War on Earth.

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The Abode of Devils—Ketef—Disorder—Talmudic legends—The restless Spirit—The Fall of Lucifer—Asteria, Hecate, Lilith—The Dragon’s triumph—A Gipsy legend—CÆdmon’s Poem of the Rebellious Angels—Milton’s version—The Puritans and Prince Rupert—Bel as ally of the Dragon—A ‘Mystery’ in Marionettes—European Hells.

‘Rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them! Woe to the earth and the sea! for the devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ This passage from the Book of Revelations is the refrain of many and much earlier scriptures. The Assyrian accounts of the war in heaven, given in the preceding chapter, by no means generally support the story that the archdragon was slain by Bel. Even the one that does describe the chief dragon’s death leaves her comrades alive, and the balance of testimony is largely in favour of the theory which prevailed, that the rebellious angels were merely cast out of heaven, and went to swell the ranks of the dark and fearful abode which from the beginning had been peopled by the enemies of the gods. The nature of this abode is described in various passages of the Bible, and in many traditions.

‘Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.’ So said Jeremiah (i. 14), in pursuance of nearly universal traditions as to the region of space in which demons and devils had their abode. ‘Hell is naked before him,’ says Job (xxvi. 6), ‘and destruction hath no covering. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place.’ According to the Hebrew mythology this habitation of demons was a realm of perpetual cold and midnight, which Jehovah, in creating the world, purposely left chaotic; so it was prepared for the Devil and his angels at the foundation of the world.

Although this northern hell was a region of disorder, so far as the people of Jehovah and the divine domain were concerned, they had among themselves a strong military and aristocratic government. It was disorder perfectly systematised. The anarchical atmosphere of the region is reflected in the abnormal structures ascribed to the many devils with whose traits Jewish and Arabic folklore is familiar, and which are too numerous to be described here. Such a devil, for instance, is Bedargon, ‘hand-high,’ with fifty heads and fifty-six hearts, who cannot strike any one or be struck, instant death ensuing to either party in such an attack. A more dangerous devil is Ketef, identified as the ‘terror from the chambers’ alluded to by Jeremiah (xxxii. 25), ‘Bitter Pestilence.’ His name is said to be from kataf, ‘cut and split,’ because he divides the course of the day; and those who are interested to compare Hebrew and Hindu myths may find it interesting to note the coincidences between Ketef and Ketu, the cut-off tail of RÁhu, and source of pestilence.1 Ketef reigns neither in the dark or day, but between the two; his power over the year is limited to the time between June 17 and July 9, during which it was considered dangerous to flog children or let them go out after four P.M. Ketef is calf-headed, and consists of hide, hair, and eyes; he rolls like a cask; he has a terrible horn, but his chief terror lies in an evil eye fixed in his heart which none can see without instant death. The arch-fiend who reigns over the infernal host has many Court Fools—probably meteors and comets—who lead men astray.

All these devils have their regulations in their own domain, but, as we have said, their laws mean disorder in that part of the universe which belongs to the family of Jehovah. In flying about the world they are limited to places which are still chaotic or waste. They haunt such congenial spots as rocks and ruins, and frequent desert, wilderness, dark mountains, and the ruins of human habitations. They can take possession of a wandering star.

There is a pretty Talmudic legend of a devil having once gone to sleep, when some one, not seeing him of course, set down a cask of wine on his ears. In leaping up the devil broke the cask, and being tried for it, was condemned to repay the damage at a certain period. The period having elapsed before the money was brought, the devil was asked the cause of the delay. He replied that it was very difficult for devils to obtain money, because men were careful to keep it locked or tied up; and ‘we have no power,’ he said, ‘to take from anything bound or sealed up, nor can we take anything that is measured or counted; we are permitted to take only what is free or common.’

According to one legend the devils were specially angered, because Jehovah, when he created man, gave him dominion over things in the sea (Gen. i. 28), that being a realm of unrest and tempest which they claimed as belonging to themselves. They were denied control of the life that is in the sea, though permitted a large degree of power over its waters. Over the winds their rule was supreme, and it was only by reducing certain demons to slavery that Solomon was able to ride in a wind-chariot.

