CHAPTER VII.

BARRENNESS.

Indian famine and Sun-spots--Sun-worship--Demon of the Desert--The
Sphinx--Egyptian plagues described by Lepsius: Locusts, Hurricane,
Flood, Mice, Flies--The Sheikh's ride--Abaddon--Set--Typhon--The
Cain wind--Seth--Mirage--The Desert Eden--Azazel--Tawiscara and
the Wild Rose.


In their adoration of rain-giving Indra as also a solar majesty,
the ancient Hindus seem to have been fully aware of his inconsistent
habits. 'Thy inebriety is most intense,' exclaims the eulogist,
and soothingly adds, 'Thou desirest that both thy inebriety and thy
beneficence should be the means of destroying enemies and distributing
riches.' [127] Against famine is invoked the thunderbolt of Indra,
and it is likened to the terrible Tvashtri, in whose fearful shape
(pure fire) Agni once appeared to the terror of gods and men. [128]
This Tvashtri was not an evil being himself, but, as we have seen, an
artificer for the gods similar to Vulcan; he was, however, father of a
three-headed monster who has been identified with Vritra. Though these
early worshippers recognised that their chief trouble was connected
with 'glaring heat' (which Tvashtri seems to mean in the passage just
referred to), Indra's celebrants beheld him superseding his father
Dyaus, and reigning in the day's splendour as well as in the cloud's
bounty. This monopolist of parts in their theogony anticipated Jupiter
Pluvius. Vedic mythology is pervaded with stories of the demons that
arrested the rain and stole the cloud-cows of Indra--shutting them
away in caves,--and the god is endlessly praised for dealing death
to such. He slays Vritra, the 'rain-arresting,' and Dribhika, Bala,
Urana, Arbuda, 'devouring Swasna,' 'unabsorbable Súshna,' Pipru,
Namuchi, Rudhikrá, Varchin and his hundred thousand descendants; [129]
the deadly strangling serpent Ahi, especial type of Drouth as it dries
up rivers; and through all these combats with the alleged authors of
the recurring Barrenness and Famine, as most of these monsters were,
the seat of the evil was the Sun-god's adorable self!

Almost pathetic does the long and vast history appear just now,
when competent men of science are giving us good reason to believe
that right knowledge of the sun, and the relation of its spots to
the rainfall, might have covered India with ways and means which
would have adapted the entire realm to its environment, and wrested
from Indra his hostile thunderbolt--the sunstroke of famine. The
Hindus have covered their lands with temples raised to propitiate and
deprecate the demons, and to invoke the deities against such sources
of drouth and famine. Had they concluded that famine was the result of
inexactly quartered sun-dials, the land would have been covered with
perfect sun-dials; but the famine would have been more destructive,
because of the increasing withdrawal of mind and energy from the
true cause, and its implied answer. Even so were conflagrations in
London attributed to inexact city clocks; the clocks would become
perfect, the conflagrations more numerous, through misdirection
of vigilance. But how much wiser are we of Christendom than the
Hindus? They have adapted their country perfectly for propitiation of
famine-demons that do not exist, at a cost which would long ago have
rendered them secure from the famine-forces that do exist. We have
similarly covered Christendom with a complete system of securities
against hells and devils and wrathful deities that do not exist, while
around our churches, chapels, cathedrals, are the actually-existent
seething hells of pauperism, shame, and crime.

'Nothing can advance art in any district of this accursed
machine-and-devil-driven England until she changes her mind in many
things.' So wrote John Ruskin recently. Of course, so long as the
machine toils and earns wealth and other power which still goes to
support and further social and ecclesiastical forms, constituted with
reference to salvation from a devil or demons no longer believed in,
the phrase 'machine-and-devil-driven' is true. Until the invention
and enterprise of the nation are administered in the interest of right
ideas, we may still sigh, like John Sterling, for 'a dozen men to stand
up for ideas as Cobden and his friends do for machinery.' But it still
remains as true that all the machinery and wealth of England devoted
to man might make its every home happy, and educate every inhabitant,
as that every idolatrous temple in India might be commuted into a
shield against famine.

Our astronomers and economists have enabled us to see clearly how
the case is with the country whose temples offer no obstruction
to christian vision. The facts point to the conclusion that the
sun-spots reach their maximum and minimum of intensity at intervals of
eleven years, and that their high activity is attended with frequent
fluctuations of the magnetic needle, and increased rainfall. In 1811,
and since then, famines in India have, with one exception, followed
years of minimum sun-spots. [130] These facts are sufficiently well
attested to warrant the belief that English science and skill will
be able to realise in India the provision which Joseph is said to
have made for the seven lean years of which Pharaoh dreamed.

