Page:The Natural History of the Christian Devil.pdf/4

 similar scene between God and Satan is related in the second chapter, and the trials of Job read very much as though Jeue and his friend were engaged in the settlement of a wager.

The character of the Hebrew Satan changed entirely after the captivity. The Jews brought back from Babylon a Devil who was the rival, the enemy of God, a dwarfed and misshapen copy of the mighty Persian Ahriman. The story of the Fall, with its seducing serpent, and the various identifications of the Devil with the serpent, found in the Jewish Scriptures, especially in the New Testament, are purely Persian; Zahak, the Prometheus of Persia, was the king of the serpents, and Ahriman after his fall to earth turned into a serpent. How the serpent became in Persia the emblem of the evil one, we shall see further on.

The Persian myth which the Jews partially borrowed was a very poetical one, far better than its Jewish and Christian copy. The Supreme Existence believed in by the Persians was a universal power, unnameable save by the descriptive epithet of "Boundless Time". From Boundless Time emanated two mighty beings, Ormuzd and Ahriman, both perfect and unstained. But Ahriman became jealous of Ormuzd and was cast out from happiness into the kingdom of darkness. Thenceforward war raged between the brothers, and whenever Ormuzd created aught perfect, Ahriman made somewhat to oppose or mar it. When Ormuzd created, Ahriman slew, and when Ormuzd made man and woman pure and happy Ahriman tempted them to fall. This fraternal conflict is to endure for 12,000 years, at the end of which period Ahriman is to set the universe on fire; the good shall pass unscathed through the flames, while the wicked shall be purified in them for three days and three nights and shall then ascend to paradise. Finally Ahriman himself shall become pure and holy, and eternal and universal happiness shall reign.

It is tolerably clear that the Christian Devil, inherited from the Jews, is a debased copy of Ahriman. Like God he is ubiquitous, tempting men simultaneously in all parts of the world. Like God he is immortal, as eternal in his hell as is God in his heaven. He quite holds his own in his long rivalry; when God creates man, the Devil mars him; he succeeds in so ravaging the world that was made "very good" that God is obliged to destroy it by water; he succeeds in winning the greater part of the human race which God made for his own glory; the finally saved are