Acknowledgments
This book has been conceived and written throughout a long process and in different places. Innumerable teachers, colleagues, and friends made it possible with their help, encouragement, and example, and I hope I can at least duly acknowledge some of them here. Of course, the shortcomings, mistakes, and oversights are all mine.
The advice and support I received at Saint Louis University’s Department of history in the past few years from Phil Gavitt, Charles (Hal) Parker, Damian Smith, Torrie Hester, Mark Ruff, Silvana Siddali, Jennifer Popiel, Lorri Glover, Flannery Burke, Douglas Boin, Luke Yarbrough, Claire Gilbert, and Fabien Montcher have been both fundamental and heartwarming. I also am particularly grateful to Thomas Madden, Michal Rozbicki, and David Borgmeyer, whose contributions, respectively as heads of the Centers for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Intercultural Studies, and International Studies went beyond their individual generosity. Fellow Sinologist Pauline Lee of the Department of Theology has been crucial in helping me refine themes and arguments in my manuscript and for getting me acquainted with the latest developments of American scholarship on history of religions.
Christopher Ahn and Diane Ganeles of SUNY Press followed me with professionalism and patience making my first editorial experience with a monograph both instructive and pleasant. I am also grateful to the three anonymous readers for their precious comments and advice.
Among all the friends and colleagues who accompanied me during different phases of my project, I thank Rebecca Wanzo, Colin Burnett, Tobias Zürn, Jacqui Shine, Srdjan Smajic, Nicole Eaton, Victoria Smolkin, Wenshing Chou and Margaret Tillman for making the arguments, structure, and prose of the book much more effective (and tolerable) than they might have been otherwise.
Special words of gratitude are due to Miranda Brown, without whose thoughtful advice and graciousness Heaven is Empty would not have been possible, and David Spafford, who, as a mentor, colleague and friend, has inspired and helped me in so many ways over two decades that it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive account here.
I shall never be grateful enough to Professor Michael Loewe, who after a long day of conferences was so kind to spend his dinner time casting light on many questions I had on Emperor Wu of the Han.
As for my time as a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, many are the teachers to whom I am intellectually and personally indebted. Michael Nylan painstakingly guided me from the confusion on my early days in the U.S. through the early phases of an academic profession in Han studies. David Johnson, in addition to introducing me to the richness of Chinese popular culture, provided invaluable feedback on my final manuscript. By pointing out structural analogies between Chinese and Greco-Roman historiography, Carlos Noreña was the first to encourage me on the path of comparative history. Erich Gruen, Mary Elizabeth Berry, and Patricia Berger still represent models of intellectual rigor and compassion that one day I hope to emulate as a teacher and scholar. I am also thankful the Department of History, the Center for East Asian Studies, the Haas and Quinn foundations, and to Jennifer Nelson of the Robbins Collection at UC Berkeley for supporting me at different stages of my project.
Among the teachers I had in Italy, I am especially grateful to Paola Nardella, Claudia Santi, Corrado Pensa, Arcangela Santoro, as well as the late Piero Corradini, Daniela Tozzi Giuli, and Paolo Daffinà who, in different roles and at different institutions, passionately introduced me to historical and cultural aspects of the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and of Inner and East Asia. A special mention goes to Chiara Peri of the Jesuit Refugee Service in Rome, where, as a volunteer, I started to grapple with the many aspects of the thorny question of interculturality.
I finally thank my families in Italy and Taiwan and my wife Lidan for the unconditioned love and support showed throughout this long process.
Filippo Marsili Taipei, July 2018
Author’s Note
Heaven is Empty addresses theoretical questions that are of interest to the broader readership of world history and history of religions. I have therefore decided to depart from customary practice in Sinological studies and move the original Chinese passages that form the basis of my arguments from the body of the text. The interested reader will find the passages, along with their related philological questions, in the endnotes.
Introduction
An Empire without a “Religion”
I heard a saying that “he who knows the “heaven” of Heaven may make himself a king, but he who does not have this knowledge may not. To the king the people are Heaven, whereas to the people food is Heaven.
—Li Yiji, “The Mad Scholar”1
Monotheisms and Globalizations
In the past few decades, discussions on the role of religion in shaping the interconnections of politics, society, and culture have acquired a particular urgency. Since the end of the Cold War, after 9/11, and even more so with the surge of IS, religion has come to occupy a central position in discourses on the most sensitive aspects of globalization.2 Popular media, public intellectuals, and academics regularly address religion either as the main cause of conflict or as the potential basis for a harmonious intercultural dialogue. In either case, most analyses tend to reify religion as if it were an independent historical subject endowed with agency, and—more or less explicitly—regard it as the foundation stone of collective cultural identities. In other words, once it is redefined more broadly as an essential component of “culture,” religion constitutes a pivotal factor in the study of group attitudes toward politics and institutions, social distinctions, economic behaviors, gender relations, and sexuality. These ideas are so ingrained in Mediterranean and Euro-American worldviews that even openly secular or atheist authors tend to articulate their arguments within ethical and epistemological parameters that reflect the unitary and totalizing bias of monotheism.3
Turning to the comparative study of ancient civilizations, the recent surge of China as a world power has prompted a new generation of scholars of antiquities to juxtapose Augustan Rome (27 BCE–14 CE) and QinHan China (221 BCE–220 CE) as two crucial phases in the trajectories of Western and Eastern civilizations.4 Their projects have demonstrated that institutional and economic analyses based on quantitative data allow for a deeper understanding of political and economic centralization across the globe.5 However, the empirical orientation that traditionally characterizes philological and historical scholarship has so far prevented these studies from engaging the postmodern and postcolonial critique of the validity of “religion” as a cross-cultural heuristic category.6 Such an oversight, together with the adoption of Augustan Rome as a universal template for the examination of ancient empires, perpetuates the conceit that political unification must be based on a shared religion or unitary conception of the sacred. As a result, specialists and the general public alike still tend to assume the systemic, identitary, and moralistic interpretation of world religions that characterize modernity as timeless and intrinsic to the very notion of the divine. Heaven Is Empty argues that unified rule is possible without cultural unification, and that cultural unification is possible without a shared religion. By offering a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of the “sacred” in Early China, I propose a novel approach to the study of the role of “religious” beliefs and practices in forging institutions and identities in the ancient and contemporary world. My research engages the fields of history of religion, world and intellectual history, sinology, and classics. In reconstructing the crucial political and cultural battles that shaped China in the period of unification under the Qin and Han empires (221 BCE–220 CE), it questions the teleological, unitary, and identitary preoccupations that have driven indigenous and foreign scholarly theorizations of religion in ancient China since the end of the nineteenth century.7 More specifically, this study challenges the indiscriminate application to the Qin and Han periods of conceptual categories developed in the study of Greco-Roman and organized religions and suggests that such applications often cloud our understanding of Qin-Han China and present a serious obstacle in comparative studies.
In the past few years, specialists of more recent periods of Chinese history have begun to deconstruct the introduction in Sinological scholarship of the very concept of a unitary religion, which occurred as a consequence of a partly voluntary adoption of foreign ideas following the dramatic clash with Western colonial interests at the end of the nineteenth century.
Early China scholars, on the other hand, because of a series of factors that we will explore in detail below, traditionally tend to operate within intellectual concerns and frameworks established by Euro-American academics. Especially in the case of the phenomena customarily studied under the category of religion, most Sinologists still seem informed by the teleological and systemic preoccupations typical of Christian historiography and that more or less openly reflect the cultural legacy of Hegelianism, both in the approaches indebted to German sociology and in Chinese state-sponsored Marxist readings.8
In the particular case of the study of empire formation, the application to the Han Dynasty of the Augustan model of a “state religion” based on “divine rulership” justifies inferences about the question of the sacred in early China that downplay the specificity and richness of indigenous worldviews.9 Unless we assume the universality of a Western conception of “religion,” even in handling measurable data, we should consider that cross-cultural inquiries into the past are based on culture-specific categories and criteria of inclusion and exclusion that are hardly relevant for the subjects under study.10 As Douglas Northrop remarks, “[S]cholars are of course situated culturally and historically, with predispositions and theoretical frameworks shaped by positions in a modern, especially Anglophone and capitalist West . . . [W]orld history studies a ‘globe’ that has been conceived through Euro-American historicist epistemologies . . . It is therefore neither objective nor value-neutral—and far from truly global.”11 In support of Northrop’s observation, it should suffice to note that while no one would question the legitimacy of an academic pursuit of an “early Chinese religion,” studying Roman civilizations in terms of yin 陰 and yang 陽, qi 氣, or dao 道 would be deemed absurd both by Western and Chinese scholars. Clearly, the processes of intellectual borrowing seem to work only in one direction. Reacting to these tendencies, I tackle the question of “religion” with a dialectic and reflexive methodology and a special attention to the intellectual attitude Reinhart Koselleck defines as “consciously admitted positionality.”12 My work provides a study of early China that accounts for indigenous contexts and concerns while historicizing and problematizing the motivations and methods that inform our scholarly approaches and intellectual paradigms.13 As quipped by the ancient Chinese thinker Zhuangzi (c. 369–286 BCE), the knowledge of the Other and of the Self proceeds through interdependent heuristic processes—“Without the Other there is no Self.”14 Thus, Heaven Is Empty does not aim at countering or confirming the refutation of the knowability of the Other of some of postmodern scholars. It instead strives
to acknowledge the inevitable subjectivity of all intellectual approaches as an integral part of its empirical analysis.
