lso, I should like to tell of Mystery. For always were we curious to
solve the secrets of life, death, and decay. Unlike the other animals,
man was for ever gazing at the stars. Many gods he created in his own
image and in the images of his fancy. In those old times I have
worshipped the sun and the dark. I have worshipped the husked grain as
the parent of life. I have worshipped Sar, the Corn Goddess. And I have
worshipped sea gods, and river gods, and fish gods.

Yes, and I remember Ishtar ere she was stolen from us by the Babylonians,
and Ea, too, was ours, supreme in the Under World, who enabled Ishtar to
conquer death. Mitra, likewise, was a good old Aryan god, ere he was
filched from us or we discarded him. And I remember, on a time, long
after the drift when we brought the barley into India, that I came down
into India, a horse-trader, with many servants and a long caravan at my
back, and that at that time they were worshipping Bodhisatwa.

Truly, the worships of the Mystery wandered as did men, and between
filchings and borrowings the gods had as vagabond a time of it as did we.
As the Sumerians took the loan of Shamashnapishtin from us, so did the
Sons of Shem take him from the Sumerians and call him Noah.

Why, I smile me to-day, Darrell Standing, in Murderers' Row, in that I
was found guilty and awarded death by twelve jurymen staunch and true.
Twelve has ever been a magic number of the Mystery. Nor did it originate
with the twelve tribes of Israel. Star-gazers before them had placed the
twelve signs of the Zodiac in the sky. And I remember me, when I was of
the Assir, and of the Vanir, that Odin sat in judgment over men in the
court of the twelve gods, and that their names were Thor, Baldur, Niord,
Frey, Tyr, Bregi, Heimdal, Hoder, Vidar, Ull, Forseti, and Loki.

Even our Valkyries were stolen from us and made into angels, and the
wings of the Valkyries' horses became attached to the shoulders of the
angels. And our Helheim of that day of ice and frost has become the hell
of to-day, which is so hot an abode that the blood boils in one's veins,
while with us, in our Helheim, the place was so cold as to freeze the
marrow inside the bones. And the very sky, that we dreamed enduring,
eternal, has drifted and veered, so that we find to-day the scorpion in
the place where of old we knew the goat, and the archer in the place of
the crab.

Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I