* It is the unanimous testimony of history, and even oflegends, that the first human beings were every wheresavages, and that it was to civilize them, and teach them tomake bread, that the Gods manifested themselves.** The rock on which all the ancients have split, and whichhas occasioned all their errors, has been their supposingthe idea of God to be innate and co-eternal with the soul;and hence all the reveries developed in Plato and Jamblicus.See the Timoeus, the Phedon, and De Mysteriis Egyptiorum,sect. I, c. 3.
"Before one nation had received from another nation dogmas already invented; before one generation had inherited ideas acquired by a preceding generation, none of these complicated systems could have existed in the world. The first men, being children of nature, anterior to all events, ignorant of all science, were born without any idea of the dogmas arising from scholastic disputes; of rites founded on the practice of arts not then known; of precepts framed after the development of passions; or of laws which suppose a language, a state of society not then in being; or of God, whose attributes all refer to physical objects, and his actions to a despotic state of government; or of the soul, or of any of those metaphysical beings, which we are told are not the objects of sense, and for which, however, there can be no other means of access to the understanding. To arrive at so many results, the necessary circle of preceding facts must have been observed; slow experience and repeated trials must have taught the rude man the use of his organs; the accumulated knowledge of successive generations must have invented and improved the means of living; and the mind, freed from the cares of the first wants of nature, must have raised itself to the complicated art of comparing ideas, of digesting arguments, and seizing abstract similitudes."
I. Origin of the idea of God: Worship of the elements and of the physical powers of nature.
"It was not till after having overcome these obstacles, and gone through a long career in the night of history, that man, reflecting on his condition, began to perceive that he was subjected to forces superior to his own, and independent of his will. The sun enlightened and warmed him, the fire burned him, the thunder terrified him, the wind beat upon him, the water overwhelmed him. All beings acted upon him powerfully and irresistibly. He sustained this action for a long time, like a machine, without enquiring the cause; but the moment he began his enquiries, he fell into astonishment; and, passing from the surprise of his first reflections to the reverie of curiosity, he began a chain of reasoning.
"First, considering the action of the elements on him, he conceived an idea of weakness and subjection on his part, and of power and domination on theirs; and this idea of power was the primitive and fundamental type of every idea of God.
"Secondly, the action of these natural existences excited in him sensations of pleasure or pain, of good or evil; and by a natural effect of his organization, he conceived for them love or aversion; he desired or dreaded their presence; and fear or hope gave rise to the first idea of religion.
"Then, judging everything by comparison, and remarking in these beings a spontaneous movement like his own, he supposed this movement directed by a will,—an intelligence of the nature of his own; and hence, by induction, he formed a new reasoning. Having experienced that certain practices towards his fellow creatures had the effect to modify their affections and direct their conduct to his advantage, he resorted to the same practices towards these powerful beings of the universe. He reasoned thus with himself: When my fellow creature, stronger than I, is disposed to do me injury, I abase myself before him, and my prayer has the art to calm him. I will pray to these powerful beings who strike me. I will supplicate the intelligences of the winds, of the stars, of the waters, and they will hear me. I will conjure them to avert the evil and give me the good that is at their disposal; I will move them by my tears, I will soften them by offerings, and I shall be happy.
"Thus simple man, in the infancy of his reason, spoke to the sun and to the moon; he animated with his own understanding and passions the great agents of nature; he thought by vain sounds, and vain actions, to change their inflexible laws. Fatal error! He prayed the stone to ascend, the water to mount above its level, the mountains to remove, and substituting a fantastical world for the real one, he peopled it with imaginary beings, to the terror of his mind and the torment of his race.
"In this manner the ideas of God and religion have sprung, like all others, from physical objects; they were produced in the mind of man from his sensations, from his wants, from the circumstances of his life, and the progressive state of his knowledge.
"Now, as the ideas of God had their first models in physical agents, it followed that God was at first varied and manifold, like the form under which he appeared to act. Every being was a Power, a Genius; and the first men conceived the universe filled with innumerable gods.
"Again the ideas of God have been created by the affections of the human heart; they became necessarily divided into two classes, according to the sensations of pleasure or pain, love or hatred, which they inspired.
"The forces of nature, the gods and genii, were divided into beneficent and malignant, good and evil powers; and hence the universality of these two characters in all the systems of religion.
