CHAPTER V
LEGENDS
THE strange narratives embodied in the Golden Legend, howsoever fabulous they may be, are referable notwithstanding to the highest Christian antiquity. They are parables rather than histories; the style is simple and Eastern, like that of the Gospels; and their traditional existence proves that a species of mythology had been devised to conceal the Kabalistic mysteries of Johannite initiation. The Golden Legend is a Christian Talmud expressed in allegories and apologues. Studied from this point of view, the newer in proportion as it is more ancient, the work will become of real importance and highest interest.1 One of the narratives in this Legend so full of mysteries characterises the conflict of Magic and dawning Christianity in a manner which is equally dramatic and startling. It is like an outline in advance of Chateaubriand's Martyrs and the Faust of Goethe combined.
Justina was a young and lovely pagan maiden, daughter of a priest of the idols, after the manner of Cymodoce. Her window opened on a court which gave upon the Christian church, so that she heard daily the pure and recollected voice of a deacon reading the holy Gospels aloud. The unknown words touched and stirred her heart, so deeply indeed that when her mother remarked one evening how grave she seemed, and sought to be the confidant of her preoccupations, Justina fell at her feet and said, “Bless me, my mother, or forgive me: I am a Christian.” The mother wept and embraced her, after which she returned to her husband and related what she had heard. That night in their sleep the parents were both visited by the same dream. A divine light descended upon them, a sweet voice called them and said: “Come unto me, all ye that are afflicted, and I will comfort you. Come, ye beloved of my father, and I will give unto you the kingdom which has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world.”
The morning dawned; father and mother blessed their daughter. All three were enrolled among the catechumens and, after the usual probation, they were admitted to Holy Baptism. Justina returned white and radiant from the church, between her mother and aged father, when two forbidding men, wrapped in their mantles, passed as Faust and Mephistopheles going by Margaret: they were Cyprian the magician and his disciple Acladius. They stopped, dazzled by the apparition, but Justina went on without seeing them and reached home with her family.
The scene now changes and we are in the laboratory of Cyprian. Circles have been traced, a slaughtered victim still palpitates by a smoking chafing-dish; the genius of darkness stands in the presence of the magician, saying: “Thou hast called me; I come. Speak: what dost thou require?”—“I love a virgin.”—“Seduce her.”—“She is a Christian.”—“Denounce her.”—“I would possess and not lose her: canst thou aid me?”—“I tempted Eve, who was innocent and conversed daily with God Himself. If thy virgin be Christian, know that it is I who caused Jesus Christ to be crucified.”—“Thou wilt deliver her into my hands, therefore.”—“Take this magical unguent, and anoint the threshold of her dwelling: the rest concerns me.”
And now Justina is asleep in her small and simple room, but Cyprian is at the door murmuring sacrilegious words and performing horrible rites. The demon creeps to the pillow of the young girl and instils voluptuous dreams full of the image of Cyprian, whom she seems to meet again on issuing from the church. This time, however, she looks at him; she listens, while the things which he whispers fill her heart with trouble. But she moves suddenly, she awakes and signs herself with the cross. The demon vanishes and the seducer, doing sentinel at the door, waits vainly through the whole night.
On the morrow he renews his evocations and loads his infernal accomplice with bitter reproaches. The latter confesses his inability, is driven forth in disgrace, and Cyprian invokes a demon of superior class, who transforms himself by turns into a young girl and a beautiful youth, tempting Justina by advice as well as caresses. She is on the point of yielding, but her good angel helps her; she joins inspiration to the sign of the cross and expels the evil spirit. Cyprian thereupon invokes the king of hell and Satan arrives in person. He visits Justina with all the woes of Job and spreads a frightful plague through Antioch; the oracles, at his instigation, declare that it will cease only when Justina shall satisfy Venus and love, who are alike outraged. Justina, however, prays in public for the people, and the pest ceases. Satan is baffled in his turn; Cyprian compels him to acknowledge the omnipotence of the sign of the cross and defies him by making it on his own person. He abjures Magic, becomes a Christian, is consecrated bishop and meets with Justina in a convent. They love now with the pure and lasting love of heavenly charity; persecution befalls both; they are arrested together, put to death on the same day and ratify in the breast of God their mystical and eternal marriage.1
According to the legend, St. Cyprian was Bishop of Antioch, but ecclesiastical history says that his seat was that of Carthage. It matters little, for the rest, whether the personalities are the same; the one belongs to poetry, while the other is a father and martyr of the Church.
