Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/313

 Persistence of Primitive Beliefs in l^keology. 281

the Assassin chiefs, the Old Men of the Mountains. What is this strange and composite figure round which has collected so much enthusiasm and tradition, potently moulding the obscure development of eastern thought and politics ?

2. First we must bear the charge of running away from our subject entirely and speak about a certain sea-demon called Khidr or the ' sea-green one,' that is, Glaucus. He is a curious Muslim saint with the attributes of immortality and omnipresence, a patron-saint of travellers especially by sea, constantly meeting and talking with wayfarers, helping them on their road and revealing to them at times divine secrets. It is confidently believed by some that he is the prototype of the Wandering Jew, or, if a later creation, that he has been completely fused with that mythical figure. An Arab proverb says ' to wander like Khidr,' and Cumont suggests that ' Ahasuerus ' (the name so well known from Edgar Quinet's romantic drama), is but a form of Khisr, itself the Perso-Turkish way of pro- nouncing Khidr. Now the story of Khidr has, strangely enough, nothing Muslim about it ! The Greek part comes from pseudo-Callisthenes' tale of Andreas, the cook of Alexander the Great : by a mere chance he found the elixir or Water of Life, drank it, obtained eternal life and was hurled by the angry king into the sea where he became ' Glaucus ' or a sea-demon, husband of Scylla and Circe, and helper of the Argonauts. This romance, begun under the Ptolemies, reached its present form before the time of Constantine [c. 300 a.d.). It passed as an interesting legend from Egypt {or from Syria) into Arabia and duly appears in the Koran (x\-iii. 59).

3. But it was Jewish influence that turned a cook who became a sea-demon into a Muslim saint and patron of travellers ! For the next figure to be fused (in this com- plex photograph) is — Elijah 1 Talmudic or Rabbinic Judaism conceived of him as immortal and omnipresent : the orthodox Jewish household keeps an empty chair for