The Argument: Metaphysics in Historical Narratives
Among Sinologists, only Robert F. Campany has systematically questioned the applicability of Euro-American approaches to ancient Chinese religions.15 He has convincingly challenged the tendency to conceive traditions such as “Buddhism” or “Daoism” in terms of theoretical coherence, collective agency, “faith,” or “belief.”16 Taking my cue from his “fluid” approach to the performative aspects of ritual in the Chinese early middle period (c. 100–600 CE), I focus on the formative years of the empire, before the introduction of Buddhism set in motion a series of cultural transformations that I consider crucial in our understanding (and misunderstanding) of Chinese ancient religions.17
My approach hinges on the observation that the diffusion of new South-Asian beliefs and practices in the first century CE (at the earliest) coincided with the introduction of a universalistic notion of religion that caused notable changes in the way the Chinese envisioned their relationship with “the sacred.”18 The moralizing potential of the “divine” as a vehicle for personal development provided new modalities for interactions within and among communities (real and imagined) and for the formalization of individual and group identities, which, as Erich Gruen points out in his study of Mediterranean civilizations, “in antiquity did not possess a pure and unadulterated character.”19 The impact of Buddhism thus prompted the Chinese to formalize the theoretical foundations of indigenous traditions according to new paradigms. The social function of the sacred was profoundly transformed through the guidance of an organized clergy, the adoption of a scriptural corpus, and the new territorial dynamics produced by the construction of stupas and temples. From an epistemological point of view, these elements made Chinese, Greco-Roman, and Judeo-Christian experiences more easily comparable, while fueling the scholarly tendency to conceive ancient civilizations indiscriminately in unitary, systemic, and identitary terms—after all, Buddhism arose in an Indo-European context.20
One of the most dangerous conceits regarding the interdependence of religion and collective identities revolves around the question of China’s inclusion among the “great world civilizations.” It has become customary to imply that the moral foundations of a complex society must derive from
an organic conception of the “sacred.” Debates on whether the origins of China were quintessentially “secular” or “religious” inevitably appropriate traditionally Euro-American philosophical preoccupations while implicitly subsuming the universality of Abrahamic models. For example, while some scholars extol the civilization of the Yellow River as one of the earliest instances of secular society, others, by referring to the supposed “spirituality” of Confucianism21 or the monotheistic nature of the Chinese notion of Heaven, argue that ancient China was endowed with an indigenous ethical tradition comparable to Christianity.22 On the other side of the spectrum, positivistic and Marxist analyses tend to treat popular religious traditions as evidence for the superstitious mentality of the earlier periods of Chinese civilization, one that must be overcome by a more “rational” and “modern” attitude.
Heaven Is Empty holds that these tendencies still underlie cultural complexes that can be traced back to the fateful clash with foreign powers, when late nineteenth-century Chinese elites felt compelled to rethink the early history of their country in non-native terms. Although these sentiments and ideas are culturally legitimate and represent an integral part of the current Chinese intellectual universe, once applied to the study of ancient societies, they can engender insidious anachronisms.
In order to formulate culture-specific notions, Heaven Is Empty looks at the scholarship on the sacred in the ancient Mediterranean world and tests the applicability of its heuristic tools to early Chinese contexts. It concentrates on historical, literary, and material sources dealing with the imperial propaganda produced to justify the dominion of Rome over the ancient Western world and of the Qin and Han dynasties over the Central States. The comparison of the Augustan age with the dynasty of the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE) serves as the starting point for a broader critique of the ways the hegemony of Abrahamic models produces views of the past that are still instrumental in the persistence of Eurocentric approaches to current intercultural debates on political and cultural identities.
Elusive Rulers, Lacunose Accounts, Inadequate Models
The main protagonists of this book are Emperor Wu 武 of the Han (r. 141–87 BCE), his court archivist Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c. 145 or 135–86 BCE) (who was in charge of recording both human and astronomical events), and the first history of China from its origins, the Records of the
Grand Historian (Shiji 史記, hereafter Records), which Sima Qian completed by integrating and finishing the work begun by his father Sima Tan 譚 (c. 165–110 BCE).23 However, studying Emperor Wu’s period through the accounts of his official historians represents a much less straightforward endeavor than it may appear. The two chief problems in the study of the Records are the well-known falling out between Emperor Wu and Sima Qian (which led to the castration of the latter), and the complicated issue of the Records’ authorship and transmission.24 Heaven Is Empty highlights the fact that, although recent scholarship has demonstrated that a syncretic form of “Confucianism” was established as a state doctrine only after the death of Emperor Wu, most readers of the Records anachronistically attribute to its authors a mature and self-conscious understanding of “Confucianism” as a coherent moral-philosophical doctrine, although it had not yet been formalized as such at the time. Furthermore, most scholars have routinely overlooked the fact that neither of the Simas was allowed to witness the most important phases of the historic ceremonies carried out by their sovereign. It is equally striking that despite the length of his reign (fifty-four years) and the sheer magnitude of his achievements, Emperor Wu always occupied a very ambiguous position in Chinese and Western historiography. The Records describes this sovereign as superstitious, inconsistent, and hopelessly under the sway of the untrustworthy fangshi 方士 (experts in esoteric practices and bodily practices, especially hailing from the coastal areas of the former states of Qi and Yan). The History of the Former Han (Han Shu 漢書), by Ban Gu 班 固 (32–92 CE) praises him as the emperor who, after the bemoaned period of persecutions and ostracism against the Classicists (in Chinese ru 儒, traditionally translated as “Confucians”) began to appoint them to important positions at court. In contrast, the poetry and popular or “apocryphal” literature of the Tang period (618–907) expressed longing for the marvelous times of Wu’s reign, a lost golden age when the Son of Heaven leisurely consorted with female deities in his private rooms. Tellingly, the prolific British sinologist Michael Loewe, widely recognized as the most authoritative and influential Han studies scholar, routinely attributes the most impactful military campaigns and policies carried out in this period to Wu’s generals, ministers, and advisors, thereby implicitly suggesting that the emperor himself lacked leadership skills, political savvy, and agency. Although he never explicitly makes the point, Loewe treats Wu as a puppet in the hands of court factions or charlatans—a viewpoint he happens to share with Sima Qian.25
There is no question that Emperor Wu had the opportunity of benefiting from the service of several exceptionally talented statesmen. However, it
cannot be ignored that almost all of his influential ministers and courtiers eventually fell out of grace or died after a very brief—albeit successful—period in office. There is, however, one interesting exception to this rule: the minister Sang Hongyang 桑弘羊 (152–80 BCE), who enjoyed Wu’s confidence until the end of his reign. Sang is remembered as the staunch promoter of radical economic centralization and state monopolies, which eventually turned several aristocratic and wealthy families against Emperor Wu. Richard von Glahn has aptly branded this political model as “mercantilist fiscal state,” which “aspired to supplanting private commerce with state-run institutions managed by enterprising merchants recruited to government service.”26 Sang also features in the Discourses on Salt and Iron (Yantielun 鹽鐵論), the partially fictionalized account of a court debate on the pros and cons of economic centralization that took place after Wu’s death.27 In the diatribe against the supporters of devolutionary measures and relative autonomy of regional elites, Sang is the champion of the court faction that envisioned a big government directly in charge of all the fundamental productive and administrative activities. The importance of Sang’s political longevity supports my thesis that despite the accusations of incoherence and superstition directed against Emperor Wu’s ritual reforms, they in fact constituted an integral part of the legitimization of radical economic centralization—the first priority of his government.
