Devil's Tor

by David Lindsay

  "You seem all at once, so very strangely, to be regarding my peculiar work as no longer peculiarly mine—but almost anybody’s."

  "Why do you want it to be yours? I will even be rather blunt, and ask you, in what sense the divine—which is your incentive and your mark—in what sense it can belong to any man with arms and legs? Surely, it must be the possessor, not the possessed!"

  Arsinal gazed at him in mournful steadiness. Afterwards, straightening his back, he sat down.

  "Words, as you know, Saltfleet," he said quietly, "may have all truth, all reason, and all right, in them; and yet may be false. I must see Miss Fleming myself before I can determine the degree of her deflective influence, if any such there be..."

  But while Saltfleet, taking a second chair, returned the other only a front of stone and grimness, he was already conscious in his heart that their breach was opened, and might not again be mended. For now he understood that he was scorning Arsinal, who of a sudden had shown himself without generosity. Because of a mystical vision in early youth, he had struggled through life under an imaginary mantle of destiny, rather too heavy for him; and yet this delusion had enabled him to do great things. But all was based on greed and egoism. Plain enough was it that the destiny, should it, against his refusal, prepare to quit him, was still to be forced to ambition. He was but a human, moved by vanity.

  To the account of his secret aims, that should be at once to follow, Saltfleet prepared himself to hearken with these uneasy expectations. He knew an increasingly settled contempt for the man, on account of this revealed half-hypocrisy of his entire career. He feared, at the same time, the application to real persons and events of the prophecy of Knossos, that might well be to find utterance by an incited tongue.

  Perhaps he was a little ahead of Arsinal. He felt only that he would come to it, and must be allowed to talk, and develop all the dark convolutions of his soul; but then must be stopped. … He had the intuition that to-day was to be no less extraordinary in his life than yesterday had been...

  Chapter XX

  THE GREAT MOTHER

  Arsinal sighed, was silent for another moment, then said quite suddenly:

  "I gave you the Knossos record. Later I had the somewhat remarkable luck to strike a fellow to it in the vicinity of the ancient Aphrodisias, in Caria, which repeats the prophetic part of the text just differently enough to throw a new illumination. The inscription is on a small silver figurine of the mother-goddess, which I have secured. I can repeat its purport from memory. The Mother, you must know, was worshipped in Caria as well."

  And he quoted:

  "'To one bed shall I bring another man and another woman, of whom shall be born a greater than they, greater than all mankind, who shall put wickedness under foot, and found my people.'

  "Thus, Saltfleet, this miracle of new birth, which in the one prediction was to arise directly from an action of the temple stone, in the other is to be the intelligent personal work of the goddess. It is one more piece of confirmatory evidence of the close connection between the two. The goddess either, mystically, is the stone; or else is to work through it.

  "I surmise that the broken sections of the original whole stone are to be rejoined before the fated marriage of the man and the woman can be consummated. One knows not the beginning of the myth, and therefore one cannot pronounce upon it. Should you desire to scoff, you have every justification. Nevertheless, there are certain appearing facts in the dark emergence of faith from the mists of the planet's prime, that do seem to bear out a history of which these prophecies may be the intuitive fruit.

  "Both records were inscribed many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. Ostensibly they have in no way influenced the Gospel story. Yet those thorough-going folk who style themselves Rationalists will inform you that the legend of a Virgin and holy Child has arisen, as if spontaneously, in many lands of both the old and the new worlds long anterior to Christian missionary activities. … They have, indeed, gone a step beyond. They have assigned a fixed astronomical date for the common original of those legends; calculated, if you please, on the rising of the sun in conjunction with the setting of the constellation Virgo, whose five principal stars are assumed to have suggested to primitive anthropomorphic imaginations the outstretching of the Virgin Mother towards her infant Sun-God!