Out of these several realms of order and disorder in nature were evolved the angels and the devils which were supposed to beset man. The first man is said to have been like an angel. From the instant of his creation there attended him two spirits, whom the rabbins found shadowed out in the sentence, ‘Jehovah-Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’ (Gen. ii. 7). This ‘breath of life’ was a holy spirit, and stood on Adam’s right; the ‘living soul’ was a restless spirit on his left, which continually moved up and down. When Adam had sinned, this restless spirit became a diabolical spirit, and it has ever acted as mediator between man and the realm of anarchy.

It has been mentioned that in the Assyrian legends of the Revolt in Heaven we find no adequate intimation of the motive by which the rebels were actuated. It is said they interrupted the heavenly song, that they brought on an eclipse, that they afflicted human beings with disease; but why they did all this is not stated. The motive of the serpent in tempting Eve is not stated in Genesis. The theory which CÆdmon and Milton have made so familiar, that the dragons aspired to rival Jehovah, and usurp the throne of Heaven, must, however, have been already popular in the time of Isaiah. In his rhapsody concerning the fall of Babylon, he takes his rhetoric from the story of Bel and the Dragon, and turns a legend, as familiar to every Babylonian as that of St. George and the Dragon now is to Englishmen, into an illustration of their own doom. The invective is directed against the King of Babylon, consequently the sex of the devil is changed; but the most remarkable change is in the ascription to Lucifer of a clear purpose to rival the Most High, and seize the throne of heaven.

‘Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming, it stirreth up the (spirits of) the dead, even all the chief ones (great goats) of the earth: it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations (demon-begotten aliens). All these shall say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy splendour is brought down to the underworld, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen, O Lucifer (Daystar), son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thy heart, I will ascend into (the upper) heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars (archangels) of God: I will sit (reign) also upon the mount of the congregation (the assembly of the enemies of God) in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds (the thunder-throne of Jehovah); I will be like the Most High. Yet shalt thou be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.’2

In this passage we mark the arena of the combat shifted from heaven to earth. It is not the throne of heaven but that of the world at which the fiends now aim. Nay, there is confession in every line of the prophecy that the enemy of Jehovah has usurped his throne. Hell has prevailed, and Lucifer is the Prince of this World. The celestial success has not been maintained on earth. This would be the obvious fact to a humiliated, oppressed, heavily-taxed people, who believed themselves the one family on earth sprung from Jehovah, and their masters the offspring of demons. This situation gave to the vague traditions of a single combat between Bel and the Dragon, about an eclipse or a riot, the significance which it retained ever afterward of a mighty conflict on earth between the realms of Light and Darkness, between which the Elohim had set a boundary-line (Gen. i. 4) in the beginning.

A similar situation returned when the Jews were under the sway of Rome, and then all that had ever been said of Babylon was repeated against Rome under the name of Edom. It recurred in the case of those Jews who acknowledged Jesus as their Messiah: in the pomp and glory of the CÆsars they beheld the triumph of the Powers of Darkness, and the burthen of Isaiah against Lucifer was raised again in that of the Apocalypse against the seven-headed Dragon. It is notable how these writers left out of sight the myth of Eden so far as it did not belong to their race. Isaiah does not say anything even of the serpent. The Apocalypse says nothing of the two wonderful trees, and the serpent appears only as a Dragon from whom the woman is escaping, by whom she is not at all tempted. The shape of the Devil, and the Combat with him, have always been determined by dangers and evils that are actual, not such as are archÆological.

A gipsy near Edinburgh gave me his version of the combat between God and Satan as follows. ‘When God created the universe and all things in it, Satan tried to create a rival universe. He managed to match everything pretty well except man. There he failed; and God to punish his pride cast him down to the earth and bound him with a chain. But this chain was so long that Satan was able to move over the whole face of the earth!’ There had got into this wanderer’s head some bit of the Babylonian story, and it was mingled with Gnostic traditions about Ildabaoth; but there was also a quaint suggestion in Satan’s long chain of the migration of this mythical combat not only round the world, but through the ages.

The early followers of Christ came before the glories of Paganism with the legend that the lowly should inherit the earth. And though they speedily surrendered to the rulers of the world in Rome, and made themselves into a christian aristocracy, when they came into Northern Europe the christians were again brought to confront with an humble system the religion of thrones and warriors. St. Gatien celebrating mass in a cavern beside the Loire, meant as much weakness in presence of Paganism as the Huguenots felt twelve centuries later hiding in the like caverns from St. Gatien’s priestly successors.

