Early in the year 1896 a company of Jews performed at the Novelty Theatre, London, in the Hebrew language, a drama entitled “King Solomon.” It was an humble affair, and only about three score in the audience—I and one very dear to me being apparently the only “Gentiles” present. The drama was mainly the legend of the Judgment of Solomon and that of the visit of the Queen of Sheba, both conventionalized, and performed in an automatic way, no spark of human passion or emotion animating either of the women claiming the babe, or the Queen of Sheba. The part of Solomon was acted by a fine-looking man, who went through it in the same perfunctory way that characterized Joseph Meyer, the Oberammergau Christ, as he appears to the undevout critical eye. Such has the biblical Solomon become in Europe.

In the same week I attended a matinÉe of “Aladdin” in Drury Lane Theatre, which was crowded, mainly with children, who were filled with delight by the fairy play. The leading figures were elaborated from Solomonic lore. A beautiful being in dazzling white raiment and crown appears to Aladdin; she is a combination of the Queen of Sheba and Wisdom; she presents the youth with a ring (symbol of Solomon’s espousal with Wisdom, or as the Abyssinians say, with the Queen of Sheba); by means of this ring he obtains the Wonderful Lamp (the reflected or terrestrial wisdom). An Asmodeus, well versed in modern jugglery, charms the audience with his tricks and antics, before proceeding to get hold of the magic ring of Aladdin, and commanding the lamp, which he succeeds in doing, as he succeeded with Solomon. This is what legendary Solomon has become in Europe.

In European Folklore, Solomon and his old adversary, Asmodeus, now better known as Mephistopheles, have long been blended. Solomon’s seal was the mediÆval talisman to which the demon eagerly responds. The Wisdom involved is all a matter of magic. It is wonderful that so little recognition has been given in literature to the epical dignity and beauty of the biblical legends of Solomon. In early English literature there was at one time a tendency to ascribe to Solomon various proverbs not in the Bible. In one old manuscript he is credited with saying:

Also,

In Chaucer’s “MelibÆus” there are ten proverbs ascribed to Solomon which are not in the Bible. But generally it is Solomon the magician who has interested the poets. In the old work, “Salomon and Saturn,” the wise man informs Saturn that the most potent of all talismans is the Bible:

And it is further said, “Each (leaf) will subdue devils.” In a profounder vein Solomon says: “All Evil is from Fate; yet a wise-minded man may moderate every fate with self-help, help of friends, and the divine spirit.”

In Prospero burying his Book, Shakespeare seems to have followed the rabbinical legend that after Solomon by his written formulas had made the devils serve him, in building the temple and other works, he resolved to practice magic no more, and buried his book. But the devils said to the people, “he only ruled you by his book,” and pointed out where it was hidden; so they left the prophets and followed magic.

At what time the notion arose that Solomon had demonic familiars does not appear, but the story in 1 Kings iii. of the gift of wisdom has some appearance of a reclamation for the deity of a credit that was popularly ascribed to a rival power. However this may be, there is a popular habit of tracing unusual human performances to Satan. As I write this paragraph (in Paris) I note a theatrical placard announcing “les sataniques devins” of Williany de Torre, a man who cries out the name and address you secretly select in the Paris Directory. Why not advertise the divinations as “angelic” instead of satanic? The heavenly beings have somehow no great reputation for cleverness. Probably this is due to the long association of intellectuality and science with heresy.

The late Lord Lytton (“Owen Meredith”) wrote a brief poem on a version given him by Robert Browning of the story in my Preface, of Solomon leaning on his staff long after he was dead: a worm gnaws the end of the staff and Solomon falls, crumbled to dust, and nothing left visible but his crown. A poem by Leigh Hunt, “The Inevitable” (in some editions, “The Angel of Death”), tells of a man who, in terror of Death, entreats Solomon to transport him to the remotest mountain of Cathay. Solomon does so.

The story of the Fall of Man, in Genesis, so fascinated Schopenhauer that he was ready to forgive the Bible all its blunders. The whole world, said the great pessimist, looks like a vast accumulation of evil developed from some absurdly small misstep. And this misstep was precisely in accord with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who says that the great mistake of the universe is “consciousness.”

