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The Legends ch. 12, THE BOOK OF JOB

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER XII

THE BOOK OF JOB

WE are told in the Bible (Job, i, 16)--

"While he [Job] was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

And in verse 18 we are told--

"While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house:

"19. And behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

We have here the record of a great convulsion. Fire fell from heaven; the fire of God. It was not lightning, for it killed the seven thousand sheep, (see chap. i, 3,) belonging to Job, and all his shepherds; and not only killed but consumed them--burned them up. A fire falling from heaven great enough to kill seven thousand sheep must have been an extensive conflagration, extending over a large area of country. And it seems to have been accompanied by a great wind--a cyclone--which killed all Job's sons and daughters.

Has the book of Job anything to do with that great event which we have been discussing? Did it originate out of it? Let us see.

In the first place it is, I believe, conceded by the foremost scholars that the book of Job is not a Hebrew work; it was not written by Moses; it far antedates even the time of Abraham.

That very high orthodox authority, George Smith, F. S. A., in his work shows that--

"Everything relating to this patriarch has been violently controverted. His country; the age in which he lived; the author of the book that bears his name; have all been fruitful themes of discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!" [1]

Job lived to be two hundred years old, or, according to the Septuagint, four hundred. This great age relegates him to the era of the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants, among whom such extreme ages were said to have been common.

C. S. Bryant says:

"Job is in the purest Hebrew. The author uses only the word Elohim for the name of God. The compiler or reviser of the work, Moses, or whoever he was, employed at the heads of chapters and in the introductory and concluding portions the name of Jehovah; but all the verses where Jehovah occurs, in Job, are later interpolations in a very old poem, written at a time when the Semitic race had no other name for God but Elohim; before Moses obtained the elements of the new name from Egypt." [2]

Hale says:

"The cardinal constellations of spring and autumn, in Job's time, were Chima and Chesil, or Taurus and Scorpio, of which the principal stars are Aldebaran, the Bull's Eye, and Antare, the Scorpion's Heart. Knowing, therefore, the longitudes of these stars at present, the interval

[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 351.

2. MS. letter to the author, from C. S. Bryant, St. Paul, Minnesota.]

of time from thence to the assumed date of Job's trial will give the difference of these longitudes, and ascertain their positions then with respect to the vernal and equinoctial points of intersection of the equinoctial and ecliptic; according to the usual rate of the precession of the equinoxes, one degree in seventy-one years and a half." [1]

A careful calculation, based on these principles, has proved that this period was 2338 B. C. According to the Septuagint, in the opinion of George Smith, Job lived, or the book of Job was written, from 2650 B. C. to 2250 B. C. Or the events described may have occurred 25,740 years before that date.

It appears, therefore, that the book of Job was written, even according to the calculations of the orthodox, long before the time of Abraham, the founder of the Jewish nation, and hence could not have been the work of Moses or any other Hebrew. Mr. Smith thinks that it was produced soon after the Flood, by an Arabian. He finds in it many proofs of great antiquity. He sees in it (xxxi, 26, 28) proof that in Job's time idolatry was an offense under the laws, and punishable as such; and he is satisfied that all the parties to the great dialogue were free from the taint of idolatry. Mr. Smith says:

"The Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Canaanites, Midianites, Ethiopians of Abyssinia, Syrians, and other contemporary nations, had sunk into gross idolatry long before the time of Moses."

The Arabians were an important branch of the great Atlantean stock; they derived their descent from the people of Add.

"And to this day the Arabians declare that the father of Job was the founder of the great Arabian people."[2]

[1. Hale's "Chronology," vol. ii, p. 55.

2. Smith's "Sacred Annals," vol. i, p. 360.]

Again, the same author says:

"Job acted as high-priest in his own family; and, minute as are the descriptions of the different classes and usages of society in this book, we have not the slightest allusion to the existence of any priests or specially appointed ministers of religion, a fact which shows the extreme antiquity of the period, as priests were, in all probability, first appointed about the time of Abraham, and became general soon after." [1]

He might have added that priests were known among the Egyptians and Babylonians and Phnicians from the very beginning of their history.

Dr. Magee says:

"If, in short, there be on the whole, that genuine air of the antique which those distinguished scholars, Schultens, Lowth, and Michaelis, affirm in every respect to pervade the work, we can scarcely hesitate to pronounce, with Lowth and Sherlock, that the book of Job is the oldest in the world now extant." [2]

Moreover, it is evident that this ancient hero, although he probably lived before Babylon and Assyria, before Troy was known, before Greece had a name, nevertheless dwelt in the midst of a high civilization.

"The various arts, the most recondite sciences, the most remarkable productions of earth, in respect of animals, vegetables, and minerals, the classified arrangement of the stars of heaven, are all noticed."

Not only did Job's people possess an alphabet, but books were written, characters were engraved; and some have even gone so far as to claim that the art of printing was known, because Job says, "Would that my words were printed in a book!"

[1. Smith's "Sacred Annals," p. 364.

2. Magee "On the Atonement," vol. ii, p. 84.]

The literary excellence of the work is of the highest order. Lowth says:

"The antiquary, or the critic, who has been at the pains to trace the history of the Grecian drama from its first weak and imperfect efforts, and has carefully observed its tardy progress to perfection, will scarcely, I think, without astonishment, contemplate a poem produced so many ages before, so elegant in its design, so regular in its structure, so animated, so affecting, so near to the true dramatic model; while, on the contrary, the united wisdom of Greece, after ages of study, was not able to produce anything approaching to perfection in this walk of poetry before the time of chylus."[1]

Smith says:

"The debate rises high above earthly things; the way and will and providential dealings of God are investigated. All this is done with the greatest propriety, with the most consummate skill; and, notwithstanding the expression of some erroneous opinions, all is under the influence of a devout and sanctified temper of mind."[2]

Has this most ancient, wonderful, and lofty work, breathing the spirit of primeval times, its origin lost in the night of ages, testifying to a high civilization and a higher moral development, has it anything to do with that event which lay far beyond the Flood?

If it is a drama of Atlantean times, it must have passed through many hands, through many ages, through many tongues, before it reached the Israelites. We may expect its original meaning, therefore, to appear through it only like the light through clouds; we may expect that later generations would modify it with local names and allusions; we may expect that they would even strike out parts whose meaning they failed to understand, and

[1. "Hebrew Poetry," lecture xxxiii.

2. "Sacred Annals," vol. i, p. 365.]

interpolate others. It is believed that the opening and closing parts are additions made in a subsequent age. If they could not comprehend how the fire from heaven and the whirlwind could have so utterly destroyed Job's sheep, servants, property, and family, they would bring in those desert accessories, Sabn and Chaldean robbers, to carry away the camels and the oxen.

What is the meaning of the whole poem?

God gives over the government of the world for a time to Satan, to work his devilish will upon Job. Did not God do this very thing when he permitted the comet to strike the earth? Satan in Arabic means a serpent. "Going to and fro" means in the Arabic in "the heat of haste "; Umbreit translates it, "from a flight over the earth."

Job may mean a man, a tribe, or a whole nation.

From a condition of great prosperity Job is stricken down, in an instant, to the utmost depths of poverty and distress; and the chief agency is "fire from heaven" and great wind-storms.

Does this typify the fate of the world when the great catastrophe occurred? Does the debate between Job and his three visitors represent the discussion which took place in the hearts of the miserable remnants of mankind, as they lay hid in caverns, touching God, his power, his goodness, his justice; and whether or not this world-appalling calamity was the result of the sins of the people or otherwise?

Let us see what glimpses of these things we can find in the text of the book.

When Job's afflictions fall upon him he curses his day--the day, as commonly understood, wherein he was born. But how can one curse a past period of time and ask the darkness to cover it?

The original text is probably a reference to the events that were then transpiring:

"Let that day be turned into darkness; let not God regard it from above; and let not the light shine upon it. Let darkness and the shadow of death cover it; let a mist overspread it, and let it be wrapped up in bitterness. Let a darksome whirlwind seize upon that night. . . . Let them curse it who curse the clay, who are ready to raise up a leviathan." [1]

De Dieu says it should read, "And thou, leviathan, rouse up." "Let a mist overspread it"; literally, "let a gathered mass of dark clouds cover it."

"The Fathers generally understand the devil to be meant by the leviathan."

We shall see that it means the fiery dragon, the comet:

"Let the stars be darkened with the mist thereof; let it expect light and not see it, nor the rising of the dawning of the day." [2]

In other words, Job is not imprecating future evils on a past time--an impossibility, an absurdity: he is describing the events then transpiring--the whirlwind, the darkness, the mist, the day that does not come, and the leviathan, the demon, the comet.

Job seems to regret that he has escaped with his life:

"For now," he says, "should I have lain still and been quiet," (if I had not fled) "I should have slept: then had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver." [3]

Job looks out over the whole world, swept bare of its inhabitants, and regrets that he did not stay and bide the

[1. Douay version, chapter iii, verses 4-8.

2. Ibid., verse 9.

3. King James's version, chapter iii, verses 18-15.]

pelting of the pitiless storm, as, if he had done so, he would be now lying dead with kings and counselors, who built places for themselves, now made desolate, and with princes who, despite their gold and silver, have perished. Kings and counselors do not build "desolate places" for themselves; they build in the heart of great communities; in the midst of populations: the places may become desolate afterward.

Eliphaz the Temanite seems to think that the sufferings of men are due to their sins. He says:

Even as I have seen, they that plough wickedness and sow wickedness, reap the same. By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed. The roaring of the lion, and the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions are broken. The old lion perisheth for lack of prey, and the stout lion's whelps are scattered abroad."

Certainly, this seems to be a picture of a great event. Here again the fire of God, that consumed Job's sheep and servants, is at work; even the fiercest of the wild beasts are suffering: the old lion dies for want of prey, and its young ones are scattered abroad.

Eliphaz continues:

"In thoughts, from the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth on me, fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake. Then a spirit passed before my face, the hair of my flesh stood up."

A voice spake:

"Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall a man be more pure than his Maker? Behold he put no trust in his servants, and his angels he charged with folly: How much less them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth. They are destroyed from morning to evening; they perish forever without any regarding it."

The moth can crush nothing, therefore Maurer thinks it should read, "crushed like the moth." "They are destroyed," etc.; literally, "they are broken to pieces in the space of a day." [1]

All through the text of Job we have allusions to the catastrophe which had fallen on the earth (chap. v, 3):

"I have seen the foolish taking root: but suddenly I," (God,) "cursed his habitation."

"4. His children are far from safety," (far from any place of refuge?) "and they are crushed in the gate, neither is there any to deliver them.

"5. Whose harvest the hungry eateth up, and taketh it even out of the thorns, and the robber swalloweth up their substance."

That is to say, in the general confusion and terror the harvests are devoured, and there is no respect for the rights of property.

"6. Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground."

In the Douay version it reads:

"Nothing on earth is done without a cause, and sorrow doth not spring out of the ground" (v, 6).

I take this to mean that the affliction which has fallen upon men comes not out of the ground, but from above.

"7. Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward."

In the Hebrew we read for sparks, "sons of flame or burning coal." Maurer and Gesenius say, "As the sons of lightning fly high"; or, "troubles are many and fiery as sparks."

[1. Faussett's "Commentary," iii, 40.]

"8. I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause;

"9. Which doeth great things and unsearchable; marvellous things without number:

10. Who giveth rain upon the earth, and sendeth waters upon the fields."

Rain here signifies the great floods which cover the earth.

"11. To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety."

That is to say, the poor escape to the high places--to safety--while the great and crafty perish.

"12. He disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands can not perform their enterprise.

"13. He taketh the wise in their own craftiness," (that is, in the very midst of their planning,) "and the counsel of the froward is carried headlong," (that is, it is instantly overwhelmed).

"14. They MEET WITH DARKNESS IN THE DAY-TIME, and grope in the noonday as in the night." (Chap. v.)

Surely all this is extraordinary--the troubles of mankind come from above, not from the earth; the children of the wicked are crushed in the gate, far from places of refuge; the houses of the wicked are "crushed before the moth," those that plow wickedness perish," by the "blast of God's nostrils they are consumed"; the old lion perishes for want of prey, and its whelps are scattered abroad. Eliphaz sees a vision, (the comet,) which "makes his bones to shake, and the hair of his flesh to stand up"; the people "are destroyed from morning to evening"; the cunning find their craft of no avail, but are taken; the counsel of the froward is carried headlong; the poor find safety in high places; and darkness comes in midday, so that the people grope their way; and Job's children, servants, and animals are destroyed by a fire from heaven, and by a great wind.

Eliphaz, like the priests in the Aztec legend, thinks he sees in all this the chastening hand of God:

"17. Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty:

"18. For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole." (Chap. v.)

We are reminded of the Aztec prayer, where allusion is made to the wounded and sick in the cave "whose mouths were full of earth and scurf." Doubtless, thousands were crushed, and cut, and wounded by the falling stones, or burned by the fire, and some of them were carried by relatives and friends, or found their own way, to the shelter of the caverns.

"20. In famine he shall redeem thee from death: and in war from the power of the sword.

"21. Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue: neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh." (Chap. v.)

"The scourge of the tongue" has no meaning in this context. There has probably been a mistranslation at some stage of the history of the poem. The idea is, probably, "You are hid in safety from the scourge of the comet, from the tongues of flame; you need not be afraid of the destruction that is raging without."

"22. At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth.

"23. For thou shalt be in league with THE STONES OF THE FIELD: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee." (Chap. v.)

That is to say, as in the Aztec legend, the stones of the field have killed some of the beasts if the earth, "the lions have perished," and their whelps have been scattered; the stones have thus been your friends; and other beasts have fled with you into these caverns, as in the Navajo tradition, where you may be able, living upon them, to defy famine.