The burthen of Isaiah is heard again, and with realistic intensity, in the seventh century, and in the north, with our patriarchial poet CÆdmon.

The All-powerful had

Angel-tribes,

Through might of hand,

The holy Lord,

Ten established,

In whom he trusted well

That they his service

Would follow,

Work his will;

Therefore gave he them wit,

And shaped them with his hands,

The holy Lord.

He had placed them so happily,

One he had made so powerful,

So mighty in his mind’s thought,

He let him sway over so much,

Highest after himself in heaven’s kingdom.

He had made him so fair,

So beauteous was his form in heaven,

That came to him from the Lord of hosts,

He was like to the light stars.

It was his to work the praise of the Lord,

It was his to hold dear his joys in heaven,

And to thank his Lord

For the reward that he had bestowed on him in that light;

Then had he let him long possess it;

But he turned it for himself to a worse thing,

Began to raise war upon him,

Against the highest Ruler of heaven,

Who sitteth in the holy seat.

Dear was he to our Lord,

But it might not be hidden from him

That his angel began

To be presumptuous,

Raised himself against his Master,

Sought speech of hate,

Words of pride towards him,

Would not serve God,

Said that his body was

Light and beauteous,

Fair and bright of hue:

He might not find in his mind

That he would God

In subjection,

His Lord, serve:

Seemed to himself

That he a power and force

Had greater

Than the holy God

Could have

Of adherents.

Many words spake

The angel of presumption:

Thought, through his own power,

How he for himself a stronger

Seat might make,

Higher in heaven:

Said that him his mind impelled,

That he west and north

Would begin to work,

Would prepare structures:

Said it to him seemed doubtful

That he to God would

Be a vassal.

‘Why shall I toil?’ said he;

‘To me it is no whit needful.

To have a superior;

I can with my hands as many

Wonders work;

I have great power

To form

A diviner throne,

A higher in heaven.

Why shall I for his favour serve,

Bend to him in such vassalage?

I may be a god as he

Stand by me strong associates,

Who will not fail me in the strife,

Heroes stern of mood,

They have chosen me for chief,

Renowned warriors!

With such may one devise counsel,

With such capture his adherents;

They are my zealous friends,

Faithful in their thoughts;

I may be their chieftain,

Sway in this realm:

Thus to me it seemeth not right

That I in aught

Need cringe

To God for any good;

I will no longer be his vassal.’

When the All-powerful it

All had heard,

That his angel devised

Great presumption

To raise up against his Master,

And spake proud words

Foolishly against his Lord,

Then must he expiate the deed,

Share the work of war,

And for his punishment must have

Of all deadly ills the greatest.

So doth every man

Who against his Lord

Deviseth to war,

With crime against the great Ruler.

Then was the Mighty angry;

The highest Ruler of heaven

Hurled him from the lofty seat;

Hate had he gained at his Lord,

His favour he had lost,

Incensed with him was the Good in his mind,

Therefore must he seek the gulf

Of hard hell-torment,

For that he had warred with heaven’s Ruler,

He rejected him then from his favour,

And cast him into hell,

Into the deep parts,

Where he became a devil:

The fiend with all his comrades

Fell then from heaven above,

Through as long as three nights and days,

The angels from heaven into hell;

And them all the Lord transformed to devils,

Because they his deed and word

Would not revere;

Therefore them in a worse light,

Under the earth beneath,

Almighty God

Had placed triumphless

In the swart hell;

There they have at even,

Immeasurably long,

Each of all the fiends,

A renewal of fire;

Then cometh ere dawn

The eastern wind,

Frost bitter-cold,

Ever fire or dart;

Some hard torment

They must have,

It was wrought for them in punishment,

Their world was changed:

For their sinful course

He filled hell

With the apostates.

Fig. 3.—Satan Punished.

Fig. 3.—Satan Punished.