"These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for a long time confused and ill-digested. Savage men, wandering in the woods, beset with wants and destitute of resources, had not the leisure to combine principles and draw conclusions; affected with more evils than they found pleasures, their most habitual sentiment was that of fear, their theology terror; their worship was confined to a few salutations and offerings to beings whom they conceived as greedy and ferocious as themselves. In their state of equality and independence, no man offered himself as mediator between men and gods as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having superfluities to give, there existed no parasite by the name of priest, no tribute by the name of victim, no empire by the name of altar. Their dogmas and their morals were the same thing, it was only self-preservation; and religion, that arbitrary idea, without influence on the mutual relations of men, was a vain homage rendered to the visible powers of nature.
"Such was the necessary and original idea of God."
And the orator, addressing himself to the savage nations, continued:
"We appeal to you, men who have received no foreign and factitious ideas; tell us, have you ever gone beyond what I have described? And you, learned doctors, we call you to witness; is not this the unanimous testimony of all ancient monuments?*
* It clearly results, says Plutarch, from the verses ofOrpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians,that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but ofall nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, apicture of the operations of nature, wrapped up inmysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a mannerthat the ignorant multitude attended rather to theirapparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what theyunderstood of the latter, supposed there to be somethingmore deep than what they perceived. Fragment of a work ofPlutarch now lost, quoted by Eusebius, Proepar. Evang. lib.3, ch. 1, p. 83.The majority of philosophers, says Porphyry, and amongothers Haeremon (who lived in Egypt in the first age ofChristianity), imagine there never to have been any otherworld than the one we see, and acknowledged no other Gods ofall those recognized by the Egyptians, than such as arecommonly called planets, signs of the Zodiac, andconstellations; whose aspects, that is, rising and setting,are supposed to influence the fortunes of men; to which theyadd their divisions of the signs into decans and dispensersof time, whom they style lords of the ascendant, whosenames, virtues in relieving distempers, rising, setting, andpresages of future events, are the subjects of almanacs (forbe it observed, that the Egyptian priests had almanacs theexact counterpart of Matthew Lansberg's); for when thepriests affirmed that the sun was the architect of theuniverse, Chaeremon presently concludes that all theirnarratives respecting Isis and Osiris, together with theirother sacred fables, referred in part to the planets, thephases of the moon, and the revolution of the sun, and inpart to the stars of the daily and nightly hemispheres andthe river Nile; in a word, in all cases to physical andnatural existences and never to such as might be immaterialand incorporeal. . . .All these philosophers believe that the acts of our will andthe motion of our bodies depend on those of the stars towhich they are subjected, and they refer every thing to thelaws of physical necessity, which they call destiny orFatum, supposing a chain of causes and effects which binds,by I know not what connection, all beings together, from themeanest atom to the supremest power and primary influence ofthe Gods; so that, whether in their temples or in theiridols, the only subject of worship is the power of destiny.Porphyr. Epist. ad Janebonem.
II. Second system: Worship of the Stars, or Sabeism.
"But those same monuments present us likewise a system more methodical and more complicated—that of the worship of all the stars; adored sometimes in their proper forms, sometimes under figurative emblems and symbols; and this worship was the effect of the knowledge men had acquired in physics, and was derived immediately from the first causes of the social state; that is, from the necessities and arts of the first degree, which are among the elements of society.
"Indeed, as soon as men began to unite in society, it became necessary for them to multiply the means of subsistence, and consequently to attend to agriculture: agriculture, to be carried on with success, requires the observation and knowledge of the heavens. It was necessary to know the periodical return of the same operations of nature, and the same phenomena in the skies; indeed to go so far as to ascertain the duration and succession of the seasons and the months of the year. It was indispensable to know, in the first place, the course of the sun, who, in his zodiacal revolution, shows himself the supreme agent of the whole creation; then, of the moon, who, by her phases and periods, regulates and distributes time; then, of the stars, and even of the planets, which by their appearance and disappearance on the horizon and nocturnal hemisphere, marked the minutest divisions. Finally, it was necessary to form a whole system of astronomy,* or a calendar; and from these works there naturally followed a new manner of considering these predominant and governing powers. Having observed that the productions of the earth had a regular and constant relation with the heavenly bodies; that the rise, growth, and decline of each plant kept pace with the appearance, elevation, and declination of the same star or the same group of stars; in short, that the languor or activity of vegetation seemed to depend on celestial influences, men drew from thence an idea of action, of power, in those beings, superior to earthly bodies; and the stars, dispensing plenty or scarcity, became powers, genii,** gods, authors of good and evil.