In the Discourses, in contrast with our current understanding of economics as an independent field, discussions on the viability of state monopolies also explore the themes of ritual and historical memory, while including elements that we would define philosophical or mythological.28 In the Records and other Han Dynasty texts, whose declared focus is not the implementation of specific politics, narratives about myths, rituals, and the legitimization of hereditary monarchy intermingle with economic questions rather frequently. I argue that if we ignore the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines and textual traditions and look at these sources while framing specific “religious” debates in their historical contexts, mythological disquisitions about ancient cultural heroes and sages acquire a much more concrete background. In the case of the Records, if we complement its reading with contemporary documents such as the Huainanzi or excavated manuscripts from Mawangdui, it becomes clear that the rivalry between Classicists and fangshi also overshadows radically different positions about Emperor Wu’s centralizing reforms.29
Wu’s long reign, according to Michael Loewe, was characterized by a struggle between Modernists, those officials who envisioned a government based on radical and administrative centralization, and Reformists, those who
opposed it.30 Marianne Bujard, by concentrating on the cultural aspects of these tensions, has highlighted the rivalry at court between the Classicists, who propounded a form imperial authority thoroughly informed by the “Confucian” textual tradition, and the fangshi, on whose expertise Wu would rely in his quest for physical immortality.31 As mentioned above, Sima Qian’s attribution of his sovereign’s inconsistencies and flimsiness to the influence of these magicians is well known. Surprisingly enough, Han scholars seem to overlook that Sima Qian disapproved of the contemporary Classicists as well. My point is that since his attacks are seldom straightforward, Sima Qian’s overt admiration for Confucius and familiarity with the texts associated with his teachings can be easily mistaken for an endorsement of the various contemporaries that claimed the Master as their inspiration. In fact, I argue that Sima Qian’s own strong background in the Classics allowed him to weave an informed and subtle—albeit indirect—critique of the superficiality, hypocrisy, and opportunism of most of the Han Classicists. Conversely, since he could not be as well versed in the cultural traditions of the peripheral regions from which the fangshi hailed, he limits his sarcasm to their continuous references to spirits, ghosts, extraordinary phenomena, and immortality, without engaging the possible import of the ceremonies Emperor Wu inaugurated under their advice. I demonstrate that the fangshi’s contribution to Wu’s ritual activities, which the Records describes as an incoherent congeries of badly understood esoteric regional traditions, was often consistent with the political agenda of the Modernists, for it aimed at legitimizing a charismatic, all-powerful, and autocratic conception of rulership.
Recently, Tamara T. Chin has detailed how Han literary genres reflected the dramatic impact of Sang’s program on Han perceptions about the economic relations between China and foreigners, and between center and periphery.32 For example, she analyzes the development of the rhapsody fu 賦 as the “primary scene of ideological contestation” against Wu’s aggressive economic politics and lavishness. Chin argues that the eventual reduction the in the size and ornamentality of this poetic form echoed the increasing popularity of positions that advocated for a return to the frugal ways of the Western Zhou.33 Paralleling Chin’s work, Heaven Is Empty focuses on Han discourses on economic models by concentrating on rituals and mythological narratives. It reconstructs substantial components of Wu’s ideological strategies by integrating the fragmentary accounts provided by the Records with contemporary material evidence, court poetry, and received and excavated documents conventionally associated with the Huang-Lao tradition.34
As eloquently summarized by Chin, Eastern Han historiography engaged in the erasure of the Records’ “arresting, unsettling, reflexive and yet internally inconsistent treatment of the very terms and conditions of discourse on frontier and market.”35 As for the issue of state ceremonies and propaganda, I illustrate how the model of kingship pursued by Emperor Wu did not survive his death. Attuned to Confucius’s “secular” dislike of direct involvement with spirits and ghosts, new generations of intellectuals would misunderstand or misrepresent the sovereign’s ritual reforms. Disconnected from a specific strategy for the cultural legitimization of centralization, their memory would survive as testament of Wu’s extravagance and superstition.
Overlapping Historical and Cultural Contexts
Ideological interpretations of the Western Han, celebrated as the first “Confucian” dynasty, have inevitably produced several misunderstandings and interconnected anachronisms that are still influential in contemporary scholarship. For centuries Chinese and Western scholars alike, despite contrasting views on his political contribution, have praised Emperor Wu for allowing the Classicists to regain a central position in the political and cultural life of the realm. According to the narrative validated in Han historiography, the Qin (221–206 BCE), the first unifiers of China, had ruthlessly vanquished their rivals and imposed a regime of violence and intimidation. It was only with the adoption of so-called “Han Confucianism” as a state doctrine under Wu that, dynastic histories claim, the unified empire received full moral legitimation and won popular support. “Han Confucianism” was supposedly based on the holistic and metaphysical reading of Confucius’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋) exposed by the Classicist Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (179–104 BCE) in the Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu fanlu 春秋繁露 36 His syncretic intellectual system complemented the theory of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命) with “heterodox” cosmological speculations developed in the former state of Qi (Dong’s birthplace) during the pre-imperial period, such as those revolving around yin and yang or the Five Phases/Elements. Dong’s elaboration explained the violence that had led to the establishment and consolidation of political unity as an integral part of the moral principles underlying cosmic changes and cycles. In short, this doctrine allowed propagandistic historiography to credit the Han with the inauguration of a moral imperial line, which reframed preexisting theories about cosmic
rulership within the ethical standards of the legendary Sage Kings of yore celebrated by Confucius. According to the Master, the ancient sovereigns conformed their rule to Heaven without becoming directly involved with the spirits and ghosts worshipped in popular cults. Chinese officials and intellectuals cultivated Confucius’s secular attitude for centuries, until the beginning of the Republican era in 1912.
Only recently have philological and historical inquiries demonstrated that the Classicists (or “Confucians”) were still barely relevant at Wu’s court, and that the text in which Dong Zhongshu elaborates his theories gained cultural preeminence, or was actually composed, in a later period.37 It was Han Shu, completed at the beginning of the first century CE, which pushed back the “triumph of Confucianism” to the prosperous age of Emperor Wu, prompting generations of later historians to adopt Mediterranean models of “divine rulership” and overlook the uniqueness of his ritual vision.
Complicating matters further, in the crucial moment of the “opening” of China, late Qing 清 (1644–1911) intellectuals chose the conceit of a Wu-promoted “Han Confucianism” as the model for the creation of a modern Western-like state religion. Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have meticulously traced the introduction of a Western notion of religion into China back to this dramatic period.38 Before the unprecedented defeat suffered in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), China lacked both a single term that could translate the English “religion” and the very notion that this concept could become an instrument for the construction of a national identity. It was in the aftermath of this unprecedented and humiliating defeat that the Qing reformers decided to follow the example of the victor, Meiji Japan (1868–1912). It seemed to them that their neighbors had swiftly entered “the modern age” thanks to the ideological fervor spurred by the West-inspired cult of the emperor. His divinity and association with the origins of the country had inspired all Japanese, regardless of class and status, to sacrifice themselves for the common good, overcome the history of humiliations imposed on Japan by foreign countries, and become a feared power in their own right.
The hesitant and ineffective responses of the Qing Dynasty to the Opium Wars (1839–1860), the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), and other political and economic catastrophes of the nineteenth century had already deeply compromised the allegiance of the Chinese people to their government. After the unforgivable debacle of 1895, the Qing reformers believed that only a Meiji-like state religion could reestablish cohesion and trust between the rulers and the ruled in China. In looking at the past for legitimizing
precedents, these officials and intellectuals became particularly interested in the level of administrative efficiency and international reputation enjoyed by the Chinese empire under Emperor Wu. In this period, following almost a century of instability, the Han finally prevailed over internal and external enemies. Wu’s officials established a firmer grip on the periphery and bolstered the treasury with the enforcement of state monopolies on salt, iron, and alcohol. These measures fostered an unprecedented period of prosperity and confidence, which Emperor Wu endeavored to celebrate with the performance of the solemn rituals for the legitimation of the dynasty, which his predecessors had preferred to postpone. Even if subsequent historians bemoaned Wu’s aggressive and expensive policies as the principal cause of the economic crisis that would haunt his successors, his legacy was salvaged by his purported sponsorship of Confucian scholars. Starting with the Eastern Han, generation after generation of Classicists (or Confucians) would credit Emperor Wu with ending the ostracism they suffered under the Qin and reintegrating them at court.
