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Leo Taxil - The Amusing Bible

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Giving the textual citations of Holy Writ and reproducing all the refutations opposed by Voltaire, Fréret, lord Bolingbroke, Toland & other critics.

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Table of concordance

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About Léo Taxil

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Léo Taxil, born Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pagès (21 March 1854 – 31 March 1907), was a French writer and journalist who became known for his strong anti-Catholic and anti-clerical views. A native of Marseille, he was placed at the age of five in a Jesuit seminary. After spending his childhood years there, he became disillusioned with the Catholic faith and began to see religious ideology as socially harmful. He wrote in his confession: “Not without usefulness I spent my early years between monastery walls, among the clergy, where I grasped, on what rests the Papal faith.” Taxil’s writings include:

À bas la calotte! (Down with the Clergy!) (1879)
Les Soutanes grotesques (The Grotesque Cassocks) (1879)
La Chasse aux corbeaux (The Crow Hunt) (1879)
Le Fils du jésuite (The Son of the Jesuit) (1879)
Les Bêtises sacrées (Sacred Stupidities) (1880)
Les Friponneries religieuses (Religious Knaveries) (1880)
Plus de cafards! (No More Cockroaches!) (1880)
Calotte et calotins (Clergy and Clericals) (1880-1882)
Les Borgia (The Borgias) (1881)
Les Pornographes sacrés (The Sacred Pornographers) (1882)
La Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus) (1882)
La Bible amusante (The Amusing Bible) (1882) — first edition, ~400 pages
Un Pape femelle (A Female Pope) (1882)
L’Empoisonneur Léon XIII (The Poisoner Leo XIII) (1883)
La Prostitution contemporaine (Contemporary Prostitution) (1883)
Pie IX devant l’Histoire (Pius IX before History) (1883)
Les Amours secrètes de Pie IX (The Secret Love-Affairs of Pius IX) (1881)
Les Maîtresses du Pape (The Mistresses of the Pope) (1884)
La Vie de Veuillot immaculé (The Immaculate Life of Veuillot) (1884)
La Bible amusante (The Amusing Bible) (1904) — complete edition, ~814 pages

The two editions in bold above are the sources of this English volume: its illustrations are taken from the first edition of 1882, which prints them large, and its text is translated from the complete edition of 1903-1904, which reduces them.

The Bible passages here will not match your English Bible. Taxil quoted a French one — in the main the Protestant version of Jean-Frédéric Ostervald (1744) — and adjusted its wording now and then for comic effect. This translation follows his French as he wrote it, rather than substituting the wording of an English version. Chapter and verse will still lead you to the right passage, but the words will often differ from the King James, the New King James or any other English Bible, and that difference is frequently what the joke turns on. Where it matters, an editorial note points it out.

Some of what he cites is not in most English Bibles at all: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and chapters 13 and 14 of Daniel — the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the Dragon. Protestant versions, Ostervald included, either omit these or set them apart among the Apocrypha, so for them Taxil must have used a Catholic French Bible.

In 1879 he was tried at the Seine Assizes for his pamphlet “À bas la calotte!” (Down with the Clergy!), on charges of insulting a religion recognized by the State and of outraging public morals, but he was acquitted. In books such as “Les Pornographes sacrés” (The Sacred Pornographers) and “Les Maîtresses du Pape” (The Mistresses of the Pope), Taxil portrayed the leaders of the Catholic Church as hedonistic creatures who indulged their fetishes in the manner of the Marquis de Sade.

In his anti-Catholic books “La Bible amusante” (The Amusing Bible) and “La Vie de Jésus” (The Life of Jesus), its companion volume on the New Testament, Taxil satirically pointed out what he considered to be the inconsistencies, errors and false beliefs presented in the Bible. The first version of “The Amusing Bible” (~400 pages) was illustrated by Frid’Rick and published in 1882 by the “Librairie anti-cléricale”. At the time of publication, the author was accused of irreverently mocking the Bible. “The Times” called for the book to be suppressed.

On 20 April 1884 Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical “Humanum Genus”, which said that the human race was “separated into two diverse and opposite parts, of which the one steadfastly contends for truth and virtue, the other of those things which are contrary to virtue and to truth. The one is the kingdom of God on earth, namely, the true Church of Jesus Christ... The other is the kingdom of Satan...” This kingdom was said to be “led on or assisted” by Freemasonry.

On 23 April 1885, after this encyclical, with its call “to tear mask from freemasons”, Taxil repented, confessed and professed conversion to Catholicism. He renounced his earlier works and announced his intention to repair the damage he had done to the true faith. He was solemnly received back into the Church. A prominent figure of the Jesuit order, Gruber, wrote: “It has been only year, and as a result of papal prayers, grace of God’s ray touched one of the hard-core atheists and enemies of the Church, a publicist, who is capable more than others to implement call of Christ’s Vicar on earth.”

Taxil wrote a series of pamphlets and books denouncing Freemasonry and charging its lodges with worshipping the devil, and criticized various godless infidels with blazing enthusiasm. The first book he produced after his conversion was a four-volume history of Freemasonry, which contained fictitious eyewitness accounts of the Freemasons’ participation in Satanism. He introduced a fictitious character, Sophie Walder, who had the talent of walking through walls and owned a snake that wrote prophecies on her back with the tip of its tail. Another book, called “The Devil in the Nineteenth Century”, introduced a new character — Diana Vaughan, a supposed descendant of the Rosicrucian alchemist Thomas Vaughan. The book contained many implausible tales about her ability to travel to various planets and her encounters with incarnate demons, one of whom played the piano in the shape of a crocodile. Diana was said to be involved in the Satanic “Palladism” cult, a supposed Satanic Freemasonry, but was redeemed when one day she professed admiration for Joan of Arc, at whose name the demons were put to flight. As Diana Vaughan, Taxil published a book called “Eucharistic Novena”, a collection of prayers praised by the Pope. These books sold well among Catholics, although Diana Vaughan never appeared in public. In 1887 Taxil even had an audience with Pope Leo XIII, who subsequently sanctioned his anti-Masonic campaign, rebuked the bishop of Charleston for denouncing the anti-Masonic confessions as a fraud, and in 1896 sent his blessing to an anti-Masonic Congress in Trent. In 1892 Taxil also began to publish a paper, “La France chrétienne anti-maçonnique” (Anti-Masonic Christian France).

Doubts about Vaughan’s veracity and even her existence began to grow, and finally Taxil promised to produce her at a lecture he was to deliver on 19 April 1897 in the great hall of the Geographical Society in Paris. To the amazement of the audience, which included a number of priests, he announced that Diana Vaughan was one of a series of hoaxes, part of a long-sustained practical joke to ridicule the Roman Catholic Church’s credulity. He thanked the bishops and Catholic newspapers for facilitating his crowning hoax, namely his conversion, which had exposed the anti-Masonic fanaticism of many Catholics. Diana Vaughan was revealed to be a simple typist in his employ, who had laughingly allowed him to use her name. Taxil described at length, and vividly, how throughout those twelve years he had deliberately and consistently mystified churchmen, and how, step by step, he had puffed up and diversified his fabrications, seeing that even the most incredible fantasies were swallowed with fascination by the pope, the cardinals and all the Catholic clergy. It was a terrible scandal. The discredit to the clergy was enormous.

The audience received these revelations with laughter, and some with indignation and hisses. Taxil was mobbed on leaving the hall, so that policemen had to escort him to a neighbouring café.

Clerics were enraged. Leo XIII pronounced anathema upon Taxil. “We...” — it was said in the papal bull — “...declare, that excommunicate and anathematize that villain, who is called the Leo Taxil, and expel him from the door of the holy Church of God... May he be damned wherever he is: in the house, in the field, on the road, on the stairs, in the desert and even on the threshold of the church. May he be cursed in life and in the hour of death. May he be cursed in all his affairs when he drinks, when he eats, when he is hungry and thirsty... May he be cursed in all parts of the body, internal and external... May he be cursed in all his the joints, for the disease gnawed him from the top of the head to the soles of feet... ”

This did not frighten Taxil, and an extended version of the book “La Bible amusante” (The Amusing Bible) — some 814 pages, with 400 numbered illustrations by Frid’Rick — was republished from 1897 onward; the complete edition of 1903-1904 was issued by the “Librairie P. Fort”, 19 rue du Temple, Paris. The extended version opened with Taxil’s public letter addressed to Pope Leo XIII and, as its cover announced, gave the textual citations of Holy Scripture together with the refutations opposed by Voltaire, Fréret, Lord Bolingbroke, Toland and other critics.

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Dedication to the Infallible Holy Father

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Most Holy Father,

They say that you are not pleased, since the 19th of April of this year, the twentieth of your glorious pontificate. The unexpected denouement of my merry mystification has put you, so we are assured, into a great rage, like a common Père Duchesne (‘like a common Père Duchesne’ — fr. ‘comme un simple père Duchesne’, after Le Père Duchesne, a Revolutionary paper whose title character was famous for furious, foul-mouthed outbursts); for to know that one has been mystified for twelve years by a sceptical freethinker is an eminently disagreeable thing, when one is the representative of the Holy Ghost, when one is directly and permanently inspired by the divine pigeon; but to know that this ridiculous posture is known to the whole world, there is the height of unpleasantness, there is what vexes in the supreme degree. O my pope, what a tile on the head for the dogma of your infallibility (‘what a tile on the head’ — fr. ‘quelle tuile’, literally ‘what a roof-tile’: a sudden misfortune, as of a tile falling on one’s head)!...

A humbug of Marseilles has made game of your venerable head; horror! (‘humbug’ — fr. ‘fumiste’, literally a stove-setter, was slang for a hoaxer; ‘made game of your head’ — fr. ‘se payer la tête de quelqu’un’, to make fun of someone) — And he had taken his measures so that his humbuggery should end by bursting like a bomb, with a din resounding through the press of both hemispheres; a curse upon it!

Joachim, my old Joachim, I understand your holy wrath.

I seem to see your grimace, at the reading of that amusing article in which Henri Rochefort summed up the situation so well:

« This most holy father, who received the humbug in a private audience, cannot deny having been in league with him; without which, his infallibility, of which he has made a dogma, would immediately be reduced to dust.

From the moment when he did not perceive the trick his visitor was preparing to play upon him, what becomes of that light from on high upon which rests, in the eyes of the dotards of Catholicism, the whole power of the successors of St. Peter?

Léo Taxil has made a fool of him, but he was making fools of us; and if the first has, for twelve years, made the bishops swallow his hoaxes, the second has been pouring his own down our throats for twelve centuries.

Either the man named Pecci is no more infallible than you or I, and nothing remains for him but to hand in, without delay, his resignation as representative of a god whom he in no way represents;

Or else, being infallible, he made himself the associate of a hoaxer whom he used to squeeze money out of the adversaries of Freemasonry; in which case there would be nothing left but to charge the gendarmes to go and arrest him in his palace, for breach of trust and fraudulent misappropriation. »

Three times alas! my old Joachim, that is the dilemma which an illustrious pamphleteer has put to you, amid the bravos of the gallery. And from Paris to New York, from London to Montevideo, the universal press has repeated the dilemma; and everywhere the applause has rung out, everywhere people have burst out laughing at your confusion, from everywhere the mocking thumb has been set to the nose, in the direction of your triple crown. And you asked yourself, O thirteenth of the sacred Leos, whether this were not indeed a nightmare!...

Nightmare, none at all. You were wide awake, and the tremendous burst of laughter which shook the globe was the irritating reality.

Most Holy Father, I owe you a consolation.

The flood of impiety swells every day; it is a veritable tide which rises, rises without ceasing. In dear France, who is the eldest daughter of the Church, teaching has been secularized for many years already; so that the new generations growing up in the schools of the State do not know the first word of Sacred History.

On several occasions I have observed, with unspeakable grief, that young people are ignorant of the edifying adventures of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Gideon, Samson, Samuel, Boaz, Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Ezekiel, Esther, Tobias, Judith, Daniel, etc., etc. Of these celebrated and venerated names they have at the very most a vague idea. To the question which a worthy priest lately put: « Do you know the Maccabees? » the answer came: « Very little; I have only been twice to see the Morgue. » (‘the Maccabees’ — fr. ‘macchabée’ is also slang for a corpse; the young man took the priest to be asking about dead bodies, which the public viewed at the Paris Morgue)

Such a state of things is distressing. Where shall we go, just heaven, if the knowledge of the pious episodes of the Bible is lost, if the writings formerly inspired by the divine pigeon fall into oblivion?... It is time to react, Most Holy Father.

