“ ‘I therefore pardon thee—and I pardon him also for thy sake: ... but ye may no more return to paradise, which I had created for your happiness; ... through your disobedience to my commands the Spirit of Evil has obtained possession of the Earth.... Your children reduced to labor and to suffer by your fault will become corrupt and forget me....
“ ‘But I will send Vishnu, who will be born of a woman, and who will bring to all the hope of a reward in another life, and the means by prayer of softening their sufferings.’ ”
The translator from whom I have quoted exclaims at the end, as well he might:—
“What grandeur and what simplicity is this Hindu legend! and at the same time how simply logical!... Behold here the veritable Eve—the true woman.”
But much more extraordinary things are quoted [pg 127] by M. Jacolliot, from the Vedas and the commentaries.
On p. 63 we read that Manu, Minos, and Manes, had the same name as Moses; on p. 73, the Brahmans who invaded India are represented as the successors of a great reformer called Christna. The name of Zoroaster is derived from the Sanskrit Sûryastara (p. 110), meaning “he who spreads the worship of the Sun.” After it has been laid down (p. 116) that Hebrew was derived from Sanskrit, we are assured that there is little difficulty in deriving Jehovah from Zeus.[65] Zeus, Jezeus, Jesus, and Isis are all declared to be the same name, and later on (p. 130) we learn that “at present the Brahmans who officiate in the pagodas and temples give this title of Jeseus—i. e. the pure essence, the divine emanation—to Christna only, who alone is recognized as the Word, the truly incarnated, by the worshippers of Vishnu and the freethinkers among the Brahmans.”
We are assured that the Apostles, the poor fishermen of Galilee, were able to read the Veda (p. 356); and it was their greatest merit that they did not reject the miraculous accounts of the Vedic period, because the world was not yet ripe for freedom of thought. Kristna, or Christna, we read on p. 360, signified in Sanskrit, sent by God, promised by God, holy; and as the name of Christ or Christos is not Hebrew, whence could it have been taken except from Krishna, the son of Devakî, or, as M. Jacolliot writes, Devanaguy?
It is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to criticise or refute such statements, and yet it is necessary to [pg 128] do so; for such is the interest, or I should rather say the feverish curiosity, excited by anything that bears on ancient religion, that M. Jacolliot's book has produced a very wide and very deep impression. It has been remarked with some surprise that Vedic scholars in Europe had failed to discover these important passages in the Veda which he has pointed out, or, still worse, that they had never brought them to the knowledge of the public. In fact, if anything was wanting to show that a general knowledge of the history of ancient religion ought to form part of our education, it was the panic created by M. Jacolliot's book. It is simply the story of Lieutenant Wilford over again, only far less excusable now than a hundred years ago. Many of the words which M. Jacolliot quotes as Sanskrit are not Sanskrit at all; others never have the meaning which he assigns to them; and as to the passages from the Vedas (including our old friend the Bhagaveda-gîta), they are not from the Veda, they are not from any old Sanskrit writer—they simply belong to the second half of the nineteenth century. What happened to Lieutenant Wilford has happened again to M. Jacolliot. He tells us the secret himself:—
“One day,” he says (p. 280), “when we were reading the translation of Manu, by Sir W. Jones, a note led us to consult the Indian commentator, Kullûka Bhatta, when we found an allusion to the sacrifice of a son by his father prevented by God himself after he had commanded it. We then had only one idée fixe—namely, to find again in the dark mass of the religious books of the Hindu, the original account of that event. We should never have succeeded but for ‘the complaisance’ of a Brahman with whom we [pg 129] were reading Sanskrit, and who, yielding to our request, brought us from the library of his pagoda the works of the theologian Ramatsariar, which have yielded us such precious assistance in this volume.”
As to the story of the son offered as a sacrifice by his father, and released at the command of the gods, M. Jacolliot might have found the original account of it from the Veda, both text and translation, in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature.” He would soon have seen that the story of Sunahsepa being sold by his father in order to be sacrificed in the place of an Indian prince, has very little in common with the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. M. Jacolliot has, no doubt, found out by this time that he has been imposed upon; and if so, he ought to follow the example of Colonel Wilford, and publicly state what has happened. Even then, I doubt not that his statements will continue to be quoted for a long time, and that Adima and Heva, thus brought to life again, will make their appearance in many a book and many a lecture-room.