Transcriber's Note: Footnotes are placed at the end of the relevantparagraph. In Chapters I and II, the printed "Mitra" was changed to"Mithra" to match other occurrences in the text, which predominate.
THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND
A History of the Ideal
By EDGAR SALTUS
l'Alhambra du songe."
Renée Vivien
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMVII
COPYRIGHT, 1907
BY EDGAR SALTUS
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. USA.
By Mr. Saltus
HISTORIA AMORIS
IMPERIAL PURPLE
MARY MAGDALEN
THE POMPS OF SATAN
THE PERFUME OF EROS
VANITY SQUARE
THE LORDS
OF THE GHOSTLAND
| I | Brahma | 7 |
| II | Ormuzd | 39 |
| III | Amon-Râ | 60 |
| IV | Bel-Marduk | 81 |
| V | Jehovah | 109 |
| VI | Zeus | 140 |
| VII | Jupiter | 166 |
| VIII | The Nec Plus Ultra | 189 |
THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND
I
BRAHMA
THE ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of theworld, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A worldgrown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language.Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, theywere but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dreamthat they remain.
"Mortal has made the immortal," the Rig-Veda explicitly declares.The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, ithas been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light,ultimately dissolved. But, meanwhile, it founded religion, which,revealed in storm and panic, for prophets had ignorance and dread. Thegods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there werediabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena andwhatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac thatthe divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps therefloated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but theunconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistiblya dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms ofthem, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, becameconcrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earthand sky, whose union was imagined—a hymen which the rainsuggest