Until that happy era shall arrive, the poor Hindus will only go
on alternately adoring and propitiating the sun, as its benign or
its cruel influences shall fall upon them. The artist Turner said,
'The sun is God.' The superb effects of light in Turner's pictures
could hardly have come from any but a sun-worshipper dwelling amid
fogs. Unfamiliarity often breeds reverence. There are few countries
in which the sun, when it does shine, is so likely to be greeted with
enthusiasm, and observed in all its variations of splendour, as one
in which its appearance is rare. Yet the superstition inherited from
regions where the sun is equally a desolation was strong enough to
blot out its glory in the mind of a writer famous in his time, Tobias
Swinden, M.A., who wrote a work to prove the sun to be the abode of
the damned. [131] The speculation may now appear only curious, but,
probably, it is no more curious than a hundred years from now will
seem to all the vulgar notion of future fiery torments for mankind,
the scriptural necessity of which led the fanciful rector to his
grotesque conclusion. These two extremes--the Sun-worship of Turner,
the Sun-horror of Swinden,--survivals in England, represent the two
antagonistic aspects of the sun, which were of overwhelming import
to those who dwelt beneath its greatest potency. His ill-humour, or
his hunger and thirst, in any year transformed the earth to a desert,
and dealt death to thousands.

In countries where drouth, barrenness, and consequent famine were
occasional, as in India, it would be an inevitable result that
they would represent the varying moods of a powerful will, and
in such regions we naturally find the most extensive appliances
for propitiation. The preponderant number of fat years would
tell powerfully on the popular imagination in favour of priestly
intercession, and the advantage of sacrifices to the great Hunger-demon
who sometimes consumed the seeds of the earth. But in countries
where barrenness was an ever-present, visible, unvarying fact,
the Demon of the Desert would represent Necessity, a power not to
be coaxed or changed. People dwelling in distant lands might invent
theoretical myths to account for the desert. It might be an accident
resulting from the Sun-god having given up his chariot one day to an
inexperienced driver who came too close to the earth. But to those
who lived beside the desert it could only seem an infernal realm,
quite irrecoverable. The ancient civilisation of Egypt, so full of
grandeur, might, in good part, have been due to the lesson taught
them by the desert, that they could not change the conditions around
them by any entreaties, but must make the best of what was left. If
such, indeed, was the force that built the ancient civilisation
whose monuments remain so magnificent in their ruins, its decay
might be equally accounted for when that primitive faith passed into
a theological phase. For as Necessity is the mother of invention,
Fate is fatal to the same. Belief in facts, and laws fixed in the
organic nature of things, stimulates man to study them and constitute
his life with reference to them; but belief that things are fixed by
the arbitrary decree of an individual power is the final sentence
of enterprise. Fate might thus steadily bring to ruin the grandest
achievements of Necessity.

Had we only the true history of the Sphinx--the Binder--we
might find it a landmark between the rise and decline of Egyptian
civilisation. When the great Limitation surrounding the powers of man
was first personified with that mystical grandeur, it would stand
in the desert not as the riddle but its solution. No such monument
was ever raised by Doubt. But once personified and outwardly shaped,
the external Binder must bind thought as well; nay, will throttle
thought if it cannot pierce through the stone and discover the
meaning of it. 'How true is that old fable of the Sphinx who sat by
the wayside propounding her riddle to the passengers, which if they
could not answer she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx is this Life of
ours to all men and societies of men. Nature, like the Sphinx, is of
womanly celestial loveliness and tenderness; the face and bosom of
a goddess, but ending in claws and the body of a lioness. There is
in her a celestial beauty,--which means celestial order, pliancy
to wisdom; but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality,
which are infernal. She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned;
one still half-imprisoned,--the articulate, lovely still encased in
the inarticulate, chaotic. How true! And does she not propound her
riddles to us? Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet with
a terrible significance, 'Knowest thou the meaning of this Day? What
thou canst do To-day, wisely attempt to do.' Nature, Universe, Destiny,
Existence, howsoever we name this grand unnameable Fact, in the midst
of which we live and struggle, is as a heavenly bride and conquest to
the wise and brave, to them who can discern her behests and do them; a
destroying fiend to them who cannot. Answer her riddle, it is well with
thee. Answer it not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself;
the solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws; Nature to thee
is a dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring. Thou
art not now her victorious bridegroom; thou art her mangled victim,
scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous, recreant,
ought to be, and must.' [132]

