‘Rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them! Woe to the earth and the sea! for the devil is come down to you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.’ This passage from the Book of Revelations is the refrain of many and much earlier scriptures. The Assyrian accounts of the war in heaven, given in the preceding chapter, by no means generally support the story that the archdragon was slain by Bel. Even the one that does describe the chief dragon’s death leaves her comrades alive, and the balance of testimony is largely in favour of the theory which prevailed, that the rebellious angels were merely cast out of heaven, and went to swell the ranks of the dark and fearful abode which from the beginning had been peopled by the enemies of the gods. The nature of this abode is described in various passages of the Bible, and in many traditions.

‘Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.’ So said Jeremiah (i. 14), in pursuance of nearly universal traditions as to the region of space in which demons and devils had their abode. ‘Hell is naked before him,’ says Job (xxvi. 6), ‘and destruction hath no covering. He stretcheth out the north over the empty place.’ According to the Hebrew mythology this habitation of demons was a realm of perpetual cold and midnight, which Jehovah, in creating the world, purposely left chaotic; so it was prepared for the Devil and his angels at the foundation of the world.

Although this northern hell was a region of disorder, so far as the people of Jehovah and the divine domain were concerned, they had among themselves a strong military and aristocratic government. It was disorder perfectly systematised. The anarchical atmosphere of the region is reflected in the abnormal structures ascribed to the many devils with whose traits Jewish and Arabic folklore is familiar, and which are too numerous to be described here. Such a devil, for instance, is Bedargon, ‘hand-high,’ with fifty heads and fifty-six hearts, who cannot strike any one or be struck, instant death ensuing to either party in such an attack. A more dangerous devil is Ketef, identified as the ‘terror from the chambers’ alluded to by Jeremiah (xxxii. 25), ‘Bitter Pestilence.’ His name is said to be from kataf, ‘cut and split,’ because he divides the course of the day; and those who are interested to compare Hebrew and Hindu myths may find it interesting to note the coincidences between Ketef and Ketu, the cut-off tail of Ráhu, and source of pestilence.1 Ketef reigns neither in the dark or day, but between the two; his power over the year is limited to the time between June 17 and July 9, during which it was considered dangerous to flog children or let them go out after four P.M. Ketef is calf-headed, and consists of hide, hair, and eyes; he rolls like a cask; he has a terrible horn, but his chief terror lies in an evil eye fixed in his heart which none can see without instant death. The arch-fiend who reigns over the infernal host has many Court Fools—probably meteors and comets—who lead men astray.

All these devils have their regulations in their own domain, but, as we have said, their laws mean disorder in that part of the universe which belongs to the family of Jehovah. In flying about the world they are limited to places which are still chaotic or waste. They haunt such congenial spots as rocks and ruins, and frequent desert, wilderness, dark mountains, and the ruins of human habitations. They can take possession of a wandering star.

There is a pretty Talmudic legend of a devil having once gone to sleep, when some one, not seeing him of course, set down a cask of wine on his ears. In leaping up the devil broke the cask, and being tried for it, was condemned to repay the damage at a certain period. The period having elapsed before the money was brought, the devil was asked the cause of the delay. He replied that it was very difficult for devils to obtain money, because men were careful to keep it locked or tied up; and ‘we have no power,’ he said, ‘to take from anything bound or sealed up, nor can we take anything that is measured or counted; we are permitted to take only what is free or common.’

According to one legend the devils were specially angered, because Jehovah, when he created man, gave him dominion over things in the sea (Gen. i. 28), that being a realm of unrest and tempest which they claimed as belonging to themselves. They were denied control of the life that is in the sea, though permitted a large degree of power over its waters. Over the winds their rule was supreme, and it was only by reducing certain demons to slavery that Solomon was able to ride in a wind-chariot.

Out of these several realms of order and disorder in nature were evolved the angels and the devils which were supposed to beset man. The first man is said to have been like an angel. From the instant of his creation there attended him two spirits, whom the rabbins found shadowed out in the sentence, ‘Jehovah-Elohim formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’ (Gen. ii. 7). This ‘breath of life’ was a holy spirit, and stood on Adam’s right; the ‘living soul’ was a restless spirit on his left, which continually moved up and down. When Adam had sinned, this restless spirit became a diabolical spirit, and it has ever acted as mediator between man and the realm of anarchy.

