An Irish precursor of Dante

by Charles Stuart Boswell

In some respects, Darmesteter’s conclusions even favour this presumption, for if we can attribute to Neo-Platonic influences the ideal character which Yima’s Vara bears in the Vendîdâd, we can understand at how recent a date the Vara came to be divested of the character of an Elysium, or abode of the happy dead, such as is the realm of Yama, of which, in other respects, it is so complete a counterpart.

In this connection, it should also be noted that the Avestan doctrine of the Otherworld gives no place to the theory of Rebirth, which is a principal article of the Platonic and Pythagorean schools, and might have been expected to occupy a prominent place in the Zoroastrian eschatology, had this been moulded to any great extent by Greek philosophy. In holding the finality of man’s lot after death, the Persian doctrine agrees with that of the Jews, and, apparently, of the Chaldæans.

However much, moreover, the elaborate dæmonic system contained in the Avesta may be indebted to Neo-Platonism for its more spiritual elements, it is neither certain nor probable that the substance of it can be derived from the same source. The eschatology of the Avesta contains much that cannot be referred to Neo-Platonic ideas, even if it must be admitted that these were widely enough accepted, in a sufficiently systematised form, at the date when the Avesta was completed, while many parts of it exhibit both Indian and Chaldæan analogies. It is enough, in this place, merely to refer to the Tree of Life and the Waters of Life, to both of which Indian, and yet closer Chaldæan, parallels exist; the mystical bird Karshipta, which is an Indian myth; the Elysium of the Gods, which is little more than an improvement on the Chaldæan Elysium; Mount Elborz, as the Persian Holy Mountain, corresponding to the Indian Mount Meru; the World Sea, which renews and purifies all created things, and is akin to the ocean out of which a new world was churned by the Hindu gods. The Var of Yima, as we have already seen, is the same as Yama’s blissful realm. The divine beings which appear in the Avesta in the guise of personified abstractions, are the deities of Aryan mythology travestied presumably, according to the hypothesis, under Neo-Platonic influences. So, apparently, the Amesha Spentas, whatever tincture of philosophic culture they may have acquired through contact with Hellenistic thought, were originally identical with the ‘Seven Magnificent Deities,’ who were the Chaldæan Gods of the Elements. We have already seen that the Seven Spirits of Earth were said to have their seats on golden thrones in the midst of the Chaldæan Elysium, even as the Amesha Spentas in the Avestan Heaven. Indeed, it is not necessary to have recourse to Neo-Platonism to account for the vast hierarchies of good and evil spirits which are found in the Avesta, and still more in the books of the Rabbis. The Chaldæan mythology, of which both Jews and Persians had undergone the influence long before their contact with Hellenistic culture, was abundantly supplied in this respect. Besides the seven principal deities (to whom, according to Lenormant, seven malignant deities were opposed), Professor Sayce[70] alludes to 50 great gods, 300 spirits of heaven, and 300 spirits of earth, beside countless minor spirits of many kinds; while the later Assyrian authorities, he says, raised the number of great gods of heaven and earth to 65,000.

Now the district occupied by the Jews during the captivity had been a focus of the religion of Chaldæa, both in the Accado-Sumerian and in the Semitic periods, and afterwards became an important part of the Persian empire. The canonical books and the Apocrypha of the Old Testament alike prove that close relations subsisted between the Jews and both their Persian and Assyrian rulers, and exhibit traces of the influence exercised by the latter upon the Jewish writers. Thus it appears no rash assumption, that it is to these sources we must ascribe the substance, at least, of those doctrines enunciated by the later Jewish writers, for which there is no authority in the earlier writings of their nation, but which correspond to ideas already existing among nations with which they lived in close and intimate contact.

We have been discoursing at somewhat tedious length upon points which may not appear to be directly relevant to our subject, seeing that the Vision legend receives no development later than the very primitive legends of Ishtâr and Gisdubar. Nevertheless, it is in the Chaldæan and Persian religions that we find many of the notions and images which furnished material to Jewish and Christian authors alike, when, under Hellenistic influences, they took up the Vision legend as a vehicle of instruction. Many of these conceptions continued to subsist in all subsequent versions of the legend, even in its latest forms. It is now time to take stock of what we have gained, and to note what features of the Vision of Adamnán, though immediately derived by the author, as we shall see later on, from the tradition current in the Church from the earliest days of Christianity, or before it, correspond to similar conceptions which exist in the Oriental tradition, while they are not represented in the classical tradition, or, if in some cases they may be found there, it is in a form which presents fewer and fainter analogies to the later developments.

