While these events were passing in France an eastern visionary was engaged in founding a religion which was also an empire. Was Mahomet an impostor or was he hallucinated? For the Moslems he is still a prophet, and for Arabic scholars the Koran will be always a masterpiece. An unlettered man, a simple camel-driver, he created notwithstanding the most perfect literary monument of his country. His success might pass as miraculous, and the martial fervour of his successors threatened for a moment the liberty of the whole world. But the day came when Asia broke under the iron hand of Charles Martel. That rough soldier tarried little for prayer when there was fighting to be done; when he wanted money he looted monasteries and churches, and even sold ecclesiastical benefices to his warriors. As the priesthood, for these reasons, could not suppose that his arms were blessed by God, his victories were ascribed to Magic. Indeed, religious feeling was so stirred up against him that St. Eucher, the venerable Bishop of Orléans, learned in a vision from an angel that the saints whose churches he had spoliated or profaned forbade him to enter into heaven, and even disinterred his body, which they plunged with his soul into the abyss. St. Eucher communicated the revelation to Boniface, Bishop of Mayence, and to Fulfvad, arch-chaplain of Pepin the Short. The tomb of Charles Martel was opened, the body proved to be missing, the inner side of the stone was blackened as if by burning, a foul smoke exhaled and a great serpent came out. An authentic report of the opening was sent by Boniface to Pepin the Short and Carloman, who were the sons of Charles Martel, praying them to take warning by the dreadful example and to respect holy things. Yet there was little of that virtue on the part of those who violated the grave of a hero on the faith of a dream, and attributed a destruction which had been completely and rapidly accomplished by death itself to the work of hell.[165]
Some extraordinary phenomena, occurring publicly in France, characterised the reign of Pepin the Short. The air seemed to be alive with human shapes; heaven reflected illusory scenes of palaces, gardens, tossing waves, ships in full sail and hosts in battle array. The atmosphere was like a great dream, and the details of these fantastic pageants were visible to everyone. Was it an epidemic attacking the organs of vision or an aerial perturbation projecting illusions on condensed air? Was it not more probably a general delusion occasioned by some intoxicating and pestilential effluvium diffused throughout the atmosphere? The likelihood of the latter explanation is increased by the fact that these visions provoked the populace, who in their imagination beheld sorcerers in the clouds scattering unwholesome powders and poisons with open hands. The country was smitten with sterility, cattle died, and the mortality extended also to human beings.
The occurrences offered an opportunity to circulate a story, the success and credit of which was in proportion to its extravagance. At that time the famous Kabalist Zedekias[166] had a school of occult science, where he taught not indeed the Kabalah but the entertaining speculations arising therefrom and forming the exoteric part of a science which has been ever hidden from the profane. With mythology of this kind Zedekias diverted the minds of his hearers. He told how Adam, the first man, originally created in an almost spiritual estate, abode above our atmosphere, in a light which gave birth at his pleasure to the most wonderful vegetation. He was served by choirs of beautiful beings, fashioned in the likeness of male and female, of whom they were animated reflections, formed from the purest substance of the elements. They were sylphs, salamanders, undines and gnomes; but in his unfallen condition Adam reigned over the gnomes and undines only by the agency of the salamanders and sylphs, who alone had the power of ascending to his aerial paradise.
There was nothing to equal the felicity of our first parents amidst the ministry of the sylphs; they were perishable spirits, but they had incredible skill in building and weaving the light, causing it to flower in a thousand forms, more varied than the most brilliant and fruitful imagination can now conceive. The earthly paradise—so named because it reposed upon the earthly atmosphere—was therefore a domain of enchantments. Adam and Eve slept in palaces of pearls and sapphires; roses sprang up around them and formed a carpet for their feet; they glided over waters in sea-shells drawn by swans; birds communed with them in delicious speech of music; flowers stooped to caress them. But all this was lost by the fall, which cast our progenitors down on earth, and the material bodies which clothed them henceforth are those skins of beasts mentioned in the Bible. They were alone and naked, where no one obeyed their caprice of thought. They forgot their life in Eden, or viewed it only as a dream seen through the glass of memory. But the realms of paradise still and forever extend above the earthly atmosphere, inhabited by sylphs and salamanders, who are thus constituted guardians of man’s domain, like mournful retainers still in the house of a master whose return they expect no more.