  "By such imbecilities do scientists, snatching a holiday from their science, make themselves ridiculous in the eyes of gods and men. For the individual stars, equally with the constellations, were to be given distinguishing names by the ancients, and, since they, the stars, were in themselves sublime, after whom or what should they be named but the sublime gods and archetypes? And should a poor likeness to a known shape, in these clusters of stars, suggest the appellation, would not it be adopted? But most are unhappy. To affirm that the men of old literally saw in the stars the god or mythical type whose name they were made to bear, this surely is the height and apex of learned childishness! ...

  "The Virgin myth truly has reappeared in many surprising forms and places throughout the world, but it never originated in a constellation. Most obviously, it is a statement of the extremely antique Mother worship, distorted in this way and in that. In the Palestine version, for instance, the goddess herself is even eliminated; the human mother is half-confounded with her, half remains in her own rank and person; the father is so completely despised and ignored that he is denied the honour of begetting his own son; the son is made a god; the extramundane meteor, that is so important an element of the earlier tradition, becomes a bright announcing star. Such a crass perversion of every feature of the original might reduce even a cynic to astonishment, but that it is all very instructive. … I don't weary you, Saltfleet?"

  "No. Pray go on."

  "For so many kindred myths distributed over the globe indicate, of course, a common source; and this of Palestine is manifestly an orientalising—probably of a north-west European faith. Here are my supporting reasons. The social equality of a free people would fail to find its counterpart among the rigid castes of the East; accordingly, the mother of a fateful son, if of known lowly birth, must be ennobled by heaven. Being thus translated, she would come to usurp many of the functions of the goddess, and in time the memory of the independent existence of the latter would altogether disappear. The goddess was alone; therefore her successor is humanly unmated—a virgin. Her divinity, however—how could it be otherwise in the East?—is still below that of her infant, by reason of his sex.

  "You will understand, Saltfleet, that I am not attempting anything so foolish as the destruction of the historical figure of Christ, with His inimitable character and teachings. Since something does not come out of nothing, such a personage, whether divine or human, has existed. I simply maintain that He has become attached to a pre-existing myth, with which He has no true connection. This myth, I say, doubtless sprang from the north-west of the world known to the ancients, so agreeable is its nature with what we are told of the peoples primitively occupying that cold and mystic region. For only among those peoples do we encounter the reverence of womankind which, despite Schopenhauer and his tribe, surely remains as the basis of the finest qualities in humanity. Nowhere else could the chaste worship of the Creatrix have originated than in the first home of those free Scandinavians whose blackest shame it was for a man to set finger in anger on a woman; or of those forest-dwelling Germans, who according to Tacitus, believed the females of their race to be divinely inspired with the spirit of prophecy—"

  "Knossos came later?" asked Saltfleet.

  "Necessarily, if my theory be correct. Knossos was a lingering on the road to Asia and to degeneration. Crete, of which Knossos was the then capital, furnishes perhaps our earliest exact knowledge of the cult in working. In like manner the final wanton worship of Cybele throughout Phrygia and Asia Minor generally, that was a presentment of the faith’s flaring up to death. It had passed slowly eastwards, from the deep-natured, deep-sighted men of the north, to brown-skinned priests
and moralists, and so on to heavily-bejewelled, painted, perfumed women, with their appropriate male companions, dancing mad orgies. The passage east was coincident with the passage of the centuries. Were it ever needful to seek a cause for the decay and death of a creed or system, here the explanation would not be obscure. A creed removed from its land, climate, circumstances, and own people, is already becoming something else. In but few cases can the new soil be as favourable as the old for its increase to purity and splendour.

  "Let the first nation beyond the racial boundary receive the light, the separating out of the faith's elements begins. Let the next nations receive it, there ensues the same perpetual modifying and rejecting, until the creed shall have become interwoven with the imperishable racial traits of the peoples receiving. … Regard the destiny of Christianity, Saltfleet. Recall the innumerable types that at one time or another have presented Christianity; the simple fishermen of Galilee, the early anchorites of the deserts, the Crusading holy knights, the fanatical inquisitors of Charles the Fifth and his monstrous son, the grim Calvinists of persecuted Scotland, the old-time English hunting parsons of the shires, the modern Laodiceans of our national hierarchy, watching in despair the approaching end of all faith—what, of the Christian elements, have had those types in common? One has insisted upon the torments of hell, another on celestial love, a third on a mystical Saviour, scarcely to be understood, a fourth on the metaphysics of original evil, a fifth on right living. … A branch that is little in one land and century may become everything in another; and in yet another may wither to nothingness...

