spirits, each of a peculiar activity. These are the Good and the Base in thought, word, and deed. Choose one of these two spirits. Be good, not base.' But practically Ahriman took continually a stronger hold on the popular imagination, and the full effects of this process were to be realised elsewhere. The religion of Zoroaster has been regarded as a reform; in M. Bréal's judgment, it was rather a return to a classification which the Hindu had abandoned or had never cared to adopt. 'While Brahmanism kept to the old belief only in the letter, Mazdeism preserved its spirit. The Parsee, who sees the universe divided between two forces, everywhere present and each in turn victorious until the final victory of Ormuzd, is nearer to the mythical representations of the first age than the Hindu, who, looking on everything as an illusion of the senses, wraps up the universe and his own personality in the existence of one single Being."1 With this dualism the Jews were brought into contact fluence on during the captivity at Babylon. That the Hebrew prophets had reiterated their belief in one God with the most profound conviction, is not to be questioned; but as little can it be doubted that as a people the Jews had exhibited little impulse towards Monotheism, and that from this time we discern a readiness to adopt the Zoroastrian demonology. Thus far Satan had appeared, as in the book of Job, among 1 Hercule et Cacus, 129. The same view of the origin of the Dualistic theo logy is taken by M. Maury, Croyances, fc., 97. ST. GEORGE AND THE DRAGON. the ministers of God; but in later books we have a closer approximation to the Iranian creed. In the words of M. Bréal, Satan assumes, in Zacharias and in the first book of Chonicles, the character of Ahriman, and appears as the author of evil. Still later he becomes the prince of the devils, the source of wicked thoughts, the enemy of the word of God. He tempts the Son of God; he enters into Judas for his ruin. The Apocalypse exhibits Satan with the physical attributes of Ahriman: he is called the dragon, the old serpent, who fights against God and his angels. The Vedic myth, transformed and exaggerated in the Iranian books, finds its way through this channel into Christianity.' The idea thus introduced was that of the struggle between Satan and Michael which ended in the overthrow of the former, and the casting forth of all his hosts out of heaven; but it coincided too nearly with a myth spread in countries held by all the Aryan nations to avoid further modification. Local traditions substituted St. George or St. Theodore for Jupiter, Apollôn, Herakles, or Perseus. It is under this disguise,' adds M. Bréal, that the Vedic myth has come down to our own times, and has still its festivals and its monuments. Art has consecrated it in a thousand ways. St. Michael, lance in hand, treading on the dragon, is an image as familiar now as, thirty centuries ago, that of Indra treading under foot the demon Vritra could possibly have been to the Hindu.'1 6 2 357 CHAP. X. That this myth should be Euemerised by Firdusi was The epic natural and inevitable, when once the poet had made Feridun of Firdusi. a king of the first Persian dynasty. He could no longer represent Zohak as a monster with three heads, three tails, six eyes, and a thousand forces; but the power of the old myth gave shape to his statement that, after the embrace of the demon, a snake started up from each of his shoulders, whose head, like that of the Lernaian hydra, grew as fast as it was cut off. Nor has it influenced the modern poet only. Cyrus is as historical as Charlemagne; but from mythical history we should learn as much of the former as we should know of the latter, if our information came only from the 1 Hercule et Cacus, 138. 2 lb. 130. BOOK II. myth of Roland. What Cyrus really did we learn from other sources; but in the legendary story he is simply another Oidipous and Têlephos, compelled for a time to live, like Odysseus and the Boots of German tales, in mean disguise, until his inborn nobleness proclaims him the son of a king. But as in the case of Oidipous, Perseus, Theseus, and many more, the father or the grandsire dreads the birth of the child, for the sun must destroy the darkness to whom he seems to owe his life. This sire of Cyrus must belong therefore to the class of beings who represent the powers of night-in other words, he must be akin to Vritra or to Ahi; and in his name accordingly we find the familiar words. Astyages, the Persian Asdahag, is but another form of the modern Zohak, the Azidahâka, or biting snake, of Vedic and Iranian mythology; and the epithet reappears seemingly in the name of Deiokes, the first king of the Median nation.1 The Semitic Satan. SECTION VIII.-THE SEMITIC AND ARYAN DEVIL. Thus far it is only on Iranian soil that we have seen the struggle between day and night, the sun and the darkness, represented as a conflict between moral good and evil, the result being a practical, if not a theoretical dualism, in which the unclean spirit is at the least as powerful as the righteous being with whom he is at war. This absolute partition of the universe between two contending principles was the very groundwork of Iranian belief; but the idea was one which could not fail to strike root in any congenial soil. To a certain extent it found such a soil in the mind of the Jewish people, who had become familiar, by whatever means, with the notion of a being whose office it was to tempt or try the children of men. The Satan who discharges this duty is, however, one of the sons of God; and in the book of Job there is no indication of any essential antagonism between The story of Deiokes is certainly not told by Herodotos for the purpose of establishing the divine right of kings; but it is more than possible that the selfishness and rapacity which mark this self-made sovereign, and his inaccessible retreat within a palace from which he never emerges, may have been suggested by the myth to which his name belongs.. IRANIAN DEMONOLOGY. X. 359 them. The position of Satan in this narrative is indeed in CHAP. strict accordance with the Hebrew philosophy which regarded God as the author both of good and evil, as the being who hardened Pharaoh's heart and authorised the lying spirit to go forth and prevail among the prophets of Ahab. But when a portion of the Jewish people was brought into contact with the fully developed system of Persian dualism, the victory of the Iranian theology seemed complete. Henceforth the notion of two hierarchies, the one heavenly, the other diabolical, took possession of their minds; and the Satan, who ruled over the powers of darkness and exercised a wide dominion as prince of the air, was confined to a level lower than that of Ahriman, only because he had once stood among the most brilliant angels in the courts of heaven. At this level he remained a fallen creature ruling over hosts of malignant demons who did his will among mankind, plaguing them with sorrow, disease, and madness, until the convictions of the first Christian societies magnified him into proportions if possible more overpowering than those of the Iranian enemy of Ormuzd. The Jew, chiefly, if not wholly, from the conviction which led him to regard God as the author both of good and evil, drew no sharp distinction between mind and matter as existing in irreconcilable antagonism; and since as a nation they can scarcely be said to the last to have attained to any definite ideas either of the fact or the conditions of a life continued after death, Satan could with them obviously have no definite dominion beyond the bounds of our present existence. He could torture the bodies, afflict the souls, or darken the minds of men; but of his everlasting reign over countless multitudes ruined by his subtle wiles we find no very definite notion But Christianity, while it rested on a distinct assurance of personal immortality altogether stronger than any to which the most fervent of the Hebrew prophets had ever attained, took root among nations who had filled all the world with gods or demons, each with his own special sphere and office. These deities the Christian teachers dethroned; but far from attempting to destroy them, they were careful to insist that they had always been, and must for ever continue to be, Effect of Christian teaching. |