That is why I am undertaking a new edition of the Holy Scriptures. I shall omit nothing, and I shall try to make this reading as attractive as possible. You shall see. On my next journey to Rome, I shall solicit from your august hand yet another special benediction, to be added to my precious collection.

If, however, taking my word for it, you deign to send me this benediction of the first quality without waiting for my visit, — Most Holy Father, do not put yourself out.

The joy of having mystified you in no way diminishes my zeal for the diffusion of the great eternal truths which are the basis of the sublime religion whose sovereign pontiff you are. I do not say that my Amusing Bible will contribute much to strengthening the faith; but it will nevertheless have one incontestable advantage: by penetrating among the victims of the secularizing State, by getting itself read by those who now are ignorant of, or know only vaguely, all these fine things, it will reveal to them what one must believe in order to have the right to call oneself a son of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.

If, after that, a few are willing to admit that it is possible for a man to live three days in the belly of a whale, not to speak of the other biblical miracles, you will owe me, my old Joachim, warm thanks for having gained you some unhoped-for recruits.

So then, no hard feelings on the subject of my mystification, eh?... This book will have consoled you, and we shall become good friends again, as before the 19th of April.

Come, do not make me beg, Leo. Send me a little instalment of benediction, by return of post.

Paris, 20 June 1897 - Léo Taxil.

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CHAPTER 1

The creation and the earthly paradise

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Now then, learn what the spirit of God dictated to Moses, the supposed sacred author to whom Genesis, the first book of Holy Scripture, is attributed; and you will observe, at every moment, that the spirit of God, unless he be of a crass ignorance, is a humbug, essentially a humbug, more of a humbug than the inventor of the palladist grand-mistress Diana Vaughan.

God is from all eternity; but, at the beginning of time, he was alone in the void. Nothing existed, save him, calling himself then Elohim, the Hebrew name by which he is designated in the first verse of the Bible; and this name is a plural, which is very singular for a gentleman all by himself.

So then, Elohim, — who is also Jehovah, Sabaoth, Adonai, as we shall see further on, — Elohim was bored (or were bored) at six francs a head in the midst of his chaos (‘at six francs a head’ — fr. ‘s’embêter à six francs par tête’, a jocular expression for being bored stiff, as though one had paid dearly for the privilege); « tohu-bohu » is the biblical term, tohu-bohu, which means topsy-turvy.

1. The chaos.

Eternity being immoderately long, master Elohim was bored for billions and billions of centuries. At last he had an idea: being God, that is to say all-powerful, he judged that to go on being bored for ever without doing anything would be the height of stupidity, and he resolved to create.

He might have created everything at a single stroke. Well, no; it seemed to him better to take his time. And he made the heaven and the earth, or, better said, matter appeared at the simple effort of his will; a matter formless, empty, confused, still tohu-bohu, and full of damp. « And the wind of God was running upon the waters » (textual); the reader is not obliged to understand.

In order not to commit blunders, it was necessary, above all, to see clearly; whence one has the right to conclude that, during the preceding thousand billions of centuries, this poor Papa Good God was in the most complete darkness.

Fortunately, he never knocked his nose against anything anywhere, since there was nothing at all.

« — Let there be light! » commanded the Eternal.

« And there was light. »

What was this light? The Bible does not say; it confines itself to informing us of this: « God saw that the light was good ». He was satisfied with it, consequently. His first care was then to « separate the light from the darkness »; again it is useless to seek to understand. « And God named the light, Day; and the darkness, Night ». — « Thus was the evening, thus was the morning. » Such was the first day of the creation.

2. Creation of the light

After which, Papa Good God busied himself with creating... guess what... the expanse, or, if you like it better, space. If one will but reflect upon it a little, it is clear that space existed from all time, even supposing an epoch when it was furnished with no star, no planet. Nevertheless, the expanse was created after the light, although « created » is here an improper term. The Bible, very muddled in its first chapter, has taught us, as we have just seen, that at the beginning of the creation Elohim made the heaven and the earth in tohu-bohu, with formless matter and confused masses of waters over which the wind of God was running; and here is how the sacred book explains this second operation, the formation of the expanse: « God created the expanse and separated the waters which are above the expanse from those which are below the expanse; and thus it was. » (Genesis 1:7) Some commentators say that it is a question of the atmosphere. In any case, one reads at verse 8: « And God named the expanse, Heavens. Thus was the evening, thus was the morning; that was the second day. »

(‘the expanse’ — fr. ‘l’étendue’, where English Bibles have ‘firmament’. The distinction matters to his joke: in the next paragraph he derives ‘firmament’ from the ancients’ belief that the sky was firm and solid, so his Bible must not already use the word here.)

Be that as it may, it emerges from this that the Holy Ghost told the author a superb hoax and abused his simplicity. This story of waters above and waters below is the reproduction of a gross error of primitive peoples. In fact, all the ancients believed that the heavens were something solid, firm, — whence the name of « firmament », — and they even imagined them to be of crystal, seeing that the light passed through; and the opinion was that above this solid plate, this firmament, there was an immense reservoir of water. Today we know that rain is water drawn up, pumped up by the sun, turned into vapours, into clouds, and falling back afterwards upon the earth; but formerly it was believed that rain came from the great reservoir above; people supposed a kind of windows opening and closing again in the plate of the firmament and thus producing the rains. And this opinion, which now makes us laugh, was current for a very long time; it is the view of Origen, of St. Augustine, of St. Cyril, of St. Ambrose and of a considerable number of doctors of the first centuries of Catholicism. The humbug Holy Ghost was making fun of them.

3. Creation of the atmosphere.

Well, let us pass on. The third day was employed by Papa Good God upon a work whose results are more appreciable than those of the preceding days. He lowered his gaze upon the waters below, and he said to himself that it would be useful to gather them together, so as to make dry parts appear, that is to say continents.

Then the waters, very obedient to his will, assembled apart, depths having been hollowed out for their heaping; on the other hand, heights were formed, bristling the surface of the solid matter with mountains, while the liquid rolled in slow or headlong waves towards the new abysses. « And God named the dry, Earth; he named also the gathering of the waters, Seas. And God saw that it was good. »

4. Creation of the continents and the seas.

It is to be remarked that Papa Good God was, most often, pleased with his job. — Name of a pipe! he must have said to himself, what a mussel I was not to have created that sooner! (‘Name of a pipe!’ — fr. ‘Nom d’une pipe!’ is a mild French oath, roughly ‘Good gracious!’; ‘mussel’ — fr. ‘moule’ was French slang for being soft, spineless, a dolt)

That day he was so satisfied with his continents and his seas that he wished to do something more before nightfall. « Let the earth put forth its shoot, said he, namely, grass bearing seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit each according to its kind, which have their seed in themselves upon the earth. And thus it was. » (Genesis 1:11)

5. Creation of the trees and the plants.

One cannot sufficiently admire this delicate attention of the Creator. Impossible to be more full of precautions than he. In fact, one wonders what the earth would be, if God had planted it with fruit trees each bearing fruits other than those of its own kind. Let us thank the paternal Elohim for not having given us apricot trees producing oranges, orange trees producing apples, apple trees producing currants, etc.; there would be no telling one from another. Ah! yes, let us thank God; what a good foreseeing papa!...

The earth having obeyed him and the apricot trees having grown bearing apricots, God, once again, « saw that it was good. Thus was the evening, thus was the morning; that was the third day ».

But here is quite another story! Three days had already passed with evening and morning, thanks to the light created at the very beginning: only, what is strange, this light which disappeared at the end of the day to make way for the darkness of night, this light illuminated the newborn world without having any hearth; no more sun than at the bottom of a coal mine. This drollery deserves a textual quotation from the Bible:

« 14. Then God said: Let there be luminaries in the expanse of the heavens, to separate the night from the day, and let them serve for signs, and for the seasons, and for the days, and for the years;

15. And let them be for luminaries in the expanse of the heavens, to give light upon the earth; and it was so.

16. God therefore made two great luminaries: the greater luminary, to rule over the day, and the lesser, to rule over the night; he made the stars also.

17. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens, to give light upon the earth:

18. And to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.

19. Thus was the evening, thus was the morning; that was the fourth day. »

6. Creation of the heavenly bodies.

No misunderstanding, is there? it is indeed a question of the sun and the moon. Consequently, according to the Holy Ghost, the creation of the sun followed the creation of the light by four days! Now, the Holy Ghost knows everything, evidently; otherwise he would not be the Holy Ghost, but a simple imbecile. Every time science makes a discovery, the Holy Ghost must laugh into his pigeon’s beak and murmur to himself: I have known that from all eternity; these poor pygmies of men give themselves great trouble to learn what is!

But then, why did the Holy Ghost dictate to Moses this colossal stupidity as well, on the subject of the light and the sun?... What a humbug, decidedly!...

In fact, down to Olaus Rœmer, astronomer of Copenhagen, who lived in the seventeenth century (1644-1710), it was believed that the sun does not produce light, but that light exists in space and that the sun serves only to « push » it; this false physical conception was an error of Descartes himself. It is to Rœmer that science owes the demonstration of this important truth, directly contrary to the statement of the Bible, that is to say: the light which illuminates our world emanates from the sun and its propagation is not instantaneous. The great Danish astronomer even came to determine exactly the speed of solar light; he established, and this is a thousand times proved today, that this light takes eight minutes eighteen seconds to reach us from the star which is its hearth, that is a speed of 308,000 kilometres per second. It is known that Rœmer was led to this great discovery by the observation of the eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, a planet forming part of our solar system. Rœmer was then in France, and he hastened to announce his discovery to the Academy (See the History of the Academy, sitting of 22 November 1675)

One may say further, with Voltaire: « If God had first spread the light through the air to be afterwards pushed by the sun, and to illuminate the world, it could not be pushed, nor illuminate, nor be separated from the darkness, nor make a day from evening to morning, before the sun existed; this theory is contrary to all physics, and to all reason. »

Moses, very ignorant in astronomy, therefore let himself be duped by the Holy Ghost; for the divine pigeon knew, at the time when Genesis was written, what Rœmer was to discover in 1675.

One will remark also how little importance the stars have, in the creation according to the Bible. The « two great luminaries » are the sun and the moon; the moon! which is only a satellite of our terrestrial planet! Ignorant Genesis is very far from suspecting that moon, earth, and even sun, are very small things in the universe; that our brilliant sun, the central star of the world we inhabit, is a modest star, one of the innumerable stars which compose the Milky Way. The sacred author sees only the earth and refers everything to the earth, that tiny planet which, in reality, turns about a star of the seventh magnitude; and this star-sun the wretched writer makes to depend, astronomically, upon its planet!

Ah! the unfortunate Moses would be astounded, were he resurrected in our day. I imagine what a head he would make (‘make a head’ — fr. ‘faire une tête’, to pull a long face) if, coming to instruct himself in any observatory whatever of Europe or America, he learned, for example, what Sirius is, a star of the first magnitude: Sirius, the most beautiful and the most brilliant of the stars of the sky, to which the Holy Ghost neglected to call his attention; Sirius, whose light takes nearly twenty-two years to reach us, its distance from the earth being 52,174,000 millions of leagues, that is 1,373,000 times the distance from the sun to the earth. What would poor Moses say, the day when there should be revealed to him the prodigious importance, in the universe, of the other solar worlds which he did not even suspect?

Suppose the professor simply teaching this to Moses, after Humboldt: — Although placed at so great a distance, Sirius and our sun belong to the same layer of stars, isolated in the celestial spaces, an island of stars in the universe; and this island of worlds and of suns, of flattened, lenticular form, has in its great axis eight hundred times the distance from Sirius to the earth; and yet it is only a small layer, extremely thin, if one compares it with the great layers, thick and deep, and incomparably richer in stars and in suns, which surround it. — Moses, who benevolently believed that the earth is the centre of the universe created by God, would go mad at it.

