Note 4 — THE MYTH OF SIMON MAGUS

For there is abundant evidence, to begin with, that a name of which the basis is Sem is one of the oldest of Semitic God-names. We have the forms Shem, Sime-on, Sams-on, S(h)amas (the Babylonian name of the sun; Hebrew Shemesh), San-d-on, or Samdan4 Semēn and Sem, all plainly connected with a sun-myth. Shamas or Samas was an Assyrian Sun-God, the duplicate of Melkarth and Hercules. Samson or Simson or Shimshai (= the Sun-man), the Hebrew Sun-hero, is unquestionably a mere variant of that myth. Sand-on, also a Sun-God, is the same myth over again. Baal-Samēn, “the Lord of Heaven,”5 is the same conception as Baal-Melkarth; Baal, “the Lord,” a Sun-God himself as well as Supreme God, being joined with the Sun-God proper. The name Sem, again, is found as signifying Hercules, in conjunction with those of Harpocrates and the Egyptian Hermes,6 and is probably involved in the mythical queen-name Semiramis (Sammuramat), since she in one of the myths gets her name from Simmas, “keeper of the king’s flocks,” who rears her7—another form of the Sun-God, belike. Simeon, in the myth of the twelve tribes, is one of the twin-brethren, who in all mythologies are at bottom solar deities. The “on” means “great,” as in Samson, Dagon, Solomon, etc.;8 and the Dioscuri of the Greek and Roman myth were “the Great Twin Brethren.” It was added to the name of the Samaritan God Êl Êlyon, “Great Êl,”9 who is just the Êl (singular of Elohim) of the Hebrews. But the name Shem itself means “the Lofty”;10 and the name of the mythical ancestor of the Shemites is at bottom a God-name, just as are those of Noach, Abram, Jacob, and Isra-ēl. It may also, it appears, have had the significance of “red-shining.”11 And, last but not least, the same vocable also has the significance of “name,” so that the Semites or sons of S(h)em were also “the men with names”12; and the Hebrew “Shem hemmaphorash” or Tetragrammaton was the name of four letters (IEUE = Yahweh) or “the peculiar name.”13 Lenormant declares14 that this last tenet came from Chaldea, where “they considered the divine name, the Shem, as endowed with properties so special and individual that they succeeded in making of it a distinct person.” But this idea of the sacredness of the God-name was one of the most prevalent of ancient religious notions. It was still devoutly held by the Christian Origen, who argued15 that the Hebrew divine names must be held to because they alone were potent to conjure with. It appears in the Judaic Teaching of the Twelve Apostles in its Christianised form (c. x), in the passage of thanksgiving beginning, “We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast made to dwell in our hearts.” In the Jewish Sepher Toledoth Jeschu, Jesus is made to do his magic works by virtue of the “Shem hemmaphorash,” the Tetragrammaton, of which he has furtively possessed himself. Thus could an ancient God-name retain its mysterious prestige even after the mystery-mongers (reversing the process imagined by Lenormant) had taken the name-quality out of it, and left only the word for “name.” In other ways it clung to the Jewish cult. It is highly probable that the pre-eminent Jewish prayer, the “Shema” (or the “Shemoneh Esreh”), of which the name is explained away into insignificance, is an extremely ancient prayer to the Sun-God.16 Even this is sought to be connected with a historical “Simon.”17 And all the while the original God Sem survives in the Jewish mythology as “Shamma-ēl,” the Prince of Demons and angel of death, who has power over all peoples except the Jews;18 and at the same time in the legend of Samu-el, the unshorn, the child of the heretofore sterile mother (vexed by her rival as Rachel by Leah), the potentate who makes and unmakes kings, and who is called up as a “God”19 from the earth by incantation.