Note 867 — Chapter IX · (continued 2)

We do not see why the clergy—especially the Catholic—should object to our statement that the patriarchs are all signs of the zodiac, and the old gods of the “heathen” as well. There was a time, and that less than two centuries ago, when they themselves exhibited the most fervent desire to relapse into sun and star worship. This pious and curious attempt was denounced but a few months since by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer. He shows two Augsburgian Jesuits, Schiller and Bayer, who felt quite anxious to change the names of the whole Sabean host of the starry heaven, and worship them again under Christian names! Having anathematized the idolatrous sun-worshippers for over fifteen centuries, the Church now seriously proposed to continue heliolatry—to the letter this time—as their idea was to substitute for Pagan myths biblical and (in their ideas) real personages. They would have called the sun, Christ; the moon, Virgin Mary; Saturn, Adam; Jupiter, Moses (!); Mars, Joshua; Venus, John the Baptist; and Mercury, Elias. And very proper substitutes too, showing the great familiarity of the Catholic Church with ancient Pagan and kabalistic learning, and its readiness, perhaps, to at last confess the source whence came their own myths. For is not king Messiah the sun, the Demiurge of the heliolaters, under various names? Is he not the Egyptian Osiris and the Grecian Apollo? And what more appropriate name than Virgin Mary for the Pagan Diana-Astarté, “the Queen of Heaven,” against which Jeremiah exhausted a whole vocabulary of imprecations? Such an adoption would have been historically as well as religiously correct. Two large plates were prepared, says Flammarion, in a recent number of “La Nature,” and represented the heavens with Christian constellations instead of Pagan. Apostles, popes, saints, martyrs, and personages of the Old and New Testament completed this Christian Sabeanism. “The disciples of Loyola used every exertion to make this plan succeed.” It is curious to find in India among the Mussulmans the name of Terah, Abraham’s father, Azar or Azarh, and Azur, which also means fire, and is, at the same time, the name of the Hindu third solar month (from June to July), during which the sun is in Gemini, and the full moon near Sagittarius.