It has been mentioned that in the Assyrian legends of the Revolt in Heaven we find no adequate intimation of the motive by which the rebels were actuated. It is said they interrupted the heavenly song, that they brought on an eclipse, that they afflicted human beings with disease; but why they did all this is not stated. The motive of the serpent in tempting Eve is not stated in Genesis. The theory which Cædmon and Milton have made so familiar, that the dragons aspired to rival Jehovah, and usurp the throne of Heaven, must, however, have been already popular in the time of Isaiah. In his rhapsody concerning the fall of Babylon, he takes his rhetoric from the story of Bel and the Dragon, and turns a legend, as familiar to every Babylonian as that of St. George and the Dragon now is to Englishmen, into an illustration of their own doom. The invective is directed against the King of Babylon, consequently the sex of the devil is changed; but the most remarkable change is in the ascription to Lucifer of a clear purpose to rival the Most High, and seize the throne of heaven.

‘Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming, it stirreth up the (spirits of) the dead, even all the chief ones (great goats) of the earth: it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations (demon-begotten aliens). All these shall say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us? Thy splendour is brought down to the underworld, and the noise of thy viols: the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou fallen, O Lucifer (Daystar), son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thy heart, I will ascend into (the upper) heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars (archangels) of God: I will sit (reign) also upon the mount of the congregation (the assembly of the enemies of God) in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds (the thunder-throne of Jehovah); I will be like the Most High. Yet shalt thou be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.’2

In this passage we mark the arena of the combat shifted from heaven to earth. It is not the throne of heaven but that of the world at which the fiends now aim. Nay, there is confession in every line of the prophecy that the enemy of Jehovah has usurped his throne. Hell has prevailed, and Lucifer is the Prince of this World. The celestial success has not been maintained on earth. This would be the obvious fact to a humiliated, oppressed, heavily-taxed people, who believed themselves the one family on earth sprung from Jehovah, and their masters the offspring of demons. This situation gave to the vague traditions of a single combat between Bel and the Dragon, about an eclipse or a riot, the significance which it retained ever afterward of a mighty conflict on earth between the realms of Light and Darkness, between which the Elohim had set a boundary-line (Gen. i. 4) in the beginning.

A similar situation returned when the Jews were under the sway of Rome, and then all that had ever been said of Babylon was repeated against Rome under the name of Edom. It recurred in the case of those Jews who acknowledged Jesus as their Messiah: in the pomp and glory of the Cæsars they beheld the triumph of the Powers of Darkness, and the burthen of Isaiah against Lucifer was raised again in that of the Apocalypse against the seven-headed Dragon. It is notable how these writers left out of sight the myth of Eden so far as it did not belong to their race. Isaiah does not say anything even of the serpent. The Apocalypse says nothing of the two wonderful trees, and the serpent appears only as a Dragon from whom the woman is escaping, by whom she is not at all tempted. The shape of the Devil, and the Combat with him, have always been determined by dangers and evils that are actual, not such as are archæological.

A gipsy near Edinburgh gave me his version of the combat between God and Satan as follows. ‘When God created the universe and all things in it, Satan tried to create a rival universe. He managed to match everything pretty well except man. There he failed; and God to punish his pride cast him down to the earth and bound him with a chain. But this chain was so long that Satan was able to move over the whole face of the earth!’ There had got into this wanderer’s head some bit of the Babylonian story, and it was mingled with Gnostic traditions about Ildabaoth; but there was also a quaint suggestion in Satan’s long chain of the migration of this mythical combat not only round the world, but through the ages.

The early followers of Christ came before the glories of Paganism with the legend that the lowly should inherit the earth. And though they speedily surrendered to the rulers of the world in Rome, and made themselves into a christian aristocracy, when they came into Northern Europe the christians were again brought to confront with an humble system the religion of thrones and warriors. St. Gatien celebrating mass in a cavern beside the Loire, meant as much weakness in presence of Paganism as the Huguenots felt twelve centuries later hiding in the like caverns from St. Gatien’s priestly successors.

The burthen of Isaiah is heard again, and with realistic intensity, in the seventh century, and in the north, with our patriarchial poet Cædmon.

Fig. 3.—Satan Punished.

Whether this spirited description was written by Cædmon, and whether it is of his century, are questions unimportant to the present inquiry. The poem represents a mediæval notion which long prevailed, and which characterised the Mysteries, that Satan and his comrades were humiliated from the highest angelic rank to a hell already prepared and peopled with devils, and were there, and by those devils, severely punished. One of the illuminations of the Cædmon manuscript, preserved in the Bodleian Library, shows Satan undergoing his torment (Fig. 3). He is bound over something like a gridiron, and four devils are torturing him, the largest using a scourge with six prongs. His face manifests great suffering. His form is mainly human, but his bushy tail and animal feet indicate that he has been transformed to a devil similar to those who chastise him.

