That this army of saints was originally created to replace the body of heroes and demi-gods of antiquity cannot be doubted. The compliance with which the church converted pagan deities into Christian heroes is perfectly well known, and it is shown in many ways. Ancient statues were declared to represent newly canonized saints to whom pagan attributes were unhesitatingly given—often most ridiculously. At the temple of Sebona, in Nubia, the Christians replaced the figure of the old god of the temple, which appeared in a fresco, by that of St. Peter, thus depicting King Rameses the Second as presenting his offering to the Christian saint! The statue of Jupiter in St. Peter’s at Rome has been declared that of the erstwhile fisherman, and its original thunderbolts have been replaced by the keys, which the Christian mythologists have filched from the god Janus to bestow on their revered patron in accordance with the promise of Matthew xvi, 19. Rome is full of proofs of this conversion of heathen to Christian deities. The temple formerly sacred to the Bona Dea was dedicated to the Virgin Mary; the church of Saint Apollinaris stands on the spot formerly dedicated to Apollo; and the temple of Mars was given to St. Martina. The very names of some of the saints have an old familiar sound—as St. Baccho, St. Quirinus, St. Romula, St. Redempta, St. Concordia, St. Nympha, and St. Mercurius.

The Christian symbolism of its heroes has also a decidedly pagan flavor. The ancient winged lion of the Egyptian mythology is made to portray St. Mark; the sacred bull denotes St. Luke; while St. John is generously supplied with both the eagle of Jove and the hawk’s head of Horus.

The idea of intercession, which is the principal attribute of all the saints, is also a very ancient religious theory and probably came with the other dogmas already mentioned from Alexandria, as we find that the Egyptians believed that some of their gods—and particularly the four gods of the dead—acted as mediators with the stern judge Osiris and attempted to turn aside his wrath and the punishment of sins.

Much akin to the saints, though differing from them in form and in never having been mortal, are the angels. These beings combine the wings of the Roman victories with the sweet voices of the Teutonic elves and the classical sirens, and are in many ways similar to the famous northern valkyries who wore shirts of swan plumage and hovered over Scandinavian battlefields to receive the souls of falling heroes. The Hindu apsaras and Moslem houris belong to the same family. A few years ago a bitter controversy arose in New York Episcopal circles as to the sex of these unearthly creatures, some strenuously advocating their masculinity, while others gallantly asserted that they were essentially feminine, but the earlier idea was that they were entirely sexless, combining the characteristic virtues of both sexes.

Apart from both saints and angels stands another figure in the Christian mythology—one, however, that has no actual counterpart in the ancient faiths. This is Satan. The classical religious systems had no such conception, their king of the dead being a gloomy and austere deity without any of the malicious or mischievous propensities of the more modern devil, and having no designs upon the welfare of mankind. The medieval conception of the devil was a grotesque compound of elements derived from all the pagan mythologies which Christianity superseded. From the sylvan deity Pan he gets his goat-like body, his horns and cloven hoofs; his lameness was due to his fall from heaven, in imitation of the fall of the Roman Vulcan; and his red beard was taken from the lightning god Thor, as was also his power over the thunderbolts; while his pitchfork is the converted trident of Neptune.

That much of the absurd fabric of Christianity is built upon a belief in Satan cannot be denied, for the whole theology is based upon the necessity of a savior whose death atones for the sins of mankind, which were consequent upon man’s fall from grace through the machinations of the devil. Had man never fallen, there were no need of a savior. Had man never been tempted, he would never have fallen, and in no words was the necessity of a belief in the devil more plainly set forth than by that most orthodox writer, des Mousseaux, in his “Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons,” published in 1852. He says: “The Devil is the chief pillar of Faith. He is one of the grand personages whose life is closely allied to that of the church, and without his speech, which issued out so triumphantly from the mouth of the serpent, the fall of man could never have taken place. Thus, if it were not for him, the Savior, the Crucified, the Redeemer, would be but the most ridiculous of supernumeraries and the cross an insult to good sense!” In his preface to “Les Hauts PhenomÈnes de la Magie,” des Mousseaux repeats this theory: “If magic and spiritualism were both but chimeras, we would have to bid an eternal farewell to all the rebellious angels now troubling the world; for thus we would have no more demons down here.... And if we lost our demons, we would lose our Savior likewise; for, from whom did that Savior save us? And then there would be no more Redeemer; for, from whom or what could that Redeemer redeem us? Hence, there would be no more Christianity.” He evidently regards Satan as “the prince of this world” (John xii, 31; xvi, 11); “the god of this world” (Cor. iv, 4); and “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. ii, 2).

