Fig. 8.—Seth Offering a Branch to Adam.
The difficulty of tracing the ethnical origin of such legends as these is much greater than that of tracing their common natural origin. The effect of certain kinds of food upon the human system is very marked, even apart from the notorious effects of the drinks made from the vegetative world. The effects of mandrake, opium, tobacco, various semi-poisonous fungi, the simplicity with which differences of race might be explained by their vegetarian or carnivorous customs, would be enough to suggest theories of the potency of food over the body and soul of man such as even now have their value in scientific speculation.
The Jewish opinion that Seth was the offspring of the divine part of Adam was the germ of a remarkable christian myth. Adam, when dying, desired Seth to procure the oil of mercy (for his extreme unction) from the angels guarding Paradise. Michael informs Seth that it can only be obtained after the lapse of the ages intervening the Fall and the Atonement. Seth received, however, a small branch of the Tree of Knowledge, and was told that when it should bear fruit, Adam would recover. Returning, Seth found Adam dead, and planted the branch in his grave. It grew to a tree which Solomon had hewn down for building the temple; but the workmen could not adapt it, threw it aside, and it was used as a bridge over a lake. The Queen of Sheba, about to cross this lake, beheld a vision of Christ on the cross, and informed Solomon that when a certain person had been suspended on that tree the fall of the Jewish nation would be near. Solomon in alarm buried the wood deep in the earth, and the spot was covered by the pool of Bethesda. Shortly before the crucifixion the tree floated on that water, and ultimately, as the cross, bore its fruit.[12]
In our old Russian picture ([Fig. 8]) Seth is shown offering a branch of the Tree of Knowledge to his father Adam. That it should spring up to be the Tree of Life is simply in obedience to Magian and Gnostic theories, which generally turn on some scheme by which the Good turns against the Evil Mind the point of his own weapon. These were the influences which gave to christian doctrines on the subject their perilous precision. The universal tradition was that Adam was the first person liberated by Christ from hell; and this corresponded with an equally wide belief that all who were saved by the death of Christ and his descent into hell were at once raised into the moral condition of Adam and Eve before the Fall,—to eat the food and breathe the holy air of Paradise.
An honest mirror was held up before this theology by the christian Adamites. Their movement (second and third centuries) was a most legitimate outcome of the Pauline and Johannine gospel. The author of this so-called ‘heresy,’ Prodicus, really anticipated the Methodist doctrine of ‘sanctification,’ and he was only consistent in admonishing his followers that clothing was, in the Bible, the original badge of carnal guilt and shame, and was no longer necessary for those whom Christ had redeemed from the Fall and raised to the original innocence of Adam and Eve. These believers, in the appropriate climate of Northern Africa, had no difficulty in carrying out their doctrine practically, and having named their churches ‘Paradises,’ assembled in them quite naked. There is still a superstition in the East that a snake will never attack one who is naked. The same Adamite doctrine—a prelapsarian perfection symbolised by nudity—was taught by John Picard in Bohemia, and a flourishing sect of ‘Adamites’ arose there in the fifteenth century. The Slavonian Adamites of the last century—and they are known to carry on their services still in secret—not only dispense with clothing, but also with sacraments and ceremonies, which are for the imperfect, not for the perfected. Again and again has this logical result of the popular theology appeared, and with increasingly gross circumstances, as the refined and intelligent abandon except in name the corresponding dogmas. It is an impressive fact that Paul’s central doctrine of ‘a new creature’ is now adopted with most realistic orthodoxy by the Mormons of Utah, whose initiation consists of a dramatic performance on each candidate of moulding the body out of clay, breathing in the nostrils, the ‘deep sleep’ presentation of an Eve to each Adam, the temptation, fall, and redemption. The ‘saints’ thus made, unfortunately, seem to have equally realistic ideas that the Gentiles are adherents of the Prince of this world, and their sacramental bands have shown some striking imitations of those events of history which, when not labelled ‘Christian,’ are pronounced barbarous. Now that the old dogmatic system is being left more and more to the ignorant and vulgar to make over into their own image and likeness, it may be hoped that elsewhere also the error that libels and outrages nature will run to seed; for error, like the aloe, has its period when it shoots up a high stem and—dies.
[1] The relations of this system to those of various countries are stated by Professor King in his work ‘The Gnostics and their Remains.’
[2] In the Architectural Museum, Westminster, there is an old picture which possibly represents the hairy Adam.