The Eliminator; or, Skeleton Keys to Sacerdotal Secrets

Let us now merely glance at some other Old-Testament fables.

Noah and his Deluge are mainly mythical, as this story is almost a literal copy of the Chaldean, though found substantially in the writings of many other nations. It readily fits the allegorical method of interpretation in almost every particular. The Chaldean account as written by Berosus, and found recently by the late George Smith of the British Museum on the clay tablets, is so much like the story in Genesis that the latter must have been copied from the former; and the slight variations in the two narratives are no greater than might have been expected as between Chaldea and Palestine. The Jews obtained it from Babylon, as there is no mention made of this miracle in any book of the Bible written before the Captivity. The books of Psalms, Proverbs, Chronicles, Judges, Kings, etc. are silent on this subject. Josephus defended the Noachian Deluge on the sole ground that an account of it was held by the Chaldeans, never pretending that the Chaldean account was taken from the Jewish record.

But it is useless to dwell on the story of a universal deluge of water. It is in the light of modern science physically impossible and absurd; and such men as Buckland, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, and Hitchcock, with many other distinguished Christian scientists, give up the doctrine of a universal deluge while claiming a partial one. And here, again, the ancient astronomy comes in with an explanation of partial floods of waters by the natural results of the “precession of the equinoxes,” in which, at certain periods during the change of the polar axis of the earth, great physical convulsions must follow, with wide eruptions of water, making a partial overflow and suggesting the idea of a universal deluge. Four such cataclysms must have occurred while the sun was making one journey through the twelve zodiacal constellations. Prof. Huxley has recently well said: “But the voice of archæology and historical criticism still has to be heard, and it gives forth no uncertain sound. The marvellous recovery of the records of an antiquity far superior to any that can be ascribed to the Pentateuch, which has been effected by the decipherers of cuneiform characters, has put us in possession of a series once more, not of speculations, but of facts, which has a most remarkable bearing upon the question of the trustworthiness of the narrative of the Flood. It is established that for centuries before the asserted migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees (which, according to the orthodox interpreters of the Pentateuch, took place after the year 2000 b. c.) Lower Mesopotamia was the seat of a civilization in which art and science and literature had attained a development formerly unsuspected, or, if there were faint reports of it, treated as fabulous. And it is also no matter of speculation, but a fact, that the libraries of this people contain versions of a long epic poem, one of the twelve books of which tells the story of a deluge which in a number of its leading features corresponds to the story attributed to Berosus, no less than with the story given in Genesis, with curious exactnesss.

“Looking at the convergence of all these lines of evidence leads to the one conclusion—that the story of the Flood in Genesis is merely a version of one of the oldest pieces of purely fictitious literature extant; that whether this is or is not its origin, the events asserted in it to have taken place assuredly never did take place; further, that in point of fact the story in the plain and logically necessary sense of its words has long since been given up by orthodox and conservative commentators of the Established Church.”

The only rational interpretation of the extraordinary stories of the Pentateuch and other scriptures is to regard them as mythical and allegorical, borrowed from the astrological systems of more ancient peoples. It is very difficult to present within the limits here allowed what has grown into ponderous volumes in elucidating the matter in hand.

The story of Jonah and the Fish, taken as a literal story, is incredible, though the notorious Brooklyn preacher thinks that it must be literally true, as that God might have so diluted the gastric juice in the stomach of the fish as to make Jonah quite indigestible! This whole story is found in earlier pagan writings, and is fully explained by the astronomical phenomena. The earth is a huge fish in the ancient mythology, and on December the 21st the sun (Jonah, the type) sinks into its dark belly, and after three days—to wit, December 25th—it comes forth. The Sun-god is on dry land again.

There is a Hindoo fable much like this. In Grecian fable Hercules was swallowed by a whale at Joppa, and is said to have lain three days in his entrails. The Sun was called Jona, as can be shown from many authorities. The nursery-tale of “Little Red Riding-Hood” was also a sun-myth, mutilated in the English story, showing how the Sun was devoured by the Black Wolf (Night), and came out unhurt. Scores of similar sun-myths could be narrated.