Looking back to the tumultuous years following the defeat of the first Sino-Japanese war, in a political and cultural context heavily conditioned by the foreign menace, a group of Qing reformers resorted to interpreting “Han Confucianism” as an indigenous “state religion” to be revived for nation building purposes. In doing so, they engendered a long series of intertwined anachronisms and misunderstandings that have never been systematically deconstructed.
In addition to deconstructing these cultural processes, Heaven Is Empty reconstructs the political and cultural struggles that eventually led to the hegemony of a “Confucian” view of state and society a few decades after Emperor Wu’s death. As importantly, it offers the first detailed interpretation of Emperor Wu’s private and public rituals as integral to his imperial vision. If the Classicists opposed it, it is because it was incompatible with the hierarchical understanding of social and political relations that reflected the interests of the landed elites, a group to which they likely belonged. They embraced Confucius’s condemnation of popular cults as a direct attack against Emperor Wu’s attitude toward spirits and ghosts, and an implicit one against his “Modernist” agenda. In other words, I interpret early Han “Confucian” criticisms concerning popular religion as a reaction to the Emperor’s attempt to impose a centralizing, autocratic, independent, active, and extremely mobile conception of monarchy. Wu’s plan to strip local aristocracies of political and economic privileges was paralleled by his attempt to bypass their mediating function and opposition by reach-
ing out to his subjects directly, through appropriation of or participation in local ritual traditions. As we will see in more detail below, during this phase, the Classicists often contrasted these policies through literary references to alternative ritual and mythological models. In response to the fangshi’s spreading of allegorical stories celebrating all-powerful legendary monarchs of the past who did not need ministers to communicate with the common people, the Classicists offered a contrasting narrative about founding fathers who succeeded only because of moderation, collegial rule, and decentralization.
It is important to remember that the Qin’s administrative reorganization of China in commanderies and counties had greatly reduced the political and economic prerogatives of local aristocracies. It had been through the exploitation of the discontent—and military resources—of these elites that the founder of the Han, Liu Bang, was able to overthrow the unifiers of China. However, once in power, he had no choice but yield to their demands. While maintaining part of the Qin’s bureaucratic structure, Liu Bang was compelled to bestow on his aristocratic allies extremely large estates that they could rule autonomously from the court. His successors, being still economically and militarily dependent on the periphery, continued to comply with this arrangement until Emperor Wu succeeded in bringing these territories back under the political and fiscal control of the central government. The opposition he faced was both political and cultural.
Finally, from a theoretical point of view, Heaven Is Empty relies on a comparative approach to test the applicability of the traditional notions of “religion,” “myth,” “ritual,” and “polytheism” to the Qin-Han contexts. In reconstructing the historiographical phases that led to the establishment of “Confucian” interpretations of this period, it proposes categories based on indigenous concerns. Emperor Wu’s efforts toward capillary bureaucratic and economic centralization did not—and could not—imply the creation of an imperial religion because unitary, systemic, identitary, and moral interpretations of the divine were not hegemonic in early imperial China.
Grappling with the Issue of “Religion” in Chinese History and Society
This book closely examines the development of the question of “an early Chinese “religion” in chapter 1. Here I want to provide a brief synthesis of what I consider to be the main features of notions of religion that are based
on the hegemonic role of monotheist models vis-à-vis conceptions of the divine throughout Chinese history. Of course, avoiding simplifications and generalizations is impossible in such an enterprise, and the outline I offer should be taken as a list of provisional comparative signposts that will help the reader establish some preliminary criteria for the study of “religion” in early imperial China. Throughout Heaven Is Empty, the concepts described in this section will progressively be replaced by notions gleaned from specific textual and cultural contexts.
First of all, monotheistic/Abrahamic notions of religion rely on ideas about the “sacred” and the “divine” that, despite evident etymological connections with the Latin terms sacer and divinus, have evolved differently over time in different parts of the world. By generalizing, we can say that these attributes now characterize the superhuman realm as ontologically separate from the human, as well as absolute, eternal, complete in itself, devoid of any negative connotation (i.e., perfect), and knowable through Revelation. Such features, once translated into social structures, inform a notion of religion that is supposed to define one’s ethical and intellectual attitude about all aspects of reality. This form of allegiance is expected to be exclusionary (professing allegiance to one creed excludes the possibility of acknowledging the truthfulness of any other) and characterized by the same degree of structural coherence that we value in philosophical and legal systems.
Even a cursory look at Chinese civilization shows that most of these criteria do not apply. The semantic range of the Chinese character shen 神, which usually translates the English “sacred” or “divine,” is far broader than that of its Western counterparts and varies depending on textual and cultural contexts. It is etymologically linked to shen 伸, to extend, and refers to everything that is more than human or extraordinary. Importantly, it does not necessarily imply the moral connotation of “holy.” Furthermore, if we are inclined to interpret shen in light of the classic Chinese notion that every element of the cosmos is made of different concentrations of qi 氣 (breath/energy/matter), it would be erroneous to define the Chinese “divine” in terms of ontological separation and absolutes. For these reasons, and in keeping with Poo Mouchou’s and Roger Ames’s work, I prefer to use “extra-human,” (meaning “more than human”) instead of “superhuman” or “supernatural,” which imply the existence of distinct realms.39
As for Chinese organized religions, as is well known, the Three Traditions (sanjiao 三教, i.e., Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) do not require exclusive commitment. Their various practices and systems of beliefs, which at times overlap, can be followed universally regardless of one’s
allegiance to one or more of them. They can be instrumental in addressing specific critical phases of life such as birth, death, marriage, procreation, illness, success, loss, and so on, but do not necessarily subsume a holistic vision that can indiscriminately be applied to all human and extra-human phenomena. As for their social usage, references to transcendence—under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (1949– ) as well as during the imperial period (3rd century BCE–1911)—do not have a primary role in legitimizing political power, defining shared morals, or establishing specific public identities. Of course, Marxism’s proverbial rejection of religion as “the opiate of the people” relegates the sacred to the private sphere. Yet we should not underestimate the impact that Confucius’s (551–479 BCE) prejudice against direct interaction with non-human entities exerted on Chinese institutions and culture. Chinese intellectual and political elites, who were selected through a system of examinations based on the “Confucian” canon, maintained that rituals were less important for the connection they provided with ancestral spirits than for the sense of respect and harmony they fostered among the living. They believed that a revival of the ritual tradition associated with the exemplary Western Zhou 周 Dynasty (1046–771 BCE) which Confucius had promoted, was crucial to the stabilization and perpetuation of the hierarchical structure of society, as it required participants to follow ceremonial protocols determined by age and status. On the other hand, these elites considered the various forms of devotion to local deities useless at best, and at worst a threat to the moral fabric of society. It is important to emphasize that the prevalence of this “anti-religious” attitude did not automatically translate into the suppression of popular cults, nor did it prevent them from prospering. It simply relegated their treatment to popular, unofficial, or less respectable literature, some of which would be collected, starting with the 3rd century CE, under the genre aptly named “accounts of anomalies” (zhiguai 志怪).40
The apparent “vagueness” or “ambiguity” of Chinese attitudes toward the divine are more easily understandable if we consider that early China lacked an institution that held undisputed authority over questions regarding the relation between spirits and ghosts, the sociopolitical order, and the common people, as the Catholic Church did in Europe and elsewhere. In other words, Chinese elites did not conceive of ritual propriety in terms of dogma versus heresy, orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, or as a theological speculation on the true nature of the divine. The realm of the divine, including ancestral spirits and ghosts, did not constitute an indisputable source of moral authority. On the contrary, the elites tended to fear spirits and
ghosts as agents of chaos and uncertainty. People who were interested in regulating political and social institutions according to sound moral principle were supposed avoid invoking ghosts and spirits at all cost.
I argue that such an attitude became dominant only after Emperor Wu’s death, when the “Confucian” Classics were definitively installed as the only legitimate source of ritual propriety, by which even the Son of Heaven had to abide. When in the second half of the first century BCE officials at court promoted the “revival” of the emperor’s sacrifices to Heaven described in the literary canon, they were de facto tethering the ruler to their exclusive philological expertise and possibly political interests. Even though this move practically elevated the Classics to the status of scripture, the systems of values they illustrated, at least in theory, did not underlie revealed and absolute truths. The Classicists simply celebrated the wisdom and authority deriving from a superior literary education focused on the study of an exemplary past.