Now it may be said that all this is a strained construction; but what construction can be substituted that will make sense of these allusions? How can the stones of the field be in league with man? How does the ordinary summer rain falling on the earth set up the low and destroy the wealthy? And what has all this to do with a darkness that cometh in the day-time in which the wicked grope helplessly?

But the allusions continue

Job cries out, in the next chapter (chap. vi)

"2. Oh that my grief" (my sins whereby I deserved wrath) "were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together!

3. As the sands of the sea this would appear heavier, therefore my words are full of sorrow. (Douay version.)

'14. For the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit; the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me" ("war against me"-Douay ver.).

That is to say, disaster comes down heavier than the sands--the gravel of the sea; I am wounded; the arrows of God, the darts of fire, have stricken me. We find in the American legends the descending dris constantly alluded to as "stones, arrows, and spears"; I am poisoned with the foul exhalations of the comet; the terrors of God are arrayed against me. All this is comprehensible as a description of a great disaster of nature, but it is extravagant language to apply to a mere case of boils.

"9. Even that it would please God to destroy me; that he would let loose his hand and cut me off."

The commentators say that "to destroy me" means literally "to grind or crush me." (Chap. vi.)

Job despairs of final escape:

"11. What is my strength that I can hold out? And what is I end that I should keep patience?" (Douay.)

"12 . Is my strength the strength of stones? Or is my flesh of brass? "

That is to say, how can I ever bold out? How can I ever survive this great tempest? How can my strength stand the crushing of these stones? Is my flesh brass, that it will not burn up? Can I live in a world where such things are to continue?

And here follow allusions which are remarkable as occurring in an Arabian composition, in a land of torrid beats:

"15. My brethren" (my fellow-men) "have dealt deceitfully" (have sinned) "as a brook, and as the stream of brooks they pass away.

16. Which are blackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid.

"17. What time they wax warm, they vanish: when it is hot, they are consumed out of their place.

18. The paths of their way are turned aside; they go to nothing and perish."

The Douay version has it:

"16. They" (the people) "that fear the hoary frost, the snow shall fall upon them.

"17. At the time when they shall be scattered they shall perish; and after it groweth hot they shall be melted out of their place.

"18. The paths of their steps are entangled; they shall walk in vain and shall perish."

There is a great deal of perishing here--some by frost and snow, some by heat; the people are scattered, they lose their way, they perish.

Job's servants and sheep were also consumed in their place; they came to naught, they perished.

Job begins to think, like the Aztec priest, that possibly the human race has reached its limit and is doomed to annihilation (chap. vii):

"1. Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? Are not his days also like the days of an hireling?"

Is it not time to discharge the race from its labors?

"4. When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise, and the night be gone? and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day."

He draws a picture of his hopeless condition, shut up in the cavern, never to see the light of day again. (Douay ver., chap. vii):

"12: Am I sea or a whale, that thou hast inclosed me in a prison?"

"7. My eyes shall not return to see good things.

"8. Nor shall the sight of man behold me; thy eyes are upon me, and I shall be no more"; (or, as one translates it, thy mercy shall come too late when I shall be no more.)

"9. As a cloud is consumed and passeth away, so he that shall go down to hell" (or the grave, the cavern) shall not come up.

"10. Nor shall he return any more into his house, neither shall his place know him any more."

How strikingly does this remind one of the Druid legend, given on page 135, ante:

"The profligacy of mankind had provoked the Great Supreme to send a pestilential wind upon the earth. A pure poison descended, every blast was death. At this time the patriarch, distinguished for his integrity, was shut up, together with his select company, in the inclosure with the strong door. Here the just ones were safe from injury. Presently a tempest of fire arose," etc.

Who can doubt that these widely separated legends refer to the same event and the same patriarch?

Job meditates suicide, just as we have seen in the American legends that hundreds slew themselves under the terror of the time:

"21. For now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be."

The Chaldaic version gives us the sixteenth and seventeenth verses of chapter viii as follows:

"The sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof faileth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth, so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways."

And then Job refers to the power of God, seeming to paint the cataclysm (chap. ix):

"5. Which removeth the mountains, and they know not which overturneth them in his anger.

"6. Which shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble.

"7. Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not; and sealeth up the stars.

"8. Which alone spreadeth out the heavens and treadeth upon the waves of the sea."

All this is most remarkable: here is the delineation of a great catastrophe--the mountains are removed and leveled; the earth shakes to its foundations; the sun fails to appear, and the stars are sealed up. How? In the dense masses of clouds?

Surely this does not describe the ordinary manifestations of God's power. When has the sun refused to rise? It can not refer to the story of Joshua, for in that case the sun was in the heavens and refrained from setting; and Joshua's time was long subsequent to that of Job. But when we take this in connection with the fire falling from heaven, the great wind, the destruction of men and animals, the darkness that came at midday, the ice and snow and sands of the sea, and the stones of the field, and the fact that Job is shut up as in a prison, never to return to his home or to the light of day, we see that peering through the little-understood context of this most ancient poem are the disjointed reminiscences of the age of fire and gravel. It sounds like the cry not of a man but of a race, a great, religious, civilized race, who could not understand how God could so cruelly visit the world; and out of their misery and their terror sent up this pitiful yet sublime appeal for mercy.

"13. If God will not withdraw his anger, the proud helpers do stoop under him."

One commentator makes this read:

"Under him the whales below heaven bend," (the crooked leviathan?)

"17. For he shall crush me in a whirlwind, and multiplieth my wounds even without cause." (Douay ver.)

And Job can not recognize the doctrine of a special providence; he says:

"22. This is one thing" (therefore I said it). "He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked.

"23. If the scourge slay suddenly, he will laugh at the trial of the innocent.

"24. The earth is given into the hands of the wicked: he covereth the faces of the judges thereof; if it be not him, who is it then?" (Douay ver.)

That is to say, God has given up the earth to the power of Satan (as appears by chapter i); good and bad perish together; and the evil one laughs as the scourge (the comet) slays suddenly the innocent ones; the very judges who should have enforced justice are dead, and their faces covered with dust and ashes. And if God has not done this terrible deed, who has done it?

And Job rebels against such a state of things

"34. Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me.

"35. Then I would speak to him and not fear him but it is not so with me."

What rod--what fear? Surely not the mere physical affliction which is popularly supposed to have constituted Job's chief grievance. Is the "rod" that terrifies Job so that he fears to speak, that great object which cleft the heavens; that curved wolf-jaw of the Goths, one end of which rested on the earth while the other touched the sun? Is it the great sword of Surt?

And here we have another (chap. x) allusion to the "darkness," although in our version it is applied to death:

"21. Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death.

"22. A land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness."

Or, as the Douay version has it:

"21. Before I go, and return no more, to a land that is dark and covered with the mist of death.

"22. A land of misery and darkness, where the shadow of death, and no order but everlasting horror dwelleth."

This is not death; death is a place of peace, "where the wicked ceased from troubling "; this is a description of the chaotic condition of things on the earth outside the cave, "without any order," and where even the feeble light of day is little better than total darkness. Job thinks he might just as well go out into this dreadful world and end it all.

Zophar argues (chap. xi) that all these things have come because of the wickedness of the people, and that it is all right:

"10. If he cut off and shut up and gather together, who can hinder him?

"11. For he knoweth vain men: he seeth wickedness also; will he not then consider it?

"If he cut off," the commentators say, means literally, "If he pass by as a storm."

That is to say, if he cuts off the people, (kills them by the million,) and shuts up a few in caves, as Job was shut up in prison, gathered together from the storm, how are you going to help it? Hath he not seen the vanity and wickedness of man?

And Zophar tells Job to hope, to pray to God, and that he will yet escape:

"16. Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away.

"17. And thine age shall be clearer than the noonday; thou shalt shine forth, thou shalt be as the morning."

"Thou shalt shine forth" Gesenius renders, "though now thou art in darkness thou shalt presently be as the morning"; that is, the storm will pass and the light return. Umbreit gives it, "Thy darkness shall be as the morning; only the darkness of morning twilight, not nocturnal darkness." That is, Job will return to that dim light which followed the Drift Age.

"18. And thou shalt be secure, because there is hope; yea, thou shalt dig about thee, and thou shalt take thy rest in safety."

That is to say, when the waters pass away, with them shall pass away thy miseries; the sun shall yet return brighter than ever; thou shalt be secure; thou shalt dig thy way out of these caverns; and then take thy rest in safety, for the great tempest shall have passed for ever. We are told by the commentators that the words "about thee" are an interpolation.

If this is not the interpretation, for what would Job dig about him? What relation can digging have with the disease which afflicted Job?

But Job refuses to receive this consolation. He refuses to believe that the tower of Siloam fell only on the wickedest men in the city. He refers to his past experience of mankind. He thinks honest poverty is without honor at the hands of successful fraud. He says (chap. xii):

"5. He that is ready to slip with his feet is as a lamp despised in the thought of him that is at ease."

But--

"6. The tabernacles of robbers prosper, and they that provoke God are secure; into whose hand God bringeth abundantly."

And he can not see how, if this calamity has come upon men for their sins, that the innocent birds and beasts, and even the fish in the heated and poisoned waters, are perishing:

"7. But ask now the beasts," ("for verily," he has just said, "ye are the men, and wisdom will die with you,") "and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee:

"8. Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare it unto thee.

"9. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?"

Wrought what? Job's disease? No. Some great catastrophe to bird and beast and earth.

You pretend, he says, in effect, ye wise men, that only the wicked have suffered; but it is not so, for aforetime I have seen the honest poor man despised and the villain prosperous. And if the sins of men have brought this catastrophe on the earth, go ask the beasts and the birds and the fish and the very face of the suffering earth, what they have done to provoke this wrath. No, it is the work of God, and of God alone, and he gives and will give no reason for it.

"14. Behold, he breaketh down, and it cannot be built up again; he shutteth up a man, and there can be no opening.

"15. Behold, he withholdeth the waters, and they dry up: also, he sendeth them out, and they overturn the earth."

That is to say, the heat of the fire from heaven sucks up the waters until rivers and lakes are dried up: Cacus steals the cows of Hercules; and then again they fall, deluging and overturning the earth, piling it into Mountains in one place, says the Tupi legend, and digging out valleys in another. And God buries men in the caves in which they sought shelter.

"23. He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them again.

"24. He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way.

"25. They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man."

More darkness, more groping in the dark, more of that staggering like drunken men, described in the American legends:

"Lo, mine eye," says Job, (xiii, 1,) "hath seen all this, mine ear hath heard and understood it. What ye know, the same do I know also."

We have all seen it, says Job, and now you would come here with your platitudes about God sending all this to punish the wicked:

"4. But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value."

Honest Job is disgusted, and denounces his counselors with Carlylean vigor:

"11. Shall not his excellency make you afraid? and his dread fall upon you?

"12. Your remembrances are like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies of clay.

"13. Hold your peace, let me alone, that I may speak, and let come on me what will.

"14. Wherefore do I take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in mine hand?

"15. Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him."

In other words, I don't think this thing is right, and, though I tear my flesh with my teeth, and contemplate suicide, and though I may be slain for speaking, yet I will speak out, and maintain that God ought not to have done this thing; he ought not to have sent this horrible affliction on the earth--this fire from heaven, which burned up my cattle; this whirlwind which slew my children; this sand of the sea; this rush of floods; this darkness in noonday in which mankind grope helplessly; these arrows, this poison, this rush of waters, this sweeping away of mountains.

"If I hold my tongue," says Job, "I shall give up the ghost!"

Job believes--

"The grief that will not speak,
Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break."

"As the waters fail from the sea," says Job, (xiv, 11,) and the flood decayeth and drieth up:

"12. So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep.

13. O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me!"

What does this mean? When in history have the waters failed from the sea? Job believes in the immortality of the soul (xix, 26): "Though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." Can these words then be of general application, and mean that those who lie down and rise not shall not awake for ever? No; he is simply telling that when the conflagration came and dried up the seas, it slaughtered the people by the million; they fell and perished, never to live again; and he calls on God to hide him in a grave, a tomb, a cavern--until the day of his wrath be past, and then to remember him, to come for him, to let him out.

"20. My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth."

Escaped from what? From his physical disease? No; he carried that with him.

But Zophar insists that there is a special providence in all these things, and that only the wicked have perished (chap. xx):

"5. The triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment."

"7. Yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where is be?"

16. He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay him."

How?

"23. When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall RAIN IT UPON him, while he is eating.

"24. He shall flee from the iron weapon, and the bow of steel shall strike him through.

"25. It is drawn and cometh out of the body; yea, the glittering sword" (the comet?) "cometh out of his gall: terrors are upon him.

"26. All darkness shall be hid in his secret places: a fire not blown shall consume him. . . .

"27. The heavens shall reveal his iniquity; and the earth shall rise up against him.

"28. The increase of his house shall depart, and his goods shall flow away in the day of his wrath."

What does all this mean? While the rich man, (necessarily a wicked man,) is eating his dinner, God shall rain upon him a consuming fire, a fire not blown by man; he shall be pierced by the arrows of God, the earth shall quake under his feet, the heavens shall blaze forth his iniquity; the darkness shall be hid, shall disappear, in the glare of the conflagration; and his substance shall flow away in the floods of God's wrath.

Job answers him in powerful language, maintaining from past experience his position that the wicked ones do not suffer in this life any more than the virtuous (chap. xxi):

"Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf. They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance. They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave. Therefore they say unto God, Depart from us; for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways."

And here we seem to have a description (chap. xvi, Douay ver.) of Job's contact with the comet:

"9. A false speaker riseth up against my face, contradicting me."

That is, Job had always proclaimed the goodness of God, and here comes something altogether evil.

"10. He hath gathered together his fury against me; and threatening me he hath gnashed with his teeth upon me: my enemy hath beheld me with terrible eyes."

"14. He has compassed me round about with his lances, he hath wounded my loins, he hath not spared, he hath poured out my bowels on the earth.