On the verge of the Desert, Prime Minister to the Necropolis at
whose gateway it stands, the Sphinx reposes amid the silence of
science and the centuries. Who built it? None can answer, so far as
the human artist, or the king under whom he worked, is concerned. But
the ideas and natural forces which built the Sphinx surround even now
the archæologist who tries to discover its history and chronology. As
fittest appendage to Carlyle's interpretation, let us read some
passages from Lepsius.

'The Oedipus for this king of the Sphinxes is yet wanting. Whoever
would drain the immeasurable sand-flood which buries the tombs
themselves, and lay open the base of the Sphinx, the ancient
temple-path, and the surrounding hills, could easily decide it. But
with the enigmas of history there are joined many riddles and wonders
of nature, which I must not leave quite unnoticed. The newest of all,
at least, I must describe.

'I had descended with Abeken into a mummy-pit, to open some
newly discovered sarcophagi, and was not a little astonished, upon
descending, to find myself in a regular snow-drift of locusts, which,
almost darkening the heavens, flew over our heads from the south-west
from the desert in hundreds of thousands to the valley. I took it
for a single flight, and called my companions from the tombs, where
they were busy, that they might see this Egyptian wonder ere it was
over. But the flight continued; indeed the work-people said it had
begun an hour before. Then we first observed that the whole region,
near and far, was covered with locusts. I sent an attendant into the
desert to discover the breadth of the flock. He ran for the distance
of a quarter of an hour, then returned and told us that, as far as
he could see, there was no end to them. I rode home in the midst of
the locust shower. At the edge of the fruitful plain they fell down
in showers; and so it went on the whole day until the evening, and
so the next day from morning till evening, and the third; in short to
the sixth day, indeed in weaker flights much longer. Yesterday it did
seem that a storm of rain in the desert had knocked down and destroyed
the last of them. The Arabs are now lighting great smoke-fires in the
fields, and clattering and making loud noises all day long to preserve
their crops from the unexpected invasion. It will, however, do little
good. Like a new animated vegetation, these millions of winged spoilers
cover even the neighbouring sand-hills, so that scarcely anything
is to be seen of the ground; and when they rise from one place they
immediately fall down somewhere in the neighbourhood; they are tired
with their long journey, and seem to have lost all fear of their
natural enemies, men, animals, smoke, and noise, in their furious
wish to fill their stomachs, and in the feeding of their immense
number. The most wonderful thing, in my estimation, is their flight
over the naked wilderness, and the instinct which has guided them from
some oasis over the inhospitable desert to the fat soil of the Nile
vale. Fourteen years ago, it seems, this Egyptian plague last visited
Egypt with the same force. The popular idea is that they are sent by
the comet which we have observed for twelve days in the South-west,
and which, as it is now no longer obscured by the rays of the moon,
stretches forth its stately tail across the heavens in the hours
of the night. The Zodiacal light, too, so seldom seen in the north,
has lately been visible for several nights in succession.'

Other plagues of Egypt are described by Lepsius:--

'Suddenly the storm grew to a tremendous hurricane, such as I have
never seen in Europe, and hail fell upon us in such masses as almost
to turn day into night.... Our tents lie in a valley, whither the
plateau of the pyramids inclines, and are sheltered from the worst
winds from the north and west. Presently I saw a dashing mountain
flood hurrying down upon our prostrate and sand-covered tents, like
a giant serpent upon its certain prey. The principal stream rolled
on to the great tent; another arm threatened mine without reaching
it. But everything that had been washed from our tents by the shower
was torn away by the two streams, which joined behind the tents, and
carried into a pool behind the Sphinx, where a great lake immediately
formed, which fortunately had no outlet. Just picture this scene
to yourself! Our tents, dashed down by the storm and heavy rain,
lying between two mountain torrents, thrusting themselves in several
places to the depth of six feet in the sand, and depositing our books,
drawings, sketches, shirts, and instruments--yes, even our levers and
iron crow-bars; in short, everything they could seize, in the dark
foaming mud-ocean. Besides this, ourselves wet to the skin, without
hats, fastening up the weightier things, rushing after the lighter
ones, wading into the lake to the waist to fish out what the sand had
not yet swallowed; and all this was the work of a quarter of an hour,
at the end of which the sun shone radiantly again, and announced the
end of this flood by a bright and glorious rainbow.

