Zénaïde A. Ragozin

“ The festival of Dumuzi lasted during the six first days of the month, with processions and ceremonies bearing two distinct characters. The worshippers at first assembled in the guise of mourners, with lamentations and loud wailings, tearing of clothes and of hair, as though celebrating the young god's funeral, while on the sixth day his resurrection and reunion to Ishtar was commemorated with the noisiest, most extravagant demonstrations of rejoicing. ”

“ Brother looks not after brother, men have no thought for one another. In the heavens the very gods are afraid; they seek a refuge in the highest heaven of Anu; as a dog in its lair, the gods crouch by the railing of heaven. Ishtar cries aloud with sorrow: 'Behold, all is turned into mud, as I foretold to the gods! I prophesied this disaster and the extermination of my creatures—men. But I do not give them birth that they may fill the sea like the brood of fishes.' Then the gods wept with her and sat lamenting on one spot. For six days and seven nights wind, flood and storm reigned supreme ”

“ Let the sinner suffer for his sin and the evil-doer for his misdeeds; but to this man be gracious that he may not be destroyed, and incline towards him favorably, that he may be preserved. And instead of bringing on another deluge, let lions and hyenas come and take from the number of men; send a famine to unpeople the earth; let the god of Pestilence lay men low. I have not imparted to Hâsisadra the decision of the great gods: I only sent him a dream, and he understood the warning.'—Then Bel came to his senses. ”

“ All the more terrible are the seven spirits of the abyss, the Maskim, of whom it is said that, although their seat is in the depths of the earth, yet their voice resounds on the heights also: they reside at will in the immensity of space, "not enjoying a good name either in heaven or on earth." Their greatest delight is to subvert the orderly course of nature, to cause earthquakes, inundations, ravaging tempests. ”

“ It is intimately connected with another tradition, common, in some form or other, to all nations who have attained a sufficiently high grade of culture to make their mark in the world—that of an original ancestral abode, beautiful, happy, and remote, a Paradise. It is usually imagined as a great mountain, watered by springs which become great rivers, bearing one or more trees of wonderful properties and sacred character, and is considered as the principal residence of the gods. Each nation locates it according to its own knowledge of geography and vague, half-obliterated memories. ”

“ In this poetical fancy, the land of shades symbolizes the numb and lifeless period of winter as aptly as the Waters of Death in the Izdubar Epic, while the seeming death of the young god answers to the sickening of the hero at that declining season of the year when the sun's rays lose their vigor and are overcome by the powers of darkness and cold. ”

“ The broadest difference, and the one from which all others flow, is that the one—Religion—is a thing of the feelings, while the other—Mythology—is a thing of the imagination. In other words, Religion comes from within—from that consciousness of limited power, that inborn need of superior help and guidance, forbearance and forgiveness, from that longing for absolute goodness and perfection, which make up the distinctively human attribute of "religiosity," that attribute which, together with the faculty of articulate speech, sets Man apart from and above all the rest of animated creation. ”

“ How like the vicissitudes that checker the somewhat greater number of hours—or days—of which the sum makes up a human life! Then when his appointed time expires, he sinks down,—lower, lower—and disappears into darkness,—dies. So does man. What is this night, death? Is it destruction, or only a rest, or an absence? It is at all events not destruction. For as surely as we see the sun vanish in the west this evening, feeble and beamless, so surely shall we behold him to-morrow morning rise again in the east, glorious, vigorous and young. ”

“ Well could a nomadic and pastoral people poetically liken the sun to a shepherd, whose flocks were the fleecy clouds as they speed across the vast plains of heaven or the bright, innumerable stars. This comparison, as pretty as it is natural, kept its hold in all ages and nations on the popular fancy, which played on it an infinite variety of ingenious changes, but it is only cuneiform science which has proved that it could be traced back to the very earliest race whose culture has left its mark on the world. ”

“ Who has not read with delight accounts of their wild life in the deserts of Arabia and Northern Africa, so full of adventure and romance,—of their wonderful, priceless horses [Pg 119] who are to them as their own children,—of their noble qualities, bravery, hospitality, generosity, so strangely blended with love of booty and a passion for robbing expeditions? They are indeed a noble race, and it is not their choice, but their country which has made them robbers and rovers—Nomads, as such wandering races are called in history and geography. ”

“ Thus, in the traditions of every ancient nation, there is a vast and misty tract of time, expressed, if at all, in figures of appalling magnitude—hundreds of thousands, nay, millions of years—between the unpierceable gloom of an eternal past and the broad daylight of remembered, recorded history. There, all is shadowy, gigantic, superhuman. There, gods move, dim yet visible, shrouded in a golden cloud of mystery and awe ”

“ Looking with strained eyes into a past dim and gray with the scarce-lifting mists of unnumbered ages, we behold our starting-point, the low land by the Gulf, Shumir, taking shape and color under the rule of Turanian settlers, the oldest known nation in the world. ”

“ The entire mass of fragmentary materials out of which they are composed in the course of time, blending almost inextricably historical reality with mythical fiction, is the National Epos of a race, its greatest intellectual treasure, from which all its late poetry and much of its political and religious feeling draws its food ever after. A race that has no national epos is one devoid of great memories, incapable of high culture and political development, and no such has taken a place among the leading races of the world. ”

