Heavenly Bridegrooms (1918)/February 1916
HEAVENLY BRIDEGROOMS[1]
By Theodore Schroeder
and Ida C.
The Sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.
Genesis 6:2.
IN one place Justin Martyr speaks of "evil demons" who "in times of old, assuming various forms, went in unto the daughters of men." Elsewhere, he also speaks of these demons manifested as apparitions that misled boys as well as women. He said that they "showed such fearful sights to men, that those who did not use their reason in judging of the actions done were struck with terror * * * * * and not knowing that these were demons they called them girls." Justin evidently looks upon the angelic bridegrooms as demoniacal from the start. Clement of Alexandria says that the angels "renounced the beauty of God for a beauty which fades and so fell from heaven to earth."
Athenagoras asserts that the angels "fell into impure love of virgins." But Tertullian calls attention to the fact that sacred Scripture terms these angels husbands; and he argues at length very ably to show that we are bound to infer from Scripture that the earthly wives of these angelic husbands were virgins, pure and undefiled, at the time of their marriage. From which, I think, it is evident that these marriages were acceptable to virtuous women, and therefore, we may infer, not an infringement of the civil law of the time or the sex which is proverbially conservative would never have contributed so largely to these unions from among its best members. Nor could they have been unions which transgressed the laws of nature, or the resulting offspring would not have been so well developed physically (as giants) nor mentally (as "mighty men which were, of old, men of renown.")
Clement of Alexandria, in his Miscellanies (Stromaba,) appears to blame the sinning angels in addition because they "told to the women the secrets which had come to their knowledge; while the rest of the angels concealed them, or, rather, kept them against the coming of the Lord." These "secrets", we learn from several of the Christian Fathers, were the arts of metallurgy, dyeing, the properties of herbs, astronomy and astrology, etc. Reasoning from this assumption that certain sciences and industrial arts were imparted to mankind from sinful angels, we need not wonder that Tertullian pertinently asks:
"But, if the self-same angels who disclosed both the material substances of this kind and their charms—of gold, I mean, and lustrous stones—and taught men how to work them, and by and by instructed them, among their other [instructions] in [the virtue of] eye-lid powder and the dyeing of fleeces, have been condemned by God, as Enoch tells us, how shall we please God while we joy in the things of those [angels] who, on these accounts, have provoked the anger and vengeance of God?"
Tertul. on Female Dress, II. 10.
This thought seems to have been to him a matter of serious moment, for he enlarges upon it as follows when speaking of the dress and ornamentation of women:
"For they, withal, who instituted them and assigned, under condemnation, to the penalty of death—those angels to wit, who rushed from heaven on the daughters of men; so that this ignominy also attached to women. For when to an age much more ignorant [than ours] they had disclosed certain well-concealed material substances, and several not well-revealed scientific arts—if it is true that they had laid bare the operations of metallurgy, and had divulged the natural properties of herbs, and had promulgated the powers of enchantment, and had traced out every curious art, even to the interpretation of the stars—they conferred properly and as it were peculiarly upon women that instrumental mean of womanly ostentation, the radiances of jewels wherewith necklaces are variegated, and the circlets of gold wherewith the arms were compressed, and the medicaments of archil with which wools are colored, and that black powder itself wherewith the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent. What is the quality of these things may be declared meantime, even at this point, from the quality and condition of their teachers; in that sinners could never have either shown or supplied anything conducive to integrity, unlawful lovers anything conducive to chastity, renegade spirits anything to the fear of God. If [these things] are to be called teachings, ill masters must of necessity have taught ill; if as wages of lust, there is nothing base of which the wages are honorable. But why was it of so much importance to show these things as well as to confer them? Was it that women without material causes of splendor, and without ingenious contrivances of grace, could not please men, who, while still unadorned and uncouth, and—so to say—crude and rude, had moved [the mind of] angels? Or was it that the (angelic) lovers would appear sordid and—through gratuitous use—contumelious, if they had conferred no [compensating] gift on the women who had been enticed into connubial connection with them? But these questions admit of no calculation. Women who possessed angels [as husbands] could desire nothing more; they had, forsooth, made a grand match. Assuredly they who of course, did sometimes think whence they had fallen, and, after the heated impulses of their lusts, looked up toward heaven, thus requitted that very excellence of women, natural beauty, as [having proved] a cause of evil, in order that their good fortune might profit them nothing but that, being turned from simplicity and sincerity they together with [the angels] themselves, might become offensive to God. Sure they were that all ostentation and ambition, and love of pleasing by carnal means, was displeasing to God."