On Cædmon’s foundation Milton built his gorgeous edifice. His Satan is an ambitious and very English lord, in whom are reflected the whole aristocracy of England in their hatred and contempt of the holy Puritan Commonwealth, the Church of Christ as he deemed it. The ages had brought round a similar situation to that which confronted the Jews at Babylon, the early Christians of Rome, and their missionaries among the proud pagan princes of the north. The Church had long allied itself with the earlier Lucifers of the north, and now represented the proud empire of a satanic aristocracy, and the persecuted Nonconformists represented the authority of the King of kings. In the English palace, and in the throne of Canterbury, Milton saw his Beelzebub and his Satan.

This adaptation of the imagery of Isaiah concerning Lucifer has in it all the thunder hurled by Cromwell against Charles. Even a Puritan poet might not altogether repress admiration for the dash and daring of a Prince Rupert, to which indeed even his prosaic co-religionists paid the compliment of ascribing to it a diabolical source.4 Not amid conflicts that raged in ancient Syria broke forth such lines as—

The Bel whom Milton saw was Cromwell, and the Dragon that serpent of English oppression which the Dictator is trampling on in a well-known engraving of his time. In the history of the Reformation the old legend did manifold duty again, as in the picture (Fig. 13) by Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach.

It would seem that in the course of time Bel and the Dragon became sufficiently close allies for their worshippers to feed and defend them both with equal devotion, and for Daniel to explode them both in carrying on the fight of his deity against the gods of Babylon. This story of Bel is apocryphal as to the canon, but highly significant as to the history we are now considering. Although the Jews maintained their struggle against ‘principalities and powers’ long after it had been a forlorn hope, and never surrendered, nor made alliance with the Dragon, the same cannot be said of those who appropriated their title of ‘the chosen of God,’ counterfeited their covenant, and travestied their traditions. The alliance of Christianity and the Dragon has not been nominal, but fearfully real. In fulfilling their mission of ‘inheriting the earth,’ the ‘meek’ called around them and pressed into their service agents and weapons more diabolical than any with which the Oriental imagination had peopled the abode of devils in the north.

At a Fair in Tours (August 1878) I saw two exhibitions which were impressive enough in the light they cast through history. One was a shrunken and sufficiently grotesque production by puppets of the Mediæval ‘Mystery’ of Hell. Nearly every old scheme and vision of the underworld was represented in the scene. The three Judges sat to hear each case. A devil rang a bell whenever any culprit appeared at the gate. The accused was ushered in by a winged devil—Satan, the Accuser—who, by the show-woman’s lips, stated the charges against each with an eager desire to make him or her out as wicked as possible. A devil with pitchfork received the sentenced, and shoved them down into a furnace. There was an array of brilliant dragons around, but they appeared to have nothing to do beyond enjoying the spectacle. But this exhibition which was styled ‘Twenty minutes in Hell,’ was poor and faint beside the neighbouring exhibition of the real Hell, in which Europe had been tortured for fifteen centuries. Some industrious Germans had got together in one large room several hundreds of the instruments of torture by which the nations of the West were persuaded to embrace Christianity. Every limb, sinew, feature, bone, and nerve of the human frame had suggested to christian inventiveness some ingenious device by which it might be tortured. Wheels on which to break bones, chairs of anguish, thumbscrews, the iron Virgin whose embrace pierced through every vital part; the hunger-mask which renewed for Christ’s sake the exact torment of Tantalus; even the machine which bore the very name of the enemy that was cast down—the Dragon’s Head! By such instrumentalities came those quasi-miraculous ‘Triumphs of the Cross,’ of which so much has been said and sung! The most salient phenomenon of christian history is the steady triumph of the Dragon. Misleader and Deceiver to the last, he is quite willing to sprinkle his fork and rack with holy water, to cross himself, to label his caldrons ‘divine justice,’ to write CHRIST upon his forehead; by so doing he was able to spring his infernal engine on the best nations, and cow the strongest hearts, till from their pallid lips were wrung the ‘confessions of faith,’ or the last cry of martyred truth. So was he able to assault the pure heavens once more, to quench the stars of human faith and hope, and generate a race of polite, learned, and civilised hypocrites. But the ancient sunbeams are after him: the mandate has again gone forth, ‘Let there be light,’ and the Light that now breaks forth is not of that kind which respects the limit of Darkness.