'Now comes the plague of mice, with which we were not formerly
acquainted; in my tent they grow, play, and whistle, as if they
had been at home here all their lives, and quite regardless of my
presence. At night they have already run across my bed and face,
and yesterday I started terrified from my slumbers, as I suddenly
felt the sharp tooth of such a daring guest at my foot.

'Above me a canopy of gauze is spread, in order to keep off the flies,
these most shameless of the plagues of Egypt, during the day, and the
mosquitos at night.... Scorpions and serpents have not bitten us yet,
but there are very malicious wasps, which have often stung us.

'The dale (in the Desert) was wild and monotonous, nothing but
sandstone rock, the surfaces of which were burned as black as coals,
but turned into burning golden yellow at every crack, and every ravine,
whence a number of sand-rivulets, like fire-streams from black dross,
ran and filled the valleys. No tree, no tuft of grass had we yet seen,
also no animals, except a few vultures and crows feeding on the carcase
of the latest fallen camel.... Over a wild and broken path, and cutting
stones, we came deeper and deeper into the gorge. The first wide
basins were empty, we therefore left the camels and donkeys behind,
climbed up the smooth granite wall, and thus proceeded amidst these
grand rocks from one basin to another; they were all empty. Behind
there, in the farthest ravine, the guide said there must be water,
for it was never empty; but there proved to be not a single drop. We
were obliged to return dry.... We saw the most beautiful mirages very
early in the day; they most minutely resemble seas and lakes, in which
mountains, rocks, and everything in their vicinity, are reflected
as in the clearest water. They form a remarkable contrast with the
staring dry desert, and have probably deceived many a poor wanderer,
as the legend goes. If one be not aware that no water is there, it is
quite impossible to distinguish the appearance from the reality. A
few days ago I felt quite sure that I perceived an overflowing of
the Nile, or a branch near El Mechêref, and rode towards it, but only
found Bahr Sheitan, Satan's water, as the Arabs call it.' [133]

Amid such scenery the Sphinx arose. Egypt was able to recognise the
problem of blended barrenness and beauty--alternation of Nature's
flowing breast and leonine claw--but could she return the right
answer? The primitive Egyptian answer may, indeed, as I have guessed,
be the great monuments of her civilisation, but her historic solution
has been another world. This world a desert, with here and there a
momentary oasis, where man may dance and feast a little, stimulated
by the corpse borne round the banquet, ere he passes to paradise. So
thought they and were deceived; from generation to generation have
they been destroyed, even unto this day. How destroyed, Lepsius may
again be our witness.

'The Sheîkh of the Saadîch-derwishes rides to the chief Sheîkh of all
the derwishes of Egypt, El Bekri. On the way thither, a great number
of these holy folk, and others, too, who fancy themselves not a whit
behind-hand in piety, throw themselves flat on the ground, with their
faces downward, and so that the feet of one lie close to the head of
the next; over this living carpet the sheîkh rides on his horse, which
is led on each side by an attendant, in order to compel the animal to
the unnatural march. Each body receives two treads of the horse; most
of them jump up again without hurt, but whoever suffers serious, or as
it occasionally happens, mortal injury, has the additional ignominy
to bear of not having pronounced, or not being able to pronounce,
the proper prayers and magical charms that alone could save him.'

'What a fearful barbarous worship' (the Sikr, in which the derwishes
dance until exhausted, howling 'No God but Allah') 'which the astounded
multitude, great and small, gentle and simple, gaze upon seriously,
and with stupid respect, and in which it not unfrequently takes a
part! The invoked deity is manifestly much less an object of reverence
than the fanatic saints who invoke him; for mad, idiotic, or other
psychologically-diseased persons are very generally looked upon as
holy by the Mohammedans, and treated with great respect. It is the
demoniacal, incomprehensibly-acting, and therefore fearfully-observed,
power of nature that the natural man always reveres when he perceives
it, because he is sensible of some connection between it and his
intellectual power, without being able to command it; first in the
mighty elements, then in the wondrous but obscure law-governed
instincts of animals, and at last in the yet more overpowering
ecstatical or generally abnormal mental condition of his own race.'