Let us return to the creation according to the Bible:

« 20. Then God said: Let the waters bring forth in all abundance animals which move and which have life; and let the birds fly above the earth, towards the expanse of the heavens.

21. God therefore created the great fishes, and all the living animals which move, which the waters brought forth in all abundance, according to their kind, and every bird having wings, according to its kind; and God saw that it was good.

22. And God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas; and let the birds multiply upon the earth.

23. Thus was the evening, thus was the morning; that was the fifth day.

24. Then, God said: Let the earth bring forth living animals according to their kind; the domestic animals, the reptiles and the beasts of the earth, according to their kind; and it was so.

25. God therefore made the beasts of the earth according to their kind, the domestic animals according to their kind, and the reptiles of the earth according to their kind; and God saw that it was good. »

7. Creation of the animals.

Aye indeed, all that was good, and master Elohim, who has hands, rubbed them with satisfaction. But there was better still to create.

— Not one of these animals resembles me, and it is a pity! he thought. And yet I have a fine head, a keen ear, a lively eye, a witty nose, and a good set of teeth! I might well create a mirror, in which I should contemplate myself; but it is better, I think, to contemplate myself by looking at my fellow... Come, it is settled; there absolutely must be upon earth an animal that has my head.

While Papa Good God was holding this reasoning, it is to be presumed that divers monkeys, of recent creation, came capering about him.

— They have something of me, he must have said to himself; but after all that is not it. Almost the whole of these species is adorned with a tail, and I have no tail. As for those which are deprived of that caudal appendage... no, that is not it either!...

And the monkeys grimaced and went on executing their marvellous capers.

Then Papa Good God took a block of damp earth, and « kneaded » it. — After that, come and maintain that God is a pure spirit and has no hands! — The Bible says also that God, having formed man, « breathed into his nostrils a respiration of life ». Behold then the first man kneaded, then animated with a great reinforcement of spittle. It is thus that « man was made into a living soul ». (Genesis 2:7)

8. Creation of man.

There is a passage, none too clear, of the first chapter of Genesis, verse 27, which has led some occultist commentators to believe that, in the first instance, man had been created hermaphrodite, but that God afterwards changed his mind. In fact, it is only at the end of the second chapter that there is any question of the creation of woman; now, 25 verses earlier, the Bible says in so many words: « God therefore created man in his image; he created him male and female in the image of God. » It is this verse, translated literally from the Hebrew text, which gave birth to the legend of the Androgyne God, very much credited in the various occultist schools; and, on the other hand, this verse being highly awkward, Christian translators have always taken care to alter it. Nevertheless, one would be wrong to attach too much importance to this biblical fancy; many other passages are still less comprehensible!

Let us look rather at what is generally admitted.

From the moment of man’s formation, Papa Good God constituted him king of the creation. He immediately made him review all the animals. « For the Eternal God had formed all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the heavens; then he had made them come unto Adam, that he might see how he would name them, and that the name which Adam should give to every living animal might be its name. »

9. Man reviews the animals.

One can picture that procession; it is Buffon, no doubt, who would gladly have been in Adam’s place!

« Thou shalt fill the earth and subdue it, it had been said to Adam; thou shalt have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth. » As king of the creation, man does not always have the upper hand, when he has to do with a lion, a tiger, a bear, a crocodile; that is what one may answer. And not only do the ferocious beasts crunch us; but humanity is besides the victim of a thousand disagreeable insects, fleas, bugs, scorpions, not to speak of the Jesuits and other cockroaches (‘cockroaches’ — fr. ‘cafard’ means both a cockroach and a sneaky person, canting hypocrite or bigot, which is the point of the jibe).

10. Man, king of the creation.

Moreover, God, who had created the ferocious beasts that relish human beefsteak, ordered man to be a vegetarian. « Behold: I have given thee every herb bearing seed which is upon all the earth, and every tree which hath in itself tree-fruit bearing seed; which shall be to thee for food. »

Finally, everything being finished — or nearly so — on the evening of the sixth day, Papa Good God, happy and more and more satisfied with his work, and perhaps slightly tired, invented the siesta and gave man the example of rest by resting himself, on the seventh day, like a good fat man of private means who feels the need to do nothing more. (Genesis 2:2)

11. The Lord rests.

« Now, the Eternal God had planted a garden in Eden, on the side of the Orient, and he had put there the man whom he had formed... And a river went forth out of Eden, to water the garden, and it divided itself into four rivers. The name of the first is Pison; it is that which floweth round about all the land of Havilah, where gold is found; and the gold of that land is good; it is there also that the bdellium and the onyx stone are found. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is that which floweth round about all the land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris; it is that which floweth in the country of the Assyrians. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. » (Genesis 2:8, 10-14)

In entering into these details, the author of Genesis wished to give an approximate idea of the situation of the marvellous Eden. But he would have done much better to say nothing; for it is impossible to be caught more foolishly in the very act of gasconade (‘gasconade’ — fr. ‘gasconnade’, a boastful tall tale, from the reputation of the Gascons for bragging).

In fact, all the commentators agree in recognizing that the Pishon is the Phasis, later named the Araxes, a river of Mingrelia, which has its source in one of the most inaccessible branches of the Caucasus, and, if there is in that region gold and onyx, on the other hand nobody has ever been able to discover what was to be understood by bdellium. On the other hand, there can be no error on the subject of the third and fourth rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates; whence it clearly results that, according to Genesis, the site of the earthly paradise would have been situated in Asia, in the region of the massif of Ararat, in Armenia, although (first blunder of the sacred author) Araxes, Tigris and Euphrates, while having their sources relatively neighbouring, have them perfectly distinct. The Araxes, far from being derived from another river, issues from the volcano Bingol-Dagh, whence it flows towards the Caspian Sea. As for the Tigris and the Euphrates, not only do they not proceed from one and the same river, but on the contrary they join each other at Korna, to form the Shat-el-Arab and to throw themselves into the Persian Gulf.

On the subject of the second river, called Gihon by Genesis, the blunder of the sacred author is fantastic. « It is, says he, the river of the land of Cush. » Now, according to the version of the Septuagint and even the Vulgate, the land of Cush (son of Ham and father of Nimrod) is none other than Ethiopia; consequently, this Gihon is the Nile, which flows, not in Asia, but in Africa, and precisely in the opposite direction to the Araxes, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the general direction of the course of the great African river being from south to north. If one places the source of the Nile at the Victoria Nyanza, as is admitted so as not to go further back, there are then at the very least eighteen hundred leagues of distance between the sources of the first and second rivers mentioned by Genesis as watering the same garden of Eden! It is true that the two others have their sources only sixty leagues from one another; which is already pretty for a garden. Besides, is it a garden, this immense territory bristling with the most precipitous peaks, formed of one of the most impracticable regions of the globe?...

Finally, third blunder, and this one might be called: the blunder of the tip of the ear (‘the blunder of the tip of the ear’ — fr. ‘montrer le bout de l’oreille’, to show the tip of one’s ear: to give oneself away, as an ass betrays itself under a lion’s skin).

The priests, as is known, maintain that the work of Moses is the Pentateuch, that is to say the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. But the learned have had the impiety to make researches, and their general opinion is that these books were manufactured by Ezra, on the return from the captivity of Babylon, in the course of the fifth century before Jesus Christ, whereas Moses, supposing that he existed and admitting for a moment as authentic the dates which concern him, lived a thousand years earlier: born in the land of Goshen, in Egypt, in 1571 before our era, and died in Arabia, on Mount Nebo, in 1451.

Bossuet was indignant at the works of Hobbes, of Spinoza and of Richard Simon against the authenticity of the works of Moses; to say that the true author of the Pentateuch is Ezra is to blaspheme, according to the fiery bishop: « What can one object, he cries (Discourse on Universal History), to a tradition of three thousand years, sustained by its own strength and by the sequence of things? Nothing consecutive, nothing positive, nothing important! »

With all respect to Bossuet, verse 14 of chapter 2 of Genesis, among other examples, gives a striking proof of the literary and religious imposture, and demonstrates, as plainly as two and two make four, that the said Genesis cannot have been written by Moses. It is in this verse that it is said: « The name of the third river is Tigris; it is that which floweth in the country of the Assyrians. » (Genesis 2:14) There it is in so many words. Some translators have replaced the last four words by: « toward the East of Assyria »; but that changes nothing. The question is this: Moses, dead in 1451 before Jesus Christ, could not employ the expressions Assyria, Assyrians, for the good reason that the Assyrian empire, which extended at once over Nineveh and Babylon and which lasted down to the eighth century before our era, began to exist about 1300, at the very most. The testimonies of Herodotus and of the Chaldean Berosus agree upon this point and have been confirmed by the monuments. (‘in the country of the Assyrians’ — fr. ‘au pays des Assyriens’, the four words Taxil counts. His argument needs that reading; English Bibles have ‘toward the east of Assyria’, the very variant he goes on to dismiss.)

The important discoveries accomplished since the beginning of our century in the history of the peoples of the ancient East, with the help of inscriptions in hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters, no longer permit today, even in the most elementary books, the reissuing of the biblical absurdities on the subject of this first part of the annals of the human race. The results obtained by the Champollions, the de Rougés, the de Saulcys, the Mariettes, the Opperts, the Rawlinsons, the Lepsiuses, the Brugsches, etc., light up ancient history with a light far more certain than the traditions collected by the humbug Ezra.

It is established that the founder of the Assyrian empire was a prince named on the monuments Ninippaloukin, who lived a hundred and fifty years after Moses. On the other hand, the region which was called Assyria was designated, in the time of Moses, under the name of the empire of the Rotennou, as results from the Egyptian monuments, mentioned by Oppert and other scholars; we see, in fact, in divers Egyptian inscriptions, that the kings of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt, contemporaries of Moses, carried their arms into Babylonia and had tribute paid to them by the Rotennou, who were dominant in Mesopotamia, in the very country of the Tigris and the Euphrates. If Moses were the true author of Genesis, he would then have written: « the Tigris, a river which flows in the country of the Rotennou. »

It is true that the tonsured ones will always be able to answer us: — The true author of Genesis is no more Ezra than Moses; it is the Holy Ghost! Consequently, were the Bible even to mention St. Petersburg and New York, that ought not to appear illogical to us and could in no way surprise us.

Let us therefore bow, and take up again the sequel of the sacred narrative, with a merry laugh; for this edifying Genesis really does not lack gaiety.

If the reader is willing, we are going to transport ourselves in thought to that marvellous garden of Eden, where four great rivers proceeding from a single fountain roll their waters. We seem to see Adam, walking about his property and giving himself up to the sweets of far-niente.

Here is what his monologue might be:

« — I am the man, and my name is Adam; which means, it appears, « red earth », seeing that I was manufactured with clay, like a common piece of pottery... What is my age?... I was born five days ago; but, according to an old proverb, one is the age one appears. And that is why I can say that in reality I was born at the age of twenty-eight, with all my teeth... No; not with all my teeth... I still lack my wisdom teeth...

Very well built, eh?... Why! how could I fail to be a fine individual, since, save for the age and the beard, I am the faithful copy of the lord Jehovah, the most stunningly smart being that exists in the universe?... Just look at this health, these robust arms, these legs of steel, nerves to sell, and, with that, a fresh complexion... Not the least rheumatism... I say bosh to illnesses... I have not even to fear the smallpox; Papa Good God manufactured me all vaccinated... And so, how I fancy myself!... and I am not wrong...

I take life easy, in this charming abode... no porter... not even a servant... There is a happy life!... I go, I come, I gather fruits, all succulent, and I stuff myself with them to my confounded fancy, braving diarrhoea without danger... I feel no fatigue, however long my walks may be; when I lie down on the grass, it is for my pleasure...

The other day, the amiable lord Jehovah offered me a diversion, of which I shall keep the merry memory all my life… All the animals of the creation passed before me: « The name that thou shalt give to each living animal shall be its name », the old Eternal Father said to me... As an attention, that was kind, that was!...