"15. He hath torn me with wound upon wound, he hath rushed in upon me like a giant."

"20. For behold my witness is in heaven, and he that knoweth my conscience is on high."

It is impossible to understand this as referring to a skin-disease, or even to the contradictions of Job's companions, Zophar, Bildad, etc.

Something rose up against Job that comes upon him with fury, gnashes his teeth on him, glares at him with terrible eyes, surrounds him with lances, wounds him in every part, and rushes upon him like a giant; and the witness of the truth of Job's statement is there in the heavens.

Eliphaz returns to the charge. He rebukes Job and charges him with many sins and oppressions (chap. xxii):

"10. Therefore snares are around about thee, and sudden fear troubleth thee;

"11. Or darkness, that thou canst not see; and abundance of waters cover thee."

"13. And thou sayest, How doth God know? Can he judge through the dark cloud?

"14. Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not and he walketh in the circuit of heaven.

15. Hast thou marked the old way which wicked men have trodden?

"16. Which were cut down out of time, whose foundation was overflown with a flood?"

"20. Whereas our substance is not cut down, but the remnant of them the fire consumeth."

"24. He shall give for earth flint, and for flint torrents of gold." (Douay ver.)

What is the meaning of all this? And why this association of the flint-stones, referred to in so many legends; and the gold believed to have fallen from heaven in torrents, is it not all wonderful and inexplicable upon any other theory than that which I suggest?

"30. He shall deliver the island of the innocent: and it is delivered by the pureness of thine "(Job's) "hands."

What does this mean? Where was "the island of the innocent"? What was the way which the wicked, who did not live on "the island of the innocent," had trodden, but which was swept away in the flood as the bridge Bifrost was destroyed, in the Gothic legends, by the forces of Muspelheim?

And Job replies again (chap. xxiii):

"16. For God maketh my heart soft, and the Almighty troubleth me:

"17. Because I was not cut off before the darkness, neither hath he covered the darkness from my face."

That is to say, why did I not die before this great calamity fell on the earth, and before I saw it?

Job continues (chap. xxvi):

"5. Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.

"6. Hell is naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.

The commentators tell us that the words, "dead things are formed under the waters," mean literally, "the souls of the dead tremble from under the waters."

In all lands the home of the dead was, as I have shown elsewhere,[1]beyond the waters: and just as we have seen in Ovid that Phaon's conflagration burst open the earth

[1. "Atlantis," 359, 421, etc.]

and disturbed the inhabitants of Tartarus; and in Hesiod's narrative that the ghosts trembled around Pluto in his dread dominion; so here hell is laid bare by the great catastrophe, and the souls of the dead in the drowned Flood-land, beneath the waters, tremble.

Surely, all these legends are fragments of one and the same great story.

"7. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

"8. He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them."

The clouds do not break with this unparalleled load of moisture.

"9. He holdeth back the face of his throne, and spreadeth his cloud upon it.

"10. He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end.

"11. The pillars of heaven tremble, and are astonished at his reproof.

"12. He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through the proud." ("By his wisdom he has struck the proud one."--Douay ver.)

"13. By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." ("His artful hand brought forth the winding serpent."--Douay ver.)

What is the meaning of all this? The dead under the waters tremble; hell is naked, in the blazing heat, and destruction is uncovered; the north, the cold, descends on the world; the waters are bound up in thick clouds; the face of God's throne, the sun, is bidden by the clouds spread upon it; darkness has come, day and night are all one; the earth trembles; he has lighted up the heavens with the fiery comet, shaped like a crooked serpent, but he has struck him as Indra struck Vritra.

How else can these words be interpreted? When otherwise did the day and night come to an end? What is the crooked serpent?

Job continues, (chap. xxviii,) and speaks in an enigmatical way, v. 3, of "the stones of darkness, and the shadow of death."

114. The flood breaketh out from the inhabitants; even the waters forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.

"5. As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it were fire."

Maurer and Gesenius translate verse 4 in a way wonderfully in accord with my theory: "The flood breaketh out from the inhabitants," they render, "a shaft, (or gulley-like pit,) is broken open far from the inhabitant, the dweller on the surface of the earth."[1]This is doubtless the pit in which Job was bidden, the narrow-mouthed, bottomless cave, referred to hereafter. And the words, "forgotten of the foot," confirm this view, for the high authorities, just cited, tell us that these words mean literally, "unsupported by the foot THEY HANG BY ROPES IN DESCENDING; they are dried up; they are gone away from men." [2]

Here we have, probably, a picture of Job and his companions descending by ropes into some great cavern, "dried up" by the heat, seeking refuge, far from the habitations of men, in some "deep shaft or gulley-like pit."

And the words, "they are gone away from men," Maurer and Gesenius translate, "far from men they move with uncertain steps--they stagger." They are stumbling through the darkness, hurrying to a place of refuge, precisely as narrated in the Central American legends.

[1. Fausset's "Commentaries," vol. iii, p. 66.

2. Ibid.]

This is according to the King James version, but the Douay version gives it as follows:

"3. He hath set a time for darkness, and the end of all things he considereth; the stone also that is in the dark, and the shadow of death.

"4. The flood divideth from the people that are on their journey, those whom the foot of the needy man hath forgotten, and those who cannot be come at.

5. The land out of which bread grew in its place, hath been overturned with fire."

That is to say, God has considered whether he would not make an end of all things: he has set a time for darkness; in the dark are the stones; the flood separates the people; those who are escaping are divided by it from those who were forgotten, or who are on the other side of the flood, where they can not be come at. But the land where formerly bread grew, the land of the agricultural people, the civilized land, the plain of Ida where grew the apples, the plain of Vigrid where the great battle took place, that has been overturned by fire.

And this land the next verse tells us:

"6. The stones of it are the place of sapphires, and the clods of it" (King James, "dust") "are gold."

We are again reminded of those legends of America and Europe where gold and jewels fell from heaven among the stones. We are reminded of the dragon-guarded hoards of the ancient myths.

The Douay version says:

"9. He" (God) "has stretched out his hand to the flint, he hath overturned mountains from the roots."

What is the meaning Of FLINT here? And why this recurrence of the word flint, so common in the Central American legends and religions? And when did God in the natural order of things overturn mountains by the roots?

And Job (chap. xxx, Douay version) describes the condition of the multitude who had at first mocked him, and the description recalls vividly the Central American pictures of the poor starving wanderers who followed the Drift Age:

"3. Barren with want and hunger, who gnawed in the wilderness, disfigured with calamity and misery.

4. And they ate grass, and barks of trees, and the root of junipers was their food.

"5. Who snatched up these things out of the valleys, and when they had found any of them, they ran to them with a cry.

"6. They dwelt in the desert places of torrents, and in caves of the earth, or UPON THE GRAVEL."

Is not all this wonderful?

In the King James version, verse 3 reads:

3. For want and famine they were solitary, fleeing into the wilderness, in former time, desolate and waste."

The commentators say that the words, "in former time, desolate and waste," mean literally, "the yesternight of desolation and waste."

Job is describing the condition of the people immediately following the catastrophe, not in some remote past.

And again Job says (Douay version, chap. xxx):

"12. . . . My calamities forthwith arose; they have overthrown my feet, and have overwhelmed me with their paths as with waves. . . .

"14. They have rushed in upon me as when a wall is broken, and a gate opened, and have rolled themselves down to my miseries. . . ."

Maurer translates, "as when a wall is broken," "with a shout like the crash of falling masonry."

29. I was the brother of dragons and companion of ostriches.

"30. My skin is become black upon me, and my bones are dried up with the heat."

We are reminded of Ovid's statement that the conflagration of Phaon caused the skin of the Africans to turn black.

In chapter xxxiv, (King James's version,) we read:

"14. If he" (God) "set his heart upon man, if he gather unto himself his spirit and his breath;

"15. All flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust."

And in chapter xxxvi, (verses 15, 16, Douay,) we see that Job was shut up in something like a cavern:

"15. He shall deliver the poor out of his distress, and shall open his ear in affliction.

"16. Therefore he shall set thee at large out of the narrow mouth, and which hath no foundation under it; and the rest of thy table shall be full of fatness."

That is to say, in the day when he delivers the poor out of their misery, he will bring thee forth from the place where thou hast been "hiding," (see chap. xiii, 20,) from that narrow-mouthed, bottomless cavern; and instead of starving, as you have been, your table, during the rest of your life, "shall be full of fatness."

"27. He" (God) "lifteth up the drops of rain and poureth out showers like floods.

"28. Which flow from the clouds which cover all from above."

The commentators tell us that this expression, "which cover all from above," means literally, "the bottom of the sea is laid bare"; and they confess their inability to understand it. But is it not the same story told by Ovid of the bottom of the Mediterranean having been rendered a bed of dry sand by Phaon's conflagration; and does it not remind us of the Central American legend of the starving people migrating in search of the sun, through rocky places where the sea had been separated to allow them to pass?

And the King James version continues

"32. With clouds he covereth the light; and commandeth it not to shine by the cloud that cometh betwixt.

"33. The noise thereof sheweth concerning it, the cattle also concerning the vapor."

This last line shows how greatly the original text has been garbled; what have the cattle to do with it? Unless, indeed, here, as in the other myths, the cows signify the clouds. The meaning of the rest is plain: God draws up the water, sends it down as rain, which covers all things; the clouds gather before the sun and hide its light; and the vapor restores the cows, the clouds; and all this is accompanied by great disturbances and noise.

And the next chapter (xxxvii) continues the description:

"2. Hear ye attentively the terror of his" (the comet's) "voice, and the sound that cometh out of his mouth.

"3. He beholdeth under all the heavens," (he is seen under all the heavens?) "and his light is upon the ends of the earth.

"4. After it a NOISE SHALL ROAR, he shall thunder with the voice of his majesty, and shall not be found out when his voice shall be heard."

The King James version says, "And he will not stay them when his voice is heard."

"5. God shall thunder wonderfully with his voice, he that doth great and unsearchable things."

Here, probably, are more allusions to the awful noises made by the comet as it entered our atmosphere, referred to by Hesiod, the Russian legends, etc.

"6. He commandeth the snow to go down upon the earth, and the winter rain and the shower of his strength "--("the great rain of his strength," says the King James version).

"7. He sealeth up the hand of every man."

This means, says one commentator, that "he confines men within doors" by these great rains. Instead of houses we infer it to mean "the caves of the earth," already spoken of, (chap. xxx, v. 6,) and this is rendered more evident by the next verse:

"8. And the beast shall go into his covert and shall abide in his den.

"9. Out of the inner parts" (meaning the south, say the commentators and the King James version) "shall tempest come, and cold out of the north.

"10. When God bloweth, there cometh frost, and again the waters are poured forth abundantly."

The King James version continues:

"11. Also by watering he wearieth the thick cloud."

That is to say, the cloud is gradually dissipated by dropping its moisture in snow and rain.

"12. And it is turned round about by his counsels that they may do whatsoever be commandeth them upon the face of the world in the earth.

"13. He causeth it to come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy."

There can be no mistaking all this. It refers to no ordinary events. The statement is continuous. God, we are told, will call Job out from his narrow-mouthed cave, and once more give him plenty of food. There has been a great tribulation. The sun has sucked up the seas, they have fallen in great floods; the thick clouds have covered the face of the sun; great noises prevail; there is a great light, and after it a roaring noise; the snow falls on the earth, with winter rains, (cold rains,) and great rains; men climb down ropes into deep shafts or pits; they are sealed up, and beasts are driven to their dens and stay there: there are great cold and frost, and more floods; then the continual rains dissipate the clouds.

"19. Teach us what we shall say unto him; for we can not order our speech by reason of darkness.

"20. Shall it be told him that I speak? If a man speak, surely he shall be swallowed up?"

And then God talks to Job, (chap. xxxviii,) and tells him "to gird up his loins like a man and answer him." He says:

"8. Who shut up the sea with doors, when it broke forth as issuing out of the womb?

119. When I made a cloud the garment thereof, and wrapped it in mists as in swaddling-bands,

"10. I set my bounds around it, and made it bars and doors." . . .

"22. Hast thou entered into the storehouses of the snow, or hast thou beheld the treasures of the hail?" . . .

"29. Out of whose womb came the ice? and the frost from heaven, who hath gendered it?

"30. The waters are hardened like a stone, and the surface of the deep is frozen."

What has this Arabian poem to do with so many allusions to clouds, rain, ice, snow, hail, frost, and frozen oceans?

"36. Who hath put wisdom in the inward part? Or who hath given understanding to the heart? "

Umbreit says that this word "heart" means literally "a shining phenomenon--a meteor." Who hath given understanding to the comet to do this work?

"38. When was the dust poured on the earth, and the clods hardened together?"

One version makes this read:

"Poured itself into a mass by the rain, like molten metal."

And another translates it--

"Is caked into a mass by heat, like molten metal, BEFORE THE RAIN FALLS."

This is precisely in accordance with my theory that the "till" or "hard-pan," next the earth, was caked and baked by the heat into its present pottery-like and impenetrable condition, long before the work of cooling and condensation set loose the floods to rearrange and form secondary Drift out of the upper portion of the dris.

But again I ask, when in the natural order of events was dust poured on the earth and hardened into clods, like molten metal?

And in this book of Job I think we have a description of the veritable comets that struck the earth, in the Drift Age, transmitted even from the generations that beheld them blazing in the sky, in the words of those who looked upon the awful sight.

In the Norse legends we read of three destructive objects which appeared in the heavens one of these was shaped like a serpent; it was called "the Midgard-serpent"; then there was "the Fenris wolf"; and, lastly, "the dog Garm." In Hesiod we read, also, of three monsters: first, Echidna, "a serpent huge and terrible and vast"; second, Chima, a lion-like creature; and, thirdly, Typhus, worst of all, a fierce, fiery dragon. And in Job, in like manner, we have three mighty objects alluded to or described: first the "winding" or "twisting" serpent with which God has "adorned the heavens"; then "behemoth," monstrous enough to "drink up rivers," "the chief of the ways of God"; and lastly, and most terrible of all, "leviathan"; the name meaning, the twisting animal, gathering itself into folds."