This is the picture of the god of War. Upon it the comment in Emek Hammelech is: ‘The colour of the godless Samaël and of all his princes and lords has the aspect of red fire; and all their emanations are red. Samaël is red, also his horse, his sword, his raiment, and the ground beneath him, are red. In the future the Holy God shall wear his raiment.’2 Samaël is leader of the Opposition. He is the Soul of the fiery planet Mars. He is the Creator and inspirer of all Serpents. Azazel, demon of the Desert, is his First Lord. He was the terrestrial Chief around whom the fallen angels gathered, and his great power was acknowledged. All these characters the ancient Rabbins found blended in his name. Simmé (dazzling), Sóme (blinding), Semól (the left side), and Samhammaveth (deadly poison), were combined in the terrible name of Samaël. He ruled over the sinister Left. When Moses, in war with the Amalekites, raised his ten fingers, it was a special invocation to the Ten Sephiroth, Divine Emanations, because he knew the power which the Amalekites got from Samaël might turn his own left hand against Israel.3 The scapegoat was a sacrifice to him through Azazel.

Samaël is the mythologic expression and embodiment of the history of Esau, afterward Edom. Jacob and Esau represented the sheep and the goat, divided in the past and to be sundered for ever. As Jacob by covering his flesh with goat-skins obtained his father’s blessing due to Esau, the Israelites wandering through the wilderness (near Edom’s forbidden domain) seemed to have faith that the offering of a goat would convince his Viceroy Azazel that they were orthodox Edomites. The redness of Samaël begins with the red pottage from which Esau was called Edom. The English version does not give the emphasis with which Esau is said to have called for the pottage—“the red! the red!” The characteristics ascribed to Esau in the legend are merely a saga built on the local names with which he was associated. ‘Edom’ means red, and ‘Seir’ means hairy. It probably meant the ‘Shaggy Mountains.’4

It is interesting to observe the parting of the human and the theological myths in this story. Jacob is the third person of a patriarchal trinity,—Abraham the Heavenly Father, Isaac the Laugher (the Sun), and Jacob the Impostor or Supplanter. As the moon supplants the sun, takes hold of his heel, shines with his light, so does Jacob supplant his elder brother; and all the deadliness ascribed to the Moon, and other Third Persons of Trinities, was inherited by Jacob until his name was changed by euphemism. As the impartial sun shines for good and evil, the smile of Isaac, the Laugher, promised great blessings to both of his sons. The human myth therefore represents both of them gaining great power and wealth, and after a long feud they are reconciled. This feature of the legend we shall consider hereafter. Jehovah has another interest to be secured. He had declared that one should serve the other; that they should be cursed who cursed Jacob; and he said, ‘Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated.’ Jahvistic theology had here something more important than two brothers to harmonise; namely a patriarch’s blessing and a god’s curse. It was contrary to all orthodoxy that a man whom Jehovah hated should possess the blessings of life; it was equally unorthodox that a father’s blessing should not carry with it every advantage promised. It had to be recorded that Esau became powerful, lived by his sword, and had great possessions.

It had also to be recorded that ‘Edom revolted from under the hand of Judah and made a king unto themselves,’ and that such independence continued ‘unto this day’ (2 Kings viii. 20, 22). There was thus no room for the exhibition of Jacob’s superiority,—that is of Israel’s priority over Edom,—in this world; nor yet any room to carry out Isaac’s curse on all who cursed Jacob, and the saying: ‘Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness’ (Mal. i.).

Answers to such problems as these evolve themselves slowly but inevitably. The agonised cry of the poor girl in Browning’s poem—‘There may be heaven, there must be hell’—marks the direction in which necessity led human speculation many ages before her. A future had to be invented for the working out of the curse on Esau, who on earth had to fulfil his father’s blessing by enjoying power, wealth, and independence of his brother. In that future his greatness while living was repaid by his relegation to the desert and the rock with the he-goat for his support. Esau was believed to have been changed into a terrible hairy devil.5 But still there followed him in his phantasmal transformation a ghostly environment of his former power and greatness; the boldest and holiest could not afford to despise or set aside that ‘share’ which had been allotted him in the legend, and could not be wholly set aside in the invisible world.

