Sabbath was observed among the Persians in the most ancient times. The second angel presides over the seventh day, and is called Debadur. The third is Kur, which probably was afterwards converted into Cyrus. He is the angel of the sun. The fourth is called Muh, and presides created the earth; where the penitent an- Thus each angel has his province. It was among the Persians that the doctrine of the guardian angel and the evil angel was first adopted. It is believed that Raphael was the guardian angel of the Persian empire. Angels of the Hebrews. The Hebrews knew nothing of the fall of the angels, until the commencement of the Christian era. This secret doctrine of them at that time; for it was then that the book attributed to Enoch, relative to the sinful angels driven from heaven, was Such is the history of the angels among the ancient Brahmins, which, after the lapse of about fifty centuries, they still continue to teach. Neither our merchants who have traded to India, nor our mis-the ancient Brahmins must have reached sionaries, have ever been informed of it; for the Brahmins, having never been edified by their science or their manners, have not communicated to them their se-fabricated. crets. It was left for an Englishman, named Holwell, to reside for thirty years at Benares, on the Ganges, an ancient school of the Brahmins, to learn the ancient sacred Sanscrit tongue, in order at length to enrich our Europe with this singular knowledge; just as Mr. Sale lived a long time in Arabia, to give us a faithful translation of the Koran, and in- "It happened, after the sons of men formation relative to ancient Sabaism, had multiplied in those days, that daughters which has been succeeded by the Mus-were born to them, elegant and beautiful. sulman religion; and as Dr. Hyde continued for twenty years his researches into everything concerning the religion of the Magi. Angels of the Persians. Enoch must have been a very ancient writer; since, according to the Jews, he lived in the seventh generation before the Deluge: but as Seth, still more ancient than he, had left books to the Hebrews, they might boast of having some from Enoch also. According to them, Enoch wrote as follows: "And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamoured of them, saying to each other, Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children. "Then their leader Samyaza said to them, I fear that you may perhaps be indisposed to the performance of this enter The Persians had thirty-one angels.The first of all, who is served by four other angels, is named Bahaman; he has the inspection of all animals except man, overprise; whom God has reserved to himself an immediate jurisdiction. God presides over the day on which the sun enters the Ram; and this day is a Sabbath, which proves that the feast of the "And that I alone shall suffer for so grievous a crime. "But they answered him and said, We all swear; "And bind ourselves by mutual exe crations, that we will not change our intention, but execute our projected undertaking. "Then they swore all together, and all bound themselves by mutual execrations Their whole number was two hundred, who descended upon Ardis, which is the top of Mount Armon. "That mountain, therefore, was called Armon, because they had sworn upon it, and bound themselves by mutual execrations. } God, or of their defeat, or of their fall into hell, or of their hatred to mankind. Nearly all the commentators on the Old Testament unanimously say, that before the Babylonian captivity, the Jews knew not the name of any angel. The one that appeared to Manoah, father of Sampson, would not tell his name. When the three angels appeared to Abraham, and he had a whole calf dressed to regale them, they did not tell him their names. One of them said, "I will come "These are the names of their chiefs: to see thee next year, if God grant me Samyaza, who was their leader-Uraka-life; and Sarah thy wife shall have a barameel, Akabeel, Tamiel, Ramuel, Danel, Azkeel, Sarakuyal, Asael, Armers, Batraal, Anane, Zavebe, Samsaveel, Ertael, Turel, Yomyael, Arazyal. These were the prefects of the two hundred angels, and the remainder were all with son. Calmet discovers a great affinity between this story and the fable which Ovid relates in his Fasti, of Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury, who, having supped with old Hyreus, and finding that he was afflicted with impotence, urined upon the skin of a "Then they took wives, each choosing { calf which he had served up to them, and for himself; whom they began to ap-ordered him to bury this hide watered proach, and with whom they cohabited teaching them sorcery, incantations, and the dividing of roots and trees. them. "And the women, conceiving, brought forth giants; with celestial urine in the ground, and leave it there for nine months. Át the end of the nine months, Hyreus uncovered his hide, and found in it a child, which was named Orion, and is now in the hea "Whose stature was each three hun- vens. Calmet moreover says, that the dred cubits," &c. The author of this fragment writes in the style which seems to belong to the primitive ages. He has the same simplicity. He does not fail to name the persons, nor does he forget the dates; here are no reflections, no maxims. It is the ancient Oriental manner. words which the angels used to Abraham may be rendered thus:-A child shall be born of your calf. Be this as it may, the angels did not tell Abraham their names; they did not even tell them to Moses; and we find the name of Raphael only in Tobit, at the time of the Captivity. The other names It is evident that this story is founded of angels are evidently taken from the on the sixth chapter of Genesis :-" "There Chaldeans and the Persians. Raphael, were giants in the earth in those days, Gabriel, Uriel, &c., are