The right answer to the enigma of the Sphinx is Man. But this creature
prostrating himself under the Sheîkh's horse, or under the invisible
Sheîkh called Allah, and ascribing sanctity to the half-witted, is not
Man at all. Those hard-worked slaves who escaped into the wilderness,
and set up for worship an anthropomorphic Supreme Will, and sought
their promised milk and honey in this world alone, carried with them
the only force that could rightly answer the Sphinx. Their Allah or
Elohim they heard say,--'Why howlest thou to me? Go forward.' Somewhat
more significant than his usual jests was that cartoon of Punch which
represented the Sphinx with relaxed face smiling recognition on the
most eminent of contemporary Israelites returning to the land of his
race's ancient bondage, to buy the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal half
answers the Sphinx; when man has subdued the Great Desert to a sea,
the solution will be complete, and the Sphinx may cast herself into it.

Far and wide through the Southern world have swarmed the
locusts described by Lepsius, and with them have migrated many
superstitions. The writer of this well remembers the visit of the
so-called 'Seventeen-year locusts,' to the region of Virginia where he
was born, and across many years can hear the terrible never-ceasing
roar coming up from the woods, uttering, as all agreed, the ominous
word 'Pharaoh.' On each wing every eye could see the letter W,
signifying War. With that modern bit of ancient Egypt in my memory,
I find the old Locust-mythology sufficiently impressive.

By an old tradition the Egyptians, as described by Lepsius, connected
the locusts with the comet. In the Apocalypse (ix.) a falling star
is the token of the descent of the Locust-demon to unlock the pit
that his swarms may issue forth for their work of destruction. Their
king Abaddon, in Greek Apollyon,--Destroyer,--has had an evolution
from being the angel of the two (rabbinical) divisions of Hades to the
successive Chiefs of Saracenic hordes. It is interesting to compare the
graphic description of a locust-storm in Joel, with its adaptation to
an army of human destroyers in the Apocalypse. And again the curious
description of these hosts of Abaddon in the latter book, partly repeat
the strange notions of the Bedouins concerning the locust,--one of
whom, says Niebuhr, 'compared the head of the locust to that of the
horse; its breast to that of a lion; its feet to those of a camel;
its body to that of the serpent; its tail to that of the scorpion;
its horns (antennæ) to the locks of hair of a virgin.' The present
generation has little reason to deny the appropriateness of the
biblical descriptions of Scythian hordes as locusts. 'The land is as
the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness.'

The ancient seeming contest between apparent Good and Evil in Egypt,
was represented in the wars of Ra and Set. It is said (Gen. iv. 26),
'And to Seth, to him also was born a son; and he called his name
Enos; then began men to call upon the name of the Lord.' Aquila
reads this--'Then Seth began to be called by the name of the
Lord.' Mr. Baring-Gould remarks on this that Seth was at first regarded
by the Egyptians as the deity of light and civilisation, but that
they afterwards identified as Typhon, because he was the chief god of
the Hyksos or shepherd kings; and in their hatred of these oppressors
the name of Seth was everywhere obliterated from their monuments, and
he was represented as an ass, or with an ass's head. [134] But the
earliest date assigned to the Hyksos dominion in Egypt, B.C. 2000,
coincides with that of the Egyptian planisphere in Kircher, [135]
where Seth is found identified with Sirius, or the dog-headed Mercury,
in Capricorn. This is the Sothiac Period, or Cycle of the Dog-star. He
was thus associated with the goat and the winter solstice, to which
(B.C. 2000) Capricorn was adjacent. That Seth or Set became the
name for the demon of disorder and violence among the Egyptians is,
indeed, probably due to his being a chief god, among some tribes
Baal himself, among the Asiatics, before the time of the Hyksos. It
was already an old story to put their neighbours' Light for their own
Darkness. The Ass's ears they gave him referred not to his stupidity,
but to his hearing everything, as in the case of the Ass of Apuleius,
and the ass Nicon of Plutarch, or, indeed, the many examples of the
same kind which preceeded the appearance of this much misunderstood
animal as the steed of Christ's triumphal entry into Jerusalem. In
Egyptian symbolism those long ears were as much dreaded as devils'
horns. From the eyes of Ra all beneficent things, from the eyes of Set
all noxious things, were produced. Amen-Ra, as the former was called,
slew the son of Set, the great serpent Naka, which in one hymn is
perhaps tauntingly said to have 'saved his feet.' Amen-Ra becomes
Horus and Set becomes Typhon. The Typhonian myth is very complex,
and includes the conflict between the Nile and all its enemies--the
crocodiles that lurk in it, the sea that swallows it, the drouth that
dries it, the burning heat that brings malaria from it, the floods
that render it destructive--and Set was through it evolved to a point
where he became identified with Saturn, Sheitan, or Satan. Plutarch,
identifying Set with Typho, says that those powers of the universal
Soul, which are subject to the influences of passions, and in the
material system whatever is noxious, as bad air, irregular seasons,
eclipses of the sun and moon, are ascribed to Typho. The name Set,
according to him, means 'violent' and 'hostile;' and he was described
as 'double-headed,' 'he who has two countenances,' and 'the Lord of
the World.' Not the least significant fact, in a moral sense, is that
Set or Typho is represented as the brother of Osiris whom he slew.