Another often overlooked factor concerning the study of religion and power during the Qin and Han is the novelty of the empire as a form of unified government. When the Central States were united in 221 BCE, the polities that we now call China had been divided for more than five centuries. The Qin and early Han rulers were pressed to contain the armies of local aristocratic lords who resented the loss of independence. In addition, their political priorities consisted of administrative, economic, and fiscal centralization; the establishment a common script; the standardization of legal codes, coinage, and systems of measurement; and the repair of roads and canals to facilitate the movement of people and goods. In these conditions, structuring the realm on a shared conception of the divine would have been unfeasible, if not altogether unthinkable.
Of course, prior to and in addition to the institution of the ceremonies mentioned above, the Qin and early Han rulers did conduct sacrifices, but these had nothing to do with the establishment of a state religion (i.e., for all the subjects of the empire) but rather with ensuring the military and economic success of the government. At the same time, as we will see, early emperors as individuals seemed interested in practices that focused on personal well-being, and these acts of worship took place in the presence of a few courtiers or in private. The fact that extant Qin and Han monumental architecture seems conceived more for the spirits of the dead than for a living public further supports the point that the Qin and the Han did not develop a religious cult of the emperor for propagandistic reasons comparable to that of the Romans. The available evidence can justify hypotheses about
the existence of a religion for the emperor but not of an imperial religion of the Western kind.
Time and Space: The Structure of Heaven Is Empty
Following contemporary trends in religious and ritual studies, I organize my analysis of Emperor Wu’s ceremonies around the “Kantian absolutes” of time and space.41 However, mindful of the specific concerns expressed in the Chinese sources, I interpret time more narrowly as the intellectual justification of hereditary monarchy in terms of mythical or historical narratives, and of continuity and rupture with the past. By space I mean the conceptual and ritual reconfigurations of the extension of territorial control that took place under Emperor Wu’s rule. In my examination of religion, I include dynamics, systems, and phenomena (human, natural, or cosmic) such as fate, fortune, and elaborate theories of historical causation, that the documents consider as having an impact on human lives regardless of contingency (i.e., metahistorical factors).
Since this book’s reconstruction of Emperor Wu’s ritual activities proceeds from a historicization and deconstruction of Western paradigms, its conceptual vocabulary undergoes the continuous scrutiny and readjustments implied in the work of cultural translation. At times in keeping, at times in contrast with the Records’ vantage point, Heaven Is Empty interprets Emperor Wu’s “religion” as discrete clusters of rituals that never consolidated into a unitary understanding of the cosmos. Some of these rituals represented a response to personal or familial crises and were aimed at seeking immediate relief in alchemic practices or the intervention of spirits and ghosts. Some satirized specific familial, aristocratic, and paternalistic conceptions of the state and family expressed in the Classics, while promoting an autocratic and non-collegial conception of power. Still others constituted an escamotage to elude the opposition of court factions and justify controversial decisions as divinely inspired. The most complex and dispendious ceremonies of Emperor Wu’s reign were part of a far-reaching program of political propaganda aimed at the elites. To the paternalistic and collaborative rule embodied by the Western Zhou, which Li Feng has efficaciously labeled delegatory kinordered settlement state, they opposed a centralizing, autocratic, “Huang-Lao” or “Daoist” model of cosmic rulership that was still popular in the early decades following the unification.42 The rituals inaugurated or recovered by Emperor Wu—in open contradiction to the exemplary, passive, moral,
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And when the lamb heard this, it suffered Moses to take it up and lay it upon his shoulders; and, carrying the lamb, he returned to the flock.
Now whilst Moses walked, burdened with the lamb, there fell a voice from heaven, “Thou, who hast shown so great love, so great patience towards the sheep of man’s fold, thou art worthy to be called to pasture the sheep of the fold of God.”[487]
4. MOSES BEFORE PHARAOH.
One day that Moses was keeping sheep, his father-in-law, Jethro, came to him and demanded back the staff that he had given him. Then Moses cast the staff from him among a number of other rods, but the staff ever returned to his hand as often as he cast it away. Then Jethro laid hold of the rod, but he could not move it. Therefore he was obliged to let Moses retain it. But he was estranged from him.
Now Pharaoh was dead. And when the news reached Moses in Midian, he gat him up, and set his wife Zipporah and his son Gershom on an ass, and took the way of Egypt.
And as they were in the way, they halted in a certain place; and it was cloudy, and cold, and rainy Then they encamped, and Zipporah tried to make a fire, but could not, for the wood was damp.
Moses said, “I see a fire burning at the foot of the mountain. I will go to it, for there must be travellers there; and I will fetch a brand away and will kindle a fire, and be warm.”
Then, he took his rod in his hand and went. But when he came near the spot, he saw that the fire was not on the ground, but at the summit of a tree; and the tree was a thorn. A thorn-tree was the first tree that grew, when God created the herb of the field and the trees of the forest. Moses was filled with fear, and he would have turned and fled, but a voice[488] called to him out of the fire, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here am I.” And the voice said again, “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” This was the reason why he was bidden put off his shoes; they were made of asses’ hide, and Moses had trodden on the dung of his ass as he followed Zipporah and Gershom.
Then God gave Moses his commission to go into Egypt, and release His captive people. But Moses feared, and said, “I am of slow lips and tongue!” for he had burnt them, with his finger, when he took the
live coal before Pharaoh, as already related. But God said to him, “I have given thee Aaron thy brother to speak for thee. And now, what is this that thou hast in thy hand?”
Moses answered, “This is my rod.”
“And to what purpose dost thou turn it?”
“I lean on it when I am walking, and when I come where there is no grass, I strike the trees therewith, and bring down the leaves to feed my sheep withal.” And when he had narrated all the uses to which he put the staff, God said to him, “With this staff shalt thou prevail against Pharaoh. Cast it upon the ground.” And when he cast it down, it was transformed into a serpent or dragon, and Moses turned his back to run from it; but God said, “Fear not; take it up by the neck;” and he caught it, and it became a rod in his hands. Then said the Most Holy, “Put thy hand into thy bosom.” And he did so, and drew it forth, and it was white, and shining like the moon in the dark of night.
Then Moses desired to go back to Zipporah his wife, but the angel Gabriel retained him, saying, “Thou hast higher duties to perform than to attend on thy wife. Lo! I have already reconducted her to her father’s house. Go on upon thy way to Pharaoh, as the Lord hath commanded thee.”
The night on which Moses entered Egyptian territory, an angel appeared to Aaron in a dream, with a crystal glass full of good wine in his hand, and said, as he extended it to him:—
“Aaron, drink of this wine which the Lord sends thee as a pledge of good news. Thy brother Moses has returned to Egypt, and God has chosen him to be His prophet, and thee to be his spokesman. Arise, and go forth to meet him!”
Aaron therefore arose from his bed and went out of the city to the banks of the Nile, but there was no boat there by which he could cross. Suddenly he perceived in the distance a light which approached; and as it drew nearer he saw that it was a horseman. It was Gabriel mounted on a steed of fire, which shone like the
brightest diamond, and whose neighing was hymns of praise, for the steed was one of the cherubim.
Aaron at first supposed that he was pursued by one of Pharaoh’s horsemen, and he would have cast himself into the Nile; but Gabriel stayed him, declared who he was, mounted him on the fiery cherub, and they crossed the Nile on his back.
There stood Moses, who, when he saw Aaron, exclaimed, “Truth is come, Falsehood is passed.” Now this was the sign that God had given to Moses, “Behold he cometh to meet thee.”[489] And they rejoiced over each other
But another account is this: Moses entered Memphis with his sheep, during the night. Now Amram was dead, but his wife Jochebed was alive. When Moses reached the door, Jochebed was awake. He knocked at the door; then she opened, but knew him not, and asked, “Who art thou?”
He answered, “I am a man from a far country; I pray thee lodge me, and give me to eat this night.”
She took him in, and brought him some meat, and said to Aaron, “Sit down and eat with the guest, to do him honour.” Aaron, in eating, conversed with Moses and recognized him.
Then the mother and sister knew him also. And when the meal was over, Moses acquitted himself of his mission to Aaron, and Aaron answered, “I will obey the will of God.”[490]
Moses spent the night, and the whole of the following day, in relating to his mother the things that had befallen him.
