Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/146

 132 the Sibylline Oracles as well as well as from the Bible and the Gospels, peculiar interpretations of the classical passage in the Revelation, crystallised slowly round a central idea, which may be even older than Christianity. Gunkel sees in it the reflex of old Babylonian myths, of the tight of the Dragon with God. But we are not now concerned with eschatological origins. The problem with which we are dealing is the question of the more recent growth and the spread of the developed form. It is therefore not devoid of interest to point out that Bede in the eighth century, one of the oldest chroniclers of the fifteen signs of the Antichrist, and of the Crack of Doom, presents a very complete system and theory of Antichrist. It is this very composite form, the result of hundreds of years of development, with which both the Northern writers and the authors of mediæval apocalypses were acquainted. They knew, not the single scattered elements, but the complete legend. They give the same imagery in almost the same sequence, as we find in the Letter of Toledo, both in its earliest and latest versions. In all these versions, as in the Antichrist Saga, the scattered elements are focussed into one sustained narrative. Each of the parallels and each single item can be traced to the writings of the Fathers of the Church. The different signs existed separately, and were only at a later period added one after another to the central figure of Antichrist. It is not necessary to quote the parallels to that passage in the Florentine version which gives a description of Antichrist, his rule over the world, the appearance of Gog and Magog, the slaying of God's two witnesses, for they speak for themselves and unmistakably betray their origin. Of greater interest it is to find the parallels to such portions in the Letter of Toledo in 11 86 as are connected with Doomsday. Let us take the hurricane and storm. We find them in Sibyll, viii, 203. "And the sun shall appear darkling by night, and the stars quit the sky, and with great fury a hurricane shall lay waste the