God, speaking to Job, and reminding him of the weakness and littleness of man, says (chap. xl, v. 20):

"Canst thou draw out the leviathan with a book, or canst thou tie his tongue with a cord? "

The commentators differ widely as to the meaning of this word "leviathan." Some, as I have shown, think it means the same thing as the crooked or "winding" serpent (vulg.) spoken of in chapter xxvi, v. 13, where, speaking of God, it is said:

"His spirit hath adorned the heavens, and his artful hand brought forth the winding serpent."

Or, as the King James version has it:

"By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent."

By this serpent some of the commentators understand "a constellation, the devil, the leviathan." In the Septuagint he is called "the apostate dragon."

The Lord sarcastically asks Job:

"21. Canst thou put a ring in his nose, or bore through his jaw with a buckle?

"22. Will he make many supplications to thee, or speak soft words to thee?

"23. Will he make a covenant with thee, and wilt thou take him to be a servant for ever?

"24. Shalt thou play with him as with a bird, or tie him up for thy handmaids?

"25. Shall friends" (Septuagint, "the nations") cut him in pieces, shall merchants" (Septuagint, "the generation of the Phnicians") "divide him?" . . (chap. xli, v. 1. Douay version.)

"I will not stir him up, like one that is cruel; for who can resist my" (his?) "countenance," or, "who shall stand against me" (him?) "and live?" . . .

"4. Who can discover the face of his garment? or who can go into the midst of his mouth?

"5. Who can open the doors of his face? his teeth are terrible round about.

"6. His body is like molten shields, shut close up, the scales pressing upon one another.

"7. One is joined to another, and not so much as any air can come between them.

"8. They stick one to another, and they hold one another fast, and shall not be separated.

"9. His sneezing is like the shining of fire, and his eyes like the eyelids of the morning." (Syriac, "His look is brilliant." Arabic, "The apples of his eyes are fiery, and his eyes are like the brightness of the morning.")

10. Out of his mouth go forth lamps, like torches of lighted fire."

Compare these "sneezings" or "neesings" of the King James version, and these "lamps like torches of lighted lire," with the appearance of Donati's great comet in 1858:

"On the 16th of September two diverging streams of light shot out from the nucleus across the coma, and, having separated to about the extent of its diameter, they turned back abruptly and streamed out in the tail. Luminous substance could be distinctly seen rushing out from the nucleus, and then flowing back into the tail. M. Rosa described the streams of light as resembling long hair brushed upward from the forehead, and then allowed to fall back on each side of the head."[1]

"11. Out of his nostrils goeth forth smoke, like that of a pot heated and boiling." (King James's version has it, "as out of a seething pot or caldron.")

"12. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame cometh forth out of his mouth.

"13. In his neck strength shall dwell, and want goeth before his face." (Septuagint, "Destruction runs before him.")

[1. "Edinburgh Review," October, 1874, p. 208.]

"14. The members of his flesh cleave one to another; he shall send lightnings against him, and they shall not be carried to another place." (Sym., "His flesh being cast for him as in a foundry," (molten,) "is immovable.")

"15. His heart shall be as hard as a stone, and as firm as a smith's anvil." (Septuagint, "He hath stood immovable as an anvil.")

"16. When he shall raise him up, the angels shall fear, and being affrighted shall purify themselves."

Could such language properly be applied, even by the wildest stretch of poetic fancy, to a whale or a crocodile, or any other monster of the deep? What earthly creature could terrify the angels in heaven? What earthly creature has ever breathed fire?

"17. When a sword shall lay at him, it shall not be able to hold, nor a spear, nor a breast-plate.

"18. For he shall esteem iron as straw, and brass as rotten wood.

"19. The archer shall not put him to flight, the stones of the sling are to him like stubble.

"20. As stubble will he esteem the hammer, and he will laugh him to scorn who shaketh the spear."

We are reminded of the great gods of Asgard, who stood forth and fought the monster with sword and spear and hammer, and who fell dead before him; and of the American legends, where the demi-gods in vain hurled their darts and arrows at him, and fell pierced by the rebounding weapons.

"21. The beams of the sun shall be under him," (in the King James version it is, "SHARP STONES are under him"--the gravel, the falling dris,) "and he shall strew gold under him like mire." (The King James version says, "he spreadeth sharp-pointed things upon the mire.")

To what whale or crocodile can these words be applied? When did they ever shed gold or stones? And in this, again, we have more references to gold falling from heaven:

"22. He shall make the deep sea to boil like a pot, and shall make it as when ointments boil." (The Septuagint says, "He deems the sea as a vase of ointment, and the Tartarus of the abyss like a prisoner.")

"23. A path shall shine after him; he shall esteem the deep as growing old." (The King James version says, "One would think the deep to be hoary.")

1124. There is no power upon earth that can be compared with him, who was made to fear no one.

"25. He beholdeth every high thing; he is king over all the children of pride." (Chaldaic, "of all the sons of the mountains.")

Now, when we take this description, with all that has preceded it, it seems to me beyond question that this was one of the crooked serpents with which God had adorned the heavens: this was the monster with blazing bead, casting out jets of light, breathing volumes of smoke, molten, shining, brilliant, irresistible, against whom men hurled their weapons in vain; for destruction went before him: he cast down stones and pointed things upon the mire, the clay; the sea boils with his excessive heat; he threatens heaven itself; the angels tremble, and he beholds all high places. This is he whose rain of fire killed Job's sheep and shepherds; whose chaotic winds killed Job's children; whose wrath fell upon and consumed the rich men at their tables; who made the habitations of kings "desolate places"; who spared only in part "the island of the innocent," where the remnant of humanity, descending by ropes, hid themselves in deep, narrow-mouthed caves in the mountains. This is he who dried up the rivers and absorbed or evaporated a great part of the water of the ocean, to subsequently cast it down in great floods of snow and rain, to cover the north with ice; while the darkened world rolled on for a long night of blackness underneath its dense canopy of clouds.

If this be not the true interpretation of Job, who, let me ask, can explain all these allusions to harmonize with the established order of nature? And if this interpretation be the true one, then have we indeed penetrated back through all the ages, through mighty lapses of time, until, on the plain of some most ancient civilized land, we listen, perchance, at some temple-door, to this grand justification of the ways of God to man; this religious drama, this poetical sermon, wrought out of the traditions of the people and priests, touching the greatest calamity which ever tried the hearts and tested the faith of man.

And if this interpretation be true, with how much reverential care should we consider these ancient records embraced in the Bible!

The scientist picks up a fragment of stone--the fool would fling it away with a laugh,--but the philosopher sees in it the genesis of a world; from it he can piece out the detailed history of ages; he finds in it, perchance, a fossil of the oldest organism, the first traces of that awful leap from matter to spirit, from dead earth to endless life; that marvel of marvels, that miracle of all miracles, by which dust and water and air live, breathe, think, reason, and cast their thoughts abroad through time and space and eternity.

And so, stumbling through these texts, falling over mistranslations and misconceptions, pushing aside the accumulated dust of centuried errors, we lay our hands upon a fossil that lived and breathed when time was new: we are carried back to ages not only before the flood, but to ages that were old when the flood came upon the earth.

Here Job lives once more: the fossil breathes and palpitates;-hidden from the fire of heaven, deep in his cavern; covered with burns and bruises from the falling dris of the comet, surrounded by his trembling fellow-refugees, while chaos rules without and hope has fled the earth, we hear Job, bold, defiant, unshrinking, pouring forth the protest of the human heart against the cruelty of nature; appealing from God's awful deed to the sense of God's eternal justice.

We go out and look at the gravel-heap--worn, rounded, ancient, but silent,--the stones lie before us. They have no voice. We turn to this volume, and here is their voice, here is their story; here we have the very thoughts men thought-men like ourselves, but sorely tried--when that gravel was falling upon a desolated world.

And all this buried, unrecognized, in the sacred book of a race and a religion.

• September 19, 2011
• 0
• Published in Ragnarok
• Written by LC Geerts

The Legends ch. 13, GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER XIII

GENESIS READ BY THE LIGHT OF THE COMET

AND now, gathering into our hands all the light afforded by the foregoing facts and legends, let us address ourselves to this question: How far can the opening chapters of the book of Genesis be interpreted to conform to the theory of the contact of a comet with the earth in the Drift Age?

It may appear to some of my readers irreverent to place any new meaning on any part of the sacred volume, and especially to attempt to transpose the position of any of its parts. For this feeling I have the highest respect.

I do not think it is necessary, for the triumph of truth, that it should lacerate the feelings even of the humblest. It should come, like Quetzalcoatl, advancing with shining, smiling face, its hands full of fruits and flowers, bringing only blessings and kindliness to the multitude; and should that multitude, for a time, drive the prophet away, beyond the seas, with curses, be assured they will eventually return to set up his altars.

He who follows the gigantic Mississippi upward from the Gulf of Mexico to its head-waters on the high plateau of Minnesota, will not scorn even the tiniest rivulet among the grass which helps to create its first fountain. So he who considers the vastness for good of this great force, Christianity, which pervades the world down the long course of so many ages, aiding, relieving, encouraging, cheering, purifying, sanctifying humanity, can not afford to ridicule even these the petty fountains, the head-waters, the first springs from which it starts on its world-covering and age-traversing course.

If we will but remember the endless array of asylums, hospitals, and orphanages; the houses for the poor, the sick, the young, the old, the unfortunate, the helpless, and the sinful, with which Christianity has literally sprinkled the world; when we remember the uncountable millions whom its ministrations have restrained from bestiality, and have directed to purer lives and holier deaths, he indeed is not to be envied who can find it in his heart, with malice-aforethought, to mock or ridicule it.

At the same time, few, I think, even of the orthodox, while bating no jot of their respect for the sacred volume, or their faith in the great current of inspired purpose and meaning which streams through it, from cover to cover, hold to-day that every line and word is literally accurate beyond a shadow of question. The direct contradictions which occur in the text itself show that the errors of man have crept into the compilation or composition of the volume.

The assaults of the skeptical have been largely directed against the opening chapters of Genesis:

"What!" it has been said, "you pretend in the first chapter that the animated creation was made in six days; and then in the second chapter (verses 4 and 5) you say that the heavens and the earth and all the vegetation were made in one day. Again: you tell us that there was light shining on the earth on the first day; and that there was night too; for 'God divided the light from the darkness'; and there was morning and evening on the first, second, and third days, while the sun, moon, and stars, we are told, were not created until the fourth day; and grass and fruit-trees were made before the sun."

"How," it is asked, "could there be night and day and vegetation without a sun?"

And to this assault religion has had no answer.

Now, I can not but regard these opening chapters as a Mosaic work of ancient legends, dovetailed together in such wise that the true chronological arrangement has been departed from and lost.

It is conceded that in some of the verses of these chapters God is spoken of as Elohim, while in the remaining verses he is called Jehovah Elohim. This is very much as if a book were discovered to-day in part of which God was referred to as Jove, and in the rest as Jehovah-Jove. The conclusion would be very strong that the first part was written by one who know the Deity only as Jove, while the other portion was written by one who had come under Hebraic influences. And this state of facts in Genesis indicates that it was not the work of one inspired mind, faultless and free from error; but the work of two minds, relating facts, it is true, but jumbling them together in an incongruous order.

I propose, therefore, with all reverence, to attempt a re-arrangement of the verses of the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, which will, I hope, place it in such shape that it will be beyond future attack from the results of scientific research; by restoring the fragments to the position they really occupied before their last compilation. Whether or not I present a reasonably probable case, it is for the reader to judge.

If we were to find, under the dris of Pompeii, a grand tessellated pavement, representing one of the scenes of the "Iliad," but shattered by an earthquake, its fragments dislocated and piled one upon the top of another, it would be our duty and our pleasure to seek, by following the clew of the picture, to re-arrange the fragments so as to do justice to the great design of its author; and to silence, at the same time, the cavils of those who could see in its shocked and broken form nothing but a subject for mirth and ridicule.

In the same way, following the clew afforded by the legends of mankind and the revelations of science, I shall suggest a reconstruction of this venerable and most ancient work. If the reader does not accept my conclusions, he will, at least, I trust, appreciate the motives with which I make the attempt.

I commence with that which is, and should be, the first verse of the first chapter, the sublime sentence:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

Let us pause here: "God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning";--that is, before any other of the events narrated in the chapter. Why should we refuse to accept this statement? In the beginning, says the Bible, at the very first, God created the heavens and the earth. He did not make them in six days, he made them in the beginning; the words "six days" refer, as we shall see, to something that occurred long afterward. He did not attempt to create them, he created them; he did not partially create them, he created them altogether. The work was finished; the earth was made, the heavens were made, the clouds, the atmosphere, the rocks, the waters; and the sun, moon, and stars; all were completed.

What next? Is there anything else in this dislocated text that refers to this first creation? Yes; we go forward to the next chapter; here we have it:

Chap. ii, v. 1. "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them."

And then follows:

Chap. ii, v. 4. "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created, IN THE DAY that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Chap. ii, v. 5. "And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew; for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground."

Here we have a consecutive statement--God made the heavens and the earth in the beginning, and thus they were finished, and all the host of them. They were not made in six days, but "in the day," to wit, in that period of remote time called "The Beginning." And God made also all the herbs of the field, all vegetation. And he made every plant of the field before it was cultivated in that particular part of the world called "The Earth," for, as we have seen, Ovid draws a distinction between "The Earth" and the rest of the globe; and Job draws one between "the island of the innocent" and the other countries of the world.

