The Athenians are accused of having sacrificed to Boreas; and this “Dæmon” is charged with having submerged and wrecked 400 ships of the Persian fleet on the rocks of Mount Pelion, and of having become so furious that all the Magi of Xerxes could hardly counteract him by offering contra-sacrifices to Thetis.[779] Very fortunately, no authenticated instance is on the records of Christian wars, showing a like catastrophe on the same scale happening to one Christian fleet, owing to the “prayers” of its enemy—another Christian nation. But this is from no fault of theirs, for each prays as ardently to Jehovah for the destruction of the other, as the Athenians prayed to Boreas. Both resorted to a neat little piece of black magic con amore. Such abstinence from divine interference being hardly due to lack of prayers, sent to a common Almighty God for mutual destruction, where, then, shall we draw the line between Pagan and Christian? And who can doubt that all Protestant England would rejoice and offer thanks to the Lord, if during some future war, 400 ships of the hostile fleet were to be wrecked owing to such holy prayers? What is, then, the difference, we ask again, between a Jupiter, a Boreas, and a Jehovah? No more than this: The crime of one's own next-of-kin, say of one's father, is always excused and often exalted, whereas the crime of our neighbour's parent is ever gladly punished by hanging. Yet the crime is the same.
So far the “blessings of Christianity” do not seem to have made any appreciable advance on the morals of the converted Pagans.
The above is not a defence of Pagan Gods, nor is it an attack on the [pg 507] Christian Deity, nor does it mean belief in either. The writer is quite impartial, and rejects the testimony in favour of both, neither praying to, believing in, nor dreading any such “personal” and anthropomorphic God. The parallels are brought forward simply as one more curious exhibition of the illogical and blind fanaticism of the civilized theologian. For, so far, there is not a very great difference between the two beliefs, and there is none in their respective effects upon morality, or spiritual nature. The “light of Christ” shines upon as hideous features of the animal man now, as the “light of Lucifer” did in days of old. Says the missionary Lavoisier, in the Journal des Colonies:
These unfortunate heathens in their superstition regard even the Elements as something that has comprehension!... They still have faith in their idol Vâyu—the God or, rather, Demon of the Wind and Air ... they firmly believe in the efficacy of their prayers, and in the powers of their Brâhmans over the winds and storms.
In reply to this, we may quote from Luke: “And he [Jesus] arose and rebuked the wind and the raging of the water, and they ceased and there was a calm.”[780] And here is another quotation from a Prayer Book: “O Virgin of the Sea, blessed Mother and Lady of the Waters, stay thy waves.” This prayer of the Neapolitan and Provençal sailors, is copied textually from that of the Phœnician mariners to their Virgin-Goddess Astarte. The logical and irrepressible conclusion arising from the parallels brought forward, and the denunciation of the missionary, is that the commands of the Brâhmans to their Element-Gods not remaining “ineffectual,” the power of the Brâhmans is thus placed on a par with that of Jesus. Moreover, Astarte is shown not a whit weaker in potency than the “Virgin of the Sea” of Christian sailors. It is not enough to give a dog a bad name, and then hang him; the dog has to be proven guilty. Boreas and Astarte may be “Devils” in theological fancy, but, as just remarked, the tree has to be judged by its fruit. And once the Christians are shown to be as immoral and as wicked as the Pagans ever were, what benefit has Humanity derived from its change of Gods and Idols?
That which God and the Christian Saints are justified in doing, becomes in simple mortals a crime, if successful. Sorcery and incantations are now regarded as fables; yet from the Institutes of Justinian down to the laws of England and America against witchcraft—obsolete [pg 508] but not repealed to this day—such incantations, even when only suspected, were punished as criminal. Why punish a chimera? And still we read of Constantine, the Emperor, sentencing to death the philosopher Sopatrus for “unchaining the winds,” and thus preventing ships laden with grain from arriving in time to put an end to famine. Pausanias is derided when he affirms that he saw with his own eyes “men who by simple prayers and incantations” stopped a strong hail-storm. This does not prevent modern Christian writers from advising prayer during storm and danger, and believing in its efficacy. Hoppo and Stadlein, two magicians and sorcerers, were sentenced to death for “throwing charms on fruit” and transferring a harvest by magic arts from one field to another, hardly a century ago, if we can believe Sprenger, the famous writer, who vouches for it: “Qui fruges excantassent segetem pellicentes incantando.”
Let us close by reminding the reader that, without the smallest shadow of superstition, one may believe in the dual nature of every object on Earth, in spiritual and material, in visible and invisible Nature, and that Science virtually proves this, while denying its own demonstration. For if, as Sir William Grove says, the electricity we handle is but the result of ordinary matter affected by something invisible, the “ultimate generating power” of every Force, the “one omnipresent influence,” then it only becomes natural that one should believe as the Ancients did; namely, that every Element is dual in its nature. “Ethereal Fire is the emanation of the Kabir proper; the Aërial is but the union [correlation] of the former with Terrestrial Fire, and its guidance and application on our earthly plane belongs to a Kabir of a lesser dignity”—an Elemental, perhaps, as an Occultist would call it; and the same may be said of every Cosmic Element.
No one will deny that the human being is possessed of various forces, magnetic, sympathetic, antipathetic, nervous, dynamical, occult, mechanical, mental, in fact of every kind of force; and that the physical forces are all biological in their essence, seeing that they intermingle with, and often merge into, those forces that we have named intellectual and moral, the first being the vehicles, so to say, the upâdhis, of the second. No one, who does not deny soul in man, would hesitate in saying that their presence and commingling are the very essence of our being; that they constitute the Ego in man, in fact. These potencies have their physiological, physical, mechanical, as well as their nervous, ecstatic, clairaudient, and clairvoyant phenomena, which are [pg 509] now regarded and recognized as perfectly natural, even by Science. Why should man be the only exception in Nature, and why cannot even the Elements have their Vehicles, their Vâhanas, in what we call the Physical Forces? And why, above all, should such beliefs be called “superstition” along with the religions of old?