Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/168

156 longed-for life in the assembly of the gods," and has the power to "interpret life or death." Gilgamesh sets out to find these Isles. He goes by Mt. Mashu, guarded by the scorpion men, and at last reaches an enchanted garden in which there is a divine tree: "Precious stones it bears as fruit—the branches were hung with them, lapis-lazuli it bears, fruit it bears, choice (?) to look upon." When he gets to the shore, which is supposed to be that of the Persian Gulf, he meets a divine mermaid whom he persuades to allow him to cross the sea to the Isles of the Blest, where dwells Sit-napishtim. He reaches them, and his ancestor promises to make him immortal. He cures him of illness and sends him back with a magic plant, of which we are told that "whoever ate of it regained the strength of his youth." On his way back it is snatched from him by the serpent called "Earth Lion."

The idea of the Isles of the Blest also occurs among the Greeks, for Hesiod first mentions them in his Works and Days as set apart for the descendants of gods.

One of the interesting features of the history of civilisation in India is the influence that the non-Aryan peoples exerted on the later developments of religion. In the Vedas themselves there is no mention of an earthly paradise. We are told that "the idea, that the brave and the virtuous go to such a place on their decease, seems not to have been current in ancient India. For already in the Rig-Veda the abode of the dead who in life have done pious deeds is said to be in heaven above, and, according to the Atharva-veda, the wicked receive their punishment in the hell below."

The earthly paradise is first mentioned in the Aitareya-Brahmana, but it is in the great epic of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana that the idea first comes into prominence. In those works are described various lands lying