That there were Schopenhaueresque ideas among some of the Solomonic school may be seen in Koheleth (Ecclesiastes), who says, “Be not overwise; why commit suicide?” (vii. 16.) I have remarked elsewhere that the story of the serpent in Eden may have been put there as a fling at Solomon and the scientific people, but on the other hand it may be argued that it was a fable devised by the Solomonic school to show how Jahveh was outwitted in his attempt to breed a race of idiots, for fear mankind might become as clever as himself. For it was not the serpent that deceived Adam and Eve, but Jahveh, in saying the forbidden fruit was fatal; the serpent told them the truth.

The folk-tale that Solomon’s staff was gnawed by a worm, and his crowned body reduced to dust, suggests the idea of grandeur laid low by some insignificant form, and in the same way Jahveh’s creation was overthrown by a worm. This humiliation of Jahveh has been now somewhat lessened by the theory that Satan took the form of the serpent, which Dante calls the worm, but nowhere in the Bible is there any confusion of the reptile in Eden with any devil. “If,” says Kalisch, “the serpent represented Satan it would be extremely surprising that the former only was cursed, and that the latter is not even alluded to.” In Genesis the extreme cleverness of the serpent is recognized, and the truth of his statement to Eve admitted, while Jahveh is shown in the ridiculous light of having his deception about the fruit exposed by a worm, and betaking himself to curses all round. These be thy gods, O Christians—for the Jews absolutely ignored the tale in all their scriptures, and in the New Testament Paul alone alludes to it.1

The serpent in Eden is evidently the symbol of wisdom, of medical art—Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek—lifted in the wilderness by Moses, and recognised by Jesus (“Be wise as serpents”), with whom as an uplifted healer of mankind the serpent-symbol was associated. But all of this is in contradiction to the curses of Jahveh on the serpent, and on those to whom the serpent brought wisdom. The fable, therefore, seems to be composed of two antagonistic parts; it is a Solomonic anti-Jahvist fable with an anti-Solomonic moral.

In the ParsÎ religion the fall of man was due to the first man having been deceived by the Evil One into ascribing the good things in creation to him—the Evil One.

In the same way the Christian ascribes to the Evil One man’s first taste of wisdom—the knowledge of good and evil—and believes his first step above the brute to be a fall.

In the ParsÎ religion that fall of man, by a lie, was recovered from by the creation of a new man. But in Christendom man has not recovered from his fall, nor can he ever recover from it so long as he disregards the new man’s word, “Be wise as serpents,” and continues to confuse his wisdom with diabolism.

Only through the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and of the eternal antagonism between them, can the tree of Life be reached.

In a Gnostic legend Solomon was summoned from his tomb and asked, “Who first named the name of God?” He answered, “The Devil.”

Did reason permit belief in a personal devil, one might recognise his supreme artifice in thus sheltering all the desolating cruelties of men, all the discords and wars that have degraded mankind into nations glorying in their ensigns of inhumanity, under a divine order. Thenceforth the enemy of man became God’s Devil, and whoso accuses the scourges of man accuses the scourges of God.

Under the teaching of the Second Solomon his personal friends could see in his tragical death a blow of the Devil aimed at God, who was trying to subdue that lawless one, for whose existence or actions God was in no sense responsible. But this was a transient glimpse. The Devil’s God was soon seen on his throne above the murderers of the great man; the stake set up by the lynchers was shaped into a symbolical cross; and all the cowardly, treacherous, murderous leaders, and the vile lynchers, are raised into agents and priests of God, presiding at a solemn rite and sacrifice for the salvation of mankind.

Instead of salvation a curse fell on mankind with that lie, and there are no signs of recovery from it. By the combination of Church and State there has been evolved a new man—a Christian restoration of deceived Yima—and no theological development touches that misbeliever in every believer. The Unitarian, the Theist, in their doctrine of a divine cosmos, the optimist, the pantheist, do but rehabilitate and philosophically reinvest the lie that the diseases and agonies in nature and in history are parts of a divinely ordered universe. They, too, must see Judas and the lynchers carrying out the plans of God. What then can they say of our contemporary betrayers of justice, the national lynchers, who are crucifying humanity throughout the world? These, too, carrying along their missionaries, are projecting God into history! But it is the God who was first named by the Devil, as the risen Solomon said, not the “Eloi,” the source only of good, whom the great friend of man saw not in all that wild chaos of violence amid which he perished, and his sublime religion with him.

