The sculpture above described is not earlier than the sixteenth century. A few paces from it, in the same line and almost under the tower, is another grotto called _La Babayou_--that is to say "of the statue," and it probably at one time enshrined an image of a saint.

On the left of the subterranean church is the fountain of the little Cut-throat already mentioned. S. Sicarius, whose relics were the great "draw" to Brantome in the Middle Ages, was supposed to have been one of the Innocents slain by Herod; and the relics were also supposed to have been given to the abbey by Charlemagne. As there was no historic evidence that Charles the Great ever had a set of little bones pa.s.sed off on him as those of the Innocent, or that he ever made a present to the abbey of a relic, it will be seen that a good deal of supposition goes to the story. As I have said before, how it was that the child of a Hebrew mother acquired a Latin name, and that one so peculiar, we are not informed.

Outside the town gate are other large excavations that are supposed to have formed a temple of Mithras, but this is mere conjecture. The largest is now employed as a _Tir_--a shooting gallery. That there were buildings connected with it is seen by the holes in the rock to receive rafters.

S. Maximus, Bishop of Riez, who died in 460, was born at Chateau Redon, near Digne, and he entered the monastic life on the isle of Lerins, under S. Honoratus, and when that saint was raised in 426 to the episcopal throne of Arles, Maximus succeeded him as Abbot of Lerins.

But this monastery was becoming crowded, and Maximus pined for the solitary life, so one day he took a boat, crossed to the mainland, and plunged into the wild country about the river Verdon, that has sawn for itself a chasm through the limestone; where it debouches, he planted himself at a place since called Moustier-Ste-Marie. The lips of the creva.s.se are linked by a chain, with a gilt star hanging in the midst, little under 690 feet above the bed of the torrent. No one knows when this star was hung there, but it is supposed to have been an _ex voto_ of a chevalier, de Blac. Within the ravine, reached by a narrow goat-path, were caves in the cliffs, and into one of these Maximus retired in 434 and was speedily followed by other solitaries.

The caves are still there, the faces walled up, but as at Liguge, and as at Marmoutier, and as at Brantome, so was it here. As the monastery grew rich, the solitaries crawled out of their holes into which the sun never shone, and erected their residence at the opening of the ravine.

A chapel remains, founded by Charlemagne, but rebuilt in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, reached by a stair protected by a parapet.

Moustier was famous at the close of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century for its faience, with elegant designs and good colouring. Specimens are now extremely scarce. Two vases of this ware may be seen on the altar of the chapel. The princ.i.p.al potters there were Pierre Fournier, Joseph Olery, Paul Rouse, and Feraud. They usually signed their work with their initials. Maximus was just a century later than Martin; the fever for imitating the lives of the Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt was then in full heat. His master, Honoratus, had been wont to escape from his island monastery and hide in a cave in the glowing red porphyry rocks of the Esterelle. I can understand his retiring thither, above a sea blue as the neck of a peac.o.c.k, among glowing red rocks, and ma.s.ses of pines, and heather, and arbutus, and every kind of fragrant herb, and where, when only snowdrops are appearing in England, the spires of white asphodel are basking in the sun.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAVES OF LIGUGe

The primitive rock monastery of S. Martin. It was abandoned later when the monks moved to the further side of the river; but Felix, a disciple of S. Martin, remained and died in the cave, now inaccessible, below the cross.]

Near Nottingham are the "Popish Holes," close to the river Lene. They are thus described by Stukeley. "One may easily guess Nottingham to have been an ancient town of the Britons; as soon as they had proper tools they fell to work upon the rocks, which everywhere offer themselves so commodiously to make houses in, and I doubt not first was a considerable collection of this sort. What is visible at present is not so old a date as their time, yet I see no reason to doubt but it is formed upon theirs. There is a ledge of perpendicular rock hewn out into a church, houses, chambers, dove-houses, &c. The church is like those in the rocks of Bethlehem and other places in the Holy Land; the altar is natural rock, and there has been painting upon the wall, a steeple, I suppose, where a bell hung, and regular pillars. The river winding about makes a fortification to it, for it comes at both ends of the cliff, leaving a plain in the middle. The way into it was by a gate cut out of the rock, and with an oblique entrance for more safety.