And on the second night, Moses and Aaron went forth to Pharaoh’s palace. Now the palace had four hundred doors, a hundred on each side, and each door was guarded by sixty thousand fighting men. The angel Gabriel came to them and led them into the palace, but not by the doors.
When they appeared before Pharaoh, they said: “God hath sent us unto thee to bid thee let the Hebrews go, that they may hold a feast in the wilderness.”
But Pharaoh said, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.”[491]
Tabari tells a different story Moses and Aaron sought admittance during two years. Now Pharaoh gave himself out to be a god.
But Moses and Aaron, when they spake at the door with the porters, said, “He is no god.” One day the jester of Pharaoh heard his master read the history of his own life, and when he came to the passage which asserted he was a god, the jester exclaimed, “Now this is strange! For two years there have been two strangers at thy gate denying thy divinity.”
When Pharaoh heard this, he was in a fury, and he sent and had Moses and Aaron brought before him.
But to return to the Rabbinic tale. Moses and Aaron were driven out from the presence of Pharaoh; and he said, “Who admitted these men?” And some of the porters he slew, and some he scourged.
Then two lionesses were placed before the palace, to protect it, and the beasts suffered no man to enter unless Pharaoh gave the word.
And the Lord spake to Moses and Aaron, saying, “When Pharaoh talketh with you, saying, Give us a miracle, thou shalt say to Aaron, Take thy rod and cast it down, and it shall became a basilisk serpent; for all the inhabitants of the earth shall hear the voice of the shriek of Egypt when I destroy it, as all creatures heard the shriek of the serpent when I stripped it, and took from it its legs and made it lick the dust after the Fall.”[492]
On the morrow, Moses and Aaron came again to the king’s palace, and the lionesses would have devoured them. Then Moses raised his staff, and their chains brake, and they followed him, barking like dogs, into the house.[493]
When Moses and Aaron stood before the king, Aaron cast down the rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent, which opened its jaws, and it laid one jaw beneath the throne, and its upper jaw was over the canopy above it; then the servants fled from before it, and Pharaoh hid himself beneath his throne, and the fear it caused him gave him bowel-complaint for a
week. Now before this Pharaoh was only moved once a week, and this was the occasion of his being lifted up with pride, and giving himself out to be a god.[494]
Pharaoh cried out from under the throne, “O Moses, take hold of the serpent, and I will do what you desire.”[495]
Moses took hold of the serpent, and it became a rod in his hands. Then Pharaoh crawled out from under his throne, and sat down upon it. And Moses put his hand into his bosom, and when he drew it forth, it shone like the moon.
The king sent for his magicians, and the chief of these were Jannes and Jambres. He told them what Moses had done.
They said, “We can turn a thousand rods into serpents.”
Then the king named a day when Moses and Aaron on one side should strive with Jannes and Jambres[496] and all the magicians on the other; and he gave them a month to prepare for the contest.
On the day appointed—it was Pharaoh’s birthday—all the inhabitants of Memphis were assembled in a great plain outside the city, where lists were staked out, and the royal tent was spread for the king to view the contest.
Moses and Aaron stood on one side and the magicians on the other.
The latter said, “Shall we cast our rods, or will you?”
Moses answered, “Do you cast your rods first.”
Then the magicians threw down a hundred ass-loads of rods, tied the rods together with cords, and by their enchantment caused them to appear to the spectators like serpents, leaping and darting from one side of the arena to the other.
And all the people were filled with fear, and the magicians said, “We have this day triumphed over Moses.”
Then the prophet of God cast his rod before Pharaoh, and it became a mighty serpent. It rolled its tail round the throne of the king, and it shot forth its head, and swallowed all the rods of the enchanters, so that there remained not one.
After that all had disappeared, Moses took the serpent, and it became a rod in his hand again, but all the rods of the magicians had vanished.
And when the magicians saw the miracle that Moses had wrought, they were converted, and worshipped the true God. But Pharaoh cut off their hands and feet, and crucified them; and they died. Pharaoh’s own daughter Maschita believed; and the king in his rage did not spare her, but cast her into a fire, and she was burnt. Bithia was also denounced to him, and she was condemned to the flames, but the angel Gabriel delivered her. The Mussulmans say that he consoled her by telling her that she would become the wife of Mohammed in Paradise, after which he gave her to drink, and when she had tasted, she died without pain.
Then Moses and Aaron met Pharaoh in the morning as he went by the side of the river, and Moses said to the king, “The Lord of the Hebrews hath sent me unto thee, saying, Let My people go, that they may serve Me in the wilderness.”
But Pharaoh would not hearken to him. Then Aaron stretched out his rod over the river, and it became blood.
All the water that was in the vessels also became blood, even the spittle that was in the mouth of the Egyptians. The Rabbi Levi said that by this means the Israelites realized large fortunes; for if an Israelite and an Egyptian went together to the Nile to fetch water, the vessel of the Egyptian was found to contain blood, but that of the Israelite pure water; but if an Israelite brought water to the house of an Egyptian and sold it, it remained water.[497]
But Pharaoh’s heart was hard; and seven days passed, after that the Lord had smitten the river.
Then went Moses and Aaron to him. But the four hundred doors of the palace were guarded by bears, lions, and other savage beasts, so that none might pass, till they were satisfied with flesh. But Moses and Aaron came up, collected them together, drew a circle round them with the sacred staff, and the wild beasts licked the feet of the prophets and followed them into the presence of Pharaoh.[498]
Moses and Aaron repeated their message to Pharaoh, but he would not hearken to them, but drove them from his presence. Aaron smote the river; but Moses on no occasion smote the Nile, for he respected the river which had saved his life as a babe.[499] Then the Lord brought frogs upon the land, and filled all the houses; they were in the beds, on the tables, in the cups. And the king sent for Moses and said: “Intreat the Lord, that He may take the frogs from me and from my people.” So the Lord sent a great rain, and it washed the frogs into the Red Sea.
The next plague was lice.[500]
The fourth plague was wild beasts.
The fifth was murrain.
The sixth was boils and blains upon man and beast.[501]
The seventh was hail and tempest. Now Job regarded the word of Moses, and he brought his cattle within doors, and they were saved; but Balaam regarded it not, and all his cattle were destroyed.[502]
The eighth was locusts; these the Egyptians fried, and laid by in store to serve them for food; but when the west wind came to blow the locusts away, it blew away also those that had been pickled and laid by for future consumption.[503]
The ninth plague was darkness.
The tenth was the death of the first-born.
The Book of Jasher says that, the Egyptians having closed their doors and windows against the plagues of flies, and locusts, and lice, God sent the sea-monster Silinoth, a huge polypus with arms ten cubits long, and the beast climbed upon the roofs and broke them up, and let down its slimy arms, and unlatched all the doors and windows, and threw them open for the flies and locusts and lice to enter.[504]
But the Mohammedans give a different order to the signs:—(1) the rod changed into a serpent; (2) the whitened hand; (3) the famine; (4) a deluge, the Nile rose over the land so that every man stood in water up to his neck; (5) locusts; (6) anommals,—these are two-
legged animals smaller than locusts; (7) blood; (8) frogs; (9) every green thing throughout the land, all fruit, all grain, eggs, and everything in the houses were turned to stone.[505]
After the plague of the darkness, Pharaoh resolved on a general massacre of all the children of the Hebrews. The Mussulmans put the temporary petrifaction of all in the land in the place of the darkness. The Book of Exodus says that during the darkness “they saw not one another, neither rose any from his place;” but the Arabs say that they were turned to stone. Here might be seen a petrified man with a balance in his hand sitting in the bazaar; there, another stone man counting out money; and the porters at the palace were congealed to marble with their swords in their hands.[506] But others say that this was a separate plague, and that the darkness followed it.
And now Gabriel took on him the form of a servant of the king, and he went before him and asked him what was his desire.
“That vile liar Moses deserves death,” said Pharaoh.
“How shall I slay him?” asked Gabriel.
“Let him be cast into the water.”
“Give me a written order,” said the angel. Pharaoh did so.
Then Gabriel went to Moses and told him that the time was come when he was to leave Egypt with all the people, for the measure of the iniquity of Pharaoh was filled up, and the Lord would destroy him with a signal overthrow.
5. THE PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA.
The Israelites had made their preparations to depart out of Egypt a month before the call came to escape.
