CHAPTER XV.
Where the Israelites Got the Adam Fable—An Earlier Version of the Adam Fable—Is Normal Man Insane?
So much for the silly fable of Adam and Eve and the snake. That fable was grey with the rime of centuries before it was stolen by the Israelites and incorporated in their mythology. Stolen goods are seldom improved by the stealing. The golden vase, with its graceful proportions, artistic traceries, and free, sweeping outline, is broken in pieces and battered into an amorphous mass in order that it may be crushed into the sack of the thief. The golden vase of Indian thought and speculation and learning had to be broken and mutilated before it would go into the sack of the truculent, and all but unlettered, Jew who stole it.
From what mine was the gold dug; what hands fashioned the original vase? Ask India's awful Temples, hewn into the rock, as if by Titans, and which are shrouded in the dim mists of the world's morning, where history gives no echo, and where even legend is dumb. Ask the manes and the ashes of the people of Bharata-Varsha,[1] whose star-eyed Philosophy tried to peer through the bars of the portcullis of Being, and whose Poetry wafted the soul of the Ayrian to the sublimity which is God, some 2,000 years before Jesus Christ was invented. Where the sunlight fell slantingly on Moeris lake; where the pyramids of Cheops and Dijon flung a shadow of weird mystery on the banks of the Nile, the Israelites found the Adam fable, and stole it. But, even then, it was second-hand—nay, possibly tenth-hand, having found its way to Egypt through many ages of time and through many realms of space. It had been borne to Egypt from
- ↑ The ancient name of India.