Jacob’s share began with a shrewd bargain with his imprudent brother. Jacob by his cunning in the breeding of the streaked animals (Gen. xxx.), by which he outwitted Laban, and other manœuvres, was really the cause of bringing on the race called after him that repute for extortion, affixed to them in such figures as Shylock, which they have found it so hard to live down. In becoming the great barterers of the East, their obstacle was the plunderer sallying forth from the mountain fastnesses or careering over the desert. These were the traditional descendants of Esau, who gradually included the Ishmaelites as well as the Edomites, afterwards merged in the Idumeans. But as the tribal distinctions became lost, the ancient hostility survived in the abstract form of this satan of Strife—Samaël. He came to mean the spirit that stirs up antagonism between those who should be brethren. He finally became, and among the more superstitious Jews still is, instigator of the cruel persecutions which have so long pursued their race, and the prejudices against them which survive even in countries to whose wealth, learning, and arts they have largely contributed. In Jewish countries Edom has long been a name for the power of Rome and Romanism, somewhat in the same way as the same are called ‘Babylon’ by some christians. Jacob, when passing into the wilderness of Edom, wrestled with the invisible power of Esau, or Samaël, and had not been able to prevail except with a lame thigh,—a part which, in every animal, Israel thereafter held sacred to the Opposing Power and abstained from eating. A rabbinical legend represents Jacob as having been bitten by a serpent while he was lingering about the boundary of Edom, and before his gift of goats and other cattle had been offered to his brother. The fiery serpents which afflicted Israel were universally attributed to Samaël, and the raising of the Brazen Serpent for the homage of the people was an instance of the uniform deference to Esau’s power in his own domain which was long inculcated.

As I write, fiery Mars, near enough for the astronomer to detect its moons, is a wondrous phenomenon in the sky. Beneath it fearful famine is desolating three vast countries, war is raging between two powerful nations, and civil strife is smiting another ere it has fairly recovered from the wounds of a foreign struggle. The dismal conditions seem to have so little root in political necessity that one might almost be pardoned even now for dreaming that some subtle influence has come among men from the red planet that has approached the earth. How easy then must it have been in a similar conjunction of earthly and celestial phenomena to have imagined Samaël, the planetary Spectre, to be at work with his fatal fires! Whatever may have been the occasion, the red light of Mars at an early period fixed upon that planet the odium of all the burning, blighting, desert-producing powers of which it was thought necessary to relieve the adorable Sun. It was believed that all ‘born under’ that planet were quarrelsome. And it was part of the popular Jewish belief in the ultimate triumph of good over evil that under Mars the Messias was to be born.

We may regard Esau-Samaël then as the Devil of Strife. His traditional son Cain was like himself a ‘murderer from the beginning;’6 but in that early period the conflict was between the nomad and the huntsman on one side, on the other the agriculturist and the cattle-breeder, who was never regarded as a noble figure among the Semitic tribes. In the course of time some Semitic tribes became agriculturists, and among them, in defiance of his archæological character, Samaël was saddled with the evils that beset them. As an ox he brought rinderpest. But his visible appearance was still more generally that of the raven, the wild ass, the hog which brought scurvy; while in shape of a dog he was so generally believed to bring deadly disease, that it would seem as if ‘hydrophobia’ was specially attributed to him.

In process of time benignant Peace dwelt more and more with the agriculturists, but still among the Israelites the tradesman was the ‘coming man,’ and to him peace was essential. The huntsman, of the Esau clan, figures in many legends, of which the following is translated from the Arabic by Lane:—There was a huntsman who from a mountain cave brought some honey in his water-skin, which he offered to an oilman; when the oilman opened the skin a drop of honey fell which a bird ate; the oilman’s cat sprang on the bird and killed it; the huntsman’s hound killed the cat; the oilman killed the dog; the huntsman killed the oilman; and as the two men belonged to different villages, their inhabitants rose against each other in battle, ‘and there died of them a great multitude, the number of whom none knoweth but God, whose name be exalted!’7

Esau’s character as a wild huntsman is referred to in another chapter. It is as the genius of strife and nomadic war that he more directly stands in contrast with his ‘supplanter.’

From the wild elemental demons of storm and tempest of the most primitive age to this Devil of Strife, the human mind has associated evil with unrest. ‘The wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest.’ Such is the burthen of the Japanese Oni throned in the heart of the hurricane, of the wild huntsman issuing forth at the first note of war, of Edom hating the victories of peace, living by the sword. The prophecy that the Prince of Peace should be born under the planet Mars is a strange and mystical suggestion. In a powerful poem by Thomas Aird, ‘The Devil’s Dream,’ the last fearful doom of Satan’s vision is imprisonment beneath a lake for ever still,—the Spirit of Unrest condemned for ever to the realm of absolute stillness!