But there are geographical inaccuracies which show its mythical character. Instead of Nineveh being “three days’ journey” from the coast where Jonah was vomited out, it is distant some four hundred miles of hill and plain, and the size of the city was not twenty by twelve miles, but more nearly eight by three miles. Moreover, the city showed no signs of decay till about two hundred and fifty years after the alleged warning of Jonah. It is truly astounding that intelligent men can be so blind. It was recently admitted by high Christian authority that there is not a particle of proof for this story except that Jesus had referred to Jonah as being “three days and nights in the whale’s belly.” If Jesus did say this, he used it as an illustration. He probably stated a current tradition, if he said it at all.

Let us now try our key in the closet-door of the Samson story.

According to the Bible account, Samson performed twelve principal exploits; and if you will turn to any good dictionary of mythology you will find a wonderful likeness to the twelve labors of Hercules in the Greek myth of the Sun. Time can be taken to examine only one—the cutting off of Samson’s hair while reposing in the lap of Delilah, and the consequent loss of his strength. Professor Goldhizer says: “Long locks of hair and a long beard are mythological attributes of the sun.”… “When the powerful summer’s sun is succeeded by the weak rays of the winter’s sun, its strength departs.” But as the sun becomes ascendant again he renews his strength, just as Samson’s strength returned when his hair grew out again. The seven locks represent the seven planetary worlds. The constellation Virgo represents Samson’s wife; and Delilah, in whose lap he dallied and lost his strength, represents the months of autumn, before the winter came to hand him over to the Philistines, the dreary time of the winter months. The story of Samson is found in the sun-myths of all the Sun-worship-ping nations, and the story of Hercules was known in an island colony of the Phœnicians five hundred years before it was known in Greece; and the story is almost as old as humanity itself. The very name Samson (or Samp-shon) in some languages means the sun; and there is not an exploit recorded of him that does not yield to the solar interpretation; and when modern ministers undertake to explain how Samson caught three hundred foxes and set fire to their tails, they never think to mention (if they happen to know it) that in the ancient festival of Ceres a fox-hunt was enacted in the theatres of Rome in which burning torches were bound to the foxes' tails. We have an explanation of this from Prof. Steinthal: “This was a symbolical reminder of the damage done to the fields by mildew, called the 'red fox' in the last of April. It was at the time of the Dog Star at which the mildew was most to be feared; and if at that time great solar heat followed too close upon the hoar-frost or dew of the cold nights, the mischief raged like a burning fox through the corn-fields. Like the lion, the fox is an animal that indicates the solar heat, being well suited both by its color and long-haired tail.” Bou-chart gives a similar explanation and application, and so do many other writers. It remains for ministers of this nineteenth century to dole out the ancient fables of the past as literal history to the grown-up children of to-day. The story of Samson in all its details yields to the key of ancient symbolism. Why not admit the fact that this is a solar myth, and thus get clear of all the blasphemy and absurdities of a literal interpretation?

The incredibly absurd story of Joshua’s commanding the sun to stand still for several hours has a rational explanation, regarded as a myth, well known to initiates to set forth the correction of the calendar, so as to make different periods correspondras one stops a clock to make it agree with the ringing of the standard time by the town bell. There are scores of parallels in ancient history.

Regard Solomon as a sun-myth, and you have no difficulty about the size of his family. The seven hundred wives and the three hundred concubines represented so many stars. Even the narratives of David’s exploits with the five kings, his “unpleasantness” with Saul, and his dalliance and intrigue with Bathsheba yield to the astro-mythological key.

The same is true of the story of the two she-bears that ate up the forty-two children who called shorn Elisha “bald-head.” The prophet was the Sun, denuded of his curls at a certain astronomical period; the two bears were the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the great bear and the little bear; and the forty-two children were a group of stars covered by the two bears, so that, figuratively, it might be said they were “eaten up.” And yet the late Dr. Nehemiah Adams of Boston once exclaimed: “I believe that the forty-two children who made fun of the bald head of the prophet of God are now in hell.” He once wrote an admirable book entitled Agnes; or, The Little Key, but he failed to find the skeleton key to unlock the solar fable of the prophet, the saucy little children, and the voracious bears.