The universally accepted belief of Christendom in the almost absolute power of the devil was the cause of the most awful persecution of innocence that the world has ever seen. While the tortures of the heretics by the Inquisition had some cause of a political as well as ecclesiastical nature, the houndings of those accused of witchcraft and sorcery had no foundation save in superstition and gross ignorance. During the Christian era millions of persons have been destroyed for this crime in conformity to the command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Ex. xxii, 18). The Roman church recognized and punished the crime; Luther approved of the burning of witches; the Scotch reformers did likewise, and the Puritans of New England delighted in the persecution.

While all religiously orthodox people accept the narrative of scriptural miracles with unquestioning faith and never cast a doubt on the greatest improbabilities so long as they are told of biblical heroes, these very people assign all the seeming supernatural affairs of post-scriptural times to the devil. Psychical phenomena which, if performed two thousand years ago by Jesus (such as the resurrection of Lazarus and the materialization to the Magdalene), they accept without hesitation, they brand as trickery or a delusion or Satan, when placed before them by a professed Spiritualist.

Witches and wizards were condemned to horrible deaths by the medieval church for performing the very identical acts for which the same church canonized departed saints and instituted offices for their adoration and worship; and modern Christians smile and sneer derisively at fortune tellers, but condemn in holy horror as heretics those who refuse to believe in the foreseeing powers of the ancient Hebrew prophets.

This Christian devil-worship, for it can be called little else, crept into Judaism during the Babylonian captivity, and was originally a recognition of the dual powers of good and evil, seemingly coequal. By placing Satan in opposition to God, in giving him eternal life, and endowing him with miraculous powers, and even allowing him to upset and vanquish the plans of God, Christians have made Satan equal, if not superior, to the Deity. A Puritan bigot hanging witches in New England was admitting in the plainest manner his faith in Satan’s power, though it never occurred to him for an instant that these curious happenings might be attributed to God. The power of God to perform miracles was then, as now, a matter of the past. With the Protestant Reformation came the idea that no longer did God interfere for the benefit of man. In the seventeenth century God had ceased to work by other than natural agencies. His miraculous powers, if not lost, were at least suspended. But not so Satan—that archfiend was as powerful as ever, if not more so. He could inflict magical tortures on God’s divinely elect and make them writhe in agony. Pious Cotton Mather had ceased to believe in divine miracles, but he had no doubt of devilish ones, and it appears to all students of that dark and shameful period of our history that the belief was rampant among the majority that God was vanquished and Satan ruled. Never was belief in the dual principles of good and evil more surely set forth in ancient Persia than it was in New England by such harsh, cruel, and bigoted priests as Mather and Parrish.

Today, while all churchmen have grown more liberal, we still find both in pulpit and pew innumerable believers in the power of Satan to tempt and force erring humanity into wrong and sinful paths in miraculous salvation from which by God they have no faith. Today, instead of earthly and present salvation by the Deity from the clutches of Satan, the belief seems prevalent that a post-mortem salvation is more efficacious, and that all that is required for eternal bliss is belief in the vicarious atonement of the Christ. To hear our orthodox friends declaim on the powers of Satan almost makes one ready to believe that God is dead and Satan rules supreme. Such is the blasphemy of demonic faith.