Without here going into the question of relationship between Typhaon
and Typhoeus, we may feel tolerably certain that the fire-breathing
hurricane-monster Typhaon of Homer, and the hundred-headed,
fierce-eyed roarer Typhoeus--son of Tartarus, father of Winds and
Harpies--represent the same ferocities of Nature. No fitter place
was ever assigned him than the African desert, and the story of
the gods and goddesses fleeing before Typhon into Egypt, and there
transforming themselves into animals, from terror, is a transparent
tribute to the dominion over the wilderness of sand exercised by the
typhoon in its many moods. The vulture-harpy tearing the dead is his
child. He is many-headed; now hot, stifling, tainted; now tempestuous;
here sciroc, there hurricane, and often tornado. It may be indeed that
as at once coiled in the whirlwind and blistering, he is the fiery
serpent to appease whom Moses lifted the brasen serpent for the worship
of Israel. I have often seen snakes hung up by negroes in Virginia,
to bring rain in time of drouth. Typhon, as may easily be seen by the
accompanying figure (14), is a hungry and thirsty demon. His tongue is
lolling out with thirst. [136] His later connection with the underworld
is shown in various myths, one of which seems to suggest a popular
belief that Typhon is not pleased with the mummies withheld from him,
and that he can enjoy his human viands only through burials of the
dead. In Egypt, after the Coptic Easter Monday--called Shemmen-Nesseem
(smelling the zephyr)--come the fifty-days' hot wind, called Khamseen
or Cain wind. After slaying Abel, Cain wandered amid such a wind,
tortured with fever and thirst. Then he saw two birds fight in the
air; one having killed the other scratched a hole in the desert sand
and buried it. Cain then did the like by his brother's body, when a
zephyr sprang up and cooled his fever. But still, say the Alexandrians,
the fifty-days' hot Cain wind return annually.

In pictures of the mirage, or in cloud-shapes faintly illumined by
the afterglow, the dwellers beside the plains of sand saw, as in
phantasmagoria, the gorgeous palaces, the air-castles, and mysterious
cities, which make the romance of the desert. Unwilling to believe
that such realms of barrenness had ever been created by any good god,
they beheld in dreams, which answer to nature's own mirage-dreaming,
visions of dynasties passed away, of magnificent palaces and monarchs
on whose pomp and heaven-defying pride the fatal sand-storm had fallen,
and buried their glories in the dust for ever. The desert became the
emblem of immeasurable all-devouring Time. In many of these legends
there are intimations of a belief that Eden itself lay where now all is
unbroken desert. In the beautiful legend in the Midrash of Solomon's
voyage on the Wind, the monarch alighted near a lofty palace of gold,
'and the scent there was like the scent of the garden of Eden.' The
dust had so surrounded this palace that Solomon and his companions only
learned that there had been an entrance from an eagle in it thirteen
centuries old, which had heard from its father the tradition of an
entrance on the western side. The obedient Wind having cleared away
the sand, a door was found on whose lock was written, 'Be it known to
you, ye sons of men, that we dwelt in this palace in prosperity and
delight many years. When the famine came upon us we ground pearls
in the mill instead of wheat, but it profited us nothing.' Amid
marvellous splendours, from chamber to chamber garnished with ruby,
topaz, emerald, Solomon passed to a mansion on whose three gates
were written admonitions of the transitory nature of all things
but--Death. 'Let not fortune deceive thee.' 'The world is given from
one to another.' On the third gate was written, 'Take provision for
thy journey, and make ready food for thyself while it is yet day;
for thou shalt not be left on the earth, and thou knowest not the day
of thy Death.' This gate Solomon opened and saw within a life-like
image seated: as the monarch approached, this image cried with a
loud voice, 'Come hither, ye children of Satan; see! King Solomon is
come to destroy you.' Then fire and smoke issued from the nostrils of
the image; and there were loud and bitter cries, with earthquake and
thunder. But Solomon uttered against them the Ineffable Name, and all
the images fell on their faces, and the sons of Satan fled and cast
themselves into the sea, that they might not fall into the hands of
Solomon. The king then took from the neck of the image a silver tablet,
with an inscription which he could not read, until the Almighty sent
a youth to assist him. It said:--'I, Sheddad, son of Ad, reigned over
a thousand thousand provinces, and rode on a thousand thousand horses;
a thousand thousand kings were subject to me, and a thousand thousand
warriors I slew. Yet in the hour that the Angel of Death came against
me, I could not withstand him. Whoso shall read this writing let him
not trouble himself greatly about this world, for the end of all men
is to die, and nothing remains to man but a good name.' [137]