* It continues to be repeated every day, on the indirectauthority of the book of Genesis, that astronomy was theinvention of the children of Noah. It has been gravelysaid, that while wandering shepherds in the plains ofShinar, they employed their leisure in composing a planetarysystem: as if shepherds had occasion to know more than thepolar star; and if necessity was not the sole motive ofevery invention! If the ancient shepherds were so studiousand sagacious, how does it happen that the modern ones areso stupid, ignorant, and inattentive? And it is a fact thatthe Arabs of the desert know not so many as sixconstellations, and understand not a word of astronomy.** It appears that by the word genius, the ancients denoteda quality, a generative power; for the following words,which are all of one family, convey this meaning: generare,genos, genesis, genus, gens.
"As the state of society had already introduced a regular hierarchy of ranks, employments and conditions, men, continuing to reason by comparison, carried their new notions into their theology, and formed a complicated system of divinities by gradation of rank, in which the sun, as first god,* was a military chief or a political king: the moon was his wife and queen; the planets were servants, bearers of commands, messengers; and the multitude of stars were a nation, an army of heroes, genii, whose office was to govern the world under the orders of their chiefs. All the individuals had names, functions, attributes, drawn from their relations and influences; and even sexes, from the gender of their appellations.**
* The Sabeans, ancient and modern, says Maimonides,acknowledge a principal God, the maker and inhabitant ofheaven; but on account of his great distance they conceivehim to be inaccessible; and in imitation of the conduct ofpeople towards their kings, they employ as mediators withhim, the planets and their angels, whom they call princesand potentates, and whom they suppose to reside in thoseluminous bodies as in palaces or tabernacles, etc. More-Nebuchim.** According as the gender of the object was in the languageof the nation masculine or feminine, the Divinity who boreits name was male or female. Thus the Cappadocians calledthe moon God, and the sun Goddess: a circumstance whichgives to the same beings a perpetual variety in ancientmythology.
"And as the social state had introduced certain usages and ceremonies, religion, keeping pace with the social state, adopted similar ones; these ceremonies, at first simple and private, became public and solemn; the offerings became rich and more numerous, and the rites more methodical; they assigned certain places for the assemblies, and began to have chapels and temples; they instituted officers to administer them, and these became priests and pontiffs: they established liturgies, and sanctified certain days, and religion became a civil act, a political tie.
"But in this arrangement, religion did not change its first principles; the idea of God was always that of physical beings, operating good or evil, that is, impressing sensations of pleasure or pain: the dogma was the knowledge of their laws, or their manner of acting; virtue and sin, the observance or infraction of these laws; and morality, in its native simplicity, was the judicious practice of whatever contributes to the preservation of existence, the well-being of one's self and his fellow creatures.*
* We may add, says Plutarch, that these Egyptian priestsalways regarded the preservation of health as a point of thefirst importance, and as indispensably necessary to thepractice of piety and the service of the gods. See hisaccount of Isis and Osiris, towards the end.
"Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall answer on the testimony of the monuments of astronomy itself; that its principles appear with certainty to have been established about seventeen thousand years ago,* and if it be asked to what people it is to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and when reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of the North;** when it finds there a central point of the sphere of the ancients, a salubrious climate, a great, but manageable river, a soil fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and placed between two seas which communicate with the richest countries, it conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture from the nature of his soil, to geometry from the annual necessity of measuring his lands, to commerce from the facility of communications, to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to civilized life.