And here I would call the reader's attention particularly to this remarkable statement:

Chap. ii, verse 5. "For the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Verse 6. "But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground."

This is extraordinary: there was no rain.

A mere inventor of legends certainly had never dared make a statement so utterly in conflict with the established order of things; there was no necessity for him to do so; he would fear that it would throw discredit on all the rest of his narrative; as if he should say, "at that time the grass was not green," or, "the sky was not blue."

A world without rain! Could it be possible? 'Did the writer of Genesis invent an absurdity, or did he record an undoubted tradition? Let us see:

Rain is the product of two things--heat which evaporates the waters of the oceans, lakes, and rivers; and cold which condenses them again into rain or snow. Both heat and cold are necessary, In the tropics the water is sucked up by the heat of the sun; it rises to a cooler stratum, and forms clouds; these clouds encounter the colder air flowing in from the north and south, condensation follows, accompanied probably by some peculiar electrical action, and then the rain falls.

But when the lemon and the banana grew in Spitzbergen, as geology assures us they did in pre-glacial days, where was the cold to come from? The very poles must then have possessed a warm climate. There were, therefore, at that time, no movements of cold air from the poles to the equator; when the heat drew up the moisture it rose into a vast body of heated atmosphere, surrounding the whole globe to a great height; it would have to pass through this cloak of warm air, and high up above the earth, even to the limits of the earth-warmth, before it reached an atmosphere sufficiently cool to condense it, and from that great height it would fall as a fine mist.

We find an illustration of this state of things on the coast of Peru, from the river Loa to Cape Blanco,[1]where no rain ever falls, in consequence of the heated air which ascends from the vast sand wastes, and keeps the moisture of the air above the point of condensation.

Or it would have to depend for its condensation on the difference of temperature between night and day, settling

[1. "American Cyclopia," vol. xiii, p. 387.]

like a dew at night upon the earth, and so maintaining vegetation.

What a striking testimony is all this to the fact that these traditions of Genesis reach back to the very infancy of human history--to the age before the Drift!

After the creation of the herbs and plants, what came next? We go back to the first chapter:

Verse 21. "And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 22. "And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let the fowl multiply in the earth."

Verse 25. "And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good."

Verse 26. "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 7. "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

We return to the first chapter:

Verse 27. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them."

We come back to the second chapter:

Verse 8. "And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed."

Verse 9. "And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil."

Verse 10. "And a river went out of Eden to water the garden," etc.

Here follows a description of the garden; it is a picture of a glorious world, of that age when the climate of the Bahamas extended to Spitzbergen.

Verse 15. "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it."

Here follows the injunction that "the man whom God had formed," (for he is not yet called Adam--the Adami--the people of Ad,) should not eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

And then we have, (probably a later interpolation,) an account of Adam, so called for the first time, naming the animals, and of the creation of Eve from a rib of Adam.

And here is another evidence of the dislocation of the text, for we have already been informed (chap. i, v. 27) that God had made Man, "male and female"; and here we have him making woman over again from man's rib.

Verse 25. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

It was an age of primitive simplicity, the primeval world; free from storms or ice or snow; an Edenic age; the Tertiary Age before the Drift.

Then follows the appearance of the serpent. Although represented in the text in a very humble capacity, he is undoubtedly the same great creature which, in all the legends, brought ruin on the world--the dragon, the apostate, the demon, the winding or crooked serpent of Job, the leviathan, Satan, the devil. And as such he is regarded by the theologians.

He obtains moral possession of the woman, just as we have seen, in the Hindoo legends, the demon Ravana carrying off Sita, the representative of an agricultural civilization; just as we have seen Ataguju, the Peruvian god, seducing the sister of certain rayless ones, or Darklings. And the woman ate of the fruit of the tree.

This is the same legend which we see appearing in so many places and in so many forms. The apple of Paradise was one of the apples of the Greek legends, intrusted to the Hesperides, but which they could not resist the temptation to pluck and eat. The serpent Ladon watched the tree.

It was one of the apples of Idun, in the Norse legends, the wife of Brage, the god of poetry and eloquence. She keeps them in a box, and when the gods feel the approach of old age they have only to taste them and become young again. Loke, the evil-one, the Norse devil, tempted Idun to come into a forest with her apples, to compare them with some others, whereupon a giant called Thjasse, in the appearance of an enormous eagle, flew down, seized Idun and her apples, and carried them away, like Ravana, into the air. The gods compelled Loke to bring her back, for they were the apples of the tree of life to them; without them they were perishing. Loke stole Idun from Thjasse, changed her into a nut, and fled with her, pursued by Thjasse. The gods kindled a great fire, the eagle plumage of Thjasse caught the flames, he fell to the earth, and was slain by the gods.[1]

But the serpent in Genesis ruins Eden, just as he did in all the legends; just as the comet ruined the Tertiary Age. The fair world disappears; cold and ice and snow come.

Adam and Eve, we have seen, were at first naked, and subsequently clothe themselves, for modesty, with fig-leaves, (chap. iii, v. 7;) but there comes a time, as in the

[1. Norse Mythology," pp. 275, 276.]

North American legends, when the great cold compels them to cover their shivering bodies with the skins of the wild beasts they have slain.

A recent writer, commenting on the Glacial Age, says:

"Colder and colder grew the winds. The body could not be kept warm. Clothing must be had, and this must be furnished by the wild beasts. Their hides must assist in protecting the life of men. . . . The skins were removed and transferred to the bodies of men." [1]

Hence we read in chapter iii, verse 21:

"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them."

This would not have been necessary during the warm climate of the Tertiary Age. And as this took place, according to Genesis, before Adam was driven out of Paradise, and while he still remained in the garden, it is evident that some great change of climate had fallen upon Eden. The Glacial Age had arrived; the Drift had come. It was a rude, barbarous, cold age. Man must cover himself with skins; he must, by the sweat of physical labor, wring a living out of the ground which God had "cursed" with the Drift. Instead of the fair and fertile world of the Tertiary Age, producing all fruits abundantly, the soil is covered with stones and clay, as in Job's narrative, and it brings forth, as we are told in Genesis, [2]only "thorns and thistles"; and Adam, the human race, must satisfy its starving stomach upon grass, "and thou shalt eat the herb of the field"; just as in Job we are told:

Chap. xxx, verse 3. "For want and famine they were solitary; fleeing into the wilderness in former time, desolate and solitary."

[1. Maclean's "Antiquity of Man," p. 65.

2. Chap. iii, verse 18.]

Verse 4. "Who cut up mallows by the bushes and juniper-roots for their food."

Verse 7. "Among the bushes they brayed, under the nettles were they gathered together."

And God "drove out the man" from the fair Edenic world into the post-glacial desolation; and Paradise was lost, and--

"At the east of the garden of Eden he placed cherubims and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep the way to the tree of life."

This is the sword of the comet. The Norse legends say:

"Yet, before all things, there existed what we call Muspelheim. It is a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and situate at the end of the earth. Surtur holds his empire there. In his hand there shines a flaming sword."

There was a great conflagration between the by-gone Eden and the present land of stones and thistles.

Is there any other allusion besides this to the fire which accompanied the comet in Genesis?

Yes, but it is strangely out of place. It is a distinct description of the pre-glacial wickedness of the world, the fire falling from heaven, the cave-life, and the wide-spread destruction of humanity; but the compiler of these antique legends has located it in a time long subsequent to the Deluge of Noah, and in the midst of a densely populated world. It is as if one were to represent the Noachic Deluge as having occurred in the time of Nero, in a single province of the Roman Empire, while the great world went on its course unchanged by the catastrophe which must, if the statement were true, have completely overwhelmed it. So we find the story of Lot and the destruction of the cities of the plain brought down to the time of Abraham, when Egypt and Babylon were in the height of their glory. And Lot's daughters believed that the whole human family, except themselves, had been exterminated; while Abraham was quietly feeding his flocks in an adjacent country.

For if Lot's story is located in its proper era, what became of Abraham and the Jewish people, and all the then civilized nations, in this great catastrophe? And if it occurred in that age, why do we hear nothing more about so extraordinary an event in the history of the Jews or of any other people?

Mr. Smith says:

"The conduct of Lot in the mountain whither he had retired scarcely admits of explanation. It has been generally supposed that his daughters believed that the whole of the human race were destroyed, except their father and themselves. But how they could have thought so, when they had previously tarried at Zoar, it is not easy to conceive; and we can not but regard the entire case as one of those problems which the Scriptures present as indeterminate, on account of a deficiency of data on which to form any satisfactory conclusion."[1]

The theory of this book makes the whole story tangible, consistent, and probable.

We have seen that, prior to the coming of the comet, the human race, according to the legends, had abandoned itself to all wickedness. In the Norse Sagas we read:

• Brothers will fight together,
  And become each other's bane;
  Sisters' children
  Their sib shall spoil;
  Hard, is the world,
  Sensual sins grow huge."

[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 388.]

In the legends of the British Druids we are told that it was "the profligacy of mankind" that caused God to send the great disaster. So, in the Bible narrative, we read that, in Lot's time, God resolved on the destruction of "the cities of the plain," Sodom, (Od, Ad,) and Gomorrah, (Go-Meru,) because of the wickedness of mankind:

Chap. xviii, verse 20. "And the Lord said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous"--

therefore he determined to destroy them. When the angels came to Sodom, the people showed the most villainous and depraved appetites. The angels warned Lot to flee. Blindness (darkness?) came upon the people of the city, so that they could not find the doors of the houses. The angels took Lot and his wife and two daughters by the hands, and led or dragged them away, and told them to fly "to the mountain, lest they be consumed."

There is an interlude here, an inconsistent interpolation probably, where Lot stays at Zoar, and persuades the Lord to spare Zoar; but soon after we find all the cities of the plain destroyed, and Lot and his family hiding in a cave in the mountain; so that Lot's intercession seems to have been of no avail:

Verse 24. "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven."

Verse 25. "And he overthrew those cities, and all the cities of the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground."

It was a complete destruction of all living things in that locality; and Lot "dwell in a cave, he and his two daughters."

And the daughters were convinced that they were the last of the human race left alive on the face of the earth, notwithstanding the fact that the Lord had promised (chap. iii, verse 21), "I will not overthrow this city," Zoar; but Zoar evidently was overthrown. And the daughters, rather than see the human race perish, committed incest with their father, and became the mothers of two great and extensive tribes or races of men, the Moabites and the Ammonites.

This, also, looks very much as if they were indeed repeopling an empty and desolated world..

To recapitulate, we have here, in due chronological order:

1. The creation of the heavens and the earth, and all the host of them.

2. The creation of the plants, animals, and man.

3. The fair and lovely age of the Pliocene, the summer-land, when the people went naked, or clothed themselves in the leaves of trees; it was the fertile land where Nature provided abundantly everything for her children.

4. The serpent appears and overthrows this Eden.

5. Fire falls from heaven and destroys a large part of the human race.

6. A remnant take refuge in a cave.

7. Man is driven out of the Edenic land, and a blazing sword, a conflagration, waves between him and Paradise, between Niflheim and Muspelheim.

What next?

We return now to the first chapter of this dislocated text:

Verse 2. "And the earth was without form, and void."

That is to say, chaos had come in the train of the comet. Otherwise, how can we understand how God, as stated in the preceding verse, has just made the heavens and the earth? How could his work have been so imperfect?

"And darkness was upon the face of the deep."

This is the primeval night referred to in all the legends; the long age of darkness upon the earth.

"And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."

The word for spirit, in Hebrew, as in Latin, originally meant wind; and this passage might be rendered, "a mighty wind swept the face of the waters." This wind represents, I take it, the great cyclones of the Drift Age.

Verse 3. "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light."

The sun and moon had not yet appeared, but the dense mass of clouds, pouring their waters upon the earth, had gradually, as Job expresses it, "wearied" themselves,--they had grown thin; and the light began to appear, at least sufficiently to mark the distinction between day and night.

Verse 4. "And God saw the light: that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness."

Verse 5. "And God called the light day, and the darkness be called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day."

That is to say, in subdividing the phenomena of this dark period, when there was neither moon nor sun to mark the time, mankind drew the first line of subdivision, very naturally, at that point of time, (it may have been weeks, or months, or years,) when first the distinction between night and day became faintly discernible, and men could again begin to count time.

But this gain of light had been at the expense of the clouds; they had given down their moisture in immense and perpetual rains; the low-lying lands of the earth were overflowed; the very mountains, while not under water, were covered by the continual floods of rain. There was water everywhere. To appreciate this condition of things, one has but to look at the geological maps of the amount of land known to have been overflowed by water during the so-called Glacial Age in Europe.

And so the narrative proceeds:

Verse 6. "And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

This has been incomprehensible to the critics. It has been supposed that by this "firmament" was meant the heavens; and that the waters "above the firmament" were the clouds; and it has been said that this was a barbarian's conception, to wit, that the unbounded and illimitable space, into which the human eye, aided by the telescope, can penetrate for thousands of billions of miles, was a blue arch a few hundred feet high, on top of which were the clouds; and that the rain was simply the leaking of the water through this roof of the earth. And men have said: "Call ye this real history, or inspired narrative? Did God know no more about the nature of the heavens than this?"

And Religion has been puzzled to reply.

But read Genesis in this new light: There was water everywhere; floods from the clouds, floods from the melting ice; floods on the land, where the return of the evaporated moisture was not able, by the channel-ways of the earth, to yet find its way back to the oceans.

"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."

That is to say, first a great island appeared dividing the waters from the waters. This was "the island of the innocent," referred to by Job, where the human race did not utterly perish. We shall see more about it hereafter.

"7. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

"8. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day."

The Hebrew Rokiis translated stereoma, or solidity, in the Septuagint version. It meant solid land--not empty space.

