Francis Legge

“ The joyous crowd, respectful rather than devout, and not above introducing a comic or rather a burlesque element into the day’s rejoicing, the images and sacred vessels carried solemnly along, the crowd of tonsured priests, and the chants and hymns sung in chorus, the return to the temple, with its prayers for Church and State, and its dismissal of the people—all these are paralleled every day in countries where the Catholic Church is still dominant. Not less modern, too, is the way in which Lucius alludes to the faith of which all these things illustrate the power. ”

“ But Manichaeism had at its back the personality of one of those wonderful men who appear at rare intervals in the world’s history, to leave behind them a memorial of their empire over the minds of their fellows in the shape of a new creed. Manes was indeed, as the discoveries of the last decade have taught us, an innovator in religion entirely worthy to rank with Zoroaster, Buddha, and Muhammad, and when the difficulties in the way of his missionary activity are considered, his influence upon the religious ideas of those who came after him was at least as marked as that of any of them. ”

“ But you having the soul of a magician will be prepared. Do not alarm yourself, for a sea-hawk hovering downwards will strike with his wings upon your body [327] . And do thou having stood upon thy feet clothe thyself in white garments, and in an earthen censer scatter drops of frankincense speaking thus: ‘I exist in thy sacred form. I am strong in thy sacred name. I have lighted upon the flowing-forth of thy good things, O Lord, God of Gods, king demon. ”

“ THE WORSHIP OF MITHRAS Few of us, perhaps, are inclined to recognize that, from its first establishment down to the Mahommedan Invasion of the VIIth century, the Roman Empire found itself constantly in the presence of a bitter, determined, and often victorious enemy. Alexander had conquered but had not destroyed the Persians; and, although the magic of the hero’s personality held them faithful to him during his too brief life, he was no sooner dead than they hastened to prove that they had no intention of tamely giving up their nationality. ”

“ THE CONQUESTS OF ALEXANDER A glance at the map of Asia at the coming of Alexander will convince us that all but a corner of the world known to the ancients was then ruled by a single power. The Persian Empire, sprawling like a huge octopus over the centre of the continent, dominated it from its four capitals at the head of the Persian Gulf, and stretched without a break from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean. ”

“ I prostrate myself and praise with a pure heart and a sincere tongue, the Great God, the Father of the Lights and of their elements, the most highly praised, the glorified, thee and all thy Majesty and thy blessed worlds that thou hast called forth! ”

“ Among the world-conquerors who have been hailed as heroes in after times, Alexander—surely the greatest individual known to history—stands distinguished by the loftiness of his aims and the swiftness with which they were attained. It is wonderful that a boy of twenty with an army that cannot have exceeded 50,000 men all told should succeed in overcoming practically the whole of Asia in less time than it took the British Empire with the third of a million to break down the armed resistance of a few thousand Boers. ”

“ O my God, if in our sin we have unwittingly sinned against the God of the Sun and Moon, the Gods enthroned in the two resplendent Palaces. If, although calling him the True, Mighty, and Powerful God, we have not believed in him. ”

“ PRE-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE ESSENES It comes as rather a wrench to leave the graceful, if vain, speculations of the Greeks, with their joyous and free life and their passionate worship of beauty, which saw in every shifting aspect of nature the revelation of some Being more perfect and glorious than man, for the gloomy and misanthropic monotheism of the Palestinian Jews. Nor is the change made more pleasant when we consider the contrast between the ideas of the two nations as to the perfectibility of man’s nature and his lot after death. ”

“ Gazing with our eyes, hearing with our ears, seizing with our hands, and trampling with our feet, we ever torture and impede the Light of the Five Gods, the dry and wet earth, the five kinds of animals, and the five kinds of plants and trees. ”

“ This wise and provident ruler of the world that he had conquered was at the same time a youth beautiful as Apollo, chivalrous as Bayard, clean as Galahad. Is it surprising that his name alone of all the conquerors of the East has endured through all changes of creed and culture, that the fierce chiefs of the Central Asian tableland still boast of him as their progenitor, and that the whole Mahommedan world still hold him the king of the believing Genii? No Caesar, Attila, or Genghiz Khan has ever thus impressed the imagination of future ages [65] . ”

“ What they, and even more urgently, their womenfolk needed was a God, not towering above them like the Eternal Sun, the eye of Mithras and his earthly representative, shedding his radiance impartially upon the just and the unjust; but a God who had walked upon the earth in human form, who had known like themselves pain and affliction, and to whom they could therefore look for sympathy and help. Such a god was not to be found in the Mithraic Cave.
For these reasons, probably, Mithraism fell after a reign of little more than two centuries. Yet for good or ill, few religions have lived in vain ”

