Alexander's Triumph.—India was unknown until after Alexander's conquests.
The Hebrews, who were unknown until so late a period, never name the Brahmins; they knew nothing of India till after Alexander's conquests and their own settling in that Egypt of which they had spoken so ill. The name of India is to be found only in the book of Esther, and in that of Job, who was not a Hebrew. We find a singular contrast between the sacred books of the Hebrews and those of the Indians. The Indian books announce only peace and mildness; they forbid the killing of animals: but the Hebrew books speak of nothing but the slaughter and massacre of men and beasts; all are butchered in the name of the Lord; it is quite another order of things.
We are incontestably indebted to the Brahmins for the idea of the fall of celestial beings revolting against the Sovereign of Nature; and it was probably from them that the Greeks took the fable of the Titans; and lastly, from them it was that the Jews, in the first century of our era, took the idea of Lucifer's revolt.
How could these Indians suppose a rebellion in heaven without having seen one on earth? Such a leap from the human to the divine nature is difficult of comprehension. We usually step from what is known to what is unknown.
A war of giants would not be imagined, until some men more robust than the rest had been seen to tyrannize over their fellow-men. To imagine the like in heaven, the Brahmins must either have experienced violent discords among themselves, or at least have witnessed them among their neighbors.
Be that as it may, it is an astonishing phenomenon that a society of men who had never made war should have invented a sort of war carried on in imaginary space, or in a globe distant from our own, or in what is called the firmament—the empyrean. But let it be carefully observed, that in this revolt of the celestial beings against their Sovereign, there were no blows given, no celestial blood spilled, no mountains thrown at one another's heads, no angels deft in twain, as in Milton's sublime and grotesque poem.
According to the Shastah, it was only a formal disobedience of the orders of the Most High, which God punished by relegating the rebellious angels to a vast place of darkness called Onderah, for the term of a whole mononthour. A mononthour is a hundred and twenty-six millions of our years. But God vouchsafed to pardon the guilty at the end of five thousand years, and their Onderah was nothing more than a purgatory.
He turned them into Mhurd, or men, and placed them on our globe, on condition that they should not eat animals, nor cohabit with the males of their new species, on pain of returning to the Onderah.