Persian or Babyand also after that, when the sons of God lonian. The name of Israel itself is came in unto the daughters of men, and { Chaldean; as the learned Jew Philo exthey bare children to them, the same be-pressly says, in the account of his depucame mighty men which were of old,tation to Caligula. men of renown." Genesis and the book of Enoch perfectly agree respecting the coupling of the angels with the daughters of men, and the race of giants which sprung from this union; but neither this Enoch, nor any book of the Old Testament, speaks of the war of the angels against We shall not here repeat what has been elsewhere said of angels. Whether the Greeks and the Romans ad mitted the Existence of Angels. They had gods and demi-gods enow to dispense with all other subaltern beings. Mercury executed the commissions of Jupiter, and Iris those of Juno; nevertheless, they admitted genii and demons. The doctrine of guardian angels was versified by Hesiod, who was cotemporary with Homer. In his poem of The Works and Days, he thus explains it : When Gods alike and mortals rose to birth, O'er earth's wide space they wing their hovering flight; ELTON'S Translation. The farther we search into antiquity, the more we see how modern nations have by turns explored these now almost abandoned mines. The Greeks, who so long passed for inventors, imitated Egypt, which had copied from the Chaldeans, who owed almost every thing to the Indians. The doctrine of the guardian angels, so well sung by Hesiod, was afterwards sophisticated in the schools: it was all that they were capable of doing. Every man has his good and his evil genius, as each one had his particular star Est genius natale comes qui temperat astrum. Socrates, we know, had his good angel; but his bad angel must have governed him. No angel but an evil one could prompt a philosopher to run from house to house, to tell people, by question and answer, that father and mother, preceptor and pupil, were all ignorant and imbecile. A guardian angel in that event will find it very difficult to save his protégé from the hemlock. We are acquainted only with the evil angel of Marcus Brutus, which appeared to him before the battle of Philippi. SECTION II. The doctrine of Angels is one of the oldest in the world. It preceded that of the Immortality of the Soul. This is not surprising philosophy is necessary to the belief that the soul of mortal man is immortal; but imagination and weakness are sufficient for the invention of beings superior to ourselves, protecting or persecuting us. Yet it does not appear that the ancient Egyptians had any notion of these celestial beings, clothed with an ethereal body, and administering to the orders of a God. The ancient Babylonians were the first who admitted this theology. The Hebrew books employ the angels from the first book of Genesis downwards: but the book of Genesis was not written before the Chaldeans had become a powerful nation: nor was it until the captivity of Babylon that the Jews learned the names of Gabriel, Faphael, Michael, Uriel, &c. which were iven to the angels. The Jewish and Christian religions being founded on the fall of Adam, and this fall being founded on the temptation by the evil angel, the devil, it is very singular that not a word is said in the Pentateuch of the existence of the bad angels, still less of their punishment and abode in hell. The reason of this omission is evident : the evil angels were unknown to the Jews until the Babylonian captivity; then it is that Asmodeus begins to be talked of, whom Raphael went to bind in Upper Egypt; there it is that the Jews first {hear of Satan. This word Satan was Chaldean; and the book of Job, an inhabitant of Chaldea, is the first that makes mention of him. The ancient Persians said that Satan was an angel or genius who had made war upon the Dives and the Peris, that is, the Fairest of the East. Thus, according to the ordinary rules of probability, those who are guided by reason alone might be permitted to think, ANGELS. that, from this theology, the Jews and Christians at length took the idea that the evil angels had been driven out of heaven, and that their prince had tempted Eve in the form of a serpent. Homer were-celestial beings, subordinate to a supreme being. The imagination which produced the one, probably produced the other. The number of the inferior gods increased with the religion of Homer. Among the Christians, the number of the angels was augmented in the course of time. It has been pretended that Isaiah, in his fourteenth chapter, had this allegory in view when he said: Quomodò occidisti de cælo, Lucifer, qui manè oriebaris?— The writers known by the names of "How hast thou fallen from Heaven, O Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory I. Lucifer, son of the morning?" fixed the number of angels in nine choirs, It was this same Latin verse, trans-forming three hierarchies; the first conlated from Isaiah, which procured for thesisting of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Devil the name of Lucifer. It was for- Thrones; the second of the Denominagotten that Lucifer signifies that which tions, Virtues and Powers; and the third sheds light. The words of Isaiah, too, of the Principalities, Archangels, and, have received a little attention: he is lastly, the Angels, who give their denospeaking of the dethroned king of Baby-mination to all the rest. It is hardly allon; and, by a common figure of speech, lowable for any one but a pope, thus to he says to him: How hast thou fallen settle the different ranks in heaven. from heaven, thou brilliant star? SECTION III. Angel, in Greek, envoy, The reader will hardly be the wiser for being told that the Persians had their peris, the Hebrews their malakim, and the Greeks their demonoi. It does not at all