similar to that of the defeat of the "old serpent, who is the accuser and Satan," repulsed and imprisoned in the abyss, which story does not, indeed, occur in the Old Testament, but existed among the oral traditions of the Hebrews, and makes its appearance in Chapters xii. and xx. of the Apocalypse of St. John. Mazdeism is the only religion in whose symbolism the serpent never plays any but an evil part, for even in that of the Bible it sometimes wears a benign aspect, as, for instance, in the story of the brazen serpent. The reason is, that in the dualistic conception of Zoroastrianism the animal itself belonged to the impure and fatal creation of the evil principle. Thus, it was under the form of a great serpent that Angromainyus, after having tried to corrupt Heaven, leaped upon the earth; it was under this form that Mithra, god of the pure sky, fought with him; and, finally, it is under this form that he is eventually to be conquered and chained for 3000 years, and at the end of the world burned up with molten metals.* In these Zoroastrian records, Angromainyus, under the form of a serpent, is the emblem of evil and personification of the wicked spirit as definitively as is the serpent of Genesis, and this in an almost equally spiritual sense. In the Vedas, on the contrary, the same myth of the conflict with the serpent has a purely naturalistic character, evidently describing an atmospheric phenomenon. The idea most frequently repeated in the ancient hymns of the Aryans of India at their primitive epoch, is that of the struggle between Indra, the god of the bright sky and the azure, and Ahi, the serpent, or Vritra, the personification of the storm-cloud that lengthens out crawling in the air. Indra overthrows Ahi, strikes him with his lightnings, and by tearing him asunder sets free the fertilizing streams that he contained. Never in the Vedas does the myth rise above this purely physical reality, never does it pass from the representation of the warring atmospherical elements to that of the moral conflict between good and evil, as it does in Mazdeism. According to a certain school of modern mythologists, of which M. Adalbert Khun is the most prominent representative in Germany, this storm-myth is the pivot on which hinges a universal explanation of all ancient religions whatever. And in particular the fundamental source, origin, and true significance of the traditions we have been reviewing, including the Biblical accounts of the Fall, are all, according to him, to be looked for in this naturalistic fable of the Vedas. No doubt the allegory which served as starting-point to this myth was not unknown to the Hebrews. We find it distinctly expressed in a verse of the Book "Bundèhesh,” xxxi. The serpent's form is also that given to different secondary personifications of the evil principle, different mythological beings created by Angromainyus to ravage the earth, and war with the good, and with the true faith-such as Azhi-Dahaka (the serpent that bites), conquered by Thraetaina, and the dragon Cruvara, slain by the hero Kereçaçpa. of Job (chap. xxvi. 13), where it is said of God, "By his Spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." Here, indeed, by the parallelism of the two clauses of the verse, the former determines the meaning of the latter. But the Vedic myth is only one of the applications of a symbolic statement, of which the source does not lie among the Aryans; but must be sought much further back in the primitive thought of humanity, anterior to the ethnical separation of the ancestors of Egyptians, Semites, and Aryans, of the three great races represented by the three sons of Noah; for it is common to all. The pastoral tribes, whence sprung the Vedic hymns, only connected it with an idea exclusively naturalistic, almost childish, and specially drawn from the phenomena that most interested their simple existence, to which all advanced civilization, whether material or intellectual, was still foreign. But among the Egyptians the same metaphor appear with a far more general and elevated significance. The serpent Assap is no longer the storm-cloud but the personification of darkness, which the sun, under the form of Ra or Horus, encounters during his nocturnal passage through the lower hemisphere, and has to triumph over before he appears in the east. Thus, the conflict between Horus and Assap is daily renewed at the seventh hour of the night, a little before the rising of the sun, and the "Book of the Dead" shows that this strife between light and darkness was taken by the Egyptians as the emblem of the moral strife between good and evil. Neither is the serpent the mere storm-cloud in those paradisiac legends of Chaldea and Phoenicia in which we have been able to discern a relation in form to the record in Genesis. The aspect of the cloud lengthening out in the sky may, indeed (I could not positively deny it without more positive certainty) have furnished the first germ of the idea of constituting the serpent the visible image of the adverse power, combining the intimately associated ideas of darkness and of evil-a notion from which, by a confusion of the physical and moral orders, no ancient religion, not even Mazdeism, was entirely able to free itself, unless it were that of the Hebrews. But with all the highly civilized peoples whose traditions we have scrutinized, the great serpent symbolizes that dark and evil power in its widest significance. But be this as it may, my faith as a Christian finds no difficulty in admitting that, in order to relate the fall of the first pair, the inspired compiler of Genesis made use of a narrative which had assumed an entirely mythical character among neighbouring peoples, and that the form of a serpent assigned to the tempter may have had for starting-point an essentially naturalistic