* The historical orator follows here the opinion of M.Dupuis, who, in his learned memoirs concerning the Origin ofthe Constellations and Origin of all Worship, has assignedmany plausible reasons to prove that Libra was formerly thesign of the vernal, and Aries of the autumnal equinox; thatis, that since the origin of the actual astronomical system,the precession of the equinoxes has carried forward by sevensigns the primitive order of the zodiac. Now estimating theprecession at about seventy years and a half to a degree,that is, 2,115 years to each sign; and observing that Arieswas in its fifteenth degree, 1,447 years before Christ, itfollows that the first degree of Libra could not havecoincided with the vernal equinox more lately than 15,194years before Christ; now, if you add 1790 years sinceChrist, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since theorigin of the Zodiac. The vernal equinox coincided with thefirst degree of Aries, 2,504 years before Christ, and withthe first degree of Taurus 4,619 years before Christ. Nowit is to be observed, that the worship of the Bull is theprincipal article in the theological creed of the Egyptians,Persians, Japanese, etc.; from whence it clearly follows,that some general revolution took place among these nationsat that time. The chronology of five or six thousand yearsin Genesis is little agreeable to this hypothesis; but asthe book of Genesis cannot claim to be considered as ahistory farther back than Abraham, we are at liberty to makewhat arrangements we please in the eternity that preceded.See on this subject the analysis of Genesis, in the firstvolume of New Researches on Ancient History; see also Originof Constellatians, by Dupuis, 1781; the Origin of Worship,in 3 vols. 1794, and the Chronological Zodiac, 1806.** M. Balli, in placing the first astronomers atSelingenakoy, near the Bailkal paid no attention to thistwofold circumstance: it equally argues against their beingplaced at Axoum on account of the rains, and the Zimb fly ofwhich Mr. Bruce speaks.
"It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men, that was organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture; and this first worship, characterized by their adoration under their own forms and natural attributes, was a simple proceeding of the human mind. But in a short time, the multiplicity of the objects of their relations, and their reciprocal influence, having complicated the ideas, and the signs that represented them, there followed a confusion as singular in its cause as pernicious in its effects."
III. Third system. Worship of Symbols, or Idolatry.
"As soon as this agricultural people began to observe the stars with attention, they found it necessary to individualize or group them; and to assign to each a proper name, in order to understand each other in their designation. A great difficulty must have presented itself in this business: First, the heavenly bodies, similar in form, offered no distinguishing characteristics by which to denominate them; and, secondly, the language in its infancy and poverty, had no expressions for so many new and metaphysical ideas. Necessity, the usual stimulus of genius, surmounted everything. Having remarked that in the annual revolution, the renewal and periodical appearance of terrestrial productions were constantly associated with the rising and setting of certain stars, and to their position as relative to the sun, the fundamental term of all comparison, the mind by a natural operation connected in thought these terrestrial and celestial objects, which were connected in fact; and applying to them a common sign, it gave to the stars, and their groups, the names of the terrestrial objects to which they answered.*
* "The ancients," says Maimonides, "directing all theirattention to agriculture, gave names to the stars derivedfrom their occupation during the year." More Neb. pars 3.
"Thus the Ethopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow;* stars of the ox or the bull, those under which they began to plow; stars of the lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which these precious animals were brought forth: and thus was resolved the first part of the difficulty.
* This must have been June.
"Moreover, man having remarked in the beings which surrounded him certain qualities distinctive and proper to each species, and having thence derived a name by which to designate them, he found in the same source an ingenious mode of generalizing his ideas; and transferring the name already invented to every thing which bore any resemblance or analogy, he enriched his language with a perpetual round of metaphors.
"Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab or cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having reached the highest point in his annuary tract, rests at the summit of the horary gnomon, and imitates the goat, who delights to climb the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or libra, those where the days and nights, being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. In the same manner he called by the name of rings and serpents the figured traces of the orbits of the stars and the planets, and such was the general mode of naming all the stars and even the planets, taken by groups or as individuals, according to their relations with husbandry and terrestrial objects, and according to the analogies which each nation found between them and the objects of its particular soil and climate.*
* The ancients had verbs from the substantives crab, goat,tortoise, as the French have at present the verbs serpenter,coquetter. The history of all languages is nearly the same.
"From this it appeared that abject and terrestrial beings became associated with the superior and powerful inhabitants of heaven; and this association became stronger every day by the mechanism of language and the constitution of the human mind. Men would say by a natural metaphor: The bull spreads over the earth the germs of fecundity (in spring) he restores vegetation and plenty: the lamb (or ram) delivers the skies from the maleficent powers of winter; he saves the world from the serpent (emblem of the humid season) and restores the empire of goodness (summer, joyful season): the scorpion pours out his poison on the earth, and scatters diseases and death. The same of all similar effects.