Imaginations were fired by these astonishing fictions when the visions of the air began to be seen in the full light of day. They signified unquestionably the descent of sylphs and salamanders in search of their former masters. Voyages to the land of sylphs were talked of on all sides, as we talk at the present day of animated tables and fluidic manifestations. The folly took possession even of strong minds, and it was time for an intervention on the part of the Church, which does not relish the supernatural being hawked in the public streets, seeing that such disclosures, by imperilling the respect due to authority and to the hierarchic chain of instruction, cannot be attributed to the spirit of order and light. The cloud-phantoms were therefore arraigned and accused of being hell-born illusions, while the people—anxious to get something into their hands—began a crusade against sorcerers. The public folly turned to a paroxysm of mania; strangers in country places were accused of descending from heaven and were killed without mercy; imbeciles confessed that they had been abducted by sylphs or demons; others who had boasted like this previously either would not or could not unsay it; they were burned or drowned, and, according to Garinet, the number who perished throughout the kingdom almost exceeds belief.[167] It is the common catastrophe of dramas in which the first parts are played by ignorance or fear.
Such visionary epidemics recurred in the reigns following, and all the power of Charlemagne was put in action to calm the public agitation. An edict, afterwards renewed by Louis the Pious, forbade sylphs to manifest under the heaviest penalties. It will be understood that in the absence of the aerial beings the judgment fell upon those who made a boast of having seen them, and hence they ceased to be seen. The ships in air sailed back to the port of oblivion, and no one claimed any longer to have journeyed through the blue distance. Other popular frenzies replaced the previous mania, while the romantic splendours of the great reign of Charlemagne furnished the makers of legends with new prodigies to believe and new marvels to relate.
CHAPTER IV
LEGENDS OF THE REIGN OF CHARLEMAGNE
Charlemagne is the real prince of enchantments and the world of faerie; his reign is like a solemn and brilliant pause between barbarism and the middle ages; while he himself is a grand and majestic apparition, recalling the magical pageant of Solomon’s sway: he is at once a resurrection and a prophecy. In him the Roman empire, overleaping Frankish and Gaulish origins, reappeared in all its splendour; in him also, as in a symbol, evoked and manifested by divination, there is delineated beforehand the perfect empire of the ages of mature civilisation, the empire crowned by priesthood and establishing its throne beside the altar.
The era of chivalry and the marvellous epos of romances begin with Charlemagne; the chronicles of his period are like the Four Sons of Aymon, or Oberon, King of Faerie. Birds utter speech and direct the French army when the path has been lost in the forest; brazen colossi appear in mid-ocean and indicate to the emperor a free way eastward. Roland, first of the paladins, wields a magic sword, baptized like any Christian and bearing the name of Durandal; the hero addresses this sword, which seems to understand him, and nothing can resist its supernatural onset. Roland has also an ivory horn, contrived so skilfully that the lightest breath wakens a response within it, and that answer is heard for twenty leagues around, causing even mountains to quiver. When the paladin falls at Roncesvalles, overwhelmed rather than conquered, even then he uprises like a giant beneath some avalanche of trees and rolling rocks; he winds his horn, and the Saracens take refuge in flight. Charlemagne, at a distance of more than ten leagues, hears the signal and would speed to his aid, but he is prevented by the traitor Ganelon, who has sold the French army to the barbaric horde. Finding himself abandoned, Roland for the last time embraces his Durandal, and then, summoning all his strength, strikes it with both hands against a mountain block, hoping to shatter the weapon, lest it fall into the hands of infidels; but the block itself is cloven, the sword is not even indented. Hereat Roland clasps it to his breast and yields up his spirit with so high and proud a mien that the Saracens do not dare to approach, but, still shaking, direct a cloud of arrows against their conqueror, who is no more. To be brief, Charlemagne, bestowing a throne upon the papacy and receiving from its hands the empire of the world in return, is the most imposing of all personalities in French history.
We have spoken of the Enchiridion—that minute work which combines the most secret symbols of the Kabalah with the most beautiful Christian prayers. Occult tradition[168] attributes its composition to Leo III and affirms that it was presented by this pontiff to Charlemagne, as the most precious of all offerings. Any king who owned it and knew how to use it worthily could become master of the world. This tradition is not perhaps to be cast aside lightly.