  "Proceed to the matter, Arsinal. We know that the New Testament creed is a compound, and that a heterogeneous mass is unstable."

  "I am merely emphasising that the root of a faith is necessarily to be sought in its land of origin. Every divine entity harboured by the human mind has needed a special environment in order to take shape at all. The Prophet's Allah demanded the glaring deserts and nightly canopy of glittering stars of Arabia; Aphrodite demanded the violet seas and perfumed air of the Grecian Archipelago; Thor, the mighty storms, salt sea spray and sunless skies of the iron coasts of the north. In like manner, I tell you, Saltfleet, the Mother could only have created herself in the human intelligence in some physical region of gloom, silence, and impenetrable forest. …

  "The Minoan clay tablet has informed us—though not in quite so many words—that our monastery stone came from the west. This may indicate the western Baltic lands, Norway, Britain, Gaul, the old Hercynian Forest of Germany; but I cannot think, Spain or Southern France. In all those northern districts the archaic yield is rich. Thus they were populated very far back. The blood-descendants of that northern stock not only built all the noblest religious edifices of Greece and Gothic Europe, but created the dream-like Hellenic mythology, its naiver Norse compeer, and the clouds, ghosts, fairies, and legendary heroes of the lochs and isles.

  "The savage ancestors of such creators obviously had it in their breed to see past practical existence. I don't mean, in the Semitic sense of an ingrained realisation of their creaturely impotence, inducing a relation to the invisible as of duty to a master; nor in the Hindu sense of a bodily and mental weariness of the grind of life, logically conducting in due course to Nirvana; but in the Cimmerian sense of a profound mystical recognition of the actuality of another world of phantoms and spirits interrupting and permeating their own... which long afterwards, Saltfleet, has become metaphysics and music. Even the grander monuments of Egypt seem difficult to account for, considered as the handiwork of a sun-baked race. The dusk and quietude of supernatural northern forests, one could almost aver, are reproduced by those fearful columns of Karnak, those sepulchral recesses of the Pyramids. …

  "Yet mere climate and land will avail nothing unless the inhabiting race be appropriate, and a man be born to it, and that man be confronted, blinded, staggered, by his Highest possible. For the first condition, I would like seriously to put it to you: whence came those blue-eyed, deep-thoughted, metaphysical giants into the world? The native stocks of Asia, Africa, America, the South Seas, the Mediterranean, have no more than animals that pigmentation or that curiosity concerning the unseen workings of the world. … Nowadays, indeed, all colours and all characters seem so blended in our populations, that a man may inherit from many sources, and be inscrutable to himself and others. …"

  "And render the whole modern theory unworkable!" completed Saltfleet. "For instance, pure blonds are still frequent enough; whereas my experience is that they are usually of the sportsman type, and spiritually rather peculiarly phlegmatic."

  "Rarely are we so fortunate in science as to find the truth on the surface. Here, in this circumstance of yours, Saltfleet, it may be very much as with the massive ruins still strewing the globe from the receded tides of northern conquest and sovereignty. The sublime philosophies of India represent the turned ebb of such a tide of blue-eyed warriors sweeping in from the west. The vigorous blood, used to cold temperatures, sickened and ceased under withering suns; but the philosophies remain. So with the Goths, Franks, Normans, Lombards, in southern and western Europe. While they were yet superior to their new circumstances, lofty cathedrals everywhere shot up to express a ghostly faith. But those races, too, have sunk from their first height, and sometimes the earlier brown-eyed have crept back to equality, through the greater stamina of their blood in countries physically suited, and sometimes the conquering race has flamed up within these last few hundreds of years, only immediately afterwards to die out; as in the Gothic Italy of the Renaissance, the Gothic Spain of the conquests of Granada and America. Then, as well innumerable intermarriages between the races have depressed the higher, and raised the lower.

