A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 02

The Lake Asphaltites, known by the name of Sodom, was long famed for its bitumen; but the Turks now make no use of it, either because the mine under the water is diminished, because its quality is altered, or because there is too much difficulty in drawing it from under the water. Oily particles of it, and sometimes large masses, separate and float on the surface; these are gathered together, mixed up, and sold for balm of Mecca.

Flavius Josephus, who was of that country, says that, in his time, there were no fish in the lake of Sodom, and the water was so light that the heaviest bodies would not go to the bottom. It seems that he meant to say so heavy instead of so light. It would appear that he had not made the experiment. After all, a stagnant water, impregnated with salts and compact matter, its specific matter being then greater than that of the body of a man or a beast, might force it to float. Josephus's error consists in assigning a false cause to a phenomenon which may be perfectly true.

As for the want of fish, it is not incredible. It is, however, likely that this lake, which is fifty or sixty miles long, is not all asphaltic, and that while receiving the waters of the Jordan it also receives the fishes of that river; but perhaps the Jordan, too, is without fish, and they are to be found only in the upper lake of Tiberias.

Josephus adds, that the trees which grow on the borders of the Dead Sea bear fruits of the most beautiful appearance, but which fall into dust if you attempt to taste them. This is less probable; and disposes one to believe that Josephus either had not been on the spot, for has exaggerated according to his own and his countrymen's custom. No soil seems more calculated to produce good as well as beautiful fruits than a salt and sulphurous one, like that of Naples, of Catania, and of Sodom.

The Holy Scriptures speak of five cities being destroyed by fire from heaven. On this occasion natural philosophy bears testimony in favor of the Old Testament, although the latter has no need of it, and they are sometimes at variance. We have instances of earthquakes, accompanied by thunder and lightning, which have destroyed much more considerable towns than Sodom and Gomorrah.

But the River Jordan necessarily discharging itself into this lake without an outlet, this Dead Sea, in the same manner as the Caspian, must have existed as long as there has been a River Jordan; therefore, these towns could never stand on the spot now occupied by the lake of Sodom. The Scripture, too, says nothing at all about this ground being changed into a lake; it says quite the contrary: "Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire, from the Lord out of heaven. And Abraham got up early in the morning, and he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld; and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace."

These five towns, Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboin, Adamah, and Segor, must then have been situated on the borders of the Dead Sea. How, it will be asked, in a desert so uninhabitable as it now is, where there are to be found only a few hordes of plundering Arabs, could there be five cities, so opulent as to be immersed in luxury, and even in those shameful pleasures which are the last effect of the refinement of the debauchery attached to wealth?

It may be answered that the country was then much better.

Other critics will say – how could five towns exist at the extremities of a lake, the water of which, before their destruction, was not potable? The Scripture itself informs us that all this land was asphaltic before the burning of Sodom: "And the vale of Sodom was full of slime-pits; and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there."

Another objection is also stated. Isaiah and Jeremiah say that Sodom and Gomorrah shall never be rebuilt; but Stephen, the geographer, speaks of Sodom and Gomorrah on the coast of the Dead Sea; and the "History of the Councils" mentions bishops of Sodom and Segor. To this it may be answered that God filled these towns, when rebuilt, with less guilty inhabitants; for at that time there was no bishop in partibus.

But, it will be said, with what water could these new inhabitants quench their thirst? All the wells are brackish; you find asphaltus and corrosive salt on first striking a spade into the ground.

It will be answered that some Arabs still subsist there, and may be habituated to drinking very bad water; that the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Eastern Empire were wretched hamlets, and that at that time there were many bishops whose whole diocese consisted in a poor village. It may also be said that the people who colonized these villages prepared the asphaltus, and carried on a useful trade in it.

The arid and burning desert, extending from Segor to the territory of Jerusalem, produces balm and aromatic herbs for the same reason that it supplies naphtha, corrosive salt and sulphur.

It is said that petrifaction takes place in this desert with astonishing rapidity; and this, according to some natural philosophers, makes the petrifaction of Lot's wife Edith a very plausible story.