Within the last few months Philadelphia has been the scene of a most imposing ecclesiastical ceremony—the investiture of the Roman Catholic archbishop with the pallium, a narrow band or sash made from wool grown upon white lambs that had been blessed by the Pope on St. Agnes’ Day. We heard the eloquent sermon of the archbishop of New York, and he commenced his plausible discourse by tracing the pallium to the mantle that fell from Elijah upon Elisha, the summer and winter sun, and was worn by him after the translation of Elijah. But we try our skeleton key, and find that Elijah represented the ascending summer sun, and Elisha the sun of autumn; and when Elijah gained the greatest height, of course his lessened rays, well called a “mantle,” fell upon the bald-headed man representing the autumn. This is the whole story in plain language, and this is the kind of stuff that ecclesiastical man-millinery is made of. The crowd stared with admiration and wonder, just as children are amused with their doll-babies, who are “sick” or “well,” “naughty” or “good,” according to the whims of the “little women” who dress and nurse them. There is a doll-baby period in every child’s history, and it may be necessary to have a doll-baby period in religion; but it does seem to some of us that it is about time for full-grown women and men to doff their bibs and aprons, lay aside their doll-babies and other ecclesiastical toys, and act as becomes men and women of full growth. Even Paul said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” It has been well said by a judicious writer: “Intelligent readers, except revelationists, well know that the Hebrew fables are myths which teem with history of a kind, if we can only separate the wheat from the chaff. So also is the story of the Creation in Genesis. We have a very valuable myth, though a purely phallic tale, such as East Indians—and perhaps they only—can thoroughly comprehend.

“We would not seek to detract from the great value of myths, for, besides their own intrinsic worth, these stories also exhibit to us many phases of ancient life and thought. Myths may be regarded as history which we have not yet been able to read. We should not discard as untrue or unhistorical any tale, biblical or other, as implying that it is false and unworthy of consideration. On the contrary, we cannot too earnestly and patiently ponder over every ancient tale, legend, or myth, as they all have some foundation and instructive lesson. Whenever an important myth has existed an important fact has doubtless been its basis.”

CHAPTER VII. THE FABLE OF THE FALL

“And calleth those things which be not as though they were.”—Rom. 4:17.

THE prevailing belief of Christendom to-day is, that about six thousand years ago, somewhere in Asia, the Supreme Creator took common clay and moulded it into the form of a man, somewhat as a sculptor forms the model from which the marble statue is to be constructed, and when shaped to his liking he breathed into the clay model the breath of life, and it became a living soul. This miraculous work is believed to have been begun and completed on a particular day; so that in the morning the earth contained not a man, but in the afternoon the full-grown, bearded man stood up in his majesty and assumed supremacy over all living things. This godlike man finding himself lonely, the Creator put him to sleep, and opened his side and took therefrom a rib, out of which he formed a woman, who was to be a companion, a wife, to the man; and from this particular couple have come, by ordinary generation, all the people dwelling upon the face of the earth. They are said to have been perfect, but, unfortunately for their progeny, this perfection did not long continue. Before they were blest with offspring they lost their Creator’s favor by eating fruit from a forbidden tree, and became fearfully demoralized, and, instead of begetting children endowed with their own angelic qualities, they became the unhappy parents of a race of moral monsters, of which we are all degraded and degenerate descendants.

The sacerdotal story of the fall of Adam and Eve is based upon the assumption that it is to be received as literal history, revealed by the Creator and written down in a book by a man specially chosen and plenarily inspired; so that there can be no error or mistake in the record. To question this narrative in its literal sense is most impious, and subjects the doubter to the charge of favoring infidelity.

While persons “professing and calling themselves Christians” cannot agree regarding many things deemed by them matters of vital importance, the fall of man is a matter in which they are fully agreed. The great basic dogma which underlies all modern systems of theology, Romish and Protestant, is the utter depravity of the human race through the fall of Adam, dooming a large majority of the human family to eternal punishment.