And if man was not or had not yet been on earth, whence could the name Heaven have been derived? For whom should God have named it, if there were no human ears to catch the sound? God needs no lingual apparatus--he speaks no human speech.

The true meaning probably is, that this was the region that had been for ages, before the Drift and the Darkness, regarded as the home of the godlike, civilized race; situated high above the ocean, "in the midst of the waters," in mid-sea; precipitous and mountainous, it was the first region to clear itself of the descending torrents.

What next?

"9. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

"10. And God called the dry land Earth and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good."

This may be either a recapitulation of the facts already stated, or it may refer to the gradual draining off of the continents, by the passing away of the waters; the continents being distinguished in order of time from the island "in the midst of the waters."

"11. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so."

It has been objected, as I have shown, that this narrative was false, because science has proved that the fruit-trees did not really precede in order of creation the creeping things and the fish, which, we are told, were not made until the fifth day, two days afterward. But if we will suppose that, as the water disappeared from the land, the air grew warmer by the light breaking through the diminishing clouds, the grass began to spring up again, as told in the Norse, Chinese, and other legends, and the fruit-trees, of different kinds, began to grow again, for we are told they produced each "after his kind."

And we learn "that its seed is in itself upon the earth." Does this mean that the seeds of these trees were buried in the earth, and their vitality not destroyed by the great visitation of fire, water, and ice?

And on the fourth day "God made two great lights," the sun and moon. If this were a narration of the original creation of these great orbs, we should be told that they were made exclusively to give light. But this is not the case. The light was there already; it had appeared on the evening of the first day; they were made, we are told, to "divide the day from the night." Day and night already existed, but in a confused and imperfect way; even the day was dark and cloudy; but, with the return of the sun, the distinction of day and night became once more clear.

"14. And God said . . . Let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years."

That is to say, let them be studied, as they were of old, as astronomical and astrological signs, whose influences control affairs on earth. We have seen that in many legends a good deal is said about the constellations, and the division of time in accordance with the movements of the heavenly bodies, which was made soon after the catastrophe:

"90. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowls that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven."

That is to say, the moving creatures, the fishes which still live, which have escaped destruction in the deep waters of the oceans or lakes, and the fowls which were flying wildly in the open firmament, are commanded to bring forth abundantly, to "replenish" the desolated seas and earth.

"23. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

"24. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so."

God does not, in this, create them; he calls them forth from the earth, from the caves and dens where they had been hiding, each after his kind; they were already divided into species and genera.

"28. And God blessed them," (the human family,) "and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply and REPLENISH the earth."

Surely the poor, desolated world needed replenishing, restocking. But how could the word "replenish" be applied to a new world, never before inhabited?

We have seen that in chapter ii (verses 16 and 17) God especially limited man and enjoined him not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; while in v. 22, ch. iii, it is evident that there was another tree, "the tree of life," which God did not intend that man should enjoy the fruit of. But with the close of the Tertiary period and the Drift Age all this was changed: these trees, whatever they signified, had been swept away, "the blazing sword" shone between man and the land where they grew, or had grown; and hence, after the Age of Darkness, God puts no such restraint or injunction upon the human family. We read:

Ch. i, v. 29. "And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat."

With what reason, if the text is in its true order, could God have given man, in the first chapter, the right to eat the fruit of every tree, and in the following chapters have consigned the whole race to ruin for eating the fruit of one particular tree?

But after the so-called Glacial Age all limitations were removed. The tree of knowledge and the tree of life had disappeared for ever. The Drift covered them.

Reader, waive your natural prejudices, and ask yourself whether this proposed readjustment of the Great Book does not place it thoroughly in accord with all the revelations of science; whether it does not answer all the objections that have been made against the reasonableness of the story; and whether there is in it anything inconsistent with the sanctity of the record, the essentials of religion, or the glory of God.

Instead of being, compelled to argue, as Religion now does, that the whole heavens and the earth, with its twenty miles in thickness of stratified rocks, were made in six actual days, or to interpret "days" to mean vast periods of time, notwithstanding the record speaks of "the evening and the morning" constituting these "days," as if they were really subdivisions of sun-marked time; we here see that the vast Creation, and the great lapses of geologic time, all lie far back of the day when darkness was on the face of the deep; and that the six days which followed, and in which the world was gradually restored to its previous condition, were the natural subdivisions into which events arranged themselves. The Chinese divided this period of reconstruction into "branches" or "stems"; the race from whom the Jews received their traditions divided it into days.

The first subdivision was, as I have said, that of the twilight age, when light began to invade the total darkness; it was subdivided again into the evening and the morning, as the light grew stronger.

The next subdivision of time was that period, still in the twilight, when the floods fell and covered a large part of the earth, but gradually gathered themselves together in the lower lands, and left the mountains bare. And still the light kept increasing, and the period was again subdivided into evening and morning.

And why does the record, in each case, tell us that the evening and the morning "constituted the day, instead of the morning and the evening? The answer is plain:--mankind were steadily advancing from darkness to light; each stage terminating in greater clearness and brightness; they were moving steadily forward to the perfect dawn. And it is a curious fact that the Israelites, even now, commence the day with the period of darkness: they begin their Sabbath on Friday at sunset.

The third subdivision was that in which the continents cleared themselves more and more of the floods, and the increasing light and warmth called forth grass and the trees, and clothed nature in a mantle of green. Man had come out of his cave, and there were scattered remnants of the animal kingdom here and there, but the world, in the main, was manless and lifeless--a scene of waste and desolation.

In the fourth subdivision of time, the sun, moon, and stars appeared;--dimly, and wrapped in clouds, in the evening; clearer and brighter in the morning.

In the next subdivision of time, the fish, which spawn by the million, and the birds, which quadruple their numbers in a year, began to multiply and scatter themselves, and appear everywhere through the waters and on the land. And still the light kept increasing, and "the evening and the morning were the fifth day."

And on the sixth day, man and the animals, slower to increase, and requiring a longer period to reach maturity, began to spread and show themselves everywhere on the face of the earth.

There was a long interval before man sent out his colonies and repossessed the desolated continents. In Europe, as I have shown, twelve feet of stalagmite intervenes in the caves between the remains of pre-glacial and post-glacial man. As this deposit forms at a very slow rate, it indicates that, for long ages after the great destruction, man did not dwell in Europe. Slowly, "like a great blot that spreads," the race expanded again over its ancient bunting-grounds.

And still the skies grew brighter, the storms grew less, the earth grew warmer, and "the evening and the morning" constituted the sixth subdivision of time.

And this process is still going on. Mr. James Geikie says:

"We are sure of this, that since the deposition of the shelly clays, and the disappearance of the latest local glaciers, there have been no oscillations, but only a gradual amelioration of climate." [1]

The world, like Milton's lion, is still trying to disengage its binder limbs from the superincumbent weight of the Drift. Every snow-storm, every chilling blast that blows out from the frozen lips of the icy North, is but a reminiscence of Ragnarok.

But the great cosmical catastrophe was substantially over with the close of the sixth day. We are now in the seventh day. The darkness has gone; the sun has come back; the waters have returned to their bounds; vegetation has resumed its place; the fish, the birds, the animals, men, are once more populous in ocean, air, and on the land; the comet is gone, and the orderly processes of nature are around us, and God is "resting" from the great task of restoring his afflicted world.

The necessity for some such interpretation as this was apparent to the early fathers of the Christian Church, although they possessed no theory of a. comet. St. Basil, St. Carius, and Origen, long before any such theory was dreamed of, argued that the sun, moon, and stars existed from the beginning, but that they did not appear until the fourth day. "Who," says Origen, "that has sense, can think that the first, second, and third days were without sun, moon, or stars?"

But where were they? Why did they not appear? What obscured them?

What could obscure them but dense clouds? Where did the clouds come from? They were vaporized water. What vaporized the water and caused this darkness on the face of the deep, so dense that the sun, moon, and stars did not appear until the world had clothed itself

[1. "The Great Ice Age," p. 438.]

again in vegetation? Tremendous heat. Where did the heat come from? If it was not caused by contact with a comet, what was it? And if it was not caused by contact with a comet, how do you explain the blazing sword at the gate of Eden; the fire falling from heaven on "the cities of the plain"; and the fire that fell on Job's sheep and camels and consumed them; and that drove Job to clamber by ropes down into the narrow-mouthed bottomless cave; where he tells us of the leviathan, the twisted, the undulating one, that cast down stones in the mire, and made the angels in heaven to tremble, and the deep to boil like a pot? And is it not more reasonable to suppose that this sublime religious poem, called the Book of Job, represents the exaltation of the human soul under the stress of the greatest calamity our race has ever endured, than to believe that it is simply a record of the sufferings of some obscure Arab chief from a loathsome disease? Surely inspiration should reach us through a different channel; and there should be some proportion between the grandeur of the thoughts and the dignity of the events which produced them.

And if Origen is right, and it is absurd to suppose that the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the third day, then the sacred text is dislocated, transposed; and the second chapter narrates events which really occurred before those mentioned in the first chapter; and the "darkness" is something which came millions of years after that "Beginning," in which God made the earth, and the heavens, and all the host of them.

In conclusion, let us observe how fully the Bible record accords with the statements of the Druidical, Hindoo, Scandinavian, and other legends, and with the great unwritten theory which underlies all our religion. Here we have:

1. The Golden Age; the Paradise.

2. The universal moral degeneracy of mankind; the age of crime and violence.

3. God's vengeance.

4. The serpent; the fire from heaven.

5. The cave-life and the darkness.

6. The cold; the struggle to live.

7. The "Fall of Man," from virtue to vice; from plenty to poverty; from civilization to barbarism; from the Tertiary to the Drift; from Eden to the gravel.

8. Reconstruction and regeneration.

Can all this be accident? Can all this mean nothing?

• September 19, 2011
• 0
• Published in Ragnarok
• Written by LC Geerts

The Legends ch. 11, THE ARABIAN MYTHS

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER XI

THE ARABIAN MYTHS

AND when we turn to the Arabian tales, we not only see, by their identity with the Hindoo and Slavonic legends, that they are of great antiquity, dating back to the time when these widely diverse races, Aryan and Semitic, were one, but we find in them many allusions to the battle between good and evil, between God and the serpent.

Abou Mohammed the Lazy, who is a very great magician, with power over the forces of the air and the Afrites, beholds a battle between two great snakes, one tawny-colored, the other white. The tawny serpent is overcoming the white one; but Abou Mohammed kills it with a rock. "The white serpent" (the sun) "departed and was absent for a while, but returned"; and the tawny serpent was torn to pieces and scattered over the land, and nothing remained of her but her head.

And then we have the legend of "the City of Brass," or bronze. It relates to "an ancient age and period in the olden time." One of the caliphs, Abdelmelik, the son of Marwan, has heard from antiquity that Solomon, (Solomon is, in Arabic, like Charlemagne in the middle-age myths of Europe, the synonym for everything venerable and powerful,) had imprisoned genii in bottles of brass, and the Caliph desired to procure some of these bottles.

Then Talib (the son of Sahl) tells the Caliph that a man once voyaged to the Island of Sicily, but a wind arose and blew him away "to one of the lands of God."

"This happened during the black darkness of night."

It was a remote, unfrequented land; the people were black and lived in caves, and were naked and of strange speech. They cast their nets for Talib and brought up a bottle of brass or bronze, containing one of the imprisoned genii, who came out of it, as a blue smoke, and cried in a horrible voice, "Repentance, repentance, O prophet of God!"

All this was in a Western land. And Abdelmelik sent Talib to find this land. It was "a journey of two years and some months going, and the like returning." It was in a far country. They first reach a deserted palace in a desolate land, the palace of "Kosh the son of Sheddad the son of Ad, the greater." He read an inscription:

"Here was a people, whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion.

"And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust.

"Death hath destroyed them and disunited them, and in the dust they have lost what they amassed."

Talib goes on with his troops, until they come to a great pillar of black stone, sunk into which, to his armpits, was a mighty creature; "he had two wings and four arms; two of them like those of the sons of Adam, and two like the fore-legs of lions with claws. He had hair upon his head like the tails of horses, and two eyes like two burning coals, and he had a third eye in his forehead, like the eye of the lynx, from which there appeared sparks of fire."

He was the imprisoned comet-monster, and these arms and eyes, darting fire, remind us of the description given of the apostate angel in the other legends:



THE AFRITE IN THE PILLAR.

"He was tall and black; and he was crying out 'Extolled be the perfection of my Lord, who hath appointed me this severe affliction and painful torture until the day of resurrection!'"

The party of Talib were stupefied at the sight and retreated in fright. And the wise man, the Sheik Abdelsamad, one of the party, drew near and asked the imprisoned monster his history. And he replied:

"I am an Afrite of the genii, and my name is Dahish, the son of Elamash, and I am restrained here by the majesty of God.

"There belonged to one of the sons of Eblis an idol of red carnelian, of which I was made guardian; and there used to worship it one of the kings of the sea, of illustrious dignity, of great glory, leading, among his troops of the genii, a million warriors who smote with swords before him, and who answered his prayer in cases of difficulty. These genii, who obeyed him, were under my command and authority, following my words when I ordered them: all of them were in rebellion against Solomon the son of David (on both of whom be peace!), and I used to enter the body of the idol, to command them and to forbid them."

Solomon sent word to this king of the sea that he must give up the worship of the idol of red carnelian; the king consulted the idol, and this Afrite, speaking through the idol, encouraged the king to refuse. What,--he said to him,--can Solomon do to thee, "when thou art in the midst of this great sea?" And so Solomon came to compel the island-race to worship the true God; he surrounded his island, and filled the land with his troops, assisted by birds and wild beasts, and a dreadful battle followed in the air:

"After this they came upon us all together, and we contended with him in a wide tract for a period of two days; and calamity befell us on the third day, and the decree of God (whose name be exalted!) was executed among us. The first who charged upon Solomon were I and my troops: and I said to my companions, 'Keep in your places in the battle-field while I go forth to them and challenge Dimiriat."' (Dimiriat was the Sun, the bright one.) "And lo, he came forth, like a great mountain, his fires flaming and his smoke ascending; and he approached and smote me with a flaming fire; and his arrow prevailed over my fire. He cried out at me with a prodigious cry, so that I imagined the heaven had fallen and closed over me, and the mountains shook at his voice.