Tertullian on Female Dress, Chap. II.
Cyprian, when blaming virgins for wearing jewels, necklaces and wool stuffs colored with costly dyes (On the Dress of Virgins, 14.) likewise remarks:
". . . . . All which things sinning and apostate angels put forth by their arts, when, lowered to the contagions of earth, they forsook their heavenly vigor."
When we remember that early Christianity sets its face like a flint against all delights of the senses and that this extreme reaction of the spiritual against the sensuous has largely shaped our social customs of today, we begin to see how important and far-reaching were these opinions of the Church Fathers that feminine adornment had been taught by angels who had sinned in wedding earthly women, and that it was therefore a sinful thing in that it has emanated from a depraved source. Some of the theories built upon this assumption are quite curious. Here are a few:
"That which He Himself has not produced is not pleasing to God, unless He was unable to order sheep to be born with purple and sky-blue fleeces: If He was able, then plainly He was unwilling, what God willed not, of course, ought not to be fashioned."
Tertullian on Female Dress, I. 8.
"For it was God, no doubt, who showed the way to dye wools with the juices of herbs and the humous of conchs: It had escaped Him, when He was bidding the universe come into being, to issue a command for (the production of) purple and scarlet sheep."
Tertul. on Female Press, II. 10.
Why should she walk out adorned? Why with dressed hair, as if she either had or sought for a husband? Rather let her dread to please if she is a virgin * * * * * * * * * It is not right that a virgin should have her hair braided for the appearance of her beauty.
Cyprian on the Dress of Virgins, 5.
"You are bound to please your husbands only. But you will please them in proportion as you take no care to please others. Be ye without carefulness, blessed [sisters]; no wife is "ugly to her own husband." She "pleased" him enough when she was selected [by him as his wife]; whether commended by form or by character. Let none of you think that if she abstain from the care of her person [compositione sui]; she will incur the hatred and aversion of husbands. Every husband is the exactor of chastity; but beauty a believing [husband] does not require, because we are not captivated by the same graces which the Gentiles think to be graces."
Tertul, on Female Dress, Book IT, Chap. IV.
"Do ye matrons flee from the adorning of vanity such attire is fitting for women who haunt the brothels. * * * * * * To a wife approved of her husband, let it suffice that she is so not by her dress, but by her good disposition. The instructions of Commodianus in favor of Christian Discipline against the Gods of the Heathens, 59."
Let us remember that these and similar teachings by the early Christian Fathers have laid the foundation of our present marriage customs. The theory that a woman sins in adorning herself to please a husband (whether present or prospective), and this theory is still indescribably popular among devout Christians.
Commodianus ascribes the teaching of "arts, * * * * * and the dyeing of wool, and everything which is done," not to the angels but to the giant progeny. And he adds:
"To them, when they died, man erected images. But the Almighty, because they were of an evil seed, did not approve that, when dead, they should be brought back from death. Whence wandering they now subvert many bodies, and it is such as these especially that ye this day worship and pray to as gods."
The Instructions of Commodianus in favor of Christian Discipline, against the Gods of the Heathen.
The author of the Clementine Homilies records a tradition concerning these gigantic "wanderers" on the borders of Ghostland which seems to him that they were not unable to beget children: After speaking of the Deluge he says:
"Since, therefore, the souls of the deceased giants were greater than human souls, inasmuch as they also excelled their bodies, they, as being a new race, were called also by a new name. And to those who survived in the world a law was prescribed to God through an angel, how they should live. For being bastards in race, of the fire of angels and the blood of woman, and therefore liable to desire a certain race of their own, they were anticipated by a certain righteous law."