Without is a plain with three niches, which I fancy their place of judicature, or the like. Between this and the castle is a hermitage of like workmanship."

These remains pertain to a cell called S. Mary le Rock, a quarter of a mile west of the Castle, and belonged to Lenton priory. It was abandoned after the time of Edward IV., and is supposed to have come down in a perfect form to the time of the Civil War, when it was much injured by the Puritans as Papists' holes. A good many ill.u.s.trations exist of it after the Civil Wars, as a large folding plate in Throsby's and Thoroton's "History of Nottinghamshire," 1797, but there is none to show what it was before.

It possesses a pigeonry much like that at Brantome, but on a smaller scale, that wiseacres have p.r.o.nounced to be a Columbarium, not for doves, but for the reception of jars containing the ashes of the dead, and have attributed this dovecote to Roman times. Mr. William Stetton, a local antiquary, writing in 1806, stated that the excavation "appeared to have been made in the earliest ages of Christianity, when the converts resorted for secrecy and security to grottoes or caves, and similar places of retirement and seclusion. The style is evidently Roman. The whole interior appears to have been invested with a thin plastering, or perhaps, only a wash, which has been painted in various colours in mosaic devices. The altar still remains pretty perfect notwithstanding the ravages of time and wanton depredation. A Roman column still adorns the north side of it, but its corresponding one on the south side has long been destroyed."

An architect, John Carter, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1860, stated that the "arrangements of the excavations are monastical; and we, with much satisfaction, trace out the infirmary, refectory, dormitory, chapter-house, and the chapel. The latter place gives two aisles, divided by perforated arches, with headways in the manner of groins, and at the east end an altar."

There can be no question now that although the original excavations were possibly enough Roman-British, the Papists' holes, as we have them now, are truly, as Mr. Carter says, monastical.

How absurd old fashioned antiquaries were may be proved by the fact that the chimney that warmed the monks, and up which went the smoke from their kitchen, was p.r.o.nounced to be a _bustum_, a flue employed for the cremation of the dead. As to the "Roman" column, that also is mediaeval.

Curzon, in his "Monasteries of the Levant," 1849, says "the scenery of Meteora (Mt. Pindus in Albania) is of a very singular kind. The end of a range of rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some earthquake, or washed away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of twenty or thirty tall, thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred feet in height; some like gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar- loaves, and some like vast stalagmites. These rocks are surrounded by a beautiful gra.s.sy plain, on three sides of which grow groups of detached trees, like those of an English park. Some of these rocks shoot up quite clean and perpendicularly from the smooth green gra.s.s, some are in cl.u.s.ters, some stand alone like obelisks. Nothing can be more strange and wonderful than this romantic region, which is unlike anything I have ever seen before or since. In Switzerland, Savoy, the Tyrol, is nothing at all to be compared to these extraordinary peaks.

At the foot of many of these rocks there are numerous caves and holes, some of which appear to be natural, but most of them are artificial; for in the dark and wild ages of monastic fanaticism, whole flocks of hermits roosted in these pigeonholes. Some of these caves are so high up in the rocks that one wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever get up to them, whilst others are below the surface, and the anchorites who burrowed in them, like rabbits, frequently afforded rare sport to parties of roving Saracens; indeed, hermit-hunting scenes seem to have been a fashionable amus.e.m.e.nt previous to the twelfth century. In early Greek frescoes and in small stiff pictures with gold backgrounds, we see many frightful representations of men on horseback in Roman armour, with long spears, who are torturing and slaying Christian devotees. In these pictures the monks and hermits are represented in gowns made of a kind of coa.r.s.e matting, and they have long beards, and some of them are covered with hair; these, I take it, were the ones most to be admired, as in the Greek Church sanct.i.ty is always in the inverse ratio to beauty. All Greek saints are painfully ugly, but the hermits are much uglier, dirtier, and older than the rest. They must have been very fusty people beside, eating roots and living in holes like rats and mice."

On the summit of these needles of rock are monasteries. Of these there were twenty-four, but now seven alone remain tenanted by monks. The sole access to them is by nets let down by ropes and hauled up by a windla.s.s, or as an alternative in the case of that of S. Barlaam, by a succession of ladders.

As an example of a rock monastery and church in Egypt, I may quote the same author's description of that of Der el Adra, or of the Pully, situated on the top of Gebel el Ferr, where a precipice about 200 feet in height rises out of the waters of the Nile.

