knowledge.
If we seek the origin of these extraordinary coincidences in opinions and habits, we must go far back of the time of the lost tribes. We must seek it in the relationship of the Jews to the family of Noah, and in the identity of the Noachic race destroyed in the Deluge with the people of the drowned Atlantis.
Nor need it surprise us to find traditions perpetuated for thousands upon thousands of years, especially among a people having a religious priesthood.
The essence of religion is conservatism; little is invented; nothing perishes; change comes from without; and even when one religion is supplanted by another its gods live on as the demons of the new faith, or they pass into the folk-lore and fairy stories of the people. We see Votan, a hero in America, become the god Odin or Woden in Scandinavia; and when his worship as a god dies out Odin survives (as Dr. Dasent has proved) in the Wild Huntsman of the Hartz, and in the Robin Hood (Oodin) of popular legend. The Hellequin of France becomes the Harlequin of our pantomimes. William Tell never existed; he is a myth; a survival of the sun-god Apollo, Indra, who was worshipped on the altars of Atlantis.
“Nothing here but it doth change into something rich and strange.”
The rite of circumcision dates back to the first days of Phoenicia, Egypt, and the Cushites. It, too, was probably an Atlantean custom, invented in the Stone Age. Tens of thousands of years have passed since the Stone Age; the ages of copper, bronze, and iron bare intervened; and yet to this day the Hebrew rabbi performs the ceremony of circumcision with a stone knife.
Frothingham says, speaking of St. Peter’s Cathedral, in Rome: “Into what depths of antiquity the ceremonies carried me back! To the mysteries of Eleusis; to the sacrificial rites of Phoenicia. The boys swung the censors as censors had been swung in the adoration of Bacchus.
The girdle and cassock of the priests came from Persia; the veil and tonsure were from Egypt; the alb and chasuble were prescribed by Numa Pompilius; the stole was borrowed from the official who used to throw it on the back of the victim that was to be sacrificed; the white surplice was the same as described by Juvenal and Ovid.”
Although it is evident that many thousands of years must have passed since the men who wrote in Sanscrit, in Northwestern India, could have dwelt in Europe, yet to this day they preserve among their ancient books maps and descriptions of the western coast of Europe, and even of England and Ireland; and we find among them a fuller knowledge of the vexed question of the sources of the Nile than was possessed by any nation in the world twenty- five years ago.
This perpetuation of forms and beliefs is illustrated in the fact that the formulas used in the Middle Ages in Europe to exorcise evil spirits were Assyrian words, imported probably thousands of years before from the magicians of Chaldea. When the European conjurer cried out to the demon, “Hilka, hilka, besha, besha,” he had no idea that he was repeating the very words of a people who had perished ages before, and that they signified Go away, go away, evil one, evil one. (Lenormant, “Anc. Hist. East,” vol. i., p. 448.)
Our circle of 360 degrees; the division of a chord of the circle equal to the radius into 60 equal parts, called degrees: the division of these into 60 minutes, of the minute into 60 seconds, and the second into 60
thirds; the division of the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60
minutes, each minute into 60 seconds; the division of the week into seven days, and the very order of the days—all have come down to us from the Chaldeo-Assyrians; and these things will probably be perpetuated among our posterity “to the last syllable of recorded time.”
We need not be surprised, therefore, to find the same legends and beliefs cropping out among the nations of Central America and the people of Israel. Nay, it should teach us to regard the Book of Genesis with increased veneration, as a relic dating from the most ancient days of man’s history on earth; its roots cross the great ocean; every line is valuable; a word, a letter, an accent may throw light upon the gravest problems of the birth of civilization.
The vital conviction which, during thousands of years, at all times pressed home upon the Israelites, was that they were a “chosen people,”
selected out of all the multitude of the earth, to perpetuate the great truth that there was but one God—an illimitable, omnipotent, paternal spirit, who rewarded the good and punished the wicked—in contradistinction from the multifarious, subordinate, animal and bestial demi-gods of the other nations of the earth. This sublime monotheism could only have been the outgrowth of a high civilization, for man’s first religion is necessarily a worship of “stocks and stones,” and history teaches us that the gods decrease in number as man increases in intelligence. It was probably in Atlantis that monotheism was first preached. The proverbs of “Ptah-hotep,” the oldest book of the Egyptians, show that this most ancient colony from Atlantis received the pure faith from the mother-land at the very dawn of history: this book preached the doctrine of one God, “the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked.” (Reginald S. Poole, Contemporary Rev., Aug., 1881, p. 38.) “In the early days the Egyptians worshipped one only God, the maker of all things, without beginning and without end. To the last the priests preserved this doctrine and taught it privately to a select few.” (“Amer. Encycl.,” vol. vi., p. 463.) The Jews took up this great truth where the Egyptians dropped it, and over the beads and over the ruins of Egypt, Chaldea, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and India this handful of poor shepherds—ignorant, debased, and despised—have carried down to our own times a conception which could only have originated in the highest possible state of human society.
And even skepticism must pause before the miracle of the continued existence of this strange people, wading through the ages, bearing on their shoulders the burden of their great trust, and pressing forward under the force of a perpetual and irresistible impulse. The speech that may be heard to-day in the synagogues of Chicago and Melbourne resounded two thousand years ago in the streets of Rome; and, at a still earlier period, it could be heard in the palaces of Babylon and the shops of Thebes—in Tyre, in Sidon, in Gades, in Palmyra, in Nineveh. How many nations have perished, how many languages have ceased to exist, how many splendid civilizations have crumbled into ruin, bow many temples and towers and towns have gone down to dust since the sublime frenzy of monotheism first seized this extraordinary people! All their kindred nomadic tribes are gone; their land of promise is in the hands of strangers; but Judaism, with its offspring, Christianity, is taking possession of the habitable world; and the continuous life of one people—one poor, obscure, and wretched people—spans the tremendous gulf between “Ptah-hotep” and this nineteenth century.
If the Spirit of which the universe is but an expression—of whose frame the stars are the infinite molecules— can be supposed ever to interfere with the laws of matter and reach down into the doings of men, would it not be to save from the wreck and waste of time the most sublime fruit of the civilization of the drowned Atlantis—a belief in the one, only, just God, the father of all life, the imposer of all moral obligations?
CHAPTER VII.
