Francis Legge

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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] .” ”

“ Soon every Greek who had strength, beauty, or talents to sell was on foot to seek his or her fortune in Asia, and with them went everywhere the petty Greek trader, as enterprising and as fearless in pursuit of gain as those countrymen of his whose booths Lord Kitchener saw set up on the field of Omdurman before the rout of the Mahdists was complete, and whose locandas still greet one in the smallest villages on the Nile. ”

“ Who art alone the life and death of much-enduring mortals.
Persephone! For thou dost ever nourish and slay all things.
Hear, blessed goddess, and send up fruits from the earth
Granting us in abundance peace and gentle-handed health
And a life of happiness, such as leads old age untroubled
To thy realm, O queen, and to dread Pluto.” By the side of this we may perhaps put the Hymn to Dionysos in the same collection. It is probably later than the other in date, the syncretism which equates Persephone with Aphrodite, Cybele, and Isis pointing to a post-Alexandrian origin. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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] . ”

“ It was only when the word went forth from Babylon or Susa, Ecbatana or Persepolis, for the calling-out of the Ban of the whole Empire that the other than Persian subject of Artaxerxes or Darius had to join the levy of his satrapy, and, on orders given to him through an interpreter, to assist the Great King in crushing some rebellious satrap or repelling foreign invasion. At other times, he must have known him only as a kind of divinity, having power to throw down and to set up, to whom he might cry, not always in vain, against the oppression of his own immediate ruler. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That people so circumstanced, confronted with a power vastly superior to their own, and resolutely bent on compelling its subjects to enter into its own system of orderly government, should have looked to rebellion and supernatural help as their sole means of escape, was only to be expected. But there were besides a great number of Jews dispersed among the heathen, who had succeeded in acquiring vast wealth together with the power which wealth brings with it; and these were by no means inclined to upset the settled order of things which the rise of the Roman Empire had brought into the East. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Knowledge, not faith, was to him the one thing needful to the soul, and he would be as little likely to think of enduring persecution for opinion’s sake as to approve of inflicting it. The secret rites and the secret formulas comprised the whole of his religion.
To sum up, then, the practical result of their speculations, the Orphics taught that the universe had passed through several stages of evolution since it was formed from chaos by its First God or Divine Workman. ”

“ Thus, the worship of the great Egyptian triad under their Greek forms was inaugurated, as was our own English Reformation in the sixteenth century, as a measure of statecraft, by a king who hardly cared to conceal that in doing so he had only his own interest to serve. Yet it may be said at once, that so far as its political purpose was concerned, the Alexandrian religion was from the outset foredoomed to failure. The Egyptians of Philhellenic times were of all the nations of the earth at once the most superstitious and the most fanatically attached to their traditional modes of worship. ”

“ By breaking down the barriers which racial and lingual divisions had hitherto set up between different nations of the earth, these conquests led to a great fusion of the religions hitherto professed by them, and thus opened the door to the world-religions which were afterwards to share between them his vast Empire. Before his coming we see the ancient world divided into separate communities each with its own pantheon and forms of worship and neither knowing nor caring greatly about those of its neighbours. ”

“ During this long period—which is often quoted, not without reason, as the classic instance of the evils attending the Priest in Power—the mass of the Egyptian people had clung firmly to the worship of one god whose vogue goes back to very early times. While the rich and powerful were raising temples to Ra and Amen and showering wealth upon their priesthoods, the poorer classes remained faithful to Osiris and the gods of his cycle with such effect that most of the other divinities found it necessary to include him in their own cults. ”

“ There is no day nor night nor smallest moment which is not occupied with thy good deeds. Thou dost protect mankind by sea and land, and scattering the storms of life dost stretch forth to them thy saving hand, with which thou dost even spin anew the hopelessly twisted web of the Fates, and dost temper the blasts of fortune and restrain the hostile courses of the stars [186] . ”

“ As for Africa, Herodotus boldly asserts that the “names” of almost all the gods worshipped by the Greeks came from Egypt [73] , and, although this is certainly not literally true, it gave him an excuse for identifying all the Egyptian deities of whom he had any knowledge with the Greek divinities whom he thought they resembled. But when Alexander’s conquests had made the different subject nations really acquainted with each other’s religion, the process of theocrasia or the fusion of one god with another received an impulse that carried it beyond all bounds [74] . ”

“ 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] . ”

“ The theocrasia or fusion of one god with another which we have seen playing such a prominent part in the religion of both Egyptians and Greeks, was of the very essence of the religion of Eleusis. At no time from the earliest mention of the Eleusinian worship onwards, is it possible to draw any sharp dividing line between Demeter and her daughter Persephone, or as Mr Louis Dyer rather flamboyantly puts it, Demeter and Persephone were at Eleusis “regarded as one, being so filled with mutual love that all barriers between them melted away [147] .” ”

“ It is evident, therefore, that the great mass of Alexander’s subjects, whether Asiatics, Egyptians or Greeks, would require something more than the sublime theorizing of the philosophers before their religious ideas could be turned in the direction of monotheism. Nine hundred years before, Amenhotep IV of Egypt had indeed been led by his adoration of the material sun to put forward a religious reform which had as its principal feature the proclaiming abroad that there was only one God, in whose sight all mankind was equal ”

“ Above all, we see the beginning of those great associations of mankind for religious purposes which are henceforth to be the principal factors in the world’s history, and whose evolution has continued unchecked down to the present day. All those that followed Alexander were in this respect nothing more than his conscious or unconscious imitators. The great princes and generals who after his death parted his Empire among them, and the Romans who gradually ate up the fragments left to these princes’ effete descendants, could but carry on the work set on foot by the Great Conqueror. ”

“ Simon also goes out of his way to affirm that his first syzygy or pair, Mind and Thought, are in the second world called Heaven and Earth, and thus forms a pretty close parallel to the Orphic couple Uranos and Ge [592] . But he is careful to mix with this explanations which shall also accord with the account of creation given in the Book of Genesis. He who standeth, hath stood, and will stand, i.e. the Eternal Being who is not liable to fall or corruption, and is the “Father” of the “Middle Space” is no less the “I am that I am” of Exodus than the Father of gods and men of Homer. ”

“ But it should be noticed that in this case the magician is dealing with a power thought to be hostile alike to man and to the beneficent gods. Typhon, who is, as Plutarch tells us, the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian Set, was looked upon in Hellenistic times as essentially a power of darkness and evil, who fights against the gods friendly to man with the idea of reducing their ordered world to chaos. Yet the magician avows himself on his side, and even speaks of his name as being able to compel the heavenly gods, to whom he must therefore be superior. ”

“ At the same time there are many proofs that magic is something more than a by-product of religion. No people, however backward, who do not practise magic in some or other of its forms, have yet been discovered; while at the same time it has always persisted among those nations who consider themselves the most highly civilized. Thus, we find the Mincopies who inhabit the Andaman Islands and are thought by some to be the lowest of mankind, threatening with their arrows the spirit that is supposed to cause tempests, and lighting fires on the graves of their dead chiefs to drive him away [300] . ”