Azazel--'of doubtful meaning'--is the biblical name of the Demon of the
Desert (Lev. xvi.). 'Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats: one lot
for Jehovah, and the other for Azazel. And Aaron shall bring the goat
upon which the lot for Jehovah fell, and offer him for a sin-offering:
But the goat, on which the lot for Azazel fell, shall be presented
alive before Jehovah, to make an atonement with him, to let him go to
Azazel in the wilderness.... And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon
the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of
the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins,
putting them upon the head of the goat, and send him away by the hand
of a fit man into the desert. And the goat shall bear upon him all
their iniquities unto a land not inhabited; and he shall let go the
goat in the desert.' Of the moral elements here involved much will
have to be said hereafter. This demon ultimately turned to a devil;
and persisting through both forms is the familiar principle that it
is 'well enough to have friends on both sides' so plainly at work in
the levitical custom; but it is particularly interesting to observe
that the same animal should be used as offerings to the antagonistic
deities. In Egyptian Mythology we find that the goat had precisely
this two-fold consecration. It was sacred to Chem, the Egyptian Pan,
god of orchards and of all fruitful lands; and it became also sacred
to Mendes, the 'Destroyer,' or 'Avenging Power' of Ra. It will thus
be seen that the same principle which from the sun detached the
fructifying from the desert-making power, and made Typhon and Osiris
hostile brothers, prevailed to send the same animal to Azazel in the
Desert and Jehovah of the milk and honey land. Originally the goat was
supreme. The Samaritan Pentateuch, according to Aben Ezra (Preface to
Esther), opens, 'In the beginning Ashima created the heaven and the
earth.' In the Hebrew culture-myth of Cain and Abel, also brothers,
there may be represented, as Goldziher supposes, the victory of the
agriculturist over the nomad or shepherd; but there is also traceable
in it the supremacy of the Goat, Mendez or Azima. 'Abel brought the
firstling of the goats.'

Very striking is the American (Iroquois) myth of the conflict between
Joskeha and Tawiscara,--the White One and the Dark One. They were
twins, born of a virgin who died in giving them life. Their grandmother
was the moon (Ataensic, she who bathes). These brothers fought, Joskeha
using as weapon the horns of a stag, Tawiscara the wild-rose. The
latter fled sorely wounded, and the blood gushing from him turned to
flint-stones. The victor, who used the stag-horns (the same weapon
that Frey uses against Beli, in the Prose Edda, and denoting perhaps a
primitive bone-age art), destroyed a monster frog which swallowed all
the waters, and guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes. He
stocked the woods with game, invented fire, watched and watered crops,
and without him, says the old missionary Brebeuf, 'they think they
could not boil a pot.' The use by the desert-demon Tawiscara of a
wild rose as his weapon is a beautiful touch in this myth. So much
loveliness grew even amid the hard flints. One is reminded of the
closing scene in the second part of Goethe's Faust. There, when Faust
has realised the perfect hour to which he can say, 'Stay, thou art
fair!' by causing by his labour a wilderness to blossom as a rose,
he lies down in happy death; and when the demons come for his soul,
angels pelt them with roses, which sting them like flames. Not wild
roses were these, such as gave the Dark One such poor succour. The
defence of Faust is the roses he has evoked from briars.