But it is said that this woman, "having looked back, became a pillar of salt." This, then, was not a natural petrifaction, operated by asphaltus and salt, but an evident miracle. Flavius Josephus says that he saw this pillar. St. Justin and St. Irenæus speak of it as a prodigy, which in their time was still existing.

These testimonies have been looked upon as ridiculous fables. It would, however, be very natural for some Jews to amuse themselves with cutting a heap of asphaltus into a rude figure, and calling it Lot's wife. I have seen cisterns of asphaltus, very well made, which may last a long time. But it must be owned that St. Irenæus goes a little too far when he says that Lot's wife remained in the country of Sodom no longer in corruptible flesh, but as a permanent statue of salt, her feminine nature still producing the ordinary effect: "Uxor remansit in Sodomis, jam non caro corruptibilis sed statua salis semper manens, et per naturalia ea quæsunt consuetudmis hominis ostendens."

St. Irenæus does not seem to express himself with all the precision of a good naturalist when he says Lot's wife is no longer of corruptible flesh, but still retains her feminine nature.

In the poem of Sodom, attributed to Tertullian, this is expressed with still greater energy:

Dicitur et vivens alio sub corpore se us,Mirifice solito dispungere sanguine menses.

This was translated by a poet of the time of Henry II., in his Gallic style:

La femme à Loth, quoique sel devenue,Est femme encore; car elle a sa menstrue.

The land of aromatics was also the land of fables. Into the deserts of Arabia Petræa the ancient mythologists pretend that Myrrha, the granddaughter of a statue, fled after committing incest with her father, as Lot's daughters did with theirs, and that she was metamorphosed into the tree that bears myrrh. Other profound mythologists assure us that she fled into Arabia Felix; and this opinion is as well supported as the other.

Be this as it may, not one of our travellers has yet thought fit to examine the soil of Sodom, with its asphaltus, its salt, its trees and their fruits, to weigh the water of the lake, to analyze it, to ascertain whether bodies of greater specific gravity than common water float upon its surface, and to give us a faithful account of the natural history of the country. Our pilgrims to Jerusalem do not care to go and make these researches; this desert has become infested by wandering Arabs, who range as far as Damascus, and retire into the caverns of the mountains, the authority of the pasha of Damascus having hitherto been inadequate to repress them. Thus the curious have but little information about anything concerning the Asphaltic Lake.

As to Sodom, it is a melancholy reflection for the learned that, among so many who may be deemed natives, not one has furnished us with any notion whatever of this capital city.

ASS

We will add a little to the article "Ass" in the "Encyclopædia," concerning Lucian's ass, which became golden in the hands of Apuleius. The pleasantest part of the adventure, however, is in Lucian: That a lady fell in love with this gentleman while he was an ass, but would have nothing more to say to him when he was but a man. These metamorphoses were very common throughout antiquity. Silenus's ass had spoken; and the learned had thought that he explained himself in Arabic; for he was probably a man turned into an ass by the power of Bacchus, and Bacchus, we know, was an Arab.

Virgil speaks of the transformation of Mœris into a wolf, as a thing of very ordinary occurrence:

Saepe lupum fieri Mœrim, et se condere silvis.Oft changed to wolf, he seeks the forest shade.

Was this doctrine of metamorphoses derived from the old fables of Egypt, which gave out that the gods had changed themselves into animals in the war against the giants?

The Greeks, great imitators and improvers of the Oriental fables, metamorphosed almost all the gods into men or into beasts, to make them succeed the better in their amorous designs. If the gods changed themselves into bulls, horses, swans, doves, etc., why should not men have undergone the same operation?

Several commentators, forgetting the respect due to the Holy Scriptures, have cited the example of Nebuchadnezzar changed into an ox; but this was a miracle – a divine vengeance – a thing quite out of the course of nature, which ought not to be examined with profane eyes, and cannot become an object of our researches.

Others of the learned, perhaps with equal indiscretion, avail themselves of what is related in the Gospel of the Infancy. An Egyptian maiden having entered the chamber of some women, saw there a mule with a silken cloth over his back, and an ebony pendant at his neck.

