Part 10

Great must have been the amazement of the Greeks when of a sudden, in different localities within the broad Roman Empire, communities arose which announced the suffering and dying God Jasios as the savior of a new age—a Jasios who, under the form of a Jew, all unknown outside his own country, had but lately been crucified; whereas, Jasios, as all Initiates of the Eleusinia and of the mysteries of Samothrace well knew, was ages and ages before slain by the thunderbolt of Zeus. And still populations were passing day after day over to the crucified Jew, the Son of God, the wonderworker, who rose from the grave, who went up to heaven. And, in consequence of his teaching, though, after all, that did but complement the teaching of a Pythagoras, a Socrates, a Plato, the noble statues of the Grecian gods were falling from their bases. Ought the Beautiful to fall in order to make room for the Good? Might not both stand side by side? And if a son of God and a thaumaturge was required, might not one be found without making of Zeus the Thunderer a victim to that fearful Jewish Yahve of Mt. Sinai?

And such a son of God and wonderworker they found. The heathen prophet Apollonius of Tyana was a contemporary of Jesus, and was deeply venerated. And, as it chanced, a certain learned Greek, Flavius Philostratus, wrote a heathen gospel of the life of this Grecian saint, not as one hostile toward the Christians, nor as one who would prove their doctrine false, but with intent to come to the aid of decaying heathendom, and prevent for a time its overthrow by Christianism. To attain this end there must be no mention of Christianism or its author, so that Olympus might tower again in all its ancient glory and triumph over Sinai and Tabor. Philostratus composed his work, as he states, out of the notes of a disciple of Apollonius, one Damis, native of Ninive, by order of Julia Domna, wife of the Emperor Septimius Severus. What part of his work consisted of matter drawn from Damis’s notes, and what he added out of his own fancy, we can never determine. But he showed true insight in making out his hero to have been a Pythagorean. He therefore represents Apollonius as deriving his wisdom indirectly from the most ancient mysteries, those of Egypt, and from the venerated Grecian sacred leagues.