It is unheard-of, how many of them filed past, the animals!... I should never have believed that there were so many living beings... I was not embarrassed to make them my distribution of names; for the language which I speak without difficulty, and without ever having been to school, is a language of an extraordinary richness, of an abundance of terms of which it is impossible to form an idea... Thus, without needing to search, I knew instantly all that is proper to each animal, merely by looking at it, and by a single word I expressed all the properties of each species, so that each name given by me is at the same time a complete and perfect definition... Let us take, for example, the animal which will later be called equus in Latin, cheval in French, horse in English, etc. Well, I clapped upon it a name which expresses that quadruped with its mane, its tail, its neck, its speed, its strength... And the bird which, in centuries to come, will be called bulbo in Latin, hibou in French, owl in English, etc., all these names to come will not be worth the one I devised and which characterizes the nocturnal bird of prey, with its two mobile tufts upon the forehead, its short and hooked beak, its big head with great round eyes surrounded by a complete circle of stiff feathers, its feet all furnished with feathers down to the claws, as well as its fierce and savage habits, its monotonous and lugubrious cry, its horror of the light... And so on, for all the living animals... Ah! it is without equal, the language which I speak, and how sad it is to think that one day it will be entirely and for ever lost!... This thought is my only sorrow... Let us drive it away very quickly, and have no care.

Oh! that general review of all the living animals, there is what was superb... Still, superb does not say everything; for we had a comic turn in the programme of the fête: it was the arrival of the fishes... Only think! this garden is right in the middle of a continent, no sea shores, nothing but rivers, that is to say fresh water... So then, you can picture the grimace the sea fishes made, in coming up the Tigris and the Euphrates to reach me; they were no longer in their usual salt water, and it annoyed them!... Truly, it was enough to make one double up... And the great cetaceans, they were the ones that were put out!... Fortunately, for that day and by way of exception, Papa Good God widened the rivers of my garden; without which the various species of whales could never have got through... As soon as I had given them their name, you should have seen them dart back and rush off, with great strokes of their fins, to regain their Ocean as fast as ever they could... I laugh at it still!...

Perhaps there will be people who will not believe this story... The impious will deny that seals from the North Pole could have come as far as Armenia, into the upper waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and that in a single day’s journey, coming down the whole Atlantic and making the complete circuit of Africa; they will say that these interesting marine mammals, dwellers in the Frozen Ocean, could not change their element without dying of it... Eh! what does criticism matter!... Upon my word of honour, I saw here, in this garden of Eden, on that occasion, seals and whales, and I add that the seals, quite pleased at having received a name from me, thanked me by saying papa! mamma!...

Punctilious minds will object: « And the fishes of the lakes, by what way did they come?... » Is an allusion intended to the lavaret, that delicious fish of the lake of Bourget, of which the inhabitants of Aix-les-Bains speak as of a glory?... And the féra, which lives exclusively in Lake Leman, which dies as soon as it is put into another water, even fresh, which cannot so much as live in the Rhone, on this side of the Leman or beyond it?... Let it then be known: the lavaret and the féra had a special permission from God; these two lake fishes came, by aerial route, to pay me a visit at Eden... And there you are! anathema on the miscreants who will not be content with this explanation!...

And then, palsambleu! (‘palsambleu!’ — fr. an old minced oath, from ‘par le sang de Dieu’, by God’s blood) it is very good of me to discuss these things... So much the worse for whoever will not believe me, when I affirm that I saw all the living animals, vertebrates, annelids, molluscs, and zoophytes!... There is not a single insect to which I did not give a name... But the one that most stupefied me is a great white worm, long, flat, which came out quite gently from my own self, an ugly worm which future naturalists will call the tænia or solitary worm of man, and which does not resemble the tænia of pigs nor the tænia of sheep; this great devil of a human worm, on coming out, made me a profound bow; I gave it a name; after which it slipped back into me by my anus and took up its domicile again in my person... If I speak of it, it is in order to omit nothing; for I did not know myself to be inhabited. Apart from that, my lodger incommodes me in no way... Nothing troubles this life of Cockaigne which I have been leading for five days... » (‘life of Cockaigne’ — fr. ‘pays de cocagne’, the land of plenty, an imaginary country of idleness and abundance)

Adam looks at himself in the limpid water of the fountain, source of the four great rivers; then, spying a lawn, he stretches himself softly upon it.

— Ah! how good it is to live thus! he murmurs.

But now he yawns... he stretches himself... an unknown languor gradually takes hold of him... Here is something new, upon my word!... And yet he feels no fatigue... What can this mean?...

He understands nothing of it. He undergoes the mysterious influence, irresistible. His eyelids close. Adam sleeps. It is the first sleep of man.

12. First sleep of man.

Now, while Adam is snoring like a German humming-top, Papa Good God comes down upon earth.

First, he rests his gaze for a fairly long while upon the sleeper.

— All the same, I do good work when I set about it! says he with satisfaction. The fellow is uncommonly well built; one would swear it was myself... when I was a few billions of centuries younger.

Stooping, he pinches the fat of his calf. To this divine pleasantry Adam replies with a snore still more sonorous than the preceding ones.

— Perfect! continues master Elohim; I shall have no need of an anaesthetic to ensure the success of my talents as a surgeon... I see that the sleep I sent to my dear young Adam was of the best conditioned; one might fire a cannon beside him without his waking... Now, it is a question of setting to work; for I have come here for an operation of the first order... While nobody hears me, I may as well make an avowal: I perceived this morning that there are moments when I am somewhat of a simpleton. Thus, where were my wits when I created man without a companion?... I gave every animal a female; at least, there are but few exceptions to this rule. The solitary worm, I created it hermaphrodite, and that is understandable, since, if it went in couples in the intestines where it dwells, it would no longer be a solitary worm... But man is not a tænia, name of a pipe!...

I must therefore manufacture him a companion, and I have decided to make her for him out of his own flesh...

Papa Good God turned a moment about Adam; he felt him over, while uttering his reflections aloud.

— I consulted the Pigeon on this subject, he continued, and I did well, for he is craftier than I... My first idea had been to cut off a corn from dear Adam and to knead a little woman out of it... The Pigeon did not approve of me; he thought a corn would be too vulgar and that the impious might find in it a pretext for saying that woman is of low extraction... The conclusion is that it is with a rib that I am going to manufacture the second human creature... Come! this is the moment, this is the instant; let us be prompt and dexterous as a dentist who is at his twenty-thousandth operation.

And, so saying, Papa Good God « tore away from Adam one of his ribs, and he closed up the flesh in the place. » (Genesis 2:21) « And the Eternal God built into a woman the rib which he had taken away from Adam. » (Genesis 2:22)

13. Creation of woman.

I hear the cry of the man, waking with a start:

— Ow! ow!... Oh! dear me!... Somebody has just taken away one of my beefsteaks!

And his surprise on seeing the pretty living doll:

— Wot’s that ‘ere?

— That? that is thy wife, and I present her to thee, answers Jehovah... Dare to say that I am not making thee an agreeable present there!...

— The fact is that she is pretty...

— One could eat her up... Lucky fellow, you!... And no mother-in-law!... You can boast of having all the luck, my boy.

The Bible relates that Adam exclaimed: « This time, this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be named hommesse, for she was taken out of man. Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall join himself to his wife, and they shall thus be one same flesh. » (Genesis 2:23-24) (‘hommesse’ — fr. a coinage of Taxil’s Bible from ‘homme’, man, where English Bibles have simply ‘Woman’; kept here because Taxil returns to the word later and makes much of it)

Useless to comment upon this exclamation of Adam, the newly married. Ah! in what gallant terms are these things put?... (‘in what gallant terms are these things put’ — fr. ‘en termes galants ces choses-là sont mises’, a line of Molière’s Les Femmes savantes, quoted ironically of a coarse thing said in fine language)

As for the rib removed, it is well to recall that, in the opinion of St. Augustine, God never gave it back to Adam. Consequently, Adam lived thus with one rib the less. « It was apparently one of his false ribs, Voltaire has remarked; for the lack of one of the principal ribs would have been too dangerous. »

Genesis tells us further (Genesis 2:25): « Now, Adam and his wife were both naked, and they had no shame thereof. » The pious commentators affirm that this nakedness without any shame is a proof of the innocence of our first parents; had they always remained in the belief that there is no immodesty in walking about stark naked, it would have been the mark of a persevering perfection. In virtue of this biblical reasoning, one might therefore reckon as living in the state of perfection those savage tribes who wear no clothing, and there are still some: nevertheless, at the time of the discovery of America, the fanatical Spanish Catholics massacred in a mass the native tribes who lived in fine innocence, and the priests blessed the massacrers. On the other hand, it has been remarked that it was the cold which caused clothes to be invented; for the naked peoples are those who live in the hottest regions. Besides, when everybody is naked, nobody is ashamed of being so: one blushes only from vanity; one fears to show a deformity which others have not.

Let us come to the great affair, to the astonishing adventure which put an end, alas! to the happiness of Adam and his spouse.

« The Eternal God had made to spring out of the earth every tree desirable to the sight and bearing fruit good to eat; and he had put the tree of life in the midst of the garden of Eden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. » (Genesis 2:9)

« The Eternal God had spoken to man with commandment, saying unto him: Thou shalt eat freely of every tree of the garden. Howbeit, as for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat thereof; for, the same day that thou shalt have eaten thereof, thou shalt die the death most certainly. » (Genesis 2:16-17)

14. The forbidden fruit.

It is well to observe first of all that, under pretext of summarizing the Bible, the priests have drawn up for the use of the faithful certain little manuals bearing the title Sacred History, in which they take care to pass over in silence those passages of the divine Scripture which embarrass them too much. Thus, in general, the faithful are told only of the famous tree of the knowledge of good and evil; we shall see presently why the priests breathe not a word of the tree of life, perfectly distinct from the other tree; we shall reproduce verse 22 of chapter 3, which is always omitted in the books given to the simple devout.

For the moment, let us occupy ourselves only with the tree whose fruit caused the fall of man. Let us recall that the emperor Julian the Philosopher, whose memory is so execrated by churchmen, indulged, on the subject of this marvellous tree, in some remarks full of good sense. It seems to us, he wrote, that the lord God ought on the contrary to have ordered man, his creature, to eat much of this tree of the knowledge of good and evil; that not only had God given him a thinking head which had necessarily to be instructed, but that it was still more indispensable to make him know good and evil, in order that he might fulfil his duties; that the prohibition was tyrannical and absurd; that it was a hundred times worse than if a stomach had been made for him in order to prevent him from eating.

Another reflection which one cannot help making is that the starting point of the little story proves that the lord Jehovah had a mental reservation and that he was very glad that man should sin. In short, Adam would have been entitled to say to him:

— My little father Elohim, if I am not mistaken, good is that which is morally good, that which pleases you, and evil, on the contrary, is that which is bad, that which displeases you... Is that quite it?

— Perfectly, my little son, the Creator would have answered.

— Consequently, Adam would have continued, let me learn in what evil consists, in order that I may avoid it; or else why have put this tree here, if I must not touch it?...

It is the curés who take charge of the rejoinder, in the place and stead of their queer Good God.

— God, they say, was imposing a trial upon nascent humanity; he wished to see whether Adam would obey him, when he was asking of him only one single and very small privation.

But it is easy to reply to the reply. According to the curés themselves, God knows the future: he had therefore foreseen what was going to happen; and, as nothing is done without his will, he knew perfectly well that man would eat of the fruit of the tree in question. He therefore willed the fall of our first parents, of that there is no doubt whatever.

Moreover, the whole sequel of the story turns against the lord Jehovah.

Let us see how things came about, according to chapter 3 of Genesis:

« 1. Now, the serpent was the most crafty of all the animals of the earth which the Eternal God had made; and he said to the woman: What! Would God have said: Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2. And the woman answered the serpent: We eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden;

3. But, as for the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said: Ye shall not eat thereof and ye shall not touch it, lest ye die.

15. Eve tempted by the serpent.

4. Then the serpent said to the woman: Ye shall by no means die;

5. But God knoweth that in the day that ye eat thereof your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as the gods, knowing good and evil.