These women were in tears, kissing him and giving him to eat. The mule was their own brother. Some sorceresses had deprived him of the human figure; but the Master of Nature soon restored it.

Although this gospel is apocryphal, the very name that it bears prevents us from examining this adventure in detail; only it may serve to show how much metamorphoses were in vogue almost throughout the earth. The Christians who composed their gospel were undoubtedly honest men. They did not seek to fabricate a romance; they related with simplicity what they had heard. The church, which afterwards rejected their gospel, together with forty-nine others, did not accuse its authority of impiety and prevarication; those obscure individuals addressed the populace in language comformable with the prejudices of the age in which they lived. China was perhaps the only country exempt from these superstitions.

The adventure of the companions of Ulysses, changed into beasts by Circe, was much more ancient than the dogma of the metempsychosis, broached in Greece and Italy by Pythagoras.

On what can the assertion be founded that there is no universal error which is not the abuse of some truth; that there have been quacks only because there have been true physicians; and that false prodigies have been believed only because there have been true ones?

Were there any certain testimonies that men had become wolves, oxen, horses, or asses? This universal error had for its principle only the love of the marvellous and the natural inclination to superstition.

One erroneous opinion is enough to fill the whole world with fables. An Indian doctor sees that animals have feeling and memory. He concludes that they have a soul. Men have one likewise. What becomes of the soul of man after death? What becomes of that of the beast? They must go somewhere. They go into the nearest body that is beginning to be formed. The soul of a Brahmin takes up its abode in the body of an elephant, the soul of an ass is that of a little Brahmin. Such is the dogma of the metempsychosis, which was built upon simple deduction.

But it is a wide step from this dogma to that of metamorphosis. We have no longer a soul without a tenement, seeking a lodging; but one body changed into another, the soul remaining as before. Now, we certainly have not in nature any example of such legerdemain.

Let us then inquire into the origin of so extravagant yet so general an opinion. If some father had characterized his son, sunk in ignorance and filthy debauchery, as a hog, a horse, or an ass, and afterwards made him do penance with an ass's cap on his head, and some servant girl of the neighborhood gave it out that this young man had been turned into an ass as a punishment for his faults, her neighbors would repeat it to other neighbors, and from mouth to mouth this story, with a thousand embellishments, would make the tour of the world. An ambiguous expression would suffice to deceive the whole earth.

Here then let us confess, with Boileau, that ambiguity has been the parent of most of our ridiculous follies. Add to this the power of magic, which has been acknowledged as indisputable in all nations, and you will no longer be astonished at anything.

One word more on asses. It is said that in Mesopotamia they are warlike and that Mervan, the twenty-first caliph, was surnamed "the Ass" for his valor.

The patriarch Photius relates, in the extract from the Life of Isidorus, that Ammonius had an ass which had a great taste for poetry, and would leave his manger to go and hear verses. The fable of Midas is better than the tale of Photius.

Machiavelli's Golden Ass.

Machiavelli's ass is but little known. The dictionaries which speak of it say that it was a production of his youth; it would seem, however, that he was of mature age; for he speaks in it of the misfortunes which he had formerly and for a long time experienced. The work is a satire on his contemporaries. The author sees a number of Florentines, of whom one is changed into a cat, another into a dragon, a third into a dog that bays the moon, a fourth into a fox who does not suffer himself to be caught; each character is drawn under the name of an animal. The factions of the house of Medicis and their enemies are doubtless figured therein; and the key to this comic apocalypse would admit us to the secrets of Pope Leo and the troubles of Florence. This poem is full of morality and philosophy. It ends with the very rational reflections of a large hog, which addresses man in nearly the following terms:

Ye naked bipeds, without beaks or claws.Hairless, and featherless, and tender-hided,Weeping ye come into the world – becauseYe feel your evil destiny decided;Nature has given you industrious paws;You, like the parrots, are with speech provided;But have ye honest hearts? – Alas! alas!In this we swine your bipedships surpass!Man is far worse than we – more fierce, more wild —Coward or madman, sinning every minute;By frenzy and by fear in turn beguiled,He dreads the grave, yet plunges headlong in it;If pigs fall out, they soon are reconciled;Their quarrel's ended ere they well begin it.If crime with manhood always must combine,Good Lord! let me forever be a swine.

