Note 9 — Chapter XX · The Holy Ghost.

Under alien influences, also, the supreme and absolute government of Jehovah had been divided, as is elsewhere described. He who originally claimed the empire of both light and darkness, good and evil, when his rivalry against other gods was on a question of power, had to be relieved of responsibility for earthly evils when the moral sense demanded dualism. Thus there grew up a separate personification of the destructive power of Jehovah, which had been supposed to lodge in his breath. The last breath of man obviously ends life; there is nothing more simple in its natural germ than the association of the first breath and the last with the Creative Spirit.9 This potency of the breath or spirit is found in many ancient regions. It is the natural teaching of the destructive simoom,10 or even of the annual autumnal breath which strikes the foliage with death. Persia especially abounded with superstitions of this character. By a sorcerer’s breath the two serpents were evoked from the breast of Zohák. Nizami has woven the popular notion into his story of the two physicians who tried to destroy each other; one of whom survived his rival’s poisonous draught, and killed that rival by making him smell a flower on which he had breathed.11 Such notions as these influenced powerfully the later development of the idea of Jehovah, concerning whom it was said of old, ‘With the breath of his mouth shall he slay the wicked;’ ‘the breath of the Lord like a stream of brimstone doth kindle (Tophet).’