6. The woman therefore saw that the fruit of that tree was good to eat and of an agreeable aspect, and that that tree was desirable to give knowledge; and she took of the fruit thereof and ate; and she gave also thereof to her husband, drawing him along with her; and he ate thereof. »

16. Disobedience of Adam and Eve

What strikes one first of all, in this narrative, is that the discourse of the serpent, its conversation with the woman, the very fact of speaking, of expressing itself in the same language as our first parents, is not given by the sacred author as a supernatural, miraculous thing, nor as an allegory. It is indeed the serpent itself that Genesis presents; it is this reptile, playing the part of an animal full of malice and cunning, which makes itself the tempter of the woman, with a fluency of elocution that a parrot might envy it.

The serpent has been so personally brought upon the scene that, ever since, the curés, finding the episode thus related improbable, have judged it necessary to make a correction in it which changes everything, but which is in contradiction with the whole text of this chapter of the Bible. According to the correctors, as artful as they are pious, it was the devil who took the form of the serpent and who, by means of this subterfuge, tempted Madame Adam; such is the way in which the priests have arranged the matter, such is their teaching of today.

This arrangement is a veritable falsification of Genesis. In the first place, not one word of the sacred text lends itself to such an interpretation. In the second place, among the various authors of the books which compose the Bible, there are two in all who have mentioned the devil: the author of the book of Job, according to whom the devil argues one fine day with God, in heaven; and the author of the book of Tobias, who cites a certain demon Asmodeus, in love with a woman named Sarah, whose seven husbands he strangles one after another. Now, these two books come quite at the end of the Bible, and, no more in these than in the others, is there any question of the Lucifer-Satan whom the Catholics bring in on every occasion, to give spice to the interest of their legends. Nowhere does one find that adventure, so well known nevertheless, of Lucifer revolting against God and vanquished by the archangel Michael. That, like everything which relates to the devil, was invented after the event, not only long after Moses, but even subsequently to Ezra.

On the other hand, certain merry commentators, in reality sceptical philosophers, have amused themselves by transforming into an apple tree, of a somewhat broad symbolism, the famous tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and they have supposed that this episode signifies, in veiled words, that Madame Adam, being ignorant of love, received the first lesson in it from a seducing devil, metamorphosed into a serpent for the occasion...

But while laughing at this pleasantry, which is one interpretation well worth another, it must be put into the same basket as the falsification of the text imagined by the curés. We must take the Bible such as it is, when we wish to examine it seriously: thus, in the little story with which we are occupied at this moment, it is indeed the animal called the serpent that is in question, and not any devil whatever, the Jews having no devils in their mythology before the epoch when the books of Job and Tobias were written; and as for the amorous innuendoes, gratuitously attributed to the tempting serpent, it is evident that it is impossible to discover them in the text of Genesis, when one has it before one’s eyes.

It is truly the serpent alone, personally, that is in question; for the sacred author sees this animal with the eyes of all his contemporaries of the various religions. The serpent, in antiquity, passed in fact for being a very cunning animal, very intelligent and full of malice. Several African peoples adored it. On another side, the case of this serpent that speaks, a case of which Genesis makes no miracle, is common to oriental literature; all the mythologies hatched in Asia are full of speaking animals; among the Chaldeans, the fish Oannes put its head out of the waters of the Euphrates every day, and, for whole hours together, it preached to the people who ran to the banks, giving good counsels, teaching at once poetry and agriculture. Those times when the animals had the power of speech are far distant; but no religion of the East had the monopoly of them. Therefore the biblical serpent spoke, without needing to be inhabited by an imp.

Besides, in this circumstance, the serpent was less cunning than it appears. The hoaxes of Holy Scripture are of an extraordinary simplicity and are bursting with contradictions. Thus, it has been asked what the serpent meant by: « Ye shall be as the gods. » This expression, which affirms the plurality of gods, is not found in this passage of Genesis alone; we shall see further on that the lord Jehovah, speaking himself, does not consider himself as the only God. The Catholic commentators, embarrassed by this phrase of the serpent, have maintained that by the gods the reptile must have meant the angels. It has been answered that a serpent could not know the angels; but, for the same reason, it could not know the gods. Simplicity, contradiction, gibberish; there indeed is the Bible.

No, not so cunning as all that, this serpent!... Its counsels were very incomplete. A really crafty serpent would have said to the woman: — Eat of the forbidden fruit, first, and then immediately afterwards, do not fail to eat of the fruit of the tree of life, which, moreover, is permitted thee.

And Jehovah, was he not the first cause of the temptation? Why had he given speech to the serpent? Without that gift, the latter could never have made itself understood by the woman.

The Bible does not make known to us the conversation in the course of which Madame Adam determined her husband to eat with her of the forbidden fruit. Fortunately, it is easy to fill up this gap left by the sacred author.

We see the first woman, whose curiosity has been pricked by the serpent, approach the tree of knowledge which is in the middle of the garden, beside the tree of life. She considers it at length, not without some hesitations.

— He is not exactly handsome, says she, that serpent who spoke to me just now; but he is, upon my word, very distinguished in his manners, and he has a charming way of speaking... The counsel he gave me seems to me good to follow; for, really, it is very tiresome to know nothing... We are, Adam and I, like turkeys (‘like turkeys’ — fr. ‘comme des dindes’; a ‘dinde’, a turkey hen, is French for a silly, gullible creature), and we might be like gods!... And then, it is tempting, this fruit... There is none finer in the whole orchard... Still, if the serpent had told me a whopper, that would not be pleasant!... Life is so agreeable!... To bite this fruit, I have a great desire to; but if the result of my greediness should be to die?... Not amusing at all, that...

She turns about the tree; the serpent, hidden behind a bush, follows all her movements from afar.

— No, it is not possible that we should die for so small a thing... It is father Jehovah who has been setting up a boat for us!... (‘setting up a boat for us’ — fr. ‘monter un bateau à quelqu’un’, to spin someone a tale, to pull their leg) To begin with, thinking it over, I find he has a string look, that old greybeard (‘a string look’ — fr. ‘l’air ficelle’; ‘ficelle’, literally a string, was slang for crafty, artful)... whereas the serpent... ah, that is better... his little head, so dainty, has I know not what good-natured expression, with eyes sparkling with wit... Besides, it is of a striking logic, what he said to me... Father Jehovah has every interest in our remaining ignorant of the fine things which are the privilege of the gods... His threat, that must be to give us the jitters, that is it... He does not wish us to know this and that... Oh! the old ones! they are all alike... sly rogues... tellers of nonsense... One must not trust them...

She drags one of the garden benches up to the tree, climbs upon it, and gathers one of the fruits. — Let us say it is an apple, since the Bible is not explicit upon this point and since, moreover, it matters little whether we call this fruit thus or otherwise. — She contemplates the apple, passing her tongue over her lips. The serpent, who has seen everything, rears upon its tail, behind the bush, and strikes up a merry quadrille. Madame Adam brings the apple near her mouth. — By the by, how is it eaten, this fruit?... Must I peel it or bite straight into it?... Bah! one way or another, it must be good... She hesitates a little more.

— To know everything or to know nothing, what an alternative!... When we play at hide-and-seek, Adam and I, is it good or is it evil?... Cruel enigma!... Must we shear our sheep in order to do well? or does one commit evil in not leaving them the wool on their backs?... It is enough to lose one’s head over... And Adam, who is for ever poking his fingers into his nose, is that good or is that evil?... Truly and truly, it is no life to be ignorant of such things!...

Deciding sharply, she gives the apple an energetic bite.

— Sapristi! how good it is!...

Another bite, more energetic still.

— Name of a name! how good it is!... What a delicious taste!... Ah! the old swindler, who had forbidden me this dainty!...

She lies down on the bench, stretches herself out on it and seems to savour the fruit all the better for it.

Adam, arriving, talking to himself: — To pass the time, I have just fished a fry out of the Tigris... but, as I am a vegetarian, I flung my fry, as soon as caught, into the Euphrates...

He perceives his spouse.

— Hey! hommesse, what are you nibbling there?

Madame Adam, sitting up with a bound:

Oh! do not scold me!... It is a fruit... from the tree... you know quite well... from one of the two trees in the middle of the garden...

— I see it, the deuce!... It is precisely the fruit of the tree which we are forbidden to touch... Well now! are you mad, my little wife?... And what about the warning of the other one?...

— Father Jehovah?... the hinderer of dancing in a ring? (‘the hinderer of dancing in a ring’ — fr. ‘l’empêcheur de danser en rond’, the French term for a killjoy) Let us talk of him, ah! yes!... He has been making game of our heads on the grand scale, the old monkey!...

— What are you singing me there?...

— His threat of death... you remember it, don’t you?..

— To be sure!... It gives me a cold shiver down the back.

— Oh! la la! my eye!... His threat, my dear, was a dodge...

— Come now, are you beating Jeannot, are you losing the ball? (‘beating Jeannot’, ‘losing the ball’ — fr. ‘battre Jeannot’ and ‘perdre la boule’, two old slang phrases for going out of one’s mind; the ‘boule’ is the head)...

— A dodge, I tell you... The proof is that I already know heaps of things, since I bit into the apple...

— You know what is good and what is evil?... You know what must be done and what must not be done?... You know the how and the why of everything and everything....

— Yes, it is beginning, my little green dog... There, I already know how many grains of salt must be put in an egg.

— Not possible!

— I know why cocks shut their eyes when they crow...

— You amaze me!... And why frogs have no tails, do you know that?

— I have just learned it this very instant...

— Say it, to instruct me...

— It is because it would get in their way when they sit down.

— Ah! bah!... You bowl me over...

— Better than that... Well, I know, I am sure, you hear me plainly, I am sure that you are a little man as good as a picture (‘as good as a picture’ — fr. ‘sage comme une image’, perfectly well-behaved) and that you have not been unfaithful to me a single time...

Adam is dumbfounded.

— A thousand firecrackers! she has suddenly got some science, my wife has!... It is true, all the same, that I have never been unfaithful to her... Saprelotte of a saprelotte! it is prodigious!... And if I were to be unfaithful to you, would that be evil or would that be good?...

— That would be evil, sir!... very evil!...

She draws him beside her, on the bi of the end of the bench (‘on the bi of the end of the bench’ — fr. ‘sur le bi du bout du banc’, a scrap of a nonsense refrain meaning, with a wink, sitting very close together indeed).

— Besides, Adam of my heart, it rests only with you to become learned like me, just as quickly and at as little cost... Bite into the apple...

She holds out the apple to him.

— It tempts me too, my dear little wife; but of what use will it be to us, to be learned as academicians, if we die of it this very day... For after all, one must reason it out: to die in a thousand years, at a pinch, would be all the same to me; but to break my pipe this very day, no, that would be stupid beyond everything... (‘to break my pipe’ — fr. ‘casser sa pipe’ is slang for to die, like the English ‘to kick the bucket’)

Madame Adam shrugs her shoulders.

— You do not seem to believe it, my pretty... But I, I know quite well what he said to me, the old Papa Good God; it was to myself that he spoke, and I assure you that he was categorical...

Allow me to repeat to you his words textually: « As for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat thereof; for, the same day that thou shalt have eaten thereof, thou shalt die the death most certainly »... There is no haggling about it, you see; I set store by my skin, I do, if you set none by yours...

— Adam, Adam, you make me laugh... Am I dead, say?

— No, you are quite alive... Only, the day is not over; look out for the bomb!..

— Oh! how obstinate men are!... You may boast of having plenty of it, of obstinacy, my dear!... It is senseless, the time you take to understand that the old razor has been making fun of us (‘the old razor’ — fr. ‘le vieux rasoir’; ‘rasoir’, a razor, was slang for a crashing bore)... There, you have just cited the academicians...

— Yes; and what then?

— The academicians... are they wells of learning, those gentlemen?

— Evidently.

— Well, it is because they are wells of learning that the academicians are immortals... (‘immortals’ — fr. the members of the Académie française are traditionally styled ‘les Immortels’, which is the joke here)

Adam is troubled by the argument. His spouse turns coaxing.

— Come, were it only to please me, bite into the apple, my dear little man... When you have tasted of it after me, we shall both be like the gods...

— Like the gods?...

— Do not seek to understand... It is the serpent who said it...

Adam, resolved: — Since it is the serpent who said it!... Give, give the apple...

He crunches the apple greedily.