“ All the Divine Powers are summed up in the Logos or Word of God, who is not only their chief but their source, and the great intermediary between God and the universe. He is neither unbegotten nor begotten after the manner of finite things, but is the vicegerent and ambassador of God, who constantly makes intercession for the world. As for man, his soul is itself nothing but one of those powers of God which in another state of existence are called angels or daemons, and it is his material body which is the source of all evil, and the prison of the soul. ”

“ Science, in this sense, has so far departed from its strict and etymological signification of knowledge, as to connote exact knowledge based upon ascertained fact, while a science is generally held to mean an organized system in which the largest possible number of related facts are gathered together with reference to one common subject of study. At first sight, it appears that nothing can be more rigidly excluded by this definition than religion, which has been defined as “the effective desire to be in right relation to the power manifesting itself in the universe [5] .” ”

“ This perpetual self-identity under varying forms, this annihilation of death through the power of self-reproduction, was the object of an enthusiastic worship, characterized by remarkable self-abandonment and immersion in the divine, by a mixture of obscene symbolism and sublime truths, by negation of the moral distinctions and family ties that exist in a more developed society, but do not exist in the free life of Nature. ”

“ As the “armour” of the First Man, from which the souls of men are formed, was made with the aid of these five worlds, it is reasonable to suppose that one or other predominates in the soul of everyone. Hence probably the degree in the Manichaean hierarchy to which any hearer might attain was thought to be decided for him before his birth, and governed his destination after death. Thus it is said in the Pistis Sophia: “Those who have received exalted mysteries shall be in exalted places, and those who have received humble mysteries in humble places in the light of my kingdom.” ”

“ THE ORIGIN OF GNOSTICISM The worship of the Alexandrian gods was in every sense a religion. Not only did it form a common bond between men and women of different rank and origin, but it had its roots in the idea of propitiating the spiritual world. In the belief of its votaries, the blessings of health, of riches, of long life, and of happiness in this world and the next, were the gifts of Serapis and Isis, which they might extend to or withhold from mortals as seemed to them good [287] . ”

“ In the first place, Orphism went a great way towards weaning the minds of men from the idea of separate gods for different nations, and towards teaching them that all their national and local deities were but different forms of one great Power, who was himself the source of all being. There can be little doubt that the Orphics thus regarded their god Dionysos, whom they made one with his father Zeus, and hailed as being in himself female as well as male, and the common type of all goddesses as well as of all gods. ”

“ A reign of terror might often exist among the great families in the capital under a jealous or suspicious Emperor, and the majority of the proletariat might there as in other large towns be entirely given up to the brutal or obscene amusements of the arena or the theatre. But in the provinces these things had little effect on the working of the system set up under the Empire; and the civilized world was for the first time, perhaps, in its history, beginning to feel the full benefits of good government and freedom from foreign invasion. ”

“ And the barriers between the Divine and the human being thus broken down, men’s minds soon became so familiar with the idea that they not only thought men might become gods, but declared that the gods were only deified men. The Athenians in the hymns that they sang to Demetrius declared that he was the only true god, and that the others were either asleep or too far off to be taken into account, or were not really gods at all [84] . But it is not with impunity that the religious ideas of a people can be thus suddenly and violently affronted. ”

“ The Demon of Envy [the name generally used in the treatise for the Devil] planted these five poisonous trees of death in the five kinds of ruined places. He made them on every occasion deceive and trouble the original luminous nature, to draw in from without the nature which is stranger to it, and to produce poisonous fruit. Thus the tree of the dark thought grows within the city of the bones; its fruit is hatred: the tree of the dark feeling grows within the city of the nerves; its fruit is irritation: the tree of the dark reflection grows within the city of the veins ”

“ Then pressed on the multitude of those who had been initiated into the divine mysteries, both men and women of every rank and age, shining in the pure whiteness of their linen robes, the women with hair moist with perfume and covered with a transparent veil, the men with closely shaven hair and glistening heads. ”

“ A sovereign without religion is a tyrant, and a people which have no religion may be deemed the most monstrous of all societies. Religion may exist without a State, but a State cannot exist without religion; and it is by holy laws that a political association can alone be bound [1011] .”
Yet in spite of these sentiments, more pithily expressed perhaps in the “No bishop, no king” of our own James I, the task of founding a common religion for the whole of the new Persian empire must have presented some uncommon difficulties. ”

“ And when you have learned all things, dismiss the god only with the strong name, the one of the hundred letters, saying ‘Begone, Lord, for thus wills and commands the great god!’ Say the name and he will depart. ”