In the first place, the earliest Chaldæan legends already exhibit the rudiments of that sevenfold division of the Heavens which was generally adopted by Jewish and Christian writers alike, and ultimately received the sanction of the scholastic divines. The science, if it can be so called, of numbers is one of the most fertile of the many fields which a perverted ingenuity has devoted to the assiduous cultivation of tares, and hardly any number has been accredited with a greater variety of significance than the number seven, by reason, doubtless, of the primitive astronomical theory of the seven planets. Dante, indeed, raised the number of heavens to ten, in accordance with the astronomical system that had come to be adopted in his day, on the authority of the ancient cosmologists, introduced to the mediæval students through Arab channels; to the original seven planetary heavens he added three others—the Heaven of fixed stars, the crystalline Heaven, and the Empyrean. We may remark, in passing, that the Samoan cosmology agrees with Dante in this tenfold division of the Heavens. In the Chaldæan mythology this conception of a sevenfold division occurs in germ only, but the Seven Magnificent Deities—the precursors of the seven Amesha Spentas, and the seven Archangels of the Hebrew and Christian divines—who preside over the several powers of nature, lend themselves easily to the attribution of separate territories in the celestial domain. The beginning of this phase is apparent in the seven portals, each guarded by a porter, through which Ishtâr had to pass on her way to the abode of the gods and of the dead, even as the spirit of Adamnán had to pass through seven ‘Heavens,’ so-called, the door of each being kept by an angelic warder; while the symbolism embodied in the gradual spoliation of Ishtâr of her earthly raiment is analogous to the gradual purgation of the soul from its earthly stains in the Christian legend.

The idea of a Tree of Life growing in the spirit world is of wide diffusion, and appears at an early date in the mythologies of the Aryans, Semites, and Turanians alike, and the Hebrews in particular needed not to have recourse for it to the mythology of either the Chaldæans or Persians. Nevertheless several of the Rabbinical legends, as, for instance, that of the journey of Seth to Paradise in the Legend of the Death of Adam, deal with the subject, associating with it the Waters of Life, in a manner less in agreement with the Scriptural account than with the Chaldæan myth, which must have been made familiar to the Jews during the captivity, not merely by oral and written tradition but through the medium of the pictorial art which would meet their eyes on every side, and in which this was a favourite subject. In Christian legend, moreover, the Tree of Life in Paradise is constantly introduced in connection with a mystical bird, or birds, as in Adamnán’s Vision. The frequency of this association may be explained in part by the great popularity in early Christian symbolism of the Phœnix legend, in connection with the palm-tree and the Tree of Life; nevertheless the birds of Christian legend differ in several conspicuous respects from the traditional notion of the Phœnix, and approach far more closely to the Karshipta, the sacred bird of the Persians, adopted by them from the old Indo-Aryan mythology. This bird, as we have seen, perched upon the sacred tree in Heaven, and he brought the Avesta to the Var of Yima and preached it there, even as the birds of Adamnán and other Christian writers sang the Hours in Paradise; where, moreover, they are constantly associated with the preaching of the Gospel by Enoch and Elias, who themselves exhibit some faint analogies to Yima.

The World Sea at the foot of the Holy Mountain in the Avestan Paradise, wherein all things defiled are cleansed and made new, reminds us of that Crystal Sea which appears in the literature of the Christian Church, and, in particular, is introduced with such magnificent effect in the Book of the Revelation.[71]

The Avestan eschatology already contains the idea, unassociated with that doctrine of rebirth by which it is accompanied in the philosophies of India and Hellas alike, of a special temporary provision for the souls of those mingled characters who are not yet fitted for an eternity of either bliss or bale—an idea in accordance with the teaching of the later Hebrew and the Christian divines, including the author of the Fis Adamnáin; and as in their writings, so in the Avesta, is that provisional state made to last until the destruction of the corrupt world and the final reign of the good principle.

The guardian angel which the Jewish and Christian divines agree in assigning to each individual soul, resembles, if it does not wholly coincide with, the Fravashi of the Persians, which would seem to have been a kind of spiritual double of the man, distinct, apparently, from his own soul, yet not so entirely separate from him as if it had been a higher spirit intrusted with the charge of him.