Two minutes pass in silence; one might hear a Panamist fly. (‘one might hear a Panamist fly’ — fr. ‘on entendrait voler une mouche’, you could hear a fly buzz; ‘voler’ means both to fly and to steal, a ‘Panamist’ being one of the politicians and financiers who robbed the public in the Panama Canal scandal of 1892) All at once, Adam utters a cry; it is knowledge arriving in him.

— Ventre-saint-gris! he cries, we are naked as worms!... This is a fine business!... (‘Ventre-saint-gris!’ — the favourite oath of King Henri IV of France)

— Navel of the pope! says the woman in her turn, I have not even any garters!... It is indecent!...

— And we who must go this evening to the ball of the orang-outangs!... Impossible to present ourselves in society, in so neglected a costume!...

— Quick, quick, we must clothe ourselves!...

« And the eyes of them both were opened; and, knowing that they were naked, they sewed together fig-leaves and made themselves girdles thereof. » (Genesis 3:7)

17. Adam and Eve have the sense of their nakedness.

Note well that the first human costume was not of vine leaves; the glory of the invention of the vine was reserved for the patriarch Noah.

Once clothed thus, the two spouses look at each other.

— We are not too bad in this rig-out, says the husband.

— As for me, the fig leaf suits me marvellously, says the woman... These garments are perhaps a little dusty; they have not been beaten since last season... Give me a brush down, Adam...

Their contentment was not to be of long duration.

« Then they heard, in the wind of the day which bloweth after noon, the voice of the Eternal God, who was walking (sic) in the garden. And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the face of the Eternal God, among the trees of the garden. » (Genesis 3:8)

18. Adam and Eve hide at the call of God.

This Jehovah, one observes it again here, is well and truly a corporeal god: he walks about, he speaks; we have seen him knead and blow. Genesis therefore presents its God after the fashion of all the other mythologies. The various peoples of antiquity had, in fact, no other idea of the divinity; Plato passes for the first who made God of a substance more or less ethereal, which was not altogether body.

The critics ask under what form God showed himself to Adam, and later to Cain, to the patriarchs, to the prophets, to all those to whom he spoke with his own mouth. The tonsured ones answer that he had a human form, and that he could not make himself known otherwise, having created man in his image. It is replied that the Israelite religion then singularly resembles, on this essential point, all the religions which the Catholic priests brand with the name of paganism; the ancient Romans, who had adopted the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, also understood the divinity only under a human aspect. This remark leads one to add: instead of its being God who made man in his likeness, might it not rather be man who imagined God in his own image? But let us not insist; for to lodge such an opinion in one’s brain is to devote oneself to the flames of hell. Let us only recall this malicious reflection of a philosopher: if cats had manufactured gods for themselves, they would have made them run after mice.

Details, such as those of God’s walk in the garden of Eden, show peremptorily that it is in no way a question of a mystical allegory; the whole narrative of the sacred author is in the style of a true history.

« 9. And the Eternal God called Adam, and said unto him: Adam, where art thou? »

He was piteous and confused, master Adam, and his wife too was in no better case. They try to slip away, they hide; but, not a bit of it! how escape the divine gaze which hovers over all?... In vain do the unfortunates strive to conceal their persons from the looks of the Most High; behind them, everywhere, resounds the terrible call of the Lord, speaking as a powerful, severe master, and preparing to punish his servant, his slave, who has disobeyed him.

No way of getting out of this bad pass; they are nabbed; they will have to confess the fault committed. Crestfallen, they will stammer out poor excuses.

« 10. Adam answered: Lord, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself. »

There they are then before the master, before this God who knows the future, who had foreseen the accident of the serpent and the apple, and who grows angry as though he had suspected nothing, as though what has just happened had not come about by his omnipotent will. Adam and his wife do not think of that in their agitation; they are going to hold the language of schoolboys caught in a fault: — Please sir, it was not I who began; it was she! — Please sir, I will not do it again, I am so sorry... Ah! no, for certain, I will not begin again, you may believe me!...

« 11. And God said unto Adam: Who hath taught thee that thou wast naked? Thou must have eaten of that which I had forbidden thee to eat.

12. And Adam answered: The woman whom thou gavest me to be with me gave me of the fruit of the tree, and I ate thereof.

13. And God said unto the woman: Wherefore hast thou done that? And the woman answered: The serpent deceived me, and I ate of the fruit. »

Now, master Elohim is going to distribute the punishments. He proceeds in order, and it is the one who was first guilty who will catch it first. Attention!

« 14. Then the Eternal God said unto the serpent: Because thou hast done this, thou shalt be cursed among all the animals and beasts of the earth; thou shalt go upon thy belly henceforth, and thou shalt feed upon earth all the days of thy life.

15. And I will put enmities between thee and the woman, between thy children and the children of the woman; they shall seek to crush thy head, and thou shalt seek to bite them in the heel. »

19. God reproaches Adam and Eve with their sin.

This chastisement inflicted upon the serpent proves, beyond possible reply, that the curés are humbugs when, with their mania for thrusting the devil in everywhere, they attribute the temptation of the woman to the demon having borrowed on that day the form of the reptile, to that Lucifer-Satan whose alleged revolt and defeat are inscribed in none of the books of the Bible. If Satan were the guilty one, God would evidently have ordered him to return forthwith to his infernal domicile and would have granted him a supplement of torture in the abode of darkness.

Now, the punishment of the temptation strikes, solely and exclusively, the serpent as an animal and a beast of the earth. According to verse 14 of chapter 3, it is to be believed that this giver of perfidious counsels was previously an animal provided with feet; and it is indeed to him that God cut off the feet that day, since he condemned him to crawl thenceforward, — a chastisement which would be most unjust, if this beast had had nothing to do with the affair. — Suppose that the abbé Garnier should disguise himself one fine morning as an honest man, that he should take the costume and make himself up to look like old Ruel, who is a philanthropist, and that he should then go under that name and commit swindles; what would happen when he was at last locked up, unmasked and brought before the police court? would the tribunal condemn to fine and imprisonment the worthy old Ruel? No, certainly! it would pronounce its sentence against the true swindler, it would apply its judgment to the said Garnier, that is clear.

The tonsured ones will therefore do well to renounce their fairy tale of Lucifer the tempter of the first woman; that hoax will not stand up. Or otherwise, in view of the sacred text, if they wish to maintain it all the same, they must say that the devil was craftier than the lord Jehovah, and that the latter, completely softened in the brain, saw nothing but the serpent in all this affair, did not perceive the least tip of Lucifer’s horn, and deprived the innocent serpent of its feet. My old Leo XIII, get out of that!

To tell the truth, from whatever point of view one considers this extravagant episode, it must be recognized that the humbug Holy Ghost has once more made fun of the pious author who wrote under his dictation. If it is true that the children of the woman, human beings, have a general aversion for serpents, if it is true that in case of an encounter the former seek readily enough to crush the head of the latter, who on their side defend themselves or attack by seeking to bite the former in the foot or the leg, on the other hand there is one penalty pronounced by God against serpents which they have never undergone: serpents do not feed upon earth, never, never at all. This sentence has therefore been evaded, unless Jehovah declared the Bérenger law applicable upon this point (‘the Bérenger law’ — fr. ‘la loi Bérenger’ of 1891, which introduced the suspended sentence into French law); in which case, the Bible has forgotten to mention this indefinite reprieve.

But, in order to savour the mystification of the Holy Ghost in all its merry mockery towards the credulous devout, one must consider the immense extent of the chastisement inflicted upon the serpent. What exactly was the tempting ophidian? The

Bible does not specify; but it matters little: it is evident that it could not be at once a viper and a grass snake, or a boa and a rattlesnake; the species of ophidians which live upon our globe are very numerous. Let us admit that it was the grass snake which provoked Madame Adam to sin; let us admit even, if you will, that the chastisement of the grass snake is reasonable in extending to the posterity of that species, and that all the grass snakes of the future are logically deprived of feet to expiate the fault of the one in Eden... Now then, if the woman had not succeeded in drawing the man into her disobedience, she alone would have been punished, is it not so?...

Well, poor serpents! the grass snake alone was guilty; but behold, at one and the same stroke, the asp, the naja, the rattlesnake, the cerastes, the slow-worm, the viper, the python, the cobra-capello, the rouleau, the elaps, the erpeton, the bothrops, the fer-de-lance, the atropos, the hypnale, the rhodostoma, the humbroni, the bungarus, the psammophis, the rat-eating eunectes, the oxyrhopus, the boa constrictor, the molure, and their posterity, have lost their feet and crawl for ever, in spite of their incontestable innocence!...

« 16. God then said unto the woman: I will multiply thy miseries and thy pregnancies; and thou shalt bring forth in pain; and thou shalt be under the dominion of thy husband. »

Unanimously, the commentators are of opinion that the penalties of this sentence aim not only at Madame Adam, but at all women until the end of the world.

Without dwelling upon what this system has of injustice, or how it denotes a tolerably cracked God, we shall remark first of all that, if the first woman had known how to resist the seductions of the serpent, she would not have brought forth in sorrow. Before that day, she was therefore conformed in a fashion altogether different from what she was at her first lying-in. Consequently, in one second, that is to say at the very instant when he pronounced his decree, God overturned from top to bottom the organism of woman. One sees it: when the finger of God sets about it, it works astonishing things.

In the second place, it is well to observe that, in spite of this omnipotence, Jehovah has not succeeded in making general the penalties which he decreed against the feminine sex: on the one hand, there are many women who are delivered without pain; on the other hand, those who wear the breeches in their household, those who lead their husband by the tip of the nose, instead of being under his domination, those are legion in all classes of society.

« 17. Then God said unto Adam: Since thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the fruit of the tree which I had forbidden thee to eat, the earth shall be cursed because of thee, and thou shalt eat of it in labour all the days of thy life.

18. And the earth shall bring thee forth thorns and thistles; and thou shalt eat the herb of the fields.

19. And thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy brow, until thou return unto that earth whence thou wast taken; for thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return. »

The same observation as above: the chastisement of Adam must strike all men as well; perfect unanimity of the theologians upon the interpretation of these three verses of Genesis.

The most terrible part of the sentence is the condemnation to death. It is true that the ineffable Jehovah forgets what he had decreed previously, that is to say that in case of the guzzling of the forbidden fruit man should die the death on the very day of the offence (Genesis 2:17). This lapse of memory in Papa Good God earned the condemned a fairly considerable adjournment of the execution; in fact, if the Bible is to be believed, Adam lived on for... nine hundred and thirty years (Genesis 5:5).

But if Adam had not eaten the apple, he would never have died, and we ourselves, all of us, should be immortal. Curious people ask: Then what would men have done on the day when the earth had been insufficient to contain them? for, Adam and his wife having received from their creation the faculty of multiplying, a moment would necessarily have come when their children and the children of their children would have peopled our planet in an exuberant fashion.

It is evident that this problem is insoluble. And so, God had need, in some sort, that Adam should commit the sin: death appears thus as a necessity; but God was anxious that man should imagine himself to be wholly in the wrong, and that is why he set for our first parents the snare of the apple and gave speech to the serpent which he knew to be capable of temptation. If God exists such as the Bible represents him, it is so completely this, that the serpent has become dumb since that epoch, although the loss of speech does not figure among the penalties which were inflicted upon it.

Another observation presents itself of itself to the mind, on the subject of the bread which Adam and his posterity were condemned to eat with a great reinforcement of sweat. It is probable that there was no bread in primitive times and that men then fed themselves like the savage tribes which still exist in our day. But let us not cavil for so small a matter, and let us admit that the lord Jehovah spoke by anticipation. The Jews, for whom the Bible was written, did in fact eat bread. Now the tonsured ones tell us that this book was not written exclusively for the Jews and that it is, in the name of the Holy Ghost, the religious law of the whole world. In that case, one is forced to recognize that bread is eaten only in countries where wheat grows: the Lapps, herdsmen of reindeer and fishers of seals, and, in general, all the peoples of the polar latitudes, are absolutely ignorant of the existence of flour; in numerous regions of the Indies, of America, of central and southern Africa, people live on fruits and on the produce of the chase. Will it be said that the word bread was employed by God figuratively and that it designates every kind of food? One may answer that the chastisement is not general either: if the workmen toil to feed themselves, if whoever lives by his labour finds himself thus stricken in consequence of the fault of Adam, it is not the same with the pleasure-seekers of life who are born rich, millionaires by inheritance. And the fat canons then! these, when they sweat, it is in summer, on account of their fat; it is not their work which makes them water their daily bread with sweat!