While Satan, as the arch-enemy, is somewhat similar to the Persian Ahriman, he is not alone in his wickedness. When Christianity came into power and supplanted paganism as the Roman state religion, it immediately debased all of the pagan gods, whom it did not appropriate to itself as saints, to devils and assigned them subordinate positions in hell, under command of the great Satan. And thus, all the beautiful water sprites, sylvan nymphs, spirits of the air, and other lesser deities, became the associates of wickedness, and, as such, continued, until a very recent date, to hold sway over the superstitious imaginations of the majority of Europeans.

The mediÆval church likewise invented the famous succubÆ and incubi, the former demons impersonating the beautiful nymphs of the old mythology and attacking the virtue of youths with their seductive arts, while the latter, in imitation of the ancient satyrs, sought the virginity of unsuspecting maidens; all of which may readily be learned of in accounts of the many trials held by “the Holy Inquisition,” in which such were condemned as had held intercourse with these demons.

In many cases, women swearing to have had intercourse with incubi were merely suffering from erotic and nymphomaniac hallucinations, while others may have found it a convenient excuse for explaining illicit impregnations. Men, falling under the charms of women, found it a convenient method for disposing of their loves, after the infatuation had passed, by declaring them succubÆ; and monks, who had contracted venereal diseases, laid their sufferings to these same fair demons. In the case of the monks, however, the succubÆ were often of purely hallucinary origin, due to excessive asceticism together with the suppression of natural desires and a too faithful conformity to the ordinance of celibacy. Nymphomania is also prevalent in convents, owing to the unnatural sexual lives led by the nuns, who either remain truly chaste or abandon themselves to all sorts of debauchery and perverted lubricities. In former times these rages of demented women were supposed to have been caused by possession of demons, which tormented them at the orders of magicians, and advantage was often taken by the unscrupulous to accuse their enemies of the crime of sorcery, and thus cause their execution.

One of the most famous of these horrible affairs was that of Loudin in Poitiers, where the nuns of the Ursuline convent, becoming hysterical and demented, swore themselves afflicted by Urbain Grandier, a priest of the local church, and despite the attempts of the rational bailiff and sensible civil lieutenants, some enemies of the curÉ among the exorcists managed to secure the arrest, torture, and final burning of the unfortunate man in 1632. Later, it was discovered that, being personally attractive, handsome and gallant, Grandier, who never denied his numerous amours, had incurred the enmity of the Loudin nuns by entirely ignoring their advances; and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned! These libidinous women, constantly brooding over disappointment to their fond hopes, gave such a character of demonic possession to their neurosis that advantage could be taken of it by rival priests to rid themselves of an envied enemy. The writhings, gesticulations, convulsions, etc., of these unfortunate women, combined with the indecency of their actions on the approach of the exorcists (caused merely by the approach of a male), were believed by the vulgar to be demonstrations of demonic possession. Other nuns, seeing the attention and notoriety thus gained by these sisters, although themselves free from dementia, could not resist the temptation to simulate its forms and thus acquire renown for themselves.

Thus arose those horrible demonical scenes which occupied the attention of all Europe during the seventeenth century and seemed to point to the possession of all convents by devils. And not convents alone, for other hysterical women, without the walls, possessed of the same rage for notoriety, took up the character of demonic possessed and spread the vulgar superstition until it seems that every woman in Europe who was so unfortunate as to be in any way afflicted with tendencies to hysteria, neurosis, idiocy, or dementia of any character whatever, came to be regarded as in the power of a demon, which in turn was the slave of some magician. And thus, through the influence of an ignorant and unscrupulous priesthood, a powerful engine was placed at its disposal for the removal of enemies. Executions for sorcery continued until their very number and barbarity palled, and the wearied people were ready for their abolition, when the Reformation opened and with the accession of power, Protestantism, in this matter, at least, swayed the masses to reason once more.

Dr. Figuier, in his “Histoire du Merveilleux,” explains these demonical possessions as entirely due to hypnotism, and, ignoring the nymphomaniac theory, asserts that the exorcists themselves hypnotized the nuns for their own glory and for purposes of vengeance. One page 234 of volume I he says: “L’appareil deployÉ par les exorcistes, leurs adjurations, leurs gestes imposants et forcenÉs, tenaient lieu des manipulations que nos magnetiseurs emploient pour endormir leurs sujets. Operant sur des jeunes filles nerveuses, malades, melancoliques, les exorcistes produisaient chez elles une partie des phenomÈnes auxquels donnÉ lieu le somnambulisme artificiel.”

