Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/329

Rh days, Hindu and Parsi in Bombay are learning from scholars in Europe the ancient connexion of their long antagonistic faiths, and have to hear that Yama son of Visavat sitting on his awful judgment-seat of the dead, to reward the good and punish the wicked with hideous tortures, and Yima son of Vivanhâo who in primæval days reigned over his happy deathless kingdom of good Zarathustrian men, are but two figures developed in the course of ages out of one and the same Aryan nature-myth. Within the limits of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem theology, the First Man scarcely occupies more than a place of precedence among the human race in Hades or in Heaven, not the high office of Lord of the Dead. Yet that tendency to deify an ideal ancestor, which we observe to act so strongly on lower races, has taken effect also here. The Rabbinical Adam is a gigantic being reaching from earth to heaven, for the definition of whose stature Rabbi Eliezer cites Deuteronomy iv. 32, 'God made man (Adam) upon the earth, and from one end of heaven to the other.' It is one of the familiar episodes of the Koran, how the angels were bidden to bow down before Adam, the regent of Allah upon earth, and how Eblis (Diabolus) swelling with pride, refused the act of adoration. Among the Gnostic sect of the Valentinians, Adam the primal man in whom the Deity bad revealed himself, stood as earthly representative of the Demiurge, and was even counted among the Æons.

The figures of the great deities of Polytheism, thus traced in outline according to the determining idea on which each is shaped, seem to show that conceptions originating under rude and primitive conditions of human thought and passing thence into the range of higher culture,

1 'Rig-Veda,' x. 'Atharva-Veda,' xviii. Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 2nd Ser. p. 514. Muir, 'Yama,' &c., in 'Journ. As. Soc. N. S.' vol. i. 1865. Roth in 'Ztschr. Deutsch. Morgenl. G.' vol. iv. p. 426. Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 60. Avesta: 'Vendidad,' ii. Pictet, 'Origines Indo-Europ.' part ii. p. 621.

2 Eisenmenger, part i. p. 365.

3 Koran, ii. 28, vii. 10, &c.

4 Neander, 'Hist. of Chr.' vol. ii. pp. 81, 109, 174.