Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/322

 290 Pei'sistence of Pri7)iitive Beliefs in Theology.

would say, by a line of its servants and ministers who in their own right are nothing. In both these systems, the Crown or the Throne are loftier than the temporary occupant ; the Law than the Prophet, the Great Mother than her short-lived consort. Both before and after Christ there were sects at work, in Judaism and in the church, striving to adjust their beliefs to these views, and becom- ing more or less orthodox in the attempt. From the third year of Trajan (100 a.d.) when Elkesai began to piece together his rhapsodies and preach a new faith and ritual, down to Mani, the great dualistic syncretist, an unbroken succession can be traced. Then came the Persian reconquest of Islam, under the refined but unorthodox Abbasids, and the entire transformation of Mushm tenets in the peculiar Shi'ite system. In this, it would appear, meet and blend the chief features of every earlier faith. We have begun with the element of the saint of folk-lore, the magician of romance : we have traced a connexion with the worthies of Hebrew Scripture and the earliest deities of Phoenicia : we have carried back the cultus of Ali and his two martyred sons to the Sumerian lament for Dumuzi, for Adonis the lord, transient mate of the Great Mother — dying to be reborn, symbol first of nature's changes and then (as man became more interested in himself) of the vicissitudes of the soul, earnest and guarantee (like Orphic Dionysus) of human immortahty.

13. The true mystical features of this religious blend linger on to-day, not in the official Shi'ism of Persia and the Passion Plays of India but rather in the pagan survivals of Chaldea and the Lebanon. Devotion to Ali, instead of Mahomet, arose from very different causes in the various sections of Islam : to some it was a mere pretext for opposing an unpopular dynasty, in fostering the Fatimite cause, whose caliphs became mere tools of adventurers in one of the grandest systems of piratical democracy : to others the name implied the revival of a native creed