Clementine Homilies, VIII, 18.
Inasmuch as the Deluge had already destroyed every one on the earth except Noah and his family, we see that the author cannot mean by those who survived in the world any giants still in the flesh. Moreover, the decree which followed and which prescribed that they are to have power over only those human beings who break the moral law and practice magic would indicate these "giants" had then entered upon what sophists would call astral, and from the paragraph quoted above, it is evidently taken for granted that these astral giants would propagate their kind. This is an important point—the testimony of a Christian Father of a tradition that human beings (not created angels) who had once inhabited bodies, could beget children on the plane of the astral unless prevented by the direct prohibition of Heaven. If it be objected that the author refers to giants still in earthly form when he speaks to "those who survived in the world" I am sure that the statement follows a remark about the Deluge and that in that case the surviving giants must have been Noah and his family. This view, however, is absurd, when we consider that the decree forbade the giants to assume power over any but the human race. If Noah and his family were the surviving giants, where would be the sense in promulgating such a decree to them? This same author gives an account of the doings of the angelic fathers of these giants which reminds one strongly of the spirit seances of the late Rev. Stainton Moses, when under conditions which precluded all fraud or illusion, tiny pearls and other precious stones suddenly materialized before the sitters. Here is the tradition recorded by the Christian Fathers:
"For of the spirits who inhabit the heaven, the angels who dwell in the lowest region, being grieved at the ingratitude of man to God, asked that they might come into the life of man, that, really becoming man, by more intercourse they might convict those who had acted ungratefully towards Him, and might subject every one to adequate punishment. Then, therefore, their petition was granted, they metamorphosed themselves into every nature; for, being of a more god-like substance, they are able easily to assume any form. So they became precious stones, and goodly pearl, and the most beauteous purple, and choice gold, and all matter that is held in most esteem. And they fell into the hands of some, and into the bosoms of others, and suffered themselves to be stolen by them. They also changed themselves into beasts and reptiles and fishes and birds, and into whatsoever they pleased. These things, also the poets among yourselves, by reason of fearlessness, sing, as they befell, attributing to one the many and diverse doings of all."
Clementine Homilies, VIII, 12.
(Then, "having assumed these forms, they convicted as covetous those who stole them, and changed themselves into the nature of man, in order that, living holily, and showing the possibility of so living they might subject the ungrateful to punishment." However, "having become in all respects men, they also became subject to masculine infirmities and fell.")
Does it not seem as though we had here a survival of Animism—a state of mind frequent among savages, children and animals in which an inanimate object which moves without visible cause or manifests in any peculiar way is thought to be alive. A horse is often terrified by a piece of paper blown in front of him, evidently he takes it for a live creature. Savages speak of the sun and moon as living individuals because of their apparently voluntary journeys through the sky; [among] the Kukis of Southern Asia * * * * * if a man was killed by a fall from a tree, his relatives would take their revenge by cutting the tree down, scattering it in chips. A modern King of Cochin, China, when one of his ships sailed badly, used to put it in the pillory as he would any other criminal. (Bastian, Oestl., Asein, Vol. 1, p. 51.) In classical times, the stories of Xerxes flogging the Hellespont and Cyrus draining the Gyndes occur as cases in point, but one of the regular Athenian legal proceedings is a yet more striking relic. A court of justice was held at the Prytaneum, to try any inanimate object, such as an axle, a piece of wood or stone, which had caused the death of anyone without proved human agency, and this wood or stone, if condemned, was with solemn form cast beyond the border. The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law (repealed in the present reign), whereby, not only a beast that kills a man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, as a tree that falls on him, kills him, is dead and is given to God, * * * * forfeited and sold for the poor * * * * *. The pathetic custom of "telling the bees" when the master or mistress of a house dies, is not unknown in our own country. In Berlin, Germany, the idea is more fully worked out; and not only is the sad message given to every bee-hive in the garden and every beast in the stall, but every sack of corn must be touched and everything in the house shaken, that they may know the master is gone. And we all know that even an intelligent nineteenth century man is not above administering an angry kick to a chair against which he has bruised himself.