Whether this spirited description was written by CÆdmon, and whether it is of his century, are questions unimportant to the present inquiry. The poem represents a mediÆval notion which long prevailed, and which characterised the Mysteries, that Satan and his comrades were humiliated from the highest angelic rank to a hell already prepared and peopled with devils, and were there, and by those devils, severely punished. One of the illuminations of the CÆdmon manuscript, preserved in the Bodleian Library, shows Satan undergoing his torment (Fig. 3). He is bound over something like a gridiron, and four devils are torturing him, the largest using a scourge with six prongs. His face manifests great suffering. His form is mainly human, but his bushy tail and animal feet indicate that he has been transformed to a devil similar to those who chastise him.

On CÆdmon’s foundation Milton built his gorgeous edifice. His Satan is an ambitious and very English lord, in whom are reflected the whole aristocracy of England in their hatred and contempt of the holy Puritan Commonwealth, the Church of Christ as he deemed it. The ages had brought round a similar situation to that which confronted the Jews at Babylon, the early Christians of Rome, and their missionaries among the proud pagan princes of the north. The Church had long allied itself with the earlier Lucifers of the north, and now represented the proud empire of a satanic aristocracy, and the persecuted Nonconformists represented the authority of the King of kings. In the English palace, and in the throne of Canterbury, Milton saw his Beelzebub and his Satan.

Th’ infernal serpent; he it was, whose guile,

Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived

The mother of mankind, what time his pride

Had cast him out from heav’n, with all his host

Of rebel angels, by whose aid aspiring

To set himself in glory above his peers

He trusted to have equall’d the Most High,

If he opposed; and with ambitious aim

Against the throne and monarchy of God

Raised impious war in heav’n, and battle proud,

With vain attempt. Him the almighty Power

Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,

With hideous ruin and combustion, down

To bottomless perdition, there to dwell

In adamantine chains and penal fire,

Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.3

This adaptation of the imagery of Isaiah concerning Lucifer has in it all the thunder hurled by Cromwell against Charles. Even a Puritan poet might not altogether repress admiration for the dash and daring of a Prince Rupert, to which indeed even his prosaic co-religionists paid the compliment of ascribing to it a diabolical source.4 Not amid conflicts that raged in ancient Syria broke forth such lines as—

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav’n.

With rallied arms to try what may be yet

Regain’d in heav’n, or what more lost in hell.

The Bel whom Milton saw was Cromwell, and the Dragon that serpent of English oppression which the Dictator is trampling on in a well-known engraving of his time. In the history of the Reformation the old legend did manifold duty again, as in the picture (Fig. 13) by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach.

It would seem that in the course of time Bel and the Dragon became sufficiently close allies for their worshippers to feed and defend them both with equal devotion, and for Daniel to explode them both in carrying on the fight of his deity against the gods of Babylon. This story of Bel is apocryphal as to the canon, but highly significant as to the history we are now considering. Although the Jews maintained their struggle against ‘principalities and powers’ long after it had been a forlorn hope, and never surrendered, nor made alliance with the Dragon, the same cannot be said of those who appropriated their title of ‘the chosen of God,’ counterfeited their covenant, and travestied their traditions. The alliance of Christianity and the Dragon has not been nominal, but fearfully real. In fulfilling their mission of ‘inheriting the earth,’ the ‘meek’ called around them and pressed into their service agents and weapons more diabolical than any with which the Oriental imagination had peopled the abode of devils in the north.

