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which are always in connection with these, and occupy, as it were, the vestibule of the spiritual world.

Gutzlaff and other travellers assure us that all the ancient notions regarding spirit life have come down to the present day amongst the Chinese. Though no nation has less sublime views of religion, they not only confidently believe in a populous spirit world around them, but hold daily intercourse with it, and that whether Taouists, Buddhists, or any other of the numerous and populous sects of China. As we shall see in a following chapter, they place tablets in their temples on which they inscribe messages to their ancestors, and inform them of everything which happens to them. In every temple the apparatus for divination is always kept in readiness: and though the law severely prohibits sorcery and magic, and interdicts the publication of wicked and corrupting books, Dr. Macgowan informs us that these go on daily and hourly. Such was antiquity everywhere, east and west, north and south; for, in the words of Sophocles, quoted elsewhere:

This is not a matter of to-day,

Or yesterday, but hath been from all time;
And none hath told us whence it came or how.

The how and the whence had not, indeed, come to Sophocles or the Greeks, but they came in the Gospel. In the words of Dean Trench, in his Unconscious Prophecies of Heathendom,'We say that the Divine ideas which had wandered up and down the world, till oftentimes they had well-nigh forgotten themselves and their origin, did at length clothe themselves in flesh and blood. They became incarnate with the incarnation of the Son of God. In His life and person the idea and the fact at length kissed each other, and were henceforward wedded for ever."

CHAPTER XIII.

THE SUPERNATURAL IN ANCIENT SCANDINAVIA.

Oss mano Esir bioda
Er'at sytandi daudi.

All must the Asar call,
And without grief I go.

DEATH SONG OF RAGNAR LODBROK

THOU

HOUGH ancient Scandinavia lay in northern Europe, its mythology and faith were those of the Eastern world. They were, like the Scandinavians themselves, but a section of that primal East which we have been traversing, and thence following its moving tribes westward. The faith of old Chaldea, of Egypt, of India, and Greece, was the faith of Scandinavia. Their gods, Odin, and Thor, and Loke, were but Vishnu and Siva, Horus, Osiris and Typhon, Jupiter, and Pluto, and Mars, under other names. Whoever studies the ancient Eddas of Scandinavia finds the direct and permanent proof of the Eastern origin of the people, their religion, and their psychology. To quote our own History of Scandinavian Literature:- To the antiquity of these songs it would be vain to attempt to fix a limit. They bear all the traces of the remotest age. They carry you back to the East, the original region of the Gothic race. They give you glimpses of the Gudahem, or home of the gods, and of the sparkling waters of the eternal fountain of tradition. They bear you in that direction towards the primal period of one tongue and one religion, and, in the

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words of the Edda, of that still greater God whom no one dared to name' (p. 29).

'Our Northern people are a people of Eastern origin. Odin and his Asar declared themselves to be from the great Svithiod, a country which appears to have been the present Circassia, lying between the Black and Caspian Seas. They brought with them Eastern customs-those of burning their dead and burying them under mounds, such as are yet to be seen on the plains of Persia and Tartary. They practised polygamy, and always looked back with patriot affection to the great Svithiod, to the primitive district of Asgård, and the city of Gudahem, or home of the gods. But, more than all, in their religious creed, they transferred the faith of Persia, India, and Greece, to the snowy mountains of Scandinavia, and there modified it so as to give it a most distinct air of originality, without destroying those primal features which marked their kinship to the East. The Asar and the giants were in constant hostility, like the gods of Greece and the Titans. They had their three principal deities Odin, Thor, and Loke, the latter the evil principle, the Pluto of the Greeks, the Ahriman of the Persians, the Siva of the Hindoos. They had their gods of thunder, of war, of eloquence, and of the sea. They had the actual Venus of the Tanais, the great deity of the Persians, the very name Vanadis suggesting that of the Hellenic Venus. They had in Balder the Vishnu or the Krishnu of India, and a more beautiful Pan. The gods of Scandinavia are actually described as sitting on Idavalla, or Mount Ida; and Odin, Thor, and Loke, like Jupiter, Mercury, and Mars of Greece, make excursions among mankind, indulge in singular love adventures, and place themselves often in circumstances that are anything but consistent with the dignity of great deities. You have the strife of light and darkness in Balder and Höder, as in Ormuzd and Ahriman; you have a tripart divinity, the Jove, Neptune, and Pluto of Greece, the Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva of India, in Odin, Thor, and Loke. Instead of the bull Apis, or the ox Abudad, we have