  "But the cathedrals still stand. And just such a monument in his own person is the blond of to-day. The blood of his forefathers has failed, leaving him colour, physical habit, stature, for vestiges. Why has it failed, Saltfleet? Because over too long a time it has not been renewed."

  Saltfleet was silent, eyeing him sombrely, through the smoke of his cigar.

  "To renew it—that northern blood—we should need to know more of its beginning," said Arsinal. "As a lusus naturæ, a miracle for it may have to be presumed. Yet such a miracle as even science might allow."

  "Would this be the Stone Age happening, that once you spoke to me about?"

  "With that idea I have played. … Yes, many times have I played with it; but never quite seriously before to-day. Indeed, it would be very awful to contemplate, Saltfleet. For imagine! Long, long ago a meteorite, of elements unknown to earth, would have shot to ground in the west; and somehow, with that descent, originated the worship of the Mother. … And since men cannot be wise from nothing, our two predictions, of Crete and Caria, have been a history, and also with the descent of the aerolith, a people has been founded; but I have told you but just now that the earliest worshippers of the Mother may most probably have been the first ancestors of the northern stocks. …

  "Chiefly I have connected these events because a racial change of supreme importance has been adumbrated. No change grander than the creation of this highest and noblest of all human peoples hitherto can be conceived. Nor can I feel that a Messiah has been indicated by the son who was to be greater than all mankind and put wickedness under foot. Neither is that need for a Messiah agreeable with the spirit of the early northern faiths, nor, historically, has such an one ever come out of the north or west. …

  "I grow confused with too many associated thoughts, and can but sketch one here and there. … How could a meteorite have induced a racial change? A chemical emanation from such, terrific as that from radium, but of a far different nature, may well have had force to raise that atomic storm within the flesh of a brown-eyed pair—a savage woman and her paramour, lying together—that even the sacred citadel should become pierced through and through. … Thus a new son would indeed be born!... I could not support its probability against the meanest physiologist, but neither could the most expe
rt deny the possibility. Hardly do we yet know all the elements of earth; and the spectroscope has given us quite unknown ones among the stars. …"

  "What is this phenomenon of the flint in your pocket, Arsinal? How caused?"

  "I can't yet decide. … But perhaps the whole was shattered, after arrival, along the line of easiest frangibility, and the halves may be polar. This polarity may indicate a strong galvanic action for the whole. It is a thought I have had. I have no more doubt that it is meteoric. …

  "Then, the peopling of half a world from a single pair, with whole tribes of individuals having revolutionary new characters... this might well come to pass, given the necessary might of the radiated particles, continuing to be inherited by common generation. It is little in history for a strong character to triumph during many hundreds of years. The world has seen the Hapsburg jaw and the Bourbon eye. So one single pair, both possessed of the new force, and completing each other, might found that dynasty of a million natural kings.

  "But the 'wickedness' to be put under foot. This can but signify the subjugation of the inferior races practising barbarism and savagery. … Or should it be a longer prophecy, relating to all the world, what in effect would happen—has happened—is this. Those possessed of the new characters went on multiplying in the north until a sufficient time had elapsed to over-stock it with these yellow-haired; when the usual choice between famine and migration would present itself, and be decided in the usual way. In this manner the conquest of the rich, unwarlike 'wicked' lands would begin. …

  "Strange, Saltfleet, if true, that the first man and father of such a stock should escape mention in the early chronicles! Yet is it true? Snorre Sturlason's Ynglinga Saga relates the conquest of the northern lands, including Sweden, by a chief named Odin, removing with his followers from the neighbourhood of the Black Sea. This was not long before Christ. Now such an event, with all its magical circumstances, is to-day no more credited than the founding of Rome by Romulus; and yet the invention has its value of another sort.