When Jahveh swears “by his holiness” (as in Ps. lxxxix. 35, Amos iv. 2), this holiness is not to be interpreted as moral, or in any human sense. It relates to ancient philosophical ideas concerning the spiritual and the material worlds. The supreme head of the spiritual world is so far above the material world in majesty that he cannot come in contact with matter, though this august “holiness” has nothing to do with his moral character. Indeed deities were in all countries considered quite above the moral obligations of men. Jahveh’s “holiness” required the employment of mediators in creation—the Spirit of God brooding over the waters, Wisdom the “undefiled” master-builder, the Word—in each of whom is some image of his quasi-physiological “holiness,” his transcendent immateriality.

It was amid these ancient conceptions that the various cults arose which attempt to please and conciliate gods by ceremonial observances, runes, recited formulas of petition or adulation, all based on the awful “holiness” that doth hedge about a god, and concerned with points of heavenly etiquette, without any implication of a moral nature in those distant celestial beings. In Euripides’ “Iphigenia” (line 20) it is said: “Sometimes the worship of the gods, not being conducted with exactness, overturns one’s life.” In the same vein Koheleth (Ecclesiastes, v. 1, 2): “Keep thy foot when thou goest into the house of God; for to draw nigh to him with attention is better than to bring the sacrifices of fools who know not that they are (? may be) doing wrong. Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thy heart be hasty to utter a word before God; for God is in heaven, and thou on earth; therefore let thy words be few.”

But in every race ethical development reaches a stage in which these majestic beings, concerned only about their worship according to etiquette, are challenged. Thus in the “Cyclops” of Euripides (xxxv. 3–5), Ulysses says: “O Jove, guardian of strangers, behold these things; for if thou regardest them not, thou, Jove, being nought, art vainly esteemed a god.”

From the first Solomon to the last, the whole intellectual development in Judea, which I have called Solomonic, means the subjection of all conceptions of the divine nature and laws to the moral sentiment and the reason of man. It was no denial of invisible beings, or of man’s relation to the universe, but a demand that all definitions and conceptions should be approached through science, experience and wisdom.

Solomon, and the Second Solomon, rest in their unknown graves; their wisdom is corrupted; but their genius survives in the earth. Of old it was said God looked down from heaven on the children of men, and found that there was “none that doeth good, no not one.” But it is now man who, with eyes illumined by the brave and cultured Solomons of all lands and ages, looks upon the gods to see if there be one that doeth good. The best of them are defended only by a plea that evil is the mask of their benevolence. But it is not humanly moral to do evil that good may come.

Our great Omar KhayyÁm, by Fitzgerald’s help, says:

The agreement may be fair enough so far as it concerns Sin, in the theological sense, but no Omnipotence, with unlimited choice of means to ends, could be forgiven for the agonies of nature, even did they result in benefits,—as generally they do not, so far as is known to the experience of mankind.

It may be, as the American orator said, “An honest god’s the noblest work of man”; and innumerable hearts enshrine fair personal ideals under uncomprehended names for deity; but each such private ideal is unconsciously antagonistic to every “collectivist” deity to whom the creation or the government of the world is ascribed.

The human heart kneels before its vision, and with Mary Magdalene cries Rabboni, My Master; but Theology recognizes only the perfunctory Rabbi, and carries her beloved off into union with thunder-god, war-god, or with a deified predatory Cosmos. Yet will not the heart be bereaved of its vision; it still sees a smile of tenderness in the universe. And philosophy, though it regard that smile as a reflection of the heart’s own love, may with all the more certainty itself find a religion in this maternal divinity in the earth, ever aspiring to its own supreme humanity.

Solomon passes, Jesus passes, but the Wisdom they loved as Bride, as Mother, abides, however veiled in fables. She is still inspiring the unfinished work of creation, and her delight is with the children of men.