the cow Audumbla; instead of genii, nymphs, dryads, and nereids, we have elves, dwarfs, and trollquinna. All the powers of nature are shadowed forth in the various deities of the various systems; and there is a great and sublime deity, far above all semi-human deities, that stands in greater proximity to man, and then comes a final fire, Regnarök, like that of the Persians, and the grand mundane catastrophe of the Christian creed. Through the whole, indeed, we trace the earliest traditions of the primitive world; the Adam and Eve in Ask and Embla, the Meshia and Meshiane of Persia; the very Fates are there in the Nornor; the Dog of Hell, and the Tree of Life. That tree in the Scandinavian mythology has assumed, through the grand imagination of poet-priests of unknown ages, a magnificence which is without a parallel; and with its Asgård, its Midgård, and its Nifelhem, its rocky region of the Rimthursur, or giants of frost, and all its light elves, elves of darkness, its giants mighty in magic, its dwarfs cunning in metallurgy, its Valkyrior, and its heroes, descended from its gods, and armed with omnipotent runes, it possesses an originality and a piquancy for the imagination that are wonderfully refreshing' (p. 38).

This being the case, we may spare ourselves the details of ancient Scandinavian faith. In exhibiting that of any great nation of antiquity, we have exhibited it. The preceding quotation shows how completely the system of it was a spiritualistic system. We need, therefore, only refer to a few of its more modified features: its identity with that of all other ancient people is indisputable. If we wanted a proof that even the very words of the central East have travelled along with its creed, we have only to take the following passages.

In the Orphic hymns we have these lines:

First was Chaos and Night, and black Erebus, and vast Tartarus ;
And there was neither Earth, nor Air, nor Heaven; but in the boundless
bosom of Erebus.

Night with her black wings, etc.

In the first book of the Vishnú Purána, where Brahma,

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prior to creation, is spoken of, follows:- There was neither day, nor night, nor sky, nor earth, nor darkness, nor light, nor any other thing, save only one incomprehensible by intellect, or that which is Brahma and Puman (spirit) and Pradhana (matter),' p. 12.

In the opening of the book of the Edda, called ‘Völuspá,' is this stanza :

Thus in Greece, in India, and in Scandinavia, we have ancient bards and sages chanting in almost the identical words the ante-creation period.

Amongst the peculiar features of the Scandinavian mythology are the Valor, or prophetesses. The Völuspá' is the prophecy of Vala, one of the greatest of these mysterious women. They are parallels of the Pythonesses of Greece, of the Alrunes of the Germans, but they do not come so distinctly before us as either of these classes. They were the northern Sibyls, but still more mysterious and indistinct. Amid the bright sunshine of a far-off time, surrounded by the densest shadows of forgotten ages, these Valor, or prophetesses, seated somewhere unseen in that marvellous heaven, pour forth an awful song of the birth of gods and the destinies of men. As Ulysses and Æneas descended to the Shades to seek counsel from Tiresias or other long-past seer, so Odin descended to consult the Vala. The scene, though thoroughly un-Scandinavianised, is familiar to English readers by Gray's 'Descent of Odin.' Odin calls the prophetess from her tomb, not from the host of spirits; and how long she had been there may be imagined by her words :

I was snowed over with snows,
And beaten with rains;
And drenched with the dews;
Dead have I long been.