The universal belief in evil spirits became a powerful engine for the advancement of the church. By its use all those who were inimical to the church could be put out of the way as comrades of devils, and, furthermore, the theory was advanced that only by the exorcisms of the church could man be protected from malevolent powers. Holy water, signs of the cross, repetitions of the name of Mary had full power to annul all the machinations of the demons, but only in the hands of the true believers was this efficacious. To preserve one from the dangers of demonic spite, absolute orthodoxy was essential, and thus a great premium was imposed upon strict adherence to the church. Thus was gross superstition a most powerful factor in the growth and spread of Christianity. According to Lecky: “There was scarcely a village or a church that had not, at some time, been the scene of supernatural interposition. The powers of light and the powers of darkness were regarded as visibly struggling for the mastery. Saintly miracles, supernatural cures, startling judgments, visions, prophecies, and prodigies of every order, attested the activity of the one, while witchcraft and magic, with all their attendant horrors, were the visible manifestations of the other.... Tens of thousands of victims perished by the most agonizing and protracted torments, without exciting the slightest compassion.... Nations that were separated by position, by interests, and by character, on this question were united.” And the germ of all this evil lay in the very foundation of Christianity—the faith held in supernatural agencies.

The belief in the supernatural agency in the temptation of Eve, the temptations of Jesus, the possibility of the miraculous conception, and the miracles of Christ, were but stepping-stones to faith in innumerable invisible but potent powers. One who can conscientiously believe in the supernatural as found between the covers of the Bible can, by but a slight stretch of the imagination, believe any preposterous tale that is woven about a supernatural agency. If one can believe a woman can conceive without contact with semen, one can believe some old woman can dry up his cow. If one can believe that Jesus actually raised Lazarus from the dead, one can believe that a man can kill him by sticking pins in a wax effigy. If one can believe that Elijah ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot, one can believe that Goody Jones rode a broomstick through the air. If one can believe that the Christ was actually tempted by the devil, one can believe in succubÆ and incubi. It is all a matter of logical reasoning. As soon as a Christian’s intellectual powers develop to a point where he can find no place for the miraculous in the world about him, he begins to doubt that which was in the world before him; but, regarding theological tales, he either places them in another category or ignores them, unless faced with them, when he crawls and calls them “sacred mysteries.” That an old woman can sour his milk or kill his child by the evil eye he does not believe, for reason has taught him otherwise. And for the same reason he would not believe his daughter if she told him she was pregnant with a miraculous child. He did not believe Josephine Woodbury when she made a similar statement in Boston a few years ago. But he does believe it of Mary, because it is a “holy mystery,” and is in another category. He has inherited his faith from a long line of orthodox ancestors, and he has never stopped to consider it by the light of pure reason. It is fortunate for the dogma of the virgin birth that it took root when people believed such things, otherwise Mary would have been adorned with the scarlet letter.

Feasts, fasts and elaborate ceremonials were important features of the most ancient worships, and it is not, therefore, strange to find somewhat modified adaptations of them in the Christian church. For, wherever Christianity wandered and found firmly implanted religious theories and customs, it immediately gave them new significations and accepted them, until finally the greater part of paganism was gathered from all parts of the civilized world and amalgamated into one strong theological organization. Finding in almost every nation a festival at the winter solstice, in commemoration of the accouchement of the celestial, virgin queen of heaven, and the birth of the sun-god, the Christian fathers decided to adopt the 25th of December as the natal day of their Christ.

Mithras, Osiris, Horus, Bacchus, Adonis and Buddha were all said to have been born on this day, and it is the date of one of the greatest religious festivals of India, during which the people decorate their houses with garlands and make presents to relatives and friends; a custom adopted by the Christians in much the same manner as was that of the ancient German yule-log, burned in honor of the sun-god.