How evil came into the world has been the most perplexing problem of the ages. Before it the most gigantic minds have been covered with confusion and paralyzed with doubt. Why sin and suffering should have been permitted, not to say created, has never been made clear to the human reason by any system of theology, Romish or Protestant. A few years ago Dr. Edward Beecher published a book entitled The Conflict of Ages. When reviewed by Dr. Charles Hodge in the Princeton Review he entitled his paper “Beecher’s Conflict;” but it was rightly called The Conflict of Ages; it was not “Beecher’s Conflict,” and the explanation given by theology only involves the question in greater doubt and difficulty.

From the first dawning of human reason, even in the mind of inquisitive childhood, questions like these have been revolved, if not formulated: Did not God know, when he made Adam and Eve, that they would fall? Why, then, did he create them? Why did he create a subtle serpent to tempt them? Why did he create a tree the fruit of which was forbidden? Why did he make the possible everlasting ruin of innumerable unborn mortals depend on such a trivial act as the eating of a certain apple? Why did he not destroy Adam and Eve after their first act of disobedience, and thus prevent them from propagating a faithless progeny, which should increase in geometrical progression until the number should be so great as to exhaust calculation with weariness, stagger reason itself, and transcend even the powers of the loftiest imagination to conceive? Why are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam’s sin be imputed to his children?

The circumstances connected with the degradation of man are so extraordinary that it is not unreasonable to inquire whether the narrative of the fall is a matter of supernatural revelation based upon an historic occurrence, or whether it is purely mythical, portraying the conceptions of the human mind as to the origin of evil at some remote period of the world’s childhood. For the support of the dogma of total depravity through the fall of Adam theologians rely primarily upon the account in the book of Genesis. It is a notable fact that Adam and Eve are not historically recognized in any other portion of the Old Testament, and their very existence was totally ignored by the Teacher of Nazareth, if the Gospels said to contain the only report of his teachings are to be credited. Nobody pretends that Moses, the doubtful author of the Pentateuch, wrote from personal knowledge; but it is claimed that he wrote under inspiration of God, though there is not a single intimation in Genesis or any other book that he was so inspired, or that God had anything more to do with his writings than he had with the writings of Homer, Herodotus, or John Milton. But the assumption that the dogma of the fall through the sin of Adam was first revealed to Moses—at most not more then eight or nine hundred years before the Christian era—is plainly exploded by the fact that this story existed among many nations centuries and centuries before Moses is said to have been born or the writing called Genesis existed.

It is not within the lines of our general purpose to here give in detail the numerous legends—substantially the same, though differing in particulars—regarding the introduction of sin into this world, found in the writings of Hindoos, Persians, Etruscans, Phœnicians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Thibetans, and others. Any man who would now dare to deny this statement regarding the prevalence of the story of the fall centuries before the writing of Genesis existed would justly subject himself to the charge of ignorance or dishonesty.

Dr. Inman states that Adam is the Phallus and Eve the Yoni—in other words, that Adam and Eve signify the same idea as Abraham and Sara, Jacob and Leah, man and woman; thus embodying in the Hebrew the Hindoo notion that all things sprang from Mahadeva and his Sacti, my lady Sara. This deduction enables us at once to recognize, as did the early Christians, the mythical character of the account of the fall; and we must conclude that the story means that the male and female lived happily together so long as each was without passion for the other, but that when a union took place between them the woman suffered all the miseries inseparable from pregnancy, and the man had to toil for a family, whereas he had previously only thought of himself. The serpent is the emblem of “desire,” indicated by the man and recognized by the woman. “There is a striking resemblance between the Hindoo and Hebrew myths. The first tells us that Mahadeva was the primary Being, and from him arose the ‘Sacti.’ The second makes Adam the original, and Eve the product of his right side—an idea which is readily recognizable in the word Benjamin. After the creation, the Egyptian, Vedic, and Jewish stories all place the woman beside a citron or pomegranate tree, or one bearing both fruits; near this is a cobra or asp, the emblem of male desire, because these serpents can inflate or erect themselves at will.”