The access to it is by a cave or fissure in the rock, the opening being about the size of the inside of a capacious chimney. "The abbot crept in at a hole at the bottom, and telling me to observe where he placed his feet, he began to climb up the cleft with considerable agility. A few preliminary lessons from a chimney-sweep would have been of the greatest service to me, but in this branch of art my education had been neglected, and it was with no small difficulty that I climbed up after the abbot, whom I saw striding and sprawling in the att.i.tude of a spread eagle above my head. My slippers soon fell off upon the head of a man under me. At least twenty men were scrambling and puffing underneath him. Arms and legs were stretched out in all manner of att.i.tudes, the forms of the more distant climbers being lost in the gloom of the narrow cavern up which we were advancing. Thence the climb proceeded up a path. At the summit beside the monastic habitations was the church cut out of the rock, to which descent is made by a narrow flight of steps."

Mr. Curzon gives a plan of this church as half catacomb or cave, and one of the earliest Christian buildings which has preserved its originality.

The caves of Inkermann in the Crimea have been already alluded to. Here is a description of a subterranean abandoned monastery and church.

"Having traversed a pa.s.sage about fifty feet long, we reached a church, or rather the remains of one; for a portion of the living rock in which these works were cut had fallen and carried with it half of this curious crypt. Its semicircular vaulted roof, and the pillars in its corners, indicated it to be of Byzantine origin; while a Greek sculptured cross, in the centre of the roof, told that it was a temple dedicated to that religion. The altar, and any sculpture which might have existed near it, are gone, and have long since been burnt into lime, or built into some work at Sevastopol. Beyond the church we found a large square apartment, entered by another pa.s.sage, and looking over the valley of Inkermann. A few more cells, resembling those on the stairs, composed the whole of this series of excavated chambers, the arrangements of which at once proclaimed them to have been a monastery.

These were the cells, the refectory, and the church. There is nothing in their construction as a work of art; yet there is an absence of that roughness and simplicity which exist in many caverns of the opposite mountain, and which indicate their being of a much earlier date than these." [Footnote: Scott (C. H.), "The Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Crimea," Lond. 1854, p. 280.]

CHAPTER X

CAVE ORACLES

Standing upon the pinnacle upon which is planted the marvellous Romanesque cathedral of Le Puy, and looking north, is seen in the distance the basaltic ma.s.s of Polignac crowned by a lofty donjon.

That ma.s.s of columnar basalt was occupied and held sacred in Roman times, and was dedicated to Apollo. In the courtyard of the castle is a well, l'Albime it is called, that descends to the depth of 260 feet, and there still exists an enormous stone mask of the solar G.o.d that closed it, and from the mouth of which oracles were given. How these were produced is now made clear. In the side of the well is a chamber cut out of the rock that concealed a confederate who uttered the response to the questioner, and the voice came up hollow and with reverberation betwixt the gaping lips of stone, to overawe and satisfy the inquirer.

"Before the old tribes of h.e.l.las created temples to the divinities,"

says Porphyry in his treatise 'On the Cave of the Nymphs,' "they consecrated caverns and grottoes to their service in the island of Crete to Zeus, in Arcadia to Artemis and Pan, in the isle of Naxos to Dionysos."

And from caves issued the most famous Grecian oracles, and the mysteries were often celebrated in them. The cave in which Zeus as an infant was concealed on Mount Ida naturally became sacred. Kronos had received the Kingdom of the World on condition that he should rear no male children. Accordingly when one was born he ate it. But when Zeus arrived, his mother gave Kronos a stone to eat in place of the child, and hurried off the babe to Crete, where it was nourished in a cave by the Corybantes, who sounded cymbals and drums to drown his cries.

There was a Charonion at Hierapolis, an account of which we get from Apulaeus and Dio Ca.s.sius. It was deep. From the orifice, which was surrounded by a bal.u.s.trade, escaped so dense a vapour that animals held in it died, and men who inhaled it were stupefied. The priests who ministered to the oracle professed to be immune, but Strabo tells us that they simply held their breath when they stooped over the fumes. He who desired to consult the oracle was for a while placed on a platform above the opening.

On the flank of Mount Citheron was a cave dedicated to the Nymphs.

