books of the Hebrews, and those of the Indians. The Indian books
announce only peace and gentleness; they forbid the killing of animals:
the Hebrew books speak only of killing, of the massacre of men and
beasts; everything is slaughtered in the name of the Lord; it is quite
another order of things.

It is incontestably from the Brahmins that we hold the idea of the fall
of the celestial beings in revolt against the Sovereign of nature; and
it is from there probably that the Greeks drew the fable of the Titans.
It is there also that the Jews at last took the idea of the revolt of
Lucifer, in the first century of our era.

How could these Indians suppose a revolt in heaven without having seen
one on earth? Such a jump from human nature to divine nature is barely
conceivable. Usually one goes from known to unknown.

One does not imagine a war of giants until one has seen some men more
robust than the others tyrannize over their fellows. The first Brahmins
must either have experienced violent discords, or at least have seen
them in heaven.

It is a very astonishing phenomenon for a society of men who have never
made war to have invented a species of war made in the imaginary spaces,
or in a globe distant from ours, or in what is called the "firmament,"
the "empyrean." But it must be carefully observed that in this revolt of
celestial beings against their Sovereign no blows were struck, no
celestial blood flowed, no mountains hurled at the head, no angels cut
in two, as in Milton's sublime and grotesque poem.

According to the "Shasta," it is only a formal disobedience to the
orders of the Most High, a cabal which God punishes by relegating the
rebellious angels to a vast place of shadows called "Ondera" during the
period of an entire mononthour. A mononthour is four hundred and
twenty-six millions of our years. But God deigned to pardon the guilty
after five thousand years, and their ondera was only a purgatory.

He made "Mhurd" of them, men, and placed them in our globe on condition
that they should not eat animals, and that they should not copulate with
the males of their new species, under pain of returning to ondera.

Those are the principal articles of the Brahmins' faith, which have
lasted without interruption from immemorial times right to our day: it
seems strange to us that among them it should be as grave a sin to eat a
chicken as to commit sodomy.

This is only a small part of the ancient cosmogony of the