This god appears to me to have been very imperfect; he was heavy, sleepy, and shapeless, having neither eyes to see nor ears to hear; he was incapable of feeling pity or anger, and the prayers and vows of men were unable to reach him. Invisible, intangible, and incomprehensible, he was floating in space, which he filled, and which he animated without bestowing a thought upon it; omnipotent and yet utterly inactive, creating islands and continents, and causing the sun and the stars to give light by his mere approach, this divine idler had created the world, but declined taking the trouble of governing his creation.
To whom had he confided the control over the stars in heaven? Mr. Pelloutier himself never could find out. As to the government of the earth, he had entrusted it to an infinite number of inferior deities, gods and sub-gods, of very small stature. They were as shapeless and as invisible as he was, but vastly more active, and endowed with all the energy which he had disdained to bestow upon himself. By their numbers and by their collective force they made up for their individual feebleness—and they must have been feeble indeed, since their extremely small size permitted a thousand of them to find a comfortable shelter under the leaf of a walnut tree!
Besides, they presided over the different departments which were assigned to them, not by hundreds, but by myriads, nay, by millions of myriads. Thus they rushed forth in vast hosts, stirring the air in lively currents, causing the rivers and brooks to flow onwards, watching over fields and forests, penetrating the soil to great depths, creeping in through every crack and crevice, and breaking out again through the craters of volcanoes. They formed a belt from the Rhine to the Taunus mountains, dazzling the whole region for a moment by a shower of sparks, and falling back upon the plain in the form of columns of black smoke.
Science has, moreover, established this incontestable principle, that motion can only be produced in two ways here, below: either by the acts of living beings, or by the contact of these microscopic deities.
Whenever the waters rose or broke forth in cataracts, whenever the leaves trembled in the wind, or the flowers bent before a storm, it was these diminutive gods who, invisible and yet ever active, forced the waters to come down in torrents, drove the tempest through the branches, bent the flowers down to the ground, and chased the dust of the highroads in lofty columns up to the clouds. It was they who caused the golden hair of the maid to fall down upon her shoulders as she went to the well, who shook the earthenware pitcher she carried on her shoulder, who crackled in the fire on the hearth, and who roared in the storm, or the eruptions of fiery mountains.
When I think of this little world of tiny insect gods, who passed through the air in swarms, coming and going, turning to the left and to the right, struggling and striving above and beneath (I ask their pardon for comparing these deities to humble insects, born in the mud and subject to infirmity and death like ourselves), I cannot help thinking of the beautiful lines by Lamartine, in which he so graphically describes life in Nature.
“Chaque fois que nos yeux, pénétrant dans ces ombres,
De la nuit des rameaux éclairaient les dais sombres,
Nous trouvions sous ces lits de feuille où dort l’été,
Des mystères d’amour et de fécondité.
Chaque fois que nos pieds tombaient dans la verdure
Les herbes nous montaient jusques à la ceinture,
Des flots d’air embaumé se répandaient sur nous,
Des nuages ailés partaient de nos genoux;
Insectes, papillons, essaims nageants de mouches,
Oui d’un éther vivant semblaient former les couches,
Ils’ montaient en colonne, en tourbillon flottant,
Comblaient l’air, nous cachaient l’un à l’autre un instant,
Comme dans les chemins la vague de poussière
Se lève sous les pas et retombe en arrière.
Ils roulaient; et sur l’eau, sur les prés, sur le foin,
Ces poussières de vie allaient tomber plus loin;
Et chacune semblait, d’existence ravie,
Epuiser le bonheur dans sa goutte de vie,
Et l’air qu’ils animaient de leurs frémissements
N’était que mélodie et que bourdonnements.”
Such were the gods known to the first ingenuous dwellers on the banks of the Rhine—gods worthy of a society but just beginning. And still, I venture to make a suggestion, which Mr. Simon Pelloutier, my guide up to this point, has unfortunately neglected to make. It is this: I feel as if there was hidden beneath this primitive and apparently puerile mythology a hideous monster, writhing in fearful threatenings and bitter mockery. This god Chaos, so careless and reckless, gifted with the power of creation but not with love for his work, seems to me nothing else but Matter, organizing itself. I have called these countless inferior deities microscopic. I should have called them molecular, for they are atoms, the monads of our science. There is evidently here a germ, not of a religious creed so much as of a philosophic system, a shadow of the materialism of a former civilization that is now degraded and nearly lost.
At first I doubted the correctness of the opinions of our learned men; but I begin to believe in them; yes, these early Celts had come, to us from distant India, from that ancient, decayed country, and in their knapsacks they had brought with them, by an accident, this fragment of their symbolic cosmogony, the sad meaning of which was, no doubt, a mystery to them also.
After some years, perhaps after some centuries, —for time does not count for much in those questions,—the Celts became weary of this selfish Deity, which was lost in the contemplation of its own being and dwelt in the centre of a cold and empty heaven, and they desired to establish some relations between him and themselves. Unable to appeal to the Creator, they appealed to Creation, and asked for a mediator, who should hear their complaints or accept their thank-offerings and transmit them to the Supreme Power.