Those who desired to inquire of them entered the grotto, when it was supposed that the Nymphs inspired them with a knowledge of the future; and such persons were ent.i.tled _Nympholeptes_. The corresponding expression among the Latins was _lymphatici_, expressive of the pale and exhausted condition in which they were when they issued from the cave. Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea says: "There are exhalations that produce drowsiness and procure visions;" and Apulaeus says: "Due to the religious fury they inspire, men remain without eating or drinking, and some become prophets and reveal future things."

Apollo was the G.o.d of prophecy above all others. He was born at Delos, according to the poets; and it is there that the Homeric poems say was one of his most ancient sanctuaries. Thence, doubtless, issued the twenty famous oracles at the epoch of the colonisation. At Delphi the priestess was seated on a tripod over a crack in the rock, from which exhaled mephitic vapours that rendered her delirious, and her incoherent exclamations were reduced into hexameters by the attendant priests. But there was also at Delos the Manteion, the prophetic grotto. This has of late years been discovered along with the foundations of the temple. The Manteion is a gallery, naturally bored in the rock. The winds that penetrate it cause strange pipings and hollow moans, that served as an accompaniment to the oracles. But the most remarkable of these caverns was that of Trophonios in Beotia.

Pausanius tells us the legend of its origin. The Beotians had suffered from drought for two years and sent to consult the oracle of Delphi.

The reply received was that they must refer themselves to Trophonios at home. But who was the party? The Beotians had never heard of him. Then the oldest of their deputies recalled having once pursued a swarm of bees and followed it till it disappeared in a cave. That doubtless was the spot, and there, after the offering of sacrifices, Trophonios obligingly showed himself, and explained who he was and what were his powers. Since that time his oracle was much consulted, and happily an account of how he, or his priests, befooled visitors to the cave has been given us by Pausanius from his personal experience.

Those who wished to consult the oracle had first to purify themselves by spending some days in the sanctuary of the Guardian Spirit and of Fortune, to abstain from warm baths, but to bathe in the river Hercynia; they might eat as much as they liked of the meat offered in sacrifice. "You are conducted during the night to the river, where you are bathed and rubbed with oil by two boys of the age of thirteen. Then the priests take possession of you, and you are conducted to two fountains side by side. You drink of one, that of Oblivion, so as to disengage your thoughts from what is past, then that of Remembrance, to a.s.sure your recollecting what is about to take place. After having addressed your prayers to a statue, you go to the oracle, dressed in a linen tunic girded below the breast, and booted in the fashion of the country. The oracle is on the mountain above the sacred grove. It is surrounded by a marble wall, about the height of your waist. On this wall are planted twigs of copper linked together by copper filaments, and the gates are in this grating. Within this enclosure is a chasm, not natural, but excavated with a good deal of art and regularity, in form like a baker's oven. There is no ladder there for descent into the cave, and one is brought, that is light and narrow. Once at the bottom you see on one side, between the ground and the masonry, a hole about large enough for a man to squeeze through. One lies on the back, and holding in one hand a honey-cake, thrust the feet in at the opening, and then work oneself till the legs are in up to the knees. Then, all at once, the rest of the body is dragged down with force and rapidity, just as if you were swept forward by an eddy in a river.

"Once arrived in the secret place, all do not learn the future in the same manner. Some see what is to befall them unrolled in vision, others hear it by the ear. Then you ascend by the same opening whereby you descended, going feet foremost. No one, it is said, has died in the cave, with the exception of one of the guardsmen of Demetrius, and he went down, not to consult the G.o.d, but in hopes of plundering the sanctuary of its gold and silver; his carcase, they say, was not ejected by the orifice that is sacred, but was found in another spot.

On issuing from the cave of Trophonios the priests lay hold of you, and after having planted you on the seat of Remembrance, question you as to what you have seen and heard. When you have told them, they hand you over, overwhelmed with fear, and unrecognisable by yourself and others, to other ministers who convey you to the edifice dedicated to the Good Genius and to Fortune."

Those issuing from the cave for long after remained dejected, pale, and melancholy. Pausanius says that after a while one who had gone through the ordeal could laugh; but Suidas tells us that those who returned from having made the descent never smiled again, and this gave occasion to a saying relative to a preternaturally grave personage, "He has consulted the oracle of Trophonios."