DAHISH OVERTAKEN BY DIMIRIAT.

Then he commanded his companions, and they charged upon us all together: we also charged upon them, and we cried out one to another: the fires rose and the smoke ascended, the hearts of the combatants were almost cleft asunder, and the battle raged. The birds fought in the air, and the wild beasts in the dust; and I contended with Dimiriat until he wearied me and I wearied him; after which I became weak, and my companions and troops were enervated and my tribes were routed."

The birds tore out the eyes of the demons, and cut them in pieces until the earth was covered with the fragments, like the trunks of palm-trees. "As for me, I flew from before Dimiriat, but he followed me a journey of three months until he overtook me." And Solomon hollowed out the black pillar, and sealed him in it with his signet, and chained him until the day of resurrection.

And Talib and his party go on still farther, and find "the City of Brass," a weird, mysterious, lost city, in a desolate land; silent, and all its people dead; a city once of high civilization, with mighty, brazen walls and vast machinery and great mysteries; a city whose inhabitants had perished suddenly in some great calamity. And on the walls were tablets, and on one of them were inscribed these solemn words:

"'Where are the kings and the peoples of the earth? They have quitted that which they have built and peopled. And in the grave they are pledged for their past actions. There, after destruction, they have become putrid corpses. Where are the troops? They repelled not nor profited. And where is that which they collected and boarded? The decree of the Lord of the Throne surprised them. Neither riches nor refuge saved them from it.'

"And they saw the merchants dead in their shops; their skins were dried, and their bones were carious, and they had become examples to him who would be admonished."

Everywhere were the dead, "lying upon skins, and appearing almost as if they would speak."

Their death seems to have been due to a long period of terrible heat and drought.

On a couch was a damsel more beautiful than all the daughters of Adam; she was embalmed, so as to preserve all her charms. Her eyes were of glass, filled with quicksilver, which seemed to follow the beholder's every motion. Near her was a tablet of gold, on which was inscribed:

"In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.... the Lord of lords, the Cause of causes; the Everlasting, the Eternal. . . . Where are the kings of the regions of the earth" Where are the Amalekites? Where are the mighty monarchs? The mansions are void of their presence, and they have quitted their families and homes. Where are the kings of the foreigners and the Arabs? They have all died and become rotten bones. Where are the lords of high degree? They have all died. Where are Korah and Haman? Where is Sheddad, the son of Add? Where are Canaan and Pharaoh? God hath cut them off, and it is he who cutteth short the lives of mankind, and he hath made the mansions to be void for their presence. . . . I am Tadmor, the daughter of the king of the Amalekites, of those who ruled the countries with equity: I possessed what none of the kings possessed," (i. e., in extent of dominion,) "and ruled with justice, and acted impartially toward my subjects; I gave and bestowed; and I lived a longtime in the enjoyment of happiness and an easy life, and emancipated both female and male slaves. Thus I did until the summoner of death came, and disasters occurred before me. And the cause was this: Seven years in succession came upon us, during which no water descended on us from heaven, nor did any grass grow for us on the face of the earth. So we ate what food we had in our dwellings, and after that we fell upon the beasts and ate, and there remained nothing. Upon this, therefore, I caused the wealth to be brought, and meted it with a measure, and sent it, by trusty men, who went about with it through all regions, not leaving unvisited a single large city, to seek for some food. But they found it not, and they returned to us with the wealth after a long absence. So, thereupon we exposed to view our riches and our treasures, locked the gates of the fortresses in our city, and submitted ourselves to the decrees of our Lord; and thus we all died, as thou beholdest, and left what we had built and what we had treasured."

And this strange tale has relations to all the other legends.

Here we have the great demon, darting fire, blazing, smoking, the destructive one; the rebel against the good God. He is overthrown by the bright-shining one, Dimiriat, the same as the Dev-Mrityu of the Hindoos; he and his forces are cut to pieces, and scattered over the land, and he, after being chased for months through space, is captured and chained. Associated with all this is a people of the Bronze Age--a highly civilized people; a people living on an island in the Western Sea, who perished by a calamity which came on them suddenly; "a summoner of death" came and brought disasters; and then followed a long period of terrible heat and drought, in which not they alone, but all nations and cities, were starved by the drying up of the earth. The demon had devoured the cows-the clouds; like Cacus, he had dragged them backward into his den, and no Hercules, no Indra, had arisen to hurl the electric bolt that was to kill the heat, restore the clouds, and bring upon the parched earth the grateful rain. And so this Bronze-Age race spread out their useless treasures to the sun, and, despite their miseries, they praise the God of gods, the Cause of causes, the merciful, the compassionate, and lie down to die.

And in the evil-one, captured and chained and sealed by Solomon, we seem to have the same thing prefigured in Revelation, xx, 2:

"2. And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.

"3. And he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should no more seduce the nations."

• September 19, 2011
• 0
• Published in Ragnarok
• Written by LC Geerts

The Legends ch. 10, THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL

RAGNAROK

THE AGE OF FIRE AND GRAVEL.

BY

IGNATIUS DONNELLY

AUTHOR OF "ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD."

[1883]

PART III

The Legends

CHAPTER X

THE FALL OF THE CLAY AND GRAVEL

I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably to the fact that the earth, in some remote age--before the Polynesians, Red-men, Europeans, and Asiatics had separated, or been developed as varieties out of one family--met with a tremendous catastrophe; that a conflagration raged over parts of its surface; that mankind took refuge in the caves of the earth, whence they afterward emerged to wander for a long time, in great poverty and hardships, during a period of darkness; and that finally this darkness dispersed, and the sun shone again in the heavens.

I do not see how the reader can avoid these conclusions.

There are but two alternatives before him: he must either suppose that all this concatenation of legends is the outgrowth of a prodigious primeval lie, or he must concede that it describes some event which really happened.

To adopt the theory of a great race-lie, originating at the beginning of human history, is difficult, inasmuch as these legends do not tell the same story in anything like the same way, as would have been the case had they all originated in the first instance from the same mind. While we have the conflagration in some of the legends, it has been dropped out of others; in one it is caused by the sun; in another by the demon; in another by the moon; in one Phaon produced it by driving the sun out of its course; while there are a whole body of legends in which it is the result of catching the sun in a noose. So with the stories of the cave-life. In some, men seek the caves to escape the conflagration; in others, their race began in the caves. In like manner the age of darkness is in some cases produced by the clouds; in others by the death of the sun. Again, in tropical regions the myth turns upon a period of terrible heat when there were neither clouds nor rain; when some demon had stolen the clouds or dragged them into his cave: while in more northern regions the horrible age of ice and cold and snow seems to have made the most distinct impression on the memory of mankind. In some of the myths the comet is a god; in others a demon; in others a serpent; in others a feathered serpent; in others a dragon; in others a giant; in others a bird in others a wolf; in others a dog; in still others a boar.

The legends coincide only in these facts:--the monster in the air; the heat; the fire; the cave-life; the darkness; the return of the light.

In everything else they differ.

Surely, a falsehood, springing out of one mind, would have been more consistent in its parts than this.

The legends seem to represent the diverging memories which separating races carried down to posterity of the same awful and impressive events: they remembered them in fragments and sections, and described them as the four blind men in the Hindoo story described the elephant;--to one it was a tail, to another a trunk, to another a leg, to another a body;--it needs to put all their stories together to make a consistent whole. We can not understand the conflagration without the comet; or the cave-life without both; or the age of darkness without something that filled the heavens with clouds; or the victory of the sun without the clouds, and the previous obscuration of the sun.

If the reader takes the other alternative, that these legends are not fragments of a colossal falsehood, then he must concede that the earth, since man inhabited it, encountered a comet. No other cause or event could produce such a series of gigantic consequences as is here narrated.

But one other question remains: Did the Drift material come from the comet?

It could have resulted from the comet in two ways: either it was a part of the comet's substance falling upon our planet at the moment of contact; or it may have been torn from the earth itself by the force of the comet, precisely as it has been supposed that it was produced by the ice.

The final solution of this question can only be reached when close and extensive examination of the Drift deposits have been made to ascertain how far they are of earth-origin.

And here it must be remembered that the matter which composes our earth and the other planets and the comets was probably all cast out from the same source, the sun, and hence a uniformity runs through it all. Humboldt says:

"We are 'astonished at being able to touch, weigh, and chemically decompose metallic and earthy masses which belong to the outer world, to celestial space'; to find in them the minerals of our native earth, making it probable, as the great Newton conjectured, that the materials which belong to one group of cosmical bodies are for the most part the same."[1]

[1. "Cosmos," vol. iv, p. 206.]

Some aolites are composed of finely granular tissue of olivine, augite, and labradorite blended together (as the meteoric stone found at Duvets, in the department de l'Ardhe, France):

"These bodies contain, for instance, crystalline substances, perfectly similar to those of our earth's crust; and in the Siberian mass of meteoric iron, investigated by Pallas, the olivine only differs from common olivine by the absence of nickel, which is replaced by oxide of tin."

Neither is it true that all meteoric stones are of iron. Humboldt refers to the aolites of Siena, "in which the iron scarcely amounts to two per cent, or the earthy aolite of Alais, (in the department du Gard, France,) which broke up in the water," (clay?); "or, lastly, those from Jonzac and Juvenas, which contained no metallic iron."

Who shall say what chemical changes may take place in remnants of the comet floating for thousands of years through space, and now falling to our earth? And who shall say that the material of all comets assumes the same form?

I can not but continue to think, however, until thorough scientific investigation disproves the theory, that the cosmical granite-dust which, mixed with water, became clay, and which covers so large a part of the world, we might say one half the earth-surface of the planet, and possibly also the gravel and striated stones, fell to the earth from the comet.

It is a startling and tremendous conception, but we are dealing with startling and tremendous facts. Even though we dismiss the theory as impossible, we still find ourselves face to face with the question, Where, then, did these continental masses of matter come from?

I think the reader will agree with me that the theory of the glacialists, that a world-infolding ice-sheet produced them, is impossible; to reiterate, they are found, (on the equator,) where the ice-sheet could not have been without ending all terrestrial life; and they are not found where the ice must have been, in Siberia and Northwestern America, if ice was anywhere.

If neither ice nor water ground up the earth-surface into the Drift, then we must conclude that the comet so ground it up, or brought the materials with it already ground up.

The probability is, that both of these suppositions are in part true; the comet brought down upon the earth the clay-dust and part of the gravel and bowlders; while the awful force it exerted, meeting the earth while moving at the rate of a million miles an hour, smashed the surface-rocks, tore them to pieces, ground them up and mixed the material with its own, and deposited all together on the heated surface of the earth, where the lower part was baked by the heat into "till" or "hardpan," while the rushing cyclones deposited the other material in partly stratified masses or drifts above it; and part of this in time was rearranged by the great floods which followed the condensation of the cloud-masses into rain and snow, in the period of the River or Champlain Drift.

Nothing can be clearer than that the inhabitants of the earth believed that the stones fell from heaven--to wit, from the comet. But it would be unsafe to base a theory upon such a belief, inasmuch as stones, and even fish and toads, taken up by hurricanes, have often fallen again in showers; and they would appear to an uncritical population to have fallen from heaven. But it is, at least, clear that the fall of the stones and the clay are associated in the legends with the time of the great catastrophe; they are part of the same terrible event.

I shall briefly recapitulate some of the evidence.

The Mattoles, an Indian tribe of Northern California, have this legend:

"As to the creation, they teach that a certain Big Man began by making the naked earth, silent and bleak, with nothing of plant or animal thereon, save one Indian, who roamed about in a wofully hungry and desolate state. Suddenly there arose a terrible whirlwind, the air grew dark and thick with dust and drifting sand, and the Indian fell upon his face in sore dread. Then there came a great calm, and the man rose and looked, and lo, all the earth was perfect and peopled; the grass and the trees were green on every plain and hill; the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, the creeping things, the things that swim, moved everywhere in his sight." [1]

Here, as often happens, the impressive facts are remembered, but in a disarranged chronological order. There came a whirlwind, thick with dust, the clay-dust, and drifting sand and gravel. It left the world naked and lifeless, "silent and bleak"; only one Indian remained, and he was dreadfully hungry. But after a time all this catastrophe passed away, and the earth was once more populous and beautiful.

In the Peruvian legends, Apocatequil was the great god who saved them from the powers of the darkness. He restored the light. He produced the lightning by hurling stones with his sling. The thunder-bolts are small, round, smooth stones. [2]

The stone-worship, which played so large a part in antiquity, was doubtless due to the belief that many of the stones of the earth had fallen from heaven. Dr. Schwarz,

[1. Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 86.

2. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 165.]

of Berlin, has shown that the lightning was associated in popular legends with the serpent.

"When the lightning kindles the woods it is associated with the descent of fire from heaven, and, as in popular imagination, where it falls it scatters the thunderbolts in all directions, the flint-stones, which flash when struck, were supposed to be these fragments, and gave rise to the stone-worship so frequent in the old world." [1]

In Europe, in old times, the bowlders were called devil-stones; they were supposed. to have originated from "the malevolent agency of man's spiritual foes." This was a reminiscence of their real source.

The reader will see (page 173, ante) that the Iroquois legends represent the great battle between the White One, the sun, and the Dark One, the comet. The Dark One was wounded to death, and, as it fled for life, "the blood gushed from him at every step, and as it fell turned into flint-stones."

Here we have the red clay and the gravel both represented.