symbol. Nothing obliges us to understand the third chapter of Genesis literally. Without any departure from orthodoxy we are justified in looking upon it as a figure intended to convey a fact of a purely moral order. It is not, therefore, the form of the narrative that signifies here, but rather the dogma that it expresses, and this dogma of the fall of the human race through the bad use that its earliest progenitors made of their free will, remains an eternal truth which is nowhere else brought out with the same precision. It affords the only solution of the formidable problem which constantly returns to rear itself before the human mind, and which no religious philosophy outside of revelation has ever been able to solve. FRANCOIS LENORMANT. POLITICAL AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN GREECE. ATHENS, August, 1879. IF during this latter period of our national existence, which from every point of view presents one of the most serious crises in our history, all Europe finds itself agitated by constant commotions, Greece, which more than any other European nation is interested in the various events of the Eastern crisis, is truly under the power of a national paroxysm. The serious modifications which have been accomplished in the state of affairs in the East were of a nature to exert a great influence on Greece, threatening each day to swallow up that country in the tempest. Doubtless, it was impossible for Greece to remain indifferent at a time when nations, but till lately unknown, were created by caprice or interest, without themselves having any sentiment of their national existence, and which now threaten her national and political future in the East. The armed protests of Crete, of Epirus, of Thessaly, and of Macedonia, were but the commencement of a general participation of Hellenism in the struggle between the Slavs and the Turks, and doubtless of a more serious complication of the Eastern Question, to the great dismay of European diplomacy, which can not or will not re-establish the equilibrium between the different national elements which struggle fiercely with each other in the Balkan Peninsula. It was only the demand made on Greece by united European diplomacy, at the commencement of the war in the East, that she should remain neutral, and the promises made to her that she should not be forgotten in a Congress of the Powers relative to the improvement of the state of things in the Ottoman Empire, which induced her to restrain her national aspirations, and to await that justice from a European Congress, which she was on the point of claiming by arms. However, the delay which has occurred up to the present time in the solution of the question of the delimitation of the Hellenic frontiers-which is still pending between the Greek Government and the Sublime Porte-is a sad sign of the blindness of the Turkish Government, and equally hurtful to both peoples, paralyzing their progress in civilization. For if this question were once settled, they would be able to turn their attention to another quarter-that, namely, where the common interests and dangers of the two peoples meet. For not only the Sublime Porte, but Europe also, should well understand that a predominance of the Hellenic element in the East has in nowise for its object to satisfy the ambitious tendencies of a race. Modern civilization is in danger of being overrun by the furious waves which threaten to carry away everything in the Russian Empire. Those fundamental principles of Russian Society, those ideas (extravagant and anti-social in all points of view) of a Panslavist Cæsarism, and the principles of Nihilism, and of other social and religious sects, so absurd and so contrary to human nature, between which there is just now raging a combat so keen and so barbarous, are symptoms fatal to civilization and to the peace of Europe, and the forerunners of a catastrophe near at hand. Slavism, which is as ancient as the Latin and German nationalities, has not, up to the present time, personified any civilizing element in European history. Its proper character is despotism, and in recent times it is anarchy in its most inauspicious and frightful aspect. Consequently, Europe must open her eyes to the danger which threatens her. A nationality which, from the very beginning of its historical activity, represents principles of society and of civilization in a state of decadence—at a period when it should be full of youth and of ideality—ought to be seriously studied by those who direct the destinies of the West. Not only is the preponderance of Panslavism in the East a menace and a danger for the future and for the regeneration of Hellenism, but dangers and complications more grave threaten all Europe, in consequence of such preponderance. The Cossack in the East, at Constantinople or near it, signifies nothing else but an entire and immediate overturning of the European equilibrium and of modern civilization. A man who well knew Russia and the Russians, the famous author of the "Soirées de Saint Petersbourg," has written these words:-"We must know how to set bounds to Russian desire, for by its nature it is without limits." Deeply significant words of Joseph de Maistre ! The history of Russian policy is a development of this idea. The public conscience of Europe ought to meditate upon and consider that peril which the Marquis of Salisbury exposed with so much lucidity and precision in that famous and memorable circular addressed to the Powers of Continental Europe-that circular which had made us hope, but in vain, for the advent of a new era in the history of English diplomacy and in the progress of international morality. But now we must, alas! repeat the famous saying of M. de Beust: "There is no longer any Europe!" We hoped, in common with the whole of the free and enlightened |