HKB
in the pure ether_. Grief and sorrow cannot approach them; plague and sickness cannot touch them. The blissful company gathered together in that far Western land inherits a tearless eternity.
Of the other details in the picture the greater number would be suggested directly by these images drawn from the phenomena of sunset and twilight. What spot or stain can be seen on the deep blue ocean in which the "Islands of the Blessed" repose forever? What unseemly forms can mar the beauty of that golden home, lighted by the radiance of a Sun which can never set? Who then but the pure in heart, the truthful and the generous, can be suffered to tread the violet fields? And how shall they be tested save by judges who can weigh the thoughts and the interests of the heart? Thus every soul, as it drew near that joyous land, was brought before the august tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and Aiakos; and they whose faith was in truth a quickening power, might draw from the ordeals those golden lessons which Plato has put into the mouth of Socrates, and some unknown persons into the mouths of Buddha and Jesus. The belief of earlier ages pictured to itself the meetings in that blissful land, the forgiveness of old wrongs, and the reconciliation of deadly feuds,[560:1] just as the belief of the present day pictures these things to itself.
The story of a War in Heaven, which was known to all nations of antiquity, is allegorical, and refers to the battle between light and darkness, sunshine and storm cloud.[560:2]
As examples of the prevalence of the legend relating to the struggle between the co-ordinate powers of good and evil, light and darkness, the Sun and the clouds, we have that of Phoibos and Python, Indra and Vritra, Sigurd and Fafuir, Achilleus and Paris, Oidipous and the Sphinx, Ormuzd and Ahriman, and from the character of the struggle between Indra and Vritra, and again between Ormuzd and Ahriman, we infer that a myth, purely physical, in the land of the Five Streams, assumed a moral and spiritual meaning in Persia, and the fight between the co-ordinate powers of good and evil, gave birth to the dualism which from that time to the present has exercised so mighty an influence through the East and West.
The Apocalypse exhibits Satan with the physical attributes of Ahriman; he is called the "dragon," the "old serpent," who fights against God and his angels. The Vedic myth, transformed and exaggerated in the Iranian books, finds its way through this channel into Christianity. The idea thus introduced was that of the struggle between Satan and Michael, which ended in the overthrow of the former, and the casting forth of all his hosts out of heaven, but it coincides too nearly with a myth spread in countries held by all the Aryan nations to avoid further modification. Local tradition substituted St. George or St. Theodore for Jupiter, Apollo, Hercules, or Perseus. It is under this disguise that the Vedic myth has come down to our own times, and has still its festivals and its monuments. Art has consecrated it in a thousand ways. St. Michael, lance in hand, treading on the dragon, is an image as familiar now as, thirty centuries ago, that of Indra treading under foot the demon Vritra could possibly have been to the Hindoo.[561:1]