appear that Isaiah sought, by this stroke of rhetoric, to establish the doctrine of the angels precipitated into hell. It was scarcely before the time of the primitive Christian church that the fathers and the rabbis exerted themselves to encourage this doctrine, in But it is perhaps better worth knowing, order to save the incredibility of the story that one of the first of man's ideas has alof a serpent which seduced the mother of ways been, to place intermediate beings men, and which, condemned for this bad between the Divinity and himself; such action to crawl on its belly, has ever since were those demons, those genii, invented been an enemy to man, who is always in the ages of antiquity. Man always striving to crush it, while it is always en- made the Gods after his own image; deavouring to bite him. There seemed princes were seen to communicate their to be somewhat more of sublimity in ce-orders by messengers; therefore, the Dilestial substances precipitated into the abyss, and issuing from it to persecute mankind. It cannot be proved by any reasoning that these celestial and infernal powers exist; neither can it be proved that they do not exist. There is certainly no contradiction in acknowledging the existence of beneficent and malignant substances which are neither of the nature of God nor of the nature of man: but a thing, to be believed, must be more than possible. The angels who, according to the Ba bylonians and the Jews, presided,,over nations, were precisely what the gods of vinity had also his couriers. Mercury, Iris, were couriers or messengers. The Jews, the only people under the conduct of the Divinity himself, did not at first give names to the angels whom God vouchsafed to send them; they borrowed the names given them by the Chaldeans when the Jewish nation was captive in Babylon; Michael and Gabriel are named for the first time by Daniel, a slave among those people. The Jew Tobit, who lived at Nineveh, knew the angel Raphaël, who travelled with his son to assist him in recovering the money due to him from the Jew Gabaël. In the laws of the Jews, that is, in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, not the least mention is made of the existence of the angels-much less of the worship of them. Neither did the Sadducees believe in the angels. But in the histories of the Jews, they are much spoken of. The angels were corporeal; they had wings at their backs, as the Gentiles feigned that Mercury had at his heels; sometimes they concealed their wings under their clothing. How could they be without bodies, since they all ate and drank, and the inhabitants of Sodom wanted to commit the sin of pederasty with the angels who went to Lot's house? Eve, and damned mankind. Jesus came to redeem mankind, and to triumph over the devil, who tempts us still. Yet this fundamental tradition is to be found nowhere but in the apocryphal book of Enoch; and there it is in a form quite different from that of the received tradition. St. Augustin, in his 109th letter, does not hesitate to give slender and agile bodies to the good and bad angels. Pope Gregory I. has reduced to nine choirsto nine hierarchies or orders, the ten choirs of angels acknowledged by the Jews. The Jews had in their temple two cherubs, each with two heads-the one that The ancient Jewish tradition, accord- of an ox, the other that of an eagle, with ing to Ben Maimon, admits ten degrees, six wings. We paint them now in the ten orders of angels:-1. The chaios form of a flying head, with two small ecodesh, pure, holy. 2. The famin, wings below the ears. We paint the answift. 3. The oralim, strong. 4. The gels and archangels in the form of young chasmalim, flames. 5. The seraphim, & men, with two wings at the back. As for sparks. 6. The malakim, angels, mes- the thrones and dominations, no one has sengers, deputies. 7. The elohim, gods yet thought of painting them. or judges. 8. The ben elohim, sons of the gods. 9. The cherubim, images. 10. The ychim, animated. St. Thomas, at question cviii. article 2, says, that the Thrones are as near to God as the Cherubim and the Seraphim, beThe story of the Fall of the Angels is cause it is upon them that God sits. Scot not to be found in the books of Moses. has counted a thousand million of angels. The first testimony respecting it is that of The ancient mythology of the good and Isaiah, who, apostrophising the King of1⁄2 bad genii, having passed from the East to Babylon, exclaims, "Where is now the Greece and Rome, we consecrated this exactor of tributes? The pines and the opinion, for admitting for each individual cedars rejoice in his fall. How hast thou a good and an evil angel, of whom one fallen from heaven, O Hellel, star of the assists him and the other torments him, morning?" It has been already observed from his birth to his death; but it is not that the word Hellel has been rendered yet known whether these good and bad by the Latin word Lucifer; that after-angels are continually passing from one to wards, in an allegorical sense, the name another, or are relieved by others. On of Lucifer was given to the prince of the this point, consult St. Thomas's Dream. angels, who made war in heaven; and It is not known precisely where the anthat, at last, this word, signifying Phos-gels dwell-whether in the air, in the void, phorus and Aurora, has become the name or in the planets. It has not been God's of the devil. pleasure that we should be informed of their abode. The Christian religion is founded on the Fall of the Angels. Those who revolted were precipitated from the spheres which they inhabited into hell, in the centre of the earth, and became devils. A devil, in the form of a serpent, tempted ANNALS. How many nations have long existed, and still exist, without annals. There were none in all America, that is, in one |