Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/318

286 in their prime and believed to be envious of their survivors. With this idea was combined a strange Incarnationist theory which spread all over Southern Asia and had a great influence on Visnu-ism: the divine being clothes himself in a different body in each of the seven ages of the world, to teach men the truth, and this figure may be called the Recurrent Prophet. Popular nature-worship, a hero-cult, a Greek romance, a figure from the Hebrew Scripture, a very ancient Phoenician deity, the learned speculation of Syrian eclectics in the first centuries —all these are constituents of the remarkable Muslim development which has separated and riven Islam into the rival camps of pure deism, and (in effect) of hero-worship or martyr-cult.

9. It is possible that the conception of 'Seven World-Ages' may have its earliest suggestion in Istar's descent through seven portals of the underworld: it is not Hindu nor Zoroastrian, and students are now very doubtful as to an early date for Chaldean astrology or the lore of the seven planets. But this is not the place for an exhaustive enquiry. Of the notion of a deity taking human form in each world-period we have clear trace in the Book of Elkesai, coming from Syrian Apamea (c. 220 ): 'Christ was an angel born of human parents who had appeared before, both in Adam and Moses.' The Ebionites (according to Epiphanius Hær. xxx. 2, liii. 1), believed that Adam and Christ were one; others of the sect that the 'Second God,' created before the angels, came down successively as the Recurrent Prophet, until at the last he suffered death only to rise again in glory clothed in Adam's body.

The Clementines, dating from the same centre (c. 250 ), presuppose throughout the book and dogma of the