Alabama -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; War stories
The Druidic rites and the festival of Beltein in Scotland and Ireland,
she found traced to their source in the worship of Phrygian Baal. The
figure of the Scandinavian Disa, at Upsal, enveloped in a net precisely
like that which surrounds some statues of Isis in Egypt. The man of
rush sails used by the Peruvians on Lake Titicaca, and their mode of
handling them, pronounced identical with that which is seen upon the
sepulchre of Ramses III. at Thebes. The head of a Mexican priestess
ornamented with a veil similar to that carved on Eastern sphinxes,
while the robes resembled those of a Jewish high-priest. A very quaint
and puzzling pictorial chart of the chronology of the Aztecs contained
an image of Coxcox in his ark, surrounded by rushes similar to those
that overshadowed Moses, and also a likeness of a dove distributing
tongues to those born after the deluge.
Now, the thought of carefully gathering up these vague mythologic
links, and establishing a chain of unity that would girdle the world,
seized and mastered her, as if veritably clothed with all the power of
a bath kol.
To firmly grasp the Bible for a talisman, as Ulysses did the sprig of
moly, and to stand in the Pantheon of the universe, examining every
shattered idol and crumbling, denied altar, where worshipping humanity
had bowed; to tear the veil from oracles and sibyls, and show the world
that the true, good and beautiful of all theogonies and cosmogonies, of
every system of religion that had waxed and waned since the gray dawn
of time, could be traced to Moses and to Jesus, seemed to her a mission
grander far than the conquest of empires, and infinitely more to be
desired than the crown and heritage of Solomon.
The night wore on as she planned the work of coming years, but she
still walked up and down the floor, with slow, uncertain steps, like
one who, peering at distant objects, sees nothing close at hand. Flush
and tremor passed from her countenance, leaving the features pale and
fixed; for the first gush of enthusiasm, like the jets of violet flame
flickering over the simmering mass in alchemic crucibles, had
vanished--the thought was a crystalized and consecrated purpose.
At last, when the feeble light admonished her that she would soon be in
darkness, she retreated to her own room, and the first glimmer of day
struggled in at her window as she knelt at her bedside praying:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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