"This language, understood by every one, was attended at first with no inconvenience; but in the course of time, when the calendar had been regulated, the people, who had no longer any need of observing the heavens, lost sight of the original meaning of these expressions; and the allegories remaining in common use became a fatal stumbling block to the understanding and to reason. Habituated to associate to the symbols the ideas of their archetypes, the mind at last confounded them: then the same animals, whom fancy had transported to the skies, returned again to the earth; but being thus returned, clothed in the livery of the stars, they claimed the stellary attributes, and imposed on their own authors. Then it was that the people, believing that they saw their gods among them, could pray to them with more convenience: they demanded from the ram of their flock the influences which might be expected from the heavenly ram; they prayed the scorpion not to pour out his venom upon nature; they revered the crab of the sea, the scarabeus of the mud, the fish of the river; and by a series of corrupt but inseparable analogies, they lost themselves in a labyrinth of well connected absurdities.
"Such was the origin of that ancient whimsical worship of the animals; such is the train of ideas by which the character of the divinity became common to the vilest of brutes, and by which was formed that theological system, extremely comprehensive, complicated, and learned, which, rising on the borders of the Nile, propagated from country to country by commerce, war, and conquest, overspread the whole of the ancient world; and which, modified by time, circumstances and prejudices, is still seen entire among a hundred nations, and remains as the essential and secret basis of the theology of those even who despise and reject it."
Some murmurs at these words being heard from various groups: "Yes!" continued the orator, "hence arose, for instance, among you, nations of Africa, the adoration of your fetiches, plants, animals, pebbles, pieces of wood, before which your ancestors would not have had the folly to bow, if they had not seen in them talismans endowed with the virtue of the stars.*
* The ancient astrologers, says the most learned of the Jews(Maimonides), having sacredly assigned to each planet acolor, an animal, a tree, a metal, a fruit, a plant, formedfrom them all a figure or representation of the star, takingcare to select for the purpose a proper moment, a fortunateday, such as the conjunction of the star, or some otherfavorable aspect. They conceived that by their magicceremonies they could introduce into those figures or idolsthe influences of the superior beings after which they weremodeled. These were the idols that the Chaldean-Sabeansadored; and in the performance of their worship they wereobliged to be dressed in the proper color. The astrologers,by their practices, thus introduced idolatry, desirous ofbeing regarded as the dispensers of the favors of heaven;and as agriculture was the sole employment of the ancients,they succeeded in persuading them that the rain and otherblessings of the seasons were at their disposal. Thus thewhole art of agriculture was exercised by rules ofastrology, and the priests made talismans or charms whichwere to drive away locusts, flies, etc. See Maimonides,More Nebuchim, pars 3, c. 29.The priests of Egypt, Persia, India, etc., pretended to bindthe Gods to their idols, and to make them come from heavenat their pleasure. They threatened the sun and moon, ifthey were disobedient, to reveal the secret mysteries, toshake the skies, etc., etc. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 198,and Jamblicus de Mysteriis Aegypt.
"Here, ye nations of Tartary, is the origin of your marmosets, and of all that train of animals with which your chamans ornament their magical robes. This is the origin of those figures of birds and of snakes which savage nations imprint upon their skins with sacred and mysterious ceremonies.
"Ye inhabitants of India! in vain you cover yourselves with the veil of mystery: the hawk of your god Vichenou is but one of the thousand emblems of the sun in Egypt; and your incarnations of a god in the fish, the boar, the lion, the tortoise, and all his monstrous adventures, are only the metamorphoses of the sun, who, passing through the signs of the twelve animals (or the zodiac), was supposed to assume their figures, and perform their astronomical functions.*
* These are the very words of Jamblicus de SymbolisAegyptiorum, c. 2, sect. 7. The sun was the grand Proteus,the universal metamorphist.