This is the original of Boileau's "Satire on Man," and La Fontaine's fable of the "Companions of Ulysses"; but it is quite likely that neither La Fontaine nor Boileau had ever heard of Machiavelli's ass.

The Ass of Verona.

I must speak the truth, and not deceive my readers. I do not very clearly know whether the Ass of Verona still exists in all his splendor; but the travellers who saw him forty or fifty years ago agree in saying that the relics were enclosed in the body of an artificial ass made on purpose, which was in the keeping of forty monks of Our Lady of the Organ, at Verona, and was carried in procession twice a year. This was one of the most ancient relics of the town. According to the tradition, this ass, having carried our Lord in his entry into Jerusalem, did not choose to abide any longer in that city, but trotted over the sea – which for that purpose became as hard as his hoof – by way of Cyprus, Rhodes, Candia, Malta, and Sicily. There he went to sojourn at Aquilea; and at last he settled at Verona, where he lived a long while.

This fable originated in the circumstance that most asses have a sort of black cross on their backs. There possibly might be an old ass in the neighborhood of Verona, on whose back the populace remarked a finer cross than his brethren could boast of; some good old woman would be at hand to say that this was the ass on which Christ rode into Jerusalem; and the ass would be honored with a magnificent funeral. The feast established at Verona passed into other countries, and was especially celebrated in France. In the mass was sung:

Orientis partibusAdventabit asinus,Pulcher et fortissimus.

There was a long procession, headed by a young woman with a child in her arms, mounted on an ass, representing the Virgin Mary going into Egypt. At the end of the mass the priest, instead of saying Ite missa est, brayed three times with all his might, and the people answered in chorus.

We have books on the feast of the ass, and the feast of fools; they furnish material towards a universal history of the human mind.

ASSASSIN – ASSASSINATION

SECTION I

A name corrupted from the word Ehissessin. Nothing is more common to those who go into a distant country than to write, repeat, and understand incorrectly in their own language what they have misunderstood in a language entirely foreign to them, and afterwards to deceive their countrymen as well as themselves. Error flies from mouth to mouth, from pen, to pen, and to destroy it requires ages.

In the time of the Crusades there was a wretched little people of mountaineers inhabiting the caverns near the road to Damascus. These brigands elected a chief, whom they named Cheik Elchassissin. It is said that this honorific title of cheik originally signified old, as with us the title of seigneur comes from senior, elder, and the word graf, a count, signifies old among the Germans; for, in ancient times almost every people conferred the civil command upon the old men. Afterwards, the command having become hereditary, the title of cheik, graf, seigneur, or count has been given to children; and the Germans call a little master of four years old, the count– that is, the old gentleman.

The Crusaders named the old man of the Arabian mountains, the Old Man of the Hill, and imagined him to be a great prince, because he had caused a count of Montserrat and some other crusading nobles to be robbed and murdered on the highway. These people were called the assassins, and their cheik the king of the vast country of the assassins. This vast territory is five or six leagues long by two or three broad, being part of Anti-Libanus, a horrible country, full of rocks, like almost all Palestine, but intersected by pleasant meadowlands, which feed numerous flocks, as is attested by all who have made the journey from Aleppo to Damascus.

The cheik or senior of these assassins could be nothing more than a chief of banditti; for there was at that time a sultan of Damascus who was very powerful.

Our romance-writers of that day, as fond of chimeras as the Crusaders, thought proper to relate that in 1236 this great prince of the assassins, fearing that Louis IX., of whom he had never heard, would put himself at the head of a crusade, and come and take from him his territory, sent two great men of his court from the caverns of Anti-Libanus to Paris to assassinate that king; but that having the next day heard how generous and amiable a prince Louis was, he immediately sent out to sea two more great men to countermand the assassination. I say out to sea, for neither the two emissaries sent to kill Louis, nor the two others sent to save him, could make the voyage without embarking at Joppa, which was then in the power of the Crusaders, which rendered the enterprise doubly marvellous. The two first must have found a Crusaders' vessel ready to convey them in an amicable manner, and the two last must have found another.