Now the author of the Clementine Homilies seems to have similarly lighted on an instance of Animism in connection with gold, pears, precious stones, etc. In prehistoric times this tradition, rational and intelligible, may suppose that these precious articles had moved or otherwise behaved as though endowed with life in the ancient times to which the tradition relates. Could it be that they suddenly appeared to those prehistoric gazers, coming from no one knew where, and moved about by unseen hands, as tables are lifted, bells rung, banjos played or flowers materialized at a modern spiritual seance, evidently reported to have come by occult means, supposed to be heavenly. The people who witnessed the phenomena were probably not accustomed to clear headed and intelligent investigation of such phenomena, see at once it was an Animistic explanation such as is given in the Clementine Homilies. As to the frightened horse, and to the ignorant savage, inanimate things seem to be alive, so may the precious objects which materialized at those prehistoric seances have seemed to the beholders to be living creatures, in as much as they sped through the air without .visible support. If alive, they surely (so would argue the witnesses) must be angelic beings since they were said to come from heaven and the attendant phenomena of the seance no doubt would increase the awe with which these "angels" were received and treasured. An "angel" is simply a vehicle for a message in the original signification. Let us glance in passing at the accounts of materializing through the psychic power. In this sense a pearl materialized through the psychic power of so reliable a modern medium as the Rev. Stainton Moses, plainly by occult means might be called an "angel"–i.e., the means by which the message from the unseen reached the sitters. In after times when the word angel had come to be specialized as a personal envoy from Heaven, the old tradition about the pearls and precious stones which had evidently come as "angels" (vehicles for a heaven-sent message) whenever told would probably be adopted to the specialized meaning and it would be said as above, that personal beings transformed into these inanimate things. First, as to the manifestations through the Rev. Stainton Moses lately declared in his journal occurs the following entry:
Tuesday, September 9th, 1873.
"Same conditions. Plentiful scent as before. Sixteen little pearls were put on the table, six having been previously given during the day. Mrs. Speer and I were writing at the same table, and a pearl was put on my letter as I was writing. After that I saw a spirit standing by Mrs. Speer, and was told that it was Mentor, who had put a pearl on Mrs. Speer's desk. After that four others came. They seemed to drop on the table, just as I have seen them with Mrs. A—h. We have in all twenty-one now.
They are small seed pearls, each perforated."
A week later, there is this entry:
"When we broke up we found a little heap of pearls was put before each. One hundred and thirty-nine little pearls have been brought to us, one hundred and ten in the last two days."
(This, it appears from another witness, occurred in daylight.)
Dr. Speer (referred to by Miss X. in Borderland as "a highly intelligent and by no means credulous witness") gives a striking instance of the materialization of a precious object:
December 31st, 1872.
"A very successful seance. A blue enamel cross was brought, no one knew whence, placed before my wife, who was told to wear it."
Mrs. Speer testifies as follows:
Ventnor, November 29th, 1893.
"I wish to state that the most convincing evidences of spirit-power always took place when hands were held.
"Other manifestations occurred, often in light, such as raps, raising of table, scent, musical sounds, and showers of pearls * * * * *. Two cameos were carved in light while we were dining."
Before leaving this part of the subject, it may be well to quote the following by Miss X. in Borderland (Miss X., I would add is by no means a spiritualist, but is distinctly opposed to the Spiritistic hypothesis):
"Mr. Stainton Moses has for many years been one of the most important witnesses for Spiritualism. The fact that, like Professor Crookes and Alfred Russell Wallace, he was a gentleman, a scholar, and a man of recognized position and character, was, to say the least, a good letter of introduction * * * * * It may be said, once for all that it is unnecessary to insist on the absolute sincerity of Mr. Stainton Moses. It is a point which has never been so much as raised. His life has been of a kind not to be called in question–obscure without mystery, dignified without pedantry, lived in the sight of just that class of the public which demands the strictest respectability of conduct, the most unequivocal correspondence between life and profession. As a clergyman he was beloved by his parishioners, as a schoolmaster he was respected by his boys, as a personal friend he commanded the confidence and esteem of all his intimates."
