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SPIRIT BASIS OF BELIEF AND CUSTOM.
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wine, was the leading Mexican sun-sacrament. The early sacrificial drinking of blood as the life is refined into the drinking of the life of John Barleycorn or of the blood of the grape as the life of the world. In the mysteries of Babylon and Chaldea the ferment of wine, like the ferment of blood, was considered the direct working of the creative spirit. Wine, the blood of the grape, was the blood of Belus, the early Guardian, who spilt his own lifeblood on the ground, that, mingling with the dust, the divine blood might forment into universal life.91 From Chaldea the mystic view, that the origin of life is the self-sacrifice of the spirit of Nature, passed west in the slain Adonis Orpheus and Dionysos, the blood of the grape, the blood of the guardian, scaring evil, housing evil, passing himself and his hosts into his worshippers, and, in divine ecstasy, enabling them to overleap the barriers of Self."
Over much of Western Asia the great Arab Prophet's (A. D. 612) yearning for scents drove the sacred use of liquor from earth to heaven. Still in the seat of its old divinity, in Syria, Babylon and Persia, liquor continued to receive worship. In the fourteenth century (A.D. 1388), after about seven hundred years of the rule of wine-hating Islâm, Hâfiz sings the praises of wine with not less fervour than the old Persian songster hymned the Haoma: -
"On a rose-leaf, I saw, writ with the blood of the wind-flower,
The bringer of ripe anderstanding is the ruby red wine.""
Again : -
“That bitter maker of rye faces which the pious miename Mother of Fionde (Umm-ul-Khabaith),
Is more pleasing to me than the virgin's kiss." Again : -
"He who has learned the secret of the Almighty on the threshold of the wine shop Gains through the wine cup the full knowledge of the Dorwish's cloister (that is of the mysteries
of belief).'* Once more Hafiz sings :
"Give me wine that I may make clear the secret of Fate,
And shew forth the face of the Lord who charms me and whose scent inflames me."
91 Bunsen's Egypt's Place in History, Vol. IV. p. 287 ; Brown's The Great Dionysiak Myth, Vol. II. p. 108.
Compare Frazer's Golden Bough, Vol. I. p. 322; Vol. II. p. 90; Brown's Great Dionysiak Myth, Vol. I. pp. 197, 235 : Vol. II, p. 5.
One of the Prophet's own sayings or hadith, recorded by the Seint of Saints, Abdul Kadir Gilani (A. D. 1257) in his Fut Ah-ul-Gheib, The Opening of the Unesen, Lahor Edition, p. 29, and in Jalál-ud-din Rami's (A. D. 1250) Masnavi', Bombay Edition, Part I. p. 17, shows the koonness of the Prophet's love of scents "Three things in this world I am foroed to love, soente, women and prayers. But prayers are to me colors of the eyes." The Araba, before the Prophet, were fond of wine. Al-Ma'ldi (A. D. 915; Prairies d'Or, Arab. Text IV. p. 218) gives the tale of Aba Mihjan, the hero of the great Arab victory of Kadisiyyah over the Persiana in A. D. 645 (H. 23). This famous warrior was also & poet. Shortly before the battle, the Arab General Sa'ad, who hated wine, ordered Abd Mihjan to be put in chains. On the morning of the battle, Aba Mihjan persuaded the general's wife to set him free for the day. The lady loosed his chains and gave him one of her husband's famous mares. On his return from the battle, which his skull and courage had mainly won, Abd Mihjan stretched his legs to receive the fetters. “Why wast thou imprisoned ? the lady asked." For those lines," said the poet," in praise of wine
When I die bary me beneath the vine-tree: Let the dew from its tendrils water my bones; Bury me not under the open sky where my soul
Would lack the elixir that in life sustained it." The praise of wine was again permitted in the laureate days of Haran-ar-Rashid (A. D. 786-808). And the medieval Arab poetry, which began under Harun-ar-Rashid at its close in the eleventh century, passed the torch to the early Persian poots. The great Sa'adi (A. D. 1967) mellowed with mysticism tho praise of wine, using the ferment of wine as a symbol of the creative working of the love of the Almighty -
From the wine that the eyes, that is the love, of AllAh shed in the mingling of Sa'aar's soul, His brain will swim till the dawn of the Day of Doom. - Farl Lutfullah Faridi. * Bar-bargi-gul-si-khani-shak dyik-nawishtah-and,
Kan-kar-ki-pukhtah-shud-mayi-chan-arghavan girift. 16 Bar Astanah mai khanah har kih yaft sind,
Zi faini jam i mai asrdri khankah ddniat. ► Mai bidih td di hamat agahi i sirri kasd,
Kih bark Wh shudam dghako bar búi kih mast,