General Forlong thus discourses upon this subject: “Most cosmogonies relate a phallic tale of two individuals Adam and Eve, meeting in a garden of delight (Gan-Eden), and then being seduced by a serpent Ar (Ar-i-man), Hoa, Op, or Orus, to perform the generative act, which it is taught led to sin and trouble, and this long before we hear of a spiritual god or of solar deities. These cosmogonies narrate a contest between man and Nature, in which the former fell, and must ever fall, for the laws of Sol and his seasons none can resist.”… “The Jews learned most of their faith and fables from the great peoples of the East; especially did they get the two cosmogonies, and that solar fable, mixed with truth, of a serpent tempting a woman with the fruit of a tree, of course in the fading or autumnal equinox, when only fruit exists and all creation tries to save itself by shielding all the stores of nature from the fierce onslaughts of angry Typhon when entering on his dreary winter. The Gan-Eden fable was clearly an attempt by Zoroastrians to explain to outsiders the difficult philosophical problem of the origin of man and of good and evil. Mithras, they said—and the Jews followed suit—is the good God, the incarnation of God, who dwells in the beauteous orb of day; to which Christian Jews added that he was born of a virgin in a cave which he illuminated.”

“The tree of life mentioned in Gen. 3: 22 certainly appears,” says Mr. Smith (Chal. Acct, p. 88), “to correspond to the sacred grove of Anu, which a later fragment of the creation-tablets states was guarded by a sword turning to all the four points of the compass; and there too we have allusions to a thirst for knowledge, having been the cause of man’s fall; the gods curse the dragon and Adam for the transgression. This Adam was one of the Zalmat-qaqadi, or dark men, created by Hea or Nin-Si-ku, a name pointing to Hea being a Nin or Creator, while Adam is called Adami or Admi, the present Eastern term for man and the lingam, and no proper name.” The impression that I get from the legends of Izdubar, or the Flood, or even the creation-tablets, is simply that these were religious revivals. Nearly every illustration of Mr. Smith’s last volume shows the serpent as an evil influence. Now, if I am right—and all I have read elsewhere tends to the same conclusion—then all the tales as to a temptation by a serpent, a fall, are phallo-pythic transmutations of faith, and have no more connection with the first creation of man upon earth than have the flood, the ark, or mountain-worship of Jews in the desert, or the destruction of Pytho by Apollo in the early days of Delphi, etc.

“The tree and serpent,” says Fergusson, “are symbolized in every religious system which the world has known, not excepting the Hebrew and Christian, The two together are typical of the reproductive powers of vegetable and animal life. It is uncertain whether the Jewish tree of life was borrowed from the Egyptians or Chaldeans; but the meaning was in both cases the same, and we know that the Assyrian tree was a life-giving divinity. And Moses, or the writer of Genesis, has represented very much the same in his coiled serpent and love-apples, or citrons, of the tree of life.

“The writer of Genesis probably drew his idea of the two trees, that of life and that of knowledge, from Egyptian and Zoroastrian story; for criticism now assigns a comparatively late date to the writing of the first Pentateuchal book. After Genesis no further notice is taken in the Bible of the tree of knowledge. But that of life, or the tree which gives life, seems several times alluded to, especially in Rev. 2: 7. The lingam or pillar is the Eastern name for the tree which gives life. But when this tree became covered with the inscriptions of all the past ages, as in Egypt, then Toth, the Pillar, came to be called the tree of knowledge.”

But it must not be supposed that all Christian theologians of the present day hold the historical and literal truth of the legend of the fall of Adam. In several of the public libraries of Philadelphia may be found a book entitled Beginnings of History, written by a learned professor of Archaeology at the National Library of France—Professor François Lenormant. It was republished by Scribner, New York, in 1886, with an introduction by Francis Brown, associate professor of Biblical Philology in the Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary of New York. It is written from a Christian standpoint, and the writer is a firm defender of the infallibility of the Hebrew Scriptures, and can never be suspected of having any sympathy with modern rationalism. He not only admits that the Edenic story of the introduction of sin, found in Genesis, is a compilation made up from the Shemitic traditions of Babylonians, Phœnicians, and other pagan peoples, but he has covered page after page with proofs of this fact by learned and accurate quotations from their numerous legends. He puts in the common plea of lawyers, known as confession and avoidance, and takes the ground that “the writer of the Hebrew Genesis took these fables from floating tradition as he found them, and cleansed them of their impurities, altered their polytheistic tendencies, made them monotheistic, and otherwise so transformed them as to make them fit vehicles of spiritual instruction by the Divine Spirit which inspired him.”