Book Title: Indian Antiquary Vol 59
Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications
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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[ August, 1930
it involves a research into the beliefs of the inarticulate quite as much as into the statements of set enquirers and writers, and it covers all historical time.
The key to the true story lies in the folk-tales about the popular holy personages with whom al-Khidr has become identified, and fortunately for the modern enquirer they are very numerous. But in making a search here it is well to bear always in mind the date of al-Khidr's fully-fledged appearance--the seventh century. Obviously only a small section of the tales of the holy personages connected with him can be examined to-day. The first of them, and one of the most important is Elijah or Elias-Ilyâs as the Muslims and most Orientals call him.
Exactly as does al-Khidr, Elijah springs suddenly into view fully-fledged. He has no home, no genealogy, no tribe ; for his surname the Tishbite refers him to no known locality or tribe. He simply exists, performs prominent acts and disappears mysteriously. Like many another holy personage of his sort he never dies. He is thus immortal, and so is al. Khidr, who drank the Water of Immortality, and here we find fastened on to this last as the ubiquitous Mystery, a folk-idea, the investigation of which would carry us over the world far indeed and right down into the ages of the long past-into the deepest depths of Babylonian and Indian antiquity. Moreover, this view of al-Khidr is as alive to-day as ever it was, and it makes him a Zinda Pir, an ever-living and therefore an undying saint. This is a Persian expression as familiar to every Indian child as is the idea it conveys to other children as far afield from India as Morocco. Practically every prominent Muslim saint is a Zinda Pir, and many of them have aoquired their exemption from death from the Water of Immortality, the fountain of which is attached as well to tales of purely secular heroes who have caught the popular imagination, such as Alexander the Great and many another.
Now, Ilyas and al-Khidr have become so thoroughly mixed up in Oriental legend often in connection with Alexander-as to be looked on as the same personage, with of course the same order of tales told about both. Whatever the one has been held to be the other has become also, and this is an important point in the general investigation. Here may I remind my hearers with a purely Western Christian education that this Address is concerned with the beliefs of Oriental peasantry mostly illiterate many of them Christians also-as much as it is concerned with those of the educated.
So far we have been considering Jewish and Muslim heroes of legend, for although Elijah is also a Christian hero, he is only such in the sense that Christianity has absorbed early Judaism. It must also be said here that he is as well known in India as he is further West, since both Nestorian Christianity and Judaism are very old religions in India—the St. Thomas Christians, as they are called, dating back in the South in large numbers for a period as long as the existence of Christians in most parts of Europe. But let us now turn to early Christianity in Syria and Palestine. There we come across a great Christian hero of the late third century in St. George of Cappadocia, the hero of the well-known Dragon story, on to whom have been fastened two quite distinct legends of the bighest antiquity-the one relating to his martyrdom and the other to his saving Princess Cleodolinda from the Dragon, to which she was exposed as a human sacrifice. This legend is a memory of a custom once common, by which important personages, generally maidens of high birth, were sacrificed annually to the wild beasts that surrounded ancient cities in very early days. The forms of death attributed to St. George have often been described and can be studied in scenes depicted on A remarkable medieval Spanish altar-piece in the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington-exhibiting a clear réchauffé of the various forms of death attributed to Tammuz in the early Babylonian literature, while the story fastened on to St. George about the Maid and the Dragon is as clearly & réchauffé of the ancient Greek tale of Perseus and Andromeda.