Verse 18, in particular, is very malevolent towards the human species. Apart from bread, man is condemned to eat only the herb of the fields, like cattle; what will the earth produce for him? thorns and thistles. The pigeon is telling us a fine tale! (‘telling us a fine tale’ — fr. ‘nous la bailler belle’, an old idiom for telling someone a whopping tall story) In spite of God, men eat something other than bread and grass. Ask Lucullus. Or else, why does Jehovah not destroy, with strokes of lightning, the restaurants which permit themselves to display dishes of meat upon their bill of fare? Useless to insist.

This is the occasion to say that Adam would have been well inspired in sending father Good God for a walk, since walking pleases Jehovah.

But here is what happened after the pronouncing of the judgment:

« 20. Then Adam named his wife Eva, because she is the mother of all the living. »

The dear man had not yet thought of giving a name to his companion; until then he had confined himself to qualifying her as hommesse, as was seen at verse 23 of chapter 2. What is curious is that the name given by Adam to his spouse should be precisely a Hebrew name; Hévah (‘Hévah’ — fr. Taxil’s form of the Hebrew name; English Bibles render it ‘Eve’, from Hebrew Chawwah, ‘living’) signifies « life ». Whence one has the right to put this dilemma to the author of Genesis: either the language of our first parents is Hebrew, and then, that language not having been lost, the story of the tower of Babel must be struck out; or Adam gave his wife a name taken from the famous primitive language, today lost, and then the sacred author has committed a blunder. In one case as in the other, the inspiring pigeon has made fun, this time again, of the writer.

Now, it is going to be seen that Jehovah did not immediately drive Adam and Eve from the earthly paradise, contrary to the widespread opinion. First, Papa Good God, finding their costume of fig leaves too summary, improvised himself a tailor.

« 21. And the Eternal God made for Adam and for his wife robes of skins, and he clothed them therewith. »

For the making of these garments, here then is a massacre of innocent beasts; the slaughterhouse was inaugurated by Elohim in person. After that, how would you have our first parents not have thought at once of using for their food the flesh of the animals so smartly immolated and skinned? Bosh for the diet of bread and grass! they must have said within themselves.

And the lord Jehovah would quite well have left Adam and Eve to live and die in Eden, if, some time after having clothed them, he had not bethought himself of that marvellous tree of life, whose fruits the man and the woman had not had the idea of munching.

« 22. Now, the Eternal God said to himself: Behold, the man is become as one of us (sic); he knoweth good and evil. But, now, care must be taken lest he also put forth his hand towards the tree of life, and pluck the fruit thereof and eat, and thus live eternally. »

Such is verse 22 which the tonsured ones omit, and with reason, in their summaries of the Bible.

Thus, it is clear, that: our two ninnies Adam and Eve, to whom the fruit of the tree of life had not been forbidden, foolishly neglected it; and if the man and the woman, while Jehovah was busy cutting out their costumes of skins, had had the happy inspiration to pounce upon one of those marvellous fruits and to swallow it quickly, it is the old raging judge who would have made a nose! (‘made a nose’ — fr. ‘faire un nez’, to pull a long face, to look put out)... Slap! his sentence became all at once unexecutable.

Is it not so, that it is decidedly droll, the Holy Bible, as soon as one reads it closely?... Not only is he seeing things, this single God who lets slip an acknowledgment of the existence of several gods; but further, he, the alleged all-powerful, avows, like an imbecile, his impotence to apply his decree of condemnation to death. On what a little it turned, just see! With a little presence of mind, Adam and Eve would have made themselves immortal, in spite of God himself!!!

And how the old Jehovah must have congratulated himself on having at last remembered that rascal of a tree of life!... no, words cannot tell it... For certain, he had tied a knot in his handkerchief. Without that!...

« 23. And the Eternal God caused Adam to go forth from the garden of Eden, that he might till the earth whereof he had been kneaded.

24. Thus he drove out the man; and then he placed a Cherub before the entrance of the garden, with a blade of a sword of fire, which turned this way and that to keep the way of the tree of life. »

20. Adam and Eve driven from the earthly paradise.

No mistake, is there?... It is indeed this unlucky tree of life which preoccupied master Elohim the most. At no price must Adam and Eve be able to return to it. But then what a confounded idea Papa Good God had had, to create that tree!... Come: with his knowledge of the future, he knew in a certain fashion that our first parents would sin and that he would condemn them to death, them and the whole human race; then this tree of life could be nothing but an embarrassment to him; it was so simple not to plant it!... Here is a precious Jehovah who would do no harm to put himself on a course of cold douches; after that, perhaps hydrotherapy establishments are conspicuous in heaven by their absence, although the beginning of Genesis has taught us the existence of upper waters, situated above the expanse in which the stars move... And again, this idea of immobilizing a Cherub with a flaming sword at the gate of Eden, that is what is stupid, oh! yes!... With a word, with a single effort of will, God could annihilate the troublesome tree of life, henceforth without reason to exist; and the All-Powerful never thought of it!...

Well, so be it for the Cherub, a sentry without a sentry-box!... This Cherub is a precious orderly, in case the discovery of Eden should tempt some new Christopher Columbus.

Come, an explorer of good will is wanted. Among my readers, does anyone wish to put down his name?... Since Papa Good God took the trouble to have the gate of Eden guarded, since he went so far as to take defensive measures to prevent humanity for ever from entering the road which leads to the tree of life, it follows that the earthly paradise and the marvellous tree still exist somewhere. If, in exploring the region where the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates are, we perceive upon a road, in front of a portal, a Cherub brandishing a blade of a sword of fire, we shall have no doubt, we shall be able to say: We are there! it is here!

A hundred thousand francs reward to whoever shall find the Cherub!

And first of all, what exactly is this individual? « Cherub » is the word which figures in the Hebrew text of Genesis. This word signifies « an ox »; it comes from charab, « to plough ». In fact, the Hebrews had kept numerous memories of their servitude in Egypt, and they copied the Egyptians pretty largely in many usages, even in what concerned the minute details of worship; it is thus that they roughly sculptured oxen, of which they made kinds of sphinxes, composite animals, such as they placed in their sanctuaries. These figures had two faces, one of a man, one of an ox, and wings, as well as legs of a man and feet of an ox. Today, the tonsured ones have changed all that: of the Cherub they have made the Chérubin, and the Chérubins of the new worship are young chubby-cheeked angels, but without bodies, having only a child’s head with two little wings; one sees these comical angels in quantities of church pictures... It is probable that the angelic doorkeeper of the earthly paradise does not answer to this last description, and that it is, on the contrary, a Cherub in the Hebrew fashion, with a head of two faces, one of them an ox’s; which will enable our explorer to recognize him from afar. Or, if it is a Chérubin in the Catholic fashion, without body or hands, it must be with his teeth that he holds his flaming sword, and, in that way too, he will not be able to remain unnoticed. But I incline towards the porter with the half-human, half-bovine head. (‘Chérubin’ — fr. Taxil sets the Hebrew ‘Chérub’ against the French ‘Chérubin’, the plump winged infant head of church painting; English has only ‘cherub’ for both, so the French form is kept. ‘porter’ — fr. ‘pipelet’, Paris slang for a concierge, after a character in Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris)

Courage then, to the search for Eden! notice to amateurs!... Even should we not succeed in penetrating it, the excursion will be interesting; one will at the very least make the tour of the garden, and one will fix the site upon the maps of geography, which, without that, would always be incomplete.

Meanwhile, let us now see what Adam and Eve did, once outside the earthly paradise, and having the entire knowledge of good and evil... including seasickness. (‘seasickness’ — fr. ‘le mal’ means both ‘evil’ and ‘sickness’, so ‘le mal de mer’, seasickness, is smuggled into the knowledge of good and evil)

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CHAPTER 2

Short history of the first men

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Holy Scripture does not abound in biographical details on the account of the first men.

The fourth chapter of Genesis cuts short the suppositions of the jovial commentators, who wished to see the work of love in the story of the apple, gathered by Eve, on the counsel of the serpent, and eaten in common with Adam. It is after the expulsion from Eden that our first parents set about making themselves a posterity. The text of the Bible is sufficiently explicit.

« 1. Now, Adam knew Eve his wife, who then conceived and brought forth Cain; and she said: I have gotten a man by the Eternal.

2. She brought forth also Abel his brother. And Abel was a shepherd, and Cain was a tiller of the ground. »

Persons who have not deepened the study of theology and of theologians are a thousand leagues from suspecting the extravagant discussions which this grave affair of the conception of the first human baby has stirred up among the Jewish and Christian commentators. In spite of the above text, some, not finding it clear enough yet, and partisans all the same of the work of love accomplished in Eden, have put forward the opinion that Eve, scarcely created, lost her virginity, and that the serpent profited, to tempt her, by the moment when Adam was asleep in order to rest from his conjugal fatigues. The others, having at their head St. Jerome, who composed the Vulgate by translating directly from the Hebrew, are of opinion that verse 1 of chapter 4 of Genesis proves that Adam never dreamed of knowing Eve until they were driven from paradise.

And the appreciations have not stopped there!... The theologians who have adopted St. Jerome’s way of seeing have divided among themselves, in virtue of the fine reasoning which follows: it being admitted that the consummation of the marriage took place after the departure from Eden, there is no motive for its having been immediately, there and then; then, when? at what precise moment?... When one is a theologian, one wants to rummage into everything; those men are of an unimaginable curiosity, above all in questions of this sort. There have therefore been people who have retailed that Adam deferred for fifteen years and even thirty years the decisive operation. Others push the thing still further and gravely maintain that Adam and Eve, by a common resolution and in order to weep for their sin, broke their continence only at the end of... a hundred years!

You think that is the end?... Ah! how little you know the theologians! Some have unearthed a tradition, in virtue of which Adam is supposed to have remained excommunicated for a hundred and fifty years for having eaten of the forbidden fruit, and to have lived during that time with a woman who, like him, had been formed of the earth and whom they name Lilia; they add that he begot devils by his commerce with this woman, and that at last he married Eve, when his excommunication was lifted, and that then he begot men. It is just to say that this opinion has not prevailed. Finally, other commentators, likewise qualified as heretics and cited by St. Epiphanius, have maintained that the devil had had to do with Eve as a husband with his wife, and that even after the departure from Eden, and that he had had by her Cain and Abel. Here then are compensations: Adam leaves Eve to make devils with another woman, and the devil goes to find Eve to make men with her.

And the question of Eve’s confinements?... The dear theologians have found in it too an inexhaustible mine of controversies. But that would lead us too far. Lastly, let us recall a celebrated and learned dissertation of the German Reinhardt, in which is agitated the question of knowing whether, yes or no, Adam and Eve had a navel!...

All that is nonsense, as the other fellow says. Let us come to what is serious, seeing that what is serious in the Bible is none the less enough to make one die of laughing.

So then Abel was a shepherd, and Cain a tiller of the soil (Genesis 4:2); and we are soon going to see that old crack-brain of a Jehovah prefer Abel to Cain. Now, I beg you to reflect upon it for one second only: which of the two sons of Adam, if you please, had obeyed God in the choice of his profession? It is Cain, by Jove! since the Eternal had ordered humanity to cultivate the earth and to feed itself exclusively on what the fields should produce, save for turning the wheat into bread. Abel, for his part, sets up as a shepherd; if he kept and reared flocks of sheep, it was evidently not for the pleasure of watching them graze while threading pearls (‘threading pearls’ — fr. ‘enfiler des perles’, to waste one’s time on idle trifles); it is, in reality, because he appreciated the sheep above all from the point of view of the leg and the cutlets, on which he regaled himself, that stands to reason. Abel therefore squarely contravened the formal and recent divine prescriptions; and it is he who was the little darling of the lord Jehovah!... Decidedly, O priceless curés, it is not in your tabernacles that you must shut up your Papa Good God; it is in a cell at Charenton. (‘Charenton’ — the celebrated lunatic asylum near Paris)

« 3. Now, it came to pass at the end of some time that Cain offered in oblation unto the Eternal of the fruits of the earth;

4. And that Abel also offered of the firstborn of his flock, and of their fat. And the Eternal was content with Abel and with his presents;

5. But he was not content with Cain nor with his presents. And Cain was irritated, and his countenance was cast down. »

21. Offerings of Abel to God.

There was indeed reason to take it ill.