And when all was ready, Moses called together the elders of the people and said to them, “When Joseph died, he ordered his descendants to take up his bones, or ever they went out of the land, and to bear them to the cave of Machpelah, where lie the bones of his father Jacob. Where are the bones of Joseph?”
The elders answered him, “We do not know.”
Now there was an old Egyptian woman, named Miriam, and she believed in the Lord. She said to Moses, “I will show thee where is the tomb of Joseph, if thou wilt swear unto me that thou wilt take me with thee from Egypt, and that thou wilt ask the Most High to admit me into Paradise.”
Moses said, “I will do these things that thou askest.”
Then the woman said, “The tomb of Joseph is in the middle of the river Nile, which flows through Memphis, at such a spot.”
Moses prayed to God, and the water fell till the bed of the river was left dry; and then he and the woman went into it, and came on the tomb of Joseph; it was a sarcophagus of marble without joints.[507]
Moses made preparations for departure, and said to the children of Israel, “God will destroy the Egyptians, and will give you their precious things.”
Then every one among the Hebrews who had an Egyptian neighbour said to him, if he was rich: “I am going to a feast in the country, I pray thee lend me jewels of gold and silver to adorn my wife and children.”
The Egyptians lent their precious things, and the Israelites by this means found themselves possessed of borrowed jewels in great
abundance. Then Moses said, “We will leave Egypt this night when the Egyptians are asleep. Let every housekeeper softly desert his house, and bring with him his precious things, and meet outside the town. And let every one slay a lamb, and sprinkle with the blood the lintel and door-posts of the house, that the neighbours may know, when they see the blood, that the house is empty.”
When the middle of the night was passed, the Israelites were assembled outside Memphis, at the place which Moses had appointed. Then the host was numbered, and it contained six hundred thousand horsemen, not including those who were on foot, the women, the children, and the aged. All who were under twenty were accounted infants, and all who were over sixty were accounted aged.
After that, Moses placed Aaron in command of the first battalion, and he said to him, “March in the direction of the sea, for Gabriel has promised to meet me on its shores.” At that time one branch of the Nile (the Pelusiac branch) flowed into the Red Sea, which extended over where is now sandy desert to Migdol.
Moses made the host follow Aaron, troop by troop, and tribe by tribe; and he brought up the rear with a strong guard of picked men.
It was dawning towards the first day of the week when Israel escaped out of Egypt.
And when day broke, behold, they were gone away. Then the Egyptians came and told Pharaoh. He sent to search all the houses of the Israelites, but they were all empty, only their lamps were left burning. Pharaoh said, “We will pursue them.” The Egyptians said, “They have borrowed our jewels; we must follow after them, and recover what is our own.”
Now Moses had used craft touching these ornaments, in order that the Egyptians might be constrained to follow. For if the Israelites had gone without these, the Egyptians would have rejoiced at their departure. But because they had borrowed of the Egyptians, therefore the Egyptians went after them to recover their ornaments, and by this means rushed into destruction.
And Israel marched all day through the wilderness protected by seven clouds of glory on their four sides: one above them, that neither hail nor rain might fall upon them, nor that they should be burned by the heat of the sun; one beneath them, that they might not be hurt by thorns, serpents, or scorpions; and one went before them, to make the valleys even, and the mountains low, and to prepare them a place of habitation.[508]
Also, when the morning dawned, there was not a house in all Egypt in which there was not a first-born dead. And this delayed the people from pursuing after the Israelites; for they were engaged in bewailing their dead, and in digging graves for them. Thus they were not at leisure to follow after their former slaves, till they had escaped clean away.
Also that night was every metal image in Egypt molten, and every idol of stone was broken, and every idol of clay was shattered, and every idol of wood was dissolved to dust.[509]
The same day Pharaoh sent into all the cities of Egypt and collected an army. When even was come the whole army was assembled about the king, and Pharaoh said to Dathan and Abiram, who had remained behind,[510] “The Israelites are few in number, they are entangled in the land, the wilderness hath shut them in.” For all the way was full of marshes and canals of water and desert tracts. “They have acted wrongly by us, for they have carried away the ornaments and jewels of our people; and Moses, by magic, has slain all our first-born, so that there is not a house in which there is not one dead.”
On the morrow—it was the second day of the week—the army was reviewed, and Pharaoh numbered the host, and he had six hundred chosen chariots, and two million foot soldiers, and five million horsemen, and, in addition, there were one million seven hundred thousand horses, and on these horses were black men.
When the sun rose on the third day, Pharaoh marched out of Memphis, and he pursued for half a day with forced marches. At noon, Pharaoh had come up with Moses, and the fore-front of Pharaoh’s army thrust the rear-guard of the army of Moses. Then the
children of Israel cried unto the Lord, and they said to Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? Wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt?”
They were divided into four opinions. One set said, “Let us fling ourselves into the sea.” Another set said, “Let us return and surrender ourselves.” The third set said, “Let us array battle against the Egyptians.” The fourth recommended, “Let us shout against them, and frighten them away with our clamour.”[511]
And Moses said unto the people, “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.”[512]
Then Moses raised his rod over the sea, and it divided, and let twelve channels of dry land appear traversing it, one for each of the twelve tribes. “When Moses had smitten,” says the Koran, “the sea divided into twelve heaps, and left twelve ways through it, and each heap was as a great mountain.”[513]
The Israelites hesitated to enter; for they said, “O Moses! the bottom of this sea is black mud, and when we place our feet on it we shall sink in and be swallowed up.”
But Moses prayed to God, and He sent a wind and the rays of the sun, and the wind and the sun dried the mud, and it became as sand.
Then Gabriel and Michael appeared to Moses, and said, “Pass on, and lead the people through. As for us, we have orders to tarry for Pharaoh.” So Moses galloped forward into the sea, crying, “In the name of the merciful and glorious God!” and all the people went in after him. But as they marched by twelve ways, and there were walls of water between, they could not see each other, and they were in fear; therefore Moses prayed to the Lord, and the Lord made the water-heaps rise and arch over them like bowers, and shelter them from the fire of the sun; and He made the watery walls so clear they were as sheets of glass, and through them the columns of the advancing army were visible to each other.
Moses traversed the sea in two hours, and he came forth with all the people on the other side.
Then Pharaoh and his host came to the water’s side, but he feared to enter in. Now Pharaoh was mounted on an entire horse of great beauty. He reined in his steed and would not go forward, for he thought that this was part of the enchantment of Moses.
But now Gabriel appeared mounted on a mare, and this was the cherub Ramka.[514] And when the horse of Pharaoh saw the mare of Gabriel, he plunged forward and followed the mare into the sea. Then, when the Egyptian army saw their king enter fearlessly into one of the channels, they also precipitated themselves into the ways through the deep.
They advanced till they reached the middle of the Red Sea, and then Gabriel reined in and turned and unfurled before Pharaoh the order he had given for the destruction of Moses in the water, and it was signed by Pharaoh and sealed with his own signet.
“See!” exclaimed the angel. “What thou wouldest do to Moses, that shall be done to thee; for thou art but a man, thou who fightest against God.”
Then the twelve heaps of water overwhelmed the host. But Pharaoh’s horse was so fleet of foot that he outfled the returning waters, and he brought the king to the shore. He would have been saved, had not Gabriel smitten him on the face, and he fell back into the sea and perished with the rest. Then said Miriam, as he sank, “Sing ye to the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.”[515]
Another curious incident is related by Tabari. When the water reached Pharaoh, and he knew that he must perish, he cried out, “I believe in the God of Israel!” Gabriel, fearing lest Pharaoh should repeat these words, and that God in His mercy should accept his profession of faith, and pardon him, passed his wing over the bottom of the sea, raised the earth, and threw it into the mouth of Pharaoh so as to prevent him from swallowing again, and said, “Now thou
believest, but before thou wast rebellious; nevertheless, thou art numbered with the wicked.”[516]
It was the ninth hour of the day when the children of Israel stood on dry land on the further side of the sea.
On the morrow, the children of Israel assembled around Moses, and said to him, “We do not believe that Pharaoh is drowned, for he had peculiar power. He never suffered from headache, nor from fever, nor from any sickness, and was internally moved but once a week.”