Apollonius was born in Tyana, a town in Cappadocia. Previous to his birth, says Philostratus, the god Proteus appeared to his mother and told her that the child soon to see the light was the God himself. This happened in a meadow, where, after gathering flowers, she had fallen asleep, while swans gathered round her and intoned their song. When the child was grown up he became a strict observer of the Pythagorean rule of life, abstaining from fleshmeat and wine, and wearing linen garments. His abode was a temple sacred to Aesculapius, god of healing. Unworthy offerers of gifts to the god he drove out, and healed such of the sick as repented of their transgressions. He rejected the Grecian mythology as fabulous, preferring far to it the fables of Esop, and his only prayer was addressed to the sun. He refused to take possession of an estate inherited from his father, and imposed on himself a silence of several years’ duration. During his extensive travels he always lodged in temples, corrected abuses in the conduct of the divine service, couched his teachings in brief sentences, gathered around him disciples, of whom one was false and a traitor; sided with the persecuted and righted the wrongs of the oppressed. Everywhere he understood the languages of the natives without learning them, and even read the thoughts of men; but the language of the beasts he learned from the Arabs of Mesopotamia. On entering that country the publican asked him whether he had with him anything subject to toll. The answer of Apollonius was that he carried about righteousness, temperance, a manly soul and a patient spirit—and many another virtue named he. The sullen taxman, who had no mind for anything that lay outside his own duties, took the names of virtues for names of women, saying: “There, your maids are all down in the book.” But Apollonius calmly went his way, with the brief remark: “They are not maids, but high-born dames;” nor paid he impost on his ideal goods. In spite of his frankness of speech he was treated with great distinction by the king of that country. He told the king that he would best strengthen his royal power by honoring many and putting trust in but a few. The king, who was ill, having been comforted by the prophet, confessed that he had been freed from anxiety, not only with regard to his kingdom, but also with regard to death. From Babylon Apollonius bent his steps toward India, and there, according to the highly embellished story, saw men four or five ells in height, also men who were half white and half black; dragons, too, of various size he saw. He constantly carried on with Damis, the one disciple who accompanied him, instructive conversations about the animals and the people whom they met. An Indian king, dazzled by the splendor of the prophet’s genius, would not wear the crown in his presence. With the Brahmans, many of whose conjurfeats are recorded, e. g., flitting through the air, or at touch of their wands causing the earth to spring aloft, Apollonius swapped wisdoms; and as, in the opinion of Damis, the wisdom of the Brahmans was derived from Pythagoras, it was from Pythagoras also, of course, that they got their doctrine of metempsychosis. We learn that Apollonius also entertained that curious idea, and that he imagined himself to have been once an Indian tax-gatherer, and was wont to tell of many incidents of that phase of his life. Furthermore, in his presence the Brahmans cured the possessed, the lame, the blind, and women in difficult labor, by imposition of hands, and by giving good counsels—practices resembling those used in our day by sympathists, so-called. Apollonius returned to Babylon and Ninive, passing through fabulous lands, and then journeyed to the Ionians of Asia Minor. Apollonius banished from Ephesus an epidemic which was there raging, by requiring the citizens to stone a beggar in whom he discerned the daemon who was the cause of the disease; the culprit, under the storm of stones, was changed into a dog. Voyaging by sea to Greece, the Sage Apollonius imposed on his shipmates with the story that Achilles had appeared unto him five ells in height, and before his eyes had grown to twelve ells. At Athens, where he arrived during the Eleusinian mysteries, the priests refused to initiate him, because he was a conjurer; whereupon the Sage of Tyana told them that already he knew more about the mysteries than the priests. This alarmed them, and they wished to recall their refusal; but it was Apollonius’s turn now to refuse them, so he deferred to another time his initiation, but in public discourses let his light shine before the Athenians. In Athens, too, there was a youth possessed, who laughed and cried without cause. Apollonius having detected the true nature of the ailment, of which no one else had any suspicion, with stern looks and words of menace confronted the daemon, who thereupon fled away, and in token of his passage overturned a statue that no one had touched. But the youth, rubbing his eyes as though waking from sleep, was seen to be cured. At Corinth the Sage detected in the bride of a comely youth a lamia or empusa; i. e., one of a class of spectral beings that used to haunt people, and under pretense of being in love with them, would eat the flesh off their bones. In the presence of Apollonius all her arts and all her imps disappeared, and the spectre was unmasked and confessed her evil intent. At the Olympian Games also this apostle of the Pythagorean philosophy preached. His following was increased by the accession of several members with their slaves; these he called his “congregation.” With them he went to Rome, where the infamous Nero then reigned, who had prohibited philosophy, which he classed with soothsaying. But one who was in the service of the tyrant, impressed by the wisdom of the traveler, allowed him to lecture in the temples, and to these lectures there was great concourse. But one of his disciples who had accompanied him from Corinth, and who in Rome had ventured to condemn publicly the conduct of Nero and the prevailing immorality, was expelled from the city by Tigellinus, captain of the emperor’s bodyguard, and trusty tool of the tyrant, while Apollonius himself was kept under surveillance. But not only could nothing be proved against him; his wisdom filled even the sanguinary minions with admiration, though he spoke to them only the stern truth. For example, being asked by Tigellinus why he had no fear of Nero, he answered: “The God who makes him an object of fear made me fearless.” Asked what he thought of Nero, “Better than you do,” he replied; “ye think him gifted for singing, I for silence.” Whereupon Tigellinus: “Go wherever you please; you are stronger than any power of mine.” A bride in Rome having died, the body was on the way to the place of interment. Apollonius bade the bearers to halt, touched the damsel, uttering some secret words, and called her back from death. Philostratus himself is in doubt whether the death was not apparent only. The philosopher then journeyed to the Strait of Gibraltar, whence he traversed Spain, Sicily and Greece, and then revisited Egypt. At Alexandria he recognized the innocence of one among eight criminals, interceded for him and had the man’s execution put off till the last moment; then arrived the order to spare his life; he had confessed only under torture. The story is also told that Apollonius, on paying a visit to Vespasian, in Alexandria, “made him Caesar,” thus giving to the Roman Empire once again, after a long interval, a just ruler; but after Vespasian’s elevation to the throne, the philosopher frankly spoke the truth to him, when the Emperor annulled, as an unjust privilege, the liberties of Greece, which Nero had in a capricious humor granted on the occasion of the Olympian Games. Leaving Egypt, Apollonius journeyed to Ethiopia to visit the Gymnosophists, who dwelt in a sort of little republic of their own, on a mountain, and conducted a famous school. Probably because they were less conceited, went naked, and performed no magical feats, our Sage deemed them less wise than the Brahmans, and had resultless controversies with them about the relative superiority of Grecian and Egyptian art, the former representing the gods as resembling man, the latter as resembling animals. In that region Apollonius exorcised a satyr that was said to have killed two women. About the time of the taking of Jerusalem by Titus, Apollonius happened to be in the neighborhood of that city, and praised the Roman general for his “moderation” (though it was a curious sort of moderation which leveled a great city with the ground). Titus answered: “I have made conquest of Solyma; you have made conquest of me,” and thereafter employed Apollonius as his adviser. At Tarsus he not only cured a young man of hydrophobia, but the dog also that had bitten him.