"People of Japan, your bull, which breaks the mundane egg, is only the bull of the zodiac, which in former times opened the seasons, the age of creation, the vernal equinox. It is the same bull Apis which Egypt adored, and which your ancestors, Jewish Rabbins, worshipped in the golden calf. This is still your bull, followers of Zoroaster, which, sacrificed in the symbolic mysteries of Mithra, poured out his blood which fertilized the earth. And ye Christians, your bull of the Apocalypse, with his wings, symbol of the air, has no other origin; and your lamb of God, sacrificed, like the bull of Mithra, for the salvation of the world, is only the same sun, in the sign of the celestial ram, which, in a later age, opening the equinox in his turn, was supposed to deliver the world from evil, that is to say, from the constellation of the serpent, from that great snake, the parent of winter, the emblem of the Ahrimanes, or Satan of the Persians, your school masters. Yes, in vain does your imprudent zeal consign idolaters to the torments of the Tartarus which they invented; the whole basis of your system is only the worship of the sun, with whose attributes you have decorated your principal personage. It is the sun which, under the name of Horus, was born, like your God, at the winter solstice, in the arms of the celestial virgin, and who passed a childhood of obscurity, indigence, and want, answering to the season of cold and frost. It is he that, under the name of Osiris, persecuted by Typhon and by the tyrants of the air, was put to death, shut up in a dark tomb, emblem of the hemisphere of winter, and afterwards, ascending from the inferior zone towards the zenith of heaven, arose again from the dead triumphant over the giants and the angels of destruction.
"Ye priests! who murmur at this relation, you wear his emblems all over your bodies; your tonsure is the disk of the sun; your stole is his zodiac;* your rosaries are symbols of the stars and planets. Ye pontiffs and prelates! your mitre, your crozier, your mantle are those of Osiris; and that cross whose mystery you extol without comprehending it, is the cross of Serapis, traced by the hands of Egyptian priests on the plan of the figurative world; which, passing through the equinoxes and the tropics, became the emblem of the future life and of the resurrection, because it touched the gates of ivory and of horn, through which the soul passed to heaven."
* "The Arabs," says Herodotus, "shave their heads in acircle and about the temples, in imitation of Bacchus (thatis the sun), who shaves himself is this manner." Jeremiahspeaks also of this custom. The tuft of hair which theMahometans preserve, is taken also from the sun, who waspainted by the Egyptians at the winter solstice, as havingbut a single hair upon his head. . . .The robes of the goddess of Syria and of Diana of Ephesus,from whence are borrowed the dress of the priests; have thetwelve animals of the zodiac painted on them. . . .Rosaries are found upon all the Indian idols, constructedmore than four thousand years ago, and their use in the Easthas been universal from time immemorial. . . .The crozier is precisely the staff of Bootes or Osiris.(See plate.)All the Lamas wear the mitre or cap in the shape of a cone,which was an emblem of the sun.
At these words, the doctors of all the groups began to look at each other with astonishment; but no one breaking silence, the orator proceeded:
"Three principal causes concur to produce this confusion of ideas: First, the figurative expressions under which an infant language was obliged to describe the relations of objects; expressions which, passing afterwards from a limited to a general sense, and from a physical to a moral one, caused, by their ambiguities and synonymes, a great number of mistakes.
"Thus, it being first said that the sun had surmounted, or finished, twelve animals, it was thought afterwards that he had killed them, fought them, conquered them; and of this was composed the historical life of Hercules.*
* See the memoir of Dupuis on the Origin of theConstellations, before cited.
"It being said that he regulated the periods of rural labor, the seed time and the harvest, that he distributed the seasons and occupations, ran through the climates and ruled the earth, etc., he was taken for a legislative king, a conquering warrior; and they framed from this the history of Osiris, of Bacchus, and others of that description.
"Having said that a planet entered into a sign, they made of this conjunction a marriage, an adultery, an incest.* Having said that the planet was hid or buried, when it came back to light, and ascended to its exaltation, they said that it had died, risen again, was carried into heaven, etc.
* These are the very words of Plutarch in his account ofIsis and Osiris. The Hebrews say, in speaking of thegenerations of the Patriarchs, et ingressus est in eam.From this continual equivoke of ancient language, proceedsevery mistake.
"A second cause of confusion was the material figures themselves, by which men first painted thoughts; and which, under the name of hieroglyphics, or sacred characters, were the first invention of the mind. Thus, to give warning of the inundation, and of the necessity of guarding against it, they painted a boat, the ship Argo; to express the wind, they painted the wing of a bird; to designate the season, or the month, they painted the bird of passage, the insect, or the animal which made its appearance at that period; to describe the winter, they painted a hog or a serpent, which delight in humid places, and the combination of these figures carried the known sense of words and phrases.* But as this sense could not be fixed with precision, as the number of these figures and their combinations became excessive, and overburdened the memory, the immediate consequence was confusion and false interpretations. Genius afterwards having invented the more simple art of applying signs to sounds, of which the number is limited, and painting words, instead of thoughts, alphabetical writing thus threw into disuetude hieroglyphical painting; and its signification, falling daily into oblivion, gave rise to a multitude of illusions, ambiguities, and errors.