Plutarch gives us some further particulars. The description made by one of the characters he introduces speaks of visions caught by inhaling a stupefying gas. Under its influence hallucinations were produced in which Trophonios himself was thought to appear, and the tortures of Tartarus were revealed. On emerging from the cave into fresh air, the questioner fell into fits of delirium, and thought he still saw strange visions. In the biography of Apollonios of Tyana, Philostratus tells us that the sage and wonder-worker was very desirous to penetrate into the cave, but that the priest raised objections and made difficulties, till at last his patience failed and he entered by main force and remained within seven days. So much in this semi-fict.i.tious biography is true perhaps--that this hero did force his way in. It is also true that he had sufficient discretion not to tell what he had discovered of the tricks there perpetrated.

There was another of these caves at Acharaca, near Nysa, on the road to Tralles. The gas there exhaled had a medical healing virtue, and also gave occasion to the delivery of oracles. Persons suffering from an illness and placing confidence in the power of the G.o.ds, travelled thither and stayed some time with the priests, who lived near the cave.

Those ministers of the G.o.ds then entered the cavern and spent a night in it. After that they prescribed to their patients the remedies revealed to them in their dreams. Often, however, they took their patients along with them into the cave, where they were expected to remain for several days fasting and falling into prophetic sleep.

About four centuries before the Christian era, there existed at Rome a temple dedicated to Jupiter Capitolinus, by the Tarquins, and beneath it was a subterranean chamber in which were preserved a collection of ancient oracles, the keeping of which was confided to his officers, the duumviri, and the penalty of death attached to the divulgation unlicensed, of their contents.

According to the legend, a strange woman, the sibyl of c.u.mae, brought to Tarquin the old nine books of oracles, and demanded for them three hundred pieces of gold. The king considered the price exorbitant, scoffed at the woman, and refused to buy. Thereupon the sibyl cast three of the volumes into the fire, and demanded the same sum precisely for the remaining six. Tarquin again declined to purchase. She then burnt three more, but still required for the remainder the original price. The king now thought that he had acted unwisely, and hastened to conclude the bargain and secure the oracles that contained prophecies relative to the destiny of the Roman people.

The oracles were written on palm-leaves in Greek, and with various signs and hieroglyphs, and the volumes were bundles of these leaves tied together.

In the year 671 of Rome, eighteen years before the Christian era, the old Temple of Jupiter, built by the Tarquins, was destroyed by fire, and with it perished the Books of Destiny. Six years after the temple was rebuilt, and an attempt was made to recover the Sibylline oracles, by sending throughout Italy for oracles reported to be Sibylline. The deputies sent brought back from Erythaea a thousand verses, but the collection rapidly increased in such quant.i.ties that Augustus ordered them to be examined, and such as proved to be worthless he burnt. After a second sifting, those that remained were put into two golden coffers and placed under the pedestal of the statue of the Palatine Apollo.

As is well known, there were in circulation a number of forged Sibylline oracles; some of these were the product of the Jewish Therapeutae, others of Christians. In his hatred of Christianity, the Emperor Julian ordered search to be made for these fict.i.tious oracular books, that they might be destroyed. In 363 the Temple of the Palatine Apollo caught fire and was destroyed. The Christians charged Julian with having caused the fire so as to get rid of the Sibylline oracles hid under the statue of Apollo. But these had not been injured; the gold boxes in which they were, were opened, and to their confusion the Christians found that the oracles contained no prophecies concerning Christ, only _sortes_ celebrating the G.o.ds Zeus, Aphrodite, Hera, &c.

The accusation brought by the Christians against Julian recoiled upon them, for it was they who, later, by the hands of Stilicho, destroyed the collection. The order for the destruction was given by two Christian emperors, Honorius and Arcadius, on the plea that these oracles favoured and encouraged paganism.

Saul, it will be remembered went to consult a witch in the cave of Endor, where she conjured up before him the spirit of Samuel.

Isaiah rebukes the Jews for "lodging in the monuments," doubtless to obtain oracles from the dead, to raise up the ghosts of the deceased, and exhort from them prophecies as to the future. As already pointed out, the dead and the pagan G.o.ds were one and the same. To consult a deity was to consult a hero or an ancestor of a former age.