Then Moses clave the sea asunder with his rod, and they saw Pharaoh and all his host dead at the bottom of the sea. The bodies of the Egyptians were covered with armour and much gold and silver, and on the corpse of Pharaoh were chains and bracelets of gold. The children of Israel would have spoiled the dead, but Moses forbade them, for he said, “It is lawful to spoil the living, but it is robbery to strip the dead.” Nevertheless many of the Hebrews went in and took from the Egyptians all that was valuable. Then God was wroth, because they had disobeyed Moses, and the sea was troubled, and for ten days it raged with fury, and even to this day the water is not at rest where the Israelites committed this sin. And the name of that place at this day is Bab el Taquath.[517]
6. THE GIVING OF THE LAW.
As long as Moses was with them, the Israelites did not venture to make idols, but when God summoned Moses into the Mount to talk with Him face to face, then they spake to Aaron that he should make a molten god to go before them.
Aaron bade them break off their earrings and bracelets and give them to him, for he thought that they would be reluctant to part with their jewels. Nevertheless the people brought their ornaments to him in great abundance, and one named Micah cast them into a copper vessel; and when the gold was melted, he threw in a handful of the sand which had been under the hoof of Gabriel’s horse, and there came forth a calf, which ran about like a living beast, and bellowed; for Sammael (Satan) had entered into it. “Here is your god that shall go before you,” cried Micah; and all the people fell down and worshipped the golden calf.[518]
And when Moses came down from the Mount and drew near to the camp, and saw the calf, and the instruments of music in the hands of the wicked, who were dancing and bowing before it, and Satan among them dancing and leaping before the people, the wrath of Moses was suddenly kindled, and he cast the tables of the Commandments, which he had received from God in the Mount, out of his hand and brake them at the foot of the mountain; but the holy writing that was on them flew, and was carried away into the heavens; and he cried, and said, “Woe upon the people who have heard from the mouth of the Holy One, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any image, a figure, or any likeness;’ and yet at the end of forty days make a useless molten calf!”
And he took the calf which they had made, and burned it with fire, and crushed it to powder, and cast it upon the face of the water of the stream, and made the sons of Israel drink; and whoever had
given thereto any trinket of gold, the sign of it came forth upon his nostrils.[519]
Of all the children of Israel only twelve thousand were found who had not worshipped the calf.[520]
The Mussulmans say that the Tables borne by Moses were from ten to twelve cubits in length, and were made, say some, of cedar wood, but others say of ruby, others of carbuncle; but the general opinion is that they were of sapphire or emerald;[521] and the letters were graven within them, not on the surface, so that the words could be read on either side. When the golden calf had been pounded to dust, Moses made the Israelites drink water in which was the dust, and those who had kissed the idol were marked with gilt lips. Thus the Levites were able to distinguish them; and they slew of them twenty and three thousand.[522]
It is a common tradition among the Jews that the red hair which is by no means infrequently met with in the Hebrew race is derived from this period; all those who had sinned and drank of the water lost their black hair and it became red, and they transmitted the colour to their posterity.
Another version of the story is as follows. Samiri (Micah), who had fashioned the golden calf, was of the tribe of Levi. When Moses came down from the Mount, he would have beaten Aaron, but his brother said, “It is not I, it is Samiri who made the calf.” Then Moses would have slain Samiri, but God forbade him, and ordered him instead to place him under ban.
From that time till now, the man wanders, like a wild beast, from one end of the earth to the other; every man avoids him, and cleanses the earth on which his feet have rested; and when he comes near any man, he cries out, “Touch me not!”
But before Moses drave Samiri out of the camp, he ground the calf to powder, and made Samiri pollute it; then he mixed it with the water, and gave it to the Israelites to drink. After Samiri had departed, Moses interceded with God for the people. But God
answered, “I cannot pardon them, for their sin is yet in them, and it will only be purged out by the draught they have drunk.”
When Moses returned to the camp, he heard a piteous cry Many Israelites with yellow faces and livid bodies cast themselves before him, and cried, “Help! Moses, help! the golden calf consumes our intestines; we will repent and die, if the Lord will pardon us.”
Some, really contrite, were healed. Then a black cloud came down on the camp, and all those who were in it fought with one another and slew one another; but upon the innocent the swords had no power Seven thousand idolaters had been slain, when Moses, hearing the cry of the women and children, came and prayed; and the cloud vanished, and the sword rested.[523]
According to some, the complaint caused by swallowing the dust of the calf was jaundice, a complaint which has never ceased from among men since that day. Thus the calf brought two novelties into the world, red hair and jaundice.
And Moses went up again into the Mount, and took with him seventy of the elders. And he besought the Lord, “Suffer me, O Lord, to see Thee!”[524] But the Lord answered him, “Thinkest thou that thou canst behold Me and live?” And He said, “Look at this mountain; I will display Myself to this mountain.”
Then the mountain saw God, and it dissolved into fine dust. So Moses knew that it was not for him to see God, and he repented that he had asked this thing.[525] After that he went with the seventy elders to Sinai, and a cloud, white and glistening, came down and rested on the head of Moses, and then descended and wholly enveloped him, so that the seventy saw him not; and when he was in the cloud, he received again the Tables of the Commandments, and he came forth out of the cloud. But they murmured that they had not also received the revelation. Then the cloud enveloped them also, and they heard all the words that had been spoken to Moses; and after that they said, “Now we believe, because we have heard with our own ears.”
Then the wrath of God blazed forth, and a thundering was heard so great and terrible that they fainted and died. But Moses feared, and
he prayed to God, and God restored the seventy men to life again, and they came down the Mount with him.[526]
And it was at this time that the face of Moses shone with the splendour which had come upon him from the brightness of the glory of the Lord’s Shekinah in the time of His speaking with him. And Aaron and all the sons of Israel saw Moses, and, behold, the glory of his face was dazzling, so that they were afraid to come near to him. And Moses called to them, and Aaron, and all the princes of the congregation; and he taught them all that the Lord had spoken to him on Mount Sinai. And when Moses spoke with them, he had a veil upon his face; and when he went up to speak with the Lord, he removed the veil from his countenance until he came forth.[527]
This was the reason why the face of Moses shone. He saw the light which God had created, whereby Adam was enabled to see from one end of the earth to the other. God showed this light now to Moses, and thereby he was able to see to Dan.[528]
When Moses went up into the Mount, a cloud received him, and bore him into heaven. On his way, he met the door-keeper Kemuel, chief of twelve thousands of angels of destruction; they were angels of fire; and he would have prevented Moses from advancing: then Moses pronounced the Name in twelve letters, revealed to him by God from the Burning Bush, and the angel and his host recoiled before that word twelve thousand leagues. But some say that Moses smote the angel, and wounded him.
A little further, Moses met another angel; this was Hadarniel, who had a terrible voice, and every word he uttered split into twelve thousand lightnings; he reigned six hundred thousand leagues higher than Kemuel. Moses, in fear, wept at his voice, and would have fallen out of the cloud, had not God restrained him. Then the prophet pronounced the Name of seventy-two letters, and the angel fled.
Next he came to the fiery angel Sandalfon, and he would have fallen out of the cloud, but God held him up. Then he reached the river of flame, called Rigjon, which flows from the beasts which are beneath the Throne, and is filled with their sweat; across this God led him.[529]
It is asserted by the Rabbis that Moses learnt the whole law in the forty days that he was in the Mount, but as he descended from the immediate presence of God, he entered the region where stood the angels guarding the Mount, and when he saw the Angel of Fear, the Angel of Sweat, the Angel of Trembling, and the Angel of Cold Shuddering, he was so filled with consternation, that he forgot all that he had learnt.
Then God sent the Angel Jephipha, who brought back all to his remembrance; and, armed with the law, Moses passed the ranks of all the angels, and each gave him some secret or mystery; one the art of mixing simples, one that of reading in the stars, another that of compounding antidotes, a fourth the secret of name, or the Kabalistic mystery.[530]
It is said by the Mussulmans, that when the law was declared to the children of Israel by Moses, they refused to receive it; then Mount Sinai rose into the air, and moved above them, and they fled from it; but it followed them, and hung over their heads ready to crush them. And Moses said, “Accept the law, or the mountain will fall on you and destroy you.”
Then they fell on their faces and placed the right side of the brow and right cheek against the ground and looked up with the left eye at the mountain that hung above them, and said, “We will accept the law.” This is the manner in which the Jews to this day perform their worship, says Tabari; they place the brow and right cheek and eye upon the ground, and turn the left cheek and eye to heaven, and in this position they pray.[531]