* The reader will doubtless see with pleasure some examplesof ancient hieroglyphics."The Egyptians (says Hor-appolo) represent eternity by thefigures of the sun and moon. They designate the world bythe blue serpent with yellow scales (stars, it is theChinese Dragon). If they were desirous of expressing theyear, they drew a picture of Isis, who is also in theirlanguage called Sothis, or dog-star, one of the firstconstellations, by the rising of which the year commences;its inscription at Sais was, It is I that rise in theconstellation of the Dog."They also represent the year by a palm tree, and the monthby one of its branches, because it is the nature of thistree to produce a branch every month. They fartherrepresent it by the fourth part of an acre of land." Thewhole acre divided into four denotes the bissextile periodof four years. The abbreviation of this figure of a fieldin four divisions, is manifestly the letter ha or het, theseventh in the Samaritan alphabet; and in general all theletters of the alphabet are merely astronomicalhieroglyphics; and it is for this reason that the mode ofwriting is from right to left, like the march of the stars.—"They denote a prophet by the image of a dog, because thedog star (Anoubis) by its rising gives notice of theinundation. Noubi, in Hebrew signifies prophet—Theyrepresent inundation by a lion, because it takes place underthat sign: and hence, says Plutarch, the custom of placingat the gates of temples figures of lions with water issuingfrom their mouths.—They express the idea of God and destinyby a star. They also represent God, says Porphyry, by ablack stone, because his nature is dark and obscure. Allwhite things express the celestial and luminous Gods: allcircular ones the world, the moon, the sun, the orbits; allsemicircular ones, as bows and crescents are descriptive ofthe moon. Fire and the Gods of Olympus they represent bypyramids and obelisks (the name of the sun, Baal, is foundin this latter word): the sun by a cone (the mitre ofOsiris): the earth, by a cylinder (which revolves): thegenerative power of the air by the phalus, and that of theearth by a triangle, emblem of the female organ. Euseb.Proecep. Evang. p. 98."Clay, says Jamblicus de Symbolis, sect. 7, c. 2. denotesmatter, the generative and nutrimental power, every thingwhich receives the warmth and fermentation of life.""A man sitting upon the Lotos or Nenuphar, represents themoving spirit (the sun) which, in like manner as that plantlives in the water without any communication with clay,exists equally distinct from matter, swimming in emptyspace, resting on itself: it is round also in all its parts,like the leaves, the flowers, and the fruit of the Lotos.(Brama has the eyes of the Lotos, says Chasler Nesdirsen, todenote his intelligence: his eye swims over every thing,like the flower of the Lotos on the waters.) A man at thehelm of a ship, adds Jamblicus, is descriptive of the sunwhich governs all. And Porphyry tells us that the sun isalso represented by a man in a ship resting upon anamphibious crocodile (emblem of air and water)."At Elephantine they worshipped the figure of a man in asitting posture, painted blue, having the head of a ram, andthe horns of a goat which encompassed a disk; all whichrepresented the sun and moon's conjunction at the sign ofthe ram; the blue color denoting the power of the moon, atthe period of junction, to raise water into the clouds.Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 116."The hawk is an emblem of the sun and of light, on accountof his rapid flight and his soaring into the highest regionsof the air where light abounds.A fish is the emblem of aversion, and the Hippopotamus ofviolence, because it is said to kill its father and toravish its mother. Hence, says Plutarch, the emblematicalinscription of the temple of Sais, where we see painted onthe vestibule, 1. A child, 2. An old man, 3. A hawk, 4. Afish, 5. A hippopotamus: which signify, 1. Entrance, intolife, 2. Departure, 3. God, 4. Hates, 5. Injustice. SeeIsis and Osiris."The Egyptians, adds he, represent the world by a Scarabeus,because this insect pushes, in a direction contrary to thatin which it proceeds, a ball containing its eggs, just asthe heaven of the fixed stars causes the revolution of thesun, (the yolk of an egg) in an opposite direction to itsown."They represent the world also by the number five, beingthat of the elements, which, says Diodorus, are earth,water, air, fire, and ether, or spiritus. The Indians havethe same number of elements, and according to Macrobius'smystics, they are the supreme God, or primum mobile, theintelligence, or mens, born of him, the soul of the worldwhich proceeds from him, the celestial spheres, and allthings terrestrial. Hence, adds Plutarch, the analogybetween the Greek pente, five, and pan all."The ass," says he again, "is the emblem of Typhon, becauselike that animal he is of a reddish color. Now Typhonsignifies whatever is of a mirey or clayey nature; (and inHebrew I find the three words clay, red, and ass to beformed from the same root hamr). Jamblicus has farther toldus that clay was the emblem of matter and he elsewhere adds,that all evil and corruption proceeded from matter; whichcompared with the phrase of Macrobius, all is perishable,liable to change in the celestial sphere, gives us thetheory, first physical, then moral, of the system of goodand evil of the ancients."