Having boldly denounced the Emperor Domitian at Ephesus, Apollonius was betrayed by his disciple Euphrates, and a plot was laid against him. Straightway he took ship for Rome, to confront the tyrant in his palace. In Rome he was thrown into prison, and treated with much harshness; but he defended himself with great spirit against the charges brought by his accuser, and was acquitted. Thereupon he uttered a tirade of reproaches against Domitian’s satellites, and suddenly vanished miraculously from the judgment hall, appearing the same day in the vicinity of Naples, where he had friends. From Naples he went to Ephesus; there, in ecstasy, he saw the assassination of Domitian, at that moment taking place in Rome; then he died. None knew what age he had attained, whether 80 years or 100, nor the time, nor the place, nor the manner of his death. According to Philostratus he appeared after his death to a young man of his native town, Tyana, who doubted the immortality of the soul, and invoked Apollonius to explain the matter; but he was invisible to the other persons present.

2. ALEXANDER THE FALSE PROPHET.

It is no matter of surprise that the cold, austere virtue and wisdom, the rather hollow religion, and the clumsy miracles of Apollonius neither built up a school for him nor kept the heathen religion on its feet; and though the emperors of the third century, from Caracalla to Diocletian, consecrated temples to him, and one of them, Alexander Severus, placed his bust, with those of Moses, Socrates and Jesus, in his private chapel, nevertheless the Sage of Tyana was soon forgotten, and with him, alas! the memory of his noble courage in the presence of tyrants. On the other hand, the charlatanry he practiced became more and more the order of the day, till at last it threw off all disguise. Whether this result is chargeable to his disciples, who, like the disciples of another master, prized his miracles more than his teachings, is a question that cannot be decided; but the fact is that soon after his death (the close of the first century) a number of impostors, wearing the cloak of religion, began to ply their trade. The satirist Lucian, who lived in the second century, and who made sport of everything—religion and philosophy, gods and men, heathen and Christians—has immortalized the tomfooleries of these pseudoprophets.

Of these the best known was Alexander of Abonotichus, in Asia Minor, a man greater in fraud, says Lucian, than his namesake, the son of Philip, in heroism. He was a large, handsome man, and by scrupulous care of his complexion, his hair, and his beard, enhanced the advantage nature had given him. But his character was “a compound of mendacity, fraud, perjury, and low tricks of every kind.” In his boyhood he was apprenticed to a quack of Tyana, a renegade disciple of Apollonius (whose life, by the way, Lucian, who lived nearer to him than Philostratus, calls a “comedy”), and by him was instructed in all the artifices whereby one can outwit and defraud his fellows. After his master’s death Alexander went into business on his own account. In Macedonia he procured one of the large harmless serpents found in that province and went back to his native town—Abonotichus—there to set up an “oracle factory,” as Lucian calls it. At Chalcedon he secretly placed on a roadside a tablet bearing the inscription that the god Aesculapius, with his father, Apollo, was soon to be at Abonotichus; the finding of this tablet caused great excitement. Meanwhile Alexander, in his native place, went about with his long, curling locks falling over his shoulders, wearing a purple robe with white stripes, and armed with a sabre. His stupid fellow townsmen, though they knew his parents, who were poor, believed him when he claimed descent from Perseus, and when they heard of the tablet set about erecting a temple to Aesculapius. Between the foundation stones of the temple Alexander secretly placed a goose-egg shell containing a newly-hatched snake; then with the wild gesticulations of a god-inspired enthusiast, hastened to the market-place, and there announced to the people that Aesculapius had just been born at the temple in the form of a serpent. To prove his oracle true he held up before them the egg with the snake. On the publication of this wondrous news, the populace flocked to the market-place. Alexander had a hut of boards erected, within which he seated himself in a reclining chair; then taking up the large snake already mentioned, which he had kept out of sight, he laid it on his breast, drew over its head a linen mask, painted to resemble a human face, the mouth of which would open and shut on pulling a string, and gave out to the people that the newborn god had already grown to that great size, and was now ready to give oracles. From all Asia Minor and Thrace the people came in thousands to witness the miracle. The mystic semi-obscurity of the hut and the magical effects of artificial light magnified the impression that the charlatan and his snake made on the people. Whoever wished to receive an oracle of the god had to write his question on a tablet, which was then to be sealed with wax and handed to the prophet. When the people had retired he melted the seals, read the questions, wrote the answers, then sealed the tablets again, and gave them back (with the answers) the seals apparently intact. The tariff for oracles was a drachma and eight oboli (about 25 cents), and the annual receipts amounted to seventy or eighty thousand drachmas (say $15,000), but he had out of this sum to pay a host of assistants and confederates. When the temple was completed Alexander carried on his business there.

