Such is the poetry of the pagan world, of the childhood of mankind; thus each one framed it for himself, in the dawn of things, at the awaking of imagination and conscience, long before the age when reflection set up defined worship and studied dogmas. Among the dreams that blossomed in the morning of the world, I love only those of Ionia.
Hereupon Paul became vexed, and called me a classicist: "You are all like that! You take one step forward into an idea, and then stop short like cowards. Come now; there are a hundred Olympuses { 182}in Egypt, in Iceland, in India. Each one of those landscapes is an aspect of Nature; each of those Gods is one of the forms in which man has expressed his idea of Nature. Admire the god by the same standard as the landscape; the onion of Egypt is worth as much as Olympian Jove." That is too strong, yet I take you at your word; you shall stand by your assertion, and extract a god from your onion.
"This very instant; but first transport yourself to Egypt, before the coming of warriors and priests, upon the river-ooze, among savages half naked in the mire, half drowned in water, half burned by the sun. What a sight is that of this great black shore steaming under the heat, where { 183}crocodiles and writhing fish lash the waters of the pools! Myriads of mosquitoes buzz in the air; large-leaved plants lift their tangled mass; the earth ferments and teems with life; the brain grows giddy with the heavy exhalations, and man, made restless, shudders as he feels in the air and coursing through his limbs the generative virtue by whose means everything multiplies and grows green. A year ago nothing grew on this ooze: what a change! There springs from it a tall, straight reed, with shining thongs, the stem, swollen with juices, striking deep into the slime; with every day it expands and changes: green at the outset, it reddens like the sun behind the mists. Unceasingly does this child of the ooze suck therefrom juices and force; the earth broods over it and commits to it its every virtue. See it now, how, of its own accord, it lifts itself half-way, and at last wholly, and warms in the sun its scaly belly filled with an acrid blood; blood that boils, and so exuberant that it bursts the triple skin and oozes through the wound! What a strange life! and by what miracle is it that the point of the summit becomes a plume and a parasol? Those who first gathered it wept, as though some poison had burned their eyes; but in the winter-time, when fish fails, it rejoices him who meets it. Those enormous heaped-up globes, are they not the hundred breasts of the great nurse, { 184}mother Earth? New ones reappear as often as the waters retire; there is some divine force hidden beneath those scales. May it never fail to return! The crocodile is god, because it devours us; the ichneumon is god, because it saves us; the onion is god, because it nourishes us."