There is extant among the old Grimoires a prayer attributed to the St. Cyprian of legend, who is possibly the holy Bishop of Carthage: its obscure and figurative expressions may have given credit to the idea that prior to his conversion he was addicted to the deadly practices of Black Magic. It may be rendered thus.
“I, Cyprian, servant of our Lord Jesus Christ, have prayed unto God the Father Almighty, saying: Thou art the strong God, my God omnipotent, dwelling in the great light. Thou art holy and worthy of praise, and Thou hast beheld in the old days the malice of Thy servant and the iniquities into which I was plunged by the wiles of the demon. I was ignorant of Thy true name; I passed in the midst of the sheep and they were without a shepherd. The clouds shed no dew on earth; trees bare no fruit and women in labour could not be delivered. I bound and did not loose; I bound the fishes of the sea, and they were captive; I bound the pathways of the sea, and many evils did I encompass. But now, Lord Jesus Christ, I have known Thy Holy Name, I have loved Thee, I am converted with my whole heart, my whole soul and all my inward being. I have turned from the multitude of my sins, that I may walk in Thy love and follow Thy commandments, which are henceforth my faith and my prayer. Thou art the Word of truth, the sole Word of the Father, and I conjure Thee now to break the chain of clouds and send down on Thy children Thy goodly rain like milk, to set free the rivers and liberate those who swim, as also those which fly. I conjure Thee to break all the chains and remove all the obstacles by the virtue of Thy Holy Name.”
The antiquity of this prayer is evident and it embodies most remarkable reminiscences of primitive types belonging to Christian esotericism during the first centuries of this era.
The qualification of “Golden” given to the fabulous legend of allegorical saints is a sufficient indication of its character. Gold, in the eyes of initiates, is condensed light; the sacred numbers of the Kabalah were called golden; the moral instructions of Pythagoras were contained in Golden Verses', and for the same reason that mysterious work of Apuleius in which an ass has an important role, is called the Golden Ass.
The Christians were accused by Pagans of worshipping an ass, and the slander in question is not of their own devising; it is referable to the Jews of Samaria, who expressed Kabalistic ideas on the Divinity by means of Egyptian symbols. Intelligence was represented in the symbol of a magical star, venerated under the name of Rempham; science was depicted by the emblem of Anubis, the latter name being altered into Nibbas; whilst vulgar faith or credulity appeared in the likeness of Thartac, a god represented holding a book, wearing a mantle and having the head of an ass.1 According to the Samaritan doctors, Christianity was the reign of Thartac, or blind faith and vulgar credulity set up as an universal oracle, superior to understanding and knowledge. This is why, in their intercourse with Gentiles and when they heard themselves identified by these with Christians, they protested and begged not to be confounded with the worshippers of an ass's head. The pretended revelation diverted the philosophers, and Tertullian mentions a Roman caricature, extant in his days, which exhibited Thartac in all his glory, identified as the god of Christianity, much to the amusement of Tertullian, though he was the author of that famous aphorism: Credo quia absurdum.1
The Golden Ass of Apuleius is the occult legend of Thartac. It is a magical epic and a satire against Christianity, which the author had doubtless professed for a period, or so at least he appears to intimate under the allegory of his metamorphosis into an ass. The story of the work is as follows. Apuleius was travelling in Thessaly, the country of enchantments. He received hospitality at the house of a man whose wife was a sorceress, and he seduced the servant of his hostess, thinking to obtain in this manner the secrets of her mistress. The maid promised to deliver to her lover a concoction by means of which the sorceress changed herself into a bird, but she made a mistake in the box and Apuleius was transformed into an ass. She could only console him by saying that to regain his proper form it would be sufficient to eat roses, the rose being the flower of initiation. The difficulty at the moment being to find roses in the night, it was decided to wait till the morrow and the servant therefore stabled the ass, but only for it to be taken by robbers and carried off. There was little chance now of coming across roses, which are not intended for asses, and gardeners chased away the animal with sticks.