But his title to public regard did not pass unchallenged. The Epicureans, who detested all trickery, and who believed that enjoyment was the only end in life worth thinking of, manifested their hostility to the prophet, and were, in turn, denounced by him as atheists and Christians. To safeguard his reputation he added to his repertoire. First, he began to give oracles viva voce, a confederate behind a screen speaking the responses into a tube terminating at the mouth of the snake’s mask. But the charge for such oracles was higher, and they were elicited only for the behoof of persons of eminence. Alexander’s fame spread even to Rome, and dupes from that seat of enlightenment came to consult the serpent-god. One of these addle-pate pilgrims from Rome asked the oracle what manner of woman he should take to wife. The oracle named the daughter of Alexander; so he married her, and offered hecatombs to his mother-in-law, his bride’s mother, in her capacity of moon-goddess, for such Alexander gave her out to be. Encouraged by many successes not inferior to this, the prophet instituted many mystic festivals, from which he excluded all unbelievers in God, as Epicureans and Christians. At these festivals the birth of Aesculapius and the nuptials of Alexander and the Moon-Goddess were represented dramatically, though perhaps a trifle too realistically. The prophet also claimed to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras, and in proof showed his thigh encased in gilded leather. His life was a continuous debauch. In time he began to hold what we should now call “dark seances;” that is, he would sit in absolute darkness and make response to questions submitted in writing on sealed tablets. As he could not read the questions at all, his answers (the oracles) were expressed for the most part in unintelligible language. Lucian once tested his powers by submitting to him the one question, “When will Alexander be caught at his tricks,” written on eight tablets; he got eight different answers, all irrelevant. He missed no opportunity of unmasking the rogue, and of teaching the people by the evidence of their own senses that the man was a vulgar impostor. The knave affected a mild friendship for his adversary, but he bribed the helmsman of a vessel on which Lucian sailed to throw him overboard; this the man had not the courage to do. Lucian wished to have the impostor put on trial for this crime, but the proconsul advised him not to invoke the help of the law, Alexander being too high in favor with the officials and the public. The city of Abonotichus had coins struck bearing the effigy of the Aesculapius serpent, and the pseudoprophet attained the age of seventy years, enjoying to the end the undiminished respect of the people.

Many were the impostors that sprang up after Alexander, and wherever there was any lack of real ones, fictitious pseudoprophets were imagined by satiric writers, Lucian’s Peregrinus, for example, a renegade Christian who devotes himself to a death by fire to win fame. It was a mad world then. New mysteries were invented in plenty, and people came in crowds for initiation. The “Golden Ass” of Apuleius is a striking satire on this mystery furore. To this period belong the Gnostics, whose doctrines were a mixture of Judaism, heathenism and Christianism; the Manichees, who gave a Christian varnish to the Persian fire worship; the Kabbalists, who heaped a vast amount of rubbish together, got out of the Hebrew Bible by juggling with its sentences, words, letters and numbers. Amid this tangle of doctrines the heathen religions sank, Judaism lost its native land, and Christianism fell into an incalculable number of sects—an evil that was not to be corrected even by the artificial unity of the Church under the Apostolical See.

_PART SIXTH._ _The Knights Templar._

1. THE MIDDLE AGE.

With the spread of Christianism the heathen mysteries came everywhere to an end, and the Christian mysteries took their place. The Christians, it is true, no longer constituted a secret society, after their faith had become the creed of the state; but there was plenty of mystic doctrine, nevertheless, and incessant strife of parties and sects, Arians and Athanasians, Pelasgians and Semipelagians, Nestorians, Monophysites and Monothelites, Adoptionists, Priscillianists, and Donatists, to name no more, over Christ’s nature, on the question whether the Holy Ghost proceeds only from the Father or equally from him and the Son; whether the soul is saved by good works or by grace of God, and so on interminably. This wrangling so occupied the minds of all that there was no longer need of secret societies. Theology, i. e., the struggle for creed, and war, i. e., the struggle for power, were the occupations of the Middle Age. Monks and knights were the two great classes of that time, with the Pope as supreme head on one side, and the Emperor on the other.

All the available knowledge was in the Middle Age employed in the service of the Church, and hence science slept from the migration of the barbarians till the invention of printing. During that period of a thousand years no addition was made to the sum of human knowledge. Arabian and Jewish physicians alone labored to save the intellectual wealth inherited from the ancient Greeks. As for Christendom, it was involved in profound intellectual darkness, and the Doctrine of Light that had been published by the Carpenter’s Son, was lost amid petty controversies and inane interpretations, till at last its strictly monotheistic groundwork was forgotten, and there remained visible only the superstructure of ethnic mysticism and of doctrines, as the Trinity, Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, borrowed from Egyptian and Grecian mythology.