Among the Central Americans the flints were associated with Hurakan, Haokah, and Tlaloe {Tlaloc?--jbh}, the gods of storm and thunder:

"The thunder-bolts, as elsewhere, were believed to be flints, and thus, as the emblem of the fire and the storm, this stone figures conspicuously in their myths. Tohil, the god who gave the Quiches fire by shaking his sandals, was represented by a flint-stone. Such a stone, in the beginning of things, fell from heaven to earth, and broke into sixteen hundred pieces, each of which sprang up a god. . . . This is the germ of the adoration of stones as emblems of the fecundating rains. This is why, for example) the Navajos use, as their charm for rain, certain

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 117.]

long, round stones, which they think fall from the cloud when it thunders." [1]

In the Algonquin legends of Manibozho, or Manobosbu, or Nanabojou, the great ancestor of all the Algic tribes, the hero man-god, we learn, had a terrific battle with "his brother Chakekenapok, the flint-stone, whom he broke in pieces, and scattered over the land, and changed his entrails into fruitful vines. The conflict was long and terrible. The face of nature was desolated as by a tornado, and the gigantic bowlders and loose rocks found on the prairies are the missiles hurled by the mighty combatants." [2]

We read in the Ute legends, given on page ---, ante, that when the magical arrow of Ta-wats "struck the sun-god full in the face, the sun was shivered into a thousand fragments, which fell to the earth, causing a general conflagration."[3]

Here we have the same reference to matter falling on the earth from the heavens, associated with devouring fire. And we have the same sequence of events, for we learn that when all of Ta-wats was consumed but the head, "his tears gushed forth in a flood, which spread over the earth and extinguished the fires."

The Aleuts of the Aleutian Archipelago have a tradition that a certain Old Man, called Traghdadakh, created men "by casting stones on the earth; he flung also other stones into the air, the water, and over the land, thus making beasts, birds, and fishes." [4]

It is a general belief in many races that the stone axes and celts fell from the heavens. In Japan, the stone

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 170.

2. Ibid., p. 181.

3. Major J. W. Powell, "Popular Science Monthly," 1879, p. 799.

4 Bancroft's "Native Races," vol. iii, p. 104.]

arrow-heads are rained from heaven by the flying spirits, who shoot them. Similar beliefs are found in Brittany, in Madagascar, Ireland, Brazil, China, the Shetlands, Scotland, Portugal, etc. [1]

In the legends of Quetzalcoatl, the central figure of the Toltec mythology, we have a white man--a bearded man--from an eastern land, mixed up with something more than man. He was the Bird-serpent, that is, the winged or flying serpent, the great snake of the air, the son of Iztac Mixcoatl, "the white-cloud serpent, the spirit of the tornado." [2]He created the world. He was overcome by Tezcatlipoca, the spirit of the night.

"When he would promulgate his decrees, his herald proclaimed them from Tzatzitepec, the hill of shouting, with such a mighty voice that it could be heard a hundred leagues around. The arrows which he shot transfixed great trees; the stones he threw leveled forests; and when he laid his hands on the rocks the mark was indelible." [3]

"His symbols were the bird, the serpent, the cross, and the flint."[4]

In the Aztec calendar the sign for the age of fire is the flint.

In the Chinese Encyclopia of the Emperor Kang-hi, 1662, we are told:

"In traveling from the shores of the Eastern Sea toward Che-lu, neither brooks nor ponds are met with in the country, although it is intersected by mountains and valleys. Nevertheless, there are found in the sand, very far away from the sea, oyster-shells and the shields of crabs. The tradition of the Mongols who inhabit the country is, that it has been said from time immemorial that in a

[1. Tyler's "Early Mankind," p. 224.

2. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 197.

3. Ibid., p. 197.

4. Ibid., p. 198.]

remote antiquity the waters of the deluge flooded the district, and when they retired the places where they had been made their appearance covered with sand. . . . This is why these deserts are called the 'Sandy Sea,' which indicates that they were not always covered with sand and gravel." [1]

In the Russian legends, a "golden ship sails across the heavenly sea; it breaks into fragments, which neither princes nor people can put together again,"--reminding one of Humpty-Dumpty, in the nursery-song, who, when he fell from his elevated position on the wall--

"Not all the king's horses,
Nor all the king's men,
Can ever make whole again."

In another Russian legend, Perun, the thunder-god, destroys the devils with stone hammers. On Ilya's day, the peasants offer him a roasted animal, which is cut up and scattered over the fields, [2]just as we have seen the great dragon or serpent cut to pieces and scattered over the world.

Mr. Christy found at Bou-Merzoug, on the plateau of the Atlas, in Northern Africa, in a bare, deserted, stony place among the mountains, a collection of fifteen hundred tombs, made of rude limestone slabs, set up with one slab to form a roof, so as to make perfect dolmens--closed chambers--where the bodies were packed in.

"Tradition says that a wicked people lived there, and for their sins stones were rained upon them from heaven; so they built these chambers to creep into." [3]

In addition to the legend of "Phaon," already given, Ovid derived from the legends of his race another story,

[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 328.

2. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 400.

3. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 222.]

which seems to have had reference to the same event. He says (Fable XI):

"After the men who came from the Tyrian nation had touched this grove with ill-fated steps, and the urn let down into the water made a splash, the azure dragon stretched forth his head from the deep cave, and uttered dreadful hissings."

We are reminded of the flying monster of Hesiod, which roared and hissed so terribly.

Ovid continues:

"The urns dropped from their hands, and the blood left their bodies, and a sudden trembling seized their astonished limbs. He wreathes his scaly orbs in rolling spirals, and, with a spring, becomes twisted into mighty folds; and, uprearing himself from below the middle into the light air, he looks down upon all the grove, and is of" (as) "large size, as, if you were to look on him entire, the serpent which separates the two Bears" (the constellations).

He slays the Phnicians; "some he kills with his sting, some with his long folds, some breathed upon by the venom of his baleful poison."

Cadmus casts a huge stone, as big as a millstone, against him, but it falls harmless upon his scales, "that were like a coat-of-mail"; then Cadmus pierced him with his spear. In his fall he crushes the forests; the blood flows from his poisonous palate and changes the color of the grass. He is slain.

Then, under the advice of Pallas, Cadmus sows the earth with the dragon's teeth, "under the earth turned up, as the seeds of a future people." Afterward, the earth begins to move, and armed men rise up; they slay Cadmus, and then fight with and slay each other.

This seems to be a recollection of the comet, and the stones falling from heaven; and upon the land so afflicted subsequently a warlike and aggressive and quarrelsome race of men springs up.

In the contest of Hercules with the Lygians, on the road from Caucasus to the Hesperides, "there is an attempt to explain mythically the origin of the round quartz blocks in the Lygian field of stones, at the mouth of the Rhe." [1]

In the "Prometheus Delivered" of echylus, Jupiter draws together a cloud, and causes "the district round about to be covered with a shower of round stones." [2]

The legends of Europe refer to a race buried under sand and earth:

"The inhabitants of Central Europe and Teutonic races who came late to England, place their mythical heroes under ground in caves, in vaults beneath enchanted castles, or in mounds which open and show their buried inhabitants alive and busy about the avocations of earthly men. . . . In Morayshire the buried race are supposed to have been buried under the sand-hills, as they are in some parts of Brittany." [3]

Turning again to America, we find, in the great prayer of the Aztecs to Tezcalipoca, {Tezcatlipoca--jbh} given on page 186, ante, many references to some material substances falling from heaven; we read:

"Thine anger and indignation has descended upon us in these days, . . . coming down even as stones, spears, and darts upon the wretches that inhabit the earth; this is the pestilence by which we are afflicted and almost destroyed." The children die, "broken and dashed to pieces as against stones and a wall. . . . Thine anger and thy indignation does it delight in hurling the stone and arrow and spear. The grinders of thy teeth" (the dragon's teeth of Ovid?) "are employed, and thy bitter whips upon the miserable of

[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 115.

2. Ibid., p. 115.

3. "Frost and Fire," vol. ii, p. 190.]

thy people.... Hast thou verily determined that it utterly perish; . . . that the peopled place become a wooded hill and a wilderness of stones? . . . Is there to be no mercy nor pity for us until the arrows of thy fury are spent? . . . Thine arrows and stones have sorely hurt this poor people."

In the legend of the Indians of Lake Tahoe (see page 168, ante), we are told that the stars were melted by the great conflagration, and they rained down molten metal upon the earth.

In the Hindoo legend (see page 171, ante) of the great battle between Rama, the sun-god, and Ravana, the evil one, Rama persuaded the monkeys to help him build a bridge to the Island of Lanka, "and the stones which crop out through Southern India are said to have been dropped by the monkey builders."

In the legend of the Tupi Indians (see page 175, ante), we are told that God "swept about the fire in such way that in some places he raised mountains and in others dug valleys."

In the Bible we have distinct references to the fall of matter from heaven. In Deuteronomy (chap. xxviii), among the consequences which are to follow disobedience of God's will, we have the following:

"22. The Lord shall smite thee . . . with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish.

"23. And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.

"24. The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from. heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. . . .

"29. And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness."

And even that marvelous event, so much mocked at by modern thought, the standing-still of the sun, at the command of Joshua, may be, after all, a reminiscence of the catastrophe of the Drift. In the American legends, we read that the sun stood still, and Ovid tells us that "a day was lost." Who shall say what circumstances accompanied an event great enough to crack the globe itself into immense fissures? It is, at least, a curious fact that in Joshua (chap. x) the standing-still of the sun was accompanied by a fall of stones from heaven by which multitudes were slain.

Here is the record

"11. And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: there were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword."

"13. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.

"14. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel."

The "book of Jasher" was, we are told, a very ancient work, long since lost. Is it not possible that a great, dim memory of a terrible event was applied by tradition to the mighty captain of the Jews, just as the doings of Zeus have been attributed, in the folk-lore of Europe, to Charlemagne and Barbarossa?

If the contact of Lexell's comet with the earth would, as shown on page 84, ante, have increased the length of the sidereal year three hours, what effect might not a comet, many times larger than the mass of the earth, have had upon the revolution of the earth? Were the heat, the conflagrations, and the tearing up of the earth's surface caused by such an arrestment or partial slowing-up of the earth's revolution on its axis?

I do not propound these questions as any part of my theory, but merely as suggestions. The American and Polynesian legends represent that the catastrophe increased the length of the days. This may mean nothing, or a great deal. At least, Joshua's legend may yet take its place among the scientific possibilities.

But it is in the legend of the Toltecs of Central America, as preserved in one of the sacred books of the race, the "Codex Chimalpopoca," that we find the clearest and most indisputable references to the fall of gravel (see page 166, ante):

"'The third sun' (or era) 'is called Quia-Tonatiuh, sun of rain, because there fell a rain of fire; all which existed burned; and there fell a rain of gravel.'

"'They also narrate that while the sandstone which we now see scattered about, and the tetzontli' (amygdaloide poreuse, basalt, trap-rocks) 'boiled with great tumult, there also arose the rocks of vermilion color.'

"'Now this was in the year Ce Tecpatl, One Flint, it was the day Nahui-Quiahuitl, Fourth Rain. Now, in this day in which men were lost and destroyed in a rain of fire, they were transformed into goslings.'" [1]

We find also many allusions in the legends to the clay.

When the Navajos climbed up from their cave they found the earth covered with clay into which they sank mid-leg deep; and when the water ran off it left the whole world full of mud.

In the Creek and Seminole legends the Great Spirit made the first man, in the primeval cave, "from the clay around him."

[1. "North Americans of Antiquity," p. 499.]

Sanchoniathon, from the other side of the world, tells us, in the Phnician legends (see page 209, ante), that first came chaos, and out of chaos was generated m or mud.

In the Miztec (American) legends (see page 214, ante), we are told that in the Age of Darkness there was "nothing but mud and slime on all the face of the earth."

In the Quiche legends we are told that the first men were destroyed by fire and pitch from heaven.

In the Quiche legends we also have many allusions to the wet and muddy condition of the earth before the returning sun dried it up.

In the legends of the North American Indians we read that the earth was covered with great heaps of ashes; doubtless the fine, dry powder of the clay looked like ashes before the water fell upon it.

There is another curious fact to be considered in connection with these legends--that the calamity seems to have brought with it some compensating wealth.

Thus we find Beowulf, when destroyed by the midnight monster, rejoicing to think that his people would receive a treasure, a fortune by the monster's death.

Hence we have a whole mass of legends wherein a dragon or great serpent is associated with a precious horde of gold or jewels.

"The Scythians had a saga of the sacred gold which fell burning from heaven. The ancients had also some strange fictions of silver which fell from heaven, and with which it had been attempted, under the Emperor Severus, to cover bronze coins."[1]

"In Peru the god of riches was worshiped under the image of a rattlesnake, horned and hairy, with a tail of gold. It was said to have descended from the heavens in

[1. "Cosmos," vol. i, p. 115.]

the sight of all the people, and to have been seen by the whole army of the Inca." [1]

The Peruvians--probably in reference to this event--chose as their arms two serpents with their tails interlaced.

Among the Greeks and ancient Germans the fiery dragon was the dispenser of riches, and "watches a treasure in the earth." [2]

These legends may be explained by the fact that in the Ural Mountains, on the east of Europe, in South America, in South Africa, and in other localities, the Drift gravels contain gold and precious stones.

The diamond is found in drift-gravels alone. It is pure carbon crystallized. Man has been unable to reproduce it, except in minute particles; nor can he tell in what laboratory of nature it has been fabricated. It is not found in situ in any of the rocks of an earth-origin. Has it been formed in space? Is it an outcome of that pure carbon which the spectroscope has revealed to us as burning in some of the comets?

[1. Brinton's "Myths of the New World," p. 125.

2. Ibid., p. 125.]

• September 19, 2011
• 0
• Published in Ragnarok
• Written by LC Geerts