During his long and sad captivity he heard the history of Psyche related, that marvellous and symbolical legend which was like the soul and poetry of his own experience. Psyche desired to take by surprise the secrets of love, as Apuleius sought those of Magic; she lost love and he the human form. She was an exiled wanderer, living under the wrath of Venus, and he was the slave of thieves. But after having journeyed through hell, Psyche was to return into heaven, and the gods took pity on Lucius. Isis appeared to him in a dream and promised that her priest, warned by a revelation, would give him roses during the solemnities of her coming festival. That festival arrived, and Apuleius describes at great length the procession of Isis; the account is valuable to science, for it gives the key of Egyptian mysteries. Men in disguise come first, carrying grotesque animals; these are the vulgar fables. Women follow strewing flowers and bearing on their shoulders mirrors which reflect the image of the great divinity. So do men go in front and formulate dogmas which women embellish, reflecting unconsciously the higher truths, owing to their maternal instincts. Men and women came afterwards in company as light-bearers; they represented the alliance of the two terms, the active and passive generators of science and life.1 After the light came harmony, represented by young musicians, and, in fine, the images of gods, to the number of three, followed by the grand hierophant, carrying, instead of an image, the symbol of great Isis, being a globe of gold surmounted by a Caduceus. Lucius Apuleius beheld a crown of roses in the hands of the high priest; he approached and was not repulsed; he ate the roses and was restored to human shape.
All this is learnedly written and intermingled with episodes which are now heroic and again grotesque in character, as befitted the double nature of Lucius and the ass. Apuleius was at once the Rabelais and Swedenborg of the old world at the close of the epoch.
The great masters of Christianity either failed or refused to understand the mysticism of the Golden Ass. St. Augustine in the City of God asks in the most serious manner whether one is to believe that Apuleius was metamorphosed literally into an ass and seems disposed to admit the possibility, but only as an exceptional phenomenon—from which nothing follows as a consequence. If this be an irony on his part, it must be allowed that it is cruel, but if it be ingenuousness…However, St. Augustine, the acute rhetorician of Madaura, was scarcely given to being ingenuous.
Blind and unfortunate indeed were those initiates of the Antique Mysteries who ridiculed the ass of Bethlehem without perceiving the infant God Who shone upon the peaceful animals in the stable—the Child on whose forehead reposed the conciliating star of all the past and future. Whilst philosophy, convicted of impotence, offered insult to victorious Christianity, the fathers of the Church assumed all the magnificence of Plato and created a new philosophy based upon the living reality of the Divine Word, ever present in His Church, reborn in each of its members and immortal in humanity. It would be a greater dream of pride than that of Prometheus, were it not at the same time a doctrine which is all abnegation and all devotion, human because it is divine and divine because it is human.
1 The Golden Legend was compiled about 1275 by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa. His authorities were (a) Eusebius, (b) St. Jerome, (c) legendary matter. I am sure that Kabalistic mysteries and Johannite initiation must look elsewhere for their records. The suggestion, however, is not worth debating.
1 In the Golden Legend the story is entitled “Of St. Justina”, whose festival is on September 26. St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, is entirely distinct from the Cyprian of legend.
1 This pictorial sign appears in an old Grimoire.
1 With this reverie of Éliphas Lévi on the subject of the mystic ass let us compare another which is of an entirely different order, though it belongs to the same category, (1) It is recorded by Josephus that a certain Jew named Onias obtained leave from Ptolemy Philometor to build a temple in honour of God at a certain place in Arabia which was subsequently called Onium, after the founder. (2) This Onium was not Heliopolis, as supposed commonly. (3) The Temple at Onium, on account of a similitude of sound, was connected with the Greek word ovos, signifying Ass. (4) The Greeks in consequence believed themselves to have discovered the secret object of Jewish worship, being the animal in question. (5) It was asserted that there was an ass's head in the vestibule of every Jewish temple. (6) As the Greeks did not closely distinguish between Jews and Christians, the ass came also to be called the god of the Christians.—Jacob Bryant: Analysts of Antient Mythology, 3rd edition, vol. vi, pp. 82 et seq.
1 The commentary of the Zohar on Genesis ii, 22, says that the words “which the Lord God had taken from man” signify that the Tradition has issued from the Written Doctrine. The words “and brought him to man” indicate that the Traditional Law must not remain isolated : it can only exist in union with the Written Law. Part I, fol. 48b. It follows, and is made plain elsewhere, that man is the Written Law and woman the Secret Doctrine.