292 SATAN NOT A PERSON-THE VERDICT OF ART. Lucifer, son of the morning!—The day star! The great red dragon!-Accuser of the brethren !—The tempter! The serpent!-The scorpion! The foul spirit!-The unclean spirit -The lying spirit! "And among his more modern titles are the following, some of which are complimentary, others scarcely so: The Old Gentleman! Old Gooseberry !-Old Nick !-Old Bogy! In conclusion I remark, that one epithet of which I am proud, and which I desire to make prominent, as obscurely denoting my human origin, was not so long ago prevalent in Scotland, and still lingers in the phrase, "The Goodman's Croft," being the corner of a field left untilled expressly for my advantage. received. This is one of the very few civilities I have CHAPTER II. AM I A PERSON OR AM I A POWER ?—THE VERDICT OF ART. You have already seen that I am the product of man's imagination excited and controlled by external nature. I intend at this point to expand that fact a little, with a view to expose the groundless fiction of my being a person. In so doing, I make a specific appeal to ancient and modern Art in * From the Introduction to "The Real Devil's Walk." THE ANIMISM OF NATURE INCLUDES SATAN. 293 its statues, images, pictures and emblems, as they are scattered up and down in museums, galleries, ruins, and as represented to the eye in the rich and varied literature of Iconography. It is a wide subject. I can find room for only a few sentences. And I place them here because they supply a decisive proof of both my non-personality and my decline. The majestic spectacle of nature; the dazzling lustre of the sun; the myriads of stars which move and sparkle in the immensity of space; the manifest and invariable regularity of their revolutions; the influence they exercise on the seasons of the year, on the life and growth of animals and vegetables; the numberless properties of the elements; the mysteries of the senses, of the passions, of thought, memory, imagination; of dreams and visions; the marvellous phenomena connected with generation-the great whole must have struck primæval races with wonder and admiration, leading to the belief that the world was full of animated existences some way resembling, but far surpassing, themselves. This bright side of nature had its dark side. The two in combination produced the "lords many and gods many" of the ancient world, including myself, "the prince of darkness." Over this celestial and diabolic hierarchy there were "thrones, dominions, principalities and powers." These were the particular objects which, from their magnitude and brilliancy, most struck the minds of men. The sun, that radiant and ever-burning mass of light, all but intolerable to man's eyes, with its fecundating action on all that vegetates and breathes on the surface of the earth, ruling in the heavens without peer or rival, received the earliest homage as "the king," "the king of day," the supreme monarch of heaven and earth. The recognition at first was as of a real living being; what we term a person. Next, but at a great distance, stands the moon, in some mysterious way dependent on the sun; inferior in magnitude and in splendour, yet not without a soft brilliancy and a fostering influWhat is this but "the queen of heaven," and as such the spouse of the sun? Bending his knee to these divinities, ence. 294 ARE THE SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC PERSONS? man soon learnt to worship, as members of the divine family, the wandering stars, the fixed stars, especially the constellations. In them we possess a permanent proof that the astral bodies were all regarded and adored as intelligent beings. The very name Zodiac denotes something that lives. I transcribe its twelve signs, together with the figures or emblems by which they are denoted.: 1. Aries, the Ram, denotes the month of March, when, 2. Taurus 8, the Bull, denotes the month of April. 5. Leo, the Lion, with July. 6. Virgo my, the Virgin, with August. 7. Libra, the Balance, with September. 8. Scorpio m, the Scorpion, with October. 9. Sagittarius f, the Archer, with November. 10. Capricornus vs, the Goat, with December. 11. Aquarius, the Water-bearer, with January. 