"Finally, a third cause of confusion was the civil organization of ancient states. When the people began to apply themselves to agriculture, the formation of a rural calendar, requiring a continued series of astronomical observations, it became necessary to appoint certain individuals charged with the functions of watching the appearance and disappearance of certain stars, to foretell the return of the inundation, of certain winds, of the rainy season, the proper time to sow every kind of grain. These men, on account of their service, were exempt from common labor, and the society provided for their maintenance. With this provision, and wholly employed in their observations, they soon became acquainted with the great phenomena of nature, and even learned to penetrate the secret of many of her operations. They discovered the movement of the stars and planets, the coincidence of their phases and returns with the productions of the earth and the action of vegetation; the medicinal and nutritive properties of plants and fruits; the action of the elements, and their reciprocal affinities. Now, as there was no other method of communicating the knowledge of these discoveries but the laborious one of oral instruction, they transmitted it only to their relations and friends, it followed therefore that all science and instruction were confined to a few families, who, arrogating it to themselves as an exclusive privilege, assumed a professional distinction, a corporation spirit, fatal to the public welfare. This continued succession of the same researches and the same labors, hastened, it is true, the progress of knowledge; but by the mystery which accompanied it, the people were daily plunged in deeper shades, and became more superstitious and more enslaved. Seeing their fellow mortals produce certain phenomena, announce, as at pleasure, eclipses and comets, heal diseases, and handle venomous serpents, they thought them in alliance with celestial powers; and, to obtain the blessings and avert the evils which they expected from above, they took them for mediators and interpreters; and thus became established in the bosom of every state sacrilegious corporations of hypocritical and deceitful men, who centered all powers in themselves; and the priests, being at once astronomers, theologians, naturalists, physicians, magicians, interpreters of the gods, oracles of men, and rivals of kings, or their accomplices, established, under the name of religion, an empire of mystery and a monopoly of instruction, which to this day have ruined every nation. . . ."
Here the priests of all the groups interrupted the orator, and with loud cries accused him of impiety, irreligion, blasphemy; and endeavored to cut short his discourse; but the legislator observing that this was only an exposition of historical facts, which, if false or forged, would be easily refuted; that hitherto the declaration of every opinion had been free, and without this it would be impossible to discover the truth, the orator proceeded:
"Now, from all these causes, and from the continual associations of ill-assorted ideas, arose a mass of disorders in theology, in morals, and in traditions; first, because the animals represented the stars, the characters of the animals, their appetites, their sympathies, their aversions, passed over to the gods, and were supposed to be their actions; thus, the god Ichneumon made war against the god Crocodile; the god Wolf liked to eat the god Sheep; the god Ibis devoured the god Serpent; and the deity became a strange, capricious, and ferocious being, whose idea deranged the judgment of man, and corrupted his morals and his reason.
"Again, because in the spirit of their worship every family, every nation, took for its special patron a star or a constellation, the affections or antipathies of the symbolic animal were transferred to its sectaries; and the partisans of the god Dog were enemies to those of the god Wolf;* those who adored the god Ox had an abhorrence to those who ate him; and religion became the source of hatred and hostility,—the senseless cause of frenzy and superstition.