May it not be that the phenomena recorded by the author of the Clementine Homilies are essentially the same in kind as those referred to above in the case of the Rev. Stainton Moses?
St. Augustine, considering the possibility of occult sex relations between earthly women and beings from the unseen world, remarks:
"The Scriptures plainly aver that the angels have appeared both in visible and palpable figures. And seeing it is so general a report, and so many aver it either from their own experience or from others, that are of indubitable honesty and credit, that the sy Ivans and fauns, commonly called incubi, have often injured women, and that certain devils from the Gauls call "Duses," do continually practice this *****, and tempt others to it, which is affirmed by such persons, and with such confidence, that it were impudence to deny it. I dare not venture to determine anything here; whether the devils being embodied in air (for the air being violently moved is to be felt) can suffer this lust, or move it so as the women with whom they commix, may feel it; yet do I firmly believe that God's angels could never fall so at that time."
St. Augustine's City of God, XV., 23.
Notice the perplexity of St. Augustine as a logician. He cannot deny that occult sex relations exist on the Borderland, the testimony to this is too wide spread and of too reliable a character. But, (we can imagine him saying) how reconcile these phenomena with the belief that the inhabitants of the world beyond the grave are immaterial, vapory, mist-like beings?
How can such a hazy, ethereal creature as a ghost produce objective sensations of touch upon an earthly being? And if possible as he ingeniously supposes, by such means as air becomes perceptible to us when violently put in motion how reconcile such phenomena with the belief that sex is impure, and that it does not exist in the world beyond the grave? How could God's angels ever fall so? It were impossible.
But St. Augustine evidently starts from two hypotheses the unsubstantiability of ghosts and the impurity (footnote, as will be seen by a perusal of the quotation in full,) and, therefore, non-existence of sex, neither of which two hypotheses has ever been definitely proven. As a logician therefore, he is at fault, and I have already shown the danger of starting from mistaken premises when dealing with occult phenomena. The two hypotheses, however, were not peculiar to St. Augustine. They were, and are, the- common property of the majority of mankind. But it does not follow that they are correct: and the psychic who rashly assumes their truth to start with (through prejudice or because other people think so) may expect to be deluded, and to come upon all sorts of fantastic, and possibly, diabolical manifestations. Such is the occult law. Start with a false premise or with a premise which you have not investigated with scrupulous care, and you are certain to get phenomena of either a misleading or a depraved character.
But all the Christian Fathers did not accept the possibility of bridegrooms from the unseen world. There were then, as now, Materialist minds which disbelieved in ghosts. Alexander, Bishop of Lycopolis, endeavored to explain away angelic bridegrooms as myths, thus:
"When the Jewish history relates that angels came down to hold intercourse with the daughters of men * * * * this saying signifies that the nutritive powers of the soul descended from heaven to earth."
On the Tenants of the Manicheans, XXV.
Hence the "injuring" of women by incubi to which St. Augustine refers, an injuring either wholly subjective and illusory, or, if objectively real, was brought about in part by the woman's ignorance of the occult requirements for correct living and clear-headedness on the Borderland, in part by her failure to thus live and think on the earthly plane.
It would be interesting to know his authority for this. Rationalistic theories cannot rest as do folklore traditions, upon a mere say-so; they must be supported either by testimony or by argument. Otherwise, we are obliged to dismiss them as the whimsical fancies of a solitary individual.
Origen says he will "persuade those who were capable of understanding the meaning of the prophet, that even before us there was one who referred this narrative to the doctrine regarding souls, which became possessed with a desi e for the corporeal life of men" and thus in metaphorical language he said was termed "daughters of men." But Origen does not give his authority, nor advance any argument in support of this explanation.
