faced monster of the poet's Inferno, canto xxxiv. [M. Didron discovers a great resemblance between this Pisan devil and the great Satan in the Last Judgment on the west wall of the principal church in the Convent of St. Gregory at Mount Athos. The latter is naked, and carries the enormous key of hell hanging to his waist. A human form, fat and gross, but with a long and powerful tail. His feet and hands have eagle's claws, an ox head and horns, and a goat's beard. Flames issue from the eyes and mouth. He holds a little naked being (one of the damned) in his left hand, squeezing him against his side till fire gushes from his mouth; with his right hand he directs another little devil to carry a basket full of the scrolls in which the evil deeds of men are chronicled, to deliver to the angel who weighs men's souls in the balance. For ears he has dogs' heads; and on each shoulder a monstrous head stretches open its throat and vomits flame. At each knee another head also vomits flame. This Satan of Mount Athos again bears a singular resemblance to a chief Satan which appears in a fifteenth century MS. in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. It would be deeply interesting to establish the Greek origin of the Satan of the Campo Santo and of that of the illuminator.]

The Oriental Devil is the personification of a rank and exuberant nature, mother and cruel step-dame, creatrix and homicide all in one. In the first ages there was understood to be but one primary Cause of all-this Cause both good and evil : one sole God himself the author of evil as of good. Later on the start was made, the Cause bifurcated on one side was God, the source of all good; on the other the Devil, who engenders all evil. But God and the Devil are clothed in monstrous forms-the Devil especially. His intellectual and varied powers are designated by many heads on one trunk. The intelligence that can embrace all things and penetrate everywhere is symbolised by a number of arms and legs. As the animal life is stronger than other created life, more intelligent and more formidable, and as each animal is endowed with some particular quality, this symbol of the evil genius was composed of all these predominant attributes without any secondary characteristic, and the Devil became an epitome of all hideous forms in zoological nature. A Persian Devil

appears in an engraving in the Didron collection in the form of a man, clothed and wearing necklets, bracelets, and anklets, but with claws on his heels and toes, and horns on his head. He is named Ahriman, Spirit of Darkness, the Iranian enemy of Ormuzd, second-born of the Eternal One, like Ormuzd, an emanation from the Primal Light; equally pure, but ambitious and full of pride, he had become jealous of the first-born of God. He created three series of evil spirits-male and female (see Fig. 20).

An Egyptian Devil, engraved from Montfaucon, see Fig. 174, has a human head from which project the heads of six animals, one that of an ox, one of a bird, and four others apparently those of serpents. Typhoeus, the whirlwind, or Typhoon, has a hundred serpent heads in Greek mythology. This extravagant and monstrous image cited by Montfaucon has a human body with large wings and four arms. With one of his hands he holds an object described by Montfaucon as the tail of some animal.*

A hideous representation of another such monster is to be found in a Turkish manuscript in the Bibl. Nationale, Paris, S.C. 242. This book was obtained by Napoleon I. at Cairo, and presented to the National Library of Paris. On the fly-leaf we read "Livre qui contient la figure d'Aftree," and below the author's name is given, "Saïaidi Mahammed ebu emer Hassan esseoudi," 990an. The flesh of this monster is olive, his eyes are green with red pupils, and his tongue is also red. He wears a green *See Montfaucon, Anti,uite Expliquée, vol. ii. plate facing p. 197, Fig. 6.

scarf round his loins, pale purple trousers lined with blue, and necklets and armlets of gold. (See Fig. 175.)

The Devil was also endowed with the features of a lion, of a tiger, an eagle, a man, or a bull, to show that evil was angry as one, cruel as another, swift as a third, intelligent as a fourth, strong and indomitable as the last. Out of this combination and multiplicity of bizarre, heterogeneous, and impossible forms, a monstrous being was developed.*

Monstrosity is, in fact, the character of the Genius of Evil in the East. Therefore it is that in the Apocalypse, which is a work altogether Eastern both in conception and in execution, so much stress is laid upon the monstrous forms of its demons. There we find, Rev. xii. 2, the dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and a tail so mighty that with it he can cast the stars of heaven to the earth with one blow. And there is the beast of the sea, Rev. xiii. 1, with a body like a leopard, feet as the feet of a bear, mouth like the mouth of a lion.

In Egypt, Typhon, who is the personification of brute matter and of purely

Fig. 174.-EGYPTIAN DEVIL.

like a

animal life, is hideous. His head is enormous, flattened ball in front, with gigantic ears; he has a large, fat, squat body, pendant flabby belly, legs swollen and formless as those of an elephant. The Behemoth of Job (Job xl. 15) eats grass like an ox.† He is armed with a tail long and thick as a cedar tree. Now the book of Job, like the vision of St. John, is an eminently Oriental poem. Such infernal genii as are there described may be seen on the beautiful vases of China and Japan. They

*See Fig. 47, vol. i. p. 162.

Didron adds, "Il est tout couvert d'écailles," but scales are an attri bute of Leviathan in chap. xli. 15, not Behemoth, xl. 15.

are hideous fabulous beasts covered with extravagant excrescences, and formed out of all known proportions. Such is, then, the physiognomy attributed to the Genius of Evil in the East. A gigantic, monstrous, composite, incoherent animal, covered with excrescences. This is not so in the West.

Here we find less extra

Fig. 175. TURKISH DEVIL.

vagance. Men are more self-contained, more reasonable. Nature is less powerful for good as for evil; it is unproductive except under the hand of man. The soil must be broken by the plough or by the spade, must be moistened by the sweat of the labourer, be pruned and trimmed every season, that it may bring forth plants,

flowers, fruits or grain. It is man, on the contrary, who is everything. It is he who does well or ill. Satan is almost completely transformed into man; these monstrous Eastern forms would have rather excited laughter than fear in our cold, rational, and mocking regions. Greece, owing to the proximity of India, still preserved some hideous forms of the Devil, but she embellishes them with her passionate genius for beauty. Cerberus has three heads, but he is in every way a dog. Harpies are unclean birds, fetid, hideous, but not monstrous. Medusa is frightful, and yet hers is a woman's head, round which, instead of hair, serpents grow and hiss. And still this Medusa becomes singularly more human in her passage from Greece to Sicily (see the bas-reliefs in Selinonte), where Pluto, Proserpine, the infernal divinities, and the pagan divinities, clothed in reasonable human form, take the place of the monstrous images of the East. The West is not so imaginative;

its birds are smaller and less coloured, its flowers and trees more pale and feeble, its mammiferæ less developed and formed in better proportions. The elephant and camel thrive badly among us, where the horse and the ox do well. The Devil of the West was also smaller, less exaggerated, less monstrous. The seven-headed devil is out of place in our churches, where the devil with one head swarms, breeds, and thrives wonderfully.

Fig. 176.-SATAN WITH
SERPENT HORNS.*

Before any constant communication between the East and West took place, and from primitive times down to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian devil constantly assumed the human form. These forms varied, but not in any vital point, and sometimes the devil was only a very ugly man. Indeed, he presents himself on our most ancient monuments with a physiognomy shrunken, lank, degraded both morally and physically. There are no devils properly so called in the catacombs either in frescoes or on

* MS. circ. 13th century. Coll. of Duke of Anjou. Bibl. Nat. Paris.