However, a hundred authors, one after another, have related this adventure, though Joinville, a contemporary, who was on the spot, says nothing about it —"Et voilà justement comme on écrit l'histoire."

The Jesuit Maimbourg, the Jesuit Daniel, twenty other Jesuits, and Mézeray – though he was not a Jesuit – have repeated this absurdity. The Abbé Véli, in his history of France, tells it over again with perfect complaisance, without any discussion, without any examination, and on the word of one William of Nangis, who wrote about sixty years after this fine affair is said to have happened at a time when history was composed from nothing but town talk.

If none but true and useful things were recorded, our immense historical libraries would be reduced to a very narrow compass; but we should know more, and know it better.

For six hundred years the story has been told over and over again, of the Old Man of the Hill —le vieux de la montagne– who, in his delightful gardens, intoxicated his young elect with voluptuous pleasures, made them believe that they were in paradise, and sent them to the ends of the earth to assassinate kings in order to merit an eternal paradise.

Near the Levantine shores there dwelt of oldAn aged ruler, feared in every land;Not that he owned enormous heaps of gold,Not that vast armies marched at his command, —But on his people's minds he things impressed,Which filled with desperate courage every breastThe boldest of his subjects first he took,Of paradise to give them a foretaste —The paradise his lawgiver had painted;With every joy the lying prophet's bookWithin his falsely-pictured heaven had placed,They thought their senses had become acquainted.And how was this effected? 'Twas by wine —Of this they drank till every sense gave way,And, while in drunken lethargy they lay,Were borne, according to their chief's design,To sports of pleasantness – to sunshine glades,Delightful gardens and inviting shades.Young tender beauties were abundant there,In earliest bloom, and exquisitely fair;These gayly thronged around the sleeping men,Who, when at length they were awake again,Wondering to see the beauteous objects round,Believed that some way they'd already foundThose fields of bliss, in every beauty decked,The false Mahomet promised his elect.Acquaintance quickly made, the Turks advance;The maidens join them in a sprightly dance;Sweet music charms them as they trip along;And every feathered warbler adds his song.The joys that could for every sense suffice.Were found within this earthly paradise.Wine, too, was there – and its effects the same;These people drank, till they could drink no more,Were earned to the place from whence they came.And what resulted from this trickery?These men believed that they should surely beAgain transported to that place of pleasure,If, without fear of suffering or of death,They showed devotion to Mahomet's faith,And to their prince obedience without measure.Thus might their sovereign with reason say,And that, now his device had made them so,His was the mightiest empire here below…

All this might be very well in one of La Fontaine's tales – setting apart the weakness of the verse; and there are a hundred historical anecdotes which could be tolerated there only.

SECTION II

Assassination being, next to poisoning, the crime most cowardly and most deserving of punishment, it is not astonishing that it has found an apologist in a man whose singular reasoning is, in some things, at variance with the reason of the rest of mankind.

In a romance entitled "Emilius," he imagines that he is the guardian of a young man, to whom he is very careful to give an education such as is received in the military school – teaching him languages, geometry, tactics, fortification, and the history of his country. He does not seek to inspire him with love for his king and his country, but contents himself with making him a joiner. He would have this gentleman-joiner, when he has received a blow or a challenge, instead of returning it and fighting, "prudently assassinate the man." Molière does, it is true, say jestingly, in "L'Amour Peintre," "assassination is the safest"; but the author of this romance asserts that it is the most just and reasonable. He says this very seriously, and, in the immensity of his paradoxes, this is one of the three or four things which he first says. The same spirit of wisdom and decency which makes him declare that a preceptor should often accompany his pupil to a place of prostitution, makes him decide that this disciple should be an assassin. So that the education which Jean Jacques would give to a young man consists in teaching him how to handle the plane, and in fitting him for salivation and the rope.