At a Fair in Tours (August 1878) I saw two exhibitions which were impressive enough in the light they cast through history. One was a shrunken and sufficiently grotesque production by puppets of the MediÆval ‘Mystery’ of Hell. Nearly every old scheme and vision of the underworld was represented in the scene. The three Judges sat to hear each case. A devil rang a bell whenever any culprit appeared at the gate. The accused was ushered in by a winged devil—Satan, the Accuser—who, by the show-woman’s lips, stated the charges against each with an eager desire to make him or her out as wicked as possible. A devil with pitchfork received the sentenced, and shoved them down into a furnace. There was an array of brilliant dragons around, but they appeared to have nothing to do beyond enjoying the spectacle. But this exhibition which was styled ‘Twenty minutes in Hell,’ was poor and faint beside the neighbouring exhibition of the real Hell, in which Europe had been tortured for fifteen centuries. Some industrious Germans had got together in one large room several hundreds of the instruments of torture by which the nations of the West were persuaded to embrace Christianity. Every limb, sinew, feature, bone, and nerve of the human frame had suggested to christian inventiveness some ingenious device by which it might be tortured. Wheels on which to break bones, chairs of anguish, thumbscrews, the iron Virgin whose embrace pierced through every vital part; the hunger-mask which renewed for Christ’s sake the exact torment of Tantalus; even the machine which bore the very name of the enemy that was cast down—the Dragon’s Head! By such instrumentalities came those quasi-miraculous ‘Triumphs of the Cross,’ of which so much has been said and sung! The most salient phenomenon of christian history is the steady triumph of the Dragon. Misleader and Deceiver to the last, he is quite willing to sprinkle his fork and rack with holy water, to cross himself, to label his caldrons ‘divine justice,’ to write CHRIST upon his forehead; by so doing he was able to spring his infernal engine on the best nations, and cow the strongest hearts, till from their pallid lips were wrung the ‘confessions of faith,’ or the last cry of martyred truth. So was he able to assault the pure heavens once more, to quench the stars of human faith and hope, and generate a race of polite, learned, and civilised hypocrites. But the ancient sunbeams are after him: the mandate has again gone forth, ‘Let there be light,’ and the Light that now breaks forth is not of that kind which respects the limit of Darkness.


1 See i. pp. 46 and 255. Concerning Ketef see Eisenmenger, ii. p. 435.

2 Isaiah xiv. It may appear as if in this personification of a fallen star we have entered a different mythological region from that represented by the Assyrian tablets; but it is not so. The demoniac forms of Ishtar, Astarte, are fallen stars also. She appears in Greece as Artemis Astrateia, whose worship Pausanias mentions as coming from the East. Her development is through Asteria (Greek form of Ishtar), in whose myth is hidden much valuable Babylonian lore. Asteria was said to have thrown herself into the sea, and been changed into the island called Asteria, from its having fallen like a star from heaven. Her suicide was to escape from the embraces of Zeus, and her escape from him in form of a quail, as well as her fate, may be instructively compared with the story of Lilith, who flew out of Eden on wings to escape from Adam, and made an effort to drown herself in the Red Sea. The diabolisation of Asteria (the fallen star) was through her daughter Hecate. Hecate was the female Titan who was the most potent ally of the gods. Her rule was supreme under Zeus, and all the gifts valued by mortals were believed to proceed from her; but she was severely judicial, and rigidly withheld all blessings from such as did not deserve them. Thus she was, as the searching eye of Zeus, a star-spy upon earth. Such spies, as we have repeatedly had occasion to mention in this work, are normally developed into devils. From professional detectives they become accusers and instigators. Ishtar of the Babylonians, Asteria of the Greeks, and the Day-star of the Hebrews are male and female forms of the same personification: Hecate with her torch (??at??, ‘far-shooting’) and Lucifer (‘light-bringer’ on the deeds of darkness) are the same in their degradation.

3 ‘Paradise Lost,’ i. 40–50.

4 And foremost rides Prince Rupert, darling of fortune and of war, with his beautiful and thoughtful face of twenty-three, stern and bronzed already, yet beardless and dimpled, his dark and passionate eyes, his long love-locks drooping over costly embroidery, his graceful scarlet cloak, his white-plumed hat, and his tall and stately form. His high-born beauty is preserved to us for ever on the canvas of Vandyck, and as the Italians have named the artist ‘Il Pittore Cavalieresco,’ so will this subject of his skill remain for ever the ideal of Il Cavaliere Pittoresco. And as he now rides at the head of this brilliant array, his beautiful white dog bounds onward joyously beside him, that quadruped renowned in the pamphlets of the time, whose snowy skin has been stained by many a blood-drop in the desperate forays of his master, but who has thus far escaped so safely that the Puritans believe him a familiar spirit, and try to destroy him ‘by poyson and extempore prayer, which yet hurt him no more than the plague plaster did Mr. Pym.’ Failing in this, they pronounce the pretty creature to be ‘a divell, not a very downright divell, but some Lapland ladye, once by nature a handsome white ladye, now by art a handsome white dogge.’—A Charge with Prince Rupert. Col. Higginson’s ‘Atlantic Essays.’

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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