12. Pisces, the Fishes, corresponding with February. These names were severally given in obedience to some assumed quality or function of the heavenly body, or rather divinity, in each case. Thus the Water-bearer, into which the sun enters in January, refers to the heavy rains of winter; the Archer, half-man and half-horse, armed with a bow, indicates the hunting season; while the Balance signifies the equal length of day and night, as though they had been weighed and adjusted. Resemblance too is the ground of the figured signs as well as the names. Thus the Ram is symbolized under a pair of ram's horns, and the Bull under a bull's head and horns. The same law of resemblance prevails throughout both the lettered accounts and the figured representatives of the divinities of polytheism in general. To you the resemblance may appear imperfect and faint. You must bear in mind that you live in a different age and in a different climate. SATAN A VANISHING PHANTASM, 295 The very fact that this explanation is called for to make my meaning clear, suffices to shew that all these divinities are no divinities at all, but now simply signs of vanished realities, those realities having existed, not in the skies, but in the human brain. Persons once, they long remained powers; but with the passing away of " the dark ages," they have ceased to be powers, and are now nothing more than shadows. Their history is my history; their fate is my fate; and my career, like that of my several brothers and sisters, would have been run long ago, but for a class of men whose chief functions depended on my personal existence. The astrologers are gone, the priests are going. And as astrology has been succeeded by astronomy, so will Satanism be succeeded by Christ. In the argument thus offered to you, the principal point is the original personality of these constellations severally. I will therefore add a few additional particulars. The greater number of these twelve signs of the zodiac, or belt of animated beings, greatly exercised and quickened the imaginations of the ancients, and in particular those of their theologians and poets. After having been immolated to the supreme god, Jupiter (Father of the Day), the ram, the Greeks said, was placed among the stars, that is among the gods, and specially in the zodiac. For a long time the ram was at once the beginning and the end of the year, and during that period his rich fleece is sought after by the fifty-two Argonauts, figuring the fifty-two weeks, and the mighty Hercules, with his twelve labours, personification of the sun-god as he toils through the cycle of the twelve months. This allegory of the annual revolution of the head of the planetary system needs no special explanation. "The heavenly bull," which in an earlier age came, like the ram, at the spring equinox, plays a not less important part in the different mythologies. The Hindoos have their bull Nandi; the Japanese, the bull which breaks the egg of the world; the Persians, the bull Mithra. Among the Egyp 296 LIKE JUPITER, AHRIMAN, THE SERPENT. tians he was worshiped under the name of Apis; and to prevent his being taken for a vulgar and perishable animal, he wore on his hide several supernatural emblems; on his tongue, the likeness of a scarabeus or sacred beetle; on his back, that of an eagle; on his shoulders, the crescent moon; on the rest of his body, divers tokens of the generative faculty; in all twenty-nine characters or symbolical attributes, a number equal to the days of the moon, or Isis in the form of a cow, to which the Bull was united and consecrated. The Lion, says Ælian, contains in himself an abundance of fiery matter which caused the Egyptians to consecrate him to Vulcan, the god of fire; they also placed him in the skies, that he might be the abode of the sun, and the sign at which that luminary arrives in the great heats of summer. The Lion often figures in the sacred legends of antiquity. Hercules kills the Nemean lion. It is a lion that Cybele commits to the guardianship of the faithless Atys. In Egypt, the lion was specially honoured, because the Nile overflowed at the epoch when the chariot of the sun touches the sign appropriated to that symbolical animal. My sign, or Ophiacus, the Serpent or Scorpion, holds a high position among the constellations. The celestial Serpent comes to the horizon at the time when the sun reaches the Balance, that is in autumn. At this moment the Persian magi fixed the beginning of the reign of Ahriman, or of darkness and cold, the introduction of evil into the universe. Ac. cordingly the Serpent represented the Persian Ahriman, the Egyptian Typhon, the Greek Pluto, the Scandinavian Loki, and in due course the English Devil. As those have vanished into thin air, so will this. The serpent accompanies Esculapius at the moment of his "descent into hell." Typhon and Pluto assume the form of a serpent. Vishnu, a member of the Hindoo trinity, appears in paintings and sculptures lying on the serpent Adissechen. The serpent is an object of profound veneration in India, in Japan, in China. He was worshiped by the Egyptians, the Phenicians, the Greeks. Equally was he venerated at Rome, at Lavinium, among the Northern nations |