“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children: and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”[317]
The nature of the crime is here clearly denoted by the suitableness of the punishment.[318] But the same over-ruling Judge, who, in conformity with His justice, could not but chastise the violation of His injunctions, yet, in mercy to man’s weakness, and seeing that “he also is flesh,” condescended to promise that the instrument of his seduction should be also the vehicle of his redeeming triumph.
“I will put enmity between thee (the serpent) and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”[319]
Pinning their faith upon the literal fulfilment of these terms, which told them that the female, as such, would be the unaided author of a being, whose healing effects would restore them to the inheritance so heedlessly forfeited, their veneration for that symbol of divine interposition became correspondingly unbounded; and their enthusiasm for the principle of its strict verification was what engendered the thought that in the general procreating scheme the yoni was the vivifier.
The Tuath-de-danaans or Lingajas, on the other hand, were not less satisfied in their security; but looking upon the terms with a more spiritual interpretation, and led by the operation of ordinary physics to consider the question as a deviation from the general rule, they erected the symbol of male capability as the standard of their doctrine. And thus, while the zeal of both parties shook the very framework of society, yet did they concur in all the essentials of their respective religions; and even the particulars of that prospect by which they were both sustained, instead of operating as an exception to the universality of this truth, only confirm its import.
The Jews, who were but newly brought forward upon the stage, and who, in the inscrutable councils of heaven, were selected as the objects of God’s immediate superintendence, being informed of the tenour of the paradisaical hope, abused it more wantonly than ever did the Pish-de-danaans or the Tuath-de-danaans.
Unable to comprehend, from their narrow mental calibre, any agency in the form of a divine emanation, and yet fancying, each of them, that she would herself be the mother of the expected Redeemer, their women indulged in all the lusts of desire, and, where no opportunity offered for licensed gratification, revelled in the arms of incest.
This alone can apologise for that intensity of passion, exceeding even the dictates of natural thirst, and unrestrained by the consideration of decency or consanguinity, whereof we read in the Old Testament, respecting the Israelitish daughters;[320] while it also demonstrates that the carnality of their souls did not allow them thoroughly to understand the precise nature of the favour designed.
Far otherwise the case with the intellectual races, which they were now appointed to supersede.
“In order to reclaim the vicious, to punish the incorrigible, to protect the oppressed, to destroy the oppressor, to encourage and reward the good, and to show all spirits the path to their ultimate happiness, God has been pleased to manifest Himself, say the Brahmins, in a variety of ways, from age to age, in all parts of the habitable globe. When He acts immediately, without assuming a shape, or sending forth a new emanation, when a divine sound is heard from the sky, that manifestation of Himself is called acasavani, or an ethereal voice: when the voice proceeds from a meteor or a flame, it is said to be agnarupi, or formed of fire; but an avatara is a descent of the Deity in the shape of a mortal; and an avantara is a similar incarnation of an inferior kind, intended to answer some purpose of less moment. The Supreme Being, and the celestial emanations from Him, are niracara, or bodiless, in which state they must be invisible to mortals; but when they are pratya-sha, or obvious to sight, they become sacara, or embodied, either in shapes different from that of any mortal, and expressive of the divine attributes, as Chrishna revealed himself to Arjun, or in a human form, which Chrishna usually bore, and in that mode of appearing the deities are generally supposed to be born of women without any carnal intercourse.”[321]