« 6. And the Eternal said unto Cain: Why art thou angry and why is thy countenance cast down?

7. If thou doest well, shall it not be received? But, if thou doest not well, the penalty of sin is at the door. Now, its desires relate unto thee; and it shall be under thy power. »

22. Offerings of Cain.

The Bible mentions no reply of Cain to God. I confess that, had I found myself in his place, the incomprehensible gibberish of verse 7 would have completely dumbfounded me.

Cain was not a prophet. Otherwise, neglecting the aforesaid gibberish, he might have answered his interlocutor:

— So it is the offerings of meat that you prefer, my old Jehovah?... Well then, you are setting an example which will be followed by the pagan sacrificers... You have precisely the same tastes as the idols will have, and these tastes will later be declared gross and unworthy of the divinity... do you know by whom?... by the very priests of Catholicism.

But Cain made no reply. This man, who had taken so much trouble to bring to a good end the cultivation of his melons, who offered to the Lord his most succulent cantaloups and who saw them despised, this man understood that God was making fun of him into the bargain, and he was so vexed at it that he lost his head for a moment. Instead of bearing a grudge against the capricious and impolite Jehovah, he committed the fault of taking it out on his brother.

« 8. And Cain said unto Abel his brother: Let us go forth. And when they were in the fields, Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. »

23. Murder of Abel by Cain.

It did not drag on, one sees; Cain was an expeditious fellow. He invites his brother to take a little stroll outside; he draws him off into the fields, under some pretext or other, to look for beetles together, for example. Once there, quickly a German quarrel, about boots (‘a German quarrel, about boots’ — fr. ‘une querelle d’Allemand, à propos de bottes’: a dispute picked over absolutely nothing); then, a good blow with a pickaxe on the head. Slap! that is done. And it is the darling of Papa Good God who, in humanity, has the first use of death.

After which, what passes in Cain’s noddle? Is he annihilated at the spectacle of his crime?... Not at all. He is suddenly metamorphosed into a hardened scoundrel, into game for the convict-prison. (‘game for the convict-prison’ — fr. ‘gibier de bagne’, one destined for the hulks) He has not the least remorse, and he, but a moment ago so dejected, is going to show himself insolent towards the lord Jehovah, who will inspire him with no fear whatever.

« 9. And the Eternal said unto Cain: Where is Abel thy brother? And Cain answered him: I know nothing of it; am I my brother’s keeper, I? »

24. « Cain, what hast thou done with thy brother? »

One seems to see the picture: Papa Good God appearing at the corner of a cloud and calling out to the murderer, and Cain who sends him something like And your sister? (‘And your sister?’ — fr. ‘Et ta sœur?’, a common Parisian retort meaning ‘mind your own business’) with the perfect serenity of a professional criminal, who believes he has made every trace of the assassination disappear and thumbs his nose at the gendarmes. Now, Jehovah had not missed a detail of the drama; his divine eye was not at fault, this time.

« 10. And God said: What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth from the earth unto me. »

25. The blood of the victim rises up against the assassin.

It is clear that a terrible chastisement is going to punish so much villainy and effrontery.

Let us then see the sequel of Jehovah’s discourse:

« 11. Therefore, now, thou shalt be cursed even by the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive from thy hand thy brother’s blood!

12. When thou shalt till the earth, she shall no more yield thee her fruit; and thou shalt be also a vagabond and a fugitive upon all the earth. »

Here is Cain condemned to vagabondage, to have neither fire nor place, to walk always without being able to stop anywhere, forerunner of the legendary Wandering Jew. But, if he is going to be a fugitive without rest or truce, he will not at the same time be a ploughman, which is an essentially sedentary profession; how would he set about ploughing, even to pure loss? — If a man charged with vagabondage proves to the tribunal that he is a ploughman, if he establishes that he possesses a field and that he cultivates it, his acquittal is certain; the accusation has collapsed, he is not a vagabond.

Thereupon, Cain gets the funk, such a fright that he loses sight of the fact that humanity is composed in all of three persons, his father, his mother and himself, and he imagines that he may be killed in his turn by the other men, who do not exist. That is a pretty cerebral derangement, that is! Well, it is there in so many words in the Bible.

« 13. And Cain said unto the Eternal: My punishment is greater than I can bear.

14. Behold: thou hast driven me out this day from off this earth, and I shall hide myself from before thy face, and I shall be a vagabond and a fugitive upon all the earth; then it shall come to pass that whosoever meeteth me shall kill me. »

At this, the wrath of old Jehovah calms down. He does not remit Cain’s condemnation to perpetual vagabondage; but, losing in his turn the sense of the situation, he does not wish the penalty to be aggravated. And so he takes Cain under his protection against these impossible assassins. If that is not delirium, I ask what will be!

« 15. And the Eternal said unto Cain: Whosoever shall kill Cain shall be punished sevenfold double. And God set a mark upon Cain, that those who should meet him might not kill him. »

26. Cain is marked with a sign of reprobation.

One expects to read now some account of Cain’s vagabondage. Ah! well, no, indeed! Nobody was ever more sedentary than this fugitive.

« 16. Then, Cain went out from before the face of the Eternal, and he came to dwell in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

17. There, Cain knew his wife, who conceived and brought forth Enoch; and he built a city which he called Enoch, after the name of his son. »

We learn thereby that Cain married: the author does not say whom; but it follows as a matter of course that Adam and Eve had daughters, of whom the Bible has neglected to speak, and that Cain married one of his sisters. We shall not make a crime of it for him; incest was obligatory in the first ages of humanity.

What rather makes us leap, so great is our surprise, is this city founded by Cain. It is already a strong thing, a vagabond who builds a city; but what workmen had he in his service? what instruments were used to construct the houses? and where in short did Cain recruit citizens to people his city of Enoch?... And the humbug Holy Ghost made the pious author whom he was inspiring swallow this fine story!...

The following verses give us the descent of Cain. Enoch begets Irad; Irad begets Mehujael; Mehujael begets Methushael. Of these personages one knows nothing but their name. Methushael begets a certain Lamech, greedier in marriage than his noble forefathers. The venerable Lamech is, in fact, the inventor of polygamy; he treats himself to two wives for his own single self, which proves that the article was beginning to be no longer rare. By his wife Adah he had two sons, named

Jabal and Jubal, and by his wife Zillah he had a son, Tubal-Cain, and a daughter, Naamah.

It appears that the sons of Jabal preferred the country to the city built by their ancestor Cain; for they were the first upon earth to dwell under tents (Genesis 4:20). As for the sons of Jubal, the city pleased them, on the contrary, and they were the gayest of the family; they loved music. « Jubal was the father of all those who play the violin and the organ. » (Genesis 4:21) Tubal-Cain, for his part, was the biblical Vulcan: « he forged all sorts of instruments of brass and iron. » (Genesis 4:22)

The polygamist Lamech seems to have lodged in his ceiling a spider of a fairly fine size (‘lodged in his ceiling a spider’ — fr. ‘avoir une araignée au plafond’, to have a screw loose); for Genesis reports of him a speech which has the merit of being short, but which no commentator has ever been able to understand.

« 23. Now, Lamech said one day unto Adah and unto Zillah, his wives: Wives of Lamech, hearken well unto my words. I will kill a man, if I be wounded; I will kill even a young man, if I be bruised.

24. For, if Cain was to be avenged sevenfold double, I, Lamech, shall be avenged seventy times seven times. »

This discourse astounded Mesdames Adah and Zillah in the highest degree; they were, no doubt, as though petrified by it and did not ask the least explanation. Holy Scripture passes immediately to the mention of the birth of Seth, third son of Adam.

« 25. And Adam knew again his wife who brought forth a son and called him Seth; for God, said she, hath given me another son, in replacement of Abel whom Cain slew.

« 26. And, a son was born to Seth, and he called him Enos. It is then that men began to invoke the name of Jehovah. »

The fifth chapter of Genesis is devoted solely to giving the genealogy of Noah, descendant of Adam by Seth. The sacred author occupies himself no more with the descent of Cain.

We find therefore the following order, in which only the eldest sons are named: Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah. But the most curious thing in this chapter is the affirmation of the extraordinary longevity of all these patriarchs. Adam was a hundred and thirty years old when he had Seth, and he lived eight hundred years more. Seth died at nine hundred and twelve years; Enos, at nine hundred and five years; Cainan, at nine hundred and ten years, etc. The one who died youngest was Lamech, father of Noah; this Lamech, who must not be confounded with the crack-brained polygamist of a moment ago, deceased in the seven hundred and seventy-seventh spring of his age.

Enoch, son of Jared, was craftier than all the others; he quite simply did not die.

« 21. Enoch lived sixty-five years, and he then begat Methuselah.

22. And Enoch, after he had begotten Methuselah, walked with God during three hundred years; and he begat sons and daughters.

23. All the time therefore that Enoch lived was three hundred and sixty-five years.

24. Now, Enoch, having thus walked with God, appeared no more, because God took him away. » (Genesis, ch. 5)

27. Enoch, an old patriarch, is caught up to heaven.

This episode is too fine; any commentary whatever would deflower it. Let us admire!

As for Methuselah, it is he who unhooked the timbale of longevity (‘unhooked the timbale’ — fr. ‘décrocher la timbale’, to carry off the prize, from the drum-shaped cup once hung at the top of a greasy pole at fairs). He had sinew, the good man; judge of it. He lived in continence until the age of a hundred and eighty-seven years, happy epoch at which he treated himself to the luxury of having a brat, and, after the birth of young Lamech II, he found the means of living seven hundred and eighty-two years more, giving to the very end proofs of his virility.

28. Methuselah is a father at a hundred and eighty-seven years.

« 26. Methuselah, after he had begotten Lamech, lived seven hundred and eighty-two years, begetting still sons and daughters. » (Textual!)

Total: nine hundred and sixty-nine years. No small matter!... People were hard to kill, in those days.

And father Noah?...

«30. Lamech called his son Noah, saying: This one shall relieve us of our work and of the labour of our hands, upon this earth which the Eternal hath cursed...

33. And Noah had passed five hundred years, when he begat Shem, Ham and Japheth. »

To be five hundred years old, and only then to set about billing and cooing with one’s little wife?... Better late than never!...

Much ink has been made to flow on the subject of the extraordinary longevity of the patriarchs of Genesis. Catholic doctors, feeling how far too difficult these hoaxes were to digest, have attempted to save the narratives of the Holy Ghost from ridicule; they have advanced that one ought perhaps to understand years as lunations, insinuating that at that epoch people no doubt reckoned solely by moons. At that rate, Methuselah would have died an octogenarian, that is all. But these obliging commentators have been roundly snubbed by the fanatics who set store by these miracles of longevity of the first men.

Canon Rohrbacher, among others, in his Universal History of the Church, declares that it is indeed a question of years of twelve months, and he cites, notably, the example of Abraham, who, according to Genesis, « died in a happy old age, being very aged and full of days, having lived a hundred and seventy-five years » (Genesis 25:7-8). If one had to reckon by lunations,

Abraham would then have lived only fourteen years and seven months in all, says Rohrbacher, and that would not accord with the expressions employed by the sacred author. The same theologian, in order to prove that the years indicated in Genesis are really of twelve months, cites again several personages whose age at the moment of the birth of their first-born the divine text makes known: Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel begot at the age of ninety, of seventy, of sixty-five years; reckoning by lunations, says Rohrbacher, it would then have to be admitted that they had children at the age of seven years and a half, of five years ten months, of five years five months! And Nahor, who begot at twenty-nine years, according to the biblical text, can one reasonably believe, cries the learned canon, that this means that he was in reality two years and five months old when he had his first child?...

No, good Rohrbacher, and it is you who are in the right: the years of which Genesis speaks are incontestably of twelve months. And so, nothing is more amusing than the case of the good man Noah, who waited until he was a full five hundred years old before he got down to hanky-panky.