Produced by Adam Buchbinder, Chandra Friend and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) Transcriber's Note: Footnotes are placed at the end of the relevant paragraph. In Chapters I and II, the printed "Mitra" was changed to "Mithra" to match other occurrences in the text, which predominate. In Chapter II, the notation [)a] represents the letter a with breve. Also, an instance in the original text of the word "JHVH" in the Hebrew alphabet has been changed to the Roman. THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND _A History of the Ideal_ By EDGAR SALTUS "Errons, les doigts unis, dans l'Alhambra du songe." Renee 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-Ra 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 the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language. Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream that they remain. "Mortal has made the immortal," the _Rig-Veda_ explicitly declares. The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it has 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. The gods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there were diabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena and whatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac that the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined--a hymen which the rain suggested--and from which broader conceptions proceeded and grander gods emerged.