“ If we further pursue humanity—losing at last all count of time in years or even centuries—back to its original separation, to its first appearance on the earth,—if we go further still and try to think of the ages upon ages during which man existed not at all, yet the earth did, and was beautiful to look upon— (had there been any to look on it) , and good for the creatures who had it all to themselves—a dizziness comes over our senses, before the infinity of time, and we draw back, faint and awed, as we do when astronomy launches us, on a slender thread of figures, into the infinity of space. ”

“ These may in a more general way be described as Nature's productive power paralyzed during the numbed trance of winter, which is as the sleep of death, when the seed lies in the ground hid from sight and cold, even as a dead thing, but awaking to new life in the good time of spring, when the seed, in which life was never extinct but only dormant, bursts its bonds and breaks into verdant loveliness and bountiful crops. ”

“ All this is sheer poetry and mythology. But how great its beauty, how obvious its hopeful suggestiveness, if it could appeal to the groping minds of those primitive men, the old Mound-Builders, [Pg 339] and there lay the seed of a faith which has been more and more clung to, as mankind progressed in spiritual culture! For all the noblest races have cherished and worked out the myth of the setting sun in the most manifold ways, as the symbol of the soul's immortality. ”

“ The burning fire shall consume it; it shall no more be planted in a row, ... the ground shall not receive its root, its head shall contain no seed and the sun shall not take care of it;—it shall not be offered at the feast of a god or a king.—The man who has cast the evil spell, his eldest son, his wife,—the spell, the lamentations, the transgressions, the written spells, the blasphemies, the sins,—the evil which is in my body, in my flesh, in my sores,—may they all be destroyed as this onion, and may the burning fire consume them this day! ”

“ One of the prettiest, oldest, and most universally favorite solar myths is the one which represents the Sun as a divine being, youthful and of surpassing beauty, beloved by or wedded to an equally powerful goddess, but meeting a premature death by accident and descending into the dark land of shades, from which, however, after a time he returns as glorious and beautiful as before. ”

“ Such is a not incomplete outline of this strange and primitive religion, the religion of a people whose existence was not suspected twenty-five years ago, yet which claims, with the Egyptians and the Chinese, the distinction of being one of the oldest on earth, and in all probability was older than both. This discovery is one of the most important conquests of modern science, not only from its being highly interesting in itself, but from the light it throws on innumerable hitherto obscure points in the history of the ancient world, nay, on many curious facts which reach down to our own time. ”

“ As they have always stubbornly resisted foreign influences, and gone the length of trying actually to erect material walls between themselves and the rest of the world, their empire is a perfectly fair specimen of what the Yellow Race can do, if left entirely to itself, and quite as much of what it cannot do, and now they have for centuries presented that unique phenomenon—a great nation at a standstill. ”

“ But when we remember that these first known settlers of Shumir came from somewhere else, and that they brought with them more than the rudiments of civilization, we are at once thrown back at least a couple of thousands of years more. For it must have taken all of that and more for men to pass from a life spent in caves and hunting the wild beasts to a stage of culture comprising the invention of a complete system of writing, the knowledge and working of metals, even to the mixing of copper and tin into bronze, and an expertness in agriculture equal not only to tilling, but to draining land. ”

“ She was a great favorite, worshipped as the Queen of Love and Beauty, and also as the Warrior-Queen, who rouses men to deeds of bravery, inspirits and protects them in battle—perhaps because men have often fought and made war for the love of women, and also probably because the planet Venus, her own star, appears not only in the evening, close after sunset, but also immediately before daybreak, and so seems to summon the human race to renewed efforts and activity. ”

“ It was a new and wonderful world suddenly opened. For these sculptures evidently recorded the deeds of the builder, some powerful conqueror and king. And those long and close lines engraved in the stone, all along the slabs, in the same peculiar character as the short inscriptions on the bricks that lay scattered on the plain—they must surely contain the text to these sculptured illustrations. But who is to read them? They are not like any known writing in the world and may remain a sealed book forever. ”

“ One longs to have shared in some of those brisk rides across plains so thickly enamelled with flowers, that it seemed a patchwork of many colors, and "the dogs, as they returned from hunting, issued from the long grass dyed red, yellow, or blue, according to the flowers through which they had last forced their way,"—the joy of the Arab's soul, which made the chief, Layard's friend, continually exclaim, "rioting in the luxuriant herbage and scented air, as his mare waded through the flowers:—'What delight has God given us equal to this? It is the only thing worth living for. ”

“ The poets of ancient India, some three thousand years ago, made the Sun the leader and king of the dead, who, as they said, followed where he had gone first, "showing the way to many." The Egyptians, perhaps the wisest and most spiritual of all ancient nations, came to make this myth the keystone of their entire religion, and placed all their burying-places in the west, amidst or beyond the Libyan ridge of hills behind which the sun vanished from the eyes of those who dwelt in the valley of the Nile. ”

“ There are only two things which can prevent the contemplation of nature and speculation on its mysteries from running into mythology: a knowledge [Pg 295] of the physical laws of nature, as supplied by modern experimental science, and a strict, unswerving belief in the unity of God, absolute and undivided, as affirmed and defined by the Hebrews in so many places of their sacred books: "The Lord he is God, there is none else beside him." "The Lord he is God, in Heaven above and upon the earth beneath there is none else." "I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me." ”

“ The conclusion is clearly forced on us, that so complicated and perfect an organization of public and private life, a condition of society implying so many discoveries and so long a practice in thought and handicraft, could not have been an early stage of existence. Long vistas are dimly visible into a past far vaster than the span as yet laid open to our view, and we long to pierce the tantalizing gloom. ”