Julius Africanus suggests another Rationalistic explanation, but is candid enough to give it as his own notion. He says:
"When men multiplied on the earth, the angels of heaven came together with the daughters of men. In some copies I find 'the sons of God.' What is meant by the Spirit, in my opinion, is that the descendants of Seth are called the sons of God on account of the righteous men and patriarchs who have sprung from him, even down to the Saviour Himself; but that the descendants of Cain are named the seed of men, as having nothing divine in them, on account of the wickedness of their race and the inequality of their nature, being a mixed people, and having stirred the indignation of God."
This ingenious theory has been eagerly grasped at by succeeding Christian writers who disbelieve in the substantiality of ghosts. So able a commentator in modern times, however, as Delitzsch (On Genesis) decides against this view, and quotes various authorities which I give elsewhere. He also quotes Keil as demonstrating that two of the Hebrew words in the text in Genesis show that "the contraction of actual and lasting marriages" is meant.
Julius Africanus, indeed, seems to have had doubts as to whether the current tradition about angelic bridegrooms might not be true after all, for he adds directly upon the heels of the above theory:
"But if it is thought that these refer to angels, we must take them to be those who deal with magic and jug glery, who taught the women the motions of the stars and the knowledge of things celestial, by whose power they conceived the giants as their children, by whom wickedness came to its heights on the earth, until God decreed that the whole race of the living should perish in their impiety by the Deluge."
Extant Fragments of the Five Books of the Chronography of Julius Africanus, in Georgius Syncellus, Chron. p. 19, al 15, ed. Paris, 11 Venet.
Nevertheless, Rationalists and Materialists are in the minority among the Fathers of the Church as regards this subject. The majority accepted the accounts in Genesis and Enoch at their face value.
To briefly sum up the majority's views of the early church on this matter:
1. Angels of a superior order did come into the earthly life whether (a) because God sent them, or (b) because they were moved with indignation at the ingratitude of men toward God and came voluntarily in order to reconcile God and man, or (c) because they were enticed by women on the earth, the traditions do not agree.
2. Having come into this earthly life, they became either the lovers or the husbands of women, whether beguiled thereto in part by the Devil, or wholly by the women or, partially or wholly by their own desires, the traditions again do not agree. One tradition, as we have seen, hints at the sin of Sodom; and an interference on the astral plane with the rights of earthly husbands; others hint at illicit amours; but Tertullian demonstrates unanswerably from sacred Scripture that the angels were the wedded husbands of the daughters of men, and that these daughters were virginal at the time of wedding their angelic lovers.
This was not, however, all their sin. One tradition, as we have seen, makes a vague allusion to the sin of Sodom in connection with the intercourse of angels with women.
3. That an angelic woman should seek in honorable marriage, especially an earthly woman, it would appear, was reckoned a sin. When asked why, we find that the Church Fathers, one and all, treated marriage as a mere expedient. Tertullian said that the reason why 'marrying' is good, is that 'burning' is worse. Minncius Felix (Octavius XXXI) remarks that "with some even the modest intercourse of the sexes causes a blush." Methodius has an entire book devoted to an argument offered by ten virgins against wedlock rnd in behalf of perpetual virginity. Origen says:
"God has allowed us to marry, because all are not fit for the higher, that is, the perfectly pure life. Cyprian says that, "Chastity maintains the first rank in virgins, the second in those who are continent, the third in the case of wedlock." He also says:
"What else is virginity than the glorious preparation for the future life? Virginity is of neither sex. Virginity is the continuance of infancy. Virginity is the triumph over pleasures. Virginity has not children; but what is more, it has contempt for offspring; it has not fruitfulness, but neither has it bereavement; blessed that it is free from the pain of bringing forth, more blessed still that it is free from the calamity of the death of children. What else is virginity than the freedom of liberty? It has no husband or master. Virginity is freed from all affections; it has not given up to marriage, nor to the world, nor to children."
Cyprian, Of the Discipline of Chastity, 7.
Justin Martyr exults that "many, both men and women of the age of sixty and seventy years, who have been disciples of Christ from their youth, continue in immaculate virginity."
In a spurious fragment credited to "Hippolytus, the Syrian Expositor of the Forum," the writer refers to an ancient Hebrew MS., which tells of Noah being commanded by God to stake off each male animal in the ark from the corresponding female. The other and principal object of marriage which runs through all nature from protoplasmic cells up to man of mutual exchange of strength and mutual happiness, seems to have been totally ignored by the early Christian Fathers. Lactantius held that it is impossible the two sexes could have been instructed except for the sake of generation. Justin Martyr says frankly:
"Neither marry at first, for no other object than to rear children, or else abstaining from marriage, continue to live in a state of continence."
Apology I, 37.
He notes with approval a Christian youth who begged P^elix, the governor of Alexandria, for permission to be made a eunuch by a physician, in order to attest his continence to the world. (Felix, however, had the good sense to refuse.) To such an extent was this unnatural loathing for wedlock carried, that Constantine found it judicious to remove the old-time penalties against celibacy, because of the many Christians who continued celibates from motives of religion.
Since marriage on natural grounds was thus depreciated by the early Church as impure when occurring between earthly men and women, we need not wonder that she viewed with horror the very thought of wedlock with an angel in as much as angels were supposed to be above earthly weaknesses. Having thus starteed from a false premise, i. e., that marital passion cannot be pure in God's sight, there was no other deduction to be made regarding these love-matches between angels and women but that they were sinful.
4. But, according to the Christian Fathers, the angels committed other sins, in addition to seeking a woman in honorable marriage. They actually endeavored to beautify the world into which they had come, and to make men wiser and happier by teaching them various arts and sciences. One might have thought this a cause for gratitude; but the Church Fathers, having started from a false premise, were logically bound to deduce the theory which Tertullian did that as these spirit husbands were fallen angels, what they taught could not possibly be conducive either to integrity, chastity, or the fear of God. Therefore, dress and adornment and the industrial arts of dyeing and metallurgy were sinful, and consequently, displeasing to the Almighty. Very different is the view taken by a more modern writer, Sir Thomas Browne, the author of the Religio Medici who, advocating the doctrine of this celestial guardianship over marriage on earth, observes: "I do think that many mysteries ascribed to our own inventions, have been the courteous revelation of spirits; for these noble essences in heaven bear a friendly regard unto their fellow natures on earth."
Apparitions, pp. 3-4. R cv. Bourchier Wrey Savile, London, 1880.
5. Ambition plays a prominent part in the traditions, it will be noticed. It is said that these angels were ambitious for earthly power and exacted libations and sacrifices; and also that they were the beings whom the heathen ignorantly supposed to be gods.
But if the reader will recall what I have said about the misleadings in spirit manifestations when the psychic starts from a false premise, he will understand how possible it is that we have to deal here with subjective illusions, and not objective realities; and that the lower estimate in which these angelic visitors came to be held was due entirely to the failure of psychics to keep the laws of correct moral living or common sense and his weaknesses and vanities and superstitions will be played upon ad libitum. As for the giant offspring said to have resulted from these unions offspring which in the male line became evil-doers, and finally demons on the astral plane if the reader will consider that necessity to which I have referred for correct living and clear thinking on both sides of the abyss of death, if the bridge of communication is to hold, he will see that if these "giants" continued to influence the world from the astral plane they could not be evil demons, but must be beneficent helpers of mankind. But there is, I think, grave doubt as to whether such offspring ever resulted from these unions between angels and earthly women, as the reader will see when I come to speak of the occult laws governing such unions. Nevertheless, there is something to be said on both sides, and we should do well to reserve our judgment until all the evidence is before us.
We have seen that Commodianus says that these giants are the gods to whom the heathen ignorantly prayed. Justin Martyr, mindful of certain similarities between the stories told of those same heathen gods and the Scriptural account of Jesus, advances the theory that the demons had some imperfect perception of the coming Messiah, gleaned from the Old Testament prophecies, and that they tried to forestall Christianity by ascribing Christ's